by Linda Barnes
I called Mooney and argued with him until he agreed to meet me in half an hour at a doughnut shop near the apartment on Westland Avenue.
34
I got there first and perched on a stool at the dingy counter. A lone waitress who looked like she’d been working three nights straight reluctantly plodded by. I ordered a large coffee with cream and two sugars in case she fell asleep before getting back to me. She swabbed the grimy countertop in front of me with a piece of rag even dirtier than the Formica. She kept staring at the door, waiting for her relief to come in, sighing and yawning for the benefit of the guy behind the cash register. Husband, maybe. She slopped some of my coffee into the saucer when she plunked it in front of me. I ordered two glazed doughnuts, my favorites. They tasted like sweetened, gluey paper.
Mooney was eighteen minutes late. The waitress’s replacement still hadn’t shown up. She took a break from glaring at the wall clock, slammed down a coffee cup, and snarled at him while she took his order for Danish.
He downed a gulp and shuddered. “Don’t you start, too, Carlotta,” he warned before I got a word out. I have seen Mooney in many different guises, from spit-and-polish dress uniform to undercover sleaze, but I’ve seldom seen him look worse. His eyes had dark smudges beneath them, and there was stubble on his chin.
“I know you’re late for a good reason,” I said demurely, resting my chin in my hand and batting my eyelashes up at him.
“Don’t start. This Canfield thing is driving me crazy. I sent a uniform over to City Hall to check out marriage licenses, birth certificates, and all that crap, and it looks like your Lydia Canfield, wife of James Hunneman, the woman who owns part of the pillow factory, is my Harold Canfield’s only sister. Which makes Hunneman Canfield’s brother-in-law, and keeps the whole mess in the family. Earn a little money at Hunneman’s factory, spend it on rent at Canfield’s apartment. We brought Harold in, and damned if I didn’t think he’d spill everything, what with us knowing the connection between him and Hunneman, but the bastard’s just yanking our chains.”
I drank coffee. It had probably been in the pot longer than the surly waitress had been on duty. “He stalling for a deal?”
“If he killed those women, or he knows who the hell did, I don’t want him cutting any deal that’s gonna keep his ass out of a cell—”
“But if that’s the only way to find out—”
“Don’t start,” he said, chewing a lump of Danish. “Paolina home?”
“I’ve got Roz looking for her. Phoned Gloria, and she’s going to have the cabbies keep an eye out. At first I thought it was just a fight with her mother …”
Mooney tried unsuccessfully to smother a yawn. “It’s never just one damn thing.” He downed more coffee like it was needed medicine. “Carlotta, it’s always a pleasure to see you, but why am I eating Danish here instead of at my desk?”
“Listen, Mooney, I’ve been running through Ana’s story in my mind all night. She denies knowing who I am. That’s lie number one. You saw her reaction to me. And she hadn’t been told my name or anything. She knew me. So I started thinking: When did she see me, when could she see me? I told you I saw Manuela, my client, the woman I thought was Manuela, speed away in an old clunker. I asked Ana if she drove a car. Remember what she said?”
“Something about not having a license.”
“Right. She evaded the question.”
“Okay,” Mooney said. “So she could have been driving, could have seen you then. So what?”
“Let’s go on to lie number two. She said she went back to Westland Avenue, took the risk of being picked up by Immigration, because maybe she left something in the room. Now that’s a big lie.”
“You think she had a more pressing reason to go back.”
“Damn straight I do. The third thing that’s bothering me is the money. The woman with the filigree ring left five hundred-dollar bills on my desk. Ana identified the ring as belonging to one of the women who roomed with her at Westland. Where’s a woman like that going to get a hundred-dollar bill?”
Mooney chewed a bite of apricot Danish. It sounded stale.
“Who searched the Westland apartment, Mooney?”
“Competent detectives.”
“Did they take it apart, really look for something somebody might have hidden there, hidden carefully?”
“Like a cache of hundred-dollar bills?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Mooney sighed. “So that’s what I’m doing here. You want to check out that apartment.”
“If Ana wanted to go back there so much that she risked La Migra picking her up, I want to know why.”
“Me too.” Mooney gulped the rest of his coffee and stood up, leaving more than half the Danish on his plate. I thought about snitching it, since the two gluey doughnuts hadn’t done much to take the edge off, but its appearance was less than tempting.
“On me,” I said, but Mooney was already halfway to the pay phone by the door. I shoved bills at the man behind the register, left a bigger tip than the waitress deserved.
“Dave’ll meet us with the key,” Mooney said when I caught up to him.
35
The door to the basement apartment was sealed with official Boston Police Department tape. Mooney slashed it as soon as he heard Dave’s footsteps. Dave nodded at me in greeting, handed over the key. He looked almost as tired as Mooney. He hadn’t shaved.
“Canfield say anything?” Mooney asked.
“Not to us,” Dave replied.
I let the men enter first, took a deep breath, and followed. It was as bad as I’d remembered, maybe worse, what with the residue of the fingerprint boys and the search team.
I said, “Too bad you can’t put Canfield away for renting a rat hole like this.”
Dave nodded agreement. Mooney said, “Where you wanna start?”
Dave said, “The guys went through here—”
“I’m looking for a place you’d hide a wad of bills,” I said, heading into the tiny back bedroom. I stopped short when I entered. The bloody mattress had turned rusty brown.
“If you want the bedroom, I’ll take the—what do you call it?—kitchenette,” Mooney yelled. “Dave, take the living room, okay? Maybe there’s a stash in a couch pillow.”
The burglar’s rule of thumb is that women keep precious belongings as close to the bed as possible, jewelry under the mattress and stuff. That’s why I wanted the bedroom. There was nothing under these mattresses but metal frames.
I didn’t think of it right away. I had to go through all the other places in the room first, from the crucifix on the wall to the pseudo closet, before my eyes were drawn back to the mattresses.
They were no more than three inches thick, ill supported on iron frames, even thinner in the middle where the outline of many a sleeper remained. My spine ached at the sight of them. I yanked the mattress from the farthest bed, stood it on end, and began a more detailed examination.
The covering had once been white. Now it was somewhere between gray and beige, stained in ways I didn’t want to think about. It smelled ripe.
Nothing on the front side of the first mattress. I flipped it over and started my examination of the back, trying to imagine where I’d attack a mattress if I wanted to hide something in it. Maybe the sides …
Nothing.
I could hear the rumble of activity from the other room. Mooney coughed. He was probably sifting through the flour and cornflakes.
I stood the second mattress on end, started the process over. I left the bloody one for last. Along the edge of the rusty, bloodstained mattress was the outline of a faint triangular scar. The stitching that closed the wound was fine and regular.
“Bingo!” I yelled, my voice too big for the room. I wondered if the upstairs tenants heard. The men in the next room did. They came running.
“Knife?” I have one in my handbag, a neat Swiss Army affair with a corkscrew and everything. I thought either of the guys might have a bigger one.
Mooney’s was strapped to his shin. He slipped it out with a sheepish glance at Dave. I’m not sure if the blade was under the legal three inches. I slit the mattress cover, plunged my hand in the opening, and removed a fistful of sticky padding. The blood had soaked through.
“Want me to—” Both Mooney and Dave must have seen the look of distaste that crossed my face.
“I’ll do it,” I snapped. I used to watch myself a lot more when I was a cop. No outward squeamishness back then, not with the boys observing.
I yanked out another handful of stuffing. “I’ll try for a while, then you can take over. I won’t hog all the action,” I promised.
“What’re you looking for?” Dave asked.
Mooney said, “Cockroaches, what do you think?”
“Thanks,” I said, wrinkling up my nose and noticing gratefully that doing so no longer hurt. “That’s all I need, a handful of roaches.”
“Want a glove?” Dave asked helpfully. “Whatever you find might have prints.”
I quickly yanked my hand out and accepted his offer. He handed me a thin plastic glove, the kind doctors use, not the black leather mitt I’d been expecting. Preparedness in the age of AIDS.
I scooped stuffing, wedging my arm farther and farther into the hole, wiggling it through all the way past my elbow. I felt a hard, thin ridge against my hand, wondered fleetingly if I’d finally found evidence of either coil or spring. “I think there’s something,” I muttered. I had to remove about six more handfuls of gunk before I could get a purchase on it. Thin and hard, like a laminated card. Bigger than a green card.
“Slash the opening a little wider,” I said to Mooney.
“Get your arm out of the way.”
“I trust you.” I didn’t want to let go of whatever it was I’d grabbed on to.
Mooney carefully enlarged the slit.
“Okay,” I said. I slid out my hand, holding a grimy, brown leather folder. Mooney grabbed it, his hands encased like mine. I wondered where the cops got all the gloves.
The folder looked familiar. I knew where I’d seen two like it recently. “INS credentials,” I said.
Mooney opened it and I stared at Harry Clinton’s picture, at his name and the numbers and letters that seemed so official. Two hundred-dollar bills were neatly folded inside.
“Who the hell—?”
“Jamieson’s buddy,” I said flatly. “The one who told me about the undercover operation at Hunneman.”
“Shit,” Mooney said. He handed the folder to Dave. “Get this to prints right away, and then get it back to me. And get an APB out for this guy. I’ll get Jamieson on the wire as soon as I get to the car. Carlotta …”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s go talk to Ana.”
36
Ana was in Interrogation Two, the room where I’d viewed the videotape of my dead client, closeted with Marian Rutledge, the classy Harvard lawyer. Mooney stopped at the coffee machine and bought himself a cup before hammering on the door. He knew better than to ask me if I wanted cop-house coffee.
The lawyer opened the door, clad in a tailored gray suit. “Good,” she said curtly upon seeing the two of us. “My client would like to speak to you.”
Mooney raised an eyebrow. We went in and Ana forced a shaky smile.
“We’re not asking for any deal up front,” Marian Rutledge said firmly. “But we are confident that our information will help your investigation, and if it does, a word on Ana’s behalf would be appreciated.” She repeated the same message for Ana’s benefit, her Spanish as elegant as her suit. Ana stared at her in openmouthed admiration. Mooney was so tired, I wasn’t sure he’d realized she was female.
“She ready to make a statement?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’d like a police translator, no offense to your Spanish.”
“Fine,” she said.
Mendez was summoned. Taping equipment was set up on the long rectangular table. Mooney checked to make sure it was in order.
The lawyer nodded to Ana when the machine began to hiss.
“¿Dónde comienzo?” Ana asked. Where do I begin?
Mooney said, “Begin with Manuela Estefan.”
Ana looked at me, glanced at her lawyer, stared longingly at the battered wooden door. There weren’t any windows, just dull beige walls. She took a deep breath. “We meet in the camp, in Texas. Brownsville, I think, is the name of the place. We tell each other stories, how we come, how we walk the long miles, how we leave our families and come here, and we are in the camp, and they say they will send us back, right back to El Salvador, we don’t even get to stay a little while. There is barbed wire and it is crowded, many refugees like us, penned like animals. And a man comes to us, to me and Manuela and three others from my country, and he says he can help us, for money, for jewelry—or maybe for other things.”
She blushed furiously and Marian Rutledge said, “Go on now, Ana.”
“We are good girls,” she declared. “Good girls. From poor families, yes, but we go to church. Good girls.”
I thought I knew why she’d wanted me to stay in Mooney’s office. Not me, in particular, but any woman.
I didn’t think she’d talk any more with Mooney and Mendez in the room, not about that part of her story. She hesitated and swallowed a gulp of coffee. It went down the wrong way and she coughed.
“The man is a coyote, a guide,” she continued. “Some he brings in from over the border, some he takes from the camps. He is a pig of a man, but he can do what he says, and soon we have bus tickets, and we come to this city, to Boston together, and we have jobs at the factory and a place to stay. He promises papers, but they never come. At the factory they don’t ask for papers.”
“Go on, Ana,” the lawyer prompted.
“More girls come to work, but the five of us are together. We work very hard for the promise of papers. Manuela, she complains, and they say if we complain, we go back to the camp, to Texas, back to El Salvador, even—back to die.
“For me it is enough. I have food to eat and I work for it, and nobody comes in the night to take me away. But Manuela, she knows more, she wants more. She talks about the other women she meets, the ones who have papers, and how they can live anyplace and do things, go out with young men and have children, families who grow up here.
“Manuela, she is the most clever of us. She finds out something, something I think about the man who is the coyote, a man we see sometimes at the factory when new girls come in. And soon Manuela has her green card. And she says to us that this secret is very valuable and it will buy green cards for all of us, for all her friends. And we drink wine and celebrate, and then Manuela is gone.”
The recorder hummed. Mendez repeated every word, his voice calm.
“The women at the factory, they say Manuela sleeps with somebody to get her card, and then she goes off because she doesn’t have to stay in such a bad place to work for so little money. But Manuela, she is so smart. She knows something. And the four of us, we think she will send for us, she will get us the green cards because she says she will, and she is not a woman who forgets.
“We wait for her, but we don’t hear. Aurelia is the bravest of us—”
“Aurelia Gaitan,” Mooney murmured.
“Sí. And she goes finally to the coyote after we wait many weeks. I think she maybe knows what Manuela knew, but she doesn’t tell us. Maybe because another girl moves into the apartment and we don’t know her so well, maybe—I don’t know why. But soon the boss at the factory tells us he has a green card for Aurelia, and she has gone also, with Manuela, to work somewhere wonderful, to California where it’s warm always, and we are happy for her, but sad, puzzled she did not say good-bye.
“We wish, the three of us, very much that Manuela had told us the secret that buys the green cards, and at home when the new girls are out, we decide to look everywhere in the apartment because Manuela is tricky and maybe she hides things and that is how Aurelia knows how to g
et her papers and be North American and free.”
Her coffee cup was empty. Mendez went out and got her a refill. She sipped it gratefully.
“In the mattress of Manuela’s bed, where a new girl is sleeping, we find it. The card you show me, Manuela’s green card, and much money, and suddenly everything is upside down. Because why would Manuela go away to work in California and leave her green card, which she is so happy about and so proud, and she will need wherever she goes in this country? Why would she leave this money, and where does this money come from? I am very afraid she is in jail.
“Delores says she will ask the man, the coyote, about the card. Maybe, she thinks, there are two cards, one—¿cómo se dice?—temporary, one for real.”
“And Delores went away,” I said. And of course the other two couldn’t go to the police, wouldn’t dream of it. Where do you turn when you grow up in a country where uniformed men haul people away in the dead of night? When any cry for help in your new country could boomerang and bring deportation?
Ana nodded bleakly and rubbed her arms, as if she were suddenly chilled. “That leaves only Amalia and myself. We are younger than the others. We decide that we do nothing until we hear from one of the women. They will not leave us without a word. We go to work, we are very quiet, we don’t complain, even when they have us work more hours. We have no secret to tell, so we don’t complain. We have no place to go and our friends are gone. And then two things happen quick together.
“We hear about you.” She nodded in my direction. “Someone who is not the police, a woman like us, and then we hear a woman talk about Manuela and how they find her dead. It’s so long, you understand, months, and in our hearts we see Manuela in California, working somewhere nice, selling dresses, maybe, with a boyfriend, maybe, and we don’t know what is true. And Amalia buys a newspaper and has someone read her the story, and we don’t know how to find out what really happened and we want the green card back, Manuela’s green card, because we think maybe that is what Manuela hid for us, the thing that is so valuable. Maybe we … I don’t know what we thought. Amalia is smarter than me. She says she will go to you. She will take the money we find with the green card—”
