The Snake Tattoo (21 page)

For instance, she knew I was coming over. That's why she saved a bone-rattler especially for me.

I cabbed it into the Zone and hung out till midnight, keeping warm with a Chris Smither tape and two pairs of gloves, seeing lots of familiar faces but no one remotely like Janine, the tattooed lady.

I kept an eye out for my gray Chevy Caprice, too. No luck.

I wondered what Mooney would be able to learn in Lincoln. I thought about Stuart Reardon and traced the scratch on my throat. What if I were responsible, indirectly, for Reardon's suicide? I mean, maybe brother Stuart hadn't been so far off course. Maybe Geoff had started something with Valerie, an affair that, once discovered, would get him fired, or worse.

Since I wasn't looking for her, I almost passed right by. I had to circle the block in rising excitement while I pried the photo out of my purse. It was Valerie Haslam, dressed and made up to kill, prancing along Washington Street on four-inch spikes.

Which was strange because she was supposed to be home in Lincoln.

I was deciding on an approach when the radio grumbled and erupted. It was Gloria's deep contralto. I answered and she said: “Sam's here, and he's got an ID on that plate.”

“Look, Glory, I'm onto something and I can't take it now.”

“Okay,” she said, “Call back soon then, babe.”

“Will do,” I said.

“Real soon,” she said. “And watch your butt.”

CHAPTER 25

I took the last corner too fast, screeching the wheels because I was afraid my quarry would get picked up during the two minutes it took me to circle the block. I was more than intrigued by Valerie's presence in the Zone.

I wanted to meet this teenage femme fatale, this fourteen-year-old who evoked such varied responses from the people closest to her. Who the hell would she be, I wondered? The competent young woman capable of taking charge of her life, the one I'd heard about from Elsie McLintock?

Or the innocent who'd run away because the boy next door had pawed her behind the math building?

Or the stubborn child, resistant to all her well-meaning parents could do, running to the Combat Zone in search of something she couldn't find at the elegant Emerson School?

Would Valerie be the girl of Geoffrey Reardon's fantasies, shy and strange, wild and free? A poet without words, a dancer minus technique?

Who was this girl who'd run away again, this little painted tramp, this daughter, this student, this friend?

“You!”

I rolled down the window, pulled up close to the curb, and hollered. Valerie pivoted with a come-hither smile on her lips. It faded. She stared at me, then shook her head no. Her tongue protruded between scarlet lips.

“No chicks,” she said curtly. The makeup couldn't disguise her youth.

“Get in the cab,” I said.

“You crazy?” she responded. “Deaf? Fuck off.”

I should have faked her, should have told her I was playing Stepin Fetchit for some rich, weird john who didn't do his own cruising, but I was only using half my mind. The other half was pondering Gloria's message, hoping Sam had told her something that would help me pull Mooney out of his hole.

“Get in the cab, Valerie,” I said. “Jerry's worried about you.”

That got her attention. “Jerry?” she repeated.

“Your mom and dad, too.”

She moved fast for a girl wearing high heels, a tight miniskirt, and enough junk jewelry to sink a rowboat. For a block she stuck to the street and I tailed her in the car. Then she veered down a narrow walkway between two buildings, and I had no choice but to tromp the brakes and leave the cab in a loading zone. I took an extra two seconds to lock up, because I figured if I lost another cab, Gloria would be truly pissed.

Not to mention Sam.

Valerie had a city block lead by the time I hit the street. My sneakers cut the distance. I was doing fine, ten feet behind and closing, when she ducked into a building and screwed it all up.

After midnight most places close down, right? But not hospitals, and Valerie had blundered into one of Boston's biggest, the New England Medical Center, a bewildering array of buildings connected by tunnels, bridges, walkways, and God knows what. If a fare asked for New England Medical Center, you could drop him or her at any one of a dozen entrances, and still be well within the Center. They probably had to run a shuttle bus.

“Come back,” I shouted, which was a waste of breath. She couldn't have heard me, and if she had, she wouldn't have listened.

The uniformed guard sitting at a tiny oak desk must have been half-asleep when Valerie went tearing by. He stared at me open-mouthed and started to rise.

I hate hospitals. I don't enter them by choice. The antiseptic smell makes my spine crawl. The rooms look like cells and the nurses like prison guards.

But damned if I was going to let that girl get away.

“Emergency,” I yelled, cradling my arm as if it were broken. Then I ran, leaving the gape-mouthed guard behind me.

We scooted down fluorescent-lit hallways, some gray and placid, some crowded with medieval torture apparatus. Doors were flung wide in our wake and occasionally somebody shouted. I focused on Valerie and nothing else. Her purse, a tiny contraption no bigger than a wallet and attached to a long strap that bandoliered her shoulder, banged rhythmically against her hip.

It was her five-four in heels against my six-one in sneakers. If it hadn't been for all the corners she wouldn't have had a prayer. When she turned I could hear her pounding steps on the polished floor. We were starting to cause quite a stir among fresh-faced interns and weary nurses. We passed another desk and I could see phones fly to faces, hear the cry for Security.

She cut a ninety-degree angle and raced down a hallway lined with IV stands and wheelchairs toward a door with a red Exit sign overhead. By the time I got there the door was closed and her heels were tapping upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time, but the door on the next landing slammed shut just as I got there. She was out on the second floor.

We played tag through the corridors. The second floor seemed to be arranged like a four-leaf clover, but the outer edge of each petal had a walkway to the outer edge of the next so I couldn't trap her in a dead end. I kept my eyes glued to her fleeing back and fumbled with the zipper on my down vest. The air was hot and still, stifling after the frigid outdoors, and I was starting to drip sweat.

Suddenly I couldn't see her anymore, couldn't hear her. I did a quick three-sixty and caught sight of her maybe twenty feet away, just stepping into an elevator.

Shit. I reversed direction so fast my heels skidded. Once the elevator doors closed she was gone. She could get out on any floor. I'd lose her. I felt like I was running through maple syrup, getting nowhere as the doors started to close. They seemed to work in slow motion, gradually narrowing the gap. I could see Valerie pressed against the back of the car, her scarlet lips open. I threw myself across the floor like I was diving for a distant volleyball on the crucial point of a championship match. The doors closed on my right wrist, balked, and opened.

I picked myself up and walked in.

Valerie wasn't alone in the elevator. There was the tiniest shriveled-up old man tucked in the corner grasping a cane. He wore glasses with lenses so thick they made his eyes look froglike. He turned slowly from me to Valerie, Valerie to me. His hands shook.

In a shivery ancient voice he said, “Up or down?”

“Down,” I said.

The elevator silence was punctuated with breathing. Valerie was gulping air as hard as I was. The old man's breath rasped through his nose.

I took Valerie's arm, smiled grimly, and said. “When the doors open, we're going to walk quietly out the nearest exit.”

“I'll scream,” she whispered furiously.

“Scream and I promise you'll spend the night in a cell,” I said conversationally, squeezing her arm a little tighter. The old man inched toward the doors, leaning heavily on the cane. I dragged Valerie a step forward and punched the hold button so the doors wouldn't shut on him. He kept his eyes glued on the floor, his lips pursed in concentration. “Ever seen the cells they dump the hookers in?” I asked. “Ever smelled 'em?”

“I won't go home,” she said.

I took her purse by the shoulder strap, transferred it to my handbag, which was big enough to swallow it whole and a few more besides.

“Hey—” she protested.

“It's just to ensure you come along,” I said. “You'll get it back.”

“I won't go home,” she repeated.

“We'll talk about it,” I said. The old man cleared the doorway, his halting shuffle propelling him at a crawl.

The security guard wasn't at his desk. He must have been called away.

CHAPTER 26

It seemed like miles back to the cab. Valerie didn't exactly fight me, but she wasn't all that helpful either. For somebody who could move so fast, she walked slowly. Once she tried to wriggle away and I had to grab her by the hair.

The cab was where I'd left it. In Boston, the stolen-car capital of the western world, that is not always the case.

Cops carry handcuffs. Private investigators don't. Nor do they have the option of tossing prisoners into a caged backseat bereft of door handles.

I kept Valerie with me in the front seat, in the middle straddling the hump, not on the passenger side. That way she'd need to scoot over, avoid banging into the fare meter, unlock the door, and heave it open before escaping. And by that time I'd stop her.

She didn't try anything. She was still breathing hard from the chase, and after that last wriggle she seemed to lose heart. Maybe she didn't like having her hair pulled.

I watched her more closely than I watched the road. There wasn't much traffic.

She'd stuck some kind of gunk on the front of her hair to make it stand on end, and she'd overdone her makeup in bold colored triangles. The effect was punk, bizarre, and cheap. She wore a low-cut Spandex bodysuit in metallic silver paired with a thigh-high black mini and killer heels. Red plastic beads, matching dangle earrings, and a fistful of rings completed the ensemble. I wondered if she'd worn the bodysuit in Geoff Reardon's class.

It wasn't her attire that separated her from the young girl in the school photo. It was her eyes. This version of Valerie had defiant, alert eyes, alive and glowing, eyes that wouldn't look demurely away from the camera.

“You on drugs?” I asked. I learned the technique when I was a cop. Often the blunt unexpected inquiry will net more response than measured logic.

“Nah,” she said. “I do some coke, but so does everybody. I don't need it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, you run pretty fast.”

“Not as fast as you.”

“Next time you're going to race me, dump the shoes,” I said.

She looked down at her feet and stifled a giggle. “I never thought of that.”

“You're lucky you didn't break a leg,” I said.

“Lucky,” she repeated sarcastically. “Well, at least I'd have been in a hospital. Look, can't we just forget you saw me?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You a cop?”

“Private,” I said.

“I could pay you,” she said.

“With what you turn in tricks?” I asked.

She ignored that for a while, but I could hear her ragged breathing. Then she said, “You mind if I turn on some noise?” Her voice was a blast of arctic air.

“Go ahead,” I said. “There's a tape in the player.”

The music picked up in the middle of Rory Block's “Lovin' Whiskey,” so I reached over and punched rewind.

It's a sad wailing song about loving a guy who drinks, and Block sings it with feeling and grace and a fine guitar backup. I don't know much about coping with alcoholics, but I know a lot about living with a coke-fiend, and believe me, she's got it right.

I stole a glance at Valerie. A tear had worked its way down her cheek, leaving a glistening trail edged in black mascara.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned her face to the window.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Look, I mean it when I say I won't go home.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“It's late,” I said. “We'll go to my place.”

“Where's that?”

“Cambridge.”

“Will you call my father?”

“We'll talk about it,” I said.

We stopped by Green & White to swap for my Toyota, and she didn't try anything there. Sam's car wasn't parked in the lot, and Gloria was swamped with the phones, so I didn't pick up the message about the license plate. I figured I'd call once I got home.

But sitting on my front porch was a man I'd never expected to see there again.

Sam Gianelli.

CHAPTER 27

“Shit,” said Valerie Haslam, her face pressed against the passenger window. “Is that your boyfriend or something?”

“Something,” I said, feeling unaccustomed warmth spread across my face.

“Shit,” she repeated under her breath, and we exchanged brief speculative smiles. She had great teeth, expensive orthodontist-improved rich-girl teeth. For the barest second, behind the garish green eye shadow, she looked like a regular teenager.

“When I stop the car,” I said, “come out my side.”

“I'm not going to run,” she said.

I guess she wanted to see Sam close up. I didn't blame her. “Glad to hear it,” I said.

“Well, you've got my fuckin' purse,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm fuckin' impressed. Let's go.”

I kept my hand on her arm, jailer-style, all the way up the front walk. I never seem to see Sam under remotely normal conditions.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hang on,” I rang the front bell three times and hoped like hell Roz was home, reasonably dressed, and not busy screwing the plumber. I was delighted to hear her feet clatter down the stairs.