by Linda Barnes
“No.”
“Stiff-ass guy, guy I’d like to impress for once. And you know what he says?”
“No.”
“He asks me: Am I a fan? I say, ‘Excuse me, sir, a fan of what?’ thinking he is no way asking me if I’m his fan because that’s kind of a stupid thing to say. So he points at this picture, this photo you gave me, and you said was a guy you followed around the other night. You know who this is?”
“I told you his name.”
“It’s some guy sings with a punk rock band.”
“But—I followed him.”
“The guy looked like this? Exactly like this?” He tapped the photo with his index finger.
“He wore a scarf. It was cold. It was dark.” I stopped because I could hear how lame it sounded. I’d expected the man to look like the photo. Dammit, he’d been with my client. She’d strolled him out of the restaurant, smiling up at her “fiancé.”
“And the woman paid you in cash?” Little Mac said.
“I accept cash.”
“You didn’t think it was odd?”
“She said she’d done some gambling at Foxwoods.”
He gave me a look, like how dumb is that? I didn’t blame him.
Big Mac said, “Let’s go back to the guy. You tailed him in a cab, you said?”
“Hey, I gave you his license plate.”
“Guess what? Stolen.”
They were landing so many direct hits, I felt boxed into a corner. “Did you run her prints, the dead woman’s?” It seemed like my only choice was to go on the offensive.
No response.
“Is an artist doing a sketch? So you can try it out on the real Jessica?”
“We’re not here to answer your questions,” Big Mac said. “You’re supposed to answer ours.”
“If we cooperate—”
Little Mac said, “Cooperation? That’s what we thought we were getting down at Albany Street.”
Big Mac said, “You made us look bad, Carlyle. Why are you lying to us?”
I could have told them I wasn’t lying. Again. I could have sworn on my mother’s grave and volunteered to take a lie detector test. Hell, I could have banged my head against the wall, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.
So I said nothing. And they took me downtown.
PART THREE
FIFTEEN
My anger level soared with each innuendo-packed question the Macs tossed my way. There was no point to the exercise beyond the naked display of power; they had decided to waste my time because they thought I had wasted theirs. They denied me a cup of coffee simply because I requested one. My head pounded till I thought it might explode, and when I finally demanded that they charge me or let me go, they let me sit for an hour and twenty-two minutes in an empty interrogation room to show me that they were in charge and I wasn’t.
No one offered me a ride home either. The Red Line into Harvard Square was crowded and steamy, full of the smell of wet wool and underwashed bodies. It wasn’t until the Central Square stop that I realized I was inspecting each boarding passenger, looking for Jessica Franklin.
I knew she was dead. She had lied to me from beginning to end. If she got on the T, if her ghost got on the T, I would grab her and shake her till she told me why she had lied. I tried to fill myself with righteous anger. The woman had lied to me and now I was in trouble with the cops. All because of her.
Every time I managed to stoke the flame of my anger to a righteous burn, it subsided in a rush of sadness followed by a tide of curiosity. Why had she come to me, that sweet-faced child, with her plausible lies? Who was she? Who was Kenneth L. Harrison?
The minute I got home, I made coffee, adding milk till it was cool enough to chug. Then I hollered for Roz. Time for a reckoning. Yelling felt good, a release, a safety valve, and I knew perfectly well she could hear me. The house is old, the walls thin. I hear her plenty, especially when she and her mate du jour go at it hot and heavy on the tumbling mats she calls furniture.
When she didn’t respond, I abandoned my caffeine on the counter and raced upstairs. Moving felt almost as good as shouting. When Roz opened the door to her third-floor hideaway, she looked like a punk Cinderella in rags, her head wrapped in a ratty scarf, a shock of blue hair visible on the right side.
“I was just going to clean the house,” she announced breathlessly. “Top to bottom. Honest.” She pays reduced rent in exchange for housework, but she cleans neither often nor well.
“I know I fucked up,” she rushed on, “but really, I was gonna do more than just check that a Jessica Franklin lived where she said she did. I was gonna run all sorts of checks, but then you told me to do that thing with the dead bodies in Vegas, remember? I thought that was more important.”
The Macs hadn’t been that loud. I wondered whether she eavesdropped on all my conversations. “But you said—”
“She wasn’t a ‘friend of a friend.’ A little white lie, you know? I didn’t think it would hurt. You needed to get back to work.”
“Did you suggest it, or did she?”
“I don’t— Is it important?”
“Yes, it’s important! Dammit, I don’t know what’s important. The girl is dead!”
Roz stared at the floor, then stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth. “I kinda think she suggested it. I put her off, said you weren’t taking clients, and then she said something about really needing to see you, and was there any way we could fix it. She sounded so nice, and— Shit! Cleaning the house, I guess I should stick to that, right?”
“I want to know who that woman is. Was. Why she lied.” I tugged my hair and concentrated on breathing. The impersonation was so detailed. It had seemed so real, the fussy mother, the prim father, the nasty anonymous note. Now they’d vanished like evening shadows, leaving behind a wild goose chase to the Cape and an unidentified body on a slab.
Roz shifted her feet uncomfortably. “I guess the cops will find out.”
“Those cops? Let me tell you, those guys are not exactly going to devote their lives to it.”
Oh, they’d do fingerprints. They’d get a police artist to do a sketch, put it in the newspaper. Maybe they’d get a match on the prints; maybe the perp would come forward. If not, they’d move on. I knew what it was like, how many cases they had, how many court appearances, how many hours they clocked. Hit-and-run clears are never a priority unless the mayor’s kid gets crushed. Boston cops are realists. They prioritize, go for the big cases, the murders, the high-profile stuff, not the small-paragraph, second-section crimes.
Yelling at Roz felt good, but it was nothing but a dead-end street. I was angry, but Roz didn’t deserve the brunt of the attack. I was angry at a dead woman, but more than that I was furious at myself, at my failure to read Jessica Franklin, to detect her massive and creative lies. I pride myself on my ability to tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit. My pride had taken a direct hit.
I kept my voice low. “Okay, you saw her? Jessica?”
“Well, yeah. I let her in. I saw her leave.”
“Could you draw her?”
Roz brightened. “Sure.”
“Okay. Draw her; that’s number one.”
“Number two?”
“I followed a car Friday night. I want you to run the plate. The cops said it was stolen—”
“If the cops—”
“Roz, they aren’t going to follow up on it, because they think I’m lying to them. If I lied about who the girl was, then my whole story is a lie; that’s what they think. I want the details: Where the car was stolen, who reported it.”
“Okay.”
“So you draw the girl and I’ll make copies of the guy’s photo. I already scanned it. It’s in the computer.”
I’d glimpsed “Ken” through fogged car windows, under fleeting streetlamps, a man wearing a heavy coat. But his general appearance had jibed with the photo. If pseudo-Jessica Franklin had picked this photo, she’d picked it because the
rocker looked like Ken, like the guy who was supposed to be Ken Harrison. Enough like the man she wanted me to follow that I’d take the bait. Therefore the photo would be good enough to show around.
Somehow I kept thinking that if I’d done my job right, if I hadn’t lost him on the Cape, things might have turned out differently. Maybe the phony bride would still be part of the world, pretending to be somebody else today.
“Okay, so that’s three.” Roz’s voice jarred me back to the present.
“Come downstairs,” I said. “And lose the turban. The house can stay dirty one more day.”
In my office I wrote out the address of the building “Ken” had visited prior to his trip to the Cape. “Number four: Go door to door, every single office in this building. Make a list of every outfit that rents space there, and see if anyone who works in the building recognizes either the drawing or the photo.”
“Right.”
“If they recognize the guy in the photo as a member of a band, keep on asking.”
“Shit,” she said. “Omigod, it’s like a publicity still. Crap, I think I’ve seen that band. I should have gotten that.”
“Would have been nice.”
She looked down at her tattered clothing and said, “I ought to change, right?”
“First,” I said, “draw.”
I handed her paper along with a pencil that she rejected, substituting a charcoal stick from a convenient pocket. I took off for the kitchen to retrieve my abandoned cup of coffee. By the time I returned, the image was taking shape.
Sometimes I forget how good she is. It always strikes me as ironic that Roz, who claims to despise all representational drawing, can catch a likeness in a few hastily drawn lines, catch it with the kind of detail a committed representational artist would kill to duplicate. As I watched the sketch grow more like Jessica, as I made the occasional suggestion, I wanted to ask, What is it that makes you despise your own talent?
My ex, a gifted musician who works sporadically at best, used to claim it wasn’t talent but will. The talent was the easy part. The ability to handle the inevitable disappointment, to trust the process, to work when no one seemed to care, to play when no one was listening, to practice for yourself, those were the hard things, the things that made the difference. And luck. Always luck, good or bad.
I pressed my lips together and imagined the real woman, the dead woman, walking into my office, cheeks pink from the cold. What kind of luck had brought the phony Jessica Franklin to my door?
“And what about the dead bodies in Vegas?” Roz said while I made copies of her effort.
My stomach lurched. I had a vision of Sam behind the wheel of a car, his face twisted with hatred, running down a young woman who looked vaguely like Jessica. “They’ll wait. You can go change.”
“Um, do we—do I get paid for this, or—? No, forget I asked. I screwed up, so I guess I owe you.”
It’s irrational, but that’s exactly how I felt, too. Somehow, in some way, I had screwed up and now I owed Jessica Franklin a debt I might never repay.
SIXTEEN
I circled the block slowly. Allston’s Pomeroy Court was a skinny, down-at-the-mouth street lined with houses in various stages of disrepair. A corner market advertised Pakistani and Indian groceries, fresh halal meats, and cut-price beer. The cars were old and rusty with PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN bumper stickers. When I parked my rented junker on nearby Guildford Street, it ft into the landscape like a piece of a child’s puzzle.
Two overturned plastic chairs decorated the weedy yard of a two-family with peeling beige paint. The adjoining house was green with unfortunate yellow trim. The high, narrow structures, too close to the street and too close to each other, had stingy lawns and forbidding chain-link fences. I checked the address against the one I had written: 82 Pomeroy Court, but failed to picture my Jessica Franklin in the faded maroon house with the torn lace curtains.
When I’d called St. Elizabeth’s and asked to speak to Ms. Franklin, nurses’ aide, a cool alto had informed me that she was not expected in today. Which meant that she might be home, enjoying a day off. I poked my finger at the bell.
“I’m not buying anything, young lady.” A woman’s voice.
“I’m not selling,” I said through the firmly closed door.
“This isn’t magazine subscriptions? I tell those people over and over, if I want a magazine, I’m perfectly okay going out and buying it at the store.” Her words were slightly slurred, enough to make me speculate about speech defects and alcohol consumption.
“Please,” I said, “you can see through the peephole; I’m all alone. I’d like to ask you a few questions. It won’t take long.”
A moment’s silence, then the rattle of a chain and the click of a dead bolt told me that curiosity had won the battle with fear.
She blinked up at me, a short middle-aged woman with carefully arched eyebrows in a heavily made-up face, wearing a dark sweater and a conservative shapeless skirt. A charm bracelet jangled on her right wrist. I wondered whether I’d caught her on her way out.
“Taking some kind of poll?” she said. “That’s rotten work, and you’re lucky anybody opens the door, this neighborhood. Used to be nice with the park right down the block, but now there’s nobody in the park but hoodlums. Wear those parkas and sweatshirt hoods up over their heads so you can’t tell ’em apart. Woman got raped there, must be going on three years ago. And they never caught him. Never. Police, fine lot they are.”
I hoped she’d upbraided the Macs for not catching the rapist.
“You’re not coming in,” she continued briskly, “so say what you want. Nobody gets in here. I’m old enough to remember the Strangler. Those women, they deserved what they got; imagine opening the door to a man. You were a man, I wouldn’t open the door, not even if you said you were a policeman. I always thought that’s what he did, said police and they opened up like clamshells.”
“What if they had credentials?”
“Pooh. Credentials. What are they worth? Counterfeit. Bought in a store.”
The Macs must have had their hands full, questioning her.
“Well, if you’re not selling, what do you want? I’ve got friends stopping by, and I don’t have all day.”
“Is your name Jessica Franklin?”
“You with the government? This the census?”
“I’m a private investigator.” In spite of her professed scorn for credentials, she cracked the screen door to take my card. “I understand your purse was stolen?”
“You with the Discovery people? I called just the way you’re supposed to, and don’t you try and hold me responsible for any charges racked up on that card. I know my rights, and don’t try telling me I didn’t call. I wrote down the name of the person I spoke to on the phone.”
“That was an excellent thing to do, but I’m not with a credit card company. I’m working a case that involves identity theft, and the police thought you might be able to help me. Nurses are such observant people. You’ve probably noticed that.” There: I’d promoted her from nurses’ aide to full-fledged professional and flattered her to boot.
“Well,” she said, with just a hint of a smile, “training does count for something.”
I gave a faint cough and tapped my chest with the flat of my hand. “I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a glass of water?”
“Oh, you might as well come in for a minute,” she said. “It’s so cold out, don’t you think? I can’t wait for the springtime. Everything looks so much better in the spring.”
“The crocuses should be up soon.”
“Oh, do you garden?”
“Whenever I have time,” I said.
“I’ll get your water.” She disappeared down the hallway.
I have time to garden precisely never, but I’d noted the neat beds under the dusty windows. Now that I’d gotten across the drawbridge, I hastily scanned the walls for photographs. She did needlepoint, or maybe the cross-stitched mottoes were her g
randmother’s. They were religious sayings, “The Lord is my Shepherd” and the like. Maybe she’d done them as a child.
In the old-fashioned living room to the right of the hall, a small corner table seemed entirely devoted to silver-framed photographs, a sort of family shrine. I scanned the images quickly, but found no one who looked like my Jessie.
This older Jessica was a collector of teacups and tarnished silver spoons, a preserver of hydrangeas. I heard her footsteps in the hall and hastily retreated to a neutral site.
“Thank you so much,” I said gratefully as I accepted the cool glass, tall and clean, with ice. She carried a glass of her own, too. I suspected hers had a dollop of vodka in it.
“Identity theft,” she said. “They had something on Channel Five just the other night. That woman, the consumer reporter with the blond hair. You can sit for a minute, but that’s all.”
I thanked her again and moved to a small armchair. She took the hairy-looking sofa, plumping up the pillows before she sat. The charm bracelet jingled. It had small silvery dice, minute playing cards, miniature martini glasses.
“I understand you lost your wallet,” I said.
“Purse. A black leather clutch. I don’t go for those oversized bags. It wasn’t a particularly good bag, just something I bought a long time ago at Filene’s.”
“How did you lose it?”
“Oh, I filled all that in on the police report.” She seemed uneasy. “I really don’t want to go into it again.”
“There are different techniques that different groups of thieves use, sort of like trademarks. Like some specialize in grabbing bags at restaurants, bags that are looped over chair backs. Some thieves work grocery stores where women leave their handbags in the carts. Some gangs grab and run, right on the street.”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure where mine was taken. I was running a lot of errands that day, and then it was just gone.”
