“Where I … oh, no. Not up there. Salem, Massachusetts. She got arrested, for soliciting I guess they call it. But that was a long time ago. I was just, what, maybe thirteen.”
“Anything happen from it?”
“I don’t think so, but I was kind of young to really understand, and she didn’t exactly talk about it at the dinner table, you know?”
“She ever talk about leaving, about finding another line of work?”
The half-laugh again. “Not exactly. She always wanted to be a movie star. Even when she did go to school, she never really studied, just came home and read the fan magazines. She thought she looked like a young Natalie Wood. That was how she said it too, ‘a young Natalie Wood.’ She kept thinking that somehow she’d be able to get into movies through somebody she’d meet. How she thought that was going to happen for her when she lived here instead of out in California someplace …”
We’d made a circuit of the block and were drawing even with her parents’ driveway.
She said, “Any more questions for me?”
“Not for now. I’m really sorry about Theresa.”
Sandra kicked a stone off the sidewalk and onto her father’s lawn. “Save your sympathy for Teri. She’s the one who died Monday. Theresa I lost a long time ago.”
She turned away from me and walked resignedly back up the path to the house.
“John! Christ, I haven’t seen you in, what, five years.”
“More like seven, Ed.”
I grew up in South Boston with Ed. He’d wanted to attend college and law school, but his steady girlfriend’s pregnancy intervened. Starting out as a night janitor in the South Boston courthouse, he slowly moved up the chain to an assistant clerk’s job. He’s active in court administration across the Commonwealth and knows everybody.
“What brings you back to God’s Little Acre? Oh, shit,” he said, striking himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “I forgot about Beth. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. I’m here officially. Sort of.”
Ed leaned over the counter and looked in every direction before saying, “What’s the trouble?”
“You know the killing over at the Barry?”
“Just what I read in the Herald. A hooker and her john, right?”
“Right. My gun was found at the scene, and I need some information I can’t look up for myself.”
“Christ, John. A double murder, that’s pretty heavy stuff. How deep are you in this?”
“I didn’t do it. Somebody mugged me and took my gun to frame me.”
“The paper just said something about ‘unidentified’ weapon.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the weapon I’m interested in. It’s the hooker.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m told she was in some legal trouble a while back.”
“And that surprises you?”
“No, but I can’t go through the cops for the story.”
“I don’t know, John. All that shit is tied up by the privacy statute. The records, I mean. She processed through here?”
“No. Salem District Court.”
“Salem! Christ, John, the chief judge of the whole fucken system works outta Salem.”
“Ed, you’ve shaken every hand ever stamped a paper in this state. All I need is some noncontroversial information about her.”
“Like what?”
“One of the suspects is a lawyer from Marblehead who used to do a lot of criminal work. I want to see if she was involved in the case.”
“Why—never mind. I don’t wanna know.” Ed bothered his teeth with his tongue for a while. “I don’t know, John. How long ago was all this?”
“Eight years, give or take.”
“Oh, John, all the stuff from that far back’d be on the micro.” He made a rude noise. “Okay, I’ll give it a try. But I’m gonna have to bury this with some other kinda requests, and God save the sailor if anybody ever notices who was asking about her.”
“I really appreciate it, Ed.”
“Name?”
“Street name was Teri Angel. Real name, and probably the one Salem would have, is Papangelis, Theresa.”
“Spell it for me.”
I spelled it. “Age back then about nineteen. The lawyer’s name is Felicia Arnold.”
“Gimme a couple days. I’ll call you.”
“Thanks, Ed.”
“Christ,” he said walking away. “Guys lose their pensions like this.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LA FLOR WAS TUCKED between a mom-and-pop grocería and a dry cleaner’s on the lower end of Sommer Street. I parked two doors down from the cleaner’s and watched the front door of the restaurant for a while. Two construction workers in bandanas, boots, and nonmatching hard hats came out, chewing thoughtfully on toothpicks. Not seeing anybody else by 1:30, I got out of the Fiat and walked into the place.
There were twenty small tables crammed into the bowling alley space that reminded me more of New York than Boston. The tables were draped in clean white cloths, a fresh-cut carnation in a clear glass vase centered on each. An elderly couple were finishing lunch near the window. She wore a plain print dress, he a fifties sharkskin suit. They were holding hands and toasting each other with small port glasses.
Niño waved to me from the back of the room. He sat on one of three stools at a tiny bar, behind which a fat man was drying glasses with a towel. Immediately in front of Niño was a table for four with two women eating across from each other. One had a badly bleached ponytail draped across her near shoulder, the other long raven black hair. They both glanced up at me, the blonde following me with her eyes as I walked toward them, the other just returning to her plate.
Niño slid off the barstool. The women both looked about thirty. Given their working hours, they could have been anywhere from seventeen to forty. The blonde was tall, even sitting down, and heavily made up. The other slumped in her chair and wore no cosmetics at all. As I reached the table, the blonde smiled at me in a practiced way, the other paid no attention.
Niño said, “John Cuddy, I have the pleasure of giving you Maylene and Salomé.”
The blonde said, “I’m Maylene, honey.” She had a south of Kansas twang in her voice. “I show it, I shake it, and I share it.”
Salomé, out of the corner of her mouth, said, “Jesus.”
Niño said, “You and me sit here and here, John. You know, boy, girl, boy, girl?”
I sat down, Maylene to my left, Salomé to my right. “Has Niño told you why I wanted to talk with you?”
Maylene said, “Yeah. It’s about the Angel.” She laid her hand over mine and gripped tight. “God, I was terrified when I heard.”
Salomé seemed awfully bored. Her attitude reminded me of the bare tolerance an experienced cop shows when paired with a rookie. I put Salomé nearer forty, Maylene nearer seventeen.
Niño said, “Hey, John, you making some impression here. I think Maylene want to swallow you pride.”
Maylene took her hand off mine and gently slapped Niño on the shoulder in that limp-wristed way some women use to show tenderness. Niño took it playfully. Salomé broke off another piece of bread from the shallow basket in front of her and sopped some gravy from her dish.
“Niño, I’d really like to talk with the women alone, okay?”
He shook his head, but he stood up. “You really think they tell you something they don’t tell me after you leave?”
“Who can say?”
Niño picked up his drink and said, “I order you the arroz con pollo and some white wine. The chicken and rice the spec-i-al-ity of the house.” He looked from Salomé to Maylene and back again. “You ladies tell this man anything he want to know.”
Maylene said “Yes, Niño.” Salomé finished her hunk of bread while Maylene struggled to lift her handbag onto the table. Made from natural cowhide, it had outlandish fringes, the kind of present Dale Evans might have bought Buttermilk for Mother’s Day.
Waiting till Niño resumed his seat at the bar, I decided to start with Maylene. I figured Salomé would know more that would help me, but I doubted she’d talk until she’d become fed up with Maylene.
“How close were you to Teri Angel?”
Maylene frowned, as though that wasn’t the question for which she’d prepared an answer. “I wouldn’t say close. The Angel didn’t want anybody to be close, I don’t think.”
“Why was that?”
Maylene took a pack of cigarettes from her bag. Her hands were big and rough, almost manly. “I don’t know. She really wouldn’t let any of the girls get to know her. Not like Salomé and me.”
Salomé avoided laughing by taking a swig of wine.
“You ever meet anybody with her?”
“You mean like a date or something?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Really, we don’t … didn’t see her that much. Just here and other places for lunch once in a while.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, Niño sets us up through these hotel people he knows, so we’re mainly on with convention types in the afternoons and maybe some traveling executives like at night. We just do one-ons.”
“One-ons?”
Salomé groaned and said, “She means one-on-ones. No parties or group gigs.”
“Oh.”
Maylene said, “That’s why we wouldn’t see her except at lunch here sometimes. We just weren’t together when we were working. We weren’t … aren’t even supposed to say hi to each other if we see a girl in the hotels or anything.”
“Because of their security people?”
“Right.”
The fat man came toward us, carrying my chicken dish and a half-carafe of wine. Given the timing, I was pretty sure La Flor didn’t exactly cook to order. I tried it. Not bad.
“Did you know any of her free-lance clients?”
Salomé laughed. “You don’t know a hell of a lot about the life, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, I got a client expecting my Dance of the Seven Veils in about an hour, and I gotta get painted and changed by then, so let me save you some time, okay?”
“Okay.” I took more chicken.
“You’re in the life for a while, you got two choices. Get out, or get your own.”
“Your own prostitutes?”
“No. Oh, that too, yeah. If you can stand dealing with pompom girls.”
Maylene said, “Sal! You promised never to tell any—”
“So let’s say you don’t want to be Niño the Second. You gotta get your own book of clients. Free-lance, okay?”
“Got it,” I said around my chewing.
“Now, you get the right book of clients, you can be pretty well set. Lots of these guys are just looking for somebody reliable, you know?” Salomé cranked up her tempo, an enthusiastic broker describing a property with potential. “Somebody who’ll do the things for them that the wives won’t without gagging and bitching about it. They find a girl they like, they’re loyal like fucking football fans about it. They stick with the same girl for years. God, I know a girl has the same three lawyers for fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years. They all know each other, but nobody knows they’re all doing her except her. She covers all her overhead on those three guys alone, and that’s just twice a month each.”
“So?”
Salomé slowed down. “So, a girl gets a good free-lance, she ain’t about to spread that information around to her competitors, follow?”
“I thought you said the free-lance clients were loyal?”
“Yeah, but they ain’t perfect. If they were, they wouldn’t be clients to start with.”
“So you never saw her book?”
“What book?”
“Her book of free-lancers.”
“Jesus. I didn’t mean she had a book. That’d be stupid.”
“Why?”
“Because they call her, not the other way around. Besides, if you did have a book, you couldn’t carry it with you, because the cops’d grab it, and you couldn’t leave it at your place, because your pimp would read it.”
I looked over at Niño. Maylene said quickly, “Oh, Niño wouldn’t do something like that.”
Sal said, “Maylene, grow up or shut up.”
I said, “Niño doesn’t mind you all branching out?”
“No.” This time Salomé glanced over at him and couldn’t quite hide a crinkle of genuine affection. “No, Niño’s good that way. Steers us the business, takes his cut but lets us keep the lion’s share. And, he doesn’t muscle in with the free-lancers. He understands how it is.”
“Any of Teri’s clients go in for rough stuff?”
“No way. First of all, Teri had the looks, way too good to need the rough boys. Plus, you don’t keep that kind of action as a free-lance. You need your man around to keep them in line sometimes.”
“So Teri didn’t talk with you about her free-lancers.”
Maylene seemed eager to contribute. “Well, she did, sort of.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, she talked about her sources.”
“Her sources?”
“Yeah, where she got the free-lances from. Like sometimes one client refers another to her. And then she had this lawyer who did a lot of divorce stuff, the lawyer would send the husbands to Teri for, well, kind of like that Masters and Jones stuff?”
Salomé said, “Masters and Johnson.”
Maylene said, “Yeah, them.”
“Teri ever mention the lawyer’s name?”
“No, just that it was a girl. A woman lawyer, I mean. Teri never mentioned names or anything, but she’d talk about some of them like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like give them made-up names, you know?”
“Like street names?”
“No, no. More like …”
Salomé said, “Labels. Like ‘the Senator,’ ‘the Wizard’—”
“He was like a computer genius, the Wizard—”
“—‘the Producer,’ and like that.”
I thought about sister Sandra mentioning Teri’s interest in the movies. “What did she mean by ‘the Producer’?”
Salomé said, “Not the real thing. Not Hollywood, I mean. She just had some guy liked to look at himself getting done. He took movies of it.”
“Movies of him and Teri together?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Videocamera?”
Salomé took a cigarette from Maylene’s pack and lit up. “How else you gonna make them?”
“Did Teri ever mention anything else about this Producer?”
Salomé blew a cone of smoke sideways from her mouth and away from me. “No.”
Maylene said, “But Sal—”
“She didn’t say anything else, Maylene.”
“She did, though.” Maylene turned to me and elaborately away from Salomé’s glare. “The Producer was her candy man.”
“Drugs.”
“Right. As much as she wanted, although she never used a lot.”
“She ever describe him?”
“Like what he looked like and all?”
“Yeah.”
“No—yeah, wait, she did! She said he had these tattoos. Like of a tank or something.”
No question we were talking about Marsh now. “Did she see this guy on a regular basis?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Same time and place each week?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. She did say … Sal, when did we have lunch with her that last time?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. It was … no, no, it wasn’t here. It was down at the Market.”
“Quincy Market?”
“Yeah, yeah. Right down by the water. And she said … no, no, it wasn’t lunch, it was brunch. Remember, Sal, we couldn’t get served our drinks ’cause it wasn’t twelve noon yet?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do
. We wanted Bloody Marys, and the waiter said we had to wait, and Teri joked about taking care of him if he’d take care of us, but you could see he was a fag so he didn’t think she was funny.”
“What did she tell you?”
“About the Producer?”
“Yes.”
“Just that she was going to do a screen test.”
“Screen test?”
“Yeah, you know, like an audition, only for the movies. She thought the way she could get into the movies was to be in one of those porno things, and the Producer told her he knew somebody who did them. He was the candy man, so maybe he did, I don’t know.”
“And he was going to introduce her to this real movie guy?”
“Yeah. Well, no. No, I think what she said was that the real movie guy would want a sample of what she could do.” Maylene put her hand to her mouth and giggled. “I don’t mean that way, in person. I mean on film. How she’d look doing it.”
“With one of the guys she free-lanced?”
“Yeah. Or one of the girls.”
“One of you?”
“No, no. I mean one of her girl clients. Some of the lezzies, they really go for somebody as beautiful as the Angel. And even the straight ones, they like to try some new things, if you get me.”
“So the Producer was going to arrange some kind of screen test for Teri.”
“Right.”
“When?”
Maylene frowned again, straining to remember. “I don’t think she said, but I think it was supposed to be real soon.”
“Soon?”
“After we were talking. She said she’d seen the Producer like the night before.”
“And when was that?”
“At the brunch, like I said.”
“Yes, but when was the brunch?”
“When?” She looked at Salomé, then back to me. “On Sunday. When else do you have brunch?”
“You mean this past Sunday?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The day before she was killed.
After I was finished with Maylene and Salomé, the fat man bowed to me graciously and said he hoped I’d enjoyed my meal. On my way to the door, Niño told me he’d meet me outside Teri Angel’s apartment house at 8:00. He gave me the address, a building down by the waterfront.
I climbed into the Fiat, drove across the MassPike interchange and into Back Bay. Heading downtown, I wended my way through the construction on Boylston Street and then quartered over past the New England School of Law and Tufts Medical and Dental complexes. The Barry Hotel stood a bit farther toward the Fort Point Channel and near South Station, railroads being the principal mode of transportation back when the Barry was Queen of the Hub.
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