Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

She began to cry. “The son of a bitch hurt me.”

  Awkwardly, with obvious pain, she slid in behind the wheel, and Daisy, with pain of his own, crept in from the other side. The car bucked when she started it, but then smoothed out as she steered it onto South Union, where she ran a red light. Her expression was sour.

  “What was the problem, Pearl?”

  “I reminded him of his mother.”

  • • •

  Emma Goss was asleep, a sheet drawn over her, her shape like a piece of furniture shrouded away during the owner’s absence. The sleep was unnatural, the fault of pills she had purchased after Harold’s funeral and had never used until Henry discovered them and made her swallow several because of shadows under her eyes and a slur in her speech. That was ten hours ago, when sunshine was flooding the room. Now, from another window, there was moonlight.

  Twice, briefly, she had come out of the sleep, the first time with the fear that someone was tracing a tightly clenched fist over her body and at any second would strike a vital spot. The second time she woke with only a vague sense of identity, as if her life had lost its distinguishing contours and were rounding in on her, dull and anonymous. Now she stirred again, this time from a voice in the room.

  “I’m home.”

  She heard a heavy tread near the bed, but remained impassive, incurious, her eyes only half open. When an arm swung over her, she smelled perfume on the sleeve.

  “Look at me.”

  It was a man’s voice, beer on his breath, but his face was only a ball of wax. Half of him was on the bed.

  “Do you know who I am? Look at the suit.”

  Her eyes worked to see. Her hand touched the scented sleeve.

  “I’m Harold,” he said.

  NINE

  “RITA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louise Leone here.”

  “That’s not your name now.”

  “Baker.”

  “Yeah, I knew it was something like that. Tough about your father. I know what it’s like to lose people.”

  “Rita, I had a close one.”

  “Yeah, I heard. How are you?”

  “Healing. I wonder if I might drop over.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Ten minutes away.”

  “Sure, why not? It’s been a while.”

  “I’ll leave now.”

  “Come around the back. That’s where I’ll be. I’m a woman likes to take it easy now.”

  Louise racked the receiver. She was in her mother’s bedroom, where the crucified Christ hung over the bed and religious pictures adorned the opposing wall. A photograph of her father, idealized beyond belief, stood on the dresser beside a smaller picture of her and her sister in Easter dresses. She glanced into the mirror, touched her hair, and then left the room.

  Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table with an untouched cup of tea, did not look up, not even when Louise dropped a hand on her mother’s frail shoulder, which felt like the back of an arthritic cat. Leaning over, she kissed the top of her mother’s head and said, “Love me, Ma?”

  “I love both my children.”

  “Me best?” she asked, playing her sister’s game.

  “Both the same.”

  She kissed her mother’s head again and straightened up with a sharp twinge. “I’m going out for a while.”

  “You should stay off your feet.”

  “Too much to do,” she said, and moved toward the door. Her mother looked up.

  “Am I going to lose you too?”

  “No, Ma, I’m too tough.”

  Her mother dropped her eyes and touched the teacup. “Maybe you only think you are.”

  A few minutes later she was cruising along Route 125 under a bright sky bearing a distant fleet of little clouds. The road edged Harold Parker State Forest, where pines sprang to heroic heights. She soon crossed the line into Andover and, at the state police barracks, took a left onto Gould Road and then another left into the Farrwood Drive area, which lay on the fringe of the forest.

  Rita Gardella O’Dea’s house was a sprawling contemporary, much of it glass, and stood on the top of a graded rise, where pines had been toppled to make way for birches. Lousie left her Porsche at the foot of the drive and hiked up a wide walkway partly overrun by creeping ground ivy. In the oblique sunlight, beds of border flowers glimmered like displays of old jewelry. At the top, winded, she rested for a few seconds and then followed a narrow footpath to the rear of the house, where the green of the lawn looked hard and healthy, full of the strength of early summer.

  “Here I am,” Rita said, as if she could be missed. She stood on the patio, an explosively overweight woman in a sleeveless frock that exposed the heft of her arms and the voluminous cups of a bra that barely restrained her fullness. Her black hair fell long and straight down her back, and her dark-eyed face was disarmingly pretty, more that of a plump schoolgirl than a widow in her forties. She was the sister of a slain Mafia leader, whose money she had inherited, along with remnants of his power. “You thirsty?” she said. “I got lemonade here.”

  A pitcher stood on a round table, hornets drawn to it. Beside the pitcher was a plate of puff pastry.

  “You want to eat? Go ahead, take something.”

  “No thank you.”

  Rita slumped into a chaise longue and gestured. “Go ahead, sit.”

  Louise sat in a padded chair, grateful to be off her feet. She crossed her legs and placed her hands demurely in her lap as Rita scrutinized her.

  “You look OK, for what you been through. A little pale, that’s all.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “A man approached me outside the funeral home. I didn’t see him until he was on me, no one I knew. He fired twice and was gone. He only hit me once. He must’ve been nervous.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “He came cheap.”

  A small butterfly gently worked its way through the air and ventured first toward Louise and then toward Rita before flitting away. Rita said, “So all you got to do is figure out where he was coming from.”

  “Yes, that’s the problem.”

  “Somebody turns on you, it’s usually this,” Rita said, and rubbed a thumb against two fingers. A hornet flew close, and she swatted the air. “You’ve built yourself a sweet operation. The big people are happy with you.”

  “When Scampy died, they thought I’d fall on my face. I surprised them.”

  “You didn’t surprise me.”

  “But maybe I’ve surprised them too much.”

  Rita’s eyes were smudges of darkness, the line of her mouth an unspoken irony. She reached down and scratched the heft of her calf, leaving chalk marks. “You scared?”

  “Only of them.”

  “Relax. If they wanted your operation, they’d have sent a real shooter. Your head tells you that.”

  Louise nodded. “I guess I needed to hear you say it.”

  “Knowing who it wasn’t pretty much tells you who it was. My brother used to say that. You didn’t know Tony, did you?”

  “Only from a distance,” Louise said, remembering a silver head of hair and an expensive suit of clothes. She remembered his face from a photograph in a Boston paper and a framed one perched on his closed casket, the North End funeral home filled with so many flowers the air hung sick. She said, “I drove Scampy in twice a year to meet with him. I always waited in the car.”

  “Scampy never introduced you?”

  “No.”

  “Smart of him. My brother could do things to women with just a look. Remember the actor Cesar Romero? That was Tony.” Rita’s large eyes filled. “I got tough skin, but I’m all lonely underneath. Most people wouldn’t guess it, but you know it, don’t you?”

  “I’m a woman.”

  “It’s more than that. I wasn’t so heavy, you and I could pass for sisters.”

  Louise smiled, and Rita suddenly shifted her weight, swung out a round arm, an
d reached into the plate of pastry.

  “Tell me about your operation.”

  “I bankroll only the biggest buys. I don’t look for business, it comes to me now. I give a reasonable rate, and I’ve never been burned.”

  “Far as you know.” Nibbling, Rita got powder on her chin and wiped it off with the padded heel of her hand. “Right now, this particular time, you got a lot of money out?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than usual?”

  Louise nodded.

  “Who’s your legman?”

  “Sal Botello from Springfield. John Rozzi rides shotgun, also from Springfield. When Scampy was dying, he recommended Sal in case I ever needed help. Their mothers were cousins or something. I took him on when I decided to expand the business.”

  Rita licked her fingers. “No man, no matter how much he kisses your ass, likes working for a woman.”

  “Sal doesn’t kiss my ass, but you’re right.”

  “He watched you grow, probably thinks he made it happen.”

  “Yes, I’ve suspected that at times.”

  “What else do you suspect?”

  “He thinks he could be me.”

  Rita’s eyes absorbed her. “You had it figured before you came here. Only thing you didn’t know was if the son of a bitch was acting on his own. Now you know.”

  Louise closed her fingers into her palms, pressing the nails. Her eyes focused on the pitcher of lemonade, prismatic in the sunlight. Rita smiled at her.

  “Go ahead, have some. It’s not from a mix. I made it with real lemons.”

  Louise rose, fearlessly fought away hornets, and poured from the pitcher, the ice cubes gushing forward, then clogging. She filled one glass and partially filled another. She offered the full one to Rita, whose hand flew up like a pigeon, wings spread.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Louise gazed off at the far reaches of the property, where the top branches of towering swamp pines examined the sky. “I know what I have to do,” she said. “All I need is permission.”

  Rita drank deeply, the right armhole of her dress gaping wide and revealing a neglected underarm and the vast motions of her torso. She smacked her lips. “That was good.”

  “Do I have it?”

  Rita deposited the empty glass beside the chaise longue. “Do what you have to do.”

  Louise immediately leaned over her and kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”

  Rita said, “Try the pastry.”

  Barney Cole crossed the street to city hall, which was topped with a clock that had not worked for decades and a bell that had never rung, no tongue. It was a pigeon-stained fortress where questionable politicians were kept in office by ancient machinery and the remains of ethnic voting blocs, of which Cole’s father had been a member in good standing. The double doors suggested portals into the lobby of a secret society. Inside, a rotunda shot up three flights to a leaded-glass skylight. At one time the welfare offices were on the top floor but were shifted when a morose recipient humiliated by a clerk went haywire, hurled herself over the rail, and was dead upon impact, her head laid open on the marble floor like pottery pieces. Cole’s father had been among the witnesses, and Cole still remembered the pallor of his father’s face when he had returned home that night.

  Cole approached the snack stand, which was operated by a blind man who recognized customers by the sound of their footsteps and detected their moods by the depth of their voices. His name was Al. “You must be a ghost,” he said.

  “Not quite,” Cole replied.

  “You’re right. Your dad’s step was a shade quicker. Same fall, though. You in a gloomy mood, Barney?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Must be my imagination,” he said, smiling under inkblot glasses. “You’ve been a stranger. Watcha doin’ here?”

  “Killing time,” Cole said with a glance at his watch. He picked up a candy bar and paid for it with a bill he pressed deep into the man’s dry hard palm, which seemed no bigger than a baby’s. “That’s a single, Al.”

  “What kinda candy?”

  “Mars bar.”

  “Your dad went for Milky Way.” Al made change and spoke with a sigh. “The best of ‘em are gone, Barney. Your dad, Vin Foley, Phil DiAdamo, Eddie Fallon, Gerry Guilmette. When it gets slow here, I can still hear their steps.”

  Cole unwrapped the candy bar. He took a small bite and then immediately closed the wrapper and slipped the bar into a pocket.

  “They were the cream, Barney. Hard to bury guys like that. They rise to the surface.”

  Cole glanced around the lobby. Many faces were unfamiliar. A woman stopped in midstride to sort the documents she was carrying, her lean legs quivering on high heels. A few fellows were talking near the elevator, which was disgorging visitors, mostly Hispanic women whose somber expressions contrasted with the exuberant colors of their clothes.

  “I never believed those stories about your dad. All bullshit as far as I was concerned.”

  In Cole’s memory his father had had a head of majestic shape; in photographs it was ordinary and balding, which gave Cole a jolt whenever he opened the album. “Even if they were true, Al, what does it matter now?”

  “That’s not the point, Barney. It mattered then.“

  The woman with the documents suddenly sprinted across the lobby as if somebody had laid a whip across her bottom. A man with shirtsleeves rolled high stuffed letters down the mail chute next to the elevator. Cole rechecked his watch.

  “You seem nervous, Barney, or is that my imagination again?”

  Cole looked to his left. A scrawny man in the dull uniform of a deputy sheriff had entered the lobby by a side door and was standing near the city clerk’s office. The shabby braid and tarnished buttons of the uniform gave him the look of a stray from a Memorial Day parade. Cole said, “Al, it was good talking to you.”

  “You didn’t say much, Barney.”

  Cole strolled over to the deputy, a trusted flunky of District Attorney Chugger Doogan, who had offices next door in superior court. Earlier the district attorney had telephoned Cole, an uncomfortable conversation that had cramped Doogan’s voice and altered the color in Cole’s face.

  “You’re ten minutes late,” the deputy said. “D.A.'s waiting for you.”

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “I saw you go in.”

  “Nothing personal,” Cole said, “but I don’t like you coming after me.”

  “Just doing what I’m told, Barney. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid.”

  The courthouse exuded its age, its grime, its intricate and irreplaceable architecture of a dead era. Police officers and bondsmen, lawyers with their clients, assistant district attorneys floated in hazes of dust through wide corridors and up expansive stairways. Gray-haired clerks filtered through the dim, the women indistinguishable from the men, as if age had made them androgynous, especially in that part of the building that seemed like a mausoleum. “Where the hell are we going?” Cole asked, for they had passed the district attorney’s offices and were descending stairs into the pit of the building, where the fluorescent lighting hung low.

  “D.A.'s interested in privacy,” the deputy said over the hum of a dehumidifier stirring up ancient odors. Each door they passed bore the legend Records. Finally the deputy halted at one and opened it while giving a quick rap. “I’ll leave you now,” he said, and vanished.

  The room, lined with fireproof file cabinets, looked into an inner chamber, where the district attorney was sitting at a table with two men who looked like high-powered insurance salesmen and sure winners of company achievement awards. The district attorney struggled to his feet, and his feedbag of a body moved slowly toward Cole, no strength of purpose in the short stout legs. The smile on his face seemed an aberration.

  “I don’t like this,” Cole said in a low voice.

  “I don’t either, Barney, but what can I do? They’re feds.”

  • • •

  Mrs.
Whipple’s polo shirt was bright yellow, her red shorts even brighter. Whenever she moved to rake or dig or pull up weeds, Henry Witlo glimpsed the colors. They flashed between the low-hanging branches of a tree and through the boundary of shrubs. Moving closer, he saw the movement of her arms and the spring of her legs. He cut through the foliage, smiled boyishly, and said, “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  She turned with a bamboo rake in her hands and gave him a quick inquiring look. “Yes, Henry?”

  He was pleased she remembered his name, though he had been reasonably sure she would, mostly from a glimpse he had once gotten of her husband, unsparingly bland, which gave him a clue to the tempo of the marriage. “I don’t mean to bother you.”

  “It’s OK,” she said. “What is it?”

  He liked the way the sun iced the gray cracks in her blond hair, and he liked the sound of her voice, though it reminded him of an elementary school teacher who had jacked him out of a chair and boxed his ears. “I don’t mean to cause trouble,” he said.

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “It’s the stereo. Sometimes you’re not home, your daughter plays it loud. I don’t mind, but it kinda gets on my aunt’s nerves. You know how old ladies are.”

  “Tell Mrs. Goss I’m sorry. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “I didn’t want to mention it.”

  Mrs. Whipple tipped her head. “You’re very good to her.”

  “She’s a nice lady, only family I got.”

  “What do you do for work, Henry?”

  “I draw disability. I got banged up pretty bad in Vietnam.”

  “That was a terrible war. My husband missed it, thank God.”

  “I was proud to serve.”

  “And your aunt must’ve been proud of you.”

  “She wrote me twice a week, and she sent me a lot of packages.”

  Mrs. Whipple wound the leather loop of the rake handle around a finger. “Are you married, Henry?”

  “No, but I’ve come close a few times,” he said. He liked the way her eyes played upon him, some sort of promise implicit in the playfulness, which was no less than what he had expected. “Long as my aunt needs me,” he said, “I’ve got no plans.”