The Snake Tattoo (5 page)

“I called from the police station,” he said. “They won't worry.” I wasn't sure if he was lying or not, but I like to start off believing my clients so I let it ride.

I pulled a spiral notebook out of the bottom left-hand drawer of the desk and headed the first page with the date, Jerry's name, and his address. I asked him for a phone number and he gave me one right off. Then he said I should probably have his parents' number, too.

“You don't live together?”

“Sure we do. I just gave you the line to my room.”

I don't come from the kind of background where kids have their own phones. Paolina's housing project doesn't run to private lines for the kiddies.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Valerie.”

I got her full name and address. Her phone, but Jerry didn't know if the rest of the family shared it. Her mother's name was Mathilde. Jerry thought it was spelled with an “e” on the end, not an “a.” Her father was Preston W., and he was a banker, or maybe an investment counselor. Probably had to become a banker with that name. “Preston W. Haslam” had the ring of old money and I thought I might have heard it around. On the other hand, it may just have had that generic banker chime. Valerie had a little sister, maybe five or six, and Jerry wasn't sure of her name, possibly Sherri. Something cute, with an “i” on the end.

“When did Valerie run away?” I asked.

“She didn't. She's not the type—”

“Yeah,” I said. “When did she disappear?”

“I saw her, uh, Monday, the fourth. I don't think anybody's seen her since then. That's not right. I mean, it's not right, is it?”

“It seems odd,” I said.

“Valerie's a great kid, really,” Jerry said, as if I'd been about to cast aspersions her way. “I mean she hasn't been doing so hot at school lately, but she wouldn't run away because she flunked some stupid class.”

“What school?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said. “The Emerson.”

If rumor was true, the boy could afford my rates. The Emerson School was supposedly the ritziest private academy in Massachusetts, a state that's no slouch in snob schools.

“What did she flunk?” I asked.

“Biology. And she was going to flunk drama, which is totally hard to do, but then I guess she turned in her stuff, so she was only really in trouble in biology. She could have gotten a tutor, or taken an incomplete.”

“Were you looking for her tonight? In the Zone?”

He stared down at the rug, lifted the ice pack to his lip.

“Why did you think she'd run there?” I tried again.

“I said I didn't think she'd run away.”

“Why were you looking for her there?”

“I had some other business. I don't know what I was thinking. I'm really tired.” He was going to add that his mouth hurt, but I guess I wasn't old enough to rate the confidence. From the way he looked at me, I had the uneasy feeling that he still classed me as a girl he wanted to impress.

“Want to tell me what happened to your mouth?”

“I walked into a wall.”

“Before or after you talked to the police?”

“Jesus,” he said, “they're not gonna find Valerie. You know how many missing kids there are in Boston? A thousand. A thousand missing kids. And then this guy said I should talk to this Youth Assistance Unit. That sounded great, you know, until I figured out it's two cops. Two cops looking for a thousand kids. Shit. It's unbelievable. Totally.”

“They get busy,” I said.

“I asked about you. They said you used to be a cop.”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd you quit?”

“Why don't you tell me more about Valerie?” I said. “Her friends. Her habits.”

“Geez,” he said. “Really, I don't know where to start. There's so much shit that's not important to anybody. And I don't know where she's gone.”

“Let me decide what's important, okay?”

Valerie was fourteen, almost fifteen, by Jerry's way of counting. She was left-handed. She had one really close girlfriend, Elsie McLintock. She'd lived in the same house all her life. She broke her left arm when she was twelve, while ice-skating. She liked to wear knitted wool hats in the winter. Her favorite color was pink. She knitted Jerry a sweater once. She liked to knit and she liked to skate. She was a pretty decent skater.

I like ice-skating. It's the only exercise I can stand besides volleyball. I can skate forward and backward, but I can't do any of the loop-de-loop fancy stuff. Valerie could.

Valerie despised field hockey. She was a good dancer. She didn't cheat on tests, like most of the kids. She had a small scar on the inside of her left wrist. He didn't know how it happened. It had always been there. Maybe it was a birthmark. There was lots of that kind of stuff. I asked him to describe her, and his hand reached for his wallet. When he realized his picture of Valerie was gone along with his money, his face got even paler, and I decided that sixteen or seventeen didn't matter. He was still a kid and he'd had a long day.

I got a blanket and a pillow out of the hall closet and told him he could sleep on the ouch for a couple of hours. Plenty of time for the inquisition to continue after sunrise.

CHAPTER 5

There's a dress code for taxi drivers in this town. Shirts have to have collars, and no shorts are allowed, not even on the hottest August scorcher. Private investigators, on the other hand, can wing it. After two hours of blissfully undisturbed slumber, I went downstairs, attired in an electric blue sweater and black wool slacks.

The blanket was folded neatly on the couch, the pillow smoothed and piled on top of it. I called Jerry's name. Nothing. I checked to see if the bathroom was occupied. The client seemed to have flown the coop, which puzzled me because I have deadbolt locks on all the doors, so you need a key to leave as well as enter my dwelling.

Then I met Roz coming out of the kitchen.

Roz is always a delight to the eye. This morning her hair was the color of cranberries, the kind that slide out of the can in a log. She wore a fuchsia T-shirt that almost met the hem of a thigh-high black denim skirt, black lacy pantyhose with a run up the right leg, and green leather pointy-toed ankle boots. Roz is short and skinny, except for her breasts. With Roz, first you notice her hair, because it's generally an unnatural color, then you notice her eyes, because she wears killer makeup—fake eyelashes and glued-on sequins—and then you become aware of her breasts, because they're emphatically there and because she has the world's best T-shirt collection, bar none. This one featured a picture of Smokey, and said:
DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO ARM BEARS
.

I'm fascinated by Roz's shoes. She wears one of those ridiculously small sizes, a five or something, so she can buy all these weird shoes nobody else wants. They have mounds of them in Filene's Basement, cheap. Today's ankle boots had incredibly skinny four-inch heels. She was perched so high on her toes that her feet looked like little hooves.

Well, not really. It's just shoe jealousy. Size eleven shoes, on the rare occasion you can find them, come in basic brown.

“He in there?” I asked, nodding toward the kitchen.

“Huh?” she replied, licking a sticky finger. Roz eats peanut butter for breakfast, straight from the jar. She has mastered the art of not looking after herself. She does all the cleaning, and she's figured out that if you don't make it dirty you don't have to clean it. Some days she can go entirely without forks, spoons, knives, plates, or glasses. I'm glad we keep separate food supplies, because when Roz's fingers are not stained with peanut butter they're usually covered with paint, turpentine, or developer fluid.

I admire Roz's basic laziness. Other people her age, which I put at around twenty, are not doing aerobics and eliminating toxins. They're improving their eating habits, getting in touch with their inner selves. Roz has a T-shirt that says “Live Hard, Die Young.” McDonald's is her idea of a health food restaurant.

“I have a missing client,” I said. “He spent the night on the couch.”

“Oh,” she said. “That was a client.” Her tone let me know she thought he was my version of the Twin Brothers. Which was dumb because Jerry Toland, though attractive, would have been cradle-snatching for Roz, never mind me. And if I had stooped to cradle-snatching why the hell would the snatchee have been sleeping on the couch? “He had to leave,” she continued. “I let him out. He's cute.”

“Great,” I said.

“Trouble?” she said.

“Somebody come for him?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Anybody waiting for him outside?”

“Nah.”

“Terrific,” I said flatly.

“He left you a note.”

“Where?”

“I stuck it on the fridge.”

That's one of our methods of communication. I probably would have noticed the note within the next three months. Roz is supposed to keep the refrigerator-door-bulletin-board organized, toss out year-old messages, expired supermarket coupons, stuff like that, but she rarely does.

This note was more like a scrap, a torn sheet of an address book that took some deciphering. It said, “Try Elsie first. Sorry to run. Thanks for everything.” At least that's what Roz thought it said. Jerry had terrible handwriting.

Roz started humming a jingle from a TV commercial. She keeps the tube blaring while she paints, and it does strange things to her mind and her art. She seemed brisk and cheerful, like she'd slept nine hours instead of caterwauling most of the night. I needed to talk to her, to make a declaration about the bathroom and the Twin Brothers. I needed to say that while I didn't care with whom she slept, I didn't want her sleeping arrangements to taint her judgment concerning bathroom design.

“Carlotta,” she said as if she could read my mind, “hey, you worried about the Brothers?”

“Right,” I said.

“Relax, okay?”

“Why?”

“The bathroom's gonna knock you out. Shazam!”

“Roz, I want a bathroom the cat won't be embarrassed to pee in, okay? I don't want state of the art. I want your basic normal bathroom.”

“But you said—”

“I said beige, not black. I said pink, not orange. Are they color-blind, or deaf, or what?”

“Carlotta, you gotta trust me,” she said. She smiled enigmatically and waltzed out the door. I could hear her heels tap up the stairs.

I felt like going back to bed and starting over. Instead I opened the fridge, found a carton of Tropicana, and poured a tumblerful. Orange juice clears my head.

Roz had deserted her copy of the
Herald
—I get the
Globe
—on the kitchen table, and sure enough, they had Mooney's story on page one, milking it for all it was worth. Reading between the lines, they seemed to be trying to link him to the other current police scandal, the one about collecting special-duty pay for not showing up at bars and sporting events. I could no more see Mooney taking cash for a job he hadn't done than I could see him roughing up somebody during an arrest, but I admit, the article made me think.

I wondered what shape Mooney's finances were in. I wondered if his mom had been sick, if he'd had any special expenses lately. Then I realized that all across New England people were doing likewise, looking for reasons for Mooney's fall from grace, even though the
Herald
was careful to use “alleged” in every other sentence. People who didn't even know Mooney were clucking over his downfall. That made me mad. I wondered if Mooney hid the papers from his mom.

I tossed the
Herald
in the trash and reread Jerry Toland's note. After a glass and a half of orange juice, I had the presence of mind to go into the living room, come back with my notebook, and leaf through the pages until I discovered the name “Elsie” in with last night's scribblings: Elsie McLintock, Valerie's best friend.

I reviewed my notes and was struck by how little Jerry had actually revealed about Valerie. The girl existed in negatives. She wasn't prom queen or valedictorian or most talented. I'd had to lead him, prompt him, for a physical description. She had brown hair. Light or dark? I don't know. There's like, this gold color in it. Her eyes were, like, this gray, or maybe green. She stood barely shoulder high, which I made out to be a five-foot-four, and maybe she was a little on the skinny side.

She was quiet, shy, but she liked her drama class. She didn't belong to any one group at school. You couldn't classify her as a prep or a nerd or a jockette. She didn't do drugs. Jerry was vehement about that. Maybe too vehement.

I'd hardly learned anything about Valerie's family. Damn that Jerry. The manner of his departure did not sit well with me.

Elsie McLintock had been noted as somebody who'd have a picture of Valerie. That would help, what with the weakness of Jerry's description.

I went to the cupboard and checked out the cereal boxes. I wasn't in the mood for Raisin Bran, and the freshness date on the Corn Flakes was long past.

How do you describe people anyway? I could tell by his eyes, by his voice, that Jerry Toland cared about Valerie Haslam. How do you define the people you love? Paolina has brown hair, but “brown” says nothing about the shimmer and sway of it, the way a strand of it might curl against her cheek or tickle her nose. And if I tried to explain Paolina, I'd have to start with her laugh, a bubble of merriment that bursts when you least expect it. Paolina's laughter seems like a special reward, reserved for me.

Well, Paolina was in Colombia, to me as “missing” as Valeria Haslam.

I ate breakfast. A bagel, cream cheese, coffee with cream and sugar. On a plate. In a cup. With silverware and a napkin. I'm profligate that way.

“Start with Elsie.” Not me. I started with the phone. I called local hospitals, jails, and finally the morgue. No Valerie Haslams. No unidentified teenage female Caucasians. I dialed the girl's house, because I figured her parents ought to know about the whole business. Maybe Valerie would answer and then I could rip up Jerry's IOU along with the standard contract from he'd insisted on signing, legal or not. I got an answering machine with a gruff male voice. I left my name and number.