A Trouble of Fools (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 1)

by Linda Barnes

  “Do you have family in Ireland?”

  “Not anymore. Not that I know of.”

  “If somebody said your brother went to Ireland, would you believe him?”

  “Not Eugene. He might have talked about going now and again. But he was like the rest of the old men at Green and White, all talk.”

  “He didn’t think life might be better there?”

  She tried to smile, battered lips and all. “One of the things my brother believed, with all his heart and soul, was that the Irish were a terrible people, if you left them in Ireland. It was his joke, that the Irish weren’t so bad once you got them away from the old sod. He used to say the trouble with Ireland is they’ve got too many Irish there.”

  The knock on the door startled me enough to bring me to my feet. It announced the entrance of an earnest young woman, who declared it time for Miss Devens to accompany her down to X-ray. A name tag was pinned to her white cardigan. Before she had a chance to continue her set speech, I said, “Nurse Hanover, this patient is a witness in a police case, and she tells me she’s been bothered by unwanted visitors.”

  “Visiting hours aren’t till seven o’clock—”

  “I know when visiting hours begin. I suggest you phone the Police Department, Area D, speak to Lieutenant Mooney, and ask him to provide a guard for Miss Devens’s door.”

  “If you think that would be best—”

  “Take care of it immediately. Personally. And until the police arrive, alert the nurse at the station to be extremely careful about who enters this room. People dressed in white tend to look alike.” I pushed back my sleeve, checked my watch, made a notation on my clipboard, and nodded a quick farewell to Margaret.

  I’m not sure, what with the state of her eyes, but I think she winked at me.

  Chapter 14

  “I need more time,” I said.

  “Let me get this straight.” The voice on the line was the same gruff bellow I’d heard the last time, belonging to “our Mr. Andrews.” I had a lot less trouble getting through to him this time. Either his name moved mountains, or I was finally getting my just reward for my charm school manners. I wolfed a bite of tuna sandwich while he summed up the situation. “You haven’t been able to reach your husband.”

  “That’s right,” I replied truthfully enough. “I’ve left messages,” I added, less truthfully.

  “And he hasn’t gotten back to you.”

  No doubt about it. This man had a grip on reality. I shooed fluffy Red Emma away from my potato chips. She adores potato chips, but then she has to drink about a gallon of water because she gets salted out.

  “Er,” the gruff voice sounded oddly hesitant. “Er, I don’t quite know how to put this, but are you and your husband having any difficulties?”

  I swallowed. “Difficulties?”

  “Of an, er, marital sort? You’re not separated, are you?”

  “Would that disqualify us?”

  “Oh, er, no. Not at all. As long as he, uh, as long as both of you show up to claim your prize.”

  “Well, like I said, I’ll keep trying.”

  “Where exactly is your husband?”

  “Why?”

  His voice got all smooth and jovial. “Oh, I just thought we might be able to phone him. Cedar Wash has operators on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  “Thomas hates to be bothered by strangers,” I said, which was an out-and-out lie. T.C. will rub up against any stranger, any time, any place. “I’ll get through. I just need time.”

  “Can you call me back in two days?”

  “Sure. No problem. Don’t give the money away till then.”

  I held the phone to my ear long after he’d hung up, because I could swear I’d heard an extra click at the beginning of our conversation. It made me wonder if someone didn’t know wiretapping was illegal.

  They’ve got this bug detector in the Sharper Image catalog, this monthly bulletin of trendy gadgetry that I get through the mail due to some computer error. Anyhow, this item only costs forty-nine bucks plus two-fifty postage, “thanks to a breakthrough in microcircuit technology.” And it only weighs two ounces, so I could keep it in my shoulder bag.

  Roz picked that moment to enter the kitchen. At least I thought it was Roz. Her hair was a bizarre shade of pink, and I wondered if she had done it on purpose or if this was the end result of all that dye. She yanked open the refrigerator. The seat of her skintight black stirrup pants looked like the seat of Roz’s skintight black stirrup pants. When she turned around, a jar of peanut butter in one hand, I knew beyond a doubt that it was Roz and that she, at least, thought her hair had turned out fine. She had a dreamy, faraway smile on her lips, in anticipation of the peanut butter, which she adores for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and she was wearing one of her signature T-shirts.

  Roz is a sweet kid, honestly, underneath the fake eyelashes, the pouty makeup, the garish jewelry, and the tough-gal, heavy-metal image. She has a fake leopard skin coat. She’s only about five two, and she’s really thin, except for these incredible breasts, which may be why she has the best T-shirt collection in the world. The messages range from “McGovern ’72” to “Tofu Is Gross” to “Stamp Out Smurfs.” Today she wore one of my favorites, a copy of the classic crimson T, with Psychotic U. emblazoned where Harvard ought to be. My absolute favorite comes from a shop in Harvard Square and is a wild shade of purple, imprinted with the following verse:

  Roses are red

  Violets are blue

  I’m schizophrenic

  And so am I

  I never comment on Roz’s appearance.

  “Yo, Carlotta,” Roz said. “How’re ya’ doin’?” She unscrewed the peanut butter jar and scooped a glob of yellowish goo onto a green-painted fingernail. We use the same refrigerator, but we buy separate supplies. Her attack on the peanut butter made me glad about that.

  I wondered if her karate-instructor boyfriend was still lurking upstairs. Roz calls him Lemon. I’m not sure if that’s his genuine nickname, or just Roz’s special term of endearment, but his real name is Whitfield Arthur Carstairs III, I swear, and when he’s not teaching karate, he’s a performance artist. Some days he stands immobile, on a soapbox, for hours, in the middle of Harvard Square. I once saw him juggle four grapefruits. He also does sporadic underground theater, and has one of the most gorgeous bodies I have ever seen.

  “You busy today?” I asked Roz.

  “Not especially,” she said. At least I think that’s what she said. Her speech was slurred by the peanut butter.

  “Want to earn a few bucks?”

  “Today?”

  She’s sharp as a tack sometimes. I don’t hold it against her. She’s at least ten years younger than I am, and she was probably weaned on television and marijuana. When she’s cleaning the house she sings TV-commercial jingles. On the other hand, she really can paint when the mood strikes her; wild abstract oils, layered with color and energy. She also does an occasional, surprisingly delicate, watercolor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Today. You have other plans?”

  “Lemon’s coming by.”

  Hah, I thought, you mean Lemon’s here. I’m a detective, for crying out loud. His truck is still parked across the street. I wondered if she thought I’d charge more rent for the two of them, or if she imagined I’d be scandalized by his overnight presence. The last thought kind of offended me. I mean, I’m not that ancient, and I’m not particularly righteous. I comforted myself by recalling the anguished and delighted grunts and groans of the night before. If Roz really wanted to keep Lemon a secret, surely she would have muted her ecstasy.

  “If he wants to earn some dough,” I said, “I can use him, too.”

  “Great,” she mumbled through the peanut butter. “What’s up?”

  “Wear working clothes. And you’d better bring rubber gloves.”

  “Rubber gloves,” she repeated. “Is this weird?”

  “The job is housecleaning. At a client’s h
ouse.”

  “Time and a half for housecleaning, if it’s not this place,” she said. She is sharp where money’s concerned.

  “Okay,” I said. I had access to a lot of cash. I gave her Margaret’s address, made her write it down. She’s scatterbrained on addresses.

  “Bring your camera,” I said. “And before you touch anything, take photos. For insurance, okay?”

  Roz brightened. She loves photography. She converted this old root cellar in the basement into a darkroom, and sometimes she stays down there for days, coming up only for an occasional hit of peanut butter.

  “No artsy-fartsy stuff, Roz,” I warned. “For a straight-arrow insurance company. And the place is a real mess. You’d better have Lemon drive his pickup so you can haul stuff away.”

  “Okay.”

  “And bring Hefty Bags.”

  “Hefty Bags, rubber gloves, and a camera,” she said. “Lemon’s gonna love it.”

  “Leave the Wesson Oil home,” I said.

  She giggled.

  “Look, Roz, seriously, here’s the key to the front door, and if anybody rings the doorbell, check them out before you open it. The lady who lives there is mixed up in some heavy-duty shit, and I don’t want you taking any chances.”

  “Me and Lemon—”

  “I know the two of you can kick anybody’s ass around the block, Roz, but you can’t kick a gun unless they let you get close enough.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be careful.” She returned the peanut butter jar to the fridge. Breakfast was evidently over. I wondered what poor Lemon subsisted on. “Hey,” she said, “did I tell you that guy came by again?”

  “Huh?” Sometimes I don’t catch on very fast either.

  “That guy you went to school with.”

  “School,” I repeated. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I thought U. Mass., probably, but he looked kinda well dressed for that.”

  “You’ve seen him with me? Here?”

  “No.”

  “He have a name?”

  “Yeah. Let’s see. Smith. Roger Smith. Didn’t you see the note on the fridge?”

  We both stared at the forest of paper on the refrigerator door. Time for a little local housecleaning, I thought.

  “Oh, Roger Smith,” I said finally.

  “A really nice guy,” she said. “You dating or what?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “Huh?” It was her turn to look bewildered.

  “I don’t know anybody named Roger Smith, and I never went to any school with anybody named Roger Smith.”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know?”

  I shook my head sadly. The phantom had struck again. According to Roz, he’d made two appearances at the front door: the first, about five days ago; the second, the day before yesterday. The first time, he’d worn a navy blazer, charcoal slacks, black loafers, a light blue shirt, and a patterned tie. The second time, he’d worn a three-piece gray suit with a faint stripe, white shirt, dark tie, wing tips. He’d been sorry to miss me, just wanted to know how I was doing. Was I still driving the Toyota? Did I have another car? Did I ever buy that place on the Cape?

  Huh?

  I have to say that for an artist, Roz was terrible when it came to describing the guy’s face, which tickled me because she had his clothes down cold. Maybe she concentrates on bodies. Lemon is certainly evidence of that. She told me the guy had a definite mauve aura. When I questioned her closely, it sounded like he was the same man who’d chatted with Gloria, the same preppy, good-looking soul who’d passed himself off to Mooney as Mr. George Robinson of the Department of Social Services.

  “Was he alone in the house, in any room, even for the briefest moment?” I asked.

  “Well, I guess,” Roz said reluctantly, “I mean, when I went to get a piece of paper to write his name down and all.”

  Shit. I was definitely going to buy that bug detector.

  Chapter 15

  While Roz and Lemon were over at Margaret’s—cleaning, I sincerely hoped—I rescued Red Emma from T.C., who had her treed in the curtains. I fed and watered the menagerie, and tried to teach the dumb bird more Marxist propaganda. Then I hauled out the phone books, Boston and suburban, and ran my finger down the list of Carlyles, hoping to find a genuine Thomas C. of a slightly larcenous bent. There was a Thomas D. Carlyle in Brockton, and a Thomas C. in Walpole, who had the nerve to spell his last name Carlisle. There were several T. Carlyles, and I dialed them all, and sure enough, they were Thelmas and Theodoras and Tinas; females every one. I gave it up, puttered around, picked some guitar, which I found frustrating, since I don’t practice enough to sound the way I used to sound, not to mention the way I’d like to sound. I gave up and fed a cassette of Rory Block’s “High Heeled Blues” album into the tape deck, because she sounds the way I’d like to sound, effortless and funky. I sang along while I answered the mail—which for me means shoving unread junk mail into those postage-paid envelopes enclosed along with the other junk mail.

  After making a dent in the mail pile, I began a detailed report of the Eugene Devens case thus far. Turning my chicken-scratched notes into typed sentences reminded me that I hadn’t talked to old Pat, the cabbie, so I dialed Gloria’s back-room number, the unlisted one, and asked for his address.

  I may have woken her up. She sounded downright hostile, but then if I were a cab dispatcher, I wouldn’t even own a phone of my own, I’d get so tired of answering the damn things. It took a while, but she eventually gave me a number and street in Dorchester.

  Before leaving the house, I took two precautions. Using most of a roll of wide duct tape, I neatly joined the two litter boxes in the downstairs bathroom, making a money sandwich. The ensemble looked like a slightly high-rise cat box.

  I also took my gun out of its wrappings in the locked bottom drawer of my bureau, and loaded it.

  You can’t live in Boston without acquiring a certain awareness of the IRA—initials spray-painted on mailboxes, fund-raising announcements tacked to laundromat bulletin boards, shamrock green collection cans strategically positioned beside certain cash registers in certain bars. But to judge by the Boston press, most of the juicy IRA stories—the bombings, the kidnappings, the shootings—are either foreign or ancient history, far away or long ago. The only recent local cause célèbre that came to mind was the Valhalla affair.

  The Valhalla was a gunrunner, an “alleged” gunrunner, I should say, that allegedly steamed out of Gloucester Harbor one September morning in ’85, carrying more than $1 million in alleged munitions (guns, bombs, et cetera) to the alleged Irish Republican Army. A federal grand jury had been investigating the hell out of everybody who had anything to do with the Valhalla, but so far, after a full year, no indictments had been handed down, which made me wonder about the ancestry of the jury members. In the meantime, one guy, an alleged informant, had disappeared under “very mysterious circumstances which rule out the possibility of flight,” according to the Boston Globe, and the rumor had duly circulated that he’d been taken out by the Boston IRA.

  On the strength of that rumor, and just in case I ran into Margaret’s stocking-masked thugs, there I was, staring at a .38-caliber S&W with a four-inch barrel, a ringer for standard police issue, and believe me, standard police issue revolvers have nothing but bad memories for me.

  From where I stand, the whole bloody Irish carnage makes no sense. It might have made sense once, but now it seems to roll on from force of habit as much as anything else, turning into some kind of modern Hydra. Chop off one head—one British soldier, one Irish Republican, one Protestant UDR man—and ten more sprout from the bleeding wound. From the heart of Massachusetts, the “troubles” seem more mythic than real. There are too many factions, too many righteous grievances, too little hope of reconciliation. A whole generation of children has been born to violence in Northern Ireland. It’s what they expect from life. For them, the Glorious Struggle is daily life. Something To Do. A Way To Pass T
he Time Until You Die. Or, more likely, until some passerby, who chose the wrong street at the wrong time on the wrong day, dies.

  I prepared myself for any encounter with the Boston branch of the IRA by adding two pounds’ worth of gun to my overcrowded, overweight shoulder bag. A lot of effect that was going to have on hundreds of years of oppression, right?

  I stopped at a liquor store on the way, and made the sort of cheap-whiskey purchase that raised the young clerk’s eyebrows. I remembered Pat’s taste.

  The old man hadn’t made a fortune driving a hack. The address I hunted was in an area folks escaped from if they could. Pat’s apartment was on the second floor of the skinniest, seediest triple-decker on a block that had seen better days. The outside of the place was gray, but I couldn’t tell if that was the intended color or the result of years of bleaching sun and lack of care. Not a bush, not a sapling. Clumps of crabgrass made an ugly excuse for a lawn. The porches on the top two levels sagged. A single lawn chair perched on the front stoop. Faded strips of once-gaudy yellow, blue, and red webbing drooped dispiritedly. One broken strip trailed on the ground.

  On the spur of the moment, I reached into the depths of my shoulder bag, and groped around until I located the gold pin with the GBA initials, the one I’d found in Eugene’s locker. I held it up to the light. It was scratched and slightly bent. I stuck the pin into the collar of my blouse.

  Patrick Day O’Grady was my man. There was a button to push under the crooked nameplate, but the door to the stairwell was ajar, propped open with a broken cedar shingle, so I just walked up to the second floor and rapped on the door. I could hear a TV voice, loud over organ music.

  I counted to ten and knocked louder. The hallway was as attractive and well kept as the outside of the house. Either the first- or third-floor tenants had eaten something greasy last night. Bad hamburger, maybe. I tried not to breathe, and banged my fist against the door hard enough to rock it on its hinges.

  I heard a shuffling on the other side of the door, mixed with a syncopated tapping sound, and then a determined and familiar old voice ordered me to go away and stop bothering an old man, you should be ashamed of yourself, all of you young kids with nothing better to do than taunt an old man who worked every day of his life and now was brought to this, and don’t bother breaking in because I haven’t got anything worth stealing, and the German shepherd would as soon eat you as look at you.