A Trouble of Fools (12 page)

“Oh, Roger Smith,” I said finally.

“A really nice guy,” she said. “You dating or what?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“Huh?” It was her turn to look bewildered.

“I don’t know anybody named Roger Smith, and I never went to any school with anybody named Roger Smith.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?”

I shook my head sadly. The phantom had struck again.

According to Roz, he’d made two appearances at the front door: the first, about five days ago; the second, the day before yesterday. The first time, he’d worn a navy blazer, charcoal slacks, black loafers, a light blue shirt, and a patterned tie. The second time, he’d worn a three-piece gray suit with a faint stripe, white shirt, dark tie, wing tips. He’d been sorry to miss me, just wanted to know how I was doing. Was I still driving the Toyota? Did I have another car? Did I ever buy that place on the Cape?

Huh?

I have to say that for an artist, Roz was terrible when it came to describing the guy’s face, which tickled me because she had his clothes down cold. Maybe she concentrates on bodies. Lemon is certainly evidence of that. She told me the guy had a definite mauve aura. When I questioned her closely, it sounded like he was the same man who’d chatted with Gloria, the same preppy, good-looking soul who’d passed himself off to Mooney as Mr. George Robinson of the Department of Social Services.

“Was he alone in the house, in any room, even for the briefest moment?” I asked.

“Well, I guess,” Roz said reluctantly, “I mean, when I went to get a piece of paper to write his name down and all.”

Shit. I was definitely going to buy that bug detector.

While Roz and Lemon were over at Margaret’s—

cleaning, I sincerely hoped—I rescued Red Emma from T.C., who had her treed in the curtains. I fed and watered the menagerie, and tried to teach the dumb bird more Marxist propaganda. Then I hauled out the phone books, Boston and suburban, and ran my finger down the list of Carlyles, hoping to find a genuine Thomas C. of a slightly larcenous bent.

There was a Thomas D. Carlyle in Brockton, and a Thomas C. in Walpole, who had the nerve to spell his last name Carlisle. There were several T. Carlyles, and I dialed them all, and sure enough, they were Thelmas and Theodoras and Tinas; females every one. I gave it up, puttered around, picked some guitar, which I found frustrating, since I don’t practice enough to sound the way I used to sound, not to mention the way I’d like to sound. I gave up and fed a cassette of Rory Block’s “High Heeled Blues” album into the tape deck, because she sounds the way I’d like to sound, effortless and funky. I sang along while I answered the mail—

which for me means shoving unread junk mail into those postage-paid envelopes enclosed along with the other junk mail.

After making a dent in the mail pile, I began a detailed report of the Eugene Devens case thus far. Turning my chicken-scratched notes into typed sentences reminded me that I hadn’t talked to old Pat, the cabbie, so I dialed Gloria’s back-room number, the unlisted one, and asked for his address.

I

may have woken her up. She sounded downright hostile, but then if I were a cab dispatcher, I wouldn’t even own a phone of my own, I’d get so tired of answering the damn things. It took a while, but she eventually gave me a number and street in Dorchester.

Before leaving the house, I took two precautions. Using most of a roll of wide duct tape, I neatly joined the two litter boxes in the downstairs bathroom, making a money sandwich.

The ensemble looked like a slightly high-rise cat box.

I also took my gun out of its wrappings in the locked bottom drawer of my bureau, and loaded it.

You can’t live in Boston without acquiring a certain awareness of the IRA—initials spray-painted on mailboxes, fund-raising announcements tacked to laundromat bulletin boards, shamrock green collection cans strategically positioned beside certain cash registers in certain bars. But to judge by the Boston press, most of the juicy IRA stories—the bombings, the kidnappings, the shootings—are either foreign or ancient history, far away or long ago. The only recent local cause celebre that came to mind was the Valhalla affair.

The Valhalla was a gunrunner, an “alleged” gunrunner, I should say, that allegedly steamed out of Gloucester Harbor one September morning in ‘85, carrying more than $1 million in alleged munitions (guns, bombs, et cetera) to the alleged Irish Republican Army. A federal grand jury had been investigating the hell out of everybody who had anything to do with the Valhalla, but so far, after a full year, no indictments had been handed down, which made me wonder about the ancestry of the jury members. In the meantime, one guy, an alleged informant, had disappeared under “very mysterious circumstances which rule out the possibility of flight,”

according to the Boston Globe, and the rumor had duly circulated that he’d been taken out by the Boston IRA.

On the strength of that rumor, and just in case I ran into Margaret’s stocking-masked thugs, there I was, staring at a 38-caliber S&W with a four-inch barrel, a ringer for standard police issue, and believe me, standard police issue revolvers have nothing but bad memories for me.

From where I stand, the whole bloody Irish carnage makes no sense. It might have made sense once, but now it seems to roll on from force of habit as much as anything else, turning into some kind of modern Hydra. Chop off one head—one British soldier, one Irish Republican, one Protestant UDR man—and ten more sprout from the bleeding

wound. From the heart of Massachusetts, the “troubles”

seem more mythic than real. There are too many factions, too many righteous grievances, too little hope of reconciliation.

A whole generation of children has been born to violence in Northern Ireland. It’s what they expect from life.

For them, the Glorious Struggle is daily life. Something To Do. A Way To Pass The Time Until You Die. Or, more likely, until some passerby, who chose the wrong street at the wrong time on the wrong day, dies.

I prepared myself for any encounter with the Boston branch of the IRA by adding two pounds’ worth of gun to my overcrowded, overweight shoulder bag. A lot of effect that was going to have on hundreds of years of oppression, right?

I stopped at a liquor store on the way, and made the sort of cheap-whiskey purchase that raised the young clerk’s eyebrows.

I remembered Pat’s taste.

The old man hadn’t made a fortune driving a hack. The address I hunted was in an area folks escaped from if they could. Pat’s apartment was on the second floor of the skinniest, seediest triple-decker on a block that had seen better days. The outside of the place was gray, but I couldn’t tell if that was the intended color or the result of years of bleaching sun and lack of care. Not a bush, not a sapling. Clumps of crabgrass made an ugly excuse for a lawn. The porches on the top two levels sagged. A single lawn chair perched on the front stoop. Faded strips of once-gaudy yellow, blue, and red webbing drooped dispiritedly. One broken strip trailed on the ground.

On the spur of the moment, I reached into the depths of my shoulder bag, and groped around until I located the gold pin with the GBA initials, the one I’d found in Eugene’s locker. I held it up to the light. It was scratched and slightly bent. I stuck the pin into the collar of my blouse.

Patrick Day O’Grady was my man. There was a button to push under the crooked nameplate, but the door to the stairwell was ajar, propped open with a broken cedar shingle, so I just walked up to the second floor and rapped on the door. I could hear a TV voice, loud over organ music.

I counted to ten and knocked louder. The hallway was as attractive and well kept as the outside of the house. Either the first-or third-floor tenants had eaten something greasy last night. Bad hamburger, maybe. I tried not to breathe, and banged my fist against the door hard enough to rock it on its hinges.

I heard a shuffling on the other side of the door, mixed with a syncopated tapping sound, and then a determined and familiar old voice ordered me to go away and stop bothering an old man, you should be ashamed of yourself, all of you young kids with nothing better to do than taunt an old man who worked every day of his life and now was brought to this, and don’t bother breaking in because I haven’t got anything worth stealing, and the German shepherd would as soon eat you as look at you.

All uttered in one breath.

“Pat,” I said for about the tenth time, trying to interrupt his speech before the curtain call. “It’s a friend. From Green and White. An old friend.”

“Call the cops on you, I will,” continued the refrain from the other side. “And don’t you think I won’t. You can’t scare me. Bums is what you are, bums, the lot of you.”

“A friend,” I hollered. “A friend with a drink.” If I yelled much louder somebody would call the police.

Silence from behind the door, followed by a suspicious inquiry. “You’re not selling anything?”

“No.”

“What’s your name, then?”

“Carlotta. I used to work with you, at Green and White.”

“Carlotta,” he repeated. “A girl.” Long pause, then some more shuffling. “And what color is your hair?”

90

“It’s red, Pat, and I don’t dye it.”

The first of an impressive series of locks clicked. The door creaked open to the limit of a solid three-inch chain. A single reddened eye peered out. The door closed firmly in my face, then swung open wide.

“And why has it taken you seven years to come courting?”

Pat said. “Come in, girl, come in. I’ve got to bar the door against the Huns.”

Illness had hit him hard, sucking off most of his muscle and fat, leaving a gaunt shadow behind. His face drooped as if somebody had released a valve and deflated it. His feet were encased in huge floppy slippers, which accounted for the shuffling noise. He leaned heavily on a walking stick.

That was the tapping. He was wrapped in a chenille bathrobe way too large for him. The ends of the self-tie belt dangled almost to his knees. He was wearing pants under the robe.

The cuffs flapped around his waxy ankles. He’d aged twenty years in seven. I’d seen healthier-looking cadavers.

“Don’t bother telling me how fine I look,” he said quickly, noting the expression on my face. “I know I’m gorgeous.

Just give me a kiss, and slip off your clothes, and I’ll die a happy man.”

“Jeez,” I said, “you haven’t changed.”

“Come in, come in. You’re more beautiful than I recall.

Say thank you for the compliment. A blush would be nice if you could manage it. Are you married yet or still an old maid?”

Shit. Was I going to interview him, or was he going to interview me? I breathed in a considerable amount of air and was surprised to find it sweet. The place was clean. Pat’s flat was a shabby affair, Spartan, the final resting place of a fussy old flirtatious bachelor. Probably a virgin. A faded print couch anchored one wall. Blowsy off-white curtains framed the windows. A framed picture of Jesus hung on the wall over the sofa, a crucifix next to it. A threadbare easy chair with a fat dented cushion faced off against a huge color TV. The furniture wasn’t arranged with conversational groupings in mind. It was set up for one man watching TV alone.

Pat flicked the set off quickly, rightfully embarrassed at being caught watching some overwrought evangelist.

“Where’s the German shepherd?” I asked. “The one who’ll rip me limb from limb?”

“Died,” he said. “Years ago. I resurrect him when the neighborhood youth come to call. You married or what?”

“How’s your love life?” I asked.

“No rings on your fingers,” he said.

“Nor on yours.”

“I thought you said something about a drink, or I’d never have let you in.”

I looked at the pasty color of his skin, and wondered if a drink would finish him off. His cheeks each boasted a dime sized circle of color. Excitement, or maybe a flush of fever.

“Be a dear,” he said, “and fetch two glasses from the drain on the kitchen sink. It’ll take you less time than it would me.” He sat heavily in the TV chair.

The kitchen was as barren and neat as the living room.

One plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon in the drain. Two coffee cups, two glasses. I wondered if he’d entertained another guest lately. I hauled a kitchen chair into the living room, and placed it near the TV chair. It was that or sit on the floor. I noticed marks on the cheap carpeting, grooves where chairs and tables and lamps had once stood, and I wondered if Pat had given his furnishings away, paring down his possessions before he died.

“To the old days” was the toast he chose when I poured the Four Roses, his preferred label, a brand I link to foul taste and worse hangovers. He patted the bottle and said teasingly, “A pint is fine, but a quart would have been better.”

“A

gallon, maybe.”

“An ocean,” he said. He gulped his drink. His smile turned into a grimace, and he shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “What do you want from me?” he asked sharply. “Nobody comes by here anymore unless they want something.”

It was a sudden mood change. Pain can do that to you.

“Margaret Devens sent me.”

“Margaret.”

“Her brother’s missing.”

“Eugene’s not come home?”

“No.”

“How long has this been going on, with nobody saying a word about it to me?”

“Two weeks.”

Pat started to pour another drink. His hand shook, and he replaced the bottle on the table. “Well, I don’t know where he is. If I did, I’d tell Margaret. I admire that woman, always have.”

“She’s worried about him,” I said.

“Every right to be,” he agreed.

I let his words hang there for a minute. Then I said, “Why?”

“The way things are out there,” Pat said, gesturing vaguely. “Pour me another, will you? And don’t ask me whether I’ll be okay, will you do me that favor? I’ve been drinking this stuff since before you were hatched.”

“What’s going on at G and W, Pat?”

“I left,” he said.

“Because you were sick.”

“Sick and tired,” he said. “Sick and tired.”