by Linda Barnes
“Sure,” I said, “especially if you don’t fill in any forms.”
“Money for bribes,” she said through closed teeth, as if she were exasperated at having to repeat the facts of life for the fifth time to a slow adolescent. “They don’t ask questions. They pay cash money.”
“You’re being treated like shit. You ought to see yourself coming out of that place, blinded, deafened, dazed. You ought to resent it. You ought to turn the bastards in. There are laws to protect you from …” I started on a soapbox speech but ran down like an unwound clock. My grandmother worked in a New York City sweatshop when she came to this country. Eighteen-hour days chained to a sewing machine in an unventilated hole with boarded-up windows. Once she fainted from lack of air, and the foreman shoved her aside so the machine wouldn’t be idle. My grandmother joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, went out on strike. Once, walking a picket line, she hit a scab over the head with a protest sign. She wound up in a Bowery jail.
Other kids got fairy tales. I got union stories.
Protest! I wanted to scream at Marta. Those women should organize and protest like my grandmother did. But then, cops hadn’t threatened to send Grandma back where she came from.
“Okay,” I said, “I can see why you work there, but why Lilia?”
“I told you, they don’t want no papers from La Migra.”
“Lilia’s been here for years. You told me she was going to file for amnesty.”
“She change her mind. She no apply. I tell her what you say, but she figure it’s a way to trick her, to send her back, maybe take the children away.”
I shook my head. I must have been shaking it for a while, but I suddenly realized I was shaking it—grimly, sadly. Asking to be taken advantage of, asking for it, that’s what these women did. So frightened, so passive, and still not safe. “How many work there?” I asked.
“Why you wanna know?”
“How many?”
“Treinta, maybe. No sé.”
We were getting more Spanish. Pretty soon Marta’s English would dry up altogether.
“I saw the front door, the hallway, the little office where the three women work. Are there a lot of other rooms?”
“No sé.”
“Do you all work in one big room? Come on, Marta, I need to know this.”
“You gonna make trouble, tell your cop friends?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You tell them, I’m gonna be the one in trouble.”
“How?”
“My own cousin, she gonna lose her work. Lilia can’t work no place else. The law change. Now you have to have the papers to get a job, or the boss, he’s in trouble. It cost him lots of money, maybe jail, I don’t know. Lilia can’t go no place else. And the women find out, they tear out my hair. Please. We need money, work.”
I thought about the foul air and the noise and the pay. And Manuela.
“A woman who worked there died.”
“Maybe she work there. I don’t know.”
“The police don’t know anything about the woman. How can they find her killer if I don’t tell them what I know?”
“You don’t know nothing. And I tell you, if a woman is dead, it’s because she got a man angry with her. You live a nice life, you don’t know, maybe. Nobody kills this woman because she works stuffing feathers into pillows. It’s because of something with a man. She sleeps with him, she doesn’t sleep with him. Who knows? But you got no reason to make trouble for Lilia and me and all those women at the factory. You make trouble there, I can’t stay here, pay the rent. I go somewhere else. With Paolina. You comprende?”
If I talked about the factory, she’d take my little sister away. I got the message, and I didn’t like it.
“Promise me you no tell about the factory.”
“Marta—”
“I mean it. You talk, I take Paolina away.”
“Where would you—”
She stopped me with another rush of words. “It won’t do you no good tell the police anyway. The police, they know.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice, rubbed her thumb and forefingers together in the universal symbol for under-the-table graft. “The boss, he pays them money to forget. A place like that doesn’t last unless money changes hands. That’s what the women say.”
“Who’s the boss?” I asked. “Mr. Hunneman? A big guy with reddish-blond hair, well dressed?”
“I don’t know. He don’t come out and greet me personal when I come to work.”
“The men who work there, tell me about them. Maybe one of them was sleeping with Manuela.”
“The guard. The shift supervisors. The boss man I never see.”
I described the big-bellied Coors T-shirt man.
“The guard,” Marta said tersely. “None of the women sleeps with that son of a dog.”
“What do they need a guard for?” I asked.
She shrugged. “If there’s trouble, I suppose.”
“Have they had trouble before?”
“Once I heard some girls make trouble about the pay, say it’s not enough. Say the machinery is too noisy, the lunch break too short, and the women should stop working.”
“And what happened?”
Marta shrugged again. “Those girls don’t work there anymore. They bring in new ones. Always new ones.” She took a final gulp of her coffee and held out the empty cup. “You make me another cup, no?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s all there is.”
Her lips pressed together, whitened. “And the lazy girl is still not home. No coffee, no nothing. The girl is old enough to work, a girl so big as that. But no, she’s too good to work. Like her father, she is, a liar like her father. She told you where I work, didn’t she? I tell her it’s a secret, but she tells you, no? Because she thinks you’d be better for a mother to her, an Anglo lady gives charity. If I lose my work, it’s gonna be because she—”
“Wait a minute, Marta,” I said firmly. “Paolina didn’t tell me. I asked her, but she wouldn’t. She listened to you.”
But Marta wasn’t listening to me. She went on, rapping her empty coffee cup on the chair arm by way of punctuation. “Just like her father, that girl. You can’t trust her for nothing. She’s never here, she’s out doing God knows what with boys maybe, with strangers, while her mother sits without a cup of coffee, without a piece of bread to offer a guest.”
My hand itched to slap her, to make the words stop, but they kept coming, angry words about Paolina’s father, about Paolina. She was so loud, I didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs. I just heard the steps running away from the door and knew whose they must be.
By the time I got to the door and unbolted it, she was gone. I could hear the echo of the downstairs door slamming. I ran over to the window. I heard steps, but I couldn’t see her running away.
“Shut up,” I said to Marta.
I should have said it sooner.
20
I looked under the front stoop on the way out, even though I knew it was wasted motion. It used to be Paolina’s refuge when tragedy struck. Tragedy was anything from bad grades to lost boots, but she hasn’t hidden there in years.
The rotted side board had been replaced. Even if it were loose, there wouldn’t have been room for Paolina to squeeze through.
I was glad of that. I remembered the scurry of rats down there. I’d never seen one, but I remembered the noise.
Maybe she’d spotted my car. Maybe I’d yank open the front door and find her sitting there. Not so easy. She couldn’t be in the car, since I’d locked all the doors, and the Cambridge public schools don’t teach ten-year-olds to boost cars yet, although sometimes I wonder. But maybe she’d be standing nearby.
She wasn’t.
So, I told myself, she went to Lilia’s or a friend’s house. I decided I’d call Marta in an hour or two and find out which.
I still circled the block and made a series of passes through the project, keeping my eyes o
n the sidewalk, looking for her. A new Chinese take-out had opened on the corner. Two young boys with shaved heads and cropped T-shirts wrestled near a fire hydrant. I felt like I was a cop again. After a couple of months in a radio unit you stop thinking about driving and concentrate on the street. Your eyes pick out anything off, as if it were a color image smack in the middle of a black-and-white photograph.
I hadn’t heard Marta mention her long-missing husband twice in three years. Why the burst of anger today? Had she heard from him? Was he in town? Was that the reason for Paolina’s bizarre behavior, her shaky school attendance?
I shook off the thought. I’d ask Paolina flat out the next time we spoke. If Dad had turned up to make trouble, we’d deal with it. I’d deal with it.
I gave up and headed home. For now my job was to find out more about the pillow factory, if possible without shutting the place down. Poor Lilia. With citizenship so close, her fear had scared her off, and now she’d be working at Hunneman’s Pillows with its foul air and machine-gun racket for all eternity, afraid to ask for a raise or a day off, expendable for life.
I wondered about Marta’s conviction that cops were paid off to ignore Hunneman’s. Marta couldn’t be discounted on statements like that. She had an uncanny sense of what was going on, the kind of intuition men label “woman’s” and scoff at.
My mom used to say that intuition was what slaves had and bosses never bothered to acquire. It grew from the need to please without calling attention to yourself. The slave learned to catch hidden signals, subtle signs of approval and disapproval, learned to anticipate events, to soothe tempers, to make nice.
Who took bribes? The cops, the INS, city code inspectors? All of the damned above?
By the time I reached home I’d decided. If cops were taking bribes, Mooney wasn’t one of them. It’s not his district, and it’s not his style. So I phoned him, and of course he was out. I didn’t try him at home because his mother answers the phone. Cop’s widow, cop’s mother, traditional Irish Catholic to the core, she disapproves of me. And she always provokes me into giving her more reasons to disapprove.
Stymied, I wandered into the kitchen and came upon Roz. What the hell she was wearing, I don’t know. To tell the truth, it looked like rags. A consignment-shop special or a designer original. Probably the former. It was black, like almost everything she wears besides the T-shirts—short, tight, and, at least from the rear, definitely eye-catching, due to a highly slit skirt and a few scattered sequins. Her hair was brassy blond, which it has been before, but not yesterday. It disoriented me. I wasn’t entirely sure who she was.
The smell of turpentine was reassuring. Who else would be painting in my kitchen? More to the point, who else would be painting a still life of a giant-sized can of Ajax, a moldy potato, and, yes, a rubber glove, stuffed so it looked like it was reaching for something?
I rarely comment on Roz’s art. I used to, but then she’d explain the symbolism of each painting in great detail.
“Hi,” I said when her paintbrush was away from canvas. Far be it from me to mess up a painting of a rubber glove fondling our Ajax.
“Yo,” she said, “give me a minute to wind this up, okay?” She didn’t turn around. Her attention was riveted on the label of the Ajax can.
Fine with me. I went over to the fridge, pulled two slices of ham out of a plastic package, used two slices of cheese for bread, stared at the clock, and called it a late lunch.
Roz laid down her brush and turned around with a satisfied sigh. “A guy came,” she said.
From the front her appearance was startling. Her brassy hair had a streak of coal black starting at her part and running down one side.
She strolled over to the refrigerator and seized a jar of peanut butter, her principal diet. I don’t know why she doesn’t have scurvy.
“Guy have a name?” I asked.
“Guy had a bod,” she said, forming her lips into a soundless whistle. “You don’t want him, let me know.”
“But did he have a name?”
“Clinton,” she said.
“That’s not a man,” I said, “that’s an Immigration agent.”
“Look again,” she advised with a grin.
“What did he want?”
“You,” she said sadly. “Not me. He’ll call later.”
“You busy?” I asked.
She stared critically at her work. “Busy meaning what?”
“You free for a job?”
“Sure,” she said.
Someday when I ask her, Roz is going to ask me what job, or how much I’ll pay her, or whether it’s legal or illegal, and then maybe I’ll think of her as real. I don’t know what I think of her as now. Some kind of phenomenon.
I sent her out to research Hunneman’s, City Hall stuff—who owns it, who leases it, corporate or individual ownership, tax records. I could tell she was disappointed by the job.
“And,” I added, “you might go over to the Cambridge Legal Collective. Ask for Marian Rutledge. See if she’s got any clients who live on Westland Avenue. Get her to search files. There’s a good-looking guy secretary. Maybe you can vamp him and see if he’ll find you the stuff.”
“Vamp him?” she asked. “Did you really say that?”
“Forgive me,” I said. “It’s your dress.”
“Well, I think I know what you mean,” she said. “It’d depend on whether he’s built.”
“The important thing is who owns Hunneman’s.”
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“Be discreet.”
I actually said that to somebody who looks like Roz.
21
The phone rang and I ran to get it, hoping Paolina’s voice would be on the other end.
It was Kristy, trying to schedule a special volleyball practice to rev us up for Saturday’s title match. I dutifully took down time and place and said I’d be there if I could arrange it. No promises.
“Nose okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” I lied.
I ended the conversation before she could inquire about Harry Clinton, the Olympic scout.
I dialed Mooney’s office again. This time somebody picked up his phone and said they thought he was somewhere in the building. I left a message: Don’t go anywhere till you talk to Carlotta. The guy on the other end said sure, he’d tell him, but from his uninterested tone I didn’t think he would.
I grabbed my handbag and ran down the front steps.
I think better when I’m driving. Part of me relaxes as soon as I settle in the driver’s seat and punch on the radio. Stray thoughts line up and organize themselves in neat rows and columns.
It seemed suddenly clear to me that I needed to make a stop before visiting Mooney, and I was pulling into the Herald driveway before I was entirely sure of the thought process that had brought me there.
I abandoned the car in a slot with a nameplate on it—some reporter’s perk, I guessed. I hoped he was out on a hot story that would keep him away from the office parking lot.
Helen, the party girl who’d given me my envelope, was still on duty, if chatting on the phone qualified as on duty. I listened to what Joe did to Sue and how Sue was going to fix him good. It didn’t sound like a business call. I cleared my throat. I didn’t want to miss seeing Mooney because of my brainstorm.
She got off the phone and heeled her precarious way over to me. “No more mail for you,” she said.
“You remember,” I said. That was promising.
“For twenty bucks I remember a lot,” she said.
“That’s just what I want to talk to you about,” I said.
On my way out of the building I saw the headline blaring from a stack of papers on some receptionist’s desk. I fumbled in my bag, trying to find change.
“It’s okay,” the lady behind the desk said with a toothy smile. “Take one. Read the Herald.”
SERIAL KILLER STALKS FENS! HOW MANY DEAD?
No wonder Mooney wasn’t answering his phone.
> 22
I knew the desk sergeant, so he gave me no hassle, just a clip-on badge that authorized me to wander the station.
Mooney was in his office, and he wasn’t alone. Much to my lack of delight, Walter Jamieson was with him. I gritted my teeth, knocked, and strolled in. The air was smoke-filled, evidence of a recent meeting unless Mooney had fallen off the wagon. I inhaled deeply. I gave it up a long time ago, but I still get a rush from the secondhand stuff.
Jamieson didn’t exactly snarl at me. Mooney cracked a smile, not a great smile, but an effort nonetheless. Jamieson was perched on the edge of the guest chair. Mooney sat in the chair behind the desk, and that took care of the seating facilities and most of the available space. I leaned my backside against a wall and slid down until I was practically on the floor. I used to sit like that in Mooney’s office a lot.
Mooney stared at me hard, lifted his hand, and touched his cheekbone. “Want to swear out a complaint?” he asked.
So much for my attempts at bruise camouflage via makeup.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” I said as Jamieson steamed.
“Mr. Jamieson was leaving,” Mooney said pointedly.
“I was not,” Jamieson denied.
“Look,” Mooney said, “we’re cooperating on this case, but cooperation means you file the right forms and we send you the relevant data. It does not mean I give you material before I get it, okay?”
From my seat on the floor I could stare up at the map on the back of the door, at the four pushpins clustered near the Fens.
Jamieson made as if to start a new wave of protest, but he kept glancing down at me and stopping. I guess he was unwilling to share his valuable thoughts with an outsider. “What is she doing here?” he finally blurted.
“Well,” Mooney said, “I hope she’s come to take me out to dinner. After that …” He gave an eloquent shrug.
Jamieson blushed and tightened his lips disapprovingly. He said, “I need copies of the reports for our files.”
“I’ll send them over,” Mooney said.
“I’d like to take them with me,” Jamieson said.
“I’ll send them.”