Lie Down with the Devil (3 page)

I stared at him, all the rational and convincing words I’d meant to use forgotten. I could hear the waves against the rocks and the
pom-pom-pom
of a silenced .22.

“Look, I have to go,” he said quickly. “I can’t tell you anything. I never could.”

“Mooney, I—”

“Don’t ask me again. You know what I’m talking about, Carlotta. Isn’t it time to admit it to yourself?”

I didn’t say anything. I pressed my lips together and stared at the gravel until the individual stones melted into a solid band of gray.

“Hey, how’s Paolina? Jeez, I’m sorry, Carlotta, I should have asked right off. I should have called you back, just to ask.”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing an unexpected lump in my throat. “You should have.”

Az me lebt mit a teivel, vert men
a teivel.
Translated freely from my grandmother’s native Yiddish: “He who lives with a devil becomes a devil.”

Mooney’s tirade struck home in more ways than he knew. It’s not that I don’t think about what Sam does for a living; it’s that I
try
not to think about it. Because when I do think about Sam’s line of work, when I ponder the Gianelli family’s generations-long involvement in organized crime, I find myself recalling my grandmother and her proverbs, and wondering not only about Sam, but also about myself and the person I might become. If I do marry him, will I come to take his work for granted? Slough it off, forget about it, live with the devil and become the devil?

Wasn’t there another saying, not a Yiddish one, but an English standard, that began “Lie down with the devil”? Lie down with the devil and what? I couldn’t recall the tag end of the slogan. Maybe I just didn’t want to.

When I flew to Bogotá to search for my little sister, I left clients in the lurch. Oh, I phoned them—or rather, I had Roz, my quasi-assistant, phone them to apologize, commiserate, and recommend other local investigators—but those clients were gone and they
weren’t coming back. When you ditch clients, word gets around: I was out of the loop and at least two of the lawyers who routinely shuttled clients my way were going to require major acts of contrition before they sent anyone again.

I drove a full shift—picking up fares in Southie and dropping them in Eastie, ferrying businessmen from the Four Seasons to Logan—because no matter how screwed up your life might be, bills manage to arrive on time, property tax payments fall due, and supermarket checkout clerks want cash in exchange for the groceries. That’s why I keep my hackney license up to date. Driving tides me over the tough times; if I drive, I don’t have to accept ugly divorce cases or take on clients who strike me as con men at first glance. But the problem with cabbing—aside from meager pay, lousy hours, expensive gas, crummy traffic, and bad tips—is that it takes your time, not your concentration. You can drive and let your thoughts roam, let them idle and sink into crevices of anxiety. No doubt about it: Other people’s problems are better than your own, which was why I was nowhere near as irritated at Roz for setting up an unauthorized appointment with a prospective client as I might have been.

Roz used to be my tenant, pure and simple. Then she became my housekeeper. Now she functions as a sort of all-purpose assistant, although not the kind who reliably does as she is told. What with the fallout from Colombia, I had told her I wasn’t yet ready to get back on the job. This morning, when she’d sprung her friend-of-a-friend, please-do-it routine on me, I hadn’t been eager, but who knows, maybe it was the fact that I had a solid shot with a client tonight that had given me the momentum to face Mooney this morning.

What had I expected? From Mooney, I don’t know,
but something more than the nothing I got. From the client? If I could have ordered off a fantasy menu, I’d have picked a Brioni-clad corporate client offering reliable, well-paid work. Maybe a low-level manager was trying to pull off a little financial embezzlement. I could investigate him and his methods, or possibly find out how the prototype of some new product wound up in a competitor’s showroom.

Instead, at 7:37 on Thursday evening, I got Jessica Franklin.

She was young. She was pretty, with a sweet round face and dark glossy hair so straight it could have been scalped off an Asian girl. Her shoes were cheap teetery heels, and we’d barely gotten past the initial formalities—name, address, and occupation—when she burst into tears.

When people say “burst into tears,” they usually mean she started to cry or a tear trickled down her cheek, but that’s not what I mean at all. This was bursting, the way a balloon bursts: one second there, next second
pop.
One second sunshine, next second downpour, cloudburst. Jessica Franklin’s sweet face screwed up into a mask of tragedy and she started crying with the desperate abandon of a baby, with unselfconscious sobs and snot and a reckless wail.

“Hey,” I said, “it can’t be that bad.”

Jessica wailed.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

She wailed harder, picking up her purse and rummaging in its deep interior. I passed her some tissues, thanking God there were tissues, a whole box of them right where they should be on my desk, but she ignored them and kept rummaging and then, with the waterworks at flood level, she lost her grip on the handbag.
I reached out to grab it, but the handle eluded my grasp, and I succeeded only in speeding its cartwheel descent.

Loose change, keys, and jewelry clanged to the floor. A deck of cards plopped onto a pile of Kleenex along with a small stapler, a cell phone, a bottle of scarlet nail polish, a makeup brush, a hairbrush, a pack of cigarettes, matchbooks, a toothbrush, a cascade of Band-Aids, pens and pencils, rubber bands, and a red bandanna.

“God,” the woman said, jumping to her feet and squatting, then kneeling awkwardly on the bare floorboards. “I’m so damned clumsy.” Her hands scrabbled at the pile of junk and fanned the playing cards across the floor. “Oh, shit. Hell, no, please, don’t help me. Please. We’ll start over in a minute. I’ll shake hands and stop crying, really. Don’t help me, please, it’s bad enough already. I feel like some kind of animal—out of control, like a puppy dog crawling on the floor.”

She was heavier than I’d thought at first glance, her knees dimpled and soft. She wore a short dark skirt and a tweedy heather-colored sweater. Her face was heart-shaped and her gentle eyes a deep soft brown. She looked too young to have the kind of troubles that would lead her to hire a private investigator, but the tears said otherwise.

She worked quickly and methodically, dumping things back in the purse, scooping the cards with skillful fingers, giving them an expert shuffle before securing them with a rubber band. While she worked she tried to regain control, and she seemed to be calming down until she came across a large envelope. As she touched it, her eyes welled, and the moaning sobs began anew.

Wordlessly, she passed me the envelope. At her nod, I opened it, then blinked in surprise: a wedding invitation.

The pale unaddressed envelope was lined with silver moiré paper; the enclosed card featured modern script. When I read the names, I glanced quickly at my appointment calendar, and yes, the young woman crouched on the floor, holding a wad of tissues to her streaming eyes, was none other than the bride-to-be. A thin silver band circled the ring finger of her left hand.

“Come on,” I said, helping her off the floor. “Sit down. Talk to me.” I didn’t think she’d handed over the invitation so I could congratulate her on the upcoming nuptials.

She collapsed in the chair. Speech still beyond her power, she picked up her purse and started rummaging again. I thought we were in for a repeat performance and braced myself for a second shower of personal items. She made a noise somewhere between a croak and a sob, then gave up and yanked a slip of paper from either a well-concealed pocket or the waistband of her skirt.

This one was cheap copy paper, folded roughly in eighths. I unfolded it.

HE WON’T BE SLEEPING HOME FRIDAY NIGHT. HE’LL BE SLEEPING WITH HER.

A fresh paroxysm of weeping accompanied my reading. I doled out more tissues, hoping she’d eventually be able to form words and sentences.

“This is really embarrassing,” she mumbled, ducking her head.

“Everybody makes mistakes,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“Some bigger than others.” When it comes to mistakes,
I know what I’m talking about. Maybe she heard it in my voice, because she stopped sniffling.

“I mean, what do you think of a girl who gets totally involved with a guy, just swept right off her feet, and she doesn’t even know who he is?”

What did I think? When I’d met Sam Gianelli, I’d assumed he was simply a businessman, owner of the cab company I drove for part-time. His mob connections, which—had I been a local, Boston born and bred—I might have inferred from his last name, were far less apparent than his physical charms.

I said, “I’d think she had a lot of company, Miss Franklin.”

“Call me Jessie. Please.”

Jessie Franklin had a killer dimple that dotted the right side of her face. She must have been an adorable child. Not quite as adorable as my adopted little sister, Paolina, but close.

“So congratulations,” I said, checking the date on the invitation. “At least you haven’t married him yet.”

She stared at her shoes. “I don’t know what to do. Time’s running out.”

I glanced at the card again. The wedding was less than two weeks away.

“You have no idea how much fuss there’s been.”

Modern weddings being what they are, I probably didn’t. Me, I got married for the first and only time when I was nineteen in a simpler world. Me and the groom, a couple of witnesses, and my dying father to walk me down the aisle.

“I don’t know what to do.” Jessie Franklin’s words came out in gulps, in fits and starts broken by sniffs and nose-blowing. “Everything’s all arranged. My mother—my mother will absolutely die if this doesn’t
go exactly the way she wants it to go. I mean, my dress, it’s gorgeous; it’s finally perfect. My mother made them change the hem three times. Three times! Everything has to be so perfect. I mean, she had a ft, arranging everything.”

I held up the accusatory note. “Do you have any idea who sent this?”

“No. Of course not. Absolutely not.”

“How did you get it?”

She stared at me blankly.

“In the mail? Shoved under a door?”

“I found it. In my purse.”

“When?”

“What’s today? Thursday? Oh my God, it’s Thursday night. Two days ago, and I still don’t know what to do.”

I’ve shadowed bank presidents and suspected thieves. I’ve worked for defense lawyers and district attorneys. This was the first time I’d been approached by a bride-to-be.

I sat back in my chair and toyed with a pencil. I have warm fuzzy feelings about brides. How can you not? Girls are raised to it, the big day, the ultimate dress, the dream-come-true event. Paolina talks about it:
happily ever after.

I was a bride once. More to the point, I had been well on the way to becoming a bride again until Sam had learned he couldn’t reenter the country without being charged with murder. Although she was younger and a stranger, I felt an immediate bond with Jessica Franklin, a forged link. Here she was: another woman engaged to a man she wasn’t sure she could trust.

I bit my lip. “You haven’t said anything to your mother?”

“Like what? Like first of all, I’m living with my fiancé, which she doesn’t know at all, thinks I’m a virgin who’s never been kissed. Like— I wouldn’t know where to start. My mom and dad, they’re old-fashioned big-time and they think I’m living with a girlfriend and working hard every minute and no fooling around. If anybody found out, I’d die. I mean, I’d never hear the end of it, what a no-good dummy I am and what a mess I’ve made of my life. And if I don’t go through with the wedding, what then? No decent man will want me now, that’s what they’ll say, and all that crap, like it was the 1950s and people still went on dates and held hands in the moonlight. My mom, especially, she’d hit the roof.”

“Would she cancel the wedding?”

“If I asked her to, I suppose, but I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Do you want her to cancel the wedding?”

I watched Jessica Franklin closely. I’d heard of brides having last-minute regrets, wanting to call the whole thing off, but not having the nerve. Some catch the last-minute flu; a few make a run for it. I wondered if the note had been folded and placed in her handbag by none other than the bride herself. It was such a personal way of delivering bad news. If she hadn’t placed the accusation of infidelity in her own bag, I wondered whether she’d considered what the method of delivery meant: an enemy close enough to touch.

What kind of person was Jessica Franklin? It’s hard to make any kind of judgment about a person in crisis. Jessica at work—she was in the billing department at St. Elizabeth’s hospital—might have been clever and competent, but the Jessica in my office was an emotional mess, and that was the only snapshot I
had to go on. I wasn’t sure which she needed more, a psychiatrist or a PI, but there she was, sitting in my client chair, and I don’t do therapy.

“You want me to find out who sent it?”

I hoped she didn’t think I’d be able to lift fingerprints off the document, wave a magic wand, and reveal the name of the miscreant in five seconds flat. Fingerprints were out. The thing had been handled and the paper wasn’t the sort I could deal with at home. If I’d still been working Homicide, I could have sent it to the state crime lab and waited a year for results.

“I—I don’t care who sent it. I just want to know it isn’t true.”

“Have you asked?”

“Asked Ken?” She spoke as though it was absolutely out of the question, an impossibility, as though the man in the moon or the prime minister of Canada would have been a more logical choice to ask instead of Kenneth L. Harrison, the groom listed on the invitation.

Probably, I thought, she should just call off the wedding, no matter how much money had been spent, no matter the shame and humiliation. If she couldn’t ask her intended a simple question, how would they be able to stay married when the questions came thick and fast later on?