Hardware

by Linda Barnes

  “Since you’re here,” I said, “maybe you can clear the air.”

  “What did he tell you?” Phil Yancey insisted. “I’ll get the bastard for slander.”

  “Not on my say-so, Mr. Yancey … isn’t it? My name is Carlyle. Ms. Carlyle.”

  “What did he say about me?”

  “Ask him,” I suggested.

  “Lee’s got a bee in his bonnet about medallions, gets hot under the collar. I don’t need his rabble-rousing when the Hackney Bureau’s finally getting off its ass. Ever since the Hynes Auditorium got itself built, and with the new Prudential Center linking the four big hotels, this city’s got life in the convention market. They’re not going to blow it with no cabs to pick up convention goers. You’ll see. New medallions within the year!”

  “Are you interested in acquiring more medallions?” I asked.

  “You got one to sell?”

  “Hypothetically?”

  “What, you’re a lawyer, you get to use words like that? Let’s say I might do you a favor at a price. If you had a medallion for sale. I think they’re good investments.”

  “Even if new ones come out within the year?”

  Yancey sniggered again. “You never know, do you?”

  I said, “Now, if you’d get off my porch—”

  “I know a lot of important people, young lady. It would be wise to listen when I talk.”

  “Make an appointment,” I said.

  One of the big Lincoln’s doors yawned. I had my key in hand. Quickly I worked it into the lock, yanked open my door, slipped inside, and flipped the bolt behind me.

  I stood for a moment with my back against the door, listening to the old man’s retreating footsteps. So that was the famous Phil Yancey. I felt like taking another shower.

  SIX

  “So,” I said to Sam, who’d finally turned up after four days instead of the promised one. “How’d you like to hire me to find out who’s bugging Green and White? I’m available, but it could be a limited-time offer.”

  Lee Cochran hadn’t gotten in touch; I was starting to wonder if he would.

  “Carlotta, listen carefully, I know who’s bugging Green and White.”

  “You do,” I said.

  “I do. Same folks who bugged the Angiulo brothers in the North End. Same folks who’ve been trying to listen in on my family for generations. The Organized Crime Task Force.”

  “But you’re not involved with—”

  “My name’s Gianelli; that’s all they need. Look, Carlotta, I’ve known about the mikes for a month. I had them checked out. By experts. Organized Crime’s the only outfit who uses ten-year-old FBI-issue equipment. I know the score; I don’t mess with it. If I did, they’d think I had action going down at the garage. Or worse, they’d get up-to-date bugs, and I wouldn’t know where the hell they were hidden.”

  “What about your constitutional right to privacy?” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “Your cabbies talk.”

  “Carlotta, you didn’t touch any of the mikes, did you? I have your word on that?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I hadn’t touched a single one. I’d photographed them, sent the film to a woman I know who works at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia.

  Sam said, “The Organized Crime Task Force is not interested in what my cabbies have to say, Carlotta.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I concede your point.”

  “Can I get that on tape?”

  “What I oppose is this togetherness routine on the computer deal. Since the salesman’s a buddy of yours, I think it will definitely put a crimp in my bargaining style.”

  “Great,” Sam said. “Then we won’t go.”

  “I want to go,” I said. “Alone.”

  “My friend lives in a slime pit. Lone females are prey.”

  “When I drive, I don’t pick and choose neighborhoods,” I said curtly, lifting a handful of hair off the nape of my neck and wondering how long it had been since I’d had it trimmed.

  “But this time you’ll be carrying cash,” Sam said.

  I bit my lip, brought up short by such a reasonable protest. I glowered out the bow window. My hostile gaze didn’t alter the weather. November in Cambridge. Bleak as Melville. Whoever decided winter didn’t begin till the December solstice must have lived to the south. Chill gray drizzle smacked the windowpanes.

  “Sam,” I said, clapping my hand to my mouth in consternation. “Your apartment. Your bedroom! Are they bugged?”

  “Relax,” he said. “I have my place swept once a month.”

  “Good for you,” I said fervently.

  “Of course, I videotape everything,” he said.

  “Dammit, Sam. This computer stuff, I’d do better by myself.”

  “Sure you would,” Sam agreed, his voice infuriatingly cheerful. “Read about you in tomorrow’s papers.”

  “I guess that’s how you learn about a lot of your pals,” I snapped. The second I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

  As the son of a ranking mafioso, Sam might actually need to check the news each morning to stay up-to-date on his infamous family, if not his friends. Who’d gotten shot, who’d been imprisoned, who was up before a grand jury, who’d taken the Fifth …

  Sam’s surname guarantees instant restaurant reservations in the North End. I understand other perks are available. I understand that Sam has chosen not to exercise them.

  The Organized Crime Task Force evidently doesn’t agree with me.

  “You sure three hundred will be enough?” I asked into the dropped-brick silence.

  “He may not take it,” Sam said after a long pause. “He’s a little offbeat. Eccentric. He might not answer the door unless I’m with you.”

  “Scared of women?”

  “Just … a little weird,” Sam said, easing up from behind and wrapping his arms around me. I leaned into his sweater, its texture rough against my cheek. “Look, here’s how I see the situation,” he murmured in my ear. “You want a computer. I can introduce you to a friend who has computers for sale. The deal is you have to let me come along. If that’s too much to ask, then go retail. Spend a thousand bucks on your hot new toy.”

  “I don’t need the latest thing,” I protested. “I could put an ad in the paper—”

  “Why’d you ask me to set this up? Why do you hate it so much when I can do you a favor?” He paused for a minute, then continued slowly, “Maybe you should ask your shrink friend.”

  Aha, I thought. Oh-ho.

  “It’s not like I’ve seen you that much lately, Sam,” I said carefully, staring out the window like I could see something other than our wavery reflections.

  “I’ve been out of town.”

  I breathed on the window and traced a five-pointed star in the fog. “Out of town. I like it. It’s so specific.”

  “Washington. And I made a detour on the way back. My uncle’s sick. In Providence.”

  “A sick uncle,” I said, hand to heart. “I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Come on,” he said impatiently.

  “My shrink friend do anything to bother you?” I asked.

  “Guy’s always hanging around the house.”

  “He lives two doors down. He brought me a client a while back.”

  “Excuse me. I thought he lived closer.”

  I wondered if Sam had seen Keith Donovan departing in the wee hours, or maybe in full morning light.

  “I don’t believe this,” I murmured, resting my forehead against the icy windowpane. “The guy happens to be ‘seeing’—as in ‘screwing’—Roz, my femme-fatale tenant.”

  Roz is, in her fashion, a femme fatale. She is undoubtably my tenant. She is also my housekeeper, my sometime assistant, my unlikeliest friend, and the owner of the most complete and bizarre T-shirt collection on planet Earth. She has the body for it.

  “Oh” was all Sam said, his unblinking eyes widening with disbelief. And instead of swelling with righteous indignation, I fe
lt guilty, not because I’d slept with Keith Donovan but because I kept considering it. Entertaining the possibility. Fantasizing, if you will.

  Things keep up like this, I might as well marry Sam. Get it over with. Then I can commit proper infidelity, and we can have the whole business legally cancelled. Sam’s father would absolutely insist on an annulment this time. Signed by the Pope, no less.

  “You having my house watched, Sam?” I asked.

  “I keep running into him, is all.”

  “Nervous” is not a word I usually associate with Sam. He’s broad shouldered, six four, a big man. I’m attracted to tall men, since I like to argue nose to nose, but most of my attachments have been to skinny, wiry guys. Sam’s the mesomorph exception to the rule. I watched him pace my living room restlessly, cracking his knuckles, straightening the cushion on my late aunt’s rocking chair, staring at his watch every ten seconds, and generally behaving like my ex-husband coming down from a three-day cocaine binge.

  “Sam,” I said, “you know you don’t need to come along to translate computer talk for me. I’ve done my homework. I’m not dumb.”

  “And dumb was what attracted me in the first place,” he said, staring at me earnestly. “That, and your tiny little feet.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said grumpily. “How much do you know about this guy we’re going to visit?”

  “Frank,” he said.

  “Frank who?”

  “Just Frank,” Sam said.

  “This Frank with no last name, how do you know he’ll have what I need?”

  Sam shrugged. “He will.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and grabbed my handbag, locking up carefully, taking time to find the big Medeco key and turn the dead bolt. My thoroughness seemed to increase Sam’s irritation, and I found myself slowing to a near crawl.

  When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why my parents kept the air jangling with their disagreements. Now, seems like I’m in proximity to a man long enough, I feel that old electric current in the breeze.

  I used to wonder why my parents got divorced, why they couldn’t make the damn marriage work for my sake, because they loved me. Now I wonder how anyone sticks it. The years of grating on each other wear you down or drive you nuts. Marriage. What a choice, what a bargain.

  My mother worried I’d never wed. Too uncompromising. Too hard to get along with. Too tall. She’d have been shocked when I strolled the aisle at a tender nineteen.

  I think I married Cal to provide my dad the opportunity to give the bride away. God knows I didn’t grant him many other causes for rejoicing.

  Mom wouldn’t have been shocked when we split. By then Dad was dead too. I guess I didn’t need to impress him anymore.

  I sneaked a sideways glance at Sam. So hard to make your father proud of you. And I wasn’t a son. And my dad was no Gianelli, just a Detroit cop.

  Each of the Gianelli boys had taken a run at making Papa proud: Gil “making his bones” by murdering a rival mobster at an age when most kids are working up the nerve to ask a cheerleader to the prom; Mitchell, unfit for the armed-services career chosen for him in the cradle—weak eyes, I’d heard—had studied accounting at Papa’s request, so there’d be a family watch on the money, even though Mitch wasn’t particularly interested, said it made his vision worse; Anthony, aka Tony Playboy, had made the leap effortlessly—named for, looking, sounding, and acting just like the old man.

  Sam, the youngest by far, had tried his hand at killing, too, cloaking it in the legality of Vietnam, returning with a Purple Heart and a sour taste in his mouth. Gave up on pleasing Papa, sent the Purple Heart back to D.C. as an alternative to flushing it down the toilet.

  The two of us waded into the mush. My size-eleven boots had fended off last winter’s glop triumphantly waterproof. The guarantee must have read “one year only.” I wriggled my toes into tight balls inside squishy socks.

  “New car?” I asked Sam, lifting an eyebrow.

  Sam likes cars. Usually owns two or three, and I don’t ask questions, since any one of them could be a gift from Papa and I have a thing about loan-sharking and prostitution, activities in which Papa Gianelli has long reigned supreme. During the past year I’ve driven with Sam in his Lincoln Continental, his Acura Legend, his aging, elegant Porsche.…

  He stood beside a rusted-out Chevy Nova, dangling the keys. Wrenching the passenger door open, he beckoned me inside.

  “It’s a loaner,” he said.

  “And you must be the garage’s most valued customer,” I replied, deadpan. “Let’s take my car instead.”

  “This car’s what we want,” he said.

  “Is it hot?”

  “Stolen?”

  “As in borrowed without consent of the owner.”

  “You have a vivid imagination, Carlotta.”

  “And tiny feet.”

  The Nova’s interior smelled of stale beer and cigar butts. I cranked open a balky window. Just a slit at the top, big enough to admit fresh air and mush flakes.

  I hate to be chauffeured. I never relax with someone else at the wheel. My body automatically assumes brake-pedal access. I struggled to keep my right foot still.

  “What, no blindfold?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Frank would have liked that,” Sam admitted. “A midnight visit. A blindfold. Late-night e-mail bounced off a chain of anonymous remailers.”

  “Will I be able to call this Frank guy later, if I have questions?”

  “Unlisted phone. You can call me.”

  I stared at the dashboard. AM radio only. I flipped the dial to 1120, WADN, raised static and Les Sampou, singing “Chinatown.”

  “Sam, have you heard of anything odd going down in the medallion market?”

  “Odd?” he said.

  “Could you just answer the question?”

  “Business as usual,” he said. “Far as I know. Which means bad, but not as bad as New York. Tense. It’ll get worse here if everybody changes over to leasing.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  “Me and Gloria, we run a small business. The drivers earn a percentage of their daily receipts. We cover partial health, gas, repairs. Vacations. Leasing’s a whole other animal. Management companies rent medallions from small investors—you know, doctors, the guys with extra cash who used to put their dough into fancy boutiques and restaurants that failed in two months—and then they lease ’em to drivers.”

  “How?”

  “Through the big garages.”

  Like Phil Yancey’s, I thought.

  “Driver pays in advance,” Sam went on, “maybe a hundred bucks for a decent shift. No unemployment. No Social Security. The cabbie has a bad shift, does under a hundred, tough. The medallion owner’s got his. The management company’s got theirs.”

  “So a shift to leasing would drive up the cost of medallions,” I said slowly.

  “Right. Because the medallion owner’s income is guaranteed, a sure thing.”

  “You think this is a good time to buy medallions?” I asked.

  Sam shrugged. “It’s like the stock market, Carlotta. Maybe it’ll go one way, maybe another. Hackney Carriage Bureau could outlaw leasing tomorrow, or they could put another two hundred medallions on the street, drive the price down.”

  “Sounds more like roulette,” I said. Possibly a game with a fixed wheel, so Yancey’d win either way. If he was planning to take a big plunge into leasing, every medallion he got his hands on might turn to gold.

  Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe Yancey could be the bogeyman in both of Cochran’s scenarios. What could I do about it with no client? Why hadn’t I heard from Cochran? Had Yancey threatened him? Scared him off?

  “Keep your money in your mattress,” Sam advised, blissfully unaware that his remark was close to the truth.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I tried to wiggle myself comfortable in the passenger seat. No deal. It was worse than one of Gloria’s old Fords.

&n
bsp; “So who the hell is Frank?” I asked.

  “An old friend.”

  “All the years I’ve known you, Sam, you never mention any Frank till five, six days ago. It’s late to spring an old buddy on me.”

  “Frank and I go way back.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Grammar school.”

  “Catholic?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Except we said ‘Yes, Sister Xavier Marie.’ And she whacked us with a yardstick if we gave her any lip. Right across the butt.”

  “Turning you into the pervert you are today,” I said sweetly.

  “Yeah, old Sister Xavier Marie. Thank God for her.”

  While we spoke, he was driving a twisty, turning path, but he couldn’t fool me. Ever since Sam gave me my first cabbie job, I’ve been navigating Boston’s back roads. Few areas of the city retain their secrets.

  Mattapan holds more than most.

  Mattapan used to be quiet, peaceful, almost like a suburb, I’ve heard, before 1968, when, so the story goes, the Boston City Council decided on the quiet to integrate it, and the realty agents colluded to drive down prices. Between redlining and blockbusting, parts of Mattapan are now what people mean when they lock the doors, shudder, and invoke the term inner city.

  The closest most whites get to Mattapan is the Franklin Park Zoo, a mile or so away, and most suburbanites are scared to go there.

  Cabbies go everyplace, by law. You can refuse a fare and risk getting suspended by the Hackney Bureau, or you can beg your dispatcher to send a more fearless cabbie to pilot your fare into Roxbury or Mattapan or Dorchester or Southie. But if you do it often, you get a bad rep, and you don’t get enough radio calls to make your weekly nut. So, with my hair tucked up under a cap, no makeup, a no-nonsense attitude, and a length of lead pipe beneath my seat, I drive where the fare wants to go. I’m cautious in passenger selection: I won’t take groups of teenage boys anywhere. The teenybop girls are less than trustworthy fare-wise, but they rarely try to beat you up.

  Sam turned onto Altamont Street, across from the New Calvary Cemetery. The way the street looks—garbage-dump vacant lots interspersed with ramshackle tenements and sag-porched tripledeckers—you might argue that the folks buried in the ground have a better situation.