A Trouble of Fools

by Linda Barnes

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said flatly, “but I’ve heard it from a good authority that you guys have been helping the IRA for a while, in a small way. You picked up change from bar canisters, converted the change to cash, and passed it along to somebody higher up, right?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Boyle ordered the troops, which was fine by me.

  “Then this man came along. John Flaherty, he calls himself. Jackie.”

  “Jackie wouldn’t have a thing to do with drugs—”

  “Shut up, Corcoran,” Boyle said. “I, for one, don’t believe a word of it. We know Flaherty. It’s some trick to get us to admit to helping the Provos. Jackie would never get mixed up with drugs. Cocaine, heroin, where would he get it from, eh?”

  “Did Jackie ever tell you where he used to work?” I asked.

  “In the Republic,” Boyle said proudly. “All over the southern counties. Then in the North. Belfast. Derry. Underground.”

  “He’s an Irish national, then?”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “Anybody seen his passport?”

  Silence.

  “They’d have checked it at the company,” somebody piped up. “When they hired him. You’ve got to do that with foreigners.”

  In her jerry-rigged basement darkroom, Roz had worked wonders, shooting terrific slides of enlarged B&W negatives of Flaherty’s employment application. The slides, rushed through a professional lab that offered six-hour service, were grainy, but legible. Every space remained blank, except for the name slot: “John Flaherty,” and the address rectangle, which was filled with a number and street in Dorchester. I’d checked out the address. The Vietnamese couple who’d answered the door of apartment 2A were extremely polite. They smiled and bowed, but spoke little English. The building superintendent had never heard of any John or Jackie Flaherty. I told the old men about the phony address.

  “So what?” Fergus shouted. “He’s on the run. There are plenty of damned informers, and a lot of Ulster storm troopers who want him dead.”

  The men, by general murmur, agreed with Fergus.

  “If Flaherty was an Irish national, his passport number, his visa status, would have to be on file, right?” I said. “You know how strict Gloria is about that stuff, don’t you? Can you think of any reason she might have approved an application like this one, with nothing, no work history, no references?” I had another slide ready for them. A blowup of a second sheet of paper, this one with less information on it. Just a name this time: “John Flaherty.” A scrawl occupied the rest of the page. “Hire,” it said. It was signed “Sam Gianelli.”

  The second enlargement wasn’t as sharp as the first. I hadn’t given Roz much time to work on it. I’d wanted to replace it in Green & White’s locked files before Gloria realized it was gone.

  “Do you want to ask me again?” I said. “How he might have gotten ahold of drugs? Or have any of you heard of the Gianelli family?”

  “Not Sam,” somebody murmured. I was glad it wasn’t me. I’d been singing that refrain for a day or two now.

  “Didn’t any of you open the parcels you ferried around the city?” I asked.

  “They were sealed. For our protection, so the FBI couldn’t trace us with fingerprints.” The voice was Joe Fergus’s, insistent, demanding.

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s no good. I’ve talked to cops: State, Boston, Cambridge. I’ve asked around. The word is that nothing, no money, no munitions, is moving out of Massachusetts, except legitimately, through the Ireland Fund. Everything going to Ireland is watched, and counted, and counted again, ever since the Valhalla business.”

  “All that proves is that Jackie and the IRA are smarter than the cops, or the cops are in it with them, and plenty are,” came a voice from the back of the room.

  “You tell me,” I said. “Where are the guns coming from? Armories? Dealers? How are they getting to Ireland? Where are the ships? They’re not moving out of Gloucester anymore. Nothing’s sailed from the South Shore. Nothing out of Boston. What about the planes? Is Aer Lingus taking off from Logan loaded with guns? Has Jackie found a way to fool the airport metal detectors? Maybe he’s using an Air Force base. Are planes taking off from Hanscom Field? For Ireland?” I started at one end of the room and tried to meet each man’s eye, to put the questions to each of them. “Nobody here got curious enough to ask? Well, let me tell you this. Irish arms are not circulating in this state. What is moving in Massachusetts is cheap, smokable cocaine—crack—in little vials like the one you saw on the screen. And I think you’re moving it, as unpaid, blind couriers. ‘Mules,’ they call them in the trade.”

  “I don’t believe a word,” Sean Boyle said.

  I had an answer. In the form of a slide. A copy of an old mug shot, granted, but Roz does good work, and the resemblance was clear.

  “Your precious John Flaherty has a record,” I said. “A friend of mine ran the name for me, and came up with a drug bust and conviction back in ’seventy-nine. Three months in the Concord Reformatory. He was not an Irish national in ’seventy-nine.”

  He hadn’t even used an alias for his operation at Green & White. How dumb can you get?

  The old guys didn’t say anything. They stared at young Jackie Flaherty with numbers across his chest and a defiant glare in his eyes. His hair was longer, tousled. I expected somebody to protest. I mean, a record isn’t everything. There are felons who go straight. I didn’t think our Jackie was one of them.

  “Somebody here is FBI,” one of the men in the back declared, a loyalist to the core. “As soon as we admit to anything, we’re all in the slammer.”

  Margaret Devens drew herself up to her full height. “You have my word, Dan O’Keefe, and you have no reason to doubt my word. No one here has any authority to keep you. Leave if you like. If it were up to me, I’d arrest the whole lot of you, for what you tried to do, and for what you did. God knows which is a worse sin, but evil is evil, and either way, it’s a burden you’ll carry forever on your soul.”

  Nobody said anything for a full minute, maybe two. I could hear the dining room clock ticking away.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve shown you that one of your ‘IRA’ couriers hangs out with a known drug dealer. I’ve given you a source of the drugs, the Gianellis. Maybe I’ve even shaken your faith in Jackie. Here’s your chance to prove me wrong, to say, ‘I opened that parcel, and it contained one automatic pistol with a green ribbon tied around the barrel.’”

  Nobody said a word.

  “How about you, Boyle? You want to tell me that the courier in the photo didn’t use the name ‘Maud’ when he called G and W?”

  Silence.

  “So none of you got curious enough to open a package,” I said.

  “My brother Eugene was an inquiring man all his life,” said Margaret Devens, softly. “A curious man, not one to take things on faith.”

  “Oh, my God.” The words punched the wind out of Sean Boyle, and he sat heavily on the couch.

  I said, “Tell us where Eugene went.”

  “Well, he’s in Ireland,” Joe Fergus said petulantly. “In Ireland.”

  “Dear Lord,” Margaret whispered, “the man still believes.”

  “Boyle had a postcard,” Fergus insisted.

  While Boyle was patting his jacket pockets, I held it up. “Never mind where I got it,” I said. “Is this the one?”

  Boyle grabbed it, checked both sides, nodded.

  “Tell them what you told me, Margaret,” I said.

  “It’s not his handwriting,” she said. “Not even close.”

  Roz had enlarged the smeared postmark. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the card had been sent from Dublin, New Hampshire.

  “My God, if this is true,” Sean Boyle said slowly, “then Eugene’s not—maybe not in Ireland at all. Margaret, believe me, we thought he was on his way with a shipment of arms. It was his dream.”

  Right out of his boys’ adventure novels.

  “Where’s
Eugene, then?” Boyle murmured. Elbows on knees, he cupped his palms, and let his head sink into his hands.

  Margaret Devens knew the answer to that one. You could read it in her face.

  “Margaret,” Sean Boyle said, “I just don’t know … I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “The whole lot of you should go to prison for what you’ve done—”

  “Margaret,” I interrupted. We’d been over that ground.

  “All you can say, Boyle,” she continued bitterly, “is nothing. And all you can do is pay attention to this red-haired woman. You do exactly what she says, and maybe you won’t see the inside of a cell for years to come.”

  I cleared my throat, to give the men time to think about what they’d heard, and because it was hard to watch Margaret and not get caught up in her pain. “I know something about the distribution plan,” I said. “I know it has to do with the cab radios, and with the code name ‘Maud,’ from the poem.” I gave a silent thank you to Pat, who’d put me on the right track. A woman’s name. Something poetic.

  I thought about Jackie Flaherty with reluctant admiration. True, he was too dumb to change his name, but he was smart enough to find a secret organization in place, a band of men well known in the community, with access to all neighborhoods, a reliable communication network—a group ripe for co-opting. Talk about a respectable cover—God, half of them must have cousins on the force. A whole fleet of unpaid, dependable mules, dreaming outdated dreams of glory. An unquestioning army brimming with unexploited loyalty.

  If felons were smart all the time, cops would go out of business. I wondered if the setup had been Flaherty’s idea from the start. Or if it had come from the top.

  “Maud,” Sean Boyle began slowly, looking at Margaret, but speaking to me. “Maud or Maudie, that was the signal. And it was always a woman’s voice that made the call, so Gloria wouldn’t get suspicious, and the calls were made none too often, and never from the same place twice.”

  Chapter 28

  At home the next morning, Red Emma was in a feisty mood, digging her claws into my index finger and pecking away at the kitchen phone. I held her farther off so she wouldn’t disturb the cute little bugging mechanism I’d discovered inside the speaker.

  “Budgies of the world, unite!” I intoned at the bird. “Read my lips, kid.”

  Muzak oozed from the receiver. I held it a good six inches from my ear.

  “How about ‘Better red than dead’?” I asked. Red Emma was not interested. She wanted to peck my nose off. “Better green than dead?”

  “What did you say?” The voice was female and accusing. I almost dropped both the receiver and the budgie.

  “I’m trying to reach Mr. Andrews,” I said politely. “It’s important. Urgent, you might say.”

  Muzak gushed.

  I can always tell Red Emma’s mood by her degree of fluffiness. On those rare occasions when she is cheerful, she puffs up into a green featherball. When she’s pissed, she gets so skinny you can barely see her. She dug her talons into my finger, and looked positively anorexic. Not without difficulty, I waved her off. She contentedly dive-bombed my head.

  “Mrs. Carlyle.” The welcoming bass was that of “our Mr. Andrews” all right. Thanks to Mooney, I knew who he really was. I kept my knowledge out of my voice.

  “Great news, Mr. Andrews,” I said eagerly. “I got in touch with Thomas. Is there any chance you can wait till the end of the week for us to visit Cedar Wash? He’ll be home by then, and I’m sure he’ll want to—”

  The bastard tripped over his own words in his eagerness. “Where did you say he was now? Did he call?”

  If he’d called, you’d have heard every word, Mr. FBI man, I thought.

  “He called a friend, a business partner, and the, uh, friend got in touch with me. But the important thing is that Tom will be home by, oh, Friday, at the latest. So, do you think you can stretch the contest rules for us? We can visit Cedar Wash as soon as he gets home.”

  “Just a minute,” Andrews said. He put me on hold. I imagined him chortling on the other end of the line, informing his colleagues that he’d hooked a big one.

  “Well,” he said, returning after a suspenseful pause, “since we’ve come this far, I suppose we might as well go all the way. Cedar Wash is run by a group of caring individuals. We pride ourselves on that.”

  I almost choked.

  “So,” Mr. Andrews said contentedly, “as soon as your husband gets home, be sure to give us a call.”

  Right.

  Believe me, the days never zipped by faster. Friday, which had seemed a distant prospect when I’d contacted Mr. Andrews, was looming closer. The clocks speeded up. The Old Geezers were strung tight. If things didn’t start moving soon, one of them, probably hot-tempered Joe Fergus, would snap, storm up to Jackie Flaherty, and punch his lights out. Or else the Cambridge cops would wake up, bust Wispy Beard, plea-bargain him till he talked, and arrest everybody at G&W.

  I was glad I had so much to do. Activity kept me from brooding over possible points of disaster.

  I couldn’t use my phone because of the bug. I dropped a lot of change in pay-phone slots.

  Headquarters was Margaret Devens’s house. Roz and Lemon moved in with her for the duration—for protection, and as an auxiliary work force. It took them a whole day to record the addresses of all “Maud” or “Maudie” pickups and deliveries.

  I let Sean Boyle split up the list because he kept hounding me for something to do. He used my old police area map as a guide. All Area A addresses went on one sheet of paper, all Area B locations on a second, all Area C—and so forth. Joe Fergus xeroxed copies at a self-service machine in Harvard Square.

  The main thing the cabbies had to do, the main thing I hoped they could do, was shut up and play along, not give Flaherty any cause for suspicion. They also served as on-the-spot observers, with Boyle as their captain. He divided them into three squadrons of three cabbies each. Fergus, O’Keefe, and Corcoran were his lieutenants. Flaherty’s every move was reported, charted, analyzed. Timing was everything. No way was he going to take delivery of a single new shipment of dope. I was willing to keep the cops out as long as no more cocaine traveled the route. But as soon as the coke came in, the cops came in. That was the deal. I owed it to the kids at the schoolyard, to Paolina.

  I gave Gloria the bare bones of the story. I didn’t mention Gianelli. I felt lousy about it, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  “What?” She slammed an unfinished Mars Bar down on her desk, glared at me, and repeated herself an octave higher. “What?”

  “I thought your boys were IRA collectors, right?”

  “Right. I got that part.”

  “Sometime last year, around the time Pat left, they let a new member into the Gaelic Brotherhood Association—that’s what GBA stands for, by the way. This new brother outdid all the rest when it came to blarney. Instead of passing the money along to the IRA, he bought cocaine with it—maybe not a huge amount at first, but business expanded. And he fed your cabbies a tale about bigger deals with the IRA, and pretty soon he got them picking up cash, and scooting drugs around the city, and feeling proud of themselves to boot.”

  I outlined the mechanics of Flaherty’s plan. When I got to the part about her own unwitting involvement through the “Maudie” calls, she did something I’d never seen her do before. She tossed the unfinished Mars Bar in the trash can.

  “Mules,” she muttered sadly. She hit her broad forehead with the flat of her palm. “I’ve got a stable full of fucking mules. No way you can keep cops out of this, Carlotta.”

  I felt terrible. I wanted to retrieve the Mars Bar. “You’re right, Glory,” I said gently. “But maybe G and W can stay in the background.”

  “Hah. Right. Background.” Gloria’s brief peal of laughter had no humor in it.

  “The Old Geezers didn’t know what they were doing—and I, for one, don’t think they should go to jail for being half-assed romantic jerks who live in
a time warp.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go to jail either, Carlotta. The food would sure as hell kill me.”

  “There might be a way out.”

  “Oh, Christ, Carlotta, is this the lead-up to one of your cockeyed schemes? I’m starting to sweat.”

  “It’s your choice, Gloria. You can call the cops now, and put them all behind bars.”

  “And probably go with them. What the hell kind of choice is that?”

  “Then play along,” I said. “Your part is small, but crucial, Glory. Your chance to be a star.”

  “Star, hell,” she muttered. “Don’t give me any of that upbeat star shit. Next thing, you’ll tell me not to worry.”

  “Calm down, Gloria.”

  “What I want to know is, will your plan keep my ass out of jail?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  She glanced around for her Mars Bar, shook her head despondently when she couldn’t locate it. “Wait till I tell my brothers,” she said.

  I could wait. I’d deliberately picked a time when none of the bruisers were around. I didn’t want them asking me why I was hassling their sister.

  “If you need more muscle,” Gloria said, “you let me know. I’m sure my brothers could help.”

  I swallowed. “Keep them in reserve, okay, Gloria? The fewer people who know about this the better.”

  “This new GBA member,” she said, “is he one of my drivers? Say, somebody who came on about the time old Pat left?”

  So much for keeping things from Gloria.

  I swallowed. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “I’ve gotta tell my brothers.”

  “Okay. If you think your brothers are big on self-control, you just go ahead and tell them. But if they move before I’m ready, they’ll screw the entire plan. And I don’t think the guards allow any junk-food care packages at Framingham State.”

  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.