Lie Down with the Devil (12 page)

“Would have been nice.”

She looked down at her tattered clothing and said, “I ought to change, right?”

“First,” I said, “draw.”

I handed her paper along with a pencil that she rejected, substituting a charcoal stick from a convenient pocket. I took off for the kitchen to retrieve my abandoned cup of coffee. By the time I returned, the image was taking shape.

Sometimes I forget how good she is. It always strikes me as ironic that Roz, who claims to despise all representational drawing, can catch a likeness in a few hastily drawn lines, catch it with the kind of detail a committed representational artist would kill to duplicate. As I watched the sketch grow more like Jessica, as I made the occasional suggestion, I wanted to ask, What is it that makes you despise your own talent?

My ex, a gifted musician who works sporadically at best, used to claim it wasn’t talent but will. The talent
was the easy part. The ability to handle the inevitable disappointment, to trust the process, to work when no one seemed to care, to play when no one was listening, to practice for yourself, those were the hard things, the things that made the difference. And luck. Always luck, good or bad.

I pressed my lips together and imagined the real woman, the dead woman, walking into my office, cheeks pink from the cold. What kind of luck had brought the phony Jessica Franklin to my door?

“And what about the dead bodies in Vegas?” Roz said while I made copies of her effort.

My stomach lurched. I had a vision of Sam behind the wheel of a car, his face twisted with hatred, running down a young woman who looked vaguely like Jessica. “They’ll wait. You can go change.”

“Um, do we—do I get paid for this, or—? No, forget I asked. I screwed up, so I guess I owe you.”

It’s irrational, but that’s exactly how I felt, too. Somehow, in some way, I had screwed up and now I owed Jessica Franklin a debt I might never repay.

I circled the block slowly. Allston’s Pomeroy Court was a skinny, down-at-the-mouth street lined with houses in various stages of disrepair. A corner market advertised Pakistani and Indian groceries, fresh halal meats, and cut-price beer. The cars were old and rusty with
PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN
bumper stickers. When I parked my rented junker on nearby Guildford Street, it ft into the landscape like a piece of a child’s puzzle.

Two overturned plastic chairs decorated the weedy yard of a two-family with peeling beige paint. The adjoining house was green with unfortunate yellow trim. The high, narrow structures, too close to the street and too close to each other, had stingy lawns and forbidding chain-link fences. I checked the address against the one I had written: 82 Pomeroy Court, but failed to picture my Jessica Franklin in the faded maroon house with the torn lace curtains.

When I’d called St. Elizabeth’s and asked to speak to Ms. Franklin, nurses’ aide, a cool alto had informed me that she was not expected in today. Which meant that she might be home, enjoying a day off. I poked my finger at the bell.

“I’m not buying anything, young lady.” A woman’s voice.

“I’m not selling,” I said through the firmly closed door.

“This isn’t magazine subscriptions? I tell those people over and over, if I want a magazine, I’m perfectly okay going out and buying it at the store.” Her words were slightly slurred, enough to make me speculate about speech defects and alcohol consumption.

“Please,” I said, “you can see through the peephole; I’m all alone. I’d like to ask you a few questions. It won’t take long.”

A moment’s silence, then the rattle of a chain and the click of a dead bolt told me that curiosity had won the battle with fear.

She blinked up at me, a short middle-aged woman with carefully arched eyebrows in a heavily made-up face, wearing a dark sweater and a conservative shapeless skirt. A charm bracelet jangled on her right wrist. I wondered whether I’d caught her on her way out.

“Taking some kind of poll?” she said. “That’s rotten work, and you’re lucky anybody opens the door, this neighborhood. Used to be nice with the park right down the block, but now there’s nobody in the park but hoodlums. Wear those parkas and sweatshirt hoods up over their heads so you can’t tell ’em apart. Woman got raped there, must be going on three years ago. And they never caught him. Never. Police, fine lot they are.”

I hoped she’d upbraided the Macs for not catching the rapist.

“You’re not coming in,” she continued briskly, “so say what you want. Nobody gets in here. I’m old enough
to remember the Strangler. Those women, they deserved what they got; imagine opening the door to a man. You were a man, I wouldn’t open the door, not even if you said you were a policeman. I always thought that’s what he did, said police and they opened up like clamshells.”

“What if they had credentials?”

“Pooh. Credentials. What are they worth? Counterfeit. Bought in a store.”

The Macs must have had their hands full, questioning her.

“Well, if you’re not selling, what do you want? I’ve got friends stopping by, and I don’t have all day.”

“Is your name Jessica Franklin?”

“You with the government? This the census?”

“I’m a private investigator.” In spite of her professed scorn for credentials, she cracked the screen door to take my card. “I understand your purse was stolen?”

“You with the Discovery people? I called just the way you’re supposed to, and don’t you try and hold me responsible for any charges racked up on that card. I know my rights, and don’t try telling me I didn’t call. I wrote down the name of the person I spoke to on the phone.”

“That was an excellent thing to do, but I’m not with a credit card company. I’m working a case that involves identity theft, and the police thought you might be able to help me. Nurses are such observant people. You’ve probably noticed that.” There: I’d promoted her from nurses’ aide to full-fledged professional and flattered her to boot.

“Well,” she said, with just a hint of a smile, “training does count for something.”

I gave a faint cough and tapped my chest with the flat of my hand. “I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Oh, you might as well come in for a minute,” she said. “It’s so cold out, don’t you think? I can’t wait for the springtime. Everything looks so much better in the spring.”

“The crocuses should be up soon.”

“Oh, do you garden?”

“Whenever I have time,” I said.

“I’ll get your water.” She disappeared down the hallway.

I have time to garden precisely never, but I’d noted the neat beds under the dusty windows. Now that I’d gotten across the drawbridge, I hastily scanned the walls for photographs. She did needlepoint, or maybe the cross-stitched mottoes were her grandmother’s. They were religious sayings, “The Lord is my Shepherd” and the like. Maybe she’d done them as a child.

In the old-fashioned living room to the right of the hall, a small corner table seemed entirely devoted to silver-framed photographs, a sort of family shrine. I scanned the images quickly, but found no one who looked like my Jessie.

This older Jessica was a collector of teacups and tarnished silver spoons, a preserver of hydrangeas. I heard her footsteps in the hall and hastily retreated to a neutral site.

“Thank you so much,” I said gratefully as I accepted the cool glass, tall and clean, with ice. She carried a glass of her own, too. I suspected hers had a dollop of vodka in it.

“Identity theft,” she said. “They had something on
Channel Five just the other night. That woman, the consumer reporter with the blond hair. You can sit for a minute, but that’s all.”

I thanked her again and moved to a small armchair. She took the hairy-looking sofa, plumping up the pillows before she sat. The charm bracelet jingled. It had small silvery dice, minute playing cards, miniature martini glasses.

“I understand you lost your wallet,” I said.

“Purse. A black leather clutch. I don’t go for those oversized bags. It wasn’t a particularly good bag, just something I bought a long time ago at Filene’s.”

“How did you lose it?”

“Oh, I filled all that in on the police report.” She seemed uneasy. “I really don’t want to go into it again.”

“There are different techniques that different groups of thieves use, sort of like trademarks. Like some specialize in grabbing bags at restaurants, bags that are looped over chair backs. Some thieves work grocery stores where women leave their handbags in the carts. Some gangs grab and run, right on the street.”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure where mine was taken. I was running a lot of errands that day, and then it was just gone.”

“Errands around here? In this area?”

“What difference does it make?”

She didn’t like my line of questioning. Either she couldn’t remember what she’d told the cops or she was lying about the theft.

“Is there anything else?” she said.

I took out my copy of Roz’s drawing. I’d worked with her to soften the chin, widen the eyes, and I was pleased with the result. It looked like my client.

“Do you know this woman?”

There was a flicker in the brown eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“She looks slightly familiar. But no, I don’t know her. Who is she?”

“It’s possible she might have been involved in the theft of your bag.”

“She’s so young.”

“Did she wait on you in a restaurant? Maybe a sales clerk? Or a patient?”

“Definitely not a patient. I’d recognize a patient.”

“Maybe you recognize this man?” I displayed the photo of my punk rocker.

“Good-looking,” she said. “That’s trouble right there.”

“You haven’t seen him either? Locally? At the hospital?”

“Sorry.”

“Does he look familiar? The way the woman does?”

“No. Her, now, she’s sort of average. I could have passed her on the street or in the grocery store, but him, I’d have noticed. And I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. My friends should be here any minute and I need a little time to set up.”

She glanced over her shoulder. In the dim hallway, I could just make out the square of a card table leaning against the wall.

“I’ll help,” I said.

“Oh, it’s no trouble.”

“Poker?” I said.

“Just a friendly game.”

“No gambling?”

“Nothing serious. Now, if there’s nothing else …”

“If you remember where you saw the girl, please call me.”

She hurried me out the door and I went without protest because I was busily recalling the contents of my Jessica’s bag, the mound of stuff she’d knocked to the ground when we first met, the bandanna and the Kleenex, the car keys. The deck of playing cards and the casino matches. Foxwoods matches. This Jessica Franklin played cards on her day off. She wore a charm bracelet hung with dice and cards. My Jessica had picked up the deck and shuffled it like a pro. Maybe the nurses’ aide had left her bag in the casino at Foxwoods. Maybe she didn’t want the police to know that; maybe gambling and drinking didn’t jibe with her idea of herself.

I zipped up my parka and pulled on my gloves. It was a possibility, but where did it lead? Suppose she had left her bag at Foxwoods. Suppose my Jessica had picked it up. They were—what?—two of how many hundreds of thousands who fled the strictures of puritan Massachusetts to gamble in Connecticut. It didn’t exactly narrow the field.

I made my way back to the Rent-a-Wreck, confident I’d find it since it wasn’t worth stealing. My cell buzzed as I opened the door and I played hunt-through-all-the-pockets till I found it.

“Hey,” Mooney said.

“Hey,” I replied warily.

“Look, your hit and run; the ME did the cut. Thought you might be interested to know it’s going in the books as a homicide.”

Either he’d tell me why or he wouldn’t. I froze with my hand on the car door.

“Whoever hit her wasn’t happy with once. Backed up and rolled over her again. Then again.”

“So you’re thinking he knew who she was?”

“He or she.”

“He,” I said. “Statistics.”

“Well, then, put it this way: I hope he knew her,” Mooney said slowly. “Because otherwise, we got some kinda nasty devil loose on the street.”

The parking attendant shoved a cardboard stub in my hand and took off with the beater, tires screaming. I watched it fishtail around a corner. Whenever Sam pulls his Jaguar into a North End lot, the help hops to it and a parking space magically appears front and center. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him pay for the privilege, either. Maybe I should be trolling every parking lot in the North End, asking whether Sam had parked the Jag long-term. Someone could have driven him to the airport.

Maybe I would do just that, after I learned Jessica Franklin’s real name and rubbed the Macs’ noses in it.

In no other place does the Gianelli name carry greater weight than in Boston’s insular North End, but that day, that era, is swiftly drawing to a close. I glanced around at the few remaining construction barriers left over from the Big Dig. Attitudes and habits were changing. The generation of immigrants, with their old world alliances and values, was dying off. The new generation had both feet in America. The landscape had changed, too. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the North End, geographically cut off from the rest of the city, had retained a fortresslike separation. Now, with the old Central Artery buried underground, no
physical barrier existed between the North End and downtown. The borders had been breached, the attractive real estate revealed to outsiders.

The ugly barrier had fallen and I found myself regretting it. There had been a solid reality to the old neighborhoods of Boston, to the ethnic divisions that made the North End what it was and Southie what it was; Charlestown and Dorchester, too. Soon, it would all be homogenized, a Disneyesque mainstreet community. Which, on the whole, was probably better than keeping to codes of silence, stoning school buses, spitting on outsiders, and defending organized crime.

I displayed both Roz’s drawing and the punk rocker’s photo to the maitre d’ at Mamma Vincenza’s. He didn’t recognize either, but he recognized me.