Saints Of New York (59 page)

Richard
had taken them out for the day. She knew that. He was taking them to the mall,
the movies, a restaurant. He'd told them that the week before. He had more
money than she did, and he lavished gifts on them. He bribed them for
affection. Alex and Sarah didn't see it that way. They saw him as a loving
father, and every once in a while he would drive it home by subtly implying
that how it was at weekends would be how it would be if they lived with him
full-time. They had been too young to be aware of what an asshole he was, and
though she had no question that Alex and Sarah loved her, they were still
tempted. As far as Carole was concerned, Richard had gone to the dark side, and
the dark side was where he would always be.

Before
she left she thought about what would happen if she was found in his house. If
they came back early, having forgotten something perhaps? What would she say?
She went up to Sarah's room and found her iPod. She was always leaving it
behind. Okay, so she didn't use it that much these days, but it wasn't so long
ago that she wouldn't have been seen without it.
I just brought Sarah's iPod over. I thought she might want it.
That would do. It was better than nothing.

Carole
Paretski took her purse, her keys, her jacket, and left the house. It was a
good thirty-minute drive south-west, all the way from Steuben, across
Washington, Flatbush and down Fourth. Being Saturday, the traffic wasn't as bad
as it could have been, and she crossed the Gowanus Canal a little before ten.
She felt nervous, afraid even, but there was a question in her mind that had
to
be
resolved. Was his house full of this stuff? The same kind of stuff that Parrish
and his partner had
taken away?
Were
her
kids
spending
weekends with a man
who watched
child
pornography
and wanted to fuck teenagers?
She shuddered at the thought. If
he touched
Sarah ...
Hell,
if Richard touched
Sarah she would kill him. She
would drive a
kitchen knife Into
his
eyes and castrate him. She would douse him in gasoline and let the motherfucker
burn to death.

Carole
Paretski came out from the junction too quickly and someone blared at her.
Surprised, she pulled over suddenly, her heart racing. What was she doing? This
was crazy behavior. But would she say that if something happened to Sarah and
she had done nothing to prevent it? They were out - all three of them. She had
the house key. She just had to know. She
needed
to.

She
pulled up outside the house on Sackett Street. She paused for a moment. There
was nothing else to do. She flipped the door lever and climbed out.

 
R
obert Parrish
sat at the kitchen table and looked at his mother defiantly. He had long since
tired of the complaints and bitterness that seemed to hover at the edges of
every conversation about his father.

'He
would
understand,' Robert said once again,
and rolled his eyes exasperatedly. 'The fact that you and he seem incapable of
even having a civil conversation these days is beside the point. It's my
education, it's my life, and I do actually have a say in it.'

'But you've done two years,
Robert,
two years
of the course, and now you want to drop it and do something else entirely.'

'Yes.'

Clare Baxter sighed. She closed
her eyes for a moment, and then reached for a cigarette. She lit it, smoked it
rapidly like a teenager, shaking her head every once in a while as if she was
battling with some internal conflict.

'I'll speak to him,' Robert said.

'No,' Clare replied, 'I will
speak to him. I will deal with this, Robert.'

'You're just going to try and
convince him to make me do what you want. The thing you seem to forget, and
this is not the first time, is that what you want and what I want are not the
same thing.'

'You think I don't have your best
interests at heart?'

'I think you have your own best
interests at heart—'

'That's a dreadful thing to
say—'

Robert sneered. 'What's the
matter? You can't handle the truth?'

Clare Baxter gritted her teeth.
She ground her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and got up from the
table. She needed
to do something -
anything
- to
distract herself. Otherwise she would more than likely slap the disrespectful—

'I
am going to speak to him,' Robert said, interrupting her thoughts.

Clare
reached the sink. She turned back towards him and took a deep breath.

'Your
father is a drunk, Robert. That's a truth for you right there. You say I can't
handle the truth . . . well, let me share a few home truths with you about the
marvelous and wonderful Frank Parrish.'

Robert
started to get up. 'I don't want to listen to this shit anymore Mom, I really
don't—'

'Sit
the fuck down, Robert! I'm serious now. You sit right there for a minute and
listen to what I have to say. You can do that much at least. What you do after
that is entirely up to you. You go over and see him. Go tell him you're going
to quit engineering halfway through the course. Graphic design? Jesus, you
really believe that there is work out there for you—'

'What
the fuck do you want from me, eh?' Robert snapped back. 'You want me to go on
doing something that I don't like and can't do?'

'Well,
if you can't do it that's probably got more to do with your own attitude than
anything else—'

'It's
not about attitude, it's about purpose. I've done enough of it to realize that
I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the guts of filthy fucking
machines in dirty factories, smelling like a fucking—'

'Enough!'
Clare snapped. 'We don't need to scream and shout at one another, and I
certainly don't see the need for you to use that kind of language to me.'

Robert
took a deep breath. 'Okay,' he said quietly. 'Okay, this is the way it is. I am
not going to carry on doing engineering. I am going to quit the class and do
graphic design. This is what I want to do. If I told Dad he would say okay,
that's fine, if that's what you want to do and you're sure—'

'Your
dad would just say what he thought you wanted to hear—'

'No,
Mom! Dad would treat me like an adult and respect the fact that I have power of
choice.'

Clare
hesitated, and then something just came over her and she let it go. 'Robert,
listen to me. He's a drunk. He is in trouble at work. He's always in trouble at
work. You know they took his driver's license off of him and put him on
pay-hold. He doesn't know that I know this, but I do. His last partner was
killed in the line of duty, and there was an internal investigation to
determine whether Frank contributed to that situation—'

'And the
internal investigation decreed that every action he took was in-policy, that he
demonstrated the exact procedure and protocol for that scenario—' 'You sound
like a police manual.'

'No, Mom, I
sound like someone who's taken the time to talk to his father about what really
happened with him and Michael Vale. You want to know what happened?' 'No, I
really don't, to tell you the truth—' 'Well, I think you should. I think that's
the least you should do. Listen to what someone else has to say for a moment
instead of being so eager to hear your own voice.' 'How dare you—'

'No,
Mom, how fucking dare
you
! He's my father
and I love him, and here's a blind-sider for you, Caitlin loves him too. We
respect him for who he is and what he does. You never worked before you got
divorced. He supported you and us, and as far as we're concerned he did a
damned good job of it. You only started working after he left, and that was
because you had to. You didn't have a fucking choice. Well, let me tell you
something. He did have a choice about what he could have done. He didn't become
a cop because he wanted to. He became a cop because he
needed
to,
because he felt it was the right thing. He had a sense of responsibility, which
is more than I can say about you . . .'

That's
when Clare Baxter lost it. She took two swift steps forward and raised her hand
to slap her son, but even as her hand arced towards him, Robert stood up. The
chair fell over backwards. He caught her arm by the wrist before it reached
him. They stood there for a moment - deadlocked, a stand-off - and then Robert
leaned forward, inches taller than his mother, and said, 'I'll do what I want,
Mom. That's the simple truth of it. I will do what I want when I want how I
want, and there's not
a
goddamned thing
in the world you can do to stop me.'

Robert
released her wrist and stepped away. The look in her eyes told him that she was
not going to challenge him anymore.

He
picked up his chair, set it straight, took his jacket from the back and put it
on.

He
walked to the door and hesitated. He looked back at her and half-smiled. 'Tell
you something, Mom. I love you, and I respect you. And I understand your
frustration with Dad, but believe me when I tell you that you are one hell of a
bitch sometimes.'

Robert
Parrish, looking more like his father than he ever had, left the house on a
high. Half an hour and he'd be at his father's apartment, and he would have a
story to tell.

I
t
had taken a few minutes for Frank Parrish to extricate himself from the
cupboard beneath the stairs. Thankfully the blade of the screwdriver had been
slim enough to fit in the gap between the latch and the striker plate,
otherwise he might have had to break the door to get out. He stood in the hall
for a while, and then he sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He
massaged his thighs, his calves, flexed his knees, and waited until circulation
fully returned to his legs, but they still hurt like hell.

He
stood carefully, leaning against the wall for balance, and then he walked up
and down the hallway a few times until he felt that his legs were once more his
own. His stomach hurt. He could feel it a little more than before.

It
was then, as he closed the stair cupboard door once more, that he paused. He
reached out his hand and pressed against the floor. Almost imperceptibly, but
unmistakably, it gave. Overtaken by a sudden feeling of urgency and agitation,
he hurriedly pulled the contents out of the cupboard again. A toolbox, a vacuum
cleaner, a pair of kid's sneakers, a bucket of paintbrushes and three cans of
paint, a blanket, a shoebox. Beneath these things, there on the floor, was the
small section of carpet, cut perfectly to fit snugly in the space. Parrish took
a screwdriver and used it to lift the corner of the carpet, and saw linoleum
beneath. He kept tugging until the section of carpet came away entirely, then
he used the screwdriver once more and lifted the linoleum. He saw the edge of a
floorboard and, pulling back the floor covering a little further, he discovered
that the board had been cut horizontally. As had the one beside it. And the
one beside that.

His
heart racing, Parrish tugged at the linoleum. It had been stapled at the back
edge and it tore fractionally. He cursed, and used his screwdriver once
more
to ease out the staples. He pulled
them free, the
linoleum came away
complete, and
he put it beside
him in the hallway. The cut
boards - three
of them, side-by-side -
now
gave the impression of a two-foot wide trapdoor. Parrish levered the
screwdriver beneath the nearest board and prized it up. He saw them right away,
and there was no mistaking what they were . . .

Reaching
out to lift the other board he heard a car slow and stop outside the house. His
heart froze. He heard the car door open. Hurrying, desperate, panic-stricken,
he replaced the first board, the linoleum, stuffed the carpet back in the
cupboard, after it the sneakers, the cans of paint, the bucket of brushes,
everything he had taken out of there. He pushed the door to with his shoulder,
snatched his bag and his torch from the floor and turned to run up the stairs.