by Linda Barnes
Given my neighborhood, the guy could have been anything from a violent PETA activist to a struggling burglar caught mid-crime, but whenever I see Roz and a young man tussling, the first thing I think is: There she goes again. From what I could see, this guy had a good body, which increased my level of suspicion. Yes, I was thinking sex, and the infinite opportunity for things to go wrong within the context of the act. Roz goes for variety in men. By variety I mean numbers rather than variations in type. She falls for hard, well-muscled bodies every time, exults in afternoon quickies and one-night stands, and is no fan of making gradual acquaintance through the fine art of conversation.
She has a high entertainment level. Maybe that’s why I keep her.
Why do I keep her? The idea froze me behind the wheel. Sometimes you step out of your life for a while and when you step back in, nothing seems to make sense. I’d gone to Colombia to retrieve my little sister, and ever since I’d returned I had felt like a visitor in my own life, wondering how I’d come to live in my aunt Bea’s old house and rent a room to a strange person like Roz.
No time for reflection now, not with curses flying and neighbors starting to peer out the windows. I left the cab at the curb and approached cautiously. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, so I didn’t want to get too close.
“Hey,” I bellowed at the top of my lungs when I got tired of being ignored.
Both combatants shot me glances. Roz’s had a shade of relief; the guy’s held nothing but anger. He seemed vaguely familiar, which reinforced the idea that I’d seen him with Roz before.
“Trouble?” I asked mildly.
The man let out a string of obscenities. Roz punctuated it with, “Fucking thief!”
“Why don’t we take it inside?” I said.
“I’m like fucking doing you a favor, and this bitch—”
Roz did something with her foot, something quick and karate-flavored that made an impact.
“Doing me a favor?” I said over his howl. “Do I know you?”
“Christ, it’s me, Jonathan. Jonno San Giordino. Katharine is my mother. She’s married to—”
She was married to Sam Gianelli’s father, his third trophy wife. Or was it his fourth?
“I brought your things. I should have fucking dumped them in an alley.”
“He was going through your files. I saw him!” That from Roz.
I thought my head might burst. I needed a bowl of soup. I needed a beer. I’d never heard a good word about Sam’s rotten stepbrother, Jonno, and Roz was wearing a too-tight fuchsia T-shirt that said, FOUR OUT OF THREE PEOPLE HAVE TROUBLE WITH FRACTIONS. If I’d been carrying the pistol I’d emptied yesterday on the firing range, the neighbors would have had a real show.
“Inside,” I said, using my crowd-control cop voice. “Both of you.”
Roz registered triumph—the bastard wasn’t getting away—and Jonno looked like he wanted to spit in my eye. When Roz let go of his wrist, he thought about fleeing. I took a step closer. Feet shuffled; the door opened and closed. The window curtains next door stopped bulging and I prayed the snoop would put the phone down without dialing 911. My stomach growled.
“Roz,” I said, “what was he doing in—?”
“Where in hell is Sam?” the man interrupted.
I shrugged. “Roz—”
“I’m not saying a fucking word with that bitch around.” Jonno didn’t want me to give her a chance to tell her story.
Roz didn’t look keen to tell the tale either. I wondered if it involved not only letting Jonno into the house, but also giving a handsome man free rein in my office while she went to change into something more comfortable.
“Roz,” I said gently.
“Take a fucking hike,” Jonno said.
“Shut up,” I said firmly, followed by, “Roz, why don’t you give us a minute?”
“Holler if you need me. I’ll be happy to kick his ass down the stoop.” She ceded ground ungraciously, flying up the stairs and banging the door at the top.
The sense of familiarity I’d felt on first seeing Jonno wasn’t because we’d met before, but because he reminded me so vividly of his mother. Her ice blue eyes stared out from above his high cheekbones. His eyebrows were heavier, his hair shorter, but both had the same tawny caramel coloring, possibly from the same exclusive salon. When he smiled at me, a flash of dental perfection, I felt as though my clothes came off the wrong rack in the wrong shop, the same way I felt when Katharine gave me the once-over.
I took the single step down to the living room, leaving him to follow in my wake. Three cardboard boxes, each larger than a wine carton, were stacked in the corner near the sofa.
Jonno sank into my client chair with a sigh. His blue sweater made clouds look prickly. He wore it over a pale shirt and khakis that were definitely not wash and wear. His shoes glowed.
He gazed at me thoughtfully for a moment before saying, “So he didn’t even give you a ring.”
A ring? I thought. A phone call? Then I realized he was staring pointedly at my left hand; he meant an engagement ring.
“And how is that your business?” I decided to remain standing. I wanted whatever advantage I could get.
“I heard you got engaged.”
“And that’s why you wanted to paw through my files?”
“That bitch—”
“What were you looking for?”
“She’s crazy.”
I’d always considered it a possibility, but the more he protested, the more I thought Roz had caught him in the act.
He said, “Look, I brought your things from Charles River Park. The boxes? I could have tossed your stuff. Or put it in storage. Like his.”
“You don’t think it’s a little soon to be doing that?”
“I want your key. To the apartment.”
“I don’t keep it in the file cabinet.”
“I need it.”
“Bulletin: Sam gave it to me. When he asks me to return it, I’ll give it back.”
“So you’re going to be difficult.”
I shrugged. What, me? Difficult?
“We’ll change the locks.”
“We?”
The change from singular to plural was not unexpected. I’d met Mama, the very expensive Katharine, on several occasions. I’d heard she kept a close eye on her only son.
“Yeah, Eddie Nardo says Sam’s a fool, you know that? And Nardo’s an up-front guy, says what he thinks. Nardo says Sam’s a real asshole, what he did. All his life brought up to the business. All his life, one lesson drilled into his head: Don’t let it get personal. Man, it’s the total stupidity of the whole thing. It’ll probably kill the old man.”
Nardo, not Katharine. The name gave me pause. Eddie Nardo was a lawyer, an advisor, a man Sam spoke of with respect. The “old man” was Sam’s father, and whether he was really alive was a matter of whom you asked on which day. He’d had so many strokes and was attached to so much medical equipment that some people thought Katharine was calling the shots. Some thought Nardo.
“Personal?” I repeated. “Stupid?” Suddenly I wanted Jonno to keep talking. I sat behind the desk and fastened a look of rapt attention on my face.
“Yeah, and it all comes back to you.”
“Me?” I did everything but bat my eyelashes.
“Man says he wants to marry you, but I guess the other woman didn’t think he should walk out on her. Who knows? Maybe she got pregnant? Maybe he’d already married her? Poor little bitch should have just let him go.”
“You don’t know what you’re—”
“Then again, maybe she had something on him.”
“She? Who?”
Jonno let me see his dental work again, a wide slow smile. “If Sam didn’t mention her, I don’t see why I should. Didn’t give you a ring, didn’t tell you about the girlfriend. Maybe all the panties at the apartment were yours, but maybe not.”
He wanted a reaction, so I was careful not to give him one.
He s
aid, “You probably don’t know where he is, do you? You probably don’t know a goddamn thing.”
He walked out before I could call Roz to kick him out. I took a quick look at my desktop, wanting to toss something after him. A paperweight. A brick. A bomb.
His cologne lingered in the air.
FIVE
I sat motionless at my desk, thinking furiously. The closest Sam had come to an explanation of his inability to return to the States was a quickly muttered, “Something happened in Las Vegas.” Now, thanks to Jonno, I had two legs of the stool. Or possibly two legs of the spider. The location of the crime: Las Vegas. And according to Jonno, the alleged victim was a woman.
Roz pounded downstairs. Before she could open her mouth, I said, “I need you to get me a list of DBs in Vegas.”
“Huh? Deadbeats in Vegas? That’s gonna take some time.”
“Dead bodies,” I corrected. “Female.”
“Wait a minute. Hang on. What about that guy? You let him go?” Her jaw was set. She seemed to think that making a list of women who’d turned up dead in Las Vegas wouldn’t be half as much fun as kicking Jonno down the front stoop would have been.
“Yeah, I let him go,” I said. Then I gave her parameters for the DB search, using Sam’s age and taste to speculate on the age of the victim and the date of his last trip to Vegas to guess the possible date of the crime.
“Is this for the new client? Jessica?”
I shook my head no.
“You’re not taking the case? But we—”
“We?”
“You need the work.”
“I’m taking it.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And you’re doing this other stuff. In addition to background on Jessica. Okay?”
It seemed like the best thing I could do at the moment, hand the research off to Roz and prep for the upcoming tail job, even though part of me wished we could trade. Trading places was out of the question: Roz is a whiz at computers, but she doesn’t drive.
I do drive. I love to drive, but at the moment I had no car. I sat at my desk and pulled my hair. Gloria’s cabs are good tail vehicles up to a point, and that point was the Boston city limits. A Boston cab sticks out in the suburbs. I was considering rentals when the boxes Jonno had left in the corner caught my eye.
Could it be that easy?
I would have sworn I hadn’t stored much at Sam’s apartment, but there in box number one, mashed rather than folded, were two of my favorite sweaters and the bathrobe that usually hung in my upstairs closet. Yes, there was underwear, but I didn’t take time to root for alien undergarments.
The next carton was stuffed with paperback Civil War histories, C.C. scrawled on the inside cover in Sam’s handwriting. He’s got a thing about books, writes his name in all his volumes to make sure that if he lends them, he gets them back. I hadn’t realized he’d initialed my books, but I was grateful; at least they wouldn’t languish in some prefab storage bunker. The idea of Sam’s soft wool suits bundled and shoved into an anonymous shed made me swallow. The idea of Jonno handling my underwear made my forehead feel too tight and my eyes burn.
I turned to the third carton. Heavy corrugated cardboard like the rest, it looked new, purchased, not a grocery store throwaway. I turned it on its axis, searching for a logo that might identify a moving company, thinking maybe the moving company would give me the name of the storage facility, thinking I could rescue Sam’s cashmere sweaters and silk ties.
The sides of the container were unmarked. Maybe the bottom would give a clue. I’d check it later, when I had time to unpack the boxes.
Label the third carton miscellaneous. Ropes of lacy ribbon, crinkled wrapping paper, two copper-colored bangle bracelets, a photo of Sam, thinner and younger, posing with his feet up on his old desk at the Green and White Cab Company. No gray in his hair, no lines at the corners of his eyes.
Was all that eye shadow mine? I buried the thought, provoked more by Jonno’s observation about panties than by my own insecurity. What was a little infidelity after all, compared to murder, the murder of a woman, a personal, face-to-face murder?
When my on-again, off-again lover, my fiancé, a man I’d come to know when he was the boss and I was young and almost a virgin, first told me he couldn’t return to the United States, I’d flat-out assumed it had to do with gaming or racketeering or conspiracy because the Gianelli name is so entwined with the history of the Boston mob that no one bothers to separate the two. I’d further assumed it had to do with Sam’s current quest to move mob assets into legitimate businesses, a quest made tougher by the current anti-terrorism laws. I’d been stunned to learn that Sam had been named in a murder indictment, but still I’d assumed it had to do with the family business, with a long-ago murder, some rival crook found stuffed in a submerged trunk, a death two or three times removed from the man I slept with, the man I’d agreed to marry.
Something happened in Las Vegas.
I bit my lip. Yanked my hair and wondered how Paolina’s shrink would interpret the impulse. A woman … Someone Sam had slept with during one of the many gaps in our togetherness? I’d never expected him to practice abstinence while we were apart. I certainly hadn’t been any plaster saint. And whenever we renewed the relationship it was without any awkward confessions; neither of us felt the need to discuss extracurricular flings.
Dammit, where was it? The miscellany box had summer clothes wedged at the bottom, a pair of sandals, a single flattened house slipper, a pamphlet issued by a consumer group on new methods of identity theft. Aha! Two purses, small date-night purses rather than serious handbags for carrying daily essentials like flashlights and lock-picks. I opened the first, found tickets to a Huntington Theater production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, tissues, lipstick. The second purse jingled promisingly and opened to reveal not money, but the object of my quest: Sam’s spare car key. The key to an indigo Jaguar XK.
Driving in Boston is basically a contact sport, and because it’s a contact sport and because I have a native Detroiter’s love of glossy high-powered automobiles, I made the decision long ago to drive a “sensible” car in this city. When my serviceable Toyota got its first scratch, I left it as a talisman, hoping it would ward off the dings, dents, and bumps to follow. If you’re going to drive in the Commonwealth, your car’s going to get salt on it every winter and suffer from potholes and acid rain and crazy drivers. It’s going to spend time in the shop, getting retouched and repainted. I’d always shaken my head at Sam’s expensive vehicles, but I’d driven them eagerly whenever he offered, enjoying the speed, the handling, the quick acceleration, racing cheerfully along Route 2 or speeding through the Big Dig tunnels, foot hard on the gas, eyes peeled for state troopers.
If Jonno hadn’t changed the locks at Charles River Park yet, what were the chances he’d gotten around to moving the Jag? Sam had his key with him wherever he was now. I’d noticed it on the nightstand in Cartagena. And I had the spare key, borrowed and forgotten in my little tan purse.
Sam’s Jaguar was fast and agile, a hell of a ride. I could lie way back on the highway, trust the engine to make up time in a hurry. An indigo Jag was a better tail car than a creaky Ford cab any day of the week.
SIX
In the summer of 1960, Boston’s West End was bulldozed to rubble. Some called it urban renewal and some called it slum clearance, but when the dust cleared, there was Charles River Park, an eight-building complex that would have looked great in Miami Beach. The tall pale buildings had no ties to New England, so to grab some local flavor, they named the towers after Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow. I like to imagine those old dead white guys rolling in their graves. Not to mention stogie-smoking Amy Lowell.
The only thing most Bostonians know about CRP is the sign. If you’re stuck in traffic—or should I say, when you’re stuck in traffic—on Storrow Drive, there it is, a taunting IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW. The complex occupies almost as much space as Boston Common,
but few outsiders enter the grounds. It’s deliberately unwelcoming, cut off, isolated, and fearful, with its own grocery store and its own security patrol. Those who live at CRP use the city, but the city does not use CRP. Visitors are not encouraged.
Charles River Park has barbed wire and fences and twenty-four-hour security guards. They’re looking for trouble from the outside. Armed gangs, hooded thugs, burglars, car thieves, not a lone white woman like me.
I strolled into the Pace Market and purchased two boxes of Kleenex. Jessie Franklin had been hard on my tissue supplies. I got a couple bottles of water, two bananas, a few other essentials. The clerk may have thought it odd when I asked him to bag the stuff lightly, each tissue box in a separate paper sack, but he did as I asked.
Burdened with my shopping, I walked past the basketball courts, the tennis courts, and the pool. I circled the pool, lingering in the shadows, waiting for the right company. Two women, nurses by their sensible shoes, passed by. Then a teenager, hunched into a hooded jacket. I didn’t have to wait long.
Business suit, overcoat, no briefcase, maybe heading out for a night on the town. Keys jingled in his gloved left hand and he was making a beeline for the back entrance of the Longfellow garage.
“Cold, huh?” I said, swinging into step beside him.
“You bet. Wind whistles between the buildings. Not as bad as Chicago, I suppose.”
“Windy city,” I agreed. I’ve heard that Chicago’s reputed windiness refers to its politicians, but who knows? “You work downtown?”
“Copley Square. Wind around the Pru, that’s bad.”
He was a gent. He didn’t wait for me to use my key on the door. He used his key, then held the door wide for me and my grocery bags. As I always say, why break and enter when you can get a guy to hold the door?
So far so good. Perfect.
Except the Jaguar wasn’t there.
I glanced around the garage, eyeballing dark corners and empty alcoves, just to make sure Sam hadn’t parked in a spot other than his own, but my first take was the right take: no indigo XK. To say I was disappointed would be to understate. I was dressed warmly for the bitter evening, but my backside had counted on a cushy leather seat for a quick ride home before the evening’s assignment. Jonno San Giordino had been more efficient than I’d bargained for.