by Linda Barnes
The best thing, the terrific thing, was that she played me a tune on the pipes I’d sent her, a tune she remembered from Colombia. Her fingering faltered on the seven slender reeds, but her pitch was true, and I found the accomplishment miraculous for a girl whose instrument is percussion. When I asked whether I could bring my guitar sometime, try to play along, she didn’t say no. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t say no.
Moon stayed with her while I spoke with her doctor, and I’ll admit I was jealous. She seemed to prefer him to me, after all we’d been through. Part of me realized that was the problem: all we’d been through. I knew another component of the problem as well: Paolina was looking for a man to replace her lost father. Knowing didn’t make the ugly green monster pack up and fly away.
Aaron Eisner met with me in his perfect room. I wondered whether the glossy plants were the same ones I’d admired last time or whether they’d been replaced by some service that whisked in lush substitutes in the middle of the night while the cleaning staff polished the spotless windows.
“How is she?”
“We’re trying to help her identify and manage her anger.”
“Without cutting herself.”
“She is not cutting herself here.”
She wouldn’t have access to a blade, so I wasn’t sure he should take much credit for that.
“How do you do it? Identify and manage anger?”
“Mainly through talking therapy.”
I had been yanking my hair and unaware of it. My hand froze in midair.
“We try to encourage her not to swallow the anger. So it won’t fester and come back to her years from now. Or never go away. Things were done to her—”
“Physical things. In Colombia?”
“I can’t break her confidence. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t sound sorry.
“Paolina told me you’ve taken the initial steps to become her legal guardian. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“It might be better if it were done sooner rather than later.”
“Is her mother—?” I was glad when Eisner interrupted, because I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Disruptive? Crazy?
“Her mother wants her released immediately.”
“Can you stall her?”
“I would have to state unequivocally that Paolina is a danger to herself or others.”
“And that would do what?”
“She’s a juvenile, but she’s old enough to be in the shady region. The records might alter her chance of returning to a public school environment. Safety issues are—”
“For Christ’s sake, she’s not going to shoot up some high school cafeteria.”
He said nothing and I realized that there wasn’t much he could say.
“What does Paolina want?” I said. “Is she happy here? Is she okay?”
“She feels safe here,” he said.
“She played me a song on the pipes.” I don’t know why I said it. It forced its way out of my mouth. If I hadn’t said it, I think I’d have started to cry.
“Did she?” Eisner said. “That’s a very positive sign.”
Mooney was waiting when I got out and he started right in on me, flinging the same questions he’d opened with before, as though I owed him answers.
“Where in hell have you been?”
“Las Vegas.”
“Sudden urge to play the slots? Hey, are you okay?”
I must have nodded, but I don’t think I did it very convincingly.
“Come on, let’s get outa here.”
The next thing I knew I was seated in a cafeteria-like place, a lunchroom in another building on the McLean grounds, and there was a steaming mug of coffee near my right hand. I picked it up, took a tentative sip, and said, “December twentieth, the night that woman died—”
Mooney, across the table, cradling a mug of his own, said, “Let’s give her a name. Danielle Wilder.”
“Major OC figures from all across the country met in Las Vegas. Sam was there.”
“Sure he was. You’re not the only one who’s been traveling, Carlotta. I went down to Nausett. Gianelli had a damn good reason to kill Danielle Wilder.”
“What? He wanted to marry me, but he was afraid I’d refuse him because Danielle could prove he wasn’t a virgin?”
“Keep your voice down. That’s not what—”
“He’s a psycho sex killer? You think I wouldn’t have noticed? Okay, what?” I could tell he had news, and not good news, either. I drank coffee while he outlined his stay in Nausett. I heard about Thurlow, the police chief, and Julie Farmer’s bereaved grandfather. He mentioned the warring forces for and against Proposition Six and possible casino gambling. A woman named Amy had identified a man named Kyle as a possible suspect, a post-Gianelli boyfriend. It all sounded promising until he got to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to Danielle Wilder’s intent to testify about organized crime involvement in the Nausett tribe.
“So there’s your reason,” he said. “She gets pissed at Gianelli, decides to change her tune. Maybe because of you, because Sam’s going to marry you and not her.”
I shook my head impatiently. “Didn’t you hear me? He was in Vegas.”
“I suppose you have proof?”
“An eyewitness.” My opinion of Solange’s impact on a jury must have shown on my face.
Mooney raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
I let out my breath in a sigh. “But I doubt she’d testify. And it gets worse: Every record with his name on it is gone. The guest register’s been altered; Caesar’s Palace says he canceled at the last minute, and none of the other hotels have him booked.” I hadn’t been able to check airline passenger lists, but Sam rarely used his real name when he flew anyway.
Mooney was shaking his head. “Carlotta, let me get this over with. There’s DNA.”
At first I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Who says?”
“The feds say.”
“What do they have? Semen? Hair? Where did they run the tests?”
“Is it just me or does it sound like you’re snatching at straws? It’s DNA, Carlyle.”
“Which, you would agree, is as good as the lab tech who runs it.”
“Jesus. What will it take?”
“Sam didn’t kill that woman.”
Mooney said, “Listen to yourself. You’re saying the DNA is wrong?”
“I’m saying it could be. Or the feds could have stage-managed it.”
“The feds fixed the DNA? Was that before or after they killed Kennedy?”
“It was while they were letting Whitey Bulger run free.” I reached across the narrow table, tilted Mooney’s chin so I could see his eyes. “Look at me. Do you think I ran over that girl, Julie Farmer, with Gianelli’s car?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Jesus, Carlotta. I know you.”
“And I know Sam.” I was uncomfortably aware of the thin ice I was skating across. I felt like one of those moms they interview in newspapers, the kind who says what a good boy her Joey was, before he shot up the school.
“Maybe you have a blind spot there,” Moon said.
“Sex? You think I’m blinded by sexual attraction?”
“It happens.”
“You going to turn me in?”
“I ought to, for your own good, for your own safety.”
A doctor with a short white jacket and a stethoscope hanging around his neck sat at the edge of our table and smiled apologetically. For the first time I realized that the other tables were crowded with medical staff, visitors, patients. My eyelids felt like they’d stick together if I blinked.
“Don’t you have work?” I asked Mooney wearily.
“Don’t worry about it. I went AWOL.”
“You what?” I goggled at him. Mooney and the force are inseparable, two sides of a coin.
He shrugged. “Work’s not life, Carlotta. Someday, you know, someday down the line, I’m gonna pull the pin, r
etire or burn out, and the BPD’s gonna march on without me.”
I took a long look at him, reliable as air, round Irish face, straight brown hair slanting almost to his eyes, blue button-down Oxford cloth shirt, gray gabardine suit pants. And I thought: He’s changed. Lifting my coffee cup, avoiding his eyes, I remembered the first day I’d met him, the no-nonsense leader of the team, how I’d been attracted by the warmth of those brown eyes, determined not to look into them too deeply, not to react to any glint of admiration or shared amusement. I wasn’t going to mess up at work. Mooney had been my boss—an attractive man, but my boss— and I’d drawn a line.
“The job’s not the same,” he said. “The technology, the forensics. Department’s doing this thing with gunshot echoes, setting up these noise detectors: A gun goes off, we’re on it. Computers. Everything’s computers. And the killings are different, too. When you go to the scene and there’s two twelve-year-olds down and a thirteen-year-old kneeling in the blood, and he says he didn’t see a thing.” Mooney’s voice ran down and I thought he could have been me, years ago, explaining why I had to leave the job.
“So you’re AWOL,” I said. “And I’m on the lam.”
“In the wind,” he said. “On the lam—that’s old mob talk.”
“In the wind,” I echoed.
“So what’s our next move?”
Our move, I thought. I liked it: Our move.
Sleep, my eyes said, but really I wasn’t so tired as I’d been on the drive. Seeing Paolina had worked on me like a tonic. The caffeine was starting to kick in, too.
“We need to go back to the beginning,” I said.
“Where is the beginning? I thought I’d find it in Nausett, but—”
“The beginning is Jessie Franklin.”
“Julie Farmer,” Mooney corrected. “Who came to you with a cock-and-bull story about getting married to Barbie’s Ken.”
“Ken,” I repeated. “Julie, Jessie. Ken, Kyle.”
“Huh?”
“What did this guy in Nausett look like? This Kyle?”
“Never saw him. The witness described him. Handsome. Six feet, blond, in his twenties.”
“Julie. Jessie. Same initial, right? So maybe’s it not Barbie’s Ken, maybe Julie wanted me to follow Danielle’s Kyle.”
“I see where you’re going. Maybe.”
“So why don’t we go nab my file, see what Roz has got—”
“Carlotta, I wouldn’t go to your place if I were you.”
“What?”
Moon smiled. “The Macs aren’t bright, but they’re not stupid either.”
THIRTY-TWO
While Moon tried to goose the Buick’s heater, I returned my rental near a busy suburban Holiday Inn. Together, driving toward Cambridge, we fell easily into the banter of the patrol car days, when no matter how wretched the assignment, the camaraderie kept us going, kept me sane. Some days we’d driven this very Buick. I knew its quirks: why the passenger door didn’t open, why Mooney had never gotten it fixed.
Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe the situation, but the sudden appearance of the Boston skyline seemed almost surreal from Arlington Heights on Route 2. The bright sky hurt my eyes. Traffic lights seemed to send mysterious blinking signals. Cops were hunting me, lurking outside my house, and here I was, sitting next to a cop, the sun glinting off his dark glasses. I envisioned bold-faced Herald headlines: PI WANTED IN HIT AND RUN.
In spite of stop-and-go traffic, we were sharing a back booth at Mary Chung’s before Roz, the spy I’d phoned en route, came in from the cold, wearing an outfit Mata Hari might have envied, carrying my guitar case.
“You loose?” Mooney said severely as she approached.
“None of your fucking business.”
“He’s not talking about your morals,” I said.
“Is anyone following you?” This time he spoke the way a father might talk to a slow two-year-old.
“I know what you mean, copper. If they were, you’d be in deep shit, huh?”
Roz and Moon don’t mix well. They can’t get by appearances. She assumes he’s as conventional as white toast. He buys her outward bizarreness as interior confusion.
She said, “First of all, they’re not interested in me; they’re waiting for Carlyle. Second, I didn’t bring a suitcase, which might have looked suspicious; I brought a guitar case.”
I’d told her to do that on the phone, so she shouldn’t have taken credit.
“Third, I walked into Harvard Square, freezing my ass, so I could see they weren’t behind me. Nobody even got out of the car. It’s too cold to walk, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m dying, by the way. My fucking toes will have to be amputated.”
“Tea?” I said.
“Then I took the train to Kendall instead of Central, and cabbed back. Believe me, there is nobody on my tail.”
She plunked the guitar case on the floor and shoved into the booth next to me. I poured tea from the metal pot, dribbling it on the tabletop.
“Don’t worry,” she told me, “I packed it just the way you said.”
I’d asked her to pad the guitar, layer it with the Tshirts and underwear I’d need to prolong my exile. I hated taking my Gibson out in this weather, but I wanted it nearby, in case Paolina let me visit again. Maybe, I thought wearily, I could bunk at McLean.
“I didn’t want to fuck up again,” Roz said earnestly. “I know it’s my fault you’re in this mess.”
“What?” Mooney said.
Roz glared at me. “You didn’t tell him?”
I poured tea into a second thin round cup.
Roz addressed Mooney across the table. “Look, the client snowed me. Old Jessie/Julie whatever, she says, ‘Oh, I really want to see her, I really need to see her, how can you slip me in to see her?’ And I fell for it, like a sucker from the sticks. I told Carlotta she was a friend of mine.”
“So that’s why—,” Mooney began.
“Friend of a friend,” I said firmly.
Roz said, “Don’t try to make it better. Then I didn’t check her out because she seemed so harmless, so totally genuine. I screwed up once, but I’m not going to screw up again.”
“Roz,” I said, “quit beating yourself over the head. I didn’t check her out, either. She was that good, Mooney. If she walked in here right now, and I wish to hell she could, I’d probably believe her all over again.”
A cheerful waitress took my order for suan la chow show. Mooney, a coward about super-spicy food, went with pan-fried Peking ravioli. Roz ordered ma paw tou fu and I could see Moon suppress a shudder at the thought of wriggling tofu.
Roz had brought the case file. I wiped up the spilled tea with a wad of napkins before spreading the paper on the tabletop.
“Okay. Before I knew Jessie Franklin was Julie Farmer, when I was trying to find out who she was, I decided the best bet would be to track down the guy she’d hired me to follow.”
“But that was a made-up story,” Mooney said. “The wedding and all that.”
“She went out of her way to hire me. She paid me. Story or no, she wanted ‘Ken’ tailed. The question is why.”
Mooney nodded. “What kind of car?”
“Volvo. Silver, with a stolen plate. Roz and I split up the workload.”
Roz gave a delicate snort to indicate that she’d been given the bulk of the scut work. I ignored her and started reading her notes. As soon as I finished with a page, I passed it to Mooney, a distant but familiar ritual. I’m the faster reader.
While I’d interviewed the genuine Jessica Franklin and visited the Nausett police, Roz had tackled the tall building in Kendall Square where “Ken” and his oddly shaped tote bag had spent some twenty-two minutes. Twenty-eight different businesses, ranging from mailorder novelty sales to financial management companies occupied the building. The two top floors were real estate management; the next two, a giant scientific equipment firm. The smaller the outfit, the lower the floor.
I passed the list to Moon. He ran his
finger down the column of names while I read Roz’s accompanying report.
She’d decided to be an insurance investigator, dressing conservatively to suit the role, which meant serious cover-up of flamboyant tattoos. Her patter: A man had been injured falling over a mop and pail in a hallway.
“Sometimes, when I got bored, I said he fell over a ladder.” She was reading over my shoulder, offering running commentary.
She had varied the floor number of the incident, depending on the suite she was currently investigating. First, she had asked whether anybody in the office had noticed the offending mop and pail or ladder.
“Some people swore they did. They must have been even more bored than I was.”
Whether she got a positive or a negative, she had hauled out her pictures. She’d drawn three, each with the same basic bone structure displayed in the photo of the musician that Jessie/Julie had given me.
Had anyone seen this guy? Did anyone know his name?
Mooney and I swapped pages. The food came, the suan la chow show so strong it made my nose run.
I rummaged for tissues, said, “What did you say if anybody asked why you wanted the guy’s name?”
“I told them he might have witnessed the accident with the bucket. I didn’t want anybody to think he was in any kind of trouble.”
“Good.”
Nobody had identified the man, but two of the outfits had struck her as hinky. She had starred them on the list. One was a political consulting firm, the other a start-up software shop. She pegged the software guys as a porno ring in disguise.
“You write a decent report,” Mooney said grudgingly.
Roz fluttered her eyelashes and giggled. Always appropriate.
Mooney’s cell phone plays a jazz riff. He looked uncomfortable when it sounded, like he’d meant to tune it to buzz and forgotten.
“Yeah,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Just a minute.”
He got up and moved into the corner of the room by the coatrack.
“Bad reception,” I said to Roz.
“Lack of trust. Where you gonna stay?”
It was way too cold to sleep on the streets. “Maybe the Y.”
“The Y? Like they don’t have cops checking there all night?”