A Trouble of Fools (8 page)

“Margaret, what does Gene have to do with it? Did you see Gene?”

She gave up, sighed deeply, closed her eye, and slept.

I sat with her a little while. The IV dripped. The second hand of the big clock described steady circles. Her breathing grew soft and even, her hand warmer.

Before I left, I tucked her hand underneath the thin blanket, and smoothed a strand of white hair off her forehead.

Like I said, I never met my grandmother.

I stopped at a deli on the VFW Parkway and ordered a pastrami on light rye, two half-sour pickles, and a can of Dr.

Brown’s cream soda. That’s the kind of food I was raised on, and while Boston’s delis can’t compare with the Detroit of my childhood, I find them soothing in stressful times.

“I gobbled a huge wedge of strawberry cheesecake for dessert. If it weren’t for volleyball and a speedy metabolism, I swear I’d be as fat as Gloria.

By the time I’d patted up the last crumbs with my fingertip it was after three, which meant Paolina would be home from school. The deli has one of those minibooths Ma Bell has installed now that Superman no longer needs a place to change. I punched the buttons. Sometimes I even miss dial phones.

“Alio?” She answers the phone the way her mom does: “Alio?” instead of “Hello?” At school and with me, she speaks good old American slang. Except every once in a while, she starts a phrase with that multisyllabic “Nooooo!”

which identifies a Colombiano every time. “iComo esta usted?” I replied.

“Carlotta’.” she said immediately. “Hi!”

My high school Spanish is good for one thing. It gets a guaranteed giggle out of Paolina, who says I have an accent like a Venezuelan peasant’s parrot.

You could tell she was glad to hear from me. When I was a cop I guess I never really got used to the fact that pimps and hookers were not pleased when I showed up. Even now, folks are not always delighted to invite a PI into their parlor.

Paolina is my antidote, my official welcoming committee.

“How’re ya’ doin’, Carlotta?” Sometimes she gets deliberately slangy to show off.

“You take your history exam?”

“You remember everything.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I got eighty-eight. But I think she’s going to grade on a curve, so maybe I got an A.”

“You study?”

“Yeah.”

“You panic?”

“Right at the beginning, when Miss Vaneer was passing out the papers, my heart started pounding, you know, but I thought about taking deep breaths, like you said, and then I was okay. I didn’t rush or anything, and I finished on time.”

“You did great. Even without a curve.”

“I did?”

“Terrific,” I said.

‘Terrific,” she echoed. I could tell she was smiling, and I pictured her at the phone, sneakers untied as usual, eyes shining.

When I first met Paolina she was seven years old, going on thirty, thin and tough as whipcord, with a knuckle splay of bruises across her right cheek, courtesy of one of her visiting “uncles.” Marta, Lord bless her, didn’t stand for that kind of thing. The guys could slap her around—something I’ve never understood, something I don’t want to understand—but mess with her kids and that was the end.

When he wouldn’t stay away, she preferred charges against the guy who’d smacked Paolina, and some kind soul at the police station suggested Big Sisters for the small scared girl with the wide eyes.

Marta doesn’t offer Paolina much in the way of praise, especially for schoolwork, because she’s not sure it’s any use to females. I’ve talked to her about it, and we’ve sort of agreed to disagree. So I try to fill the gap. I make sure I know when the tests come, and what the grades are, and I’m extremely generous with compliments. Paolina used to be so scared of taking tests, so sure she’d fail, that she’d faint or throw up. She used to spend testing days in the nurse’s office.

Now she’s pulling As and Bs.

Am I proud? Not so you’d notice, provided you’re blind and deaf.

“Hey, about Saturday,” I said.

“You can’t come?” Paolina’s always prepared for disappointment.

“Of

course I can come.” Sometimes, when I was a cop, I had to back out on our regular dates. Now I’m private, that doesn’t happen anymore. Ever. When you’re ten, there ought to be somebody you can rely on. “I just wanted to make sure you remembered.”

“Noon, no?” she said, using the multisyllabic national marker. “I’ll be ready.”

“I’ll honk.”

“Where are we going?”

“Surprise,” I said, to cover the fact that I didn’t know yet.

“Jeans and sneakers.”

“Okay. And I want to talk to you.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“Not on the phone. When I see you.”

“Anything special?”

Her voice sounded troubled, but all she said was, “It’s about volleyball.”

“Can it wait till Saturday?”

“Sure,” she said, but she didn’t sound right.

“Any tests tomorrow?”

“Just a quiz. In Spanish.”

“Better you than me,” I said.

“Es verdad,” she agreed with a giggle.

“Adios, amiga.” I hung up. There was this guy waiting to use the phone. I hadn’t even noticed him.

It used to be easier to find places to take Paolina. Puppet Showplace in Brookline was great, but now she’s kind of old for that. They get so sophisticated so young, it kills me. And one of the Big Sister rules is not to spend much money. The kids come from poor families, and we’re not supposed to come on like fairy godmothers. Just friends.

On the way back to Margaret’s, I decided I’d drive Paolina to this wild-animal farm in New Hampshire. The trees up north would be in full fall color, and she really likes animals. She’s got two scraggly cats already, and if Marta would okay the deal, I’d give her Red Emma in a flash.

Paolina calls Red Emma Esmeralda, because she’s green.

She’s trying to teach her a few choice Spanish phrases, and says the bird’s accent is better than mine.

What with having three names, the bird probably can’t learn anything because she’s in the middle of an identity crisis.

I

cruised Margaret’s block to see if any cops still lurked there. No blue-and-whites out front, no anonymous vans, no suspicious unmarked sedans with elaborately casual guys reading newspapers in the front seats. The door didn’t have a police seal on it, but I could tell the lab boys had come and gone by the gritty residue on the brass pineapple door knocker. They must have gotten a great set of my prints.

Since I had the front door key in my pocket, it didn’t take me long to get inside. I’d snitched it from Margaret’s handbag during the ambulance ride. As an honorary granddaughter, I figured the least I could do was bring her robe and slippers to the hospital.

And as a private investigator, I could do what I’d intended to do that morning. Search Eugene’s room.

I’ll

tell myself I have a mind above housework, but one glance at Margaret’s living room and I was sorely tempted to race to the kitchen for a broom, a mop, a bucket, Handy Andy, Spic and Span, anything. The memory of what the kitchen really offered—more chaos—held me back. That and the fear that maybe, God forbid, I was developing a latent housekeeping streak.

If the crime lab team had bothered to step into the living room, they hadn’t righted the furniture, restuffed any cushions, vacuumed the rug, or dusted the mantle. They might have swiped a few bits of smashed china, but there was plenty still scattered on the scratched floorboards. From the foyer, the shards looked like exotic flower petals.

Paolina painted a watercolor once, for art class, of three soggy crumpled yellow Kleenexes, next to a pile of orange peels. I keep that picture in my bedroom, framed. I like it.

Her teacher didn’t. Her teacher asked her why she was painting garbage.

Paolina told me it hadn’t been garbage from far away. In the picture, the Kleenex and the orange peels, floating gently in a gutter, are magical water lilies.

It was the same with Margaret’s broken plates and vases.

Far away, flowers. Close up, garbage.

I tried to piece together two chunks of purple glaze, and dropped them back on the floor in disgust. Maybe I could bribe Roz to clean. Nobody should have to come home from the hospital to a house that looked like the target of a wrecking ball. And Margaret Devens, I reassured myself, would come home.

The cops had left a trail of muddy footprints on the stair carpeting. I followed them.

Four bedrooms and a tiled bath opened off the narrow hallway. I glanced in each doorway. Picking Eugene’s room seemed easy. Only the left front bedroom, a largish room, maybe twelve by sixteen, lacked a pastel dust-ruffle and frilly lace curtains.

Standing in the dimly lit hallway, I tried to imagine the room before the whirlwind struck, make a few guesses about the guy who’d slept there for sixteen years’ worth of nights.

It didn’t seem like the room of a fifty-six-year-old man. I wondered if I’d stumbled on Gene’s boyhood bedroom, preserved intact as some family shrine.

I checked the other rooms again, just to make sure. Frills and lace. Scented dusting powder. Only one room smelled of cigar smoke, the one I’d singled out first.

The narrow bed’s brass headboard was barred and knobbed. The mattress had been yanked onto the floor, and slit repeatedly. Coils of wire poked out of the springs like jack-in-the-box toys. Over the bed hung a giant poster of young Carl Yastrzemski, Red Sox hero.

So the searchers had been looking for something substantial, not a key, or a photo, or anything flat that could be taped behind smiling Yaz.

I took a few steps into the room, letting my eyes wander.

It’s hard to get to know a guy from his room when that room’s been trashed by persons unknown, and possibly rifled by the cops to boot.

On surfaces not graced by old baseball posters, Eugene favored taped-up pages from girlie magazines. That was the total of his decorating pizazz, at his age, unless the previous searchers had stolen the Picasso prints off the paler rectangles on the walls. More likely Miss September had fallen into disfavor, or under the bed. Eugene read soft-porn “male adventure novels” that looked like Harlequin Romances for men. I loved the titles: Beyond Glory, Glorious Flames,

Gunrunner to Glory. A whole lot of glory on the covers; that and big-breasted women falling out of slinky nightgowns.

The day after I covered my first homicide as a cop, I went home and scoured my bedroom. Threw out all that embarrassing junk I’d hoarded, marveling at the bizarre items I’d thoughtlessly shoved into the bottom drawer of my dresser for the cops to smirk at on that inevitable day. The gonzo Diet Aids I’d purchased, convinced I was two pounds over the fashion limit for my latest bikini. They made me throw up, but I’d paid so much for those dumb pills, mail order, sight unseen, that I’d been too angry to toss them in the trash. So I’d heaved them in the bottom drawer instead, along with the book of illustrated religious poetry (can you believe it?) that was the very first gift my very first boyfriend gave me when I was an old maid of fourteen. I tossed out the early letters from Cal, my ex, letters I suppose could be called love letters, if you stretched the bounds. Out went the old tube of birth-control foam, along with one of those sexy uplift bras, and the torn jeans I’d worn, almost exclusively, my eighteenth summer. I found and discarded a coupon for breast enlargement cream, corny birthday cards, a mercifully brief attempt at a diary.

If the cops come and toss my room tomorrow, they won’t find much of a personal nature. Pictures of my mom and dad. My wedding album, a curiously impersonal item, since the smiling bride seems a total stranger to me. Aunt Bea’s oval gold locket, with its two photos of faded young men.

My aunt Bea never married. I have no idea who those men were or what they meant to her, but she treasured that locket, and I shine it up every once in a while in her memory. Probably the most personal item in my room is my old National steel guitar, and there’s no way those cops will ever know what that guitar means to me.

My worst cop trait was insubordination. My best was sheer stubbornness, and I haven’t lost it. Even though I knew the place had been plundered by the bad guys and the good guys both, I searched it again. I shook out the pages of those trashy novels, twisted the stupid knobs off the brass headboard, poked inside them with a wire coathanger.

Did I find any terrific clue the cops had overlooked?

Of course not.

One loose scrap of paper fluttered out of a paperback, and it made me feel a little better about brother Eugene. It was a poem, “No Second Troy,” by William Butler Yeats, copied on lined notebook paper, the kind you tear out of ring binders.

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

I remembered what the bartender had said, about Gene’s interest in the glorious rebellion, and the great Irish poets. It added a little depth to a character otherwise defined by sports memorabilia, Playboy centerfolds, and sisterly devotion.

I read the rest of the poem out loud. I liked it, but I have to admit I enjoyed the contrast, too. It’s not often you come across a poem by Yeats stuck in a semiporn paperback that would probably have caused the poet to puke.

The attic steps were narrow, steep, and uncarpeted.

They took a ninety-degree turn ten steps up, and from that point on I had to crouch to avoid the ceiling. At the top step, the paneled door swung open with one of those creaky horror-movie noises I absolutely adore as long as I’m safe in the depths of my cushy cinema seat. I’m ashamed to say it had a different effect in Margaret’s attic. The spit in my mouth dried up so fast my tongue felt like a prune. My ears, suddenly sharp, started to register each faint noise as a threat. Passing cars, wind-whipped branches, ratlike scamperings … Was that a footstep? In the house?