A Trouble of Fools (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 1)

by Linda Barnes

  “That’s it.”

  “These contests usually have other requirements. Like you and Tom have to earn fifty grand a year, and you need a major credit card, or stuff like that. You read the fine print?”

  “There isn’t any. Wait, I’ll show you.” I went into the kitchen and yanked the winning letter off the refrigerator door, brought it back, and held it out. He read it intently, almost without blinking, just the way he always studied police reports.

  “Looks okay,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, with the same lack of enthusiasm. “I should probably run it by the bunco squad. Maybe the Attorney General’s Office. There’s gotta be a catch, right?”

  “Let me take care of it,” he said, folding the letter. “You mind if I borrow this for a day or two?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Come on, Carlotta. What have you got to lose?”

  “Twenty thousand,” I said, going along with his smile.

  “Sure.”

  “Mooney,” I said, kicking off my shoes and sinking onto the creaky sofa, “thanks and all that. But don’t mess this up for me. I mean, if they’re broke, go ahead and arrest them. But if they’ve got money, even if they’re illegal or something, don’t you dare bust them until I figure out a way to collect T.C.’s twenty grand.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. “Trust me.”

  “Hah,” I said. “Trust a cop.”

  So then he started in on Margaret Devens and I dodged questions for a good fifteen minutes.

  I must have been awfully tired because I actually thought about spilling the whole thing in his lap. My natural wariness won. I admitted that Margaret Devens was my client, that the work involved was of a confidential nature, that, of course, I had every intention of cooperating with the police, but that I could not say whether today’s attack had anything to do with the work Margaret had hired me to perform. Miss Devens was, after all, under sedation, and I had no reason to assume the attack was perpetrated by other than random thugs. I mean, aren’t things getting out of hand in our fair city when decent people are attacked in their own homes—

  “Carlotta, I have heard this speech before,” Mooney said.

  “Well, hell, I don’t want to bore you.”

  “You don’t,” he said with a smile that told me he wasn’t about to take my hint to leave.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “No, thanks. That guy ever show up?”

  “What guy?”

  “You must have a lot of them around. The smoothie who said he was with the Department of Social Services. The pseudo George Robinson. Remember?”

  That’s when the first thud came from upstairs. Mooney was on his feet before I could speak. His size is deceptive. He can really move. He’d taken about three steps toward the stairs before I stopped him.

  “Relax,” I said. “It’s my tenant.”

  “I thought you lived alone.”

  “I have a tenant.”

  “He lifts weights? And drops them?”

  “She takes karate lessons. Her name is Roz. Her boyfriend and instructor owns the truck parked across the street. They’ve covered the whole third floor with tumbling mats, and sometimes they get a little loud.”

  They do get a little loud, particularly Roz, and not just when they practice karate. She picked that particular moment to start making the kind of noise that doesn’t go with fighting, and Mooney sat back down, grinning broadly. Damn Roz, anyway. To keep the lieutenant’s mind off the upstairs activity, to keep my mind off it as well, I led with the first question that sprang to my lips. I asked Mooney if he’d ever heard of an organization with the initials GBA.

  “GBA,” he said, and I swear the smile on his face got even wider. “God, I haven’t heard that one in years.”

  “What, Mooney?”

  “My dad used to belong. All my uncles. I think it’s defunct now, has been for years. It was big in the old days, the NINA days.”

  “Nina?” This was getting worse by the minute.

  “No Irish Need Apply. NINA. I forget you’re not a Boston native. Boston natives know these things.”

  “Do they know what GBA means? Am I the only one who doesn’t? And are you ever going to tell me?”

  “Let me see, I guess it stood for the Gaelic Brotherhood Association. It was a social club. Must be dying out by now.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I just came across the initials somewhere.”

  “In conjunction with your private-eye work?”

  “Mooney,” I said, “let me put it like this. The PI business is so bad, I’m seriously thinking of going back to driving a hack.”

  Chapter 13

  First thing the next morning, I locked myself in the downstairs bathroom, crouched between the cat box and the toilet, and counted the cash under the kitty litter. I stopped, overwhelmed, at $12,480, with a few piles left untotaled. I mean, what the hell, what’s a few hundred here or there? I rocked back on my heels, smacking my right elbow a mean one on the edge of the sink, and thought about safe-deposit boxes. The abundance of loot must have unnerved me because I actually considered mailing bundles of bills to myself in large manila envelopes, in spite of the fact that my experience of the U.S. Postal Service indicates that it would be more reliable to flush the money down the toilet than trust it to a mailbox. If I flushed it, at least I’d know it would eventually wind up in Boston Harbor.

  I decided to let the money stay put. T.C. didn’t seem to mind, and Roz doesn’t do cat boxes.

  Friday’s a volleyball morning, so I played volleyball. The Y-Birds won a resounding victory over some elite health club whose members didn’t want to chip their nail polish. I swam laps, ate two jelly doughnuts, drank two cups of coffee, and staked out Paolina’s neighborhood drug pusher for an hour. This time I’d brought my camera—I took candids. Wispy Beard’s customers seemed so young I started wondering if he might be dealing crack.

  Heroin, as in white powder injected into the veins, is expensive. Cocaine, as in white powder sniffed up the nose, is expensive, which puts them both within the reach of football players, rock stars, and high-tech executives, which is okay by me, because most of them are old enough to ruin their lives if they so desire. But crack, also called rock, is cheap, smokable coke. You can cook it up in your kitchen—just add baking soda and water—wait till it hardens, and chip it into saleable chunks. No chemists needed. We’re not talking sophisticated toots through rolled hundred-dollar bills. We’re talking ten, fifteen bucks for a half-hour high, not to mention addiction. The users are young. Kids. Like Paolina.

  I dialed Boston City Hospital from a vandalized pay phone, and was informed by a nasal voice that while Miss Devens’s condition continued to improve, she could not take any calls, but would be allowed to receive two visitors, members of her immediate family only, between the hours of seven and nine that evening.

  Somehow I didn’t think Eugene would show up. And I needed to talk to her before then.

  Hospitals are confusing places these days. They used to seem organized, back when the nurses wore caps that told where each one went to school. Nurses’ uniforms used to be just that: uniform. Now, anything goes, as long as it’s white, so I stopped home long enough to change into white slacks and a white cotton sweater, an outfit a bit summery for late September. I retained my scuffed, once-white Adidases. They didn’t quite cut it as typical nurse footwear, but my choices were limited—sneakers or stack-heeled peekaboo sandals. I scraped my hair back into as severe a bun as I could manage, scowled into the mirror, and departed, Margaret’s robe and slippers stuffed into an official-looking briefcase that I tucked under my arm.

  Act like you belong and folks tend to let you be. What with nurses’ strikes and part-time workers and day-night shifts, I was sure nobody would pay attention to me unless I strolled into the operating theater and started to perform brain surgery.

  I took the elevator to the fifth floor, walk
ed briskly past the nurse’s station with a crisp nod at the woman on duty, stared at my watch, and plunged ahead. Clutching the briefcase and a hospital administrator’s clipboard that I’d borrowed from a nearby desk, I entered Margaret’s room and closed the door behind me. The bed next to hers was empty this time, but looked just as forbidding with the curtains open. I yanked the chart from the end of Margaret’s bed with professional aplomb. Most of the stuff written on it was gobbledygook, but her temperature and blood pressure seemed pretty normal, which was what I wanted to know. I mean, I needed to talk to the lady, but I didn’t want the shock to kill her.

  The color TV suspended high on the far wall was tuned to some daytime game show. The sound was mercifully off, but a couple who looked like Barbie and Ken dolls were jumping up and down and pointing at a huge roulette wheel as if it were a holy vision.

  Margaret Devens’s good eye was fully open, but she wasn’t paying any attention to the animated dolls on the TV screen. The area around her purpled eye had a yellowish tinge to it. At first glance, it looked even worse than yesterday, but when she turned her head, I could see that the swelling had gone down and the eye was actually open a slit. I was wondering just how severe her concussion was when she said calmly, “Well, thank God for small favors. You’re not a nurse.”

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “That’s what they all say,” she mumbled. “Not that any of them gives a rat’s tail.”

  I smothered a smile that seemed inappropriate to the surroundings. “Remember me?” I said.

  “I know who I am,” she responded fretfully, “and I know who you are. Now please, be a good girl and march over to that front desk and get me out of this place. I’ll never get well here. They don’t let you sleep, and the food can’t be eaten. Just because I’m old and I’ve got Medicare doesn’t give them the right to keep me. Every soul who comes in here jabs me with a needle or stuffs pills down my throat or—”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I want to talk about the money in the toy chest.”

  Her mouth snapped shut, and all the animation left her face as if it had been wiped clean with a rag. She stared at the silent TV, which now displayed a young woman surveying the triumph of her day, her freshly mopped, gleaming kitchen linoleum. The happy housewife got so excited that she whirled into a little dance. Roz would have puked.

  “Miss Devens?” I got no response, so I made a production of pulling over the visitor’s chair and seating myself, just to let her know I had no intention of leaving. “Margaret?”

  She didn’t meet my gaze, and when she spoke, her lips barely moved. “I didn’t mean to say anything. It was unfair, them giving me that drug, you asking me questions—”

  “You asked me to hide the money and I did. I’d say that gives me the right to a few answers.”

  Her hands laced themselves together across the bed-clothes. The IV line was still fastened to her left hand. She fingered the tape that held it in her vein. “First you have to promise me,” she said slowly.

  “Promise you what?”

  “You’ll look for Eugene.”

  “I have been looking for Eugene.”

  She closed her eyes. Her lips were still swollen and I had to lean forward in my chair to hear her clearly. “If I answer your questions, maybe—I don’t know—maybe you’ll give it up, walk away.”

  “How can I promise before I know?”

  She opened her eyes wide. No doubt about it, the stubborn Aunt Bea streak I’d noticed while she sat in the rocking chair in my living room had been real. “If you can’t,” she said firmly, “then I think I’m much too weak to answer any questions.” Her right arm stretched out and grabbed a black box fastened to a long rubber hose. She held it so tightly her knuckles whitened. “This buzzer calls the real nurse, Miss Carlyle, and I’m sure she’ll agree with me.”

  I should have quit right then. Instead I counted to ten and said, “Hey, I brought your robe and slippers.”

  “Thank you.” Her hand poised over the call button, she was stubbornly polite.

  “Is there anything else I can bring you? A book?”

  “No, thank you.” Just as stubborn, just as polite.

  “Okay,” I said. “How about a deal? I keep looking for your brother, no matter what you tell me, provided you let me file a missing persons report with the police.”

  She closed both her eyes. The IV tube trickled liquid into her left hand. The white sheets had more color to them than her cheeks. I felt nasty bargaining with a battered old woman. I had to remember that steely streak in her before I could make myself speak.

  “Deal or no deal?” I said.

  “Deal,” she said, releasing her grip on the black box.

  “Did you recognize the man who beat you up?”

  “Man,” she said scornfully. “Men. Two of them.”

  “Did you recognize them?”

  “They had blurry faces, all bulgy. Eugene always told me keep the door on the chain, even in the daytime, but I don’t know, maybe I thought it was him coming home. I didn’t think, I just opened the door.”

  Blurry, bulgy faces sounded like stocking masks to me.

  “They knew about the money?” I asked.

  “They knew about it. I told them I didn’t have any idea what they were blathering about.”

  “Why?” I asked softly.

  She consulted the TV. It showed the roulette wheel again. She didn’t answer.

  “Just because you’re stubborn?” I insisted.

  “Yes,” she said angrily, “just because I’m stubborn.”

  “The Gaelic Brotherhood Association,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  She stared at me for a long time, stared through me like she was seeing someone else.

  “Deal or no deal?” I said.

  She took a deep breath and shuddered like it hurt her somewhere inside. “It is, it was, a social organization, folks from Ireland. It’s old. My parents belonged, my uncle Brian—”

  “I know what it was. What is it now?”

  “Maybe eight months ago, maybe a year ago, it started up again. I used to belong myself, but this time Eugene said I wouldn’t enjoy the meetings, it was just a bunch of the cabbies, and they met odd hours.” Her right hand tapped the edge of the bed restlessly and she murmured, almost to herself, “I should have known something was wrong.”

  Catholics and Jews are tied, I think, for the guilt championship of the world. Here was this old woman, beaten to a pulp, probably because of something her brother had done, blaming herself for not having the gift of second sight.

  “Go on,” I said. I probably sounded a little angry. I was.

  “That’s all he told me, all I know to this day, I swear. A harmless little social club, an excuse for a few drinks. It wasn’t till after Eugene disappeared that I looked in the toy chest. We used to hide things there, secret messages and such, when we were children. That’s why I looked. And when I saw what was there, all that money, I didn’t know what to do. I came to you.”

  “After you visited the cab company.”

  “Wouldn’t you have gone? I tried to talk to some of the men, Sean Boyle, Joe Fergus. I couldn’t find Pat—Patrick O’Grady. He might have told me something, but he was out sick. Oh, those men! Some of them I’ve known for years, and they smiled at me and said go home, don’t worry. It made me so angry I can’t even tell you. They gave the old biddy a pat on the head and said go on home, don’t trouble yourself, it’s only your one relative in the world gone missing. It’ll all turn out fine—”

  “Did you open Eugene’s locker?”

  “Locker? I didn’t know—”

  “Why didn’t you mention the money when you came to me?”

  Silence.

  “Where do you think the money came from?”

  She tried to shake her head, winced with the pain of the effort, and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you think it’s going?”

  It was a question she must ha
ve expected, but it made her hands jump as if an electric current had passed through them. She swallowed with an audible gulp. “I pray God I’m wrong, but in the old days we used to send money, the Gaelic Brotherhood Association, I mean, used to send money—to Ireland.”

  “The IRA,” I said flatly. Oh, shit. Deep shit.

  Margaret twisted her hands together, forgetting about the IV hookup. “You don’t know how it was, Miss Carlyle. You’re too young. I remember though, I remember. When I was still a child my mother took me to Boston Common and there must have been a hundred thousand Irish-Americans, all gathered together in protest against the British, for the Cause. It was so different back then, it was like another world. Before the troubles started again in the sixties, it was organized. The money was for food and clothes, to help the families of the men rotting in the British prisons, to help the children go to Catholic schools—”

  She stopped, out of words and breath, and seemed to want me to say something. “Sure,” I said. I guess I am too young. I’ve got some respect for the Irish; I’m part Irish after all. The music and the poetry are terrific. But then you’ve got the divorce laws. And the IRA …

  Margaret seemed satisfied with my one-word contribution. She started talking again, more slowly. “The American money tapered off. The fund-raisers were desperate by ’seventy-five. Noraid contributions were way down because of the horror stories in the newspapers. Children maimed. Husbands shot in front of their wives. It was too much, too much, and there was no end to it. And the trickle of money still coming stopped dead on Saint Patrick’s Day in ’seventy-seven, when the Four Horsemen said, ‘No more.’”

  “Four horsemen?”

  “Teddy Kennedy, and Moynihan, and Tip O’Neill, and Governor Carey. They spoke out against the IRA, and we listened. The groups were disbanded. The GBA stopped meeting. The churches preached against the violence. It ended.” She closed her eyes and I could tell by her pallor that I’d have to stop soon.

  “Did it end for your brother?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was flat and toneless. “I thought so then. He didn’t have much money to give, and if he’d given to the Provos, he wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. Terrorists, I call them now, even if some of them are my own people.”