by Linda Barnes
My cell rang, and I grabbed it, willing Paolina’s voice, hoping the janitor hadn’t heard the sound.
“Dinner?” Sam’s baritone. “We could try the Harvest.”
Not Paolina. I tried not to let either disappointment or accusation seep into my response. “I don’t think I’ll have time.”
“You haven’t found her?”
“No. Sam—”
“You gotta eat—”
I might have to stuff fuel down my throat, but there was no way I could see myself sitting at a white-tablecloth restaurant poring over a menu. “This isn’t a great time to talk.” I’d follow up on Mooney’s idea later; I had the locker to crack now.
“You think I oughta talk to Marta? She might—”
“Sam, no. I appreciate it, but…” He believes women confide in him. What they do—what Marta does, anyway—is flirt with him. She’d shoot the breeze all night, tell him anything he wanted to hear.
“Let me do something,” he said.
I closed my eyes and listened to the faint hum of the polishing machine. Should I ask whether some organized crime hit man might have snatched my little sister? Instead I said, “Marta’s got a new guy named Gregor Maltic.” I spelled it. “You might—”
“I’ll see if anybody knows him. And you gotta sleep, right, so I’ll come by later.”
He hung up before I had time to reply. Plenty of time to ask about Mob-related complications tonight, I figured, so I stowed the phone and opened the locker as noiselessly as possible, imagining my little sister’s hand, warm on the same metal, less than a week ago.
The first thing that hit me was the smell, a combination of scents, floral, citrusy, musky, overwhelming. Lined on the top shelf, a row of tiny bottles and flasks glittered: perfume, cologne, and toilet water. My little sister started collecting cosmetic-counter giveaways at the age of eight. Probably a line of girls at her locker each morning, begging to borrow the latest fragrance.
A pink sweatshirt on a hook, a brief tie-dyed tee beneath it, stuff she’d have worn in early fall when it was still warm. A plastic bag held gym clothes, navy shorts and a white shirt, wrinkled and smelly.
The hall lighting was dim. I got a flashlight from my backpack, took every item out of the lower part of the locker and placed it on the floor for further inspection, fighting against the rising conviction that there was nothing to find, that I was wasting my time, that she’d been snatched randomly off the street. I unrolled a pair of socks and shook them out. I unfolded pages of lined three-hole paper to discover rough drafts of homework assignments, reassembled a sheet that had been ripped to pieces to find a “D” on a quiz for act 2, scene 2 of Julius Caesar. Used spiral notebooks, broken pens. Where was her backpack? If she was using it as a suitcase, I’d have expected to find her textbooks abandoned somewhere. They weren’t at my house. They weren’t at the Watertown house. They weren’t here.
I aimed the flashlight beam into the back corner of the locker floor, then the rear of the high shelf behind the row of perfume vials. Something was jammed in the back corner, an envelope, maybe. I didn’t want to knock over all the scent bottles, so I took each container out, one by one, placing them on the floor in a rickety row. A few more scraps of paper, scrunched exams, discarded attempts at essays. I reached into the corner recess, touched cloth, and withdrew a small drawstring bag made of rough brown felt.
It was maybe three inches by four, with a thin brown cord gathered tightly at the top, and pinked edges. The bottom of the pouch felt lumpy. I tugged at the top edges to spread the cord, held the sack in my right hand, and spilled the contents into my left. Something tumbled out, wrapped tightly in white tissue paper.
Pills, I thought, powder, but the shape was stiff and unyielding. I put my back to a neighboring locker, bent my knees, and slid to the floor, catching the pouch in my lap while my hands fumbled with the tissue.
Ornamental, some kind of jewelry, a pin, maybe, but no—I turned it over with careful fingertips—there was no clasp on the back of the small gold shape. It was an odd shape, whimsical, unusual.
It was gold, or gold-colored, but not the kind of gold usually seen in jewelry. More of a red-gold, an assertive gold. Not much shine to it, but depth. For its size, it felt heavy. It was the form of a man or, possibly, the more I gazed at it, a bird. The tiny body had two rows of raised ornamental ridges. The outspread arms, or wings, were arched. The head was triangular and a beak-like nose protruded beneath bulbous eyes. The areas that weren’t raised were smooth. The figure was symmetrical, but not perfectly so, as though it had been made by hand, possibly hammered. The back side looked less finished than the front, the beak-like nose a hollow void.
Face up, the protruding eyes looked blind. The face belonged to something not quite human and not quite animal. I was still peering at it, running my fingers over the metal when Roz interrupted with news that, with the janitor safely drinking coffee at a nearby store counter, she’d raised Aurelia on the phone: the gossip thing hadn’t panned out, what now?
I displayed the little birdman.
“Hey, cool.” She whistled softly and held out a scarlet-taloned hand. I was reluctant to part with the figure, but she didn’t seem to sense my hesitation, and grabbed it eagerly. Staring at it closely, nose to beak, she traced the ornamental ridges with a fingertip. “Looks pre-Columbian. Not Mayan, though. Definitely not Mayan.”
Roz calls herself a post-punk artist, and from the acrylic oddities she paints, you can’t really tell she’s educated in the arts. Slowly, over the years, the truth has emerged: She’s studied at some very classy places, the MFA School and Pratt included. Never hung around long enough to get a degree.
I said, “Colombian.” I guess I gave it the Spanish long o pronunciation. That’s what I was thinking: Colombia, the country, Paolina’s birthplace.
“Pre-Columbian,” Roz corrected. “That’s before Columbus hit America. With the u, not the o. But they got plenty of pre-Columbian stuff in Colombia, shit that was there before the Europeans invaded. Most pre-Columbian gold is South American.”
“This is gold?”
She stroked it with her small fingers. “I think so. Some kind of blend of copper and gold. I knew about it when I made jewelry; it’ll come to me.”
I stuck my hand out. She ignored it.
“Can I have it back?”
She glared at me frostily. “I wasn’t gonna steal it.” But her hands seemed as reluctant as mine had been to give it up. “Where’d you get it? Is it Paolina’s?”
I bit my lip. I’m not sure how long I sat like that, the little birdman warm in my palm.
“We going to the Pit or what?” Roz was staring at me oddly. “Aren’t we supposed to go there next, hand out flyers?”
When they extended the Red Line and redesigned the Harvard Square MBTA station, someone had the bright idea of making the entry-way inviting, with a circular plaza surrounded by stone benches. If the powers that be had foreseen the actual use the plaza would be put to, the architect would have been drawn and quartered; I doubt the City Council wanted to attract the homeless, the druggies, the unemployed and unemployable, seeking to get high. Teens converge there, townies mainly, but a sprinkling of college kids, the ones who don’t quite fit in or can’t afford the freight at the trendy cafes. You can buy just about anything at the Pit. The older men come out late at night, especially when it’s cold, because after midnight the barter gets serious, shelter for food and sex. Runaways throng there.
I looked into the birdman’s blank eyes and shook my head. “Help me repack the locker. Then you can handle the Pit on your own.” She’d do fine solo, distributing the flyers, questioning the misfits.
Normally Roz would have pounced on any change of plans, demanding to know why I’d changed my mind. She’s gotten interested in the investigation racket and thinks she might try it on her own someday. Something in my eyes must have stopped her. She quickly gathered perfume vials and dirty clothes and dumped them back in the locke
r.
I wrapped the gold birdman in the wrinkled tissue and stowed him in his felt pouch, thinking pre-Columbian, South American, Colombian. Thinking goddamn Marta didn’t say a word about this. Thinking she’d be at work by the time I got there.
CHAPTER 6
If a cop had been patrolling Mt. Auburn Street or Trapelo Road, lurking unseen behind a billboard or liquor store, I’d have gotten the chance to lead a cruiser on a high-speed chase. The traffic police were busy elsewhere, so I exceeded the speed limit and charged through amber lights unimpeded.
It may not be true that Waltham bars have gotten busier since Cambridge and Boston caught no-smoking fever, but you couldn’t prove it by the early crowd at McKinley’s. The place hadn’t been open more than forty-five minutes and already the haze of smoke over the L-shaped bar was as thick as a low-hanging cloud. From her station at the hostess stand, Marta glanced at the door, a welcoming smile firmly in place. When she saw me, the smile froze and her hands dropped the square of stiff red cloth she’d been folding. Crumpled, the napkin lay on the scratched wooden floor like a puddle of blood.
“You can’t bother me here; I’m working!” Her heels clacked furiously as she approached, and her whisper attracted the attention of drinkers at the tables dotted to the right of the bar. She wore the same short skirt she’d set off in this morning, but she had yanked her top down to expose bare shoulders. Her hair swung like a heavy curtain around her face. The blond streaks were new.
I don’t know. If my daughter were missing, I might skip the blow dry. If my daughter were missing and the woman looking for her showed up unannounced at my place of business, I might ask after the child’s welfare. I tried to get my face to relax, but I don’t think I managed a smile.
I was a cop long enough to learn that the surface doesn’t reflect the inner core. I’ve interrogated distraught suspects who turned out to be complete innocents and cool-as-ice liars who were felons from the toe-nails up. I’ve been alive long enough to know that appearances lie. When I was sixteen, everybody thought I was doing so well after my mother’s death, so damn well, right up until the night I jumped a bus and left town.
“Take a break,” I suggested.
We glared at each other for an instant; then she snatched the fallen napkin off the floor and slapped it down on a tabletop. “What? You find something?”
She was worried about what I’d seen at her house. Hastily I reviewed the search. I’d been so focused on finding the passport. What had I missed?
“Let me buy you a drink,” I said.
The place was dark the way daytime bars are dark, with the artificial dimness of heavy shades over small windows and minimal overhead light. I watched her eyes to see whether she signaled to any of the wait staff, any of the customers. It was too early for a bouncer.
She turned abruptly and her heels pocked the floor again. She murmured something to the bartender, a rangy blond who shot me a quick glance. Then she grabbed a tray, two glasses, two bottles of Bud, and ferried them to a corner booth. I followed and slid onto a saggy leather bench.
She sat across from me. I waited, sipping beer without tasting it, rerunning a mental tape of the house search: kitchen, den, bedroom, closet. Closet. I reviewed the clothing in Marta’s closet, item by item, the stuffed racks, the dangling tags.
Sometimes, you wait long enough, a perp will get so uncomfortable he’ll spill his guts; Marta held up well.
“Your hair looks good,” I said, deciding she’d sit silently till her blond streaks faded. “Nice earrings.”
“These? These are—”
“They’re new. Like a lot of the clothes in your closet.”
“So? I buy a few things. I work hard. What’re you doing?”
Spreading my napkin on the table like a placemat, I emptied the brown felt pouch and unwrapped the tissue paper. The tiny statue caught the light.
“I never seen it before,” she said quickly.
Up till that moment, I hadn’t been sure, but she was so immediately defensive it was clear she was lying. As soon as the words left her lips, she realized her mistake; they must have rung as tinnily false to her ears as they did to mine.
I sucked in a deep breath, desperate for a cigarette. After six long years of good behavior, the beer and the smoke had triggered a deep longing in my lungs. Besides, if I had something to hold in my right hand, it might stop clenching.
“A father has a right to send a gift to his daughter, I think,” Marta said defiantly.
I took another sip of tasteless beer, the glass icy in my hand. I replaced it on the table, in the exact center of the wet circle it had left on the wooden top. I remembered her downcast eyes when I’d asked her whether she was in touch with Roldan’s family. Assuming he was dead, I’d never asked if she’d been in touch with Roldan himself. There it was again, that ugly word: assuming.
With effort, I kept my voice soft and uninflected. “Okay, Marta, when did he get in touch? How? Did he write? Did he call?”
No response.
“He sent you money, right? Did you sell her, for chrissake?”
“Hey, you watch what you say!”
“Any trouble?” The bartender barely raised his voice. A couple of men at the bar gave me the evil eye.
“It’s okay,” she said, tossing him a forced smile. Then she refocused on me, lowering her voice. “Don’t go getting me in trouble here. I lose my job, I’ll kill you.”
“Come on, Marta, talk to me.”
“What’s the big deal? I don’t know nothing about where she is. All I know is he writes me a letter, maybe eight, nine months ago, says how he’s sorry for not taking care of me better. Is nice, no? After fifteen years, he remembers he gave me a little something to remember him by.” She made a bitter sound, half laugh, half grunt.
“You have the letter?”
“Why would I keep it? I don’t still have the money he sent, either.” No? I thought. Not even a little bit, in a sugar bowl? “How much?” I asked.
“You think I’m folding napkins in a bar and I’m a millionaire? He send a couple hundred, a couple hundred when he’s got millions stashed away, maybe billions.”
There’d been three hundred in the sugar bowl, but the real question was why send Marta a dime? When I’d last spoken to Roldan, he’d said he never wanted to deal with her again. They told different tales concerning their brief time together. Knowing Marta, I’d been willing to take his word for it. Now I reminded myself that just because one side is lying doesn’t mean the other is telling the truth.
“Marta, this can come out in dribs and drabs, take all night, and cost you your job. Why not start at the beginning, tell me what you know, and I’ll leave you alone?”
She pressed her lips together and considered how to spin the story so she’d come out looking good. A skinny man got up from his barstool and fed fifty cents into the jukebox. Marta, the good hostess, beamed at him to keep in practice, and the speakers blared the opening bars of an oldie named “Sweet Caroline.” I’d never heard it sung by anybody but drunken baseball fans at Fenway Park. I preferred it that way.
She leaned back in her chair and regarded me coolly. “I get a letter, like I say, signed Carlito. I used to call him that. There’s a couple bills tucked inside, and he asks can he send a few things to his girl. Paolina, he means. After that, the letters are only for her. Personal and private.”
I didn’t believe for a minute that Marta hadn’t read them.
She held the little birdman up to the dim light. “If he sent her this, I never saw it. You know, the mail, it gets to the house so late I’m already on the way to work. Most girls, you know, they get a present, they show it to their mother, but she likes to keep secrets. She’s a sly one. Always, she’s like that, even when she’s a baby.”
I knew her before you did. I know her better than you do.Sooner or later every conversation we’ve ever had comes down to that.
“Do you know what it is?” I held out my hand to reclaim th
e figure.
“It’s pretty,” she said, placing it reluctantly in my palm. “Just some little thing. I don’t know what you call it.”
“So you’re telling me you got one letter, a couple hundred bucks, and that’s it? You weren’t curious. You didn’t want more? You didn’t write back—”
“You think there’s a return address or something?” she said angrily. “There’s nothing. Roldan calls the shots, like always.”
“There was a postmark.”
“Miami. Yeah, big deal.”
“You didn’t tell anybody you’d heard from him?”
“Who’s to tell?”
“How many times did he write to Paolina? How often?”
“You mean she didn’t run and tell you all about it?”
I moistened my lips. The bar was too quiet, the jukebox silent now, the clientele too interested in our discussion. I caught the bartender’s eye and nodded at the TV screen. He upped the volume on a sports news show and the customers’ eyes flickered to the screen.
“Okay, Marta,” I said, “this happened months ago, right?”
“Right.” Her eyes flickered, just a sideways glance at the surface of the table, just a slight aversion to meeting my eyes.
“But something happened more recently, this week, last week?”
Silence.
“Marta, don’t you want to get back to work? Bartender’s doing a good job greeting people. They might realize they don’t need you.”
She glared at me, the mascara so thick on her lashes, I wondered if she could feel the heavy goo. “It’s nothing.”
“Marta! Just tell me.”
“Okay, okay, when the lady calls from Carlito and asks can he have her picture, I go along. What’s so wrong with that?”
“What lady? What picture?”
“Hey, let go, you’re hurting me.”