by Linda Barnes
“You could have told me he was here, Glory.”
“Yeah, but then you’d have walked out, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Can’t hide from him all your life, babe.”
“Who’s hiding?” I said.
Gloria shot me a cream-filled smile. She had this incurable, romantic, happily-ever-after streak that fascinates me. I mean, if working at Green & White Cab in a wheelchair doesn’t knock that kind of crap out of you, what will?
“Look,” I said. “I want a cab.”
“Shit,” she said. “One thing about you, Carlotta, you never quit.”
CHAPTER 17
Gloria gave me her worst rattletrap Ford on the theory that if I was going to get run off the road again, I might as well do it in a cab already booked for demolition derby. I detoured to buy a can of pine-scented air freshener, then drove to the Zone, squealing the tight curves on Storrow Drive, beating out yellow lights down Arlington to Boylston Street.
When you pilot a Boston cab, that kind of driving is expected.
I fought the urge to stop by Sam’s Charles River Park penthouse. I’d just check to see if he was home yet, I told myself. See if a female voice answered the buzzer, I told myself. Bullshit, I told myself. Who are you kidding?
I stuck a tape in my boom-box, working by feel in the dark. Bonnie Raitt strummed the first chords of “Streetlights,” then the drums came in and I sang along. The mix of blues and Motown on that album soothes my Detroit native bones.
At the corner of Washington and Eliot, in the brass heart of the Zone, the weed-free lawns of Lincoln existed on some other planet. It amazes me that people from Lincoln speak the same tongue as folks who inhabit the Zone.
I speak Lincoln, but I speak Zone with a better accent, more authority. Oh, it’s changed some since my cop days. The pizza shack has a fresh coat of red paint, already covered with graffiti. “Liberate El Salvador,” it says over and over, interspersed with Spanish insults involving Alberto’s mother and a dog. The peek-a-boo theater has new tinted window glass. Developers are eating up the vacant lots and empty buildings, encroaching fast. Some of the porno shops have fled to Saugus, Revere, Stoughton, any unsuspecting town that’ll take them. The Naked I’s still there, but the Pussy Cat Lounge is gone, its infamous runway sold at auction.
Every guy on the street looked like a sailor, a pimp, or an undercover cop.
When I’m in the Zone I try to see nothing but surface. I study the light bulbs that make up the signs, the mica chips in the sidewalks, the strippers’ photos on the billboards.
Usually it doesn’t work. That’s one of the reasons I quit being a cop. I see more than I want to, more than I can handle without turning to mush or turning to stone.
The Zone is Boston’s sewer, the drain that sucks down the ones who can’t quite swim. The men and women prowling the nighttime streets are mostly old hands at survival, veterans whose eyes have that timeless frozen hardness. It doesn’t take the young ones long to develop the look. Children huddle in doorways, shivering and swearing, talking big. The hookers seem hungrier every year, “tough” painted on their faces along with the makeup. Hypodermic syringes float across puddles of urine. I always wonder, what happened, what happened to these people?
What happened to Valerie Haslam that made her think she’d be better off here?
The lights were out in Renney’s flat at the back of the alleyway. I circled the Zone’s perimeter, crisscrossed the streets, loitered in spaces reserved for fire hydrants. Nobody really looks at a cab. I rescued a scared couple who’d blundered in from the theater district, ferried them to the posh Westin Hotel. They gave me a big tip, and said they hadn’t realized Boston was so dirty.
I got into a routine with the cab: drive a little, wait a little, check the lights at Renney’s, look under the streetlamps at the gatherings of boys and girls. Prostitutes use the streetlamp glare to advertise the merchandise. The old folks, the homeless, don’t care about the lights. They congregate near the heating grates.
At the end of an hour what I really wanted was a bullhorn on the top of the cab. “You!” I’d holler, my voice booming like God Almighty’s, the next time some jerk cut me off with a right turn from the left-hand lane. “You, in the red Trans Am! Stupid move, asshole! Stupid move!”
Boston drivers earn their reputation. In Detroit, where I learned to drive, they had respect for automobiles.
Once I thought I saw my client, Jerry Toland, but the boy hugging the streetlamp was younger than Jerry, thinner, with brown hair. He was talking to a blonde whose skirt covered her hips but not her thighs. She kept moving those legs, marching up and down, swinging her arms against the cold. Her breath was a frosty puff of cigarette smoke.
Once I thought I saw Sam, but it was just wishful thinking, daydreaming at night. The kind of daydreaming that fogs up the windshield.
I like Sam. I like sex. I like my independence, and I don’t like one-night stands. Maybe I should put an ad in the personals.
I counted the number of cop cars. I kept my eyes peeled for the gray Caprice, Mooney’s hooker, Valerie Haslam. The lights in Renney’s place stayed dark.
Three hours later my knee hurt, my backside was numb, I’d run out of tapes, and I was damned tired of waiting for somebody else to make a move. I screeched a corner and caught the neon flash of a Budweiser sign. It made me think about 2 A.M. closing time, and I found the cab heading, almost by itself, toward the bar where Mooney’s difficulties had begun.
I parked in a loading zone, wishing I had one of those Officer on Duty cards to save me from a ticket.
Jamming my driving cap low on my forehead, I stuffed my hair underneath and grabbed my down vest off the passenger seat. It has a shapeless cut, and I didn’t want anybody to think I’d mistaken the Blue Note for a dating bar. Stooping my shoulders, I went straight to the bar and sat on a vacant stool in the darkest corner of a dark room.
I needn’t have bothered. At one-thirty in the morning, Dracula could perch on a bar stool in a dive like this and get served without comment. The old guy closest to me wore dirty woolen gloves with the fingers cut off. He was reading a tabloid with the headline: MIDGET TRAINS TO BE ASTRONAUT IN CLOTHES DRYER.
I ordered a Jack Daniel’s.
I’m not a drinker. I never acquired the taste, but I figured the bartender would be happier to talk to a whiskey drinker at three-and-a-quarter a pop than a beer guzzler at a buck-twenty-five. Not that I’d decided to question the bartender, a skinny young guy who looked wide awake, smooth, and ready to lie.
The room was maybe twenty by thirty, paneled with phony wood on the bar side. The other walls had started out yellow, but were faded to tan and splashed with water stains from leaky overhead pipes. It may have been the yellowish light, but everybody in the bar looked faded, too.
Two working girls had moved chairs close to a radiator and kicked off their spikes to toast their feet against the hot metal. One wore a platinum wig; one had a punky shock of blonde hair that could have been her own. The white-haired one wore mesh stockings. The blonde was flirting long distance with a lone man at a table.
Besides my tabloid reader, there were three male customers. One was a sailor, a foreigner by the oddly shaped cap. The other two were medium-sized men. Brown hair, average height, average build, nondescript in every way. Guys who’d perfected the art of hiding in plain sight.
No wonder Mooney had recalled so few witnesses.
The Jack Daniel’s burned the back of my throat.
A man came in with a surge of cold air and sat at a table in the back, nodding to the two hookers as he passed. He wore a lined raincoat that masked his bulk, belted without defining a waist. Something about the way he moved was familiar. I watched his reflection in the dusty mirror behind the bar. He waved at the bartender, who poured a double scotch and hustled over.
A regular.
He had dark, greasy hair, big ears, a pear-shaped face with cheeks so plump they bulged. His thi
n lips seemed stretched by the cheeks, fixed in a permanent, but not a friendly, grin. He wore wire-rimmed glasses.
The bartender answered my wave. I was about to slide my card on the bar and ask him where he’d been the night Mooney had a fight when the man in the raincoat yelled for another drink.
I don’t forget voices. I remembered his. He was a cop.
“Beer,” I said hastily, slipping my card back in my pocket. I wanted to stay undercover, too.
The bartender raised an eyebrow.
“Whatever’s on draft,” I said.
I couldn’t recall the cop’s name. I don’t think our paths had crossed more than twice during my whole six-year tenure, but I’d talked to him on the phone. So he must have worked out of another division. Area D, maybe. Yeah, Area D.
The man next to me flipped the page. PRINCESS DI SPEAKS TO UFO ALIENS, it said.
The bartender and the cop repeated the business with the double scotch, but this time there was a whispered discussion between the two men. I couldn’t hear a word. I nursed my drink. It was almost closing time.
The bartender disappeared into a back room, came out with a middle-aged guy who walked with a stutter and a limp, leaning heavily on a cane. The man made his way over to where the cop sat. I watched the confrontation in the mirror.
They didn’t say much, but what they said was soft and furious. Then the man in the raincoat lifted his untouched second drink and slowly, very slowly, poured it on the floor. The limping man lifted his cane like a weapon. The cop said something and the man reconsidered. The hand and the cane came down. He turned with as much dignity as he could muster and limped away. Then the cop in the raincoat headed out the door. I didn’t see him pay his tab.
I laid my money on the bar and followed.
CHAPTER 18
Imitating drunks I have known, I turned right when I came out the door, hesitated, then veered left as if I couldn’t make up my mind which way to go. A teenager in a T-shirt and jeans hurried by, clutching a white paper bag. I stumbled twenty paces and peered down a dismal alley. The man in the raincoat had disappeared. He must have had a car waiting nearby.
I shivered and zipped my vest against the wind. It had picked up, whirling the Styrofoam fast-food cartons down the gutter, stinging my ears. I stuck my hands in my pockets, fumbled for the car keys, and made my way back to the loading zone. No ticket. No broken windows. No dented fenders.
Was the Blue Note a regular cop watering hole? Was the guy in wire-rims keeping the place under surveillance? Did the bartender know the guy was a cop, or just that he drank Johnny Walker doubles on the rocks?
And what was this pouring-liquor-on-the-floor routine? Not the best way to stay incognito.
I decided on a few more passes. Closing time is a good time to circulate. When the bars shut down, the hookers come out.
I was letting my questions stew, driving on automatic pilot, when I saw Marla.
Marla’s a regular, a lady I used to arrest maybe once every three months. She’s got four kids in state care, and a drug habit that keeps her working the streets. A detox veteran, she never seems to take the cure for long. I keep hoping she’ll change, but I guess she’s doing the best she can.
In a red mini topped by a shiny black jacket, she must have been freezing. Her high heels were sprained-ankle specials. I have no idea of Marla’s age. Her oldest kid must be fifteen.
I blocked the crosswalk and she hollered nasty things about me and my ancestors until I stuck my head out the window and waved.
“Hop in,” I said.
“How come?” She is, like most hookers, suspicious.
I brandished the cash my last fare had donated.
“Who you supposed to be tonight, girl?” she said, opening the door and climbing into the passenger seat. “Turn up the heater, for Christ’s sake.”
The last time I saw Marla I was decked out as a sister hooker. She could have killed my cover, but she kept quiet.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said.
“Where we going?”
“Just cruising. I’ll put you down wherever you say.”
“Looking for somebody,” she repeated. “Down here.”
“Right.”
“Honey, down here is where you come not to be somebody,” she said. “Ain’t got no somebodies ’round here.” She chuckled and nodded and I wondered what she was using to get high. I wanted to launch into a speech about AIDS and clean needles, but figured she was in no shape to pay me any mind.
“Remember Janine, with the tattoos?” I asked.
“The tattooed lady?” Marla stared out the side window. Her voice was low, the words slurred. “I think she gone away from here. Is this all the heat this junk heap puts out?”
“I saw her last night,” I said.
Marla shook her head. “Lots of gals look like Janine. Seems to me I heard she got sick or something.”
“Remember who you heard that from?” I asked.
“Nah.”
“Remember when?”
“Nah.”
I sighed and said, “How about a new one? A real young white chickie, brown hair, brown eyes, five-four?”
“She a somebody?”
“Family in Lincoln,” I said.
“You ever try kicking that heater?” Marla asked.
I passed over my picture of Valerie. It was getting a handled look to it, edged curved and worn. I flicked on the dome light so she could see better. The streets were empty and the driving easy. Most of the boys and girls had scored for the night or given up and found shelter. There was a little action in front of the bus depot, but the bitter wind was an effective crackdown on prostitution.
Dead time, the cops used to call it.
Marla stared at the picture so long I thought she’d nodded off. Then she said, “I think I could have seen her—for what it’s worth.”
“If it’s true, it’s worth. If it’s not, it’s not.”
“Honey, I don’t tell lies to no ex-policewoman. I expect you got friends.”
“A couple,” I said.
“I know you ain’t gonna sic ’em on me. But I do think maybe I saw this child. She wearing shoes like you wear to the senior fucking prom. White silky stuff, and I think they ain’t gonna stay that color long, girl.”
“Where was she?”
“Corner,” Marla said. “Under some lamppost. I tell you I wasn’t takin’ too much note exactly where I was.”
“She alone?”
“A couple gals with her. Rhonda, I think, maybe. You remember Rhonda? She talking to some dude, your girl.”
“Pimp?”
“A john, maybe. White boy. Maybe a hustler. Maybe chickenhawk. Prettiest dude I ever seen. Gold hair like a picture in a church.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Dunno,” she said. “Days, you know, they go on by.”
“Prettiest dude I ever seen” sounded like Geoffrey Reardon to me.
“It wasn’t tonight, was it?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I remember tonight okay, I think,” she said.
So Reardon had lied. If it was Reardon.
“Tell me more about this guy,” I said.
“Honey, I got to be going. You can let me off at the bus station, okay?”
“This guy with the blonde hair,” I said.
“Yeah? So what about him?”
“Seen him around?”
“Just the once. Kind of boy you remember.”
We haggled a little for old times’ sake, and then I gave her a twenty and dropped her at the corner of St. James. I spent the next hour holed up near my alleyway, trying to keep warm and awake. The lights never went on at Renney’s. No Valerie. No Caprice. No Janine. No unnamed cop in a bulky raincoat.
On the bright side, I didn’t even put a ding in the cab.
CHAPTER 19
Back home, I spent fifteen bleary-eyed minutes deciphering notes stuck under the magnets on my refrigerator door. Roz had scrawl
ed a message from Spider telling someone, probably herself, not to miss ProtoSlime at the Rat, ProtoSlime being some rock group and the Rat being Rathskeller in Kenmore Square, a hangout of bizarre repute. There was a note that said “peanut butter,” meaning she was running out of it, and one that said “check out toilet!”
Sometimes Roz answers the phone and sometimes she doesn’t, depending on her mood and hair color du jour, so I have a telephone answering machine. Its red light glowed steadily. Either Reardon hadn’t gotten around to reading Valerie’s diary, hadn’t found anything relevant therein, or had ripped up my card as soon as he’d ushered me out his office door.
The latter possibility seemed the most likely, what with his lying about not seeing Valerie, so I tossed the place until I found the phone book most likely to contain the address of a man who worked in Lincoln. The Metro West Directory—Ma Bell’s attempt to forge an identity for Boston’s western suburbs—was underneath a potted plant in my bedroom.
No Reardon, Geoffrey. I searched some more and found the Boston phone book propping open a kitchen closet.
Reardon, Geoffrey L., lived at 228 Dudley Street, Somerville—a low-rent address. Since I have little respect for the sleep of people who lie to me, I dialed, 4 A.M. notwithstanding. I got no answer. A deep sleeper, or a man who slept away from home.
With his looks he could sleep anyplace he wanted, I thought, summoning courage to check out the second-floor bathroom. I eased open the door, saw chocolate tile, holes and pipes. A large carton rested in a corner. Peeking inside I thought I saw, yes, I did see, a perfectly appalling electric blue toilet.
Must be in transit to another bathroom, I told myself. I thought about rousing Roz. Maybe she was sleeping with someone I could question concerning the blue toilet. I decided this was not something I wanted to deal with in the wee hours and contented myself with writing a note: “Do not install this toilet!!!” and taping it to the box. Then I got undressed, unwound the Ace bandage from my knee, and pulled the covers over my head.
