A Trouble of Fools (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 1) Page 5

  I shoved back the covers and leaped out of bed.

  The Y is the only place to go when you oversleep. Nobody cares if you don’t put on makeup. Lipstick before 9 A.M. is regarded with suspicion at the Y.

  I spike for the Y-Birds, which says a lot fast. We play killer volleyball, not beach blanket stuff, and we do it three mornings a week. That’s why my knees and elbows are unusual shades of magenta and yellow. I am intimately acquainted with the wooden gym floor at the Central Square Y, and I wouldn’t miss a game for the world.

  Volleyball is also why the fingernails on my right hand are clipped short and square. I always keep my left-hand nails short because I play blues guitar, not as well as I used to, but pretty damn well considering how little I practice these days. Acoustic only. The good old stuff: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Reverend Gary Davis. No sweet love songs, just wailin’ done-me-wrong blues.

  I would like to point out that while my nose has been broken three times, accounting for a slightly off-center bump, it has never been touched during a volleyball game. The first time, I was just a kid. Ronnie Farmer, the little boy next door, banged me on the nose with a hammer, for no apparent reason other than to see how hammers and noses interacted when they met; the second time, my nose came in contact with the steering wheel of my cab. The third time was cop business.

  People I like say my nose has character.

  I play volleyball because I can’t stand exercise for exercise’s sake. I shudder at the very thought of those stationary bikes, peddling to nowhere. The symbolism is just too grim.

  Volleyball, though, I love. And the women I play with are terrific: the phys ed coach from Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a couple cops, a computer jockette, some M.I.T. students. We play hard, but we treat each other kindly. You dive after a ball, give it everything you’ve got, and even if you miss the damn thing, you get a pat on the back and a hand up. I like that. And after the game, I swim laps to cool off.

  Three days a week, that’s my morning. Good healthy exercise. Makes me tingle with righteousness while I eat breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts afterwards.

  I brought my Eugene Devens notebook along and flipped it open on the orange Formica countertop, next to my two glazed donuts and sugared coffee. I’d called a few more hospitals with no luck. If Gene was getting doctored, he was doing it under an alias, and while I could come up with about fifty reasons for seeking anonymous medical care, I couldn’t blend any of the reasons with what I knew about Eugene Devens.

  Which was not a hell of a lot.

  I stared at my notebook, at the sum total of all I’d gleaned about the man, from his sister, from Gloria, from Billy the bartender, from my few remaining cop contacts.

  Eugene Paul Mark Devens. No criminal record. Born, May 28, 1929. Delivered at St. Margaret’s in Dublin, Ireland, second child of Mary Margaret and Patrick Joseph Devens, if you didn’t count the two stillbirths and three miscarriages in between Margaret and her baby brother. What a treasured child he must have been. How do small babies, swaddled in those tiny blankets, grow up to be men who disappear without a trace?

  Eugene Paul came to the States at the age of five and was educated at the usual assortment of Catholic schools. I wondered if his mom had meant her only son for the priesthood, been disappointed when he’d quit high school. I wondered if she’d been disappointed or relieved when he’d finally married at thirty-five. Married Mary Elizabeth Reilly in 1964. Wife died six years later, sixteen years ago. No kids.

  Nobody had mentioned vices other than drink and ladies in connection with Gene. I hadn’t found any involvement with, say, the numbers or the track, but if there were heavy loans involved, if Gene couldn’t pay the sharks, that would be a hell of a reason for him to stay lost.

  Eugene Devens did not own a car, which might seem strange for a cabdriver in any other city. In Boston, which has ample parking for, say, one in ten of its residents—not to mention commuters—not owning a car makes sense. You save—not only on parking tickets, but on medical expenses for mental-health-related ailments. Unfortunately, one of the best ways to trace a missing person is through automobile registration. Eugene’s gain was my loss.

  The Central Square Dunkin’ Donuts has a phone booth at the back, one of the few real phone booths left in the world where you can talk with any privacy. By using up a lot of dimes and impersonating a dotty travel agent cursed with a missing middle-aged tourist, I learned that no Eugene Devens had traveled via Aer Lingus from Logan to either Shannon or Dublin. Aer Lingus is it as far as direct flights from Boston to Ireland. I figured anyone who felt as Eugene Devens did about the British would hardly set foot on the hated soil of Heathrow, but I checked out British Air and TWA and Pan Am. Nothing. I even checked People Express out of Newark, in case he’d gone cattle car.

  I called a genuine travel agent, and discovered that the only charters to Ireland departing within the past two weeks had consisted entirely of M.I.T. faculty members, a group with whom Gene Devens would hardly have felt at home. No, she had not heard of any travel organization with the initials GBA. Ships she eliminated in no time. Boston is not the great port it once was. Zip. Nada. No passenger ships had sailed for the Emerald Isle in the past month.

  So if Gene was in jolly old Ireland, he’d traveled incognito. Walked across the water. Sailed solo. Parachuted from a secret military jet. And pretty soon, he’d send a postcard to Billy the bartender, and all would be well, except I’d feel morally obligated to refund most of Margaret Devens’s thousand.

  I checked my notebook again, searching for God knows what. My notes looked like an obit. Born, schooled, married. Everything but date of death.

  I shook the thought away with the doughnut crumbs. It was time to speak to my client again. I needed a look at Gene’s room.

  My car was parked in one of those back lots off that narrow street right behind Mass. Ave., Bishop Somebody-or-Other Drive. It’s the kind of street that makes you think the bishop wasn’t held in high esteem. My little red Toyota was still there though, untouched. Did you know that when a woman who grew up in Detroit buys a Japanese car, it’s close to treason?

  Before heading to the Devens house, I swung by Paolina’s housing project. It’s one of those low-rise brick townhouse developments, better planned than the ghetto towers, with less concentrated poverty and hopelessness, an occasional tree, a small square of grass. It’s tucked in a back pocket of East Cambridge. The steel skyscrapers of the high-tech boom have grown up around it, encircling it, blocking the sun.

  It’s not so bad in the daytime, but nights, I want to haul Paolina’s whole family out of there. Paolina’s mom, Marta, is Colombian. She married some Puerto Rican guy over here, and he scampered after the fifth kid. There’s a rotating mass of visiting cousins and uncles. Marta’s a character. Put her down in the desert and she’d sell you sand. Not only would you pay through the nose for it, she’d make you enjoy the privilege. If she hadn’t come down with a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis, the family would never have wound up in the projects. Every once in a while she shows a trace of the old spark, but mostly she just goes through the paces.

  Paolina would be in school for the day, but I wasn’t planning on a visit.

  He was sprawled on the stoop of the building next door to Paolina’s, leaning against the dirty yellow bricks, staring at something only he could see. Same guy I’d been watching for three weeks, a scrawny Hispanic with unhealthy yellowish skin drawn tight across a narrow face. He had a droopy mustache, a wispy unkempt beard. Dark shadows around his eyes made him look older than he dressed. His T-shirt had sweat circles around the armpits, and his jeans were faded to the color of the pale morning sky. He hugged a worn leather satchel.

  It was the satchel that interested me. More than that, what came out of it.

  Drugs and housing projects go together like cops and robbers. I know that. But not drugs and Paolina. Those two are never going to be spoken of in the same breath.

  I’d noticed Wispy
Beard a few times when I’d come by to pick her up. I got curious. I confided in a Cambridge cop I know, a nice enough guy, but too busy to do the kind of surveillance needed for a bust. I’m not too busy. Maybe I can’t clean up the world, but next door to my little sister, nobody is going to dole out little packets from an old leather satchel.

  I sat in my car and took notes. Comings and goings. Two kids, one not more than twelve years old, gave something to Wispy Beard, got something in return. Full descriptions went down in the notebook. As soon as I got a definite pattern, I’d give my cop friend a date and a time, and make sure the bastard got himself busted good.

  His days were numbered in my mind.

  Chapter 7

  I’d stayed at my observation post too long, so I flew down Memorial Drive, my thoughts grimly fixed on that scumbag drug dealer. I was halfway to the Boston University Bridge before I shook myself out of it, and noticed that the elm leaves were edged with gold, and high clouds filtered the sunlight into fine visible rays. With breathtaking suddenness, the road reared up and flashed a spectacular view of Boston’s church steeples, brownstones, and skyscrapers. It still gives me goosebumps after all these years.

  On crisp autumn days, no city compares to Boston, especially when you sneak up on it from the Cambridge side of the Charles. It’s the river that makes the magic, frames the city with a silver band. Today the Charles was flat as glass, except for two single sculls cutting the water, gliding toward the M.I.T. boathouse. The skyline is a jumble downtown, but off to the right the Hancock and Prudential towers guard the Back Bay. At the top of Beacon Hill, the gold dome of the State House caught a shaft of sunlight and beamed it back in my eyes, forcing me to look down and pay attention to the road.

  They say fish swim in the Charles River these days. You no longer have to race to the doctor for a tetanus shot if you fall off your sailboat. Ever since I came to Boston to live with Aunt Bea after my parents died, they’ve been saying people would be able to swim in the Charles in five more years. Then five more years. Then five more.

  It looked like I might have to wait that long at the foot of the B. U. Bridge. Cars honked, drivers swore, but to no avail. The college kids were back in town, in sufficient numbers to take the right of way by force. When the swarm of students finally parted wide enough for my car to pass, I took the curve onto Park Drive and followed the Riverway out to where it turns into the Jamaicaway. The road traces Olmsted’s chain of city parks, and it’s got twists and turns enough to delight a former cabbie. I drove it too fast, but then everybody does. Unlike everybody else, I stayed in my lane.

  Left at the Jamaica Pond boathouse. Right on Centre Street. I followed the tracks of a trolley line that hasn’t run in God knows how many years. Jamaica Plain’s a real part of Boston, a neighborhood, a nontourist section of town. I remember Centre Street lined with shoe repair shops, laundries, mom-and-pop convenience stores, and restaurants with counters where the regulars stopped for eggs, bacon, and political arguments on their way to work.

  Now Centre Street has florists, at least I think they might be florists. One had two pink lilies plunked in a single vase by way of window display. Another, fearful of garish overstatement, featured a single spray of orchids. I counted three croissant bakeries, four small shuttered restaurants with hand-lettered menus, two shoe boutiques. The signs of gentrification.

  Where will all those young urban professionals get their shoes resoled?

  Give me an address anywhere in Boston and I can find it cold. Margaret Devens had started to babble directions over the phone, but I’d shut her down. Cabbies know.

  I took a right onto a quiet residential street of big old Victorians; a few weary down-and-outers with chipped aluminum siding, some newly pastel-painted numbers with geranium-filled window boxes. Big houses for big families. Most of the Boston Irish who’d escaped the Southie slums made a beeline for the elegant South Shore suburbs, but some, particularly the ones with city government ties, headed for areas of Jamaica Plain like this one. Lace-curtain Irish, it must have been once, with a lively parish church, and houses bursting with kids. Now, most of the better-decorated places looked like they’d been sliced into separate apartments, probably condos. They didn’t look as luxurious as the dream townhouses my cat and I were invited to view at Cedar Wash, but I bet the price tags were pretty steep.

  When I saw the white Victorian monster on the corner, I stopped wondering why Margaret and Eugene hadn’t exchanged many confidences. If just the two siblings lived at number 19, they could use separate floors and never meet. They’d need two phone lines so they could call each other in case of emergency.

  There must have been money in the family once, to buy that house. There’d have to be some left over, to pay the property taxes, refresh the gleaming white paint, keep the sloping lawn neatly manicured, the yews and azaleas trimmed.

  Well, Margaret had a stash of crisp hundred-dollar bills.

  And Eugene drove a hack.

  One thing about Jamaica Plain, you never have much trouble parking. I pulled the Toyota to the curb smack in front of the Devens house.

  A walkway of concrete squares and grass rectangles tempted me to hopscotch up to the porch. I controlled myself in case my client was peering from behind one of the window shades.

  The front door wore a polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. I ignored the doorbell for a chance to get my fingerprints on its bright surface. It clanged a bold satisfying note.

  I waited awhile, humming a tune Paolina had taught me, something that named a lot of animals in Spanish, then tried the bell. I could hear it buzz and echo inside. I rang again, hollered Margaret’s name.

  Damn. I checked my watch. Eleven-twenty. I’d spent longer than I meant to in Cambridge, but surely Margaret would have waited an extra twenty minutes.

  Well, maybe she’d forgotten. She was old, after all. Maybe she was at church, or visiting some neighbor, gossiping over coffee while I shivered in the chill. Just for the hell of it, I turned the front door handle and gave the door a push. It opened easily and I stood there gaping.

  City people lock their doors.

  “Margaret!” I called again, yelling it loudly, as much to warn anybody in the house of my approach as to get a response. My hand reached reflexively for the gun on my service belt, the way it used to when I entered unsecured premises as a cop. As a private operator, I leave guns alone if I can help it.

  I always remember what Humphrey Bogart says in that old movie when he takes the gun away from the punk: “So many guns, so few brains.”

  The foyer was big and cool, with wooden floorboards worn mellow. No quick sand-and-polyurethane job here. Only care, years of care—the kind my Aunt Bea had lavished on her Cambridge home—gave it that warm sheen. The wallpaper was one of those old grass-papers, in a faint beige. A worn octagonal Chinese rug colored the center of the floor. Overhead, a multiarmed chandelier hung low enough to menace.

  The foyer had four escapes: three archways, the back one smaller than the right or the left, and a steep flight of beige-carpeted stairs. I turned left toward what must have been the living room, and stopped with my jaw hanging wide.

  Stuffing erupted from an overturned couch. Someone had slashed three huge X’s in the flowered upholstery and done his best to turn the sofa inside out. A wooden end table was cracked, baring pale wood under a dark finish. An amputated armchair leg stuck out of the shattered leaded glass door of a curio cabinet. A pile of smashed crockery lay at the base of one wall. It looked like someone had hurled Margaret’s treasures against the wall for the pleasure of hearing the crash and tinkle.

  I swallowed and shoved my hands automatically into the pockets of my jeans so I wouldn’t be tempted to right a chair, smooth a torn cushion.

  Margaret.

  As I opened my mouth to call her name, I heard footsteps, heavy running steps, and the slam of a screen door. Back door, side door, how the hell did I know? I ran out front, stared right and left, saw not
hing, no one. I raced down the narrow walkway to the back of the house. Somewhere, a car engine roared to life and tires screeched on pavement. Through a stand of lilac bushes, I caught one glimpse of a hurtling dark van. By the time I’d vaulted Margaret’s back fence, it was gone.

  Margaret.

  I ran back to the house, calling her name, but my voice cracked and I don’t think I got much in the way of volume.

  I started searching, careful where I put my feet. The destruction was even worse in the kitchen—canned goods, cereal, flour, emptied in a pile in the middle of the floor.

  This didn’t look like robbery. It looked like vengeance. Or war.

  I found her in the dining room, crumpled in a corner, her flowered dress rucked up under her, a big white apron half covering her face. A trickle of blood oozed from one corner of her mouth. I put my ear to her chest, and felt the rise and fall of her breath. I don’t think I could have heard a heartbeat. Blood was rushing in my ears, screaming.

  I touched her shoulder, spoke her name, both more roughly than I intended. My hand was shaking, and I realized my teeth were clenched tight with anger. Anger at the chaos, at the broken useless dishes. Anger at myself, for not arriving moments earlier, not preventing this. Anger at my helplessness, as I knelt by my client’s battered face.

  “It’s okay, Margaret,” I said softly, once I could force the words between my dry lips. “Don’t try to move. I’ll be right back.”

  The jack was ripped out of the wall, so I ran across the street and used a startled neighbor’s phone. I know a number that gets a faster response than 911. Mooney’s number.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I crooned in Margaret’s ear, straining to hear the wail of the ambulance. I touched her hand. It felt cool and dry. It moved, curling limply around my own, tightening. She moaned, or maybe she tried to say something. I put my head close to her lips, but I couldn’t make out any words.