A Trouble of Fools

by Linda Barnes

  The day after I covered my first homicide as a cop, I went home and scoured my bedroom. Threw out all that embarrassing junk I’d hoarded, marveling at the bizarre items I’d thoughtlessly shoved into the bottom drawer of my dresser for the cops to smirk at on that inevitable day. The gonzo Diet-Aids I’d purchased, convinced I was two pounds over the fashion limit for my latest bikini. They made me throw up, but I’d paid so much for those dumb pills, mail order, sight unseen, that I’d been too angry to toss them in the trash. So I’d heaved them in the bottom drawer instead, along with the book of illustrated religious poetry (can you believe it?) that was the very first gift my very first boyfriend gave me when I was an old maid of fourteen. I tossed out the early letters from Cal, my ex, letters I suppose could be called love letters, if you stretched the bounds. Out went the old tube of birth-control foam, along with one of those sexy uplift bras, and the torn jeans I’d worn, almost exclusively, my eighteenth summer. I found and discarded a coupon for breast enlargement cream, corny birthday cards, a mercifully brief attempt at a diary.

  If the cops come and toss my room tomorrow, they won’t find much of a personal nature. Pictures of my mom and dad. My wedding album, a curiously impersonal item, since the smiling bride seems a total stranger to me. Aunt Bea’s oval gold locket, with its two photos of faded young men. My aunt Bea never married. I have no idea who those men were or what they meant to her, but she treasured that locket, and I shine it up every once in a while in her memory. Probably the most personal item in my room is my old National steel guitar, and there’s no way those cops will ever know what that guitar means to me.

  My worst cop trait was insubordination. My best was sheer stubbornness, and I haven’t lost it. Even though I knew the place had been plundered by the bad guys and the good guys both, I searched it again. I shook out the pages of those trashy novels, twisted the stupid knobs off the brass headboard, poked inside them with a wire coathanger.

  Did I find any terrific clue the cops had overlooked?

  Of course not.

  One loose scrap of paper fluttered out of a paperback, and it made me feel a little better about brother Eugene. It was a poem, “No Second Troy,” by William Butler Yeats, copied on lined notebook paper, the kind you tear out of ring binders.

  Why should I blame her that she filled my days

  With misery, or that she would of late

  Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

  Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

  Had they but courage equal to desire?

  I remembered what the bartender had said, about Gene’s interest in the glorious rebellion, and the great Irish poets. It added a little depth to a character otherwise defined by sports memorabilia, Playboy centerfolds, and sisterly devotion. I read the rest of the poem out loud. I liked it, but I have to admit I enjoyed the contrast, too. It’s not often you come across a poem by Yeats stuck in a semiporn paperback that would probably have caused the poet to puke.

  Chapter 11

  The attic steps were narrow, steep, and uncarpeted. They took a ninety-degree turn ten steps up, and from that point on I had to crouch to avoid the ceiling. At the top step, the paneled door swung open with one of those creaky horror-movie noises I absolutely adore as long as I’m safe in the depths of my cushy cinema seat. I’m ashamed to say it had a different effect in Margaret’s attic. The spit in my mouth dried up so fast my tongue felt like a prune. My ears, suddenly sharp, started to register each faint noise as a threat. Passing cars, wind-whipped branches, ratlike scamperings … Was that a footstep? In the house?

  I swallowed, took a deep breath, and sternly ordered myself to stop behaving like the women on the covers of Eugene’s hot novels. I tried to whistle, but my mouth wasn’t wet enough, so I hummed a few bars of an old Lightnin’ Hopkins blues tune I’m learning to pick.

  The door opened into shadow, not darkness, therefore the attic had a light source somewhere, one sadly insufficient for a search. I dipped into my shoulder bag—which weighs about a ton because I keep it crammed with pick-locks, my trusty Swiss army knife, MBTA tokens, and stray lipsticks—in hopes of locating a flashlight. My first find the right shape turned out to be a can of that old-style lacquery hairspray, which, believe me, is just as off-putting to muggers as a can of Mace, much cheaper, and you don’t need a license for it. I never use hairspray for anything else.

  After a bit more groping I came up with a flashlight. Not quite a full-sized one, but adequate. I beamed it through the doorway, and stepped into its pool of light.

  As haunted attics go, Margaret’s was a real disappointment, consisting of two semifinished slant-roofed rooms, the smaller a sort of anteroom to the larger. Both had been painted beige within the past century. Pink insulation of a more recent vintage peeked out from behind an occasional unpainted joist.

  They seemed to be storage rooms, containing no big items—which would never pass the bend in the staircase—but lots of small stuff. An old wire birdcage hung on a metal stand, door ajar, occupant long gone. Two china-doll figurine lamps, chipped, eyed each other from opposite ends of the smaller room. Between them was a cracked vase, sloppily glued, a pile of ratty velvet curtains, and layers of undisturbed dust, which led me to believe that neither the cops nor the robbers had lavished their attention on the attic.

  In the larger room, I located a single stingy window and yanked at its stained shade, which snapped up with a bang and hit the roller so hard that it brought the whole business down in a heap. The sudden alarm made the silence eerier, and I found myself listening for footsteps again. I hummed a few more bars of the Hopkins blues. The room had a nice echo.

  A pedal sewing machine sat on a mahogany case against the wall opposite the window. A dress dummy wrapped in India-print cotton gave me an uneasy moment or two. Four chairs shared a corner, set up in a square, their upholstery faded to uneven rose. I wondered where the card table had gone.

  The place smelled like an attic, dry, stale, and dusty, a haven for moths. I thought about opening the window for a little ventilation, but a spiderweb bridged the frame, and I hated to disturb the pattern on the dirty glass, much less the crawly little beast who’d designed it. I am no fan of spiders. I know most of them are harmless wee creatures, the do-gooders of the insect world, but honestly, yuck.

  No toy chest in the first room. No toy chest in the second room.

  Talk about stubborn. I searched those two rooms, side to side, top to bottom, methodically, and probably damn close to maniacally. I played my flashlight into every cranny, got my hands filthy, and my hair full of cobwebs. I strained to shift heavy cardboard boxes, kicked the lighter ones across the floor as my frustration level soared. I kept banging my head on the sloped side of the ceiling, which gave me a headache, and did not improve my temper.

  Nothing.

  As the light faded in the attic window, I sank to the floor in the middle of the larger room, clasped my arms around my knees, and let my eyes and my brain do the work for a change. I pivoted slowly, dusting a small circle with the seat of my jeans, checking the floor and the walls. The attic seemed small for the house beneath it.

  My first thought was that one patch of flooring was less dusty than the rest. By the time I stood up, I’d registered that the clean square was near one of the unpainted joists, that the wallboard next to the joist leaned at a slight angle. It moved easily when I wiggled it. And when I gave it a shove, it slid to one side, revealing the rest of the attic, the real unfinished attic.

  I poked my flashlight in the four-by-three gap, but I didn’t have to follow. A wooden arch-topped trunk sat right behind the panel. I grabbed it by one of its two brass handles and hauled it triumphantly over to the window.

  It was latched, not locked, and the lid was heavy. The layer of kid’s stuff on top startled me. Halloween costumes, mostly. I pulled aside a net tutu, gray with age, and tried to imagine it on an eight-year-old Margaret. A magician’s hat and cloak followed, then a feathered Indi
an headdress. The dust made my nose itch. I gave in and sneezed loudly. It echoed. If anyone else were in the house, he’d hear it.

  Stop it, Carlotta, I scolded myself. Nobody else around. Just you and the boogeyman.

  I kept emptying the trunk, figuring Margaret probably hadn’t been worried sick about the safety of her old tutu.

  I have never seen that much money before.

  It took my breath away, a lovely sight, done up in neat bundles, banded in green. Most of the bills were old, so the stash didn’t have that phony TV-ransom-money-in-the-attaché-case look to it. Stacks of vintage tens and twenties lined the entire bottom of the trunk. On top, a few thinner stacks of bright, new, mint-fresh hundreds perched like candy roses on the top of the cake.

  I knew where Margaret had gotten the cash to pay me.

  I wasted a while staring at the loot, wondering whether there was more or less than my cat’s promised twenty grand involved.

  Hide it, Margaret had begged. Hide it.

  To tell the truth, it seemed pretty well hidden already. I could drag the trunk back to the gap in the wall, replace the wallboard, wipe out the tracks in the dust with a kitchen broom.

  But the absence of dust would be a clue. That stopped me. That and the fact that I’d found the trunk in the first place. If I could find it somebody else could too. Especially somebody who suspected it was in the house. Somebody who’d already exhausted the possibilities of the first two floors before being interrupted by a nosy red-headed private eye.

  I picked up a stack of bills. I really hadn’t meant to touch it, but the money drew my hand like a magnet. I riffled the edges of the hundreds, flipped the stack over to admire whichever president was pictured on the face, and that’s when I noticed that the cash was not only banded, the band was initialed.

  With the letters GBA.

  Chapter 12

  The stash would never have wound up where it did if it hadn’t been for Mooney.

  My favorite part of those Gothic suspense novels, aside from the climactic moment when our heroine gets a message from our hero and waltzes off to meet him at midnight in the old abandoned warehouse, is where the heroine goes outside carrying thousands of bucks belonging to some secret organization, armed only with a can of hairspray.

  Granted it was barely ten o’clock when I locked Margaret’s front door, balancing a suitcase and two Hefty Bags, but I sure had that dumb heroine feeling as I peered into the backseat of my Toyota and glanced furtively into the nearby bushes. A fleeing squirrel could have given me heart failure.

  Once in the car, I felt more resolute. I drove like the ex-cabbie I am, and I can absolutely guarantee you that nobody followed me from Margaret’s house to my own.

  What I didn’t count on was Mooney. He was sitting smack in the center of my front stoop, the porch light gleaming off the top of his head in a kind of halo effect. If I didn’t make a habit of leaving lights on to illuminate the burglars, I might not have seen him.

  Shit. I didn’t want to leave that much cash in my car for five seconds, much less the time it would take me to deal with Mooney. Boston is the car-theft capital of the Western world, and Cambridge runs it a close second. Quickly, I pulled into the driveway.

  I had my door open before the car actually came to a halt. I keep my trash on the back landing, and I hurriedly swung the two Hefty Bags up to join the three already awaiting tomorrow’s garbage pickup. Then I grasped the suitcase, and headed toward the front door before Mooney got the bright idea of coming around back to see what was taking so long.

  “Hi, Carlotta,” Mooney said, still seated in the porch light’s glow. I was trying to breathe normally. Inhale. Exhale.

  He indicated the suitcase. “Moving in or out?”

  “Robe and slippers,” I answered truthfully, “for the lady who got clobbered over in Jamaica Plain.”

  Mooney said, “I hear she’s gonna be okay.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I was hoping you’d invite me in,” Mooney said.

  “So, you wanna come in?” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Play with the cat for a minute,” I said apologetically as soon as we got as far as the living room. “I’ll be right back.” I turned the kitchen faucet on full blast to cover the noise of the back door opening, grabbed the two garbage bags, and hauled them into the bathroom.

  The cash smelled a little the worse for wear because I’d layered a level of Margaret’s kitchen trash over each batch of money, just in case, for camouflage. Maybe that’s what gave me the idea.

  I’d bought this new litter box for T.C., one of those plastic Rubbermaid things that I thought His Majesty might prefer to his old dilapidated box, but no way. So I took the plastic tray, filled it with the cash, shook it so the bundles were level and then plunked T.C.’s old litter tray on top of it. A perfect fit. Nobody could have guessed that the cat was doing his business over a fortune.

  I flushed the toilet, and went back out to face Lieutenant Mooney.

  Mooney doesn’t dress like a cop, off duty or on. He wears button-down Oxford cloth shirts and tweedy jackets. Sweater vests. Blue jeans. It’s a soft, comfortable look, like the image some Harvard prof might choose, except that Mooney’s shirts bulge around the kind of biceps you don’t get from sitting at a desk correcting exams.

  He’d seated himself in the rocking chair, which was thoughtful of him because the sofa isn’t up to a man his size. He was surveying the room with the same quiet, focused attention he gave to crime scenes.

  “I like it,” he said gravely, “but it’s not what I expected.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “No. It’s just not the way I see you,” he said.

  “It’s not me, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t decorate this place. My aunt did.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  The only room in the house that I really call my own is my bedroom. I chose it for the three wide windows—they give plenty of morning sunlight for my jungle of plants. I started from scratch on that room. I sanded the floorboards. I steamed off the wallpaper. I stripped sixteen coats of paint—sixteen!—off the window moldings, until the natural wood came through. The bed is huge, king-sized, because I finally got fed up with mattresses that dangle my feet over the edge. I make my bed twice a year, so I buy good-looking sheets on sale at Filene’s Basement, always solids, never pastels. I’ve got this fantastically warm down comforter, also bought on sale, with a charcoal gray cover. I wanted a brass headboard, but talk about expensive! So I settled for a white wicker one that’s really two single-bed headboards laced together with invisible wire. The dresser and the bedside table are vaguely Chinese, picked up cheap in a Cape Cod antique shop. Plants, books, my big illuminated globe, my record and tape collection, and my guitar are the decorations. I’d like to have one really good oil painting, but so far Roz hasn’t delivered. The stereo system, which is so high-tech glossy it’s practically blinding, probably cost more than everything else in the room combined, even if you toss in the old black-and-white TV that I keep in the closet along with my underprivileged wardrobe.

  Who knows, maybe someday Mooney will see my bedroom. I wonder if he’ll think it looks like me.

  He earned points by not starting out the way most cops would, barking questions about Margaret. We’d worked together long enough that he knows I’d just clam up. He’s got roundabout ways, and that makes him a dangerous man in my book.

  He said, “So, how are you doing collecting the cat’s loot?”

  For a panicky moment all I could see were the bundles of cash hidden under T.C.’s kitty litter. Then I remembered. “Oh, yeah,” I said quickly, recovering, “I called the guys. They just want me to bring old Thomas along and I—or rather we—get the cash.”

  “Has to be the both of you?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s the only obstacle?”

  “It looms fairly large.”

  “If you propose nicely, say down on one knee, an
d maybe buy me a bunch of daisies, we could get married tonight,” Mooney said.

  “Takes three days for a license,” I said.

  “I know a JP who takes bribes. I wouldn’t even hold out for an engagement ring.”

  “You’d change your name?” I said, letting the sarcasm flow. “Your whole name?”

  “Women can take any name they want when they get married. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Unless it’s done to defraud, Mooney.”

  “Hey, I’m willing to try to make the marriage work. I’m not talking about one of these quickie divorces.”

  “Come on, Moon. Don’t tease. I’ve been there.”

  “Carlotta, not all guys turn into Mr. Hyde on their wedding night.”

  Right. Even Cal waited a while. Mooney met Cal once. Arrested him even. God, I was young when I married. Didn’t know what the words “addictive personality” meant. Cal was a walking time bomb from day one. He didn’t smoke, he chain-smoked, lighting the next cigarette from the stub of the first, ignoring a hacking cough. He didn’t drink beer, he guzzled six-packs. He didn’t just play guitar, he led all-night marathons, grabbing the bass when the bass man dropped out, jumping and shouting, singing till the neighbors howled. He didn’t make love, he …

  Well, we might have made it through all that, the good and the bad, if he hadn’t discovered cocaine, found that he loved, adored, worshipped that white powder he snorted up his nose more than he loved or needed me.

  I know I’m not supposed to think about it that way. I’m supposed to think about it as a disease. Go ahead, try to control the way you think. Especially if you’ve been brought up by a Jewish mother whose house specialty was GUILT. Then you say to yourself, where did I go wrong, how did I fail him?

  “Hey,” Mooney said gently. “Come back. So you need a husband named Thomas in order to collect. What else?”

  “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?”