A Trouble of Fools

by Linda Barnes

  “Could your brother be staying with a friend?”

  “I’m afraid I—I don’t know his friends as well as I might.”

  “Does he drink?” Considering cabdrivers I have known, I thought I’d better get that one out of the way.

  “Some. At an Irish pub.”

  Ah, now I knew where to look. There are two hundred Irish pubs in Boston. Maybe another hundred in Cambridge.

  “To excess?” I inquired, putting it as politely as I knew how.

  “At times,” she answered cautiously. “You know what men are.”

  I ignored that one. “Has he gone off on benders?” I asked. “At times?”

  “Well, I can’t say no. After Betty died, he’d go off once in a while. He’d get, well, bleak-looking, and then he’d be out a night or two. But it’s been years now. And he never stayed away so long. Never.”

  I bit into a cookie. “Did he take things with him?”

  “Things?”

  “Did you check his room? Did he pack a bag?”

  “If he had I wouldn’t be here, would I? If he’d taken a trip, I’d know where he was. My brother and I are close, truly we are.” She fumbled in her lumpy handbag. “I brought his picture,” she said, and when she looked at her brother’s photograph, her face melted. She tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth quivered, and tears welled up in her eyes.

  “May I see it?”

  She offered it with a shaky hand.

  If there ever was a man with the map of Ireland on his face, Eugene Paul et cetera was it. I recognized him from the cab company, remembered him vaguely, a cheerful red-faced man with unruly hair. He looked a bit like his sister with a fuller face, minus most of the worry lines. He looked like he knew how to have a good time.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Fifty-six. Doesn’t look it, does he? Baby of the family and all. Spoiled.”

  He seemed a lot younger, boyish even. Charming.

  When my Aunt Bea looked at you in a certain way, you knew all was lost. She knew you hadn’t done your homework. She knew you’d failed that history test. She could see clear to the back of your soul, and plumb the depths of unworthiness lurking there. Imagine my surprise when I glanced up and found Margaret Devens peering at me with eyes like that—determined, purposeful eyes.

  Quickly, she turned away, and made fluttery motions with her hands, distractions that came too late. I’d recognized her.

  No, I didn’t know her from some other time or place, not personally. But I have known women her age, women of steel who grew up in an era when feathers and fans and batted eyelashes were the name of the game. The smart ladies learned the score, played along. I recognized Margaret Devens’s silly gestures and flowered dresses and wooly pink coats and white cotton gloves for what they were: camouflage fatigues.

  She might have slipped past me if she hadn’t been sitting in Aunt Bea’s chair. Aunt Bea’s shawls and scarves and bangles and hats were armor-plated, every one.

  “What exactly do you want?” I asked. “To know where he is? To talk to him, to see him? Do you want him to move back?”

  “I want you to find him,” she said, smiling and nodding and dithering away. “That’s all.”

  “Women?” I asked.

  “Possibly.” She blushed demurely, and for a moment I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. I mean, she was sitting in Aunt Bea’s chair. Maybe I’d had some kind of flashback. Certainly there was nothing in her demeanor now to suggest anyone but a dear old biddy come from church to set her mind at rest about her brother.

  So I didn’t mention the dire possibilities—the hospitals, the refrigerated drawer in the morgue—because of the blush, out of deference for her age, because of the look on her face when she saw her brother’s photo. I don’t have a little brother, but I’ve got sort of a little sister, and I have the feeling that when I look at Paolina’s school photos, I get a goofy expression on my face, too.

  “How much do you charge?” she asked.

  I glanced down at her shoes. My full-price clients are mainly divorce lawyers with buffed cordovan Gucci loafers. Margaret Devens wore orthopedic wedgies with run-down heels, much worn, much polished, shabbily genteel. My pay scale started a downward slide.

  “I’m not a charity case,” she said firmly. “You tell me the same price the rich ones pay. I’ve plenty of money. What do the wealthy pay you?”

  “Three hundred a day plus expenses,” I said, knocking a hundred off the top. “But with missing persons cases, I generally take some expense money up front, and charge a flat fee on delivery. Maybe I’ll find him with one phone call. Maybe I never will.”

  “Will a thousand do for a retainer? Or an advance, whatever you call it.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t the cat’s twenty K, but it would sure help pay the bills.

  I waited for her to pull out a checkbook, but she took a fat leather change purse out of her handbag. She crowded it behind her purse, trying to block my view.

  By sitting up tall, I had a perfectly clear view of a huge wad of bills. She peeled off ten hundreds, squared the edges neatly, and placed them on the cookie plate.

  So, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I didn’t think something was fishy right from the start.

  Chapter 2

  “Workers of the world, unite!” I intoned, enunciating carefully.

  “Fluffy wanna drink,” Red Emma chirped. Seeing she hadn’t pleased me, she tried again. “Fluffy is a dirty bird,” she said.

  “Fluffy is a twit,” I responded.

  To tell the truth, I didn’t rename her just because she squawked so much. “Red Emma,” Emma Goldman, the infamous anarchist of the teens and twenties, was one of my mom’s heroes. One of mine, too, I guess, even if I tend to see her as Maureen Stapleton in Reds. I grew up on my mom’s glorious tales about her mom and the New York garment workers’ strike. My grandma-to-be evidently bopped a scab on the head, got caught, and spent the night in the Bowery lockup. My mom made that night in jail seem like the Medal of Honor—my dad called grandma a jailbird. As I grew older I recognized those as fighting words, and I’d sit on the front stoop till the barbs and pots stopped flying through the air.

  Maybe I could teach the bird to swear. She seemed to have no trouble with F words.

  If I could teach her to swear intelligibly, I could put her on the phone the next time some hospital’s Patient Information Department zapped me on hold before I could blurt out a protest.

  As you may have gathered, I had not located Eugene Devens at the local hospitals. Unless he’d contracted that soap opera standard, amnesia, he was healthy and managing on his own.

  Amnesia. Perhaps if I rapped Red Emma gently on the head, her previous existence as Fluffy would evaporate. She would return to budgie infancy, ready for me to instruct her further in what dad and I used to call The Sayings of Chairman Mom.

  One good thing. I had gotten through to the morgue, and they didn’t have any unclaimed corpses that matched up with Eugene Devens.

  “Budgies of the world, unite!” I said to the parakeet. “You have nothing to lose but your brains.”

  “Fluffy wanna cracker,” she replied hopefully.

  Seeing that we’d reached an impasse, I said good night, stuck her back in the cage, and yanked the hood down, providing instant sunset. That bird has my late Aunt Bea’s exact voice. She’s just as stubborn, too. Sometimes it’s like being haunted.

  I fed T.C. his dinner, pulled a windbreaker over my Grateful Dead T-shirt, and checked my jeans. Both knees intact. I made sure all the lights were on before I left. That way the burglars don’t trip over anything. I leave the radio blaring, too, since T.C. is not much of a watchcat.

  I was going to have to do some legwork for Margaret Devens’s thousand. Legwork I was looking forward to with, shall we say, mixed emotions.

  My old red Toyota kicked over on the second try. I love that car, first one I ever bought, and still feisty. I indulge my passion for red in a
utomobile ownership. Cars don’t have to complement your hair.

  Green & White is not one of your more prosperous cab companies. It’s tucked into a block of cut-rate auto-glass dealers and used-rug shops that front on the less-than-scenic Mass. Pike. The garage is ugly yellow brick, with an interior done in Early Oilstain. Eight cabs can park inside, as long as nobody needs to open any doors. There’s one hydraulic lift, just in case the mechanic gets ambitious. The mechanic they had in my day rarely had the energy to flip the pages on the girlie calendar.

  The office is the real treat. The two eight-by-four windows have never been washed. If you didn’t know that, you might think they were supposed to be opaque. The left-hand Venetian blind, a blotch of black smudges trisected by strips of yellowed tape, is out-uglied only by the right-hand one, which is dirtier, and broken to boot, so that the slats list to the left. A pegboard full of car keys is the most attractive item of decor. You wouldn’t want to peer in any of the corners.

  I hacked part-time while I majored in sociology at U. Mass.–Boston. It taught me how to get around the city without ever being obliged to stop for a red light. It also kept me away from waitressing, which was a good thing because I’ve never gotten the knack of taking orders.

  I worked nights. From eleven to seven the voice of the late-night dispatcher came over so smooth and fine it was a pleasure to hear the squawk box. I bet we got a lot of business from guys just dialing for the pleasure of hearing that sexy contralto say she’d pick ’em up in five minutes. I didn’t meet the owner of the voice till months after I’d formed a picture of her in my mind.

  I guess I’d always imagined her black. A deep huskiness in her voice, the kind I associate with gospel singers and fire-and-brimstone preachers, gave it away. In my imagination she was tall and svelte and exotic as hell, breathing heavily into the microphone, a future Motown R&B star.

  Her color was the only thing I got right.

  Gloria. Her immense bulk caught me totally off guard. Not to mention the wheelchair. I mean, that low sexy voice never gave a hint of anything but ease, even when the board was lit up from here to Tuesday and all the cabs were broken down and a hurricane was set to blow.

  Gloria. Spinal cord injury in a car crash at nineteen. Lived in a room at the back of the garage; no steps to interfere with the motorized chair. She kept herself to herself, seemed to socialize only with her three behemoth brothers. When the cabbies joked about her—which wasn’t often, and always in stifled tones coupled with quick over-the-shoulder glances in case said brothers were present—they’d say she was suicidal, eating herself to death.

  I got in the habit of dropping by her office, shooting the breeze. At the beginning, I guess I went out of pity, but Gloria wasn’t buying. She sat in that chair like a queen born to a throne, and she ruled the G&W kingdom with a gloved iron fist.

  She never took lunch or dinner breaks, because she ate all day long, maintaining her bulk while sitting by the phones. Now I’m a snacker, but I’ve never seen anything like Gloria. She packs this huge handbag every morning with stuff that would make a nutritionist gag. She is Hostess’s best client, bar none. If she ever goes off the deep end, she can use the Twinkie defense.

  “Hey, Glory,” I said. She lifted her face from a bite of cream-filled cupcake, and flashed me a grin. She looked fatter than ever, her face so smooth she seemed ageless. “Hey, babe,” she said.

  I parked myself in a faded orange plastic chair, first checking for roach occupation. “Thanks for sending Miss Devens by.”

  “Just paying off, babe.”

  “We’re square by now.”

  After graduating U. Mass., I’d given up hacking and joined the Police Department. I’d been able to do Gloria a favor or two.

  She grinned wider and said, “Who’s counting?”

  “Got a minute?”

  The phone rang. She scratched a number on a pad, pressed a button on her microphone, and sang out, “Kelton Street. “Who’s got it?”

  Static, then a tinny voice filled the room. “Scotty. Park and Beacon.”

  “One-eighty-five,” she said. “Third floor. Guy named Booth. Got it?”

  “Copy.”

  “Out.”

  “I can chat between calls, Carlotta,” she said. “Sunny day like this. Warm. The folks are walking.”

  “Business okay?”

  She held up a plump hand and waved it back and forth. Not many people know Gloria’s a full partner in G&W. Sam Gianelli, the smooth-talking son of a Boston mob figure, is Gloria’s other half. Sam, who specializes in running small businesses into the ground, had taken her on to save himself the embarrassment of losing another company, pumping cash from her insurance settlement into G&W’s collapsing veins, building the wheelchair-accessible room in the back as part of the deal.

  Possibly the smartest day’s work he’d ever done.

  Sam and I had history. He was the reason I looked on my visit to the garage with apprehension. I’d dated him. Even learned something from the experience: Never sleep with the boss.

  “Bet you didn’t come by to ask if business was okay,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Sam’s not here, is he?”

  “You care?”

  Everybody wants to be a psychologist. “Eugene Devens,” I said flatly. “Off on a toot?”

  She said, “Shit, Carlotta, I don’t like this business with Gene. Didn’t even bring his cab in. Left it down by the docks, and they towed it to that damn Cambridge yard.”

  “The one with the two Dobermans?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe he scampered so he wouldn’t get stuck for the tow fee.”

  Gloria shrugged her massive shoulders. She can move fine from the waist up.

  “Ever do anything like that before?” I asked.

  “Reliable, on the whole.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Gloria finished her cupcake, and carefully swept the crumbs off her desk to feed the creatures below. “Seen the sister?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe she made him go to church twice every Sunday. Maybe he just kicked over the traces,” Gloria said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  “Is he thick with anybody here? Anybody he’d move in with?”

  “They’re all thick,” she said. “More ways than one. You remember the crowd he hung out with.”

  I smiled. “The Old Geezers, right? Isn’t that what we called them?”

  “Right. Eugene Devens, Sean Boyle, Joe Fergus, Dan O’Keefe, Pat O’Grady, all the old Irish coots. Joe Costello’s in with them, but I don’t know what kind of Irish name Costello is. They’re tighter now, what with all the new cabbies. I mean for the Geezers, the Russian Jews were bad enough. Now they’ve got Haitians, and Jamaicans, and the Afghans are moving in fast. Devens and his buddies see themselves as the last American cabbies. They hang out and booze and moan about how the industry’s going to hell.” She smiled one of her wicked smiles. “Funny, they don’t bitch much to me. I think they figure I might be prejudiced. Can you beat that?”

  Nobody complains much to Gloria. First of all, she’s got a tongue so caustic it ought to be registered with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and second, she’s got those three devoted brothers, each bigger and tougher than the last. The smallest, nicest one got tossed out of the NFL for biting some guy’s ear off, or so the story goes. Her brothers rigged up the room behind the garage with every electric gizmo available. Wires and motors everyplace. There’s even a network of pulleys and ladders and metal bars so she can haul herself up and get to the fridge or the stove. Walking into Gloria’s high-tech room and bath, tucked behind that grimy garage, is like charging from the nineteenth century straight to the twenty-first with no pit stops.

  “What about Pat?” I said. “You ask Pat where Eugene went? He used to be plugged into every little intrigue.”

  “Pat left, Carlotta, maybe six months ago. Cancer. Operation, chemotherapy, the works.”
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  “Shit.” Pat almost made the rest of the Old Geezers bearable with his self-deprecating humor and ready smile. “Well, you ask the guys where Eugene went? You ask Boyle?”

  I waited while Gloria took another call. She frowned as she hung up. “Look, Carlotta, I hope this whole thing is a lot of smoke. It could be. I’ve asked all the Geezers about Gene, and I’ll tell you, they’re not worried. They’re, I don’t know, kind of weird and excited and, well, they’re not saying shit. He coulda run off with some woman, somebody his sister would have hated on sight, some teenybopper, for Christ’s sake. All I know is he’s gone.”

  “He pick up his last paycheck?”

  Gloria stared down at the desktop. “We owe him two days.”

  “I don’t like that much.”

  “We’ll hold it for him.”

  “He leave anything?”

  The phone bleeped, and Gloria went into her spiel. I’d changed my question by the time she hung up.

  “What did he leave, Gloria?”

  She spent some time rooting for a cookie in her bag, removing a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, then a sack of marshmallows. I doubt she has room in there for keys or a wallet or a comb. “Well,” she said finally, “I didn’t tell his sister about his locker.”

  I just raised my eyebrows.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Carlotta. She looked so, hell, sort of sweet, but, you know, white gloves and a flowered hat. I figured she’d bust it open and find stuff she could use against him for the rest of his natural life. Box of condoms or something sinful, you know?”

  “I wouldn’t hold it against him, Glory.”

  “I don’t have a key.”

  “You got a bolt-cutter?”

  “He comes back, he won’t like it.”

  “He comes back, we’ll buy him a new lock.”

  “Sam won’t like it.”

  She watched me obliquely, with half-closed eyes, when she mentioned Sam’s name. She always does, so I was ready. I met her with a blank stare that would have done credit to a cardsharp.

  “Sam won’t know,” I said evenly, “will he? And if he should happen to find out, we’ll snow him somehow.”