by Linda Barnes
“What did she flunk?” I asked.
“Biology. And she was going to flunk drama, which is totally hard to do, but then I guess she turned in her stuff, so she was only really in trouble in biology. She could have gotten a tutor, or taken an incomplete.”
“Were you looking for her tonight? In the Zone?”
He stared down at the rug, lifted the ice pack to his lip.
“Why did you think she’d run there?” I tried again.
“I said I didn’t think she’d run away.”
“Why were you looking for her there?”
“I had some other business. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m really tired.” He was going to add that his mouth hurt, but I guess I wasn’t old enough to rate the confidence. From the way he looked at me, I had the uneasy feeling that he still classed me as a girl he wanted to impress.
“Want to tell me what happened to your mouth?”
“I walked into a wall.”
“Before or after you talked to the police?”
“Jesus,” he said, “they’re not gonna find Valerie. You know how many missing kids there are in Boston? A thousand. A thousand missing kids. And then this guy said I should talk to this Youth Assistance Unit. That sounded great, you know, until I figured out it’s two cops. Two cops looking for a thousand kids. Shit. It’s unbelievable. Totally.”
“They get busy,” I said.
“I asked about you. They said you used to be a cop.”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Why don’t you tell me more about Valerie?” I said. “Her friends. Her habits.”
“Geez,” he said. “Really, I don’t know where to start. There’s so much shit that’s not important to anybody. And I don’t know where she’s gone.”
“Let me decide what’s important, okay?”
Valerie was fourteen, almost fifteen, by Jerry’s way of counting. She was left-handed. She had one really close girlfriend, Elsie McLintock. She’d lived in the same house all her life. She broke her left arm when she was twelve, while ice-skating. She liked to wear knitted wool hats in the winter. Her favorite color was pink. She knitted Jerry a sweater once. She liked to knit and she liked to skate. She was a pretty decent skater.
I like ice-skating. It’s the only exercise I can stand besides volleyball. I can skate forward and backward, but I can’t do any of the loop-de-loop fancy stuff. Valerie could.
Valerie despised field hockey. She was a good dancer. She didn’t cheat on tests, like most of the kids. She had a small scar on the inside of her left wrist. He didn’t know how it happened. It had always been there. Maybe it was a birthmark. There was lots of that kind of stuff. I asked him to describe her, and his hand reached for his wallet. When he realized his picture of Valerie was gone along with his money, his face got even paler, and I decided that sixteen or seventeen didn’t matter. He was still a kid and he’d had a long day.
I got a blanket and a pillow out of the hall closet and told him he could sleep on the ouch for a couple of hours. Plenty of time for the inquisition to continue after sunrise.
CHAPTER 5
There’s a dress code for taxi drivers in this town. Shirts have to have collars, and no shorts are allowed, not even on the hottest August scorcher. Private investigators, on the other hand, can wing it. After two hours of blissfully undisturbed slumber, I went downstairs, attired in an electric blue sweater and black wool slacks.
The blanket was folded neatly on the couch, the pillow smoothed and piled on top of it. I called Jerry’s name. Nothing. I checked to see if the bathroom was occupied. The client seemed to have flown the coop, which puzzled me because I have deadbolt locks on all the doors, so you need a key to leave as well as enter my dwelling.
Then I met Roz coming out of the kitchen.
Roz is always a delight to the eye. This morning her hair was the color of cranberries, the kind that slide out of the can in a log. She wore a fuchsia T-shirt that almost met the hem of a thigh-high black denim skirt, black lacy pantyhose with a run up the right leg, and green leather pointy-toed ankle boots. Roz is short and skinny, except for her breasts. With Roz, first you notice her hair, because it’s generally an unnatural color, then you notice her eyes, because she wears killer makeup—fake eyelashes and glued-on sequins—and then you become aware of her breasts, because they’re emphatically there and because she has the world’s best T-shirt collection, bar none. This one featured a picture of Smokey, and said: DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO ARM BEARS.
I’m fascinated by Roz’s shoes. She wears one of those ridiculously small sizes, a five or something, so she can buy all these weird shoes nobody else wants. They have mounds of them in Filene’s Basement, cheap. Today’s ankle boots had incredibly skinny four-inch heels. She was perched so high on her toes that her feet looked like little hooves.
Well, not really. It’s just shoe jealousy. Size eleven shoes, on the rare occasion you can find them, come in basic brown.
“He in there?” I asked, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Huh?” she replied, licking a sticky finger. Roz eats peanut butter for breakfast, straight from the jar. She has mastered the art of not looking after herself. She does all the cleaning, and she’s figured out that if you don’t make it dirty you don’t have to clean it. Some days she can go entirely without forks, spoons, knives, plates, or glasses. I’m glad we keep separate food supplies, because when Roz’s fingers are not stained with peanut butter they’re usually covered with paint, turpentine, or developer fluid.
I admire Roz’s basic laziness. Other people her age, which I put at around twenty, are not doing aerobics and eliminating toxins. They’re improving their eating habits, getting in touch with their inner selves. Roz has a T-shirt that says “Live Hard, Die Young.” McDonald’s is her idea of a health food restaurant.
“I have a missing client,” I said. “He spent the night on the couch.”
“Oh,” she said. “That was a client.” Her tone let me know she thought he was my version of the Twin Brothers. Which was dumb because Jerry Toland, though attractive, would have been cradle-snatching for Roz, never mind me. And if I had stooped to cradle-snatching why the hell would the snatchee have been sleeping on the couch? “He had to leave,” she continued. “I let him out. He’s cute.”
“Great,” I said.
“Trouble?” she said.
“Somebody come for him?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Anybody waiting for him outside?”
“Nah.”
“Terrific,” I said flatly.
“He left you a note.”
“Where?”
“I stuck it on the fridge.”
That’s one of our methods of communication. I probably would have noticed the note within the next three months. Roz is supposed to keep the refrigerator-door-bulletin-board organized, toss out year-old messages, expired supermarket coupons, stuff like that, but she rarely does.
This note was more like a scrap, a torn sheet of an address book that took some deciphering. It said, “Try Elsie first. Sorry to run. Thanks for everything.” At least that’s what Roz thought it said. Jerry had terrible handwriting.
Roz started humming a jingle from a TV commercial. She keeps the tube blaring while she paints, and it does strange things to her mind and her art. She seemed brisk and cheerful, like she’d slept nine hours instead of caterwauling most of the night. I needed to talk to her, to make a declaration about the bathroom and the Twin Brothers. I needed to say that while I didn’t care with whom she slept, I didn’t want her sleeping arrangements to taint her judgment concerning bathroom design.
“Carlotta,” she said as if she could read my mind, “hey, you worried about the Brothers?”
“Right,” I said.
“Relax, okay?”
“Why?”
“The bathroom’s gonna knock you out. Shazam!”
“Roz, I want a bathroom the cat won’t be embarrassed to pe
e in, okay? I don’t want state of the art. I want your basic normal bathroom.”
“But you said—”
“I said beige, not black. I said pink, not orange. Are they color-blind, or deaf, or what?”
“Carlotta, you gotta trust me,” she said. She smiled enigmatically and waltzed out the door. I could hear her heels tap up the stairs.
I felt like going back to bed and starting over. Instead I opened the fridge, found a carton of Tropicana, and poured a tumblerful. Orange juice clears my head.
Roz had deserted her copy of the Herald—I get the Globe—on the kitchen table, and sure enough, they had Mooney’s story on page one, milking it for all it was worth. Reading between the lines, they seemed to be trying to link him to the other current police scandal, the one about collecting special-duty pay for not showing up at bars and sporting events. I could no more see Mooney taking cash for a job he hadn’t done than I could see him roughing up somebody during an arrest, but I admit, the article made me think.
I wondered what shape Mooney’s finances were in. I wondered if his mom had been sick, if he’d had any special expenses lately. Then I realized that all across New England people were doing likewise, looking for reasons for Mooney’s fall from grace, even though the Herald was careful to use “alleged” in every other sentence. People who didn’t even know Mooney were clucking over his downfall. That made me mad. I wondered if Mooney hid the papers from his mom.
I tossed the Herald in the trash and reread Jerry Toland’s note. After a glass and a half of orange juice, I had the presence of mind to go into the living room, come back with my notebook, and leaf through the pages until I discovered the name “Elsie” in with last night’s scribblings: Elsie McLintock, Valerie’s best friend.
I reviewed my notes and was struck by how little Jerry had actually revealed about Valerie. The girl existed in negatives. She wasn’t prom queen or valedictorian or most talented. I’d had to lead him, prompt him, for a physical description. She had brown hair. Light or dark? I don’t know. There’s like, this gold color in it. Her eyes were, like, this gray, or maybe green. She stood barely shoulder high, which I made out to be a five-foot-four, and maybe she was a little on the skinny side.
She was quiet, shy, but she liked her drama class. She didn’t belong to any one group at school. You couldn’t classify her as a prep or a nerd or a jockette. She didn’t do drugs. Jerry was vehement about that. Maybe too vehement.
I’d hardly learned anything about Valerie’s family. Damn that Jerry. The manner of his departure did not sit well with me.
Elsie McLintock had been noted as somebody who’d have a picture of Valerie. That would help, what with the weakness of Jerry’s description.
I went to the cupboard and checked out the cereal boxes. I wasn’t in the mood for Raisin Bran, and the freshness date on the Corn Flakes was long past.
How do you describe people anyway? I could tell by his eyes, by his voice, that Jerry Toland cared about Valerie Haslam. How do you define the people you love? Paolina has brown hair, but “brown” says nothing about the shimmer and sway of it, the way a strand of it might curl against her cheek or tickle her nose. And if I tried to explain Paolina, I’d have to start with her laugh, a bubble of merriment that bursts when you least expect it. Paolina’s laughter seems like a special reward, reserved for me.
Well, Paolina was in Colombia, to me as “missing” as Valeria Haslam.
I ate breakfast. A bagel, cream cheese, coffee with cream and sugar. On a plate. In a cup. With silverware and a napkin. I’m profligate that way.
“Start with Elsie.” Not me. I started with the phone. I called local hospitals, jails, and finally the morgue. No Valerie Haslams. No unidentified teenage female Caucasians. I dialed the girl’s house, because I figured her parents ought to know about the whole business. Maybe Valerie would answer and then I could rip up Jerry’s IOU along with the standard contract from he’d insisted on signing, legal or not. I got an answering machine with a gruff male voice. I left my name and number.
The doorbell buzzed three times, the signal for Roz. I heard her flying down the steps, clattering in her tiny boots. She greeted the Twin Brothers with equal enthusiasm, as if she hadn’t just spent most of the night with one of them.
It’s cowardly, I know, but I decided to flee before the destruction began. It was way too early for Mooney’s hooker to make an appearance in the Zone, so I decided to follow Jerry’s advice and start with Elsie. Why not? Valerie’s parents weren’t home, and kids have to be in school, right?
On my way out the door the telephone rang. The stern voice on the other end identified herself as Mrs. Mooney, the lieutenant’s mother. She wanted to know if I could drop by the apartment. Anytime would be good. Now would be preferable.
CHAPTER 6
Back when I was a cop, I used to drive by Mooney’s place in my cruiser and imagine what it was like inside. Now I parked my Toyota down the block and stared up at the brick building. Aside from a fanlight over the front door, the architect hadn’t gone in for many fancy touches. Four stories high, the dingy yellow brick square was peppered with rectangular windows. The three steps up to the door were plain concrete, flanked by two urns that should have held geraniums. The right-hand urn was broken, a section of lip still jagged. The left-hand one was whole, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom.
The Mooney clan used to live in South Boston, an Irish stronghold renowned for stoning buses full of black kids. Mooney got tired of being labeled a bigot on the basis of his address and moved to the Hemenway Street apartment right after the cops nailed a ring of firebugs who were turning the Symphony Road area into a Beirut look-alike. His mom wanted him to come home to Southie when his father died, but Mooney’s stubborn. He kept his apartment, so Mom sold the family homestead, and moved in with her only son.
I checked out the on-street parking, hoping to spot Mooney’s battered Buick. Seven cars sported parking tickets.
Mooney doesn’t talk much about his mother. What I know about her can be summed up in few words: cop’s widow, cop’s mother. I met her once at the station and got the strong impression she didn’t care for female cops. Maybe that’s why I summed her up as a member of the Ladies Auxiliary, defining her in terms of her husband and son. I never do that to women I like—or even to women I know.
I didn’t know much about Mooney’s mom. Not even her given name. To me she existed as a presence—stern, forbidding, righteously Catholic—and I wasn’t sure if I’d picked up the image from Mooney or constructed it on my own.
Her sharp voice on the phone hadn’t helped.
I patted my hair down before I rang the bell. The automatic gesture made me pause. I used to do it all the time, back when I was an insecure teenager. Now—well, if my hair’s too wild, too bad. But the instinctive response made me wonder if I wanted to impress Mooney’s mom. And why.
The minute I hit the bell, her voice came over the loudspeaker. She must have been waiting for me. Maybe she’d watched me approach from a curtained window. When I gave my name, she buzzed me in. The interior door was heavy wood, solid, with bars blocking a dusty window. The foyer smelled musty, and the gray stair carpeting had seen long years of use.
I didn’t have to search for 3B. The door was already open and Mrs. Mooney hovered in the doorway. I wouldn’t have known her.
She wore a shapeless pink housedress that hung straight from her shoulders, covered by a worn beige cardigan. Her gray hair was full and lush, obviously a wig. The contrast between the glossy hair and the sunken face was too great. There was a hint of Mooney around her jaw. Heavy lines creased her brow and dragged her face down in discontented folds.
She favored me with a faint smile, but she’d lost none of her peremptory telephone manner.
“Come in,” she said, and it wasn’t an invitation but an order.
“How do you do,” I said formally, “I’m Carlotta Carlyle.”
“Peg Mooney,” she said, extending a frail h
and. “I remember you in uniform.”
She closed the door after me, leaning on it heavily. Then she transferred her weight to the rubber grips of an aluminum walker.
“Please,” she said briskly, “have a seat on the couch. It takes me a little while to set myself up in the chair. Would you like some lemonade?”
There was a glass on the coffee table with a little lace doily underneath, sheltering the wooden table from harm. Not that it had ever been a good piece of wood, but whatever care and polish could do for it they’d done.
The room was like that. The fabric on the green brocade sofa looked thin enough to shred, threadbare with careful cleaning. The smocked throw pillows were twenty years old if they were a day, their once-gold taffeta graying at the edges. Too much furniture had been stuffed in the small room, too many quaint little ornamental tables and footstools. Too many doilies and cushions and knickknacks. The effect was that of a larger room condensed. It made me claustrophobic and I wondered how Mooney stood it. Mooney who had a desk and a chair and a single picture in his office.
I was certain the furnishings dated from the Mooney childhood home, too worn to resell and too “good” to give away. Was Mooney’s room different or had he let Mom do whatever she wanted with his apartment?
I tried to help Mrs. Mooney with the slow business of sitting down, but she nodded me away almost angrily. My grandmother used to do everything for herself, too. Stubborn as six mules, my mom used to call her, with a hint of admiration.
I never met my mother’s mother, though I was brought up on a steady diet of her Yiddish sayings. When my mother married outside the faith—a non-Jew, a Catholic—my strictly Orthodox grandmother refused to see her again. She mourned her daughter and chanted the traditional prayers for the dead. Over the passing years, she relented. She’d speak to my mother on the telephone, at first only on her birthday, later every Friday evening—early—before sundown and the shabbas made the use of machinery unthinkable. My mother always said that if my bubbe had lived even another month they’d have reconciled, and the two of us would have met.
