The Snake Tattoo (27 page)

Roz had been right. The chocolate tile was perfect. The Day-Glo orange sink, the one with the busted faucet, had disappeared to my delight, and been replaced with a beige pedestal sink, sleek and modern. All the fixtures were shades of beige—“almond,” “toast,” and “wheat” if memory served—and none of them quite matched. But Roz had brought them all together with paint. She'd done this thing with the walls—she called it a stippled faux-marble effect—with different shades of beige and pink and gold, that made all the different fixtures look like they'd been planned just the way they were.

And the tub was great. Not a Jacuzzi or anything fancy, but a tub big enough to stretch out in. I had a bottle of Caswell-Massey Lily of the Valley Bubble Bath perched on its side, and plans to dedicate the tub that night. I hadn't quite decided whether to christen it alone or call Sam to help me. I was tired, but maybe not that tired.

“Pretty snazzy,” Mooney said.

Roz had painted the ceiling pink. Pink is not my favorite color, but it gave the room a cheerful glow.

I guess I'd just expected Mooney to give the room a perfunctory glance and an approving noise, but he pushed over to the sink and inspected it in a professional way. Then he checked the toilet, eyeing the label. And then he sat down on the edge of the tub, started to say something, and wound up laughing.

“Well, I don't think it's so funny,” I said.

“Oh, yes you will,” he said, trying to regain his composure.

“Come on downstairs,” I figured the strain of the hearing had finally gotten to him. “Drink your beer.”

“You'd better drink yours,” he said, chuckling madly and hanging onto the banister on the way down.

“Why?”

“Because you've got more trouble than you think,” he said.

We sat at the kitchen table. I took a deep breath and said, “What's wrong? Did they do something to the main drain?”

“Nope,” he said.

“Then what? Why are you giggling like a moron?”

“Is one of the guys named Rodney?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied slowly.

He took a big gulp of beer. “Carlotta, listen. I don't know a good way to tell you this. You got a bathroom full of stolen appliances up there.”

“No.”

“Yeah, Carlotta. Honest. All that stuff fell off the back of truck, you know what I mean?”

“I'll kill them,” I said.

“Shit, Carlotta. I just saw the report.”

“Oh my God, Mooney. You're kidding.”

“I swear I'm not.”

I drank some beer. I couldn't taste it. “Is this receiving stolen property or what?”

“It could be,” he said through another fit of giggles. I've never known Mooney to giggle.

“Could be,” I repeated.

“I don't have to say anything,” he said. “You could pretend I never went upstairs.”

“Mooney, let me get this straight. You mean for the rest of my life I'll have to worry about who uses my bathroom? Maybe put up a sign: No cops in the bathroom.”

“It'd be easy to let it go,” he said. “Except—”

“Oh, Mooney,” I said. “You don't tell on me. I don't tell on you, and pretty soon we're like Manelli, right?”

“Well,” he said. “Not that bad.”

I drank my beer. I could feel a fit of the giggles coming on. Or maybe tears. “But that's what it would be, Mooney. I'd have to live with it. This would be your favor to me—and then I'd owe you one—and then—hell.”

“It's not a capital crime,” Mooney said.

“What is? Getting a little kickback from a bar? Being afraid to tell your mom or your teacher what your dad did to you after school? Looking the other way when your husband and your daughter spend a little too much time together? How does it start, Mooney? With somebody shutting his eyes, shutting her eyes, letting it go this one time. Once you start letting things go—”

“Come on, Carlotta, aren't you getting a little overwrought about this?”

“Yeah,” I said, teeth clenched, “I am.”

“I'm really sorry, Carlotta,” he said. But he couldn't quite keep a straight face.

“Dammit,” I said.

“It'd look better if you called it in,” Mooney said. “Good defense against receiving.”

“Christ, Mooney, they'll take the stuff as evidence, right? They'll take my bathtub. I have got to have a bath, Mooney. I mean I'm desperate.”

“Well, I've got a solution,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I'll bet you do.”

“Look, you're probably hungry, right? We could go out and get something to eat. Ice cream, if that's all you want. Herrell's or anyplace you want. And my mom's visiting her cousin. I have a tub. Nothing real special, but a tub.”

“Mooney,” I said warily, “you didn't know about this before?”

“Huh? What do you mean? I just thought I recognized the guy on the way out. Rodney what's-his-name.”

“And you're not pulling my leg?”

“I wouldn't do that. The stuff is hot, Carlotta. I'm not saying you knew about it. I'm not saying Roz knew about it, but she's got rotten taste in friends.”

All the time Mooney was talking I had the image of cops dancing in my head, cops ripping my brand-new bathroom apart. It was practically unbearable so I switched channels.

I thought about Sam Gianelli and his dark wavy hair and his Charles River Park apartment and his wonderful sunken bathtub. Then I looked over at Mooney—solid, substantial Mooney. Maybe if he hadn't been wearing the uniform.…

“Sorry, Mooney,” I said. “I've got other plans for tonight.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries

1

“A pickle may not remember getting pickled, but that doesn't make it a cucumber.”

That's what my mom used to tell me when I was a kid. She reserved it for occasions on which I pleaded forgetfulness, for anything from “Forgot to make my bed” to “Forgot to do my homework.” She'd recite it in Yiddish, and I always thought it was a direct quote from her mother, who had heard it in turn from her own mom, my great-grandmother, a formidable woman—a redhead like me—reputedly seven feet tall.

People exaggerate; she was probably no more than my own six-one.

I wanted to repeat the pickle saying to the woman in my office, the one who couldn't remember where she'd acquired my business card. But she wouldn't have understood the Yiddish. As a matter of fact, she wouldn't have understood the English either.

Her name was Manuela Estefan.

She sat in the client's chair by the side of my rolltop desk, her pinched face framed by dark hair. She wore a white blouse with a V-neck, long sleeves, and some kind of embroidery on the collar and cuffs. I'm no needlework expert, but the design didn't have the flattened look of machine stitchery, and I got the idea it might be homemade. With the blouse she wore a dark cotton skirt and black pumps. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap. She blinked as if she hadn't seen sunlight for days, and I wondered if I should yank the shade on the September sunset.

Her name was one of the few things we'd established. This was because she spoke little English and I spoke little Spanish.

“Car-low-ta,” she said, giving the name its Spanish pronunciation, as if she thought I was Hispanic too. I didn't have the Spanish to explain that my Scots-Irish dad had named me for some movie star who made one B film in the late forties and then hit the skids. My ad in the Yellow Pages didn't even mention my first name—what with the still existing prejudice against female private investigators. And, like I said, I hadn't yet learned how Manuela had come by my card.

She'd had it clutched in her hand when she rang the doorbell. She'd shoved it quickly into a plastic handbag, but I'd seen it.

Usually my clients make appointments, but I have nothing against a little walk-in trade. If she didn't mind my shiny face, my jeans and T-shirt attire, and maybe a hint of eau de locker room, I was perfectly happy to take a crack at earning a fee.

I hoped my stomach wouldn't growl too fiercely.

If Manuela had timed her surprise visit any earlier, she'd have been out of luck. An hour ago I'd been in the gym at the Cambridge YWCA, playing possibly the best volleyball of my life. I was still awash in the afterglow, winded, sweaty, loose—and damn proud of an upset victory, another step toward the City League finals, a step nobody thought the Y-Birds could take.

We'd started off lackadaisical, losing two games before we found our rhythm. Fortunately, like baseball and life, volleyball has no time limit. You keep on playing the points, whacking the ball, until one side takes three out of five, and a game never ends until one team is up by two points.

At the beginning of the third game I could feel the momentum swing. The rusty gears who'd lost the first two games so awkwardly suddenly meshed as a team and won the next two.

There'd been points that left me tingling. Plays I longed to see again on some nonexistent instant replay screen. Had Kristy, our captain, really made that impossible dig? Had I managed to spike that shot? That hard?

The final game was like floating, like slow-motion choreography, like shared silent prayer. I knew what every other player would do before she did it. Winning that last point didn't mean any more to me than breathing.

I must have talked a mile a minute taking Paolina home. Sometimes a good game affects me like that. Paolina, my little sister—not my real little sister but my Big Sisters little sister—had been curiously silent, moody. I wondered if she resented the Y-Birds, disliked sharing me with the team. I'd have to spend more one-on-one days with my little sister.

I'd made it back to the house in good time, driving like the part-time cabbie I am but managing to avoid a traffic ticket. I'd slipped my key in the lock, patted T. C., my cat, and raced to the kitchen to pour a tall glass of orange juice in preparation for a pig-out dinner.

I was surveying the dismal contents of the fridge when the doorbell rang.

My stomach was getting impatient, not having counted on playing several rounds of twenty questions in Spanglish.

Manuela's eyes flickered and she stood abruptly. I thought she was going to storm out and return with an interpreter. But she only marched as far as my late Aunt Bea's rocking chair and the
Globe
I'd abandoned on its cushion.

I'm better at guessing weight than age, but I figured her for anywhere from seventeen to thirty. Her hair was long enough to brush her shoulders, fine and straight, giving her a dark Alice-in-Wonderland look.

I hadn't read the paper yet. It was still rolled and bound with a rubber band. Some days I read it devotedly; some days it goes to the bottom of the parakeet's cage right after I read the comics.

Manuela grabbed it triumphantly, opened to the Metro section, and spread it on my desk, stabbing one of her bony fingers at an article below the fold. Her nails were short and unpolished, her hands chapped and lined. They made her nearer thirty than seventeen.

I grimaced because the first thing that caught my eye was the front-page picture of a wounded child, shot along with twenty-one others in a California schoolyard. The caption said the gunman had used an AK-47 assault rifle. Just walk into your local gun shop and tell the owner you want to shoot up a playground full of kids. Okay, mister, will that be Visa or MasterCard?

I shifted my gaze to Manuela's pointing finger. It tapped a small item, maybe three inches of print. “Body identified,” it said.

I pressed my lips together while I read the brief report. I learned that a female corpse, found some three weeks ago in the Fens, had been tentatively identified by a certain document discovered on the body.

The Fens is a meandering Back Bay park surrounding a straggly excuse for a river—sometimes called the Fenway, sometimes the Muddy River. It's an urban oasis, replete with the usual muggings, but dead bodies don't turn up there every day. I was surprised this corpse had gotten so little play in the press.

I read on. The name of the victim was Manuela Estefan.

I stared at the woman in my office.

I reread the last sentence, the last paragraph.

I glanced up. My Manuela Estefan had returned to the chair next to the desk, and was nervously twisting a ring on one finger. It was a filigree silver band, maybe a wedding ring. I noticed that her fingernails were not just short, they were bitten, worried away to tiny half-moons with pads of bulging skin beneath.

“
¿Usted es parienta de ella
?” I asked, hoping I'd come close to saying “Are you related to this woman?”

“
No es su nombre
. No her name,” Manuela said, shaking her head vigorously. “We—I think—”

“Did someone else—?”

“No. I think—
Mi tarjeta
. She is—no—she
has
my card. You get my card back for me.”