A Trouble of Fools (6 page)

“What name?”

“George Robinson. He had a business card.”

“Eighteen bucks for a box of three hundred, right?”

“It looked pretty good,” Mooney said.

“Shit.”

“So watch your back.”

“I get a crick in my neck,” I said.

“Anything I can do.”

“Anything?” I said.

“Got something in mind?”

“Look, how about if we forget that fifty bucks you owe me, and just call it favor for favor?”

“A fifty-buck favor sounds like trouble, Carlotta.”

“I want you to find out some stuff about what could happen, legally I mean, in this hypothetical situation.”

“Hypothetical,” he repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Go on.”

“It has to do with impersonating a cat.”

“Crawling around on all fours and meowing?”

“It’s important, Mooney. It’s about T.C.”

“Somebody’s impersonating your cat?”

“Mooney, if I tell you about this, you have to promise not to screw it up for me. I mean, I’d be telling you as a friend, not a cop.”

“Well, that would be an improvement.”

“I just want to know what kind of trouble I can get in if I have, say, you or some other guy present himself as Thomas C. Carlyle.”

“Me, huh?”

“Possibly.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess it depends.”

“On what?”

“Do I get petted?”

I woke the next morning in a tangle of sheets with a sour beer aftertaste coating my tongue. Funny how neither ice cream nor toothpaste really kills that telltale beer taste.

T.C., curled up on the pillow next to mine, is not too fussy, so I wasn’t overly concerned about bad breath. Either I’d forgotten to set my alarm clock, or else I’d flipped it off and gone back to sleep. Just as I was about to soothe myself with a calming well-you-must-have-needed-the-rest, I realized it was Thursday morning. Which made it twenty minutes before my regular 8 a.m. volleyball game at the YWCA.

I shoved back the covers and leaped out of bed.

The Y is the only place to go when you oversleep. Nobody cares if you don’t put on makeup. Lipstick before 9

a.m. is regarded with suspicion at the Y.

I spike for the Y-Birds, which says a lot fast. We play killer volleyball, not beach blanket stuff, and we do it three mornings a week. That’s why my knees and elbows are unusual shades of magenta and yellow. I am intimately acquainted with the wooden gym floor at the Central Square Y, and I wouldn’t miss a game for the world.

Volleyball is also why the fingernails on my right hand are clipped short and square. I always keep my left-hand nails short because I play blues guitar, not as well as I used to, but pretty damn well considering how little I practice these days. Acoustic only. The good old stuff: Lightnin’

Hopkins, Son House, Reverend Gary Davis. No sweet love songs, just wailin’ done-me-wrong blues.

I would like to point out that while my nose has been broken three times, accounting for a slightly off-center bump, it has never been touched during a volleyball game. The first time, I was just a kid. Ronnie Farmer, the little boy next door, banged me on the nose with a hammer, for no apparent reason other than to see how hammers and noses interacted when they met; the second time, my nose came in contact with the steering wheel of my cab. The third time was cop business.

People I like say my nose has character.

I play volleyball because I can’t stand exercise for exercise’s sake. I shudder at the very thought of those stationary bikes, peddling to nowhere. The symbolism is just too grim.

Volleyball, though, I love. And the women I play with are terrific: the phys ed coach from Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a couple cops, a computer jockette, some M.I.T. students.

We play hard, but we treat each other kindly. You dive after a ball, give it everything you’ve got, and even if you miss the damn thing, you get a pat on the back and a hand up. I like that. And after the game, I swim laps to cool off.

Three days a week, that’s my morning. Good healthy exercise.

Makes me tingle with righteousness while I eat

breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts afterwards.

I brought my Eugene Devens notebook along and flipped it open on the orange Formica countertop, next to my two glazed donuts and sugared coffee. I’d called a few more hospitals with no luck. If Gene was getting doctored, he was doing it under an alias, and while I could come up with about fifty reasons for seeking anonymous medical care, I couldn’t blend any of the reasons with what I knew about Eugene Devens.

Which

was not a hell of a lot.

I stared at my notebook, at the sum total of all I’d gleaned about the man, from his sister, from Gloria, from Billy the bartender, from my few remaining cop contacts.

Eugene Paul Mark Devens. No criminal record. Born, May 28, 1929. Delivered at St. Margaret’s in Dublin, Ireland, second child of Mary Margaret and Patrick Joseph Devens, if you didn’t count the two stillbirths and three miscarriages in between Margaret and her baby brother.

What a treasured child he must have been. How do small babies, swaddled in those tiny blankets, grow up to be men who disappear without a trace?

Eugene Paul came to the States at the age of five and was educated at the usual assortment of Catholic schools. I wondered if his mom had meant her only son for the priesthood, been disappointed when he’d quit high school. I wondered if she’d been disappointed or relieved when he’d finally married at thirty-five. Married Mary Elizabeth Reilly in 1964.

Wife died six years later, sixteen years ago. No kids.

Nobody had mentioned vices other than drink and ladies in connection with Gene. I hadn’t found any involvement with, say, the numbers or the track, but if there were heavy loans involved, if Gene couldn’t pay the sharks, that would be a hell of a reason for him to stay lost.

Eugene Devens did not own a car, which might seem strange for a cabdriver in any other city. In Boston, which has ample parking for, say, one in ten of its residents—not to mention commuters—not owning a car makes sense. You save—not only on parking tickets, but on medical expenses for mental-health-related ailments. Unfortunately, one of the best ways to trace a missing person is through automobile registration. Eugene’s gain was my loss.

The Central Square Dunkin’ Donuts has a phone booth at the back, one of the few real phone booths left in the world where you can talk with any privacy. By using up a lot of dimes and impersonating a dotty travel agent cursed with a missing middle-aged tourist, I learned that no Eugene Devens had traveled via Aer Lingus from Logan to either Shannon or Dublin. Aer Lingus is it as far as direct flights from Boston to Ireland. I figured anyone who felt as Eugene Devens did about the British would hardly set foot on the hated soil of Heathrow, but I checked out British Air and TWA and Pan Am. Nothing. I even checked People Express out of Newark, in case he’d gone cattle car.

I called a genuine travel agent, and discovered that the only charters to Ireland departing within the past two weeks had consisted entirely of M.I.T. faculty members, a group with whom Gene Devens would hardly have felt at home.

No, she had not heard of any travel organization with the initials GBA. Ships she eliminated in no time. Boston is not the great port it once was. Zip. Nada. No passenger ships had sailed for the Emerald Isle in the past month.

So if Gene was in jolly old Ireland, he’d traveled incognito.

Walked across the water. Sailed solo. Parachuted from a secret military jet. And pretty soon, he’d send a postcard to Billy the bartender, and all would be well, except I’d feel morally obligated to refund most of Margaret Devens’s thousand.

I checked my notebook again, searching for God knows what. My notes looked like an obit. Born, schooled, married.

Everything but date of death.

I shook the thought away with the doughnut crumbs. It was time to speak to my client again. I needed a look at Gene’s room.

My car was parked in one of those back lots off that narrow street right behind Mass. Ave., Bishop Somebody-or Other Drive. It’s the kind of street that makes you think the bishop wasn’t held in high esteem. My little red Toyota was still there though, untouched. Did you know that when a woman who grew up in Detroit buys a Japanese car, it’s close to treason?

Before heading to the Devens house, I swung by

Paolina’s housing project. It’s one of those low-rise brick townhouse developments, better planned than the ghetto towers, with less concentrated poverty and hopelessness, an occasional tree, a small square of grass. It’s tucked in a back pocket of East Cambridge. The steel skyscrapers of the high-tech boom have grown up around it, encircling it, blocking the sun.

It’s not so bad in the daytime, but nights, I want to haul Paolina’s whole family out of there. Paolina’s mom, Marta, is Colombian. She married some Puerto Rican guy over here, and he scampered after the fifth kid. There’s a rotating mass of visiting cousins and uncles. Marta’s a character. Put her down in the desert and she’d sell you sand. Not only would you pay through the nose for it, she’d make you enjoy the privilege. If she hadn’t come down with a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis, the family would never have wound up in the projects. Every once in a while she shows a trace of me old spark, but mostly she just goes through the paces.

Paolina would be in school for the day, but I wasn’t planning on a visit.

He was sprawled on the stoop of the building next door to Paolina’s, leaning against the dirty yellow bricks, staring at something only he could see. Same guy I’d been watching for three weeks, a scrawny Hispanic with unhealthy yellowish skin drawn tight across a narrow face. He had a droopy mustache, a wispy unkempt beard. Dark shadows around his eyes made him look older than he dressed. His T-shirt had sweat circles around the armpits, and his jeans were faded to the color of the pale morning sky. He hugged a worn leather satchel.

It was the satchel that interested me. More than that, what came out of it.

Drugs and housing projects go together like cops and robbers. I know that. But not drugs and Paolina. Those two are never going to be spoken of in the same breath.

I’d noticed Wispy Beard a few times when I’d come by to pick her up. I got curious. I confided in a Cambridge cop I know, a nice enough guy, but too busy to do the kind of surveillance needed for a bust. I’m not too busy. Maybe I can’t clean up the world, but next door to my little sister, nobody is going to dole out little packets from an old leather satchel.

I sat in my car and took notes. Comings and goings. Two kids, one not more than twelve years old, gave something to Wispy Beard, got something in return. Full descriptions went down in the notebook. As soon as I got a definite pattern, I’d give my cop friend a date and a time, and make sure the bastard got himself busted good.

His days were numbered in my mind.

I’d stayed at my observation post too long, so I flew down Memorial Drive, my thoughts grimly fixed on that scumbag drug dealer. I was halfway to the Boston University Bridge before I shook myself out of it, and noticed that the elm leaves were edged with gold, and high clouds filtered the sunlight into fine visible rays. With breathtaking suddenness, the road reared up and flashed a spectacular view of Boston’s church steeples, brownstones, and skyscrapers. It still gives me goosebumps after all these years.

On crisp autumn days, no city compares to Boston, especially when you sneak up on it from the Cambridge side of the Charles. It’s the river that makes the magic, frames the city with a silver band. Today the Charles was flat as glass, except for two single sculls cutting the water, gliding toward the M.I.T. boafhouse. The skyline is a jumble downtown, but off to the right the Hancock and Prudential towers guard the Back Bay. At the top of Beacon Hill, the gold dome of the State House caught a shaft of sunlight and beamed it back in my eyes, forcing me to look down and pay attention to the road.

They say fish swim in the Charles River these days. You no longer have to race to the doctor for a tetanus shot if you fall off your sailboat. Ever since I came to Boston to live with Aunt Bea after my parents died, they’ve been saying people would be able to swim in the Charles in five more years. Then five more years. Then five more.

It looked like I might have to wait that long at the foot of the B. U. Bridge. Cars honked, drivers swore, but to no avail.

The college kids were back in town, in sufficient numbers to take the right of way by force. When the swarm of students finally parted wide enough for my car to pass, I took the curve onto Park Drive and followed the Riverway out to where it turns into the Jamaicaway. The road traces Olmsted’s chain of city parks, and it’s got twists and turns enough to delight a former cabbie. I drove it too fast, but then everybody does. Unlike everybody else, I stayed in my lane.

Left at the Jamaica Pond boathouse. Right on Centre Street. I followed the tracks of a trolley line that hasn’t run in God knows how many years. Jamaica Plain’s a real part of Boston, a neighborhood, a nontourist section of town. I remember.

Centre Street lined with shoe repair shops, laundries, mom-and-pop convenience stores, and restaurants with counters where the regulars stopped for eggs, bacon, and political arguments on their way to work.

Now Centre Street has florists, at least I think they might be florists. One had two pink lilies plunked in a single vase by way of window display. Another, fearful of garish overstatement, featured a single spray of orchids. I counted three croissant bakeries, four small shuttered restaurants with hand-lettered menus, two shoe boutiques. The signs of gentrification.

Where will all those young urban professionals get their shoes resoled?

Give me an address anywhere in Boston and I can find it cold. Margaret Devens had started to babble directions over the phone, but I’d shut her down. Cabbies know.

I took a right onto a quiet residential street of big old Victorians; a few weary down-and-outers with chipped aluminum siding, some newly pastel-painted numbers with