Read A Trouble of Fools Online

Authors: Linda Barnes

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Private Investigators

A Trouble of Fools (7 page)

BOOK: A Trouble of Fools
11.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

geranium-filled window boxes. Big houses for big families.

Most of the Boston Irish who’d escaped the Southie slums made a beeline for the elegant South Shore suburbs, but some, particularly the ones with city government ties, headed for areas of Jamaica Plain like this one. Lace-curtain Irish, it must have been once, with a lively parish church, and houses bursting with kids. Now, most of the better decorated places looked like they’d been sliced into separate apartments, probably condos. They didn’t look as luxurious as the dream townhouses my cat and I were invited to view at Cedar Wash, but I bet the price tags were pretty steep.

When I saw the white Victorian monster on the corner, I stopped wondering why Margaret and Eugene hadn’t exchanged many confidences. If just the two siblings lived at number 19, they could use separate floors and never meet.

They’d need two phone lines so they could call each other in case of emergency.

There must have been money in the family once, to buy that house. There’d have to be some left over, to pay the property taxes, refresh the gleaming white paint, keep the sloping lawn neatly manicured, the yews and azaleas trimmed.

Well, Margaret had a stash of crisp hundred-dollar bills.

And Eugene drove a hack.

One thing about Jamaica Plain, you never have much trouble parking. I pulled the Toyota to the curb smack in front of the Devens house.

A walkway of concrete squares and grass rectangles tempted me to hopscotch up to the porch. I controlled myself in case my client was peering from behind one of the window shades.

The front door wore a polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. I ignored the doorbell for a chance to get my fingerprints on its bright surface. It clanged a bold satisfying note.

I waited awhile, humming a tune Paolina had taught me, something that named a lot of animals in Spanish, then tried the bell. I could hear it buzz and echo inside. I rang again, hollered Margaret’s name.

Damn. I checked my watch. Eleven-twenty. I’d spent longer than I meant to in Cambridge, but surely Margaret would have waited an extra twenty minutes.

Well, maybe she’d forgotten. She was old, after all.

Maybe she was at church, or visiting some neighbor, gossiping over coffee while I shivered in the chill. Just for the hell of it, I turned the front door handle and gave the door a push.

It opened easily and I stood there gaping.

City people lock their doors.

“Margaret!” I called again, yelling it loudly, as much to warn anybody in the house of my approach as to get a response.

My hand reached reflexively for the gun on my service belt, the way it used to when I entered unsecured premises as a cop. As a private operator, I leave guns alone if I can help it.

I always remember what Humphrey Bogart says in that old movie when he takes the gun away from the punk: “So many guns, so few brains.”

The foyer was big and cool, with wooden floorboards worn mellow. No quick sand-and-polyurethane job here.

Only care, years of care—the kind my Aunt Bea had lavished on her Cambridge home—gave it that warm sheen.

The wallpaper was one of those old grass-papers, in a faint beige. A worn octagonal Chinese rug colored the center of the floor. Overhead, a multiarmed chandelier hung low enough to menace.

The foyer had four escapes: three archways, the back one smaller than the right or the left, and a steep flight of beige carpeted stairs. I turned left toward what must have been the living room, and stopped with my jaw hanging wide.

Stuffing erupted from an overturned couch. Someone had slashed three huge X’s in the flowered upholstery and done his best to turn the sofa inside out. A wooden end table was cracked, baring pale wood under a dark finish. An amputated armchair leg stuck out of the shattered leaded glass door of a curio cabinet. A pile of smashed crockery lay at the base of one wall. It looked like someone had hurled Margaret’s treasures against the wall for the pleasure of hearing the crash and tinkle.

I swallowed and shoved my hands automatically into the pockets of my jeans so I wouldn’t be tempted to right a chair, smooth a torn cushion.

Margaret.

As I opened my mouth to call her name, I heard footsteps, heavy running steps, and the slam of a screen door.

Back door, side door, how the hell did I know? I ran out front, stared right and left, saw nothing, no one. I raced down the narrow walkway to the back of the house. Somewhere, a car engine roared to life and tires screeched on pavement. Through a stand of lilac bushes, I caught one glimpse of a hurtling dark van. By the time I’d vaulted Margaret’s back fence, it was gone.

Margaret.

I ran back to the house, calling her name, but my voice cracked and I don’t think I got much in the way of volume.

I started searching, careful where I put my feet. The destruction was even worse in the kitchen—canned goods, cereal, flour, emptied in a pile in the middle of the floor.

This didn’t look like robbery. It looked like vengeance.

Or war.

I found her in the dining room, crumpled in a corner, her flowered dress rucked up under her, a big white apron half covering her face. A trickle of blood oozed from one corner of her mouth. I put my ear to her chest, and felt the rise and fall of her breath. I don’t think I could have heard a heartbeat.

Blood was rushing in my ears, screaming.

I touched her shoulder, spoke her name, both more roughly than I intended. My hand was shaking, and I realized my teeth were clenched tight with anger. Anger at the chaos, at the broken useless dishes. Anger at myself, for not arriving moments earlier, not preventing this. Anger at my helplessness, as I knelt by my client’s battered face.

“It’s okay, Margaret,” I said softly, once I could force the words between my dry lips. “Don’t try to move. I’ll be right back.”

The jack was ripped out of the wall, so I ran across the street and used a startled neighbor’s phone. I know a number that gets a faster response than 911. Mooney’s number.

“You’re going to be fine,” I crooned in Margaret’s ear, straining to hear the wail of the ambulance. I touched her hand. It felt cool and dry. It moved, curling limply around my own, tightening. She moaned, or maybe she tried to say something. I put my head close to her lips, but I couldn’t make out any words.

All I could think of was Aunt Bea, and the way her hand gripped mine in that awful hospital room just before she died. I heard a voice whispering in the still room, and it was mine, begging Margaret to hang on, hang on.

If Eugene Devens was responsible for this, I would find him. I would find him all right.

CHAPTER
8

Room 501 South, Boston City Hospital. In spite of the fresh white paint and the red and blue poppy-splattered curtains, I’ve seen prison cells a whole lot cheerier. It was a double room, the size of a large closet. Sliding curtains were ominously closed around the bed of the occupant who’d arrived first and copped the window view of the trash dumpster.

Margaret’s eyes were closed, too, one of them swollen shut, purpling nicely. Breath rasped through her nostrils. An IV bag dripped colorless fluid through a thin tube connected to the veins in her left hand by needles and tape. The elevated hospital bed dwarfed her. White lab coats surrounded her. All that white, all that machinery—the combination made my stomach quake.

A broken collarbone, abrasions, contusions, probably a concussion. An impossibly young and cheerful doctor said she was lucky she hadn’t broken a hip.

Hospitals and prisons both make me sweat. Maybe it’s the smell. More likely, it’s something about places that hold you against your will.

At least prisons don’t have doctors who tell you how lucky you are.

Margaret had briefly regained consciousness in the ambulance.

In a shaky voice, she’d informed the EM”I that she had a mess to clear up at home, and he could just stop at the corner and she’d be on her way, thank you very much. And all the time, you could see she was hurting like hell, barely able to squeeze the words out of her swollen mouth. I hope I’ve got half that much spunk when I’m her age.

1 waited in a dismal antiseptic-smelling hallway while two cops I didn’t know tried to question her. A pimply blond teenager in hospital greens slid one of those heavy buffing machines in lazy arcs across the linoleum floor. Over the hum, I could hear the cops’ voices. I couldn’t hear Margaret.

Every once in a while a loudspeaker would cough out a doctor’s name or a room number, “Code Red” or “Code Blue,”

and a sudden rush of white uniforms and scuffling feet would follow. Otherwise it was just the floor-buffer man and me. We exchanged brief smiles.

When the cops came out, I introduced myself. One of them knew Mooney.

“He sends his best,” the guy said. He was long and lean and wore the uniform well. ‘Too busy to take the squeal himself.”

“Yeah,” echoed the second cop. He was older, short and potbellied, with a jutting chin. Didn’t do a thing for the uniform.

I

nodded toward Margaret’s door. “She tell you anything?”

“Too

woozy,” the fat cop said immediately, with a

warning glance at his partner. He wasn’t the type to give information to mere civilians.

“Said she fell downstairs,” the lean cop said softly.

A hefty blond nurse breezed into 501 carrying a tray with a glass of chipped ice and a straw. I excused myself and followed.

The

closer I got, the worse she looked, and believe me, the view from the doorway window had been bad enough.

From two feet away, her skin, the part of her skin that wasn’t bandaged, or raw and red, or purple from the bruises, was gray. The bandage across her forehead was neat enough, but a brownish stain was seeping through on the left side. All the tubes and drains made her look like some helpless old marionette, controlled by the huge mechanical bed and the display of instruments on the wall behind her head.

The nurse addressed her as if she were awake. I wasn’t sure, but I figured the nurse ought to know.

“I hope those policemen didn’t upset you,” she said briskly, smoothing an offending wrinkle out of the top sheet.

“They have to ask their questions, I suppose.” She glanced at her wristwatch, then at me. “I’m sure your, uh, granddaughter can help you with the ice water.”

I nodded obediently, and tried to look young and earnest.

The beating had added years to Margaret’s appearance.

The tray also held a syringe. The nurse uncapped the needle, lifted it to the light, checked something scrawled on the chart at the end of the bed.

“What’s that?” Margaret was awake after all.

“It’s for the pain.”

“I don’t want it.”

“You’ll feel a little pinch, Miss Devens, that’s all.”

“I don’t—” She tried to turn away, but didn’t have the strength to resist.

“There,” the nurse said calmly, removing the syringe from the vicinity of Margaret’s hip. “The medication will take effect soon, so don’t worry if you start feeling drowsy.

Maybe your granddaughter will stay with you till you fall asleep.”

I beamed her a sincere, appreciative, family-member smile. The cops got a grudging three minutes. I’d just been granted unlimited bedside time, albeit with a drugged client.

Sometimes there’s a benefit to not looking like your typical cop.

 

“She’ll feel much better tomorrow, dear,” the nurse promised me as she left.

 

I maneuvered a chair close to the head of the bed, sat down, and waited.

 

“Go away,” Margaret whispered. I hadn’t seen her open her eyes since the nurse left, but she’d turned her head in my direction, so I guess she must have peeked.

“What did he want?” I asked.

She said nothing and kept her eyes shut.

“Did you know him? Them?”

Again nothing.

 

“Was it Gene? Did your brother do this to you?”

That forced her good eye open. “No.”

“Then why are you trying to cover it up?”

Silence. The eye closed.

 

“Margaret, listen to me, I’m not a cop. I’m on your side.

You paid me. Maybe I can help. You didn’t fall downstairs. A tornado did not strike your house.”

I No response.

 

“Did they get what they wanted?”

 

“No.” The single syllable came out with grim satisfaction.

She repeated it and her voice cracked.

 

“Water?”

 

I held the glass while she made an attempt to suck at the straw through swollen lips. She winced at the feel of it, and waved the glass away.

 

“Listen.” Her voice was so faint I had to lean over the bed. She grasped my hand, which was chilled from the icy glass. Hers was colder. “Find Gene. Please.”

 

“I’m looking. I’ll keep looking.”

 

“If I die—”

 

“You’re not dying, Margaret. The doctor—”

 

“Doctors.” She practically spat the word. “Eugene … If I die, there’s nobody else.”

 

I thought she’d dozed off, but when I tried to release my hand, she drew me closer with surprising strength. “Hide it,”

she whispered. “Hide it for me. Don’t tell.”

 

Whatever they’d given her, Demerol, morphine, was starting to take hold. Her one open eye was wide and vacant, staring at the ceiling. I’m not sure she knew I was there.

 

“Hide what?” I said.

 

She gazed at me blankly, as if she’d never seen me before in her life.

 

“Hide what?” I repeated.

 

“Go … home,” she murmured. Each word was separate, disjointed, like the beginning of a new thought. “Home …

attic… toy trunk.”

 

“A toy trunk in the attic?”

 

She stared at me intently, pleading out of that one wandering eye. “Home … behind … trunk … attic …” She talked the way a drunk walked, trying to toe a straight line, wavering uncontrollably. She couldn’t manage to get the right words out, only the urgency. “Home … hide the …

hide it. Gene …”

BOOK: A Trouble of Fools
11.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The MacGregor by Jenny Brigalow
Absolution by Amanda Dick
If I Lose Her by Daily, Greg Joseph
Steal the Night by Lexi Blake
Aunt Dimity's Death by Nancy Atherton
Julia Justiss by The Courtesan