A Trouble of Fools (17 page)

No drug-related arrests.

Not yet.

“What’s the plan?” I asked when I finished reading.

“Wait,” he said.

“What do you mean, wait? He’s over at the schoolyard now.”

“What I said.”

“You got an order for a wire? An undercover? What?”

“Look, next week I can put somebody on it. Maybe two weeks. We haven’t got enough detectives to cover this right now.”

“So I just keep watching the guy.”

“Don’t spook him.”

“Me? You rousted him.”

“It’s different now.”

“Is he dealing crack?”

“Do you know or are you asking?”

“I’m asking.”

“I can’t say.”

“You can’t say?”

“Right.”

“So tell me,” I said to Jay after silently digesting the whole mess, “on a different subject altogether, you got much IRA action going down over here?”

I guess I was just pulling his chain, the way he’d yanked old Horace’s. He looked at me as if I’d sprouted horns, and repeated the initials.

“IRA?”

“Yeah? Irish, et cetera, et cetera.”

“You kidding? That bunch is out. No more support. No more wicked Noraid collecting money for guns. The government forced Noraid to register as an agent of the IRA, and that was the end of it. It’s all respectable these days. The Irish Fund, thank you very much, faith and begorra. Ritzy dinner dances at the Parker House, thousand-dollar-a-plate banquets with Tip O’Neill as emcee. They even made a TV

commercial. All the money to the church and charity, and not one penny for the IRA.”

“You sure about that?”

“Why?”

Ah, cops. Always a question. “Well, see, on the way over, I met this leprechaun, and he came up to me, and—” I saw the look Jay was giving me, and decided not to ride him.

Sometimes cops have bad days. Most of the time, cops have bad days.

“So long, Carlotta.”

“Thanks, Jay.”

It’s a good thing my Toyota knows the way home. As soon as I got near the car all my volleyball adrenaline and most of my righteous anger leaked out, leaving me deflated and sleepy and kind of ornery. A double-parked patrol car blocked my exit, so I had to clump back up the stairs, and 1

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trade insults with the desk sergeant until some jerk grudgingly moved it. I spit on the fender. I’m not proud of it. I just did it.

Roz was in the kitchen, yakking on the phone in her usual position, cross-legged on the countertop. She is a motor mouth phone gabber, and it’s a miracle anybody ever gets through on my line. Paints, brushes, palette knives, and bottles of oily gook were spread over the kitchen table, and as far as I could tell, she was composing a still life of steel wool pads and a Windex bottle. I always know the cleaning aids I purchase will come in handy.

“Carlotta, great, I’ve got messages,” she said, dropping the phone to one shoulder. “Tequila, how about I call you back? At the Rat? Tonight? Gross. Jeez. Okay. Later.” She hung up on Tequila. I wondered if Tequila was a boy or a girl. I knew it wasn’t a rat. The Rat is this punk hangout in Kenmore Square. If Mooney got a call to go to the Rat, he’d bring rubber gloves, a chair, and a whip.

I stared blankly at the refrigerator, wondering if anything inside would make me feel human. The clock said three, and the sun was blazing through the window over the sink, so that made it three in the afternoon. Monday afternoon. I felt like it was 3 a.m. on some planet where everything was slightly out of focus. I held open the refrigerator door until it started doubling as an air conditioner. A container of cottage cheese looked vaguely appealing, except I couldn’t remember buying cottage cheese, so chances were that if I opened the carton, furry green curds would greet my eyes. I shut the refrigerator door.

“Messages,” Roz was saying. “You okay?”

She was wearing this fifties housedress get-up, with lacey white socks and black pointy-toed ankle-high boots. She’d added a purple streak down the left side of her pink hair. Her earrings looked like Coke bottle caps.

“Me?” I said in a dead voice. “I feel great. Absolutely.”

“It’s the riotous living,” Roz said.

Maybe she had eavesdropped on me and Sam. The idea perked me up.

“Carlotta?”

“Yeah?”

‘This guy keeps calling. Sam Gianelli.”

My face got warm, all of a sudden. I hoped I wasn’t blushing. “Yeah?”

“He’s phoned like five times. Awesome voice.”

“Yeah.”

“I told him I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

He might call Gloria to check when I got off. That would be great. Gloria would razz me for the next hundred years. I stared ruefully at the telephone, picked up the receiver, and slowly replaced it in the cradle. I didn’t want to call Sam. I didn’t want to see Sam. I didn’t want to ask him about Jack Flaherty. Sam’s no dummy. He’d know I was investigating at G&W. He’d realize I didn’t trust him. And that would be the end. Better leave it for a few days. Then I could say I’d met the guy, and wondered if Sam had ever run into him. Something like that.

I opened the refrigerator again. I had a faint memory of a salami in the meat tray. Three anonymous tinfoil bundles later, I located it. I keep leftovers until they get fuzzy. That way I don’t feel guilty about throwing out good food.

“And Mooney’s been calling,” Roz said. “The cop. Just one message, repeated over and over and over. Call Mooney.

Call Mooney. Call Mooney. Capitalized. Underlined. Totally emphatic, with sugar on top.”

I shrugged. It took all my concentration to slice three rounds of salami without severing a thumb.

“He got the hots for you, or what?” she asked.

“Didn’t he say?”

“He said urgent. Something else, too.”

She’s like that. Saves up the good parts. Eats her pie starting at the crust end.

“Contest,” she said, nodding her head gravely. The bobbing purple streak ruined the solemn effect. “Contest. Urgent, about some contest.”

I scooped up the phone so fast I almost dropped the knife on my foot.

And, of course, Mooney was nowhere to be found. I left a message.

Urgent.

“Jeez, that was some mess over in J.P.,” Roz said. “Wow.

There was this pile of glop in the middle of the kitchen floor you wouldn’t believe. Flour and honey and cherry pie filling and oatmeal. Totally gross. Wanna see the pictures?”

“While I’m eating?”

“Lemon wanted to, like, blow the place up or something.

He didn’t think we could ever get it clean.”

“Did you?”

“We had to use boiling water, and the ice scraper from the pickup. I’m going back over today to put another coat of wax on the floor.”

I excused myself, and dove into the bathroom. T.C.‘s cat box looked untouched by other than feline paws. Leave the money there, Margaret had said. / don’t want it. I wondered how long I could live with IRA cash in the bathroom. It generated a bit of tension, like juggling eggs.

Roz was staring critically at the Windex bottle when I got back, edging it a shade to the right of the S.O.S.

“You didn’t see my old school friend, did you?” I asked.

“Uh, Roger Smith or something?”

She cast sheepish eyes at the floor. “Nope, he hasn’t been by.” She frowned and returned the Windex bottle to its original position. “Unless—”

“Unless?”

She bit down on her tongue, then realized it impeded her speech. “Well, you got one more call, from a weirdo who sounded kind of like Roger Smith. But he said his name was Andrews. From Cedar Wash Condominium Resorts. You’re not buying some gross condo, are you?”

“Relax. I’ll still be here to collect the rent.”

“You like the Windex picture? You think I should put in some fruit? Garlic?” She likes to paint bulbs of garlic. Those I can always find later.

“Lot of potential.” That’s what I say when I’m baffled by one of Roz’s masterpieces. I’m scared she’ll explain the deeper meanings.

I ate two slices of salami, called it a balanced meal, and went upstairs.

I didn’t call Mooney again. I didn’t call Sam. I didn’t get back to Andrews at Cedar Wash. I slept six and a half hours, like a rock.

I didn’t like John Flaherty.

It took me two days to cross the guy’s path, although we supposedly worked the same shift. The bastard’s hours were so irregular Gloria should have given him the boot, except, of course, he’d been personally recommended by her partner—my lover—good old Sam Gianelli.

I finally asked Sam about him, worked it in real casually while we were up in my room, sated and lying back on the bed. Bonnie Raitt crooned “Angel From Montgomery” in the background: “I am an old woman, named after my mother.

My old man is another child that’s growin’ old.

If dreams were thunder, and lightnin’ was desire, This old house would have burnt down

a long time ago.”

I sang along with the first verse. Whenever I hear that song I have to restrain myself from leaping up and grabbing my guitar. It didn’t seem appropriate at the moment.

“You know this Jack Flaherty?” I said, running my fingertips down the line of dark curly hair on Sam’s chest. “At GandW?”

“Nah.” Sam yanked my arm lower, and I couldn’t hear any tightness or discomfort in his voice. “You think I know all the drivers?”

“Just the women,” I said, to keep it light.

“Oh, yeah, that Rosie, she’s one hot dame.”

“Yeah?” The idea cheered me up. I hoped crabby Rosie went home to one steamy romance after another.

“Oh, you got a lot to learn before you’re in Rosie’s league,” he assured me. A pretty good liar, Sam. Papa Gianelli should be proud.

“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to.

To believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go.”

Raitt gave the song one of her fine wailing finishes. Her voice quieted the other noises in the room, from the ticking clock to T.C. meowing in the corner. He likes to warn me when I pay too much attention to another male.

After that, I didn’t feel bad about not telling Sam why I was driving for G&W. I figured we were even, both lying. It might not be the perfect basis for a meaningful relationship, but it was fine for what we had going.

Anyhow, it took me two days to meet this Flaherty, two minutes to decide I’d seen him someplace before, and two seconds to spot him for a jerk. He was a couple years older than me, which made him young by G&W standards, maybe the only Caucasian driver under fifty. He had bad teeth, yellow and crooked. His face was well shaped, but all the features seemed squeezed together in the center. His eyes, nose, and mouth were too small for the flesh surrounding them. He was the kind of guy who gabs with men, but takes a friendly hello from a female as an attempted seduction, so I couldn’t get into the kind of conversation that would have naturally led to the questions I longed to ask: So where’d you work before this? How do you know Sam Gianelli? Ever been in Ireland? Collect much money for the IRA last week? Buy any machine guns?

I followed Joe Fergus for half a night, Andy O’Brien the other half. Choosing the guys who’d met at the Rebellion, and giving precedence to Irish-sounding surnames, the next night I followed a Maloney and an O’Keefe. None of them robbed the Bank of Boston. O’Brien made a brief stop at the Rebellion, but I didn’t see any other cabs in the parking lot.

O’Keefe dropped somebody off at the Yard of Ale. Maloney picked up a fare in front of the All Clear. I tried to make something of it, but taxi drivers get a lot of barroom business these days, what with bartenders worried about getting sued if some drunken patron piles his car into the neighborhood nursery school after tossing back one more for the road.

I listened to radio calls, wrote each one down, but couldn’t find a pattern. No calls from a mysterious woman in red at midnight. I was careful to note any woman’s name that blared out of the squawkbox, because of what old Pat had said about a woman being involved. But G&W, a small cab company, tried for personalized service. Gloria radioed the name of each caller along with the address: George Burke at 468 Beacon, Mrs. Edelman on Cumberland. Sometimes just a first name, sometimes just a last. I wrote down a lot of women’s names.

I was getting nowhere, and Margaret Devens was coming home tomorrow. Not only was Margaret coming home, but I’d called Mr. Andrews and Cedar Wash Condominium Resorts was threatening to revoke my twenty K unless I showed up with my husband, Thomas, within the week. The missing persons report on Eugene Devens had drawn a fat zero. Between Sam and screwed-up biorhythms, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t connect with Mooney on the phone—

As my grandmother used to say: You’re such a brain, you can worry more in one minute than other people can in a whole year.

Wednesday night, I decided John Flaherty was the one to tail. I waited until he signed in—late again. He sailed off in cab 442, one of the brand-new ones, which didn’t make me like him any better, since I was stuck with another antique.

He spoke up maybe ten minutes later, accepting Gloria’s offer of a fare in the South End.

Now I know the back roads of Boston. I can beat a civilian to any city location with minutes to spare, but another cabbie, that’s a different story. I screeched the tight curves on the Fenway, cut over to Huntington Avenue by the Museum of Fine Arts, and was blessed by the god of traffic lights for once in my life.

A well-dressed young couple promenaded the sidewalk in front of 117 Pembroke Street. The man carried a slim briefcase, and the woman was decked out in Ralph Lauren’s version of what Connecticut WASPs wear to the market. I pulled into an unlit sidestreet with a decent view, and waited maybe five seconds for G&W 442 to catch up with me.

Well, we had one exciting night, let me tell you. Cab 442

took the couple as far as the Westin Hotel. I mean, they could practically spit as far as the Westin from Pembroke Street. Walk? At night? God forbid.

442 queued up for the Westin’s doorman, and was rewarded with a fare, a lone businessman. From the Westin we journeyed to the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, tracing Storrow Drive to the Mass. Ave. Bridge, which is a mess of construction lights and battered yellow barrels. Then Memorial Drive up to the Hyatt’s front door. Nothing odd in that. I ran my meter just the way Flaherty should have been running his. I’d check the total with Gloria. If I couldn’t nab him for anything else, maybe I could get him for embezzlement.