Authors: Linda Barnes
Neither of us said anything for a while. The drone of the sports commentator got louder. The score was tied and the jerk was going into raptures at the thought of a second overtime.
“I'm sorry about my mother,” Mooney said.
I took in a deep breath. “Forget it,” I said.
“She just doesn't understandâ” he began. “Hell,” he said under his breath, “I don't understand, either.”
CHAPTER 16
“So how the hell's your knee?”
Those were the first words out of Gloria's mouth when I limped into G&W's late that night, which is why I adore that woman. None of this “What did you do to my cab?” business. No bemoaning what can't be changed.
She had the phone tucked between her shoulder and one of her chins and was busily scribbling an address down with one hand and hanging onto the microphone with the other.
“Get me a cab at 124 Emory,” she crooned into the mike. “Come on, boys, pick it up now, pick it up. And be careful. I understand it's slippery at the corner of Comm. Ave. and Allston.”
I grinned. In cab talk, “slippery” means the cops have set up a speed trap.
A metallic voice responded: “335, Gloria, I've got it. Five minutes.”
“Sit down,” she said, replacing the receiver. “Take the weight off.”
I sank into the guest chair, forgetting for once to check for cockroaches. I hate the idea of sitting on a cockroach. Nothing squished beneath me.
“Knee's not bad,” I said. “But I wish I'd been driving my own car.”
“Wishes don't get you shit, you know,” Gloria said, punching buttons on her console and biting into a Hostess cupcake. “It happened. It's over. You're sitting here, not lying in some hospital, so you be grateful.”
Gloria has a certain authority when she talks like that. I've never heard her version of the car crash that put her in the wheelchair, but she and hospitals are no strangers.
“You want a cupcake?” she asked. She had a whole carton of them, twelve packages, two to a package, squatting on one corner of her desk. “They got cream in the middle,” she said.
“No, thanks.” Normally I love junk food, but I can't eat with Gloria. I just sit back and marvel.
“The insurance is paid up,” she said, separating cellophane from the chocolate frosting with the squiggle on top. “You're bonded. I hate having a cab off the road, but Sam said to go ahead and lease one. Hackney Bureau'll transfer the medallion.”
“You told Sam,” I said.
“She had to, didn't she?” The voice came from the doorway leading to the garage, but I didn't have to turn around to see who it was.
Not only hadn't I looked for cockroaches, I hadn't checked for fancy cars outside. He couldn't have been standing there long. I'd have felt his eyes.
“Hi, Sam,” I said.
He looked like he'd stopped by on his way to someplace else, wearing an expensive gray suit, a white shirt, and a patterned tie with glints of blue and green. I didn't notice the clothes right away. When I did, I wondered if there was some woman waiting for him out in that Mercedes or BMW, and I swallowed hard.
Sam's not stop-your-heart gorgeous, not like Geoffrey Reardon, but he's the right height and the right build. He's got a strong, bony face, dark eyes and hair, a stubborn chin, and he does something to me, just standing across a room, that most men can't do no matter how close they come.
“Carlotta,” he said. It came out flat, an acknowledgment of my presence, nothing more.
“Sorry about the cab,” I said.
He had Gloria's big ledger under his arm. He's the partner who keeps the books, and he stops in from time to time to pick up the records. I shot a reproachful glance at Gloria, who could have warned me. She was communing with Hostess.
“Nice blouse,” he said. I couldn't remember what I was wearing. I knew I'd changed at home after substituting hot compresses for the longed-for bath. I remembered feeding the cat, the bird, admiring one of Roz's incomprehensible paintings. My turquoise shirt, that's what I'd chosen. Tucked into black jeans.
“Nice suit,” I said.
His face had that clean, just-shaven glow, and I thought I could catch a hint of his after-shave, but it was probably just my nose playing tricksâand my memory.
To tell the truth, standing in the doorway under the light from the bare hanging bulb, he looked like a goddamn knight in shining armor. But did I feel like a damsel in distress? Nope. We six-foot-one-inch women rarely do. Glass slippers don't come in size eleven.
There was one of those silences. I could hear Gloria demolishing cupcakes. Sam and I have too much to say to each other, and not enough. I left a message on his answering machine six months ago. A very inadequate message.
“Maybe you're getting to be bad luck,” he said.
“I hope not,” I said. “I don't mean to be.”
More silence.
“Your cop buddies gonna get the guy who hit you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“If you got a license plate, I know somebody who can run it down,” he said.
Sam Gianelli is the son of a Boston Mob boss. He has ways of getting information that I don't even want to think about. If your name is Gianelli in this town, people tell you things. Strangers fall on their faces doing you favors.
“I'd like to do it,” he said.
Maybe he had a couple more lines at the corners of his eyes. Maybe I was just searching for flaws.
Gloria stopped chewing long enough to say, “Of course she got a plate. She's got good eyes and she uses them. Here, write it down on this.” She stuck a stub of pencil in my hand and slid a card across her desk. I wrote down the number of the gray Caprice, feeling like I ought to explain that it wasn't really the car that had run me off the road, knowing that I didn't want to start a discussion. Not about Mooney's problems. Not with Sam.
Gloria clicked her tongue impatiently, waiting for me to hand the card to Sam, or for him to cross the room and take it. We must have been eight, ten feet apart.
“Well, shit,” she said finally, reaching for the card and reading it aloud. “It's 486-ITO. Got that? Mass. plate, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“I'll see what I can do,” Sam said.
“Thanks,” I said.
He turned and went out the door, and I started breathing again.
The phone rang. Gloria scribbled, sang an order over the mike to pick up Dr. Bennett on Peterborough Street. She blew cupcake crumbs off her desk. Then she motored her chair halfway around the desk, leaned forward, and tapped me on the shoulder. “Wake up,” she said sharply. “That wasn't so damn bad, was it? You could have moved your ass and given him the damn card, you know?”
“You could have told me he was here, Glory.”
“Yeah, but then you'd have walked out, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Can't hide from him all your life, babe.”
“Who's hiding?” I said.
Gloria shot me a cream-filled smile. She had this incurable, romantic, happily-ever-after streak that fascinates me. I mean, if working at Green & White Cab in a wheelchair doesn't knock that kind of crap out of you, what will?
“Look,” I said. “I want a cab.”
“Shit,” she said. “One thing about you, Carlotta, you never quit.”
CHAPTER 17
Gloria gave me her worst rattletrap Ford on the theory that if I was going to get run off the road again, I might as well do it in a cab already booked for demolition derby. I detoured to buy a can of pine-scented air freshener, then drove to the Zone, squealing the tight curves on Storrow Drive, beating out yellow lights down Arlington to Boylston Street.
When you pilot a Boston cab, that kind of driving is expected.
I fought the urge to stop by Sam's Charles River Park penthouse. I'd just check to see if he was home yet, I told myself. See if a female voice answered the buzzer, I told myself. Bullshit, I told myself. Who are you kidding?
I stuck a tape in my boom-box, working by feel in the dark. Bonnie Raitt strummed the first chords of “Streetlights,” then the drums came in and I sang along. The mix of blues and Motown on that album soothes my Detroit native bones.
At the corner of Washington and Eliot, in the brass heart of the Zone, the weed-free lawns of Lincoln existed on some other planet. It amazes me that people from Lincoln speak the same tongue as folks who inhabit the Zone.
I speak Lincoln, but I speak Zone with a better accent, more authority. Oh, it's changed some since my cop days. The pizza shack has a fresh coat of red paint, already covered with graffiti. “Liberate El Salvador,” it says over and over, interspersed with Spanish insults involving Alberto's mother and a dog. The peek-a-boo theater has new tinted window glass. Developers are eating up the vacant lots and empty buildings, encroaching fast. Some of the porno shops have fled to Saugus, Revere, Stoughton, any unsuspecting town that'll take them. The Naked I's still there, but the Pussy Cat Lounge is gone, its infamous runway sold at auction.
Every guy on the street looked like a sailor, a pimp, or an undercover cop.
When I'm in the Zone I try to see nothing but surface. I study the light bulbs that make up the signs, the mica chips in the sidewalks, the strippers' photos on the billboards.
Usually it doesn't work. That's one of the reasons I quit being a cop. I see more than I want to, more than I can handle without turning to mush or turning to stone.
The Zone is Boston's sewer, the drain that sucks down the ones who can't quite swim. The men and women prowling the nighttime streets are mostly old hands at survival, veterans whose eyes have that timeless frozen hardness. It doesn't take the young ones long to develop the look. Children huddle in doorways, shivering and swearing, talking big. The hookers seem hungrier every year, “tough” painted on their faces along with the makeup. Hypodermic syringes float across puddles of urine. I always wonder, what happened, what happened to these people?
What happened to Valerie Haslam that made her think she'd be better off here?
The lights were out in Renney's flat at the back of the alleyway. I circled the Zone's perimeter, crisscrossed the streets, loitered in spaces reserved for fire hydrants. Nobody really looks at a cab. I rescued a scared couple who'd blundered in from the theater district, ferried them to the posh Westin Hotel. They gave me a big tip, and said they hadn't realized Boston was so dirty.
I got into a routine with the cab: drive a little, wait a little, check the lights at Renney's, look under the streetlamps at the gatherings of boys and girls. Prostitutes use the streetlamp glare to advertise the merchandise. The old folks, the homeless, don't care about the lights. They congregate near the heating grates.
At the end of an hour what I really wanted was a bullhorn on the top of the cab. “You!” I'd holler, my voice booming like God Almighty's, the next time some jerk cut me off with a right turn from the left-hand lane. “You, in the red Trans Am! Stupid move, asshole! Stupid move!”
Boston drivers earn their reputation. In Detroit, where I learned to drive, they had respect for automobiles.
Once I thought I saw my client, Jerry Toland, but the boy hugging the streetlamp was younger than Jerry, thinner, with brown hair. He was talking to a blonde whose skirt covered her hips but not her thighs. She kept moving those legs, marching up and down, swinging her arms against the cold. Her breath was a frosty puff of cigarette smoke.
Once I thought I saw Sam, but it was just wishful thinking, daydreaming at night. The kind of daydreaming that fogs up the windshield.
I like Sam. I like sex. I like my independence, and I don't like one-night stands. Maybe I should put an ad in the personals.
I counted the number of cop cars. I kept my eyes peeled for the gray Caprice, Mooney's hooker, Valerie Haslam. The lights in Renney's place stayed dark.
Three hours later my knee hurt, my backside was numb, I'd run out of tapes, and I was damned tired of waiting for somebody else to make a move. I screeched a corner and caught the neon flash of a Budweiser sign. It made me think about 2
A.M.
closing time, and I found the cab heading, almost by itself, toward the bar where Mooney's difficulties had begun.
I parked in a loading zone, wishing I had one of those Officer on Duty cards to save me from a ticket.
Jamming my driving cap low on my forehead, I stuffed my hair underneath and grabbed my down vest off the passenger seat. It has a shapeless cut, and I didn't want anybody to think I'd mistaken the Blue Note for a dating bar. Stooping my shoulders, I went straight to the bar and sat on a vacant stool in the darkest corner of a dark room.
I needn't have bothered. At one-thirty in the morning, Dracula could perch on a bar stool in a dive like this and get served without comment. The old guy closest to me wore dirty woolen gloves with the fingers cut off. He was reading a tabloid with the headline:
MIDGET TRAINS TO BE ASTRONAUT IN CLOTHES DRYER
.
I ordered a Jack Daniel's.
I'm not a drinker. I never acquired the taste, but I figured the bartender would be happier to talk to a whiskey drinker at three-and-a-quarter a pop than a beer guzzler at a buck-twenty-five. Not that I'd decided to question the bartender, a skinny young guy who looked wide awake, smooth, and ready to lie.
The room was maybe twenty by thirty, paneled with phony wood on the bar side. The other walls had started out yellow, but were faded to tan and splashed with water stains from leaky overhead pipes. It may have been the yellowish light, but everybody in the bar looked faded, too.
Two working girls had moved chairs close to a radiator and kicked off their spikes to toast their feet against the hot metal. One wore a platinum wig; one had a punky shock of blonde hair that could have been her own. The white-haired one wore mesh stockings. The blonde was flirting long distance with a lone man at a table.