Hardware (The Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries)

by Linda Barnes

  I stuffed two pillows lengthwise in my bed, threw the quilt over them, and tucked them in like a baby.

  I slid up the window sash, going for speed rather than silence. It banged like a shot in the night. Listen up, neighbors, I thought.

  I’ve lived in this house since I was sixteen. Since my mother died in Detroit, and I got sent to live with her older sister because nobody else wanted me. For a while I wasn’t sure Beatrice wanted me either. I always kept an escape hatch. A downspout to an elm tree, a five-foot drop.

  I hadn’t used it since I was eighteen. Lighter, scrappier, with fewer broken bones and scars and sprained ankles. At eighteen I never, never, thought about falling.

  Didn’t have that back-of-the-neck tingle to contend with either, the image of a gun barrel aimed at my heart or my head.

  The downspout was less than firmly connected to the roof. Had it always had that sway, that slight bounce? I twined my legs and inched my way down in blackness. The tree. How far to its sheltering branches? As soon as I had the thought, one poked itself at my behind. A skinny branch. No help. I shinned farther down the spout, praying it would hold, testing the area around my feet for a good crotchlike branch. It ought to fucking be there. I hadn’t pruned the damned tree.

  I stepped into it and sank low. I could hear voices from my room. The bedroom light flashed on. Good. Ruin their night vision. Suddenly it snapped off. I held on to the branch and extended my body full-length. If anybody was gazing out the living room window, he’d have an easy pickoff. Quick drop and roll, or protect the ankle? I heard a shout that made up my mind for me. Quick drop, forward roll, out of the crouch running.

  Keith’s seemed miles away.

  “Nine one one,” I hollered through the door as soon as I heard the jangle of chain.

  “What?” he said.

  “Yell. Life and death. Whatever the hell you can think of to make it as top priority as top priority gets.”

  “What? Where are you—?”

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” I screamed. “Just call the police.”

  Then I really ran.

  FORTY-THREE

  A spindly black ladder rested against the back of the house. Like “Frank,” they must have slipped in through the kitchen window. Why hadn’t I nailed it shut?

  I had choices: I could enter the same way; I could wait for the cops. Turnaround time on the 911 depended on intangibles: who was riding dispatch; what else was going down in Cambridge tonight. Would Keith Donovan choose the right words? “In progress. Breakin. Shots fired.” I should have told him the code. He knew hospital lingo, not cop talk. I wriggled my bare toes in the freezing grass, crossed my arms, and tucked my hands under my armpits to keep them warm.

  They had Lauren. Lauren might give up Joey. Lauren, believing they wanted the actual culprit, would talk. I imagined Joey, locked in the big closet, hearing voices in the dark.

  I dug my pistol deeper into the back of my jeans, made sure the tank top covered it. Then I rang the front doorbell. I didn’t have my keys.

  I kept ringing. Got a good rhythm going. Twenty-two times before Roz said, “Who’s there?”

  “Me.”

  “Run!” she yelled. “You don’t wanna be here.”

  The door swung open and Mitch—Sam’s brother, good old Mitch, the middle boy—grabbed my wrist and hauled me inside.

  “Where’d you go?” he demanded. He was dressed in baggy black sweats. His face was ruddy and his breath came hard.

  “Where do you think? You didn’t cut the phone lines on the whole block.”

  He chewed his lower lip. You could practically see wheels turning in his head as he glanced at his watch. “Give me the computer disks and we’re history. We can forget this.”

  “It’s gone too far for a kiss-off,” I said.

  “She packing?” one of Mitch’s associates asked. I recognized the big goon from Sam’s apartment. He was gleefully dangling Roz by her hair, one meaty hand twined in the colored strands. A bizarre marionette, she barely managed to balance on the tips of her toes.

  “Here’s her piece,” Mitch said scornfully, waving my old .38. The bottom left-hand drawer of my desk hung open. Must have busted the lock. “Some big-time investigator. Keeps her gun wrapped in her ex’s undershirt. Sam told me all about it. She couldn’t bronze her ex’s balls, so she keeps the shirt for a trophy.”

  “It’s just you, Mitch, right?” I asked, feeling the weight of the new .40 sag my waistband. “Solo. Gil and Tony don’t know.”

  “About what?” he said with an innocent smirk.

  I didn’t like taking my eyes off Mitch, but I had to view the damage. Lauren, sprawled on a chair near the arch leading to the dining room, clasped a hand to a reddened cheek. An unfamiliar man loomed over her.

  She caught my eye, inhaled; she was ready to speak.

  “I can’t believe Papa G knows,” I said, jumping in before Lauren could open her mouth.

  “Always yapping,” Mitch complained.

  “You’re the mouth, Mitch,” I continued, willing Lauren to shut up. “Volunteering that crap about Sam selling the company. I almost believed you. On the whole, you did a hell of a job.”

  “Shut up,” Mitch said.

  “I like a good story.” The goon near Lauren had a surprisingly high voice.

  “Harry,” Mitch snapped, “shut it.”

  Harry didn’t seem intimidated. I made sure my voice was loud enough to reach him.

  “What I like best is the way you took advantage of an already existing situation. You played Cochran and Yancey like a pair of violins, Mitch. Really. You have my admiration.”

  “I don’t need it. I’ve got your gun. I want Sam’s disks.”

  “Then there’s the long-range planning,” I said. “You hire a nasty little shit like Zach, figure Gloria’ll take the kid on as a driver, but he’s only around long enough to check the lay of the land. He quits and all the pieces are in place. Small owners always feel paranoid about medallions; you stoke the paranoia with rumors, rumors spiced with truth. Yancey’s probably gonna try to move to leases, right? Make major money. You provide the spark to ignite the blaze. Simple. Two anonymous phone calls: one to Cochran; a follow-up to Yancey. You dial ’em yourself? Or did one of your goons do that?”

  “The disks,” he said, idly aiming my .38 at various parts of my body. “You shouldn’t have taken them.”

  “You pay Zach and a couple freelance punks, nobody with Mob connections, to beat up cabbies, folks from Green and White, other small companies, independents. Zach knows the routine, how to kill the lights, the safety flashers.”

  “Good for him,” Mitch said scathingly. “Never met the guy. I understand he blew himself to kingdom come.”

  “Mitchell,” I said. “You made mistakes. The drive-by was stupid. What? You got impatient? Things moving too slowly for you? Maybe you were hoping Sam might take a shift when drivers got scarce, get killed in one of your staged robberies? He never would, Mitch. You know why? He promised your dad; Sam never drives.”

  Mitchell licked his chapped lips, grunted.

  I hurried on. “You were lucky; nobody identified the drive-by shooters. Were you one of them, by the way?”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. So Zach keeps the game going, spreading the beatings around. You want it clear that Green and White’s a target, but not the target. When it comes, you want the explosion to seem like cab business, not Mob business.”

  “You always talk this much?” Mitch asked.

  “You ought to know,” I said. “You bugged G and W. You nabbed the old FBI mikes. You’re the ‘expert’ Sam trusted. He’d trust his big brother, wouldn’t he?”

  “You done?”

  “No,” I said. “Actually I’m not: I have a major question, the big one: Would you need that kind of dog-and-pony show if your dad wanted Sam dead? Papa wants i
t done, I hear it gets done.”

  “Some decisions an old man shouldn’t have to make,” Mitch said, with more dignity than I’d expected. “Sam took our money. He took Gotti money, Gambino money. Nobody takes my money.”

  “Is this about money, Mitch?” I asked. “Or is this about hate? Jealousy? You’ve known cash was leaking out of G and W for months. You hung the bugs hoping to catch Sam on tape, saying things so damning Papa would have backed you up, applauded your gumption.”

  “Sam’s a friggin’ traitor; he travels to Washington every other day. Rats on us to some Senate subcommittee. Talks to Joey Fresh, visits the old creep in jail.”

  “If he’d said one word about the Senate on tape, you’d have had him cold. He didn’t. So you tried to work a scam that couldn’t come back at you, so Papa’d never know that you’d had Sam killed. Lucky Zach blew himself up and died when he did. His type, he’d have bled you for years.”

  Lauren said, “Wait—”

  My voice rolled over hers. “I guess you wouldn’t want to go to Papa, Mitch. With nothing but computer disks for evidence. I mean, he knows you’re good with numbers, but how’s he going to react, you figure? Sam’s the baby boy. Papa loves Sammy. Papa always loved Sam. Wore out the knees on his pants praying when Sam was in Vietnam, right? Sure, the old man wishes Sam were in the business, but Papa’s proud of Sam, proud that one of his sons is making it on his own. Maybe he’s gonna decide Sam’s more valuable than you, Mitch. What exactly is it do you do for the family? You the brains of the outfit?”

  He slapped me across the face. I sucked in my breath. Lauren screamed.

  The scream wasn’t for me, wasn’t for the welt raised when Mitch’s heavy ring scratched my cheek. It was for the revolver that suddenly appeared in Harry’s hand. Lauren must have thought he was going to fire at her. Then, when he strode across the living room, at me. I flinched, didn’t turn away.

  Harry with the tenor voice, Mitch’s companion and accomplice, placed the barrel of the revolver in Mitch’s right ear. It was a small gun, a .22. I thought I recognized it from the drawer on Hanover Street. Taurus. Nine-shot cylinder.

  “Harry. What?” Mitch’s voice cracked. He dropped my .38 to the floor with a clatter.

  “From your father,” the man said in his high-pitched voice. “He told me, wait till you admitted it, in front of witnesses, that you tried to kill your brother.”

  “Come on, Harry. Put the fucker down. Sam’s fine. He’s okay. Come on—”

  Harry kept talking. “Your dad told me tell you this, Mitch, at the end. The last thing you’re gonna hear: he said tell you he only had three sons.”

  The .22 hardly made more than a pop, the sound of a champagne cork. Mitch slumped to the floor.

  Up till then, I thought the rest of us had a chance. Now the game had changed. Harry had no incentive to leave live witnesses.

  I yanked the .40 from my waistband, released the safety.

  “Scatter!” I yelled, throwing myself to the ground. Roz chinned herself on the big goon’s arm, bit, kicked, and dropped, rolled behind a chair, screaming at the top of her lungs. Lauren found the strength to propel herself into the dining room. Harry, staring sadly at the floor, like a guy who’d had to put down his favorite dog, didn’t react quickly enough. I fired and kept firing to let them know this was not going to be some easy mop-up job.

  A puff of hot air passed my left ear. It had a sobering effect.

  Lying flat on the ground, arms propped on elbows, my left hand steadying the unfamiliar .40, I stopped fooling around, sighted and aimed. Harry went down.

  I dived past him, rolled behind my desk, hitting the floor with elbows and knees, keeping the gun protected. Behind me, over my head, shots pounded the computer. The screen imploded with a boom, shattering into a hundred shards. The machinery sparked, hissing like a nest of snakes.

  I heard sirens. Welcome, blessed sirens.

  I stopped shooting. The remaining gunman staggered out the door.

  “When they question you,” I yelled at Lauren, my voice too harsh, too loud. “Shut up. Just shut up. You’re a friend who came to visit. You don’t know anything except what you saw tonight and you’re not clear on that. Nothing, nothing about Joey! Roz, you okay?”

  Silence.

  “Roz!”

  “Fucker ripped some of my hair out,” she whimpered softly.

  I breathed again.

  “Run upstairs and tell Joey to keep it zipped.”

  “Why? Shit. Yes.”

  “Hurry back down.”

  I refused to speak to a cop till Mooney came.

  FORTY-FOUR

  By the time we released him, Joey Frascatti was all too ready to leave his closet. After hours of police interrogation—separate, en masse, in Cambridge, in Boston—none of us smelled like a spring breeze, but Joey took the honors.

  Blinking in bright light, he seemed most horrified by the destruction of the computer. Its smoldering ruins bothered him a lot more than the stinking closet or the taped outline on the dark floorboards where Mitch Gianelli had bled away his life. Joey didn’t grieve over my smashed knickknacks and broken windows. The bullet holes that admitted gusts of icy wind didn’t faze him.

  He took the cash, stuffed in a knapsack and a pillowcase. He promised not to write.

  “Fuck him,” Lauren said after he’d left. Then she sat on the sofa and began a serious crying jag. As I tacked plywood, I recalled my first view of “Frank’s” tripledecker, with cardboard taped over the windows to shut out the light.

  “Lauren could have been in love with Joey all these years,” Keith said later, in bed. “After things went sour between her and Sam, she could have fixated on Joey, imagined him as the unattainable Mr. Right.”

  My head rested on his shoulder. His arm encircled me, fingertips massaging the nape of my neck. We were at his place. Crime-scene tape blocked the door to my house.

  “I hope not,” I muttered. “A world-class jerk.”

  “Turned out to be a world-class jerk. Must have been different once, to make two people care enough to give him a new life. Not many people get that, a brand-new life.”

  “Fucked up twice,” I said.

  “Which is probably what we’d all do, screw up over again.”

  “You’re full of cheer.”

  “More than I can say for you.”

  “I’m not looking forward to my next assignment,” I said.

  “Oh,” Keith responded in his noncommittal way. I could see why patients would accept the gambit, reveal their secrets.

  Not me, I thought. I don’t need a shrink, thank you, just a warm body to help me through the night.

  I have legit P.I. work. Leaving tomorrow, traveling to Traverse City, Michigan, to explain to a family how their son and brother died some twenty years ago. Quickly. In the dark. On a muddy path leading to a numbered hill. I’m leaving my new gun at home; airport security doesn’t like them. I shouldn’t need one for this case.

  Mooney says it’s a good time to leave town.

  I’ve warned Lauren and Sam that I’m planning to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth as I’ve heard it. I wasn’t there. If Floyd Markham’s family wants to kick up a fuss, so be it. Sam sets great store by their Catholicism, says they probably accept and believe that their boy is in the arms of the Lord. If your martyred son resides in eternal paradise, it won’t matter where his earthly remains are buried. Sam’s counting on that.

  I visited Joey Frascatti’s tomb. I can describe the grassy slope, the dogwood trees, the vault, the Carrara marble angel that stands guard over their son. I hope the Markham clan won’t ask me to.

  If they want proof, if the Markhams need the certainty of closure, if they demand to exhume the remains buried as Joseph Frascatti Junior, that’s up to them. It’s their call.

  Sam and Lauren are paying me well to take this trip, to face the mistake they made long ago. Sam even offered to buy me a new computer. I accepted. Nothing fancy. This time I’m pl
anning to go legit, link up to a specialized network for private eyes, Investigators’ Online Network or the PI SIG on CompuServe, whichever’s cheapest.

  If there’s going to be an information superhighway out there, I’ll be the one tooling along in a rusting pickup truck.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Two and a half weeks after Marvin’s funeral, I picked up Gloria at Mass. General. She wanted to go for a ride in her van. Her doctors didn’t object; they thought it might do her good. She wasn’t eating. Not that the docs were against a judicious diet, but she wasn’t eating, period. The skin on her upper arms was starting to hang loose. Her cheeks looked like withered apples.

  I wasn’t surprised when she asked to stop at Green & White.

  I wheeled her close to the wreckage. The ramp leading to the back room’s entry was melted and twisted into a tortured metal sculpture. Signs declared the building unsafe for habitation. The doors were boarded shut.

  “Not much to see,” I hazarded.

  “Miracle they saved the buildings on either side,” she muttered.

  “The fire department did a hell of a job,” I said.

  Gloria inhaled a deep breath of motor-exhaust-filled air. “I’m gonna rebuild,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. It was the first positive thing I’d heard her say since the disaster, unless you counted the amens at Marvin’s funeral.…

  She’d arrived and departed by ambulance. Flat on a gurney during the service, flanked by Leroy and Geoffrey. Of all the mourners in the New Faith Baptist Church, hers was the voice that rang in my dreams, chiming the amens in the calm, majestic note of a believer.

  “We still own the medallions,” she said. “We have insurance.”

  “Enough?” I asked.

  Gloria wheeled her chair forward, taking particular care to avoid a rut in the pavement.

  “Someone sent me a check,” she said. “It should cover costs. Take care of your fee.”