by Linda Barnes
First, I ruled out all the women. That made the task slightly less impossible: sixteen suspects down from thirty-five. Then I yanked my hair and stared at the blank white porcelain of the refrigerator door. Got up and made myself a sandwich: ham, Swiss cheese, salami, lettuce and tomato, on rye. Ate it. Stared at the porcelain some more until the suspects started coming into focus.
Five of the guys were just plain fat and one was decidedly on the hefty side; I’d felt like telling them all to walk. Might do them some good, might bring on a heart attack. I crossed them all out. Making a thin person look plump is hard enough; it’s damn near impossible to make a fatty look thin.
Then I considered my regulars: Jonah Ashley, a tiny blond southern gent; muscle-bound “just-call-me-Harold” at Longfellow Place; Dr. Homewood getting his daily ferry from Beth Israel to MGH; Marvin of the gay bars; and Professor Dickerman, Harvard’s answer to Berkeley’s sixties radicals.
I crossed them all off. I could see Dickerman holding up the First Filthy Capitalist Bank, or disobeying civilly at Seabrook, even blowing up an oil company or two. But my mind boggled at the thought of the great liberal Dickerman robbing some poor cabbie. It would be like Robin Hood joining the sheriff of Nottingham on some particularly rotten peasant swindle. Then they’d both rape Maid Marian and go off pals together.
Dickerman was a lousy tipper. That ought to be a crime.
So what did I have? Eleven out of sixteen guys cleared without leaving my chair. Me and Sherlock Holmes, the famous armchair detectives.
I’m stubborn; that was one of my good cop traits. I stared at that log till my eyes bugged out. I remembered two of the five pretty easily; they were handsome and I’m far from blind. The first had one of those elegant bony faces and far-apart eyes. He was taller than my bandit. I’d ceased eyeballing him when I noticed the ring on his left hand; I never fuss with the married kind. The other one was built, a weight lifter. Not an Arnold Schwarzenegger extremist, but built. I think I’d have noticed that bod on my bandit. Like I said, I’m not blind.
That left three.
Okay. I closed my eyes. Who had I picked up at the Hyatt on Memorial Drive? Yeah, that was the salesman guy, the one who looked so uncomfortable that I’d figured he’d been hoping to ask his cabbie for a few pointers concerning the best skirt-chasing areas in our fair city. Too low a voice. Too broad in the beam.
The log said I’d picked up a hailer at Kenmore Square when I’d let out the salesman. Ah, yes, a talker. The weather, mostly. Don’t you think it’s dangerous for you to be driving a cab? Yeah, I remembered him, all right: a fatherly type, clasping a briefcase, heading to the financial district. Too old.
Down to one. I was exhausted but not the least bit sleepy. All I had to do was remember who I’d picked up on Beacon near Charles. A hailer. Before five o’clock, which was fine by me because I wanted to be long gone before rush hour gridlocked the city. I’d gotten onto Storrow and taken him along the river into Newton Center. Dropped him off at the BayBank Middlesex, right before closing time. It was coming back. Little nervous guy. Pegged him as an accountant when I’d let him out at the bank. Measly, undernourished soul. Skinny as a rail, stooped, with pits left from teenage acne.
Shit. I let my head sink down onto the dining room table when I realized what I’d done. I’d ruled them all out, every one. So much for my brilliant deductive powers.
I retired to my bedroom, disgusted. Not only had I lost $4.82 in assorted alloy metals, I was going to lose fifty dollars to Mooney. I stared at myself in the mirror, but what I was really seeing was the round hole at the end of a .22, held in a neat, gloved hand.
Somehow, the gloves made me feel better. I’d remembered another detail about my piggy-bank robber. I consulted the mirror and kept the recall going. A hat. The guy wore a hat. Not like my cap, but like a hat out of a forties gangster flick. I had one of those: I’m a sucker for hats. I plunked it on my head, jamming my hair up underneath—and I drew in my breath sharply.
A shoulder-padded jacket, a slim build, a low slouched hat. Gloves. Boots with enough heel to click as he walked away. Voice? High. Breathy, almost whispered. Not unpleasant. Accentless. No Boston r.
I had a man’s jacket and a couple of ties in my closet. Don’t ask. They may have dated from as far back as my ex-husband, but not necessarily so. I slipped into the jacket, knotted the tie, tilted the hat down over one eye.
I’d have trouble pulling it off. I’m skinny, but my build is decidedly female. Still, I wondered—enough to traipse back downstairs, pull a chicken leg out of the fridge, go back to the log, and review the feminine possibilities. Good thing I did.
Everything clicked. One lady fit the bill exactly: mannish walk and clothes, tall for a woman. And I was in luck. While I’d picked her up in Harvard Square, I’d dropped her at a real address, a house in Brookline: 782 Mason Terrace, at the top of Corey Hill.
JoJo’s garage opens at seven. That gave me a big two hours to sleep.
I took my beloved car in for some repair work it really didn’t need yet and sweet-talked JoJo into giving me a loaner. I needed a hack, but not mine. Only trouble with that Chevy is it’s too damn conspicuous.
I figured I’d lose way more than fifty bucks staking out Mason Terrace. I also figured it would be worth it to see old Mooney’s face.
She was regular as clockwork, a dream to tail. Eight-thirty-seven every morning, she got a ride to the Square with a next-door neighbor. Took a cab home at five-fifteen. A working woman. Well, she couldn’t make much of a living from robbing hacks and dumping the loot in the garbage.
I was damn curious by now. I knew as soon as I looked her over that she was the one, but she seemed so blah, so normal. She must have been five-seven or -eight, but the way she stooped, she didn’t look tall. Her hair was long and brown with a lot of blond in it, the kind of hair that would have been terrific loose and wild, like a horse’s mane. She tied it back with a scarf. A brown scarf. She wore suits. Brown suits. She had a tiny nose, brown eyes under pale eyebrows, a sharp chin. I never saw her smile. Maybe what she needed was a shrink, not a session with Mooney. Maybe she’d done it for the excitement. God knows, if I had her routine, her job, I’d probably be dressing up like King Kong and assaulting skyscrapers.
See, I followed her to work. It wasn’t even tricky. She trudged the same path, went in the same entrance to Harvard Yard, probably walked the same number of steps every morning. Her name was Marcia Heidegger and she was a secretary in the admissions office of the college of fine arts.
I got friendly with one of her coworkers.
There was this guy typing away like mad at a desk in her office. I could just see him from the side window. He had grad student written all over his face. Longish wispy hair. Gold-rimmed glasses. Serious. Given to deep sighs and bright velour V necks. Probably writing his thesis on “Courtly Love and the Theories of Chrétien de Troyes.”
I latched onto him at Bailey’s the day after I’d tracked Lady Heidegger to her Harvard lair.
Too bad Roger was so short. Most short guys find it hard to believe that I’m really trying to pick them up. They look for ulterior motives. Not the Napoleon type of short guy; he assumes I’ve been waiting years for a chance to dance with a guy who doesn’t have to bend to stare down my cleavage. But Roger was no Napoleon. So I had to engineer things a little.
I got into line ahead of him and ordered, after long deliberation, a BLT on toast. While the guy made it up and shoved it on a plate with three measly potato chips and a sliver of pickle you could barely see, I searched through my wallet, opened my change purse, counted out silver, got to $1.60 on the last five pennies. The counterman sang out, “That’ll be a buck, eighty-five.” I pawed through my pockets, found a nickel, two pennies. The line was growing restive. I concentrated on looking like a damsel in need of a knight, a tough task for a woman over six feet.
Roger (I didn’t know he was Roger then) smiled ruefully and passed over a quarter. I was effusive in my th
anks. I sat at a table for two, and when he’d gotten his tray (ham-and-cheese and a strawberry ice cream soda), I motioned him into my extra chair.
He was a sweetie. Sitting down, he forgot the difference in our height, and decided I might be someone he could talk to. I encouraged him. I hung shamelessly on his every word. A Harvard man, imagine that. We got around slowly, ever so slowly, to his work at the admissions office. He wanted to duck it and talk about more important issues, but I persisted. I’d been thinking about getting a job at Harvard, possibly in admissions. What kind of people did he work with? Were they congenial? What was the atmosphere like? Was it a big office? How many people? Men? Women? Any soulmates? Readers? Or just, you know, office people?
According to him, every soul he worked with was brain dead. I interrupted a stream of complaint with “Gee, I know somebody who works for Harvard. I wonder if you know her.”
“It’s a big place,” he said, hoping to avoid the whole endless business.
“I met her at a party. Always meant to look her up.” I searched through my bag, found a scrap of paper and pretended to read Marcia Heidegger’s name off it.
“Marcia? Geez, I work with Marcia. Same office.”
“Do you think she likes her work? I mean I got some strange vibes from her,” I said. I actually said “strange vibes” and he didn’t laugh his head off. People in the Square say things like that and other people take them seriously.
His face got conspiratorial, of all things, and he leaned closer to me.
“You want it, I bet you could get Marcia’s job.”
“You mean it?” What a compliment—a place for me among the brain dead.
“She’s gonna get fired if she doesn’t snap out of it.”
“Snap out of what?”
“It was bad enough working with her when she first came over. She’s one of those crazy neat people, can’t stand to see papers lying on a desktop, you know? She almost threw out the first chapter of my thesis!”
I made a suitably horrified noise and he went on.
“Well, you know, about Marcia, it’s kind of tragic. She doesn’t talk about it.”
But he was dying to.
“Yes?” I said, as if he needed egging on.
He lowered his voice. “She used to work for Justin Thayler over at the law school, that guy in the news, whose wife got killed. You know, her work hasn’t been worth shit since it happened. She’s always on the phone, talking real soft, hanging up if anybody comes in the room. I mean, you’d think she was in love with the guy or something, the way she.…”
I don’t remember what I said. For all I know, I may have volunteered to type his thesis. But I got rid of him somehow and then I scooted around the corner of Church Street and found a pay phone and dialed Mooney.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Somebody mugged you, but they only took your trading stamps.”
“I have just one question for you, Moon.”
“I accept. A June wedding, but I’ll have to break it to Mother gently.”
“Tell me what kind of junk Justin Thayler collected.”
I could hear him breathing into the phone.
“Just tell me,” I said, “for curiosity’s sake.”
“You onto something, Carlotta?”
“I’m curious, Mooney. And you’re not the only source of information in the world.”
“Thayler collected Roman stuff. Antiques. And I mean old. Artifacts, statues—”
“Coins?”
“Whole mess of them.”
“Thanks.”
“Carlotta—”
I never did find out what he was about to say because I hung up. Rude, I know. But I had things to do. And it was better Mooney shouldn’t know what they were, because they came under the heading of illegal activities.
When I knocked at the front door of the Mason Terrace house at 10:00 A.M. the next day, I was dressed in dark slacks, a white blouse, and my old police department hat. I looked very much like the guy who reads your gas meter. I’ve never heard of anyone being arrested for impersonating the gasman. I’ve never heard of anyone really giving the gasman a second look. He fades into the background and that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
I knew Marcia Heidegger wouldn’t be home for hours. Old reliable had left for the Square at her usual time, precise to the minute. But I wasn’t 100 percent sure Marcia lived alone. Hence the gasman. I could knock on the door and check it out.
Those Brookline neighborhoods kill me. Act sneaky and the neighbors call the cops in twenty seconds, but walk right up to the front door, knock, talk to yourself while you’re sticking a shim in the crack of the door, let yourself in, and nobody does a thing. Boldness is all.
The place wasn’t bad. Three rooms, kitchen and bath, light and airy. Marcia was incredibly organized, obsessively neat, which meant I had to keep track of where everything was and put it back just so. There was no clutter in the woman’s life. The smell of coffee and toast lingered, but if she’d eaten breakfast, she’d already washed, dried, and put away the dishes. The morning paper had been read and tossed in the trash. The mail was sorted in one of those plastic accordion files. I mean, she folded her underwear like origami.
Now coins are hard to look for. They’re small; you can hide ’em anywhere. So this search took me one hell of a long time. Nine out of ten women hide things that are dear to them in the bedroom. They keep their finest jewelry closest to the bed, sometimes in the nightstand, sometimes right under the mattress. That’s where I started.
Marcia had a jewelry box on top of her dresser. I felt like hiding it for her. She had some nice stuff and a burglar could have made quite a haul with no effort.
The next favorite place for women to stash valuables is the kitchen. I sifted through her flour. I removed every Kellogg’s Rice Krispy from the giant economy-sized box—and returned it I went through her place like no burglar ever will. When I say thorough, I mean thorough.
I found four odd things. A neatly squared pile of clippings from the Globe and the Herald, all the articles about the Thayler killing. A manila envelope containing five different safe-deposit-box keys. A Tupperware container full of superstitious junk, good luck charms mostly, the kind of stuff I’d never have associated with a straight-arrow like Marcia: rabbits’ feet galore, a little leather bag on a string that looked like some kind of voodoo charm, a pendant in the shape of a cross surmounted by a hook, and, I swear to God, a pack of worn tarot cards. Oh, yes, and a .22 automatic, looking a lot less threatening stuck in an ice cube tray. I took the bullets; the loaded gun threatened a defenseless box of Breyers’ mint chocolate-chip ice cream.
I left everything else just the way I’d found it and went home. And tugged my hair. And stewed. And brooded. And ate half the stuff in the refrigerator, I kid you not.
At about one in the morning, it all made blinding, crystal-clear sense.
The next afternoon, at five-fifteen, I made sure I was the cabbie who picked up Marcia Heidegger in Harvard Square. Now cabstands have the most rigid protocol since Queen Victoria; you do not grab a fare out of turn or your fellow cabbies are definitely not amused. There was nothing for it but bribing the ranks. This bet with Mooney was costing me plenty.
I got her. She swung open the door and gave the Mason Terrace number. I grunted, kept my face turned front, and took off.
Some people really watch where you’re going in a cab, scared to death you’ll take them a block out of their way and squeeze them for an extra nickel. Others just lean back and dream. She was a dreamer, thank God. I was almost at District One headquarters before she woke up.
“Excuse me,” she said, polite as ever, “that’s Mason Terrace in Brookline.”
“Take the next right, pull over, and douse your lights,” I said in a low Bogart voice. My imitation was not that good, but it got the point across. Her eyes widened and she made an instinctive grab for the door handle.
“Don’t try it, lady,” I Bogied on. “You think I’
m dumb enough to take you in alone? There’s a cop car behind us, just waiting for you to make a move.”
Her hand froze. She was a sap for movie dialogue.
“Where’s the cop?” was all she said on the way up to Mooney’s office.
“What cop?”
“The one following us.”
“You have touching faith in our law-enforcement system,” I said.
She tried a bolt, I kid you not. I’ve had experience with runners a lot trickier than Marcia. I grabbed her in approved cop hold number three and marched her into Mooney’s office.
He actually stopped typing and raised an eyebrow, an expression of great shock for Mooney.
“Citizen’s arrest,” I said.
“Charges?”
“Petty theft Commission of a felony using a firearm.” I rattled off a few more charges, using the numbers I remembered from cop school.
“This woman is crazy,” Marcia Heidegger said with all the dignity she could muster.
“Search her,” I said. “Get a matron in here. I want my four dollars and eighty-two cents back.”
Mooney looked like he agreed with Marcia’s opinion of my mental state. He said, “Wait up, Carlotta. You’d have to be able to identify that four dollars and eighty-two cents as yours. Can you do that? Quarters are quarters. Dimes are dimes.”
“One of the coins she took was quite unusual,” I said. “I’m sure I’d be able to identify it.”
“Do you have any objection to displaying the change in your purse?” Mooney said to Marcia. He got me mad the way he said it, like he was humoring an idiot.
“Of course not,” old Marcia said, cool as a frozen daiquiri.
“That’s because she’s stashed it somewhere else, Mooney,” I said patiently. “She used to keep it in her purse, see. But then she goofed. She handed it over to a cabbie in her change. She should have just let it go, but she panicked because it was worth a pile and she was just baby-sitting it for someone else. So when she got it back, she hid it somewhere. Like in her shoe. Didn’t you ever carry your lucky penny in your shoe?”