by Linda Barnes
“Look what I got,” he said with a face-splitting grin, displaying a gun case big enough to house a major hunk of artillery. “H-K MK23. Special Ops gun. Wanna give it a try?”
I gave a less-than-enthusiastic shrug.
“Well, okay, then. Forget it. Navy SEAL buddy of mine dropped it off. Guys say it’s got too much kick for a woman.”
“Stop prodding, Harry.” His smile got even broader when I said his name.
“You’re just waiting, right?”
“Right.”
“You need to reup for anything?”
“No.” I don’t have to keep my numbers up the way Mooney does.
“Got more women now. Had to put in another bathroom.”
When I used to go to the range, the toilet was for the guys, and the women made do. That’s the way it was when I was in the force and that’s usually the way it is now, except everybody talks about how times have changed.
Harry removed the pistol from the case. “Pretty thing, isn’t it? A lot of the SEALs want something smaller and lighter, but this is a stopper for sure. Forty-five ACPs and those’ll sure drop a target faster than a nine. Double action. You can use the JHP bullets, too, the expandables.”
I have about as much patience for gun talk as I do for wine talk. I like to shoot and I like to drink, but I don’t practice either vocabulary.
“Pretty heavy, though.”
He handed it to me, and I thought why the hell not? Mooney wouldn’t duck out on me, now that he’d seen me. Harry handed over ear protectors and goggles.
Just like threading a needle, a cop friend named Jo Triola once told me, and we’d joyfully shared the secret giggles of the girly metaphor. You couldn’t say that to any of the guys, that shooting a gun was like threading a needle. If it wasn’t a sports metaphor, Jo and I had learned early on, better not say it at all. The concentration required to shoot well, to fire efficiently and effectively, shuts out the rest of the world. If I could continually manufacture tasks that required the same level of concentration as shooting, I wouldn’t have to question Mooney, wouldn’t need to talk to anyone, wouldn’t have to face up to …
I got lost in the sound and the smell and the immediacy of the task at hand, and suddenly it was as clear as if it were happening all over again. Muscle memory can do that to you, I suppose, because the last time I’d fired a gun, not this gun, but a similarly heavy gun, an unfamiliar gun, and smelled the pungent tang of cordite, I’d heard the reports unfiltered by earmuffs. I’d been in South America, in Colombia, in Cartagena, and the scene had had nothing to do with orderly lanes and motionless paper targets. It had to do with revenge and hatred, with ensuring that my little sister walked out of the room alive. The sweat trickled down my back in spite of the cold and I could have shot forever, slapping magazine after magazine into the well, imagining the people I’d have liked to kill, trying not to imagine those I wished I could bring back from the dead. As fast as I could pump bullets into the target wasn’t fast enough. I rammed another magazine home and repositioned my body and I wasn’t standing in the lane at Moon Island anymore. I was in an airless second-floor room with thick whitewashed walls, smelling sweet florals and spring rain and cordite.
“Hey, what the hell? You okay?”
“What?”
“Keep it pointed downrange,” Harry was yelling in my ear. “He’s dead. You fucking shredded him.”
“Sorry.”
“What the hell!”
Eventually you run out of ammunition; that’s what it comes down to. You’re forced to go back to the daily routine, the one-foot-ahead-of-the-other stuff, the get-up-in-the-morning stuff. The confronting-your-old-boss-at-the-firing-range stuff.
Mooney was suddenly there, the way he is, solid and as unassuming as a man the size of a linebacker can be, his face concerned but wary. I caught a glint of gray in the brown hair near his right temple.
“I’ll take care of this, Harry,” he said.
The instructor glanced at him and then at me, turned and walked away, carrying the H-K and shaking his head.
“Carlotta.”
“You meant to call me back, right?”
“If I’m gonna avoid you, I guess I’ll need to change a few habits.”
“I can find you anytime.”
“You found me now.”
“You know what I want.”
“Forget about it, Carlotta.”
“What do you mean, forget about it?”
“It’s a secret indictment. Secret. They’re called that for a reason.”
“No warrant?”
“Not yet.”
“Why? Why is the DA keeping it under wraps? Is it political?”
He shrugged.
“Mooney, it’s murder.”
“That’s right.”
“Which murder? Whose? Who the hell died? You can at least tell me that.”
“Look, I can’t talk to you. I can’t be seen with you.”
“You can’t be seen with me? Why?”
He lowered his voice. “You know a fed named Dailey?”
“No.”
“Gianelli know him?”
“How would I know?”
“You haven’t told anybody that I gave Gianelli the heads-up?”
“I would never do that.”
“Has anybody been following you around? You know, in an American-made sedan, gray or brown? You know the deal.”
“No. What the—?”
“Just answer the question.”
“I should answer your questions, but you won’t answer mine? Look, Moon, if I don’t even know what crime he’s supposed to have committed, I can’t do anything. I can’t help—”
“Ask Gianelli.”
“Sam doesn’t want my help.”
“Right, Carlotta. He doesn’t want your help. You ever wonder why?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He licked his lower lip and for a moment I thought he was going to turn away without another word. He stared at the ground as he spoke, kept his voice even and uninflected. “I don’t know, but it occurs to me that maybe Gianelli doesn’t want you to find out what really happened. He may not want your help because there’s no way you can help. He may say he didn’t do it, but what I don’t understand is why the hell you believe him. You know who he is, right? What he is? You know where he comes from. A man lives with that kind of shit since he’s a boy— You tell me: How do you live with shit all around you and not get dirty?”
I stared at him, all the rational and convincing words I’d meant to use forgotten. I could hear the waves against the rocks and the pom-pom-pom of a silenced .22.
“Look, I have to go,” he said quickly. “I can’t tell you anything. I never could.”
“Mooney, I—”
“Don’t ask me again. You know what I’m talking about, Carlotta. Isn’t it time to admit it to yourself?”
I didn’t say anything. I pressed my lips together and stared at the gravel until the individual stones melted into a solid band of gray.
“Hey, how’s Paolina? Jeez, I’m sorry, Carlotta, I should have asked right off. I should have called you back, just to ask.”
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing an unexpected lump in my throat. “You should have.”
TWO
Az me lebt mit a teivel, vert men a teivel. Translated freely from my grandmother’s native Yiddish: “He who lives with a devil becomes a devil.”
Mooney’s tirade struck home in more ways than he knew. It’s not that I don’t think about what Sam does for a living; it’s that I try not to think about it. Because when I do think about Sam’s line of work, when I ponder the Gianelli family’s generations-long involvement in organized crime, I find myself recalling my grandmother and her proverbs, and wondering not only about Sam, but also about myself and the person I might become. If I do marry him, will I come to take his work for granted? Slough it off, forget about it, live with the devil and become the devil?
Wasn
’t there another saying, not a Yiddish one, but an English standard, that began “Lie down with the devil”? Lie down with the devil and what? I couldn’t recall the tag end of the slogan. Maybe I just didn’t want to.
When I flew to Bogotá to search for my little sister, I left clients in the lurch. Oh, I phoned them—or rather, I had Roz, my quasi-assistant, phone them to apologize, commiserate, and recommend other local investigators—but those clients were gone and they weren’t coming back. When you ditch clients, word gets around: I was out of the loop and at least two of the lawyers who routinely shuttled clients my way were going to require major acts of contrition before they sent anyone again.
I drove a full shift—picking up fares in Southie and dropping them in Eastie, ferrying businessmen from the Four Seasons to Logan—because no matter how screwed up your life might be, bills manage to arrive on time, property tax payments fall due, and supermarket checkout clerks want cash in exchange for the groceries. That’s why I keep my hackney license up to date. Driving tides me over the tough times; if I drive, I don’t have to accept ugly divorce cases or take on clients who strike me as con men at first glance. But the problem with cabbing—aside from meager pay, lousy hours, expensive gas, crummy traffic, and bad tips—is that it takes your time, not your concentration. You can drive and let your thoughts roam, let them idle and sink into crevices of anxiety. No doubt about it: Other people’s problems are better than your own, which was why I was nowhere near as irritated at Roz for setting up an unauthorized appointment with a prospective client as I might have been.
Roz used to be my tenant, pure and simple. Then she became my housekeeper. Now she functions as a sort of all-purpose assistant, although not the kind who reliably does as she is told. What with the fallout from Colombia, I had told her I wasn’t yet ready to get back on the job. This morning, when she’d sprung her friend-of-a-friend, please-do-it routine on me, I hadn’t been eager, but who knows, maybe it was the fact that I had a solid shot with a client tonight that had given me the momentum to face Mooney this morning.
What had I expected? From Mooney, I don’t know, but something more than the nothing I got. From the client? If I could have ordered off a fantasy menu, I’d have picked a Brioni-clad corporate client offering reliable, well-paid work. Maybe a low-level manager was trying to pull off a little financial embezzlement. I could investigate him and his methods, or possibly find out how the prototype of some new product wound up in a competitor’s showroom.
Instead, at 7:37 on Thursday evening, I got Jessica Franklin.
She was young. She was pretty, with a sweet round face and dark glossy hair so straight it could have been scalped off an Asian girl. Her shoes were cheap teetery heels, and we’d barely gotten past the initial formalities—name, address, and occupation—when she burst into tears.
When people say “burst into tears,” they usually mean she started to cry or a tear trickled down her cheek, but that’s not what I mean at all. This was bursting, the way a balloon bursts: one second there, next second pop. One second sunshine, next second downpour, cloudburst. Jessica Franklin’s sweet face screwed up into a mask of tragedy and she started crying with the desperate abandon of a baby, with unselfconscious sobs and snot and a reckless wail.
“Hey,” I said, “it can’t be that bad.”
Jessica wailed.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
She wailed harder, picking up her purse and rummaging in its deep interior. I passed her some tissues, thanking God there were tissues, a whole box of them right where they should be on my desk, but she ignored them and kept rummaging and then, with the waterworks at flood level, she lost her grip on the handbag.I reached out to grab it, but the handle eluded my grasp, and I succeeded only in speeding its cartwheel descent.
Loose change, keys, and jewelry clanged to the floor. A deck of cards plopped onto a pile of Kleenex along with a small stapler, a cell phone, a bottle of scarlet nail polish, a makeup brush, a hairbrush, a pack of cigarettes, matchbooks, a toothbrush, a cascade of Band-Aids, pens and pencils, rubber bands, and a red bandanna.
“God,” the woman said, jumping to her feet and squatting, then kneeling awkwardly on the bare floorboards. “I’m so damned clumsy.” Her hands scrabbled at the pile of junk and fanned the playing cards across the floor. “Oh, shit. Hell, no, please, don’t help me. Please. We’ll start over in a minute. I’ll shake hands and stop crying, really. Don’t help me, please, it’s bad enough already. I feel like some kind of animal—out of control, like a puppy dog crawling on the floor.”
She was heavier than I’d thought at first glance, her knees dimpled and soft. She wore a short dark skirt and a tweedy heather-colored sweater. Her face was heart-shaped and her gentle eyes a deep soft brown. She looked too young to have the kind of troubles that would lead her to hire a private investigator, but the tears said otherwise.
She worked quickly and methodically, dumping things back in the purse, scooping the cards with skillful fingers, giving them an expert shuffle before securing them with a rubber band. While she worked she tried to regain control, and she seemed to be calming down until she came across a large envelope. As she touched it, her eyes welled, and the moaning sobs began anew.
Wordlessly, she passed me the envelope. At her nod, I opened it, then blinked in surprise: a wedding invitation.
The pale unaddressed envelope was lined with silver moiré paper; the enclosed card featured modern script. When I read the names, I glanced quickly at my appointment calendar, and yes, the young woman crouched on the floor, holding a wad of tissues to her streaming eyes, was none other than the bride-to-be. A thin silver band circled the ring finger of her left hand.
“Come on,” I said, helping her off the floor. “Sit down. Talk to me.” I didn’t think she’d handed over the invitation so I could congratulate her on the upcoming nuptials.
She collapsed in the chair. Speech still beyond her power, she picked up her purse and started rummaging again. I thought we were in for a repeat performance and braced myself for a second shower of personal items. She made a noise somewhere between a croak and a sob, then gave up and yanked a slip of paper from either a well-concealed pocket or the waistband of her skirt.
This one was cheap copy paper, folded roughly in eighths. I unfolded it.
HE WON’T BE SLEEPING HOME FRIDAY NIGHT. HE’LL BE SLEEPING WITH HER.
A fresh paroxysm of weeping accompanied my reading. I doled out more tissues, hoping she’d eventually be able to form words and sentences.
“This is really embarrassing,” she mumbled, ducking her head.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” I said.
“Yeah, right.”
“Some bigger than others.” When it comes to mistakes, I know what I’m talking about. Maybe she heard it in my voice, because she stopped sniffling.
“I mean, what do you think of a girl who gets totally involved with a guy, just swept right off her feet, and she doesn’t even know who he is?”
What did I think? When I’d met Sam Gianelli, I’d assumed he was simply a businessman, owner of the cab company I drove for part-time. His mob connections, which—had I been a local, Boston born and bred—I might have inferred from his last name, were far less apparent than his physical charms.
I said, “I’d think she had a lot of company, Miss Franklin.”
“Call me Jessie. Please.”
Jessie Franklin had a killer dimple that dotted the right side of her face. She must have been an adorable child. Not quite as adorable as my adopted little sister, Paolina, but close.
“So congratulations,” I said, checking the date on the invitation. “At least you haven’t married him yet.”
She stared at her shoes. “I don’t know what to do. Time’s running out.”
I glanced at the card again. The wedding was less than two weeks away.
“You have no idea how much fuss there’s been.”
Modern weddings being what they are, I
probably didn’t. Me, I got married for the first and only time when I was nineteen in a simpler world. Me and the groom, a couple of witnesses, and my dying father to walk me down the aisle.
“I don’t know what to do.” Jessie Franklin’s words came out in gulps, in fits and starts broken by sniffs and nose-blowing. “Everything’s all arranged. My mother—my mother will absolutely die if this doesn’t go exactly the way she wants it to go. I mean, my dress, it’s gorgeous; it’s finally perfect. My mother made them change the hem three times. Three times! Everything has to be so perfect. I mean, she had a ft, arranging everything.”
I held up the accusatory note. “Do you have any idea who sent this?”
“No. Of course not. Absolutely not.”
“How did you get it?”
She stared at me blankly.
“In the mail? Shoved under a door?”
“I found it. In my purse.”
“When?”
“What’s today? Thursday? Oh my God, it’s Thursday night. Two days ago, and I still don’t know what to do.”
I’ve shadowed bank presidents and suspected thieves. I’ve worked for defense lawyers and district attorneys. This was the first time I’d been approached by a bride-to-be.
I sat back in my chair and toyed with a pencil. I have warm fuzzy feelings about brides. How can you not? Girls are raised to it, the big day, the ultimate dress, the dream-come-true event. Paolina talks about it: happily ever after.
I was a bride once. More to the point, I had been well on the way to becoming a bride again until Sam had learned he couldn’t reenter the country without being charged with murder. Although she was younger and a stranger, I felt an immediate bond with Jessica Franklin, a forged link. Here she was: another woman engaged to a man she wasn’t sure she could trust.
I bit my lip. “You haven’t said anything to your mother?”
“Like what? Like first of all, I’m living with my fiancé, which she doesn’t know at all, thinks I’m a virgin who’s never been kissed. Like— I wouldn’t know where to start. My mom and dad, they’re old-fashioned big-time and they think I’m living with a girlfriend and working hard every minute and no fooling around. If anybody found out, I’d die. I mean, I’d never hear the end of it, what a no-good dummy I am and what a mess I’ve made of my life. And if I don’t go through with the wedding, what then? No decent man will want me now, that’s what they’ll say, and all that crap, like it was the 1950s and people still went on dates and held hands in the moonlight. My mom, especially, she’d hit the roof.”
