The Snake Tattoo (20 page)

I wondered why Marta was fighting with her father. And who Carlos Roldan Gonzales was, and what the “man they say is my grandfather” business was all about. Since Bogotá isn't a seaport, I wasn't too worried about boats and stowaways. But I was worried about Paolina.

I've never been to Bogotá, so my image is warped by news accounts of kidnappings and drug wars. I remembered a Channel 5 special report featuring gangs of hungry beggar children, and I prayed Marta would keep a sharp eye on her daughter.

Her
daughter, I'd almost thought
my
daughter, but Paolina wasn't mine.

I took her letter into the kitchen. It wasn't dinnertime by a long shot, but hunger gnawed. Getting almost stabbed had something to do with it. Every time I've stared down a gun barrel or hit the floor under fire, I've gotten incredibly ravenous, or felt terribly sexy, or both.

Considering the state of my social life, I was glad I was only hungry. I had a sudden vision of Sam and how great he'd looked at the garage. I focused on food.

I stood on tiptoe and reached way in the back of the tiny cupboard over the refrigerator for my secret shrinking hoard of TV Time popcorn. Roz thinks I hide dope there. TV time is great popcorn, but damned if the manufacturers haven't joined the microwave revolution. When my stash runs out, I'm going to have to buy a microwave just so I can make decent popcorn.

There's progress for you.

I shook the stuff in a battered four-quart pot over an old-fashioned gas flame, feeling righteous. None of this stick-the-bag-in-the-oven-and-wait laziness for me. I melted too much butter, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and figured I'd skip dinner.

Red Emma joined me at the kitchen table. She adores popcorn, practically inhales it. Then she has coughing fits because she gets salted out, and I have to feed her about a gallon of water.

“So,” I said to her, “think he'd have knifed me, with you there as a witness and all?”

“Fluffy is a pretty bird,” she said.

I extended my index finger, cautiously because sometimes she bites. She hopped on board, encouraged by the popcorn kernel I held just out of her reach.

Since she was in a chatty mood, I tried her out on a few Socialist slogans, “Workers of the world, unite!” and that ilk, the maxims of my mother's union-organizing life.

“Pretty bird,” she said stubbornly, mimicking my Aunt Bea.

“Dumb cluck,” I said.

She dug her claws into my finger and got skinny and mean-looking.

“
¿Habla espanol?
” I tried, mindful of Paolina's directive.

“
Buenos dias
,” said the bird quite clearly, ruffling up her feathers. God knows what she'd have said if I'd asked her to say
buenos dias
.

I let her perch on the rim of the popcorn bowl as a tribute to her bilingualism.

My fingers kept wandering to my neck, tracing the faint scratch. It interfered with my appetite, but not until I'd almost emptied the bowl.

I left a few kernels for Esmeralda-Red Emma-Fluffy, dialed Joanne at Area A, and lo!, she picked up the phone.

“Carlotta,” she said in an odd voice. I got the feeling she'd been expecting somebody else.

“Busy?” I asked.

“No more than usual,” she said too heartily, “But, uh, I haven't got anything on that licence plate.”

“Nothing? As in zip?”

“I ran it and there's no listing. You probably got the digits mixed up.”

“Joanne, that's the plate.”

“What can I say, kid? I can't help you on it.”

“Can't?”

“That's what I said. Sorry.”

I hung up slowly, puzzled because Joanne didn't sound like herself. Puzzled because I knew I'd gotten the damn numbers right. It was a Mass. plate, and the Registry should have had a title to match.

I found the phone book and wrote down Geoffrey Reardon's Somerville address. Then I folded the contract brother Stuart had signed, and stuck it in my handbag. It never hurts to carry an official-looking form.

CHAPTER 23

I had no trouble finding the address, choosing back roads all the way, avoiding lights and traffic like any smart cabbie. It felt good to drive, good to breath the stale car-heated air. My hands, busy with the wheel, the horn, and the signals, wandered to my neck less frequently.

I stopped across the street from number 85. If Geoff Reardon had committed suicide in the second-floor apartment of this Somerville triple-decker, nobody would have wondered why. It looked like the kind of place you rented when you came to the end of the line.

It was a weather-beaten beige house with a bad case of peeling shingles. Somebody had tried to jazz it up with blue window trim a few decades back, but the window frames were mostly rotted now, sun-faded. Two first-floor windows were cracked and sealed with cardboard to keep out the cold. No great loss; they didn't overlook much of a view. The front lawn was a square brown patch. Narrow burnt-glass alleys separated the house from its closest neighbors. No driveways. A battered big-wheel tricycle rested against a dried-up yew hedge, waiting for some kid to come and play.

I did my reconnoitering from the Toyota. The nearby houses had an abandoned air but were probably crammed with nosy neighbors. In crowded city neighborhoods, you can get away with anything if you look like you know what you're doing. If you look uneasy, uncertain, people get antsy. Sometimes they even call the cops.

Breaking and entering, for that reason alone, should be done under cover of darkness. But I was not about to do a B&E, since I had a perfectly legit key. All I had to do was enter, which can be done in daylight under the right conditions.

I checked out the conditions. The house had two doors: one, more elaborate, for the first floor; the other, a common entry for the second- and third-floor apartments. I could see three separate buzzers, each with a nameplate. I took a deep breath and left the Toyota, my bag slung over my shoulder, the key palmed in my hand.

I don't look much like a burglar. Sometimes it comes in handy.

I went up the porch steps with a purposeful stride, pretended to hit the third-floor buzzer, waited for a mythical friend to come bouncing downstairs, then, talking to myself, saying things like, “Hi. Gee, it's nice to see you again.” I let myself in.

The key turned smoothly in the lock, which helped the illusion. Once inside the narrow foyer, I dropped the smile and the act and tiptoed up the stairs.

I needn't have bothered with the charade. Reardon's neighbors weren't the noticing kind, or else they'd have noticed the person or persons who'd gotten there first and trashed the place.

Not that there was much to trash.

Reardon's office at the Emerson spoke of quiet wealth, old money. His living room talked poverty. His furniture, even before the attentions lavished on it by the intruders, was Morgan Memorial's best. And not much of that. He owned a bilious pink sofa that couldn't have looked a lot better with the pillows whole, and a beige armchair, now lying on its back with one leg stuck in the pseudo fireplace. That was it.

Unless, of course, whoever'd upended the chair had stolen the priceless antiques.

I wondered if the folks on the first and third floors were deaf. They must have heard somebody overturn the chair. Maybe Reardon habitually threw wild parties, but it sure didn't look like that sort of place.

He had a living room, a kitchen, a bath, and a bedroom big enough for a double bed as long as you didn't want to walk around it. The kitchen was a tiny galley with all the appliances lined up against one wall—if you call a two-burner hot plate and a three-by-five mini-refrigerator appliances. There was no oven. Three cupboards doors hung open. The refrigerator contained two cartons of moldy cottage cheese and a half-gallon of milk that I had no desire to sniff.

Somebody'd ripped the sheets and blankets off the bed, and tilted the mattress away from the spring. The lone picture in the entire apartment, a blameless print of Monet's
Water Lilies
, was tossed face down on the bed.

The closet door was closed.

All the other doors in the place were ajar. Every drawer and cupboard, too. I stared at the closet and wished I'd brought my gun instead of rewrapping it in the old undershirt and sticking it in my desk.

Well, I could have gone home, fetched it, come back, and broken in all over again. Instead I crept closer, trying not to creak the wooden floorboards, hugged the wall, turned the doorknob, and flung the sucker open.

Of course, there was nobody inside. The place was too damn quiet. I wanted to hum or sing or whistle or something, but I kept remembering those first- and third-floor tenants.

The closet was dark, bigger than I'd expected, a walk-in. I flicked on the light switch by the side of the door and stepped inside. It was amazing.

At least the size of the bedroom, maybe bigger, it must have started life as a back porch. Somebody'd enclosed it and turned it into the closet of your dreams. Geoff Reardon may not have had furniture, but he had clothes.

I don't know if gay or bisexual men are vainer than the hetero kind. I never conducted a survey. My feeling about alternate lifestyles is generally “live and let live.” Period. Well, maybe there's a twinge of regret because so many good-looking guys are out of the boy-girl market, and so many of my female friends are searching for Mr. Okay, never mind Mr. Right.

I try to take people as I find them, not as representative gays, straights, or whatever. Based on his living quarters alone, Reardon certainly defied stereotype. He was too weird to be typical.

I mean, this was a guy with no oven in his kitchen and eighteen suits in his closet. I counted. Eighteen suits, twenty sport coats—all hung on fancy wooden hangers. He had a valet press and a revolving tie rack. Enough shoes to stock a small shop, complete with wooden shoe trees. Wire baskets, two full of sweaters, one of brightly colored skimpy jockey shorts, lined the walls. Shirts were piled high in cardboard laundry boxes.

Somebody had poked around, emptied a few shirt boxes, pushed aside a few hangers, but there was no destruction. Not like in the living room.

I backed out and sat on the edge of the bed.

Okay. Somebody had beat me to it. But who?

Robbers read the obits. That's a fact of life. If your hubby dies and you give the press the time and date of the funeral, you are advertising your absence from home, and there are some jerks out there who'll take the opportunity to add to your grief. I used to see it all the time when I was a cop.

So it could have been your ordinary grave robbers.

It could have been a lover, removing a bawdy photograph, a compromising letter. Would an ex-lover slit the sofa cushions?

Reardon could have been mixed up in some drug and sex thing at the school, like Valerie's father suspected, and one of his partners could have searched for his stash of dope or kiddie porn. The old falling-out-among-thieves routine.

Whoever trashed the place probably hadn't been looking for Valerie's notebook.

Which meant I might as well look for it myself.

I went through that place like cops are supposed to after a suspicious death. I practically counted the knives and forks. I found little of a personal nature. No photos. No knickknacks. Certainly no compromising photos or letters. I wondered if Reardon had gotten rid of things prior to his suicide. I sure would. It's bad enough to die, but think of some cop going through your stuff afterward.

Did I find the notebook?

No.

A still small voice at the back of my head wondered if Reardon had returned it to Valerie. And when.

CHAPTER 24

I picked up a cab at ten Sunday night.

Earlier, I'd phoned Mooney.

He sounded like I woke him up, which worried me because eight o'clock is early for a grown man to hit the sack alone, probably a sign of depression. I suppose I should have been glad he was home instead of drinking in some bar. I asked how things were going, and he grunted a reply.

“Cops found your witness yet?” I asked.

“If they have, they haven't told me. Or the
Herald
. Hearing's coming up fast.”

“Stop reading the papers.” I said. “Look, Mooney, you know Joanne. Anything funny with her?”

“Triola? Nope. Why?”

“I asked her to run a plate and she's giving me the runaround.”

“The P.D. doesn't exist to do you favors. Ever think of that?” he asked, sounding more like himself.

“Nope. How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“How are you on doing me favors?”

“Like?”

“A guy killed himself in Lincoln. I'd like to know details.”

“So?”

“You know somebody in Lincoln?”

“I might,” Mooney said, always cautious.

“A cop?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you see where I'm headed, Mooney?”

“You want me to ask him about this stiff.”

“Geoffrey Reardon,” I said. “With a G. Got that?”

“How much do I owe you so far?” he asked. “For looking for that damn hooker?”

“Nothing. I haven't found her.”

“I sent you a check.”

“Geez,” I said, “I never got it. You'd better stop payment.”

“Carlotta,” he said.

“You can work off your debt finding out about Reardon,” I said.

“Yeah, well, my cop friend might not be so forthcoming if he knows I'm—”

“How's he gonna know you're suspended?” I said quickly.

“Seems to me everybody knows.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, Gloria sends you her best.”

“See, she knows.”

“What Gloria doesn't know,” I said, “isn't worth knowing.”

That much was true. She sat in her wheelchair, a busy spider connected to a web of radios and telephones, absorbing information as fast as she swallowed Twinkies. She was an encyclopedia of city lore and fast becoming legend in the tight world of Boston cabs.