A Trouble of Fools (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 1)

by Linda Barnes

  As I walked out the door, she unwrapped a fresh Mars Bar, and gobbled it in two huge bites, as though it might be her last.

  Chapter 29

  Among the calls I made from pay phones was one to my lawyer, just in case. Whenever I left the house, I dialed home religiously, every half hour. Roz was staying at Margaret’s most of the time. She had strict instructions not to answer my phone when she dropped by for a change of clothes or a meal of peanut butter. I used my remote beeper to check calls received. I heard from a manufacturer of vinyl siding, and a woman doing a toothpaste survey.

  From my home phone, I made no calls, with the exception of one preplanned session with Roz, stationed at a pay phone in a Jamaica Plain diner. We chatted about how pleased I was that Tom was finally coming home.

  I didn’t let the Devens case totally rule my life. I ate. I slept. I played volleyball. I told myself it would all be over by Friday. Nothing would interfere with Paolina’s Saturday band concert. I had plenty of time. Instead of picking her up for our regular noon rendezvous, I was expected in the school auditorium at 7 P.M. sharp. I look forward to band concerts with mixed emotions. My ears wince, my heart smiles.

  I called Mooney from Dunkin’ Donuts, after a strenuous morning at the Y. I’d intended to visit him, but I changed my mind after dueling a tough squad from the East Boston Y. Near the end of the game, I blocked a spiked ball with the heel of my palm so hard the return practically shot to the ceiling. My team made the point, but we lost. I hoped it wasn’t an omen. My hand ached.

  That really doesn’t explain why I was not in a mood to confront Mooney. Let’s just say that he always had a way of punching holes in my cases when I was a cop. Besides, I like his voice on the phone. It’s low and gruff and rumbly. He’d have made a good blues singer.

  I asked if the door to his office was closed.

  “Nope.”

  “Could you close it?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People will think I’m getting a personal phone call.”

  I could picture the wide grin on his face. “You are,” I said. “Personal and business-related and important.”

  I heard the receiver thump against his wooden desktop, the slam of his office door.

  “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Mooney,” I said. “Would you say you still owed me a favor, or what?”

  He considered it for a while. “I’d say we’re pretty even.”

  “Then how’s my credit?”

  “Depends.”

  “Mooney, how’d you like to help your career, and give the FBI a gorgeous black eye at the same time? Would you be remotely interested?”

  “I could be,” he said cautiously.

  “Look, I don’t need any credit for this. I’m not saying I’d mind seeing my name in the papers. It might be good for business. But I’ll leave that up to you. What I want is cooperation.”

  “What kind of cooperation, Carlotta? I can’t break the law.”

  “Don’t tell me what cops can do, Moon. I know what you can do. You can make plans based on the word of a reliable informant. You can make judgment calls.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mooney, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. This will all go down by Friday, or else I’ll turn it over to you. Completely. The whole thing. You’ve got my word.”

  Silence.

  “I can do it without you, Mooney. I just thought you might like to be there for the finale, make the FBI look dumb.”

  “What’s my end of the deal? What do I have to guarantee?”

  “First, that you won’t jump the gun. Even if you decide to pass on it, you’ll give me until Friday, free and clear.”

  “This Friday?”

  “Make it Saturday morning. Eight A.M.”

  “Is it about T. C.?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Would it require a lot of work?”

  “I’d leave that up to you, Mooney. I trust you. You’ve got to trust me. No more Twenty Questions.”

  I could hear him breathing. “Deal,” he said.

  We talked.

  Mooney, being Mooney and Irish to the core, could see my point. He felt a sneaking sympathy for the Old Geezers. He didn’t want to arrest a whole bunch of cops’ elderly uncles and fathers-in-law. Nor did he wish to arrest a fat black woman in a wheelchair, especially one with three hulking brothers. I admit I played fast and loose with Gloria. She would have despised my romantic version of her plight. I didn’t let that stop me. I was convincing as hell. Once I even had to lower my voice because the Dunkin’ Donuts waitress was taking an interest in my performance.

  There were parts of it Mooney didn’t like. I’d expected that. He said I was relying too heavily on cops taking informants seriously. I agreed with him completely, a technique that leaves him speechless. I told him he could make it work by letting me know which officers would be likely to move fast on drug arrests, which cops were busting ass for promotion.

  “This is going to be a lot of work,” he grumbled.

  He agreed to get the warrants ready. He agreed to stand by. He wanted to tap my telephone.

  I had to remind him that it was already bugged.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “Don’t call me.”

  I’ve always wanted to say that.

  He was still blitzing questions when I bade him a firm good-bye, and hung up.

  Rude, I know. But Mooney’s never satisfied.

  Chapter 30

  I was so busy juggling half a dozen mental balls that, when the doorbell buzzed, it never occurred to me that Sam Gianelli would be on the stoop. If it had, I wouldn’t have answered the door.

  Wearing a cotton plaid shirt—beige with a navy stripe—and khaki slacks, he looked cool, relaxed, and casual. He carried flowers. Purple iris.

  I must have opened the door, because somehow he was in the foyer. I guess I spoke to him, uttered polite, inane sentences, thanked him for the flowers, but my mind had gone profoundly blank.

  I am no Mata Hari. There is no way I could play a bedroom scene with a man I intended to screw in an entirely different sense of the word. I mean, I hadn’t thought much about Sam the past few days, what with all the frenzied planning. I’d just hoped he’d stay the hell out of town.

  And here he was, with flowers in his hand, and a warm smile on his face, inquiring whether I’d missed him while he was gone.

  T.C. rubbed against my leg, immediately and instinctively jealous. I knelt down and fussed over him. My uncharacteristic behavior must have shocked the cat, but it gave me something to do while I pulled myself together.

  It was early Wednesday afternoon. Three days had passed since the meeting at Margaret Devens’s house. Things were heating up. All the arrangements, the signals, the codes, had been set. We were waiting for one particular phone call—from “Maud.”

  I’d rather do anything than wait. My personal hell will be a dentist’s lobby, filled with ancient, thumbed copies of Glamour. To avoid reverting to chain-smoking or nail-biting, I was cooking—for me a rare occupation. Paolina’s class was having a bake sale, and she’d asked me to contribute these weird confections my mom used to make. They went over big with the Girl Scouts, and now I’m doomed to bake them for all eternity. Not that I mind, for Paolina.

  I was wearing white painter’s pants, streaked with egg yolk, and an electric blue T-shirt, similarly stained. I don’t own an apron, and I’m not overly neat with an eggbeater. I’m sure I had dabs of batter on my face. Neither my outer nor inner self was prepared for Sam’s company.

  “I’m, uh, cooking,” I said, less than brilliantly.

  “You?”

  “Yeah. I’m making these chocolate chip meringue things. Paolina wants them colored, green and pink. Class colors. The food coloring doesn’t make them taste any different, but they look kind of gross.”

  I led him into the kitchen. I had the FM radio tuned to a local blues station. I turned the volum
e down. I found a vase, and snipped the ends of the iris stems at an angle. I arranged the flowers. I felt like a robot.

  “How was the trip?” I asked.

  “So-so.”

  Score any cocaine? I wondered.

  He asked for a glass of water, admitted orange juice would be better, agreed that a little vodka wouldn’t hurt the taste. I poured a large swig of Smirnoff’s into mine. The kitchen timer gave a ding that sounded like the starting bell for Round One of the Middleweight Boxing Championship, and I yanked a tray of meringues out of the oven, burning myself as usual. For me, they ought to make pot holder mitts that reach clear to the shoulder.

  “Smells good,” Sam said, staring dubiously at the neat rows of pink blobs.

  “Help yourself. I couldn’t remember if I doubled the recipe last time or tripled it, so this time I tripled it. I may have made enough of these suckers to go into business for myself.”

  “Then you can stop driving a hack. You enjoying it?”

  “No sweat,” I lied.

  “Bring the extras over to Gloria. She can eat maybe three dozen,” Sam said. “Look, were you expecting anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Do you mind my coming by? I should have called, I guess.”

  I took another pull on my vodka-laced orange juice.

  “This is nice,” Sam said, gazing around the kitchen.

  “What?” My kitchen is never going to be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. I missed Roz.

  “Domestic interior,” he said, smiling wickedly. “Woman baking, man appreciatively sampling the goods. I should have married you years ago, when you didn’t know any better. You’d have straightened me out.”

  I stole a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. Yeah. More likely, we’d have warped together.

  “These things aren’t bad.” He spoke through a mouthful of chips and meringue.

  “You get one. The rest are for Paolina.”

  “She sounds like quite a kid,” he said. “I’ll have to meet her.”

  Never, I thought.

  “You really think of her as your sister?”

  “She’s all the family I’ve got.”

  He grimaced and said, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have any family.”

  I whisked together egg whites and sugar, and added two drops of green food coloring for the final batch. The drops produced a pale grayish tint. I decided another drop couldn’t hurt, tilted the bottle again. I must have shaken it pretty hard. Eight, maybe nine drops of the stuff hit the meringue. I wondered if anyone would eat loden green chocolate chip meringues.

  The silence was stretching uncomfortably long, so I asked Sam how he was getting on with the rest of the Gianellis. It was social chat. I didn’t really want to know. I wanted him to leave.

  “Hell, I don’t even see them, except for my sister.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Older than me, the second oldest. She married an outsider.”

  “An outsider?”

  “Not an Italian—not, you know—” He waved his arms around and did a Godfather imitation. “Not a Gianelli Sicilian Italian.” He winked, dropped the act, and smiled. His teeth were white and even.

  I added chocolate chips to the batter, studied it, tossed in a few more. “Your family didn’t like that?”

  “Are you kidding? It was like a mortal sin. The guy’s Irish, for Christ’s sake. Working class. And my sister chose him herself, which made it worse. My father hit the ceiling. He’s from the old school. I guess he thought he’d give his only daughter as a reward to one of his faithful retainers. On a silver platter.”

  I scooped weird greenish batter, mixed with lumps of dark chocolate, into small mounds on a baking sheet. I couldn’t remember if I’d buttered the tray or not. I’d scoured the damn thing for half an hour after locating it down in Roz’s darkroom filled with murky fluid. I devoutly hoped I was not about to poison the entire fifth grade.

  “God, are these sweet,” Sam said.

  “You’re not eating another one, are you?”

  “You know,” he went on, “the day Gina married Martin, my mom dressed in black. She didn’t go to the wedding, but she put on this black dress, and she walked around the North End, so everybody would know she was in mourning. Didn’t speak to Gina for years, until the grandchildren started coming. She sees them occasionally, but she almost never speaks to Flaherty. If he answers when she phones, she hangs up. So sometimes I think you’re lucky, choosing your family like that.”

  My spoon hung in the air, drooling meringue.

  “Flaherty,” I repeated. “Not—”

  “Look, don’t mention this at the garage, okay?” Sam said, coming up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my rib cage. I could feel his breath on my neck, his smoothly shaven cheek against mine. “That driver you mentioned—Flaherty—he’s Gina’s kid.”

  Oh, God. No wonder he couldn’t use an alias at the cab company.

  “John’s been nothing but trouble for her,” Sam went on, “so she asked me to give him a job, see if he straightens out. What he really wanted was to go into the—you know, my dad’s business. And that would kill Gina. She steered clear of that bunch, made a pretty decent life for herself. But I don’t know. I don’t think John likes hacking much. I don’t think he likes me.”

  He nuzzled my neck, and turned me around. My face felt like it was frozen.

  “Hey.” Sam tilted my chin up with his index finger, forced my eyes to meet his. “John hasn’t been coming on to you, has he?”

  I kissed him, to stop his words. The kiss lingered. He twined his fingers in my hair, and pushed me back against the countertop. I got chocolate chip mush on my white pants. I was breathing too heavily to care.

  I know what I said about Mata Hari. But what followed wasn’t cool or calculated. Part of it was relief. Part of it was pure longing.

  “Your clothes are dirty,” Sam said after a while. “Let’s take them off.”

  “Not in the kitchen. I have a tenant.”

  “We can’t do it on the kitchen table?”

  We steamed up the shower instead, playing with the soap, and with each other, almost losing our balance on the slippery tile. We washed each other’s hair with huge handfuls of lather. Sam scrunched his eyes shut to avoid any wayward soap. Rinsed, we toweled off and got into my bed. I hit the button on the tape deck, and Bonnie Raitt sang “That Song About the Midway.” Her aching, soaring voice sounded lonely and lost.

  We moved to the music like familiar lovers, timing our thrusts for mutual pleasure, but our thoughts couldn’t have been more separate. Our lovemaking was gentle and slow. Intense. The afternoon light slanted in through the blinds. Tangles of his dark hair tickled my face.

  I don’t know what Sam was thinking. How do you ever know what another soul is thinking? Me, I guess I was saying good-bye.

  Maybe if I had warned him then, it would have turned out differently. But the wheels were in motion. It was too late.

  Chapter 31

  The call came late Thursday night. Early Friday morning, really. Fifteen minutes past midnight.

  “Maudie” needed a cab at the Trailways Terminal.

  According to Sean Boyle, Flaherty handled bus depot and train station runs personally. Any member of the GBA could cover a “Maud” call at a residential address, do routine pickup and delivery work, but only Flaherty answered the bus or train station calls. The stations must be where he did business, trading cash for drugs. That was smart, using buses and trains. What with all the baggage checks at airports these days, a lot of federal agents were locating dope instead of terrorists.

  Flaherty wasn’t dealing in Gianelli channels. He must have made his own connection, which wouldn’t have been too hard. A river of dope flows from New York to Boston. Maybe Flaherty saw the whole Green & White scam as some kind of apprenticeship. Maybe he thought after he earned his rep as an independent, he could go to Papa Gianelli a
nd request his rightful place in the family business.

  Eugene Devens must have suspected, must have followed him on one of his station runs. How Eugene had lifted the cash, I didn’t know. Why he hadn’t passed it on to the IRA—whom he considered its true owner—I did know. He hadn’t passed it on because he was dead. And whoever had killed him had been dumb enough to do it before he told them where the money was.

  I got the call from Gloria at sixteen minutes past midnight. I recognized her voice immediately. She apologized for dialing the wrong number. That was the signal. She’d stalled “Maudie” as agreed, told the woman it would be half an hour or more before a cab could get loose. In half an hour Gloria would put the call on the airwaves.

  Unless she heard from me that something had gone drastically wrong.

  I dialed the Harvard Square pay phone where Lemon had been staked out for so many nights I was afraid he’d called it quits. But the patience he’d developed from playing statue—plus the salary I was paying him from T. C.’s hoard—kept him faithful. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Tom,” I said, as soon as I heard his voice. “Tom, honey, how was the trip?”

  “It’s great to be home,” Lemon said. “I missed you, babe.”

  Don’t schmaltz it up, kid, I thought.

  “I missed you, too,” I said. “How about if I pick you up at the Trailways Terminal? In half an hour? Is that okay? I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Me, neither, babe. Look, don’t be late. I don’t want anybody to notice me hanging around.”

  “And you’ll go along with this contest thing?” I asked.

  “Look, Carlotta,” he said impatiently, “we’ve been through this. I’m not going on any wild-goose chases with you. I’ll be at the bus station in half an hour, and then I don’t know. I might be moving out again tonight.”

  “Tonight,” I waited. “But we won’t have any time.”

  “Shut up,” he said roughly. I’d described the real Thomas Carlyle to Lemon in enough detail for him to embellish his role. “Just meet me at the Trailways Terminal.”

  “The new one,” I said. “On Atlantic Avenue. In half an hour,” I repeated, just in case.