“Do not make fun of my babies. They require a lot of attention. Even more than you.” Her tone conveyed just what an incredible concept that was.
Irene was a rescuer of basset hounds, someone who took in lost and battered pooches. She also ate brown rice, wore leather sandals as big as snowshoes, and wouldn’t buy self-adhering stamps because it was bad for the environment. When she wasn’t working, she favored baggy shorts and T-shirts with meaningful logos, an amusing contrast to her work self, where she was one of the more proper wearers of the uniform. It reminded me of how little we know of each other just from what we can see.
“Reenie, what is the name of that Indonesian restaurant we always go to on Saint Martin? I was trying to recommend it the other day, and I could not think of the name.”
“I never remember stuff like that,” she said. “I just go where you take me.”
“Yes, you do remember. I know you do.” Tristan settled into the seat next to his friend.
While they chatted, I stood back against the window and scanned the terminal, a habit I had acquired when I had managed my own operation. Back then, I had been looking for anything out of the ordinary, any problem about to emerge that could disrupt the day’s smooth exchange of aircraft in and aircraft out. I had a different purpose now. I was looking for any of the targets of my investigation, but most especially the tall blonde with the fulsome physique and the predator’s eyes. I knew she would be here somewhere. She was on a layover, just as we had been.
“Reenie, it’s the place where we sit outside on the screened-in porch. They serve the dinner in courses on those little plates that look like soap dishes.”
“I know the one you’re talking about, T. I just don’t remember the name.”
She was four gates down. I spotted her with two other women: Sally, the blonde she had been with in the limo the night before, and Sylvie Nguyet, a French-Vietnamese woman—girl, really—whose picture I also had in my hooker files at home. Taller by a head, Angel stood next to them like a great marble statue, a Venus de Milo with arms and a bombshell silhouette that made her two pals look downright wispy.
“Tristan, come here.”
“What?”
“I want to ask you something.” He was my absolute best source for what I needed to know. The prostitution ring was an open secret among flight attendants, but still a secret. Most would talk about it only in private, and none would talk about it with someone as new as I was. Tristan was the exception. He shared freely with me, partly because we were friends, partly because he liked to show off what he knew, and partly because he was an incorrigible gossip.
“Is that Sylvie over there with those other two women?”
He peered down the concourse. “Oh, Lord, it is, Reenie. And she’s standing with the Dairy Queen herself.”
“Be nice, Trissy.” Irene, on the other hand, had no use for gossip. She wanted to set an example, she always said, for her thirteen-year-old daughter.
“Dairy Queen?” I was confused. “Do you mean Angel?”
“Angela.” Tristan lounged back against the window with me. “No matter what she calls herself, her name is Angela.”
“Is Dairy Queen a mammary reference?”
He laughed. “That works, too, but no. She’s trailer trash from the side of a one-lane West Texas dirt highway, out where they have Dairy Queens at every other mile marker. She should be working at one of them serving up chocolate-dipped soft-serve ice cream in Styrofoam cones instead of trying to be one of us.”
“That is such a mean thing to say.” Irene finished a row, turned her needles, and started on the next.
“You know it’s true.”
Angel, Sally, and Sylvie gathered their gear and rolled through their boarding door and out of sight. According to the monitor, they were bound for LaGuardia and then probably home to Boston, like us.
I shifted my attention to Tristan. “That’s an interesting perspective for someone who hails from the great state of Wyoming. At least Texas has Neiman-Marcus.”
“I beg your pardon.” He raised his chin in mock indignation. “Angela is trash because of what she is, not because of where she came from.”
“She should get involved in Toastmasters.” Irene looked up to find us both staring at her. “I think it would help her. It would certainly help build her self-confidence. Have you ever heard her try to give a PA? It would make her a better flight attendant.”
“Honey, Angelina might need to learn how to read, but she does not need any more confidence, and she certainly does not need to be a better flight attendant. She makes her money on her back.”
Irene sniffed. “Those are just rumors, Trissy. You shouldn’t spread them.”
He shook his head. “Go back to your knitting and purling, sweetie pie. We’ll let you know when the conversation turns to beagles or Birkenstocks.”
“Bassets,” she corrected. “Basset hounds.”
“What-ever.”
I checked the area. The only people near enough to hear were a man on a cell phone and a young woman reading a paperback Still, I lowered my voice. “Are you saying she’s one of the hookers?”
“Angela is not one of them; she’s the queen bee. The madam. The übertramp.”
“I thought they were all just freelancers.”
“They were, until Angela came along and turned a ragtag bunch of disorganized whores into a lean, mean fucking machine. Sounds like the story line for a Broadway play, doesn’t it? Send in the Whores? Don’t Cry for Me, I’m a Hooker?”
“Tristan.” Irene did her own check around the lounge. “All you’re doing is encouraging a nasty and unfair stereotype. It’s like saying all Italians are mobsters, or all Muslims are terrorists.”
“If the Manolo Blahnik fits…”
“You have no proof.”
“That’s the nice thing about gossip, Reenie. The standard of proof is so very low.”
“For all you know, you are the source of all these rumors.”
“Tell me this. If you’re a flight attendant making forty thousand dollars a year, how do you afford a condo at the Ritz?”
“The Ritz?” He was teasing Irene and clearly delighting in it, but I was the one hanging on every word. Oh, for a microcassette, or at least a pad and pencil. “The new Ritz-Carlton?”
“Angela has a two-bedroom. Not even a one-bedroom or a studio, although I doubt they even have studios in those buildings. Do you know what she paid? Just under two million. That’s more than twelve hundred per square foot.”
“How do you—”
“Barry.”
“Oh, right.” I had forgotten his partner was a real estate agent in the city. “Is that a lot for that area?”
“No, but that’s beside the point. It’s a lot for a flight attendant, especially one who already owns a cottage on the Cape, where she keeps her second car, her Hummer.”
“Maybe,” Irene said, “she has another source of income.”
“She does, dear, and I just told you what it is.”
“Another source besides… what you’re saying.”
“No one seems to be able to locate any other source of income. Ditto for her slut posse. Sally and Sylvie and Claudia and Ava and the rest. You can often find them at the spa or working out at the LA Sports Club. Or having lunch in Paris.”
We all heard the boarding door at our gate close, which meant the aircraft was ready for us. It was time to pack up and go.
“You’re jealous.” Irene wrapped her doggie sweater around the needles and put the whole thing into her World Wildlife Fund tote bag.
Tristan stood up straight, shook out his slacks, and smoothed his jacket. “I’m quite happy with my life, at long last. Have you heard the latest rumors?”
He asked it in a way that was irresistible. I couldn’t wait to hear the answer. In spite of herself, neither could Irene. We shuffled a little closer together. “What,” she asked, “is the latest rumor?”
“Angela is trying to start
up a West Coast shop. My sources tell me there are at least ten dirty girls on the transfer list to LA.”
This was news to me. “Is Angel herself on the transfer list?”
“Not that I’ve heard. She must be sending some minion of hers out there. Can you believe it? The woman has no shame.”
We were now at the point in our ongoing conversation on the subject where I was better off keeping my mouth shut. And yet…
“I still don’t understand why you don’t turn these women in.”
They both turned to blink at me. “Alexandra, you are so management. We’ll have to work on you.”
“You should talk. You were a flight services supervisor once.”
“That was temporary insanity, and it was only two years.” He squinted at me. “You spent, what… fourteen… sixteen years?”
“Fourteen.”
“I’m a union officer, Alexandra. My job is to protect union members, not help management fire them. They tried to terminate a bunch of them last year, but we got them all back.”
Irene found that amusing. “You’re full of baloney. They came back because the company couldn’t prove anything. They never can. That’s why they go on and on.”
“Would you defend these women,” I asked, “even if the company could prove their case?”
“Of course I would.” Tristan put a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “You’re union now. When you’re union, you stick together, no matter what. They might be hookers, but they’re our hookers.”
He glanced at Irene, who was already on her way. I glanced at Tristan, my friend, who had just declared himself my sworn enemy. I filed it with all the other bridges to be crossed when I got there. Right now, I had to serve cold muffins to eighty-five passengers who would want more from us than we could give them.
Tristan grabbed his bag and turned to me. “Ready for another day in the friendly skies?”
“I’m ready.”
Chapter Three
The flight passed without incident… without major incident. Tristan did spill a carton of orange juice on a man wearing a business suit. He made him happy with the promise of a free upgrade. This was in spite of his suspicions that the savvy passenger had knocked the carton out of his hand on purpose, expecting exactly that result.
“That’s not a suit,” he fumed. “It’s a polyester sponge from off the rack at the Men’s Wearhouse. It’s probably his designated spill suit. His real suit is up in that Tumi bag he stashed overhead.”
Eventually we made it to Boston, flying hard, low, and late into an early-autumn rainstorm. With the wings rocking and the tail hammering, the cabin was quiet, filled with the brittle tension that hardens inside an airborne machine that seems to be rattling too much. But if there were silent prayers and last-minute promises to God, they all evaporated when the wheels touched the runway and we landed safely in the steady, soaking rain.
It was still raining an hour later when I emerged from the T station at Copley Square in the Back Bay. My standard flight attendant’s umbrella, which was the size of a salt shaker when folded up, kept me dry from the waist up, but it was too small to protect my lower half. By the time I had walked the two blocks to the restaurant, my stockings were damp, and my dark blue leather flats, the best pair of working shoes I owned, had turned black. I was bitter about it. I couldn’t afford a new pair.
Inside the restaurant, it smelled like rain and felt like the onset of winter. Maybe it was the dim lighting. Maybe it was the rack full of raincoats inside the door. Maybe it was the lack of progress on a case that had begun back when it was summer and the Red Sox were still in first place.
“Hello, Miss Shanahan.” The hostess took my coat and umbrella. “Mr. Harvey is in the back.”
“Thanks, Yumiko.”
Harvey would be in his favorite booth in the back. I couldn’t see him, which was the point, but Harvey Baltimore was always where he said he would be and always at least twenty minutes early.
The first time I’d heard the name Harvey Baltimore, I had assumed it was a nickname, a street moniker bestowed upon a swaggering private investigator who happened to hail from Maryland. In fact, Harvey was a person as mild of manner as I had ever met and Baltimore was his real name. His great grandfather had emigrated from Poland in 1898. When asked at Ellis Island for his destination, he’d told them. According to Harvey, in later years, the old man would pronounce that he was glad he hadn’t been going to Schenectady. His name, he would always add, had not been too dear a price to pay for his new life in America.
I knew enough by now to get myself settled before walking into Harvey’s line of sight and unsettling him. I slipped off my raincoat, shook out the little umbrella, stomped the water out of my soggy shoes, and stowed my bag behind the bar. Only then did I make my way back, where Harvey sat, hunched prayerfully over his cup of tea. As I approached, his head popped up He blinked at me, and didn’t even wait for me to sit down.
“What is happening? Is something wrong? Why did we have to meet today?”
“Hello, Harvey.” I slipped into my side of the booth. “I’m fine and it’s nice to see you, too.”
He was dressed in his gray suit with the windowpane plaid—one of the two suits he always wore when he left his big house in Brookline—and the expression of deepest gloom, which he wore at all times.
“Sorry. So sorry, but your phone call had me worried. What is happening?”
“I didn’t mean to worry you and I’m sorry to drag you out in this weather.” I picked up the menu and signaled for the waiter. “Let me just order some dinner and I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
“Dinner? It’s not even four o’clock.” Harvey didn’t like the natural order of things to be disturbed.
“I’m starving and I didn’t have time to eat on the flight. Are you having something?”
“Soup. I will have soup.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
When the waiter came, I gave him my order for two bowls of miso soup, a California roll and… and…
“A plate of mixed tempura, please.”
I put the menu aside with a twinge of regret. What I really wanted was the sushi special—seven different varieties of raw fish on cubes of rice that I could drench in soy sauce, ginger, and wasabe. But every once in a while, I succumbed to the screeching warnings about the health hazards of eating uncooked fish. It must have been the proximity to Harvey and the influence of his chronically jangled nerves.
Harvey spent the majority of his time in a high state of agitation, convinced that if a meteor fell from the heavens tomorrow, it would fall on him. But he had good reason. He had been diagnosed five years ago with multiple sclerosis. It was a devastating blow that had peeled away the last defenses of a chronically nervous, fifty-one-year-old man and left him feeling vulnerable and scared. Working with Harvey was by turns murderously frustrating and heartbreakingly sad.
He reached up with his napkin and dabbed at the dew on his forehead.
“What did your doctor say?”
“I am still, unfortunately, as diseased as ever. Perhaps a little more.”
“I’m sorry, Harvey. I know you were expecting better news.”
“No matter.” He said it with that offhand nonchalance that left no doubt about how much it did matter. “What did you do?” he asked me. “Did you get fired? Is that what you are keeping from me?”
That was the other thing about Harvey. He was highly perceptive.
“I’m not keeping anything from you, which is why we’re here.”
“Then you did get fired.”
“No, I did not.” I slumped back in the booth. “I got a stern letter of warning.”
“I knew it.” He launched immediately into his quietly hysterical mode. “This thing is falling apart. I knew it would. Did I tell you? Did I not tell you this?”
“It’s not falling apart.”
“How can they fire you after only six weeks? What did you do?”
<
br /> “I am not fired. I am warned, and all I did was melt a couple of ice buckets, which were not supposed to be stored in the ovens in the first place. I’ve had a few customers gripe, and a couple of trips ago—” I glanced up at him. There was no point in unsettling him further.
“How will you conduct an undercover investigation if you cannot hold on to your cover? You have to be a working stewardess to do this job.”
“Flight attendant.”
“What?”
“I’m working as a flight attendant, not a stewardess. I’m also working for you as an investigator, which means I am working virtually around the clock. I spend more than half my time on the road. When I’m not flying, I’m on surveillance. When I’m not on surveillance, I’m writing reports. It’s hard to smile all day and be nice when you’ve had no sleep for three nights running. All things considered, I think I’m keeping up pretty well. Did you get the pictures I sent from last night?”
“I never should have let you talk me into this. This is not what I do. Insurance fraud, background checks, forensic accounting. That’s what I do. What do I know from hookers and pimps? Nothing. That’s what.”
“Harvey, I thought you should know what’s going on, but if this is the way you react, you will discourage any further impulse I might have to keep you in the loop.”
“I do not wish to be in the loop. I would rather not know. Dear God.”
“Is that true?”
“No. But I am no longer convinced this case is worth it for me anymore.”
“Look, maybe I am—” The waiter appeared with our soup. I waited for him to set the lacquered bowls in front of us and retreat. “Maybe I do cause you undue aggravation, but you have to be fair. This case has been worth a lot of money to you. Shall we review the billings we’ve generated from this job over the past few months?” It wasn’t enough to buy new shoes, but it certainly was enough to pay the rent.
He stared into his cup of miso. He tugged on the sleeves of his worn suit coat. He tried to pull the collar of his pressed white shirt into the next larger size. With his fortunes as a private investigator deteriorating along with his health, he had agreed to take me on because he needed cash fast and I brought a presold job with me. I had agreed to be taken on because I needed to work for a licensed investigator for three years before I could qualify on my own. I thought we were the perfect match. He had the contacts, the license, and a lot of things I wanted to learn from him. I had the mobility and the enthusiasm for the work that had been sapped by his condition, although I had to wonder if he’d ever had much enthusiasm to begin with.
The Alex Shanahan Series Page 78