VI

I drove up to Bangor that afternoon. Voodoo Ray Czabo and his wife had moved back up to Maine so that she could be closer to her mother, which proved that not only was Ray kind of unpleasant, he was also dumb as well. When a woman like Edna Czabo says she wants to be closer to her mother, then you might as well start packing your bags and looking for a bachelor apartment, because no good can come of it. The talk was that Ray Czabo’s marriage was on the rocks.

Ray was a skinny guy who dressed neatly, smelled nice, and could be superficially charming when the necessity arose, but his fascination with suffering and the vicarious pleasure-and actual profit-he derived from it left him a couple of rungs below blowflies on the moral ladder. I’d never had the joy of making Mrs. Czabo’s acquaintance, but from what I heard she made Ray seem like good company.

There were two vehicles in the driveway, a sensible Nissan and a souped-up Firebird, when I pulled up outside the Czabos’ nondescript single-story house, surrounded by similarly anonymous houses with marginally newer paintwork. The grass in the yard was patchy and unkempt, and the trees and bushes that bordered their property hadn’t been pruned that year. Light was already fading as I walked up to the door and pressed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the door was opened by a woman in a pale blue bathrobe. Her feet were bare, her hair was tousled, and she had the smoking butt of a cigarette in her hand. I picked out the remains of lipstick at the corners of her mouth, and her chin and cheeks were red and irritated.

“Mrs. Czabo?” I said.

“That’s me.”

She finished the cigarette, seemed to look for somewhere to put it out, then contented herself with tossing it onto the step by my feet. I stamped it out for her.

“I was looking for your husband.”

“Who are you?”

I showed her my license.

“My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private-”

“Yeah, I know all about you. You broke Ray’s nose.”

“I didn’t break his nose. He ran into a wall.”

“He ran into a wall because he was running away from you.”

I conceded the point.

“I still need to talk to him.”

“What’s he done now? Dug up a corpse?”

“I just have some questions for him. He’s not in any trouble.”

“Yeah, well, Ray don’t live here no more. He moved out a couple of months ago.”

“You know where he is?”

She picked at something between her teeth. Her fingers emerged clutching a short hair. I tried not to think of its possible origins.

“He does his thing, I do mine. I don’t pay no heed to his business.”

I heard a toilet flush in the house and a man appeared in the hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was younger than Mrs. Czabo by a decade, which made him about my age, but he looked bulkier and stronger than I was. He glanced at me, then asked her if everything was okay.

“I’ll holler if I need you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that it would be a sorry day when she needed his help.

“I just want an address,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Cocksucker,” she said. “You hear me?” Her voice was low, and I could smell the staleness on her breath.

“Ray said you were a cocksucker, and he was right. That’s all you are. So why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave us all in peace?”

“Gee,” I said, “you’re a nice lady.”

She made a gesture using her tongue and her right hand, just in case I wasn’t clear on what being a cocksucker entailed, then closed the door in my face.

My cell phone rang as I walked down Edna Czabo’s garden path. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller display. It turned out to be Denny Maguire.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

I leaned against my car and looked at the Czabo house. A drape twitched in one of the front windows.

“Sure,” I said.

“Look, this could be nothing. You asked me if I remembered anything that Grady said while I was in that basement. Like I told you, I was pretty out of it before they rescued me, so most of it’s a blur, but I do recall him telling me that he was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“He said that he was going to be punished for what he’d done to those kids, and for what he was going to do to me eventually, I guess. He said that he was damned, but that he wouldn’t go without a fight. He told me that he’d taken precautions. I didn’t know what he meant. I thought later that he was talking about the way he’d reinforced the basement door, but now I’m not so sure.”

The drape twitched again in the front window, this time with a little more force.

“There was always black paint on his hands,” Denny continued, “and he was hanging paper and working on the house all of the time. I remember that most of the walls had been covered while I was kept in the basement, because he’d nearly finished the job when the police came for him. There were other things, odd things. During the first days, there was a pile of bones in the corner of the basement. He told me that they came from dogs. Later, he took them away and buried them.”

“He told you this?”

“Yeah. His hands were dirty, and he must have seen me looking at them. He said that he’d been working in his yard, burying the bones. That was when he first began talking about the precautions he was taking, and about how he wasn’t going to be pulled from his home without a fight.”

The front door of the Czabo house opened, and the bulky young man appeared on the step. He was now dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweat top. There were scuffed sneakers on his feet.

“I don’t know if any of that is helpful,” said Denny.

“It may be,” I said. “Listen, Denny, I have to go, but thanks for that. I’ll let you know how things work out.”

I killed the connection just as the man I took to be Edna Czabo’s lover reached the end of the path.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked. His voice was a little high, and softer than I’d expected.

“Your mother,” I replied. “She says you’re to come home and stop screwing around with other men’s wives. Oh, and she wants you to pick up some milk along the way.”

He didn’t look too pleased at the reply, but he didn’t make a move either, although I could see his hands almost involuntarily tense into fists. He was probably smarter than he looked, which made me wonder what he was doing with Edna Czabo.

“Why are you looking for Ray?” he asked.

“I have some questions for him.”

“Ray doesn’t come around here much.”

“Did you scare him away?”

“It’s all over between him and Edna. He moved out.”

“So she told me. Do you know where he is?”

“Edna says he’s in Bangor someplace. I don’t know where.”

“That’s not very helpful,” I said. “So if you didn’t come out here to help, why did you come out?”

His head jerked back slightly in the direction of the house, and the woman within.

“Did she send you out to frighten me?” I asked.

He had the decency to look embarrassed.

“We just don’t want any trouble. I don’t want any trouble.”

I sized him up. A man who says he doesn’t want trouble has usually experienced trouble before, and has a pretty good expectation of experiencing it again. If Ray Czabo had done something wrong, then I could just be the first of any number of people who might come knocking on his wife’s door, the cops among them.

“You got a name?” I said.

“Tillman,” he said. “Casey Tillman.”

“Anything to Gunnar Tillman?”

He nodded. “He’s my old man.”

“I thought I saw a resemblance.”

Gunnar Tillman was bad news, the kind of minor-league hood that places like Bangor threw up occasionally like a piece of rotten fish. He was involved in drugs, prostitution, and maybe a little smuggling of immigrants across the Canadian border, if the stories were to be believed. I could understand now why his son didn’t want the cops sniffing around his affairs.