A Trouble of Fools (23 page)

There were parts of it Mooney didn’t like. I’d expected that. He said I was relying too heavily on cops taking informants seriously. I agreed with him completely, a technique that leaves him speechless. I told him he could make it work by letting me know which officers would be likely to move fast on drug arrests, which cops were busting ass for promotion.

“This

is going to be a lot of work,” he grumbled.

He agreed to get the warrants ready. He agreed to stand by. He wanted to tap my telephone.

I had to remind him that it was already bugged.

“I’ll call you,” I said. “Don’t call me.”

I’ve always wanted to say that.

He was still blitzing questions when I bade him a firm good-bye, and hung up.

Rude, I know. But Mooney’s never satisfied.

I was so busy juggling half a dozen mental balls that, when the doorbell buzzed, it never occurred to me that Sam Gianelli would be on the stoop. If it had, I wouldn’t have answered the door.

Wearing a cotton plaid shirt—beige with a navy stripe— and khaki slacks, he looked cool, relaxed, and casual. He carried flowers. Purple iris.

I must have opened the door, because somehow he was in the foyer. I guess I spoke to him, uttered polite, inane sentences, thanked him for the flowers, but my mind had gone profoundly blank.

I am no Mata Hari. There is no way I could play a bedroom scene with a man I intended to screw in an entirely different sense of the word. I mean, I hadn’t thought much about Sam the past few days, what with all the frenzied planning.

I’d just hoped he’d stay the hell out of town.

And here he was, with flowers in his hand, and a warm smile on his face, inquiring whether I’d missed him while he was gone.

T.C. rubbed against my leg, immediately and instinctively jealous. I knelt down and fussed over him. My uncharacteristic behavior must have shocked the cat, but it gave me something to do while I pulled myself together.

It was early Wednesday afternoon. Three days had passed since the meeting at Margaret Devens’s house. Things were heating up. All the arrangements, the signals, the codes, had been set. We were waiting for one particular phone call— from “Maud.”

I’d rather do anything than wait. My personal hell will be a dentist’s lobby, filled with ancient, thumbed copies of Glamour. To avoid reverting to chain-smoking or nail-biting, I was cooking—for me a rare occupation. Paolina’s class was having a bake sale, and she’d asked me to contribute these weird confections my mom used to make. They went over big with the Girl Scouts, and now I’m doomed to bake them for all eternity. Not that I mind, for Paolina.

I was wearing white painter’s pants, streaked with egg yolk, and an electric blue T-shirt, similarly stained. I don’t own an apron, and I’m not overly neat with an eggbeater.

I’m sure I had dabs of batter on my face. Neither my outer nor inner self was prepared for Sam’s company.

“I’m, uh, cooking,” I said, less than brilliantly.

“You?”

“Yeah. I’m making these chocolate chip meringue things.

Paolina wants them colored, green and pink. Class colors.

The food coloring doesn’t make them taste any different, but they look kind of gross.”

I led him into the kitchen. I had the FM radio tuned to a local blues station. I turned the volume down. I found a vase, and snipped the ends of the iris stems at an angle. I arranged the flowers. I felt like a robot.

“How was the trip?” I asked.

“So-so.”

Score any cocaine? I wondered.

He asked for a glass of water, admitted orange juice would be better, agreed that a little vodka wouldn’t hurt the taste. I poured a large swig of Smirnoff’s into mine. The kitchen timer gave a ding that sounded like the starting bell for Round One of the Middleweight Boxing Championship, and I yanked a tray of meringues out of the oven, burning myself as usual. For me, they ought to make pot holder mitts that reach clear to the shoulder.

“Smells good,” Sam said, staring dubiously at the neat rows of pink blobs.

“Help yourself. I couldn’t remember if I doubled the recipe last time or tripled it, so this time I tripled it. I may have made enough of these suckers to go into business for myself.”

“Then you can stop driving a hack. You enjoying it?”

“No sweat,” I lied.

“Bring the extras over to Gloria. She can eat maybe three dozen,” Sam said. “Look, were you expecting anybody?”

“No.”

“Do you mind my coming by? I should have called, I guess.”

I took another pull on my vodka-laced orange juice.

“This is nice,” Sam said, gazing around the kitchen.

“What?” My kitchen is never going to be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

I missed Roz.

“Domestic interior,” he said, smiling wickedly. “Woman baking, man appreciatively sampling the goods. I should have married you years ago, when you didn’t know any better.

You’d have straightened me out.”

I stole a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. Yeah.

More likely, we’d have warped together.

“These things aren’t bad.” He spoke through a mouthful of chips and meringue.

“You get one. The rest are for Paolina.”

“She sounds like quite a kid,” he said. “I’ll have to meet her.”

Never, I thought.

“You really think of her as your sister?”

“She’s all the family I’ve got.”

He grimaced and said, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have any family.”

I whisked together egg whites and sugar, and added two drops of green food coloring for the final batch. The drops produced a pale grayish tint. I decided another drop couldn’t hurt, tilted the bottle again. I must have shaken it pretty hard. Eight, maybe nine drops of the stuff hit the meringue.

I wondered if anyone would eat loden green chocolate chip meringues.

The silence was stretching uncomfortably long, so I asked Sam how he was getting on with the rest of the Gianellis.

It was social chat. I didn’t really want to know. I wanted him to leave.

“Hell, I don’t even see them, except for my sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Older than me, the second oldest. She married an outsider.”

“An

outsider?”

“Not an Italian—not, you know—” He waved his arms around and did a Godfather imitation. “Not a Gianelli Sicilian Italian.” He winked, dropped the act, and smiled. His teeth were white and even.

I added chocolate chips to the batter, studied it, tossed in a few more. “Your family didn’t like that?”

“Are you kidding? It was like a mortal sin. The guy’s Irish, for Christ’s sake. Working class. And my sister chose him herself, which made it worse. My father hit the ceiling.

He’s from the old school. I guess he thought he’d give his only daughter as a reward to one of his faithful retainers. On a silver platter.”

I scooped weird greenish batter, mixed with lumps of dark chocolate, into small mounds on a baking sheet. I couldn’t remember if I’d buttered the tray or not. I’d scoured the damn thing for half an hour after locating it down in Roz’s darkroom filled with murky fluid. I devoutly hoped I was not about to poison the entire fifth grade.

“God, are these sweet,” Sam said.

“You’re not eating another one, are you?”

“You know,” he went on, “the day Gina married Martin, my mom dressed in black. She didn’t go to the wedding, but she put on this black dress, and she walked around the North End, so everybody would know she was in mourning. Didn’t speak to Gina for years, until the grandchildren started coming.

She sees them occasionally, but she almost never speaks to Flaherty. If he answers when she phones, she hangs up.

So sometimes I think you’re lucky, choosing your family like that.”

My spoon hung in the air, drooling meringue.

“Flaherty,” I repeated. “Not—”

“Look, don’t mention this at the garage, okay?” Sam said, coming up behind me. He wrapped his arms around my rib cage. I could feel his breath on my neck, his smoothly shaven cheek against mine. “That driver you mentioned— Flaherty—he’s Gina’s kid.”

Oh, God. No wonder he couldn’t use an alias at the cab company.

“John’s been nothing but trouble for her,” Sam went on, “so she asked me to give him a job, see if he straightens out.

What he really wanted was to go into the—you know, my dad’s business. And that would kill Gina. She steered clear of that bunch, made a pretty decent life for herself. But I don’t know. I don’t think John likes hacking much. I don’t think he likes me.”

He nuzzled my neck, and turned me around. My face felt like it was frozen.

“Hey.” Sam tilted my chin up with his index finger, forced my eyes to meet his. “John hasn’t been coming on to you, has he?”

I kissed him, to stop his words. The kiss lingered. He twined his fingers in my hair, and pushed me back against the countertop. I got chocolate chip mush on my white pants. I was breathing too heavily to care.

I know what I said about Mata Hari. But what followed wasn’t cool or calculated. Part of it was relief. Part of it was pure longing.

“Your clothes are dirty,” Sam said after a while. “Let’s take them off.”

“Not in the kitchen. I have a tenant.”

“We can’t do it on the kitchen table?”

We steamed up the shower instead, playing with the soap, and with each other, almost losing our balance on the slippery tile. We washed each other’s hair with huge handfuls of lather. Sam scrunched his eyes shut to avoid any wayward soap. Rinsed, we toweled off and got into my bed. I hit the button on the tape deck, and Bonnie Raitt sang “That Song About the Midway.” Her aching, soaring voice sounded lonely and lost:

“Well, I met you on a midway at a fair last year, And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear.

You were playing on horses, playing on guitar

strings,

You were playing like a devil wearing wings.”

We moved to the music like familiar lovers, timing our thrusts for mutual pleasure, but our thoughts couldn’t have been more separate. Our lovemaking was gentle and slow.

Intense. The afternoon light slanted in through the blinds.

Tangles of his dark hair tickled my face.

I don’t know what Sam was thinking. How do you ever know what another soul is thinking? Me, I guess I was saying good-bye.

Maybe if I had warned him then, it would have turned out differently. But the wheels were in motion. It was too late.

T.C. does not like to travel except when he likes to travel.

I hadn’t had him in the Toyota since the last time he threw up on the dashboard.

Mooney had insisted.

I grabbed the cat and wrestled a leash attachment onto his collar. He glared at me with wide-eyed disbelief, and exercised his claws. I kept a grip on him, and pretty soon he calmed down.

I took my gun out of my shoulder bag. I thought about leaving it home. I thought about Wispy Beard. I thought about the two thugs who’d roughed up Margaret. I jammed it into the waistband of my jeans, at the small of my back. It was uncomfortable.

Just as well. When a gun starts feeling comfortable, I’ll know it’s time to quit.

I know my way around the old Greyhound Terminal in Park Square. It used to be a highlight of my beat, a dimly lit trough stinking of urine and rancid grease, a magnet for pimps. There they’d lurk, night after night, meeting those buses from Peoria, greeting those lost, young, hungry-eyed runaways. The Greyhound pimps were something else— bizarre, perverted Welcome Wagon hosts with a set line of patter, a memorized, routine rap: “Hey, girl, you lookin’

good. You look like you could use a meal. You got a place to stay? You want a little reefer? A little coke?”

Park Square got urban-renewed with a vengeance. They tore down practically every building in sight, but left the Greyhound Terminal, a monument to sleaze. I don’t understand why, since they promptly built a shiny new bus depot near South Station. The Trailways Terminal.

I zipped up Storrow Drive to the Southeast Expressway, my eyes peeled for traffic cops, although getting nailed for speeding is no real threat in Boston. I hit seventy. That’s when my Toyota starts to shimmy. I slowed to sixty-eight.

Two dark cars followed me, so I politely used my blinkers to signal lane changes and turns. My shadows moved with me, no signals. I took the High Street exit, a left on Congress, a right on Atlantic Ave. I hung an illegal U into the Trailways parking lot, and sandwiched the Toyota between an old VW

bus and a tiny Escort. I glanced at my watch. Gloria’s call should have gone out two minutes ago. From here on in, the timing depended on Flaherty.

T.C. and I stared at each other in the dark. After yowling along with the radio for a few ear-shattering moments, he’d settled into one of his silent, accusing modes. Hell, I agreed with him. I should have left him home. I cracked my window open an inch. He could stay in the car and sulk.

There was a cab stand smack in front of the futuristic glass-and-steel structure. Flaherty wouldn’t even have to hunt for a parking space. Green & White number 442 was nowhere in sight. Yet.

I was relieved not to see any other G&W cabs nearby. I’d had trouble keeping the Old Geezers under wraps the past few days, especially Boyle and Fergus. They wanted Flaherty for breakfast. They tossed around words like “tar” and “feathers.” Hanging was too good for the bastard.

The bastard. Sam’s nephew. His only sister’s only son.

I swallowed, gulped salty air, and stomped on the rubber mat that opened the sliding door. I focused straight ahead, so I wouldn’t seem to notice the men behind me. I could feel their eyes on the back of my neck.

The station was like an airplane hangar, with steel overhead beams, soaring escalators, and narrow catwalks over an enormous central lobby. I buttoned my jacket against the air conditioned chill. The air smelled wrong—canned and recycled to a metallic breeze. All that glass, and not a single window that opened.

I shook my head as I looked around. Spiffy new building, same pimps, same winos, same runaways. On one bench an exhausted young woman in a denim jumper held a baby on her lap, and scolded a toddler to stay close. I didn’t recognize anyone right off, but I wasn’t trying to recognize anyone.