by Linda Barnes
This was not the time for a lecture about spying from staircases. “I thought he was okay too. I made a mistake about him.” I said gently, “The good guys don’t wear white hats and the bad guys don’t wear black.”
“But then how can you tell?” she asked.
My mother always told me I couldn’t trust anyone. She had a hundred ways to say it, couched in her own mother’s useful Yiddish phrases. There were so many, all about the uselessness of strangers. The one that summed it up was, A goy blayht a goy. A stranger remains a stranger. A Gentile is always a Gentile.
If you trust people, you could wind up bedding Harry Clinton.
Or loving Paolina.
She wasn’t crying, but it cost her a gallant effort not to cry, and I wanted to tell her to let go, not to put on any brave front for me.
“Why did you need to talk to the Immigration man?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and continued in a shaky voice, “Because I’m illegal. I’m not an American.”
“Oh, Paolina.” I rested my hand on her head. Her shiny hair felt soft.
“My dad isn’t from Puerto Rico. He’s somebody I never met. I don’t even have a picture of him. I never heard of him until we went to Bogotá.”
“How did you find out?” I asked. I wanted to probe to the bottom of the wound, to make sure she talked it all out. But I kept my voice gentle and easy.
“We stayed with my aunt,” she said, “my tía Rosa, but one night we went to this big house, this enormous house on the top of a hill. A woman in a uniform, like a nurse, answered the bell, and Mom said I should go with her. She took me down a long hallway, lit with candles, to the kitchen, and we had mint tea and cookies. She told me how to get to the bathroom, but I got lost. Maybe I took the wrong staircase. It was such a big house.”
“Go on, honey.”
“I kept walking around, looking at things. There was a big blue-and-yellow parrot on a stand in one hallway, and I talked to him but he didn’t talk back. I kept thinking I’d find the kitchen again, and then I was on this balcony, in a tiny room that looked over another room, a room with almost as many books as a library. And I heard my mom talking. I should have yelled down to her. But I didn’t. I listened.
“She was talking to this old man. He had white hair and he was dressed all in black. She called him my grandfather, but he wasn’t her dad, because I’ve seen pictures of Mom’s dad in the scrapbooks. And I couldn’t figure it out, so I stayed and listened to everything they said.
“They had a terrible fight. Mom wanted money. She said he owed it to me. And he called her names and said maybe I wasn’t his granddaughter. And even if I was, he hated his son and he wouldn’t give her any money. And later I asked Mom questions about the old man and whether he had any children because I thought maybe my real dad was dead or something.”
How could Marta have been so foolish as to imagine Paolina didn’t know?
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“I wish he was. I wish I never knew about him.”
I could hear distant cheering from the gym, but I didn’t connect the sound to volleyball. I didn’t even wonder who’d won the fourth game.
Paolina said, “I pretended I was like you, like a detective. I asked my cousins and other people down there.”
“And what did you find out?” I asked.
She bit her lip and tugged at her necklace. Then she said, “My father, my real father, is named Carlos Roldan Gonzales. He’s one of those guys you read about in the papers with all the drugs. He used to just be a Communist or something, but now he’s mixed up with drugs, and the police and the army chase him all the time, and everybody wants to kill him. Everybody hates him, and that’s who my father is.
“Mom didn’t even tell me. She let me think Dad was my father, and he’s not. I don’t think he adopted me or anything. I’m not American, even. I’m like the women at the factory. I don’t know who I am.”
Her shoulders heaved and the tears started. At first she tried to stop them, sniffing them back, then she gave it up and cried like the small child she was, with grief and abandon.
“Paolina, honey, listen to me.” I waited until she looked me in the eye. I should have given her a tissue. I never carry tissues when I need them. “You’re the same person you were.”
“No I’m not. I’m not the same. Look at me in school. Will everybody have to know? Will I get deported? Will I have to live with my father? I thought that man would know because he worked for Immigration, but he didn’t care about anything except that I saw him at the factory.”
“You’re not going away. You won’t get deported.”
“Why? How?”
“We’ll have to think about it and find out what’s really true and what isn’t. There are a lot of things we can do once we find out the truth.”
“But—”
“Listen, the important thing is that you know who you are. You play drums in the band. You’re my little sister. You’re not your mother and you’re not your father.”
“But I’m like my mother. Lilia says I look like my mother.”
“So you think you have to be like your father too?”
“I guess, but I don’t want to be bad.”
“Oh, Paolina.” I stared at the floor and the ceiling and the walls and tried to find the words that would make it better. I touched the tiny gold fish on the black silky cord.
“Remember the fish,” I said slowly. “How I thought it was a little stick man and you told me it was a fish. Well, to some people it’s more than a fish. It’s a symbol, a Christian symbol, a very old one. But it’s something even more basic. It’s gold wire twisted into a shape. Whether I think it’s a fish or I think it’s a man, it’s still gold wire.
“What I’m trying to say is, you’re you, whether you think you’re different or not. Nothing has changed since you overheard that conversation except the way you think about yourself. You thought you were a gold fish because one man was your father. Now you think you’re a stick man because somebody else is your father. But what you’re made of is the same.”
The swelling and the pain in my ankle seemed to decrease after that. I played eight minutes in the fifth and final game. I kept glancing over at Paolina, sitting on the bench, waiting for me. She had the very faintest of smiles on her face. We lost the game 15–12. It felt like a victory.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries
One
“Men darf lebn un lozn lebn,” my mother always used to tell me when I was a child. Now that I’m grown I know the words translate roughly to “Live and let live,” but for Mom it meant “Don’t mix in.”
Her warning didn’t take. That’s how I make my living, mixing in.
Amend that. It’s how I’d make my living if I could. But the investigations business is dicey: sometimes I turn away three clients in a single day; sometimes I go for weeks without hearing a knock at my door. Because I like to eat—and I prefer to say no to the occasional client who thinks he can buy what’s not for sale—I pilot a cab nights to make ends meet.
I enjoy night driving. I like the garish after-midnight world. Its clarity excites me—the glare of headlights, the flashing neon, the sharp edges. But sometimes, blinded by the glitter, I forget to pay attention to the shadows.
I was dozing at a cab stand, fanning myself with the travel section of the Globe. The air conditioner was going full blast; a faint stream of tepid air trickled through the vents, no match for the August heat. I was dreaming about my next fare, a well-built gentleman who’d drop miraculously into the backseat and say, “Cape Cod, please. A slow drive along the seashore, catch some ocean breeze.”
Even half asleep, I recognized her.
She wore dark glasses and a cape that looked like it was made of raincoat material. Just the thought of its weight made me shudder. But for the Boston cabbie dress code, I’d have been wearing shorts, a halter, and sandals. As it was, I had on my lightest-weight
khaki slacks, a thin white cotton shirt, and sneakers.
Hesitating under the hotel canopy, she groped in her shoulder bag and slipped the doorman a bill. From the way he clicked his heels and raised his whistle to his lips, what he’d just palmed was no portrait of George Washington. I gunned the motor automatically. I was the next cab in line.
For a pulsebeat, I felt like flooring it, racing away without a backward glance. Then the sweating gold-braided attendant seized the door handle, and it was too late.
I’ve kept track of her through the years, my old buddy Dee Willis. Hauled my black-and-white TV out of the closet to watch her that time she appeared on Letterman. She was so drunk they only let her sing one song at the end, and then she forgot half the words. That must have been five years ago, and the fans have long since forgiven her. Lately her name crops up in the Globe every other day. Change Up, the album that went double platinum, or whatever they call the best there is in the record biz, in two days, or two weeks, or something incredible, had turned her into an overnight success after sixteen years.
I opened my mouth to say hello.
She didn’t even glance at me. “Take me to the library,” she demanded, her voice low and tense. “No. Forget it. Just cruise around Copley Square, okay? Into the South End.”
I closed my mouth and bit my lower lip, nodding to let her know I’d heard. My fares generally want to go from here to there, and heaven help the jockey who detours a block out of the way.
Two blocks passed. I cranked down the front window and enjoyed the breeze. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I felt awkward. It’s hard to identify yourself right off the bat to an old friend who’s made better than good. Especially when you’re the one driving the hack.
I concentrated on squeezing through the yellow light at St. James, tailing a dark blue Mercedes. Maybe, even if she deigned to look, she wouldn’t recognize me. At night, especially when I’m wearing a slouch cap over my red hair, most of my fares hardly notice I’m a woman. And my best disguise isn’t the hat; it’s the job. Nobody notices cab drivers.
I sneaked a look in the rearview mirror. Dee had removed the sunglasses. She seemed absorbed in the study of a painted fingernail.
The South End wasn’t even a mile from her hotel, hardly a decent walk, much less a cab ride. I toyed with the idea of saying “Chintzy fare,” starting things rolling with a joke. The more I hesitated the harder it got, like chatting with somebody at a party, somebody you know pretty well, but whose name you’ve forgotten. If you confess right off, it’s not too bad. But the longer you talk, the harder it gets to ask for a name. You keep wondering who the hell you’re talking to, and hoping you won’t blow it.
We hit a red light and I did some more rearview-mirror gazing. The backseat was pretty dark, but a streetlamp helped. Dee was staring into space, drumming her fingers on her thigh, clutching her big shoulder bag. She looked good, maybe a little hard, but good. She unbuttoned her cape, revealing a red shirt, embroidered with enough gold thread to catch the light. I couldn’t make out the pattern. She wore a long rope of gold beads and dangling, flashy earrings. Thick eyeliner, heavy-duty makeup. Maybe she’d played a gig tonight. I hadn’t noticed an ad in the newspaper, but some days I just skim it before taking it home to line the parakeet’s cage.
Her wild dark hair was permed into a halo. I knew she was older than I am, but you couldn’t prove it by her appearance.
We sped two blocks, got caught at another traffic light. She drew in a deep breath, held it, and let it out audibly. Then she closed her eyes and repeated the heavy-breathing business. She hadn’t cranked down the back window. In her cape, she was probably melting.
I wondered where she was heading, cruising the South End in the wee hours, wondered if the encounter might not be embarrassing for both of us.
I met Dee Willis my first year at U.Mass.-Boston, jamming at a party, her pure vocals rising over a flood of badly tuned instruments, making everybody sound twice as good. She wasn’t all that pretty, and she sure wasn’t school-smart—but she had that voice, and in my crowd we forgave her everything for a song.
I turned onto Pembroke Street. “You want me to circle the block?” I asked, my voice barely loud enough to penetrate the square porthole in the required-by-Boston-law bulletproof divider.
“Keep going. I’ll tell you where to stop.” She pressed her nose against the left rear window. Maybe she’d stopped looking at people in general, not just cabbies. I’ve heard celebrities get like that, pretending to wear blinders so they won’t have to answer stupid questions all the time, or get interrupted by autograph hounds during meals.
I tried the rearview mirror again, but this time edged a bit to my right, so my own reflection stared back at me. Dee looked like she was doing fine. And me? Not bad, thank you. If I pick up a couple more skip traces a year, I might be able to give up cabbing altogether.
My trouble-sensing radar blipped as we crossed Tremont and kept on traveling into one of the city’s less savory neighborhoods.
Dee rapped on the shield. “Hang a left,” she said. I obliged. She seemed to be navigating from memory.
“Stop here!” She shoved money through the little sliding window. A bill fluttered to the seat and I bent to get it. By the time I’d straightened up, she was slamming the door.
Where was she going? We hadn’t stopped near any restaurants that might be open this late. She raced across a lane of traffic into a small neighborhood park.
The park, sometimes called Blackstone Square, sometimes less pleasant names, is a pretty safe place to hang out during the day if you don’t mind winos bumming a dollar. At night, Bostonians give it a wide berth, frightened by the homeless with their grapes-of-wrath faces.
I started up, then slowed way down. If Dee was trying to score some coke solo, things were tighter in the music world than I expected.
It wasn’t hard to keep her in sight. She hurried across a deserted basketball court. The few scraggly trees hung limply in the heat. A triple-decker apartment briefly blocked my view as I turned the corner.
Dee seemed to be cruising the grassy center of the park, chatting with bench-squatters. I pulled the cab into a fireplug slot and watched, puzzled.
I was a cop for six years. I know what a drug buy looks like.
Dee held a level hand above her head as if she were describing something big. Moonlight caught the side of her face. She nodded, then pulled a crumpled bill out of her bag, gave it to the figure on the bench, and moved along.
That part looked familiar, the transfer of cash, but Dee didn’t seem to get what she wanted in exchange for the currency.
I yanked off my cap, lifted the heavy curls off the nape of my neck, and wished I’d brought along an elastic band and a few hairpins.
Dee repeated the performance at another bench. A ragtag guy with a week’s worth of beard started following her. She turned and spoke to him. I flicked off the air conditioner’s useless belch, but all I could hear was a babel of voices. The man’s carried farther, but I couldn’t understand the words.
Another guy lumbered over, and this one looked like major trouble. Drunk or stoned, he was big and unsteady on thick legs, and seemed to be wearing his entire wardrobe, shirts layered over shirts, pants over pants.
Heat alone can cause ugly moods. Add alcohol or drugs and you’ve got one of the reasons cops hate hot August nights.
I heard an angry cry and cut the ignition, shoving the keys into my pocket. The cry was followed by a scream. I was already out of the cab and racing toward the park.
I’d automatically grabbed the foot-long chunk of lead pipe I keep beneath the seat. It wasn’t as comforting as my service revolver used to be.
“Hell, you can afford it, lady,” a man’s voice shouted as I approached.
Dee’s hand was tight on the strap of her shoulder bag. She was staring down a guy a foot taller than she was, and she didn’t look half as frightened as she should have been. Maybe she didn’t se
e the people gathering on the asphalt playground.
“Get lost,” I heard her say, arrogant as ever. “It’s none of your business.”
“Throw the bag here, bitch,” the overdressed drunk yelled. He was leaning on the edge of a trash bin, too soused to move, and for that I was grateful. He egged the others on, their self-appointed cheerleader.
From the direction of the playground a steady stream of hungry, shaky, drunken souls moved toward Dee like sharks closing on a bleeding fish. Her cape swung open and her shirt glittered in a car’s passing beams.
I called her name.
She didn’t hear me. Another guy, mid-fifties with a tuft of white hair, made a swipe at her bag and connected. They started playing tug-of-war, and the shoulder strap broke. Dee got a corner of the purse and yanked, but the bag upended and spilled with a soft cascade of thuds and clunks. The man hit the ground with a grunt, grasping for change, bills, pawnable trinkets.
I pushed my way between two women muttering at the edge of the pack and shoved in close enough to grab Dee’s shoulder.
“Leave me alone,” she said, fighting me, clinging to her handbag. Then she looked up at me for the first time. I saw the shock of recognition in her eyes.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said firmly.
“She’s gonna give us ten bucks apiece,” a man hollered.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath. Passing out free cash on the ritziest corner in Boston will get you a guaranteed unpleasant situation. Playing Santa where ten bucks will buy a lot of wine or a lid of dope is just plain stupid. Before my eyes, the promise of free money was changing a handful of unfortunates into a mob.
As I started hauling Dee toward the cab, I could feel sweat trickle down my back. I heard a bottle break behind me.
“Move it,” I urged. She was hanging back, staring over her shoulder. Somebody made a dive for her beads.
“I know him,” a deep voice yelled from the dark. “Gimme the ten.”
“Me too.”
“Where’s the money, lady?”