The Snake Tattoo (6 page)

The doorbell buzzed three times, the signal for Roz. I heard her flying down the steps, clattering in her tiny boots. She greeted the Twin Brothers with equal enthusiasm, as if she hadn't just spent most of the night with one of them.

It's cowardly, I know, but I decided to flee before the destruction began. It was way too early for Mooney's hooker to make an appearance in the Zone, so I decided to follow Jerry's advice and start with Elsie. Why not? Valerie's parents weren't home, and kids have to be in school, right?

On my way out the door the telephone rang. The stern voice on the other end identified herself as Mrs. Mooney, the lieutenant's mother. She wanted to know if I could drop by the apartment. Anytime would be good. Now would be preferable.

CHAPTER 6

Back when I was a cop, I used to drive by Mooney's place in my cruiser and imagine what it was like inside. Now I parked my Toyota down the block and stared up at the brick building. Aside from a fanlight over the front door, the architect hadn't gone in for many fancy touches. Four stories high, the dingy yellow brick square was peppered with rectangular windows. The three steps up to the door were plain concrete, flanked by two urns that should have held geraniums. The right-hand urn was broken, a section of lip still jagged. The left-hand one was whole, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom.

The Mooney clan used to live in South Boston, an Irish stronghold renowned for stoning buses full of black kids. Mooney got tired of being labeled a bigot on the basis of his address and moved to the Hemenway Street apartment right after the cops nailed a ring of firebugs who were turning the Symphony Road area into a Beirut look-alike. His mom wanted him to come home to Southie when his father died, but Mooney's stubborn. He kept his apartment, so Mom sold the family homestead, and moved in with her only son.

I checked out the on-street parking, hoping to spot Mooney's battered Buick. Seven cars sported parking tickets.

Mooney doesn't talk much about his mother. What I know about her can be summed up in few words: cop's widow, cop's mother. I met her once at the station and got the strong impression she didn't care for female cops. Maybe that's why I summed her up as a member of the Ladies Auxiliary, defining her in terms of her husband and son. I never do that to women I like—or even to women I know.

I didn't know much about Mooney's mom. Not even her given name. To me she existed as a presence—stern, forbidding, righteously Catholic—and I wasn't sure if I'd picked up the image from Mooney or constructed it on my own.

Her sharp voice on the phone hadn't helped.

I patted my hair down before I rang the bell. The automatic gesture made me pause. I used to do it all the time, back when I was an insecure teenager. Now—well, if my hair's too wild, too bad. But the instinctive response made me wonder if I wanted to impress Mooney's mom. And why.

The minute I hit the bell, her voice came over the loudspeaker. She must have been waiting for me. Maybe she'd watched me approach from a curtained window. When I gave my name, she buzzed me in. The interior door was heavy wood, solid, with bars blocking a dusty window. The foyer smelled musty, and the gray stair carpeting had seen long years of use.

I didn't have to search for 3B. The door was already open and Mrs. Mooney hovered in the doorway. I wouldn't have known her.

She wore a shapeless pink housedress that hung straight from her shoulders, covered by a worn beige cardigan. Her gray hair was full and lush, obviously a wig. The contrast between the glossy hair and the sunken face was too great. There was a hint of Mooney around her jaw. Heavy lines creased her brow and dragged her face down in discontented folds.

She favored me with a faint smile, but she'd lost none of her peremptory telephone manner.

“Come in,” she said, and it wasn't an invitation but an order.

“How do you do,” I said formally, “I'm Carlotta Carlyle.”

“Peg Mooney,” she said, extending a frail hand. “I remember you in uniform.”

She closed the door after me, leaning on it heavily. Then she transferred her weight to the rubber grips of an aluminum walker.

“Please,” she said briskly, “have a seat on the couch. It takes me a little while to set myself up in the chair. Would you like some lemonade?”

There was a glass on the coffee table with a little lace doily underneath, sheltering the wooden table from harm. Not that it had ever been a good piece of wood, but whatever care and polish could do for it they'd done.

The room was like that. The fabric on the green brocade sofa looked thin enough to shred, threadbare with careful cleaning. The smocked throw pillows were twenty years old if they were a day, their once-gold taffeta graying at the edges. Too much furniture had been stuffed in the small room, too many quaint little ornamental tables and footstools. Too many doilies and cushions and knickknacks. The effect was that of a larger room condensed. It made me claustrophobic and I wondered how Mooney stood it. Mooney who had a desk and a chair and a single picture in his office.

I was certain the furnishings dated from the Mooney childhood home, too worn to resell and too “good” to give away. Was Mooney's room different or had he let Mom do whatever she wanted with his apartment?

I tried to help Mrs. Mooney with the slow business of sitting down, but she nodded me away almost angrily. My grandmother used to do everything for herself, too. Stubborn as six mules, my mom used to call her, with a hint of admiration.

I never met my mother's mother, though I was brought up on a steady diet of her Yiddish sayings. When my mother married outside the faith—a non-Jew, a Catholic—my strictly Orthodox grandmother refused to see her again. She mourned her daughter and chanted the traditional prayers for the dead. Over the passing years, she relented. She'd speak to my mother on the telephone, at first only on her birthday, later every Friday evening—early—before sundown and the
shabbas
made the use of machinery unthinkable. My mother always said that if my
bubbe
had lived even another month they'd have reconciled, and the two of us would have met.

Instead I went with my mother to help clean out
Bubbe
's apartment after her death. My photograph, an ornately framed enlargement of a snapshot Mom had sent her long ago, had pride of place on the living room wall. My grandmother had never acknowledged receiving it.

The musty smell I associated with age and stubbornness, sickness and death, clung to Mooney's place.

The
Herald
was on the coffee table, the story about Mooney face-up below the front-page fold. I wanted to hide it.

Peg Mooney saw my eyes take it in, and she stuck her chin out defiantly.

“You read that, I guess,” she said, lowering herself into the chair. It was a slow process. She clutched the walker until she was maybe eight inches above the cushion, then let go and collapsed abruptly with a sigh.

I pretended to be fascinated by my glass of lemonade. It was good, fresh-squeezed and tart. I hoped Mooney had made it because I couldn't stand the thought of his mother going to all that work for me, squeezing lemons with her weak, clawed hands.

“My son doesn't know I called you,” she began.

I waited, watching her.

“And I don't want him to know. There are things I don't want to know about in his life and things I don't want him to know about in mine. We live in each other's pockets but privacy is still important, I think.”

I nodded my agreement, drank lemonade.

“I know you used to work for Joseph,” she said.

It took me a minute to realize that Joseph was Mooney. I knew his name was Joe, but nobody ever used it.

“And since you used to be a policewoman, I assume you know people in the department still.”

“I do,” I said. Over her head on the far wall were framed photographs, like in my grandmother's flat, some black and white, some in older sepia tones. One must have been Mooney as a little boy. He wore a sailor suit and his face was fuller and softer, but essentially the same.

“All my friends on the force are retired,” she said. “Well, really, they were never my friends. They were Pat's friends, my husband's drinking buddies. The wives were tolerated, not like now.… But I know it's all changed since the old days. The young cops aren't the same. College cops, my Pat used to call them, and he'd look down his nose at them, though he never made it out of high school. He was a fine policeman, my husband, seven citations for bravery, and shot once before the end. Gave his life to the department, just like my boy.”

I settled in and drank lemonade. I'd been invited to listen to reminiscences. Well, I'd lived through worse. If it helped her forget her pain for a while, I could certainly spare the time. Her voice softened when she talked about “her Pat” and I could catch the faintest hint of a brogue. I searched the wall for a photograph of a younger Mrs. Mooney. She was there in her wedding gown, smiling shyly, with no suffering in her eyes.

“Is there anything I can get you?” I asked her. “I could make you some coffee, or tea.”

“No, thank you,” she said, stiffening immediately when I brought her back to the present. “But there's something you can do for me. You can explain how a man can give his whole life to the department and then have them all turn on him over nothing.”

“I don't think I can explain that,” I said.

“The
Herald
would never have printed garbage like that when my husband was alive. The police would never have broken ranks and talked about one of their own like that, and to be a reporter.”

“Your son must have explained what happened—”

“He doesn't talk about it. He pretends it didn't happen and he goes off every day somewhere like he had to go to work. Only now I know he's not going to work. I thought maybe he came to you.…”

“No,” I said.

“Are you Catholic?” she asked out of the blue.

“No,” I said flatly.

“Ah,” she murmured. “He wouldn't tell me that.”

“Is it so important?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said without batting an eye. “To me.”

“Mrs. Mooney, what can I do for you?”

“My son thinks you're trustworthy.”

“I think highly of your son,” I said. “He's a fine policeman and a fine person.

She gestured to the wall of photos over her shoulder. “There's a picture of him here with his wife,” she said. “Go take a look. Such a handsome couple they are.”

I wanted to correct her. His ex-wife. But then, she probably didn't recognize their divorce. I got up and crossed the room.

It was an eight-by-ten studio portrait, and Mooney's wife was lovely, with a soft, smiling face. Petite. Blonde. High Slavic cheekbones. She clung to Mooney's arm, and he wore a smile so carefree it was almost painful.

I turned my attention to another picture, one of a sternfaced man. “Is this your husband?” I asked.

“The one in uniform,” she said. “That's Pat. Always in uniform. He was a beat cop till the day he died and proud of it.”

I went back to the sofa and sat down gently to save the upholstery.

“Well, Miss Carlyle,” she said, “if I still knew people in the department, I wouldn't need you to …”

“To what?” I said when she faltered.

“Would you like more lemonade?” she asked. “It's no bother …”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Listen,” she said, “if you really work as a private cop, I want to hire you to do a task for me. I'd do it myself, but I'm too lame and too slow.”

“What task?”

“I have a little money put by. I can pay you for it.”

“What task?” I repeated.

“In the old days, I wouldn't have needed to do this. The department used to take care of its own, you know?”

I waited, full of foreboding.

“I want you to talk to the policeman, the one who wrote up the report, and I want you to convince him that he saw a knife, that he made a mistake on the paperwork, you know?”

“Please,” she went on when I said nothing. “It's not too late, just because of what the papers say. Things get lost at police stations. Maybe the knife was in the man's pocket and they found it later at the hospital, but one of the orderlies stole it or something. There are ways to manage it with no one getting hurt.”

“You don't think there was a knife, do you?” I said gently.

“I don't care,” she replied.

“You think your son beat that guy up and lied about it?”

“Listen to me, girl,” she said angrily. “It doesn't matter to me whether there was a knife or a gun or a machete or a machine gun. My boy is a good cop, like his father was.”

“Times have changed,” I said.

“And not for the better.”

“Did his father beat people up?” I shouldn't have challenged her, but I couldn't help it. There was a gleam in her eye, and she answered me like she'd been waiting for a fight and I was the selected opponent.

“People that needed beating, yes, and he wasn't ashamed of it. None of this modern ‘be kind to the scum of the earth' garbage, and let them come back and shoot you tomorrow. My husband knew which side he was on.”

“That must have been a comfort to him.”

“It was,” she said. “Oh, it was.”

“So you want me to bribe a police officer,” I said quietly. I finished the last drop of lemonade and put the glass back on the table, in the exact center of the crocheted doily. “You know your son would hate it.”

“He wouldn't know,” she said. “That's part of your job. I want it handled tactfully. I can pay you a hundred dollars, and for the officer another hundred.”

“No,” I said. “I'm sorry. I can't.”

“Then maybe you'll do it because you care what happens to Joseph. This is eating him up, killing him.”