by Linda Barnes
I didn’t care.
The cops hadn’t set up a cordon yet. They were milling and talking, and only one of them tried to head me off, worried I might be the advance press guard. I brushed him off with Mooney’s name, and one of the other guys knew me and gave the first guy a wink.
I don’t know what Department gossip says about Mooney and me, but it’s a hell of a lot more colorful than reality. I’m not a cop now, so it doesn’t matter. And yet I guess I still resent it. Otherwise I wouldn’t get so pissed, right? Over a simple leering wink from a guy whose IQ was probably a tenth of his badge number.
The old anger gave me something to concentrate on while I sped down the path toward a stand of elms, eerily lit by flashlights and rotating cherry beacons.
Mooney loomed up out of the dark, all six-four two hundred and forty linebacker pounds of him.
“A body?” I said, dreading the answer.
“What are you—”
“Let me see her,” I said. “I think I can make the ID.”
“It’s not pretty,” he said.
“It never is.”
“Why are you—”
“I got a call. I tried to get you—”
“This way,” he said. “If you puke, the medical examiner’s gonna give me hell.”
I followed him, biting my lower lip, hardening myself, getting ready. “Just another stiff,” I murmured to myself. “Just another body. Nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do.”
They hadn’t bagged it yet. A police photographer stood at her feet and the sudden explosion of light temporarily blinded me.
The height and weight seemed right. The dark hair. The face was bruised and swollen, unrecognizable, cut and covered with dark blood. And the hands were gone. Just gone, hacked off at the wrists.
“Well?” Mooney said.
I couldn’t say anything.
Not until I saw something sparkle on the ground.
It was a thin silver band. The filigree ring I’d last seen on my client’s left hand.
9
“Twenty-one Westland Avenue.”
I guess I must have mumbled the address as I stared at the dead woman’s mutilated arms, because that’s what Mooney said to me when he forcibly turned me around by the shoulders.
“Twenty-one Westland,” I echoed slowly, looking into his eyes and still seeing the corpse. “Come with me.”
“What the hell, Carlotta—”
I started talking and yanking him by the hand at the same time, because I didn’t want to lose minutes while I explained. He hollered something over his shoulder to another cop and came with me. I babbled out the tale of the late-night phone call.
“Then you can identify the corpse as the woman who came to see you?”
“The ring on the ground,” I said. “She was wearing it.”
“Could have been planted,” he said.
“It was loose. She kept twisting it, fiddling with it.” I remembered her hands—small, hardworking hands with bitten nails.
Lemon had pulled his van onto the grassy verge, shielded by two patrol cars. A cop was quizzing him, and I waved and yelled at him to go on home before he and Roz got arrested.
Mooney had two uniforms tail us in a unit. We took his Buick, with me automatically scrambling into the driver’s seat and sliding over to the passenger side. Mooney refuses to get his passenger door fixed. He says every time he gets his car shipshape, somebody else bangs into it.
It took us maybe four minutes to find 21 Westland. It shouldn’t have taken that long, but none of the apartment buildings, a string of four-story, yellow-brick jobs, seemed to have an address, the same way Boston streets never have street signs. The cross streets sometimes do, but the main thoroughfares, never. It’s a way of telling tourists they don’t belong.
We finally caught a glimpse of a 43 on a fanlight and got a fix on the proper side of the street. Then we nailed a 57 and turned back, closer to the Fens.
Number 21 didn’t seem to have any identifying marks, but it sat next to 23, and that was good enough for me.
There were no parking places. By no parking places I mean no parking places. Even the fire hydrants and the handicapped slots were taken. Mooney left the car double-parked with the unit tucked in behind us, its cherry lights flashing. We were both careful to lock our doors, police vehicles not being off-limits to the Massachusetts car thief.
Number 21 was a weathered brick building like the rest, narrow enough to appear taller than its four stories. It had a street lamp close by; from four feet away I could barely make out faint numerals on the cracked glass of the front door.
The door opened easily to a small, dimly lit vestibule; the four of us entering at once made it even smaller. One of the officers in the unit must have been a cigar smoker. I hacked out a cough while we studied our surroundings. There were five mailboxes and five doorbells, which made it one resident per floor and some poor soul in the basement. None of the names under the mailboxes belonged to Manuela Estefan. Nobody had the initials M. E. Mr. Y. Thompson had the top floor, Mr. and Mrs. Keith Moore (Shellie) the third, Lawrence Barnaby the second, R. Freedman the ground floor. The basement apartment was rented out to A. Gaitan, and that was the button Mooney pushed.
I’m not sure if he pushed it because he thought the super might live in the basement or because A. Gaitan had a Hispanic surname.
No response. The cigar-smoking cop was for pushing every goddamn bell until somebody got the hell out of bed and let us the fuck in.
I pressed my nose against the glass of the inside door, and that’s when I noticed that someone had slipped a little piece of wood, like half a shim shingle, between the jamb and the door. Nobody was going to have to buzz us in.
There was an elevator in a hallway lit by a single forty-watt bulb. The linoleum on the floor looked like it couldn’t stand brighter lighting. There were two doors down the hall past the elevator. One said 1A, so I supposed it belonged to R. Freedman, although I didn’t understand the need for the A since there was only one apartment per floor. The other door led to a staircase, again lit with a single bare bulb. I glanced at Mooney, and we both nodded at the same time and started down the stairs. One officer followed us. The cigar smoker stayed in the hall, his .38 already out of its unsnapped holster.
The stairway led to a damp corridor lined with old pipes. Somewhere a furnace banged and whimpered. Mooney listened for a moment at the Gaitan apartment door, then knocked loudly and scooted to one side. The other officer, taking the cue, flattened himself against a wall and drew his weapon. I stayed out of the line of fire, well back in the hallway. I make it a policy never to get in between guys waving loaded guns.
Nobody answered.
Mooney glared at me. I elevated my shoulders. I didn’t know which apartment the call had come from, any more than he did. Maybe while we were down here the killer was escaping out some back door or scrambling down the fire escape from the fourth-floor apartment.
I was going to urge Mooney to call for more backup when he got a stubborn set to his jaw, reached over, and turned the doorknob. It clicked the way doors do when they’re left open, and the eyes of the patrolman who’d been up against the wall went cold and wary. He shifted his hands on his gun.
The two cops went through in an instant, noiselessly. I knew they were checking the rooms, the closets, behind the doors. That’s what cops do first, search for victims and perps. I went in. Nobody told me not to.
There was no one inside Gaitan’s apartment. I could tell by the deflated air of the young advance cop, his weapon now sheathed, his adrenaline still pumping.
“Only the two rooms,” he muttered, his face pale. He seemed to be taking extraordinary care with his breathing, in and out, making sure he got it right. “You better see the other one.”
The last comment was addressed to Mooney, but I tagged along.
The front room was ugly enough, mottled paint, a sprung beige sofa, two narrow cots, and one wall containing som
ething an optimistic landlord might describe as a kitchenette if a two-by-four refrigerator, a hot plate, and a cupboard qualified as a kitchenette.
The back room was worse, much worse. Someone had painted it dull green thirty years ago. A wooden cross bearing an elongated, suffering Jesus was tacked to the back wall. There was barely space for three more narrow cots and a metal rod on wheels that made do for a closet. Two white shirts and two pairs of tan chinos hung crookedly on the rod. The odor of unwashed bedclothes filled the air. That, and something else.
One look, one smell, and Mooney sent the uniform out to fetch a warrant and notify a crime-lab unit One unmade cot was blood-soaked, rusty in the dim light. Blood had splashed the other two cots, the wall, the cross. An old black dial phone rested on a rumpled pillow, its receiver dangling.
“Don’t touch anything,” Mooney said sharply.
I gave him a faintly disgusted look. My hands were already in my pockets. They’d made the journey automatically.
“If she’d lost her hands here, the ring might be a plant,” I said, just to be saying something. The words came out funny.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Mooney said. “Especially if you recognized the voice on the phone …”
“I think so, I’m not sure.”
“You didn’t erase the tape?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Think there’s enough blood for him to have sawed her hands off here?” I asked.
“How the hell would I know? Depends on whether she was dead or not, how much she’d bleed, I guess.”
All the time we were talking, we were looking, the way cops look at crime scenes, mentally tagging the evidence, asking the questions they’ll ask the medical examiner, wondering about fingerprints on the phone, hairs on the pillowcase.
I shivered. “She must have been alone when she called,” I said.
“Or somebody might have been holding a knife to her throat,” Mooney muttered. Then he seemed to see me for the first time. “You shouldn’t be here when the squad arrives,” he said.
“I’m a witness,” I said.
“To a phone call,” he said. “That’s all. And maybe you shouldn’t get any more involved.”
“Involved,” I repeated. “She called me for help.”
“Look, the INS guy told me this business has nothing to do with stuff here. It’s leftovers from Central America. Hit squads. Death squads.”
“Mooney,” I protested, “I wouldn’t believe anything that guy said.”
“I don’t know what the hell we’ve got by the tail here,” he said sharply, “but I know I don’t like it. And I don’t like you in the middle of it.”
“And there’s nothing you can do about it, Mooney,” I said evenly, “because here I am. And if I were you, I’d be a hell of a lot more interested in the whereabouts of A. Gaitan than any Salvadoran hit squad.”
Mooney opened his mouth to argue. He can’t help it. He’s Boston Irish, born and bred, and instinct tells him to get the women and children to shelter. He opened his mouth, glared at me, and silently closed his mouth again. Bless him for that.
10
I couldn’t sleep when I got home. Big surprise. Roz and Lemon had given up on me and retired for the night, or so the blackness of the third-floor windows seemed to indicate.
No further messages on the machine. I rewound the tape and listened to Manuela’s plea, trying to match tone and timbre to the voice I’d heard in my office. I played it again. And again. When I caught myself nodding off, I removed the cassette and slipped it into my handbag.
Upstairs I got ready for bed, splashing noisily in the bathroom sink, humming to crack the silence, undressing and donning one of the men’s V-necked T-shirts I prefer as nightwear because they’re cheap and comfy with no lacy things that itch. I put on my red chenille bathrobe to ward off a chill that was mainly interior, sat cross-legged on the floor, and yanked the hardshell guitar case out from under the bed.
I used to worry about insomnia, but nobody ever died from it that I know. The best cure I’ve come up with is my old National steel guitar.
Me and the devil, we’re walking hand in hand.
Me and the devil, we’re walking hand in hand.
I couldn’t remember who wrote it, but I was trying to play it the way Rory Block does, with a thumping bass line, making the guitar moan and talk. I can’t match Block’s voice. She’s got too wide a range for me, able to make those low-down groans and then hit those high, wailing shouts. But if I keep in practice, which I try to do, I can damn near imitate her playing. I even bought her instructional tape, because some of her weird tunings and hammerings had me totally frustrated, and I work at it hard.
I have perfect pitch. That and a dollar fifty will get you coffee and a doughnut.
Bury my body down by the highway sign.
Bury my body down by the highway sign.
No cheerful stuff tonight.
Usually my eyelids give out before my fingers, but I didn’t even try sleep until long after my calluses started to ache. By the time I stretched out on the bed it was almost dawn, and visions of that bloody bed kept yanking me back from the edge of unconsciousness. The alarm clock buzzed way before I was ready for it.
I’d set the alarm for Friday morning volleyball, forgetting that the tournament schedule had effectively canceled it. By the time I quit functioning on automatic pilot, I was at the Central Square Y, feeling fuzzy and disoriented. There weren’t enough players for a pickup game, so I ran the track and tacked an extra twenty pool laps to my regular twenty. The pictures in my mind were still ugly. I kept seeing the crucifix on the wall over the stained cot, wondering if it was the last thing Manuela had seen, wondering if it had been any comfort to her.
I dressed and went across the street to Dunkin’ Donuts, weaving to avoid the Mass. Ave. traffic, ordered coffee and two honey-dipped as usual, sat at the orange Formica counter, and reviewed Mooney’s moves of the night before.
Letter-perfect. Except for letting me stick around.
He’d talked to every tenant in the building. He’d rousted the owner out of bed as soon as he found out where the rent checks were sent. There was no superintendent in the building. Three buildings, all owned by the same company, shared a super who lived in the basement at 23 Westland. Mr. Perez had been summoned and questioned. He’d rented the basement flat five months ago to a woman named Aurelia Gaitan. She’d paid two months in advance, two months’ deposit, and that was the last he’d seen of her. Must have sent in her rent checks or he’d have heard about that, all right. Mr. Canfield, the landlord, didn’t put up with any deadbeats, no way, no how. Hispanic lady, yeah. Short, dark. That was all he recalled. Legal, illegal, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. People had to live someplace, and thank God he’d had somewhere to live before he’d finally gotten his green card, and he was going to be a citizen in maybe three years, and then the police wouldn’t wake him in the middle of the night, no, by the Holy Mother, they wouldn’t. He’d have some rights then.
And no, he didn’t have any idea that more than one woman might have lived in the basement. All these cots, somebody must have moved them in at night while he was sleeping. He had to sleep sometime, didn’t he? It was a free country, wasn’t it?
He was a short, swarthy, barrel-chested man with a lot of bravado and a bald head. I could tell some of the cops liked Perez as a suspect on the spot. He had an accent and he smelled of liquor and tobacco. But Mooney hadn’t been able to shake him, and there was no way to say if he was lying or telling the truth about the woman named Aurelia Gaitan, whether she was my Manuela or not. They had the green card sent over from headquarters, but the super just shrugged when he saw it, saying he sure couldn’t tell from a photo the size of a postage stamp whether the two women were the same and what the hell was all the fuss, anyway, and maybe if he were a citizen, he’d call a lawyer or something.
The landlord, Harold Canfield, showed up in a chocolate Merce
des with a lawyer in tow. Aside from the fancy car and the legal help, he didn’t fit my image of a landlord. Tall and skinny, with darting eyes and too-short sleeves on his brown suit, he looked like a man who never ate a decent meal. Too much nervous energy for that; he’d just grab a bite standing at the counter the way I sometimes do.
His voice was surprisingly deep and calm. He used it to say that he hadn’t a clue as to who was leasing his apartments. All he cared about was getting the rent on time. It was odd, maybe, that the Gaitan woman sent cash in an envelope instead of a check like most of the other tenants, but cash was still legal, wasn’t it? And you know how some of these foreigners are, don’t hold with banks.
None of the tenants except Lawrence Barnaby admitted seeing anybody associated with the basement flat, and he only said he saw a “Spanish girl” in the hall occasionally. He hadn’t even exchanged hellos with her. Maybe he’d seen more than one woman, he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t paid much attention. Nobody knew anything about the basement flat. Nobody had any idea how many people lived there. Urban isolation.
The index fingerprint on Manuela’s green card ought to be some help. The crime lab might be able to tell if she’d been in the apartment.
Of course, there was no finger to match the print to.
I shuddered and spilled a little coffee, wiped it up with a paper napkin.
Scrubbing at the stupid counter top, I realized I wasn’t shuddering at the handlessness of the corpse. I’ve seen worse things than that. You don’t stay a cop for six years in Boston without viewing some sights you’d rather not see. What was giving me the shakes was the suspicion, deeply buried in my mind, that I’d pointed the killer at Manuela.
I kept remembering that car, the white Dodge Aries, following me. I’d been so sure it was an INS car, I hadn’t even tried to get the plate number. And I’d been so open in my questioning, talking to lawyers, asking for Manuela at the sanctuary church, at the Cambridge Legal Collective.
