Coyote

by Linda Barnes

  “Is not telling the truth the same as telling a lie?” she countered.

  “Sometimes I suppose it would be, and sometimes not. It would depend on the situation, I guess.”

  “Oh,” she said, turning away from me again and staring out the dirty window.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  Great, I thought. No evidence of drugs in the room. Just a kid who used to be open as a sunflower closed as a fist.

  “If you didn’t come to make me go to school, then why did you come?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “to find out if you or your mom knows a woman named Manuela—”

  The door opened and a torrent of Spanish burst out of Marta, so quick that I didn’t have a chance to translate half of it. But I got enough. Paolina was not to talk about things that didn’t concern her.

  She was grounded. She could go to school or she could go nowhere. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good thing for her to see me on Saturday.

  “Marta,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm with an effort, “I need to ask her about this woman, Manuela Estefan. It’s a simple question. Maybe it’s a teacher at school, somebody she knows.”

  “Tell her,” Marta commanded.

  “I don’t know anybody like that,” Paolina said sullenly. “What’s the big deal?”

  I apologized for upsetting everybody and left, with none of my questions answered and plenty more bothering me than when I first came in.

  6

  At seven o’clock that night, fed up with my failure to find a trace of my client, I decided to do something practical: earn a few bucks. Manuela’s five hundred would not last forever, and I find I can always use cash, to buy cat food and size-eleven shoes—which are practically impossible to find on sale—not to mention paying the taxes on my old Victorian.

  The house is mine, absolutely. Aunt Bea paid off the thirty-year mortgage eight months before she died. The only hitch is that the place is so close to Harvard Square, in such a desirable neighborhood, that property values shot through the roof. I pay so much in taxes that it might as well be rent. High rent. I think of it that way and stick it in the bank monthly so I won’t die of shock when the twice-yearly bills come through.

  I prefer to earn the rent as a private detective, but I still moonlight as a jockey for Green & White Cab Company. I’ve been doing it for years, ever since I started college. It suits me a whole lot better than waitressing. I like to drive—it’s something you can do while listening to music—and I know the city. Mooney chides me about hacking, says it’s dangerous for a woman, as if it weren’t dangerous for a man, and as if my cop experience counted about as much as holding down a desk job with the phone company.

  When I was a cop, I got to carry a gun. Cabdrivers are forbidden to carry firearms, but I have yet to meet one who doesn’t keep a chunk of lead pipe under the driver’s seat.

  I’ve got mine.

  Before heading over to G&W, I reviewed my day. After striking out with Marta and Paolina, I’d visited a Cambridge church that provided sanctuary for illegal aliens. Either they’d never heard of Manuela—the one who’d made the paper posthumously or the one who’d visited my office—or they weren’t about to say so to any investigator who spoke halting Spanish. Then I’d gotten thumbs-down from a couple of lawyer acquaintances who dealt with immigrants, although one said he’d spread the word that I was looking for the woman. He’d also recommended another place in Cambridge, a legal service agency that helped illegals. Their secretary treated me like an undercover INS agent, which pissed me off.

  So I’d gone home to lick my wounds. I consider myself such an obviously trustworthy person that it irritates me when people don’t take me at face value. I know that’s dumb. Especially coming from an ex-cop who’s always telling her little sister not to trust strangers. I guess I have trouble realizing I’m a stranger sometimes.

  Hungry as usual, I’d made dinner out of leftovers, chili and Monterey Jack spiced with jalapeño peppers being the main ingredients. Put enough jalapeños in your food and you can’t tell its actual age. I fed my cat, who is a far more refined eater than I am, his can of FancyFeast in his ritual spot on the kitchen floor. I even changed the water in Red Emma’s cage.

  Then I’d phoned in an ad, to both the Globe and the Herald, urgently requesting Manuela Estefan to get in touch with Carlotta Carlyle concerning her card. I decided to run both ads for two weeks: $12.95 at the Globe, $8.95 at the Herald, where they were having a special. Both of them let me charge it on my Visa.

  I’d mailed a third bill to a woman whose runaway daughter I’d retrieved, printing “final notice” in red at the bottom of the page and wondering just what the hell I was going to do if she continued to ignore me. Repossess the daughter?

  Roz, my third-floor tenant, housecleaner, and sometime assistant, was upstairs taking her karate lesson. I could tell by the thumps on the floor, and by Lemon’s van, which was parked outside. Lemon, Roz’s karate instructor, has some three-piece-suit banker’s name, Whitfield Arthur Car-stairs III, I think, and doubles as a performance artist. They’re occasional lovers, although Roz is not the monogamous type, and when their thumping grew more rhythmic, I decided to leave the house for a while.

  It’s not that I’m horny all the time. As Bonnie Raitt, one of my favorite blueswomen, sings, “I ain’t blue, just a little bit lonely for some lovin’.” Still, I figured I’d rather drive a cab than listen to Roz’s bliss. Roz puts a lot of volume into her love-making.

  So I yanked a windbreaker over my jeans and T-shirt, and tried to break my speed record for the two-plus miles to G&W. I didn’t crack it, but neither did I get caught by the cops.

  Instead of picking up a set of car keys and taking off, my usual procedure, I decided to chat with Gloria, G&W’s main asset, dispatcher, and co-owner. She sometimes sends me clients, and she just might have referred the lady who’d called herself Manuela.

  Gloria motioned me toward her guest chair while she crooned murmuring reassurances into the phone. I sat down, balancing my boom box on my lap. I never like to put anything on the floor in that place. The concrete has the sticky quality of old movie-house floors after fifty years of spilled orange drink and ground-in popcorn.

  I always bring a tape deck when I’m going out to pilot a cab. The radios Gloria’s got in her old Fords can barely catch the AM top-forty stations, the ones that broadcast at twenty million kilowatts.

  My eyes scanned the garage, carefully not lingering in any corners. G&W is ugly but reliable. Nobody ever tries to pretty it up with a poster here or a vase of flowers there. It’s too drab to invite that kind of interference. A bright spot would make the rest of the blight unbearable. So, wisely, Gloria does nothing, and the most attractive item in the room remains a square of corkboard with keys hanging on it.

  Not that Gloria could do a lot more than organize and order people around, the two things she does best. Gloria operates G&W out of a wheelchair.

  “How you doin’?” she asked in her silky voice between phone calls and bites of Milky Way. Gloria eats nonstop and has the bulk to prove it. I have never seen anything nutritious pass her lips.

  “One of your cabs is off the road every moment we speak,” I reminded her with a grin. “So tell me, you give out my business card to any Hispanic ladies lately?”

  “Why? Your ears been tingling or what?”

  “Simple question, simple answer, Gloria,” I said.

  The phone rang, and her hand swooped down on it like a bird of prey. While she soothed an irate customer who’d been waiting two minutes longer than promised, I eyed her desktop.

  There was an airmail envelope, addressed to Gloria in a familiar scrawl, lying in the center of the blotter. From Italy. I caught myself before my hand reached out and grabbed it. I glanced up, and Gloria was staring at me.

  If I ever blushed, I would have. The letter was from Sam Gianelli, half-owner of
G&W. Gloria likes to keep tabs on my love life, and I didn’t want her to know how eagerly I awaited Sam’s return. Hell, she’d probably tell him all about it.

  “I ain’t blue, just a little bit lonely …” I hoped I’d brought the right tape along. I could hear Raitt’s high, fine voice singing in my head.

  Gloria hung up, her mellow voice having done its work. “So,” she said, carefully not mentioning the envelope, “what Spanish lady? I got a few Spanish-speaking guys working here. I don’t remember any of ’em needing a private eye.”

  “Ever give one of them my card?”

  Gloria took another bite of Milky Way. “Nope,” she said finally. “What’s up? You got a paying job?”

  I wouldn’t have shaken free without a detailed cross-examination, except that the phones started going crazy. I grabbed some cab keys and left.

  A Dodge Aries practically clipped my fender as I drove off the lot.

  I ferried conventioneers from their Anthony’s Pier Four dinners to their Westin and Marriott hotels, earning enough cash to keep me going at a modest clip for a week. Then I cruised Jamaica Plain, one of Boston’s neighborhoods. J.P. has a high-density illegal population, both Irish and Hispanic, with a lot of landlords doing big business renting tiny two-bedroom apartments to ten or so aliens.

  I stopped at an all-night grocery store, a mom-and-pop place with Spanish signs in the window. I thought I’d describe my Manuela to the proprietor, but without a picture or a great command of the language, the project seemed silly, so I just bought a can of Pepsi and left, smiling at the guy behind the counter.

  A little after midnight that damn white Dodge Aries came by for the third time, parked up the street, and started tailing me. I toyed with him a little while, trying to lead him down one-way streets and into dead-end alleys, but whoever it was knew the city too well to let me backtrack and get behind him.

  “INS,” I said to myself, turning up the volume on Rory Block’s “Gypsy Boy” and helping her out with the scat-singing part. Jamieson, that goddamn INS agent, was trailing me, trying to get a line on Manuela Estefan.

  I let him tail me into the North End. It took me two minutes to lose him in its winding maze.

  7

  By the time I got home—a little past two A.M.—it seemed like weeks had passed since Manuela Estefan’s visit. Part of me felt I’d already earned her advance. Hell, I’d earned it just listening to that INS jerk at lunch, not to mention paying for the ads in the Globe and the Herald, not to mention the gas I’d used traveling to places where I’d earned nothing but gringa insults.

  Five hundred bucks a day is what I charge my high-toned, Gucci-shoed lawyer clients. I don’t have a lot of those. The rest pay on a sliding scale. I go by shoes a lot. I remembered Manuela’s worn heels. Five hundred would buy her another day or two.

  While making a sandwich—hard salami, Swiss cheese, and fairly suspicious turkey on rye—I checked the refrigerator door for messages. It’s our communal bulletin board. Roz is in charge of keeping it neat and tidy, and it will soon qualify for federal disaster funds. She leaves hastily scrawled messages on crumpled scraps of paper under an assortment of magnets, ranging from the plain silver disks I originally bought to the beer cans, horses’ asses, and Day-Glo hamburgers she prefers. There were two notes—one from Roz to Roz to buy more peanut butter, the other warning that T. C. was running low on liver and bacon, his preferred flavor of FancyFeast.

  I’ve learned it’s wise to cater to T. C.’s culinary whims.

  I was down to the last bite of my sandwich before I noticed the flashing red light on the answering machine. I punched the buttons that ran the Panasonic through its paces. There was a message from Sam—still in Italy, dammit. He has a wonderfully deep voice even transcontinental phone connections can’t screw up. He thought he’d be home in a week, maybe a week and a half. He was stuck in some hotel in Turin in a room with a huge canopied bed.

  There was a beep signaling the end of his message and then a long enough pause that I thought the machine had gone into some kind of trance. I could hear breathing, shallow and fast.

  “Señorita,” the voice whispered. “Es … es Manuela. ¡Ayúdame, por favor! Yo sé que usted me va a ayudar. Veinte uno Westland. ¡Pronto, señorita!”

  I replayed the message because the voice was so soft. It came in gasps and starts, and that made it harder to understand. The Spanish was basic enough: “It’s Manuela. Help me, please. I know you will help me. Twenty-one Westland. Hurry.”

  I tugged at a strand of my hair, a rotten habit that will one day leave me bald. A single hair came loose. I ran it through my fingers.

  I’ve gotten messages like that before, and one thing I have learned is that hurrying to the rescue is one thing and racing off without thinking is another.

  I knew where Westland Avenue was, in a student-infested area near Northeastern and the Fens. I thought the voice was Manuela’s, but I couldn’t be sure. I’m good with voices, but the woman who’d called sounded terrified. Her whispery voice was high and breathy, and I couldn’t be sure it belonged to the same woman I’d talked to last night.

  Wednesday evening. And it was well into Friday morning now.

  Nor did I know when the call had come in.

  I’d have to roust Roz, no matter what she and Lemon were up to. I knew Lemon was still around because I’d noticed his van blocking the RESIDENT PARKING ONLY sign. I made my tread especially heavy on the narrow wooden steps leading to the third floor, knocked loudly, and opened the door carefully, which was just as well, because Lemon, clad only in Jockey shorts, was standing behind the door ready to clobber me.

  Roz was sound asleep, mouth open, snoring faintly. I roused her by tugging and hollering.

  “When did the phone ring?” I asked when she finally sat up, covering herself with the sheet. She sleeps on these tumbling mats she’s got all over the floor. Tumbling mats and old black-and-white TVs are her major furniture. It was nice to know she used sheets and pillows. Maybe she’d hauled them out in Lemon’s honor.

  “Phone,” she mumbled.

  “There was a call at ten and another maybe half an hour later,” Lemon said briskly. I shouldn’t have bothered waking Roz.

  “Want to earn a few bucks?” I asked Lemon. His illustrious family had cut him off without a cent, and his performance-art career is mainly doing juggling and mime in Harvard Square and passing the hat afterward. I don’t know whether Roz pays for her karate lessons or not.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Me too,” Roz said, struggling naked out of the sheets and pulling a selection from her incredible wardrobe of T-shirts over her head. This one was electric blue and said CAPTAIN CONDOM across the front. It was illustrated.

  Before we left for Westland Avenue, I dialed Homicide. Mooney wasn’t in.

  8

  We took Lemon’s van. He drove, and I watched for followers. A cold drizzle slicked the pavements and I huddled in my peacoat, glad of the warmth of the three of us jammed in the front seat. Roz sat between us, by virtue of her barely five foot height, her short legs straddling the hump. I wasn’t sure she was awake at first, but gradually she came around. I could tell because she started firing questions.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she replied warily.

  “Could be genuine, could be a trap,” I said.

  “Meet me at the abandoned warehouse at midnight,” she mumbled. “Expecting anybody in particular?”

  “I met an INS agent who doesn’t like me,” I said. “But I don’t think this is his style.”

  “Immigration and Naturalization,” Lemon said proudly. He’s a bright kid, really.

  “If they wanted to know if I knew where the woman was, they might have faked a help message, but they wouldn’t have given me an address,” I said. “They’d have waited outside the front door to tail me.”

  “So then it’s not the INS,” Lemon said. “Probably.”

  “Yeah. So w
hat I want here is backup. I don’t go scooting off in the middle of the night to rescue damsels in distress. Not solo. Not since I read my first Nancy Drew.”

  “What kind of backup?” Lemon asked.

  “I go in alone. I don’t come out or give you an all-clear signal in five minutes, you come in.”

  “You armed?” Roz said, proving she was still awake.

  I nodded. My .38 Police Special was tucked in the waistband of my slacks, under my sweater, the metal cold against the small of my back. I keep it in the locked bottom drawer of my desk, unloaded and wrapped in one of my ex-husband’s undershirts.

  “Okay, then,” she said, and seemed to go back to sleep. I didn’t have to tell her how much I’d hate to use it. Guns are necessary in the business, what with all the crooks waving them around. I admit that—and I keep my hand in at the pistol range—but I don’t like guns. I’ve killed two men with guns, one when I was a cop, one after I turned private. Both killings had to happen, and I don’t spend a lot of time rehashing my life, but neither was easy to swallow.

  Lemon drove well, effortlessly shifting the gears on the old van. The rain was the kind of stuff that messes up your windshield, too light for the regular swipe of the windshield blades. The glass steamed up, and Roz leaned forward and wiped a ragged circle with a wad of Kleenex. It fogged again immediately, so we cracked the windows open and froze.

  The journey took maybe twenty minutes. Memorial Drive, then over the B.U. Bridge, along Park Drive to Brookline Ave. Lemon took a wrong turn and I had to straighten him out.

  The detour took us back along the Fenway, and that’s when I noticed the flashing lights. Automobile accident, I told myself, although the first worry pangs hit my stomach just about then. I remembered the newspaper article Manuela had shown me, about the body in the Fens. It must have been found nearby.

  Up close I could tell the flashers belonged to police units. No wreckers, no tow trucks. When I saw Mooney’s battered Buick parked with two wheels up on the curb, I hollered Lemon to a halt. Then I was out of the car and running, and Lemon was yelling after me, something about where the hell was he supposed to leave the damned van.