Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (19 page)

“I think you need to go, lady, that’s what I think.” She made to stand up, but Pamela caught her wrist in her fingers and squeezed until she could feel the frail bone bend. The woman hissed at her, but she hung on.

“You see,” she pulled Emma down by her wrist, halfway across the table, making sure the woman could not mistake her intentions. “This is what I think. I don’t think a man called Rosemary at all. I asked around a bit, and Rosemary sounds like she was a pretty smart girl. What I think is that you called her. You told her you had to meet someone up there and that you were scared and she ran to your rescue just like she always did. Only it wasn’t you waiting when she got there, was it? It was Blackie. You set her up to be slaughtered and then tried to get it pinned on my husband. Just like you set John Mullins up years ago to take Robert O’Donnell out on a hunting trip. And then blackmailed him with pictures of the two of you in bed afterwards to make sure he kept his mouth shut, knowing it would destroy his career, which was all he had left when you were through with him.”

“You can’t prove it,” the woman said sullenly.

“I don’t need to, all I have to do is call the police and drop a few hints and suspicions and they’ll prove it.

“What do you want then?”

“Love Hagerty.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s going to kill my husband if I don’t find a way to get him locked up for a really long time.”

“What makes you think I got anything on Love?”

“Because it was him that you seduced John Mullins for, him that wanted Robert O’Donnell dead. Him that you were setting my husband up on murder charges for. Am I right? It’s just that Blackie did the dirty work of killing that poor girl.”

Emma’s lip twisted up in an unattractive sneer. “You think you’re Trixie Belden or something? Pretty little detective in her expensive clothes. But those clothes were paid for with dirty money.”

“You jealous?” Pamela asked, trying to disguise how badly the remark had unsettled her. Emma might be fishing, but she didn’t look as though she was making lucky guesses.

“Jealous?” She shook her head. “I hate him. I hate him like I ain’t never hated anybody in my life. And not for the reasons you’re thinking, either. Yeah, I whore for him, I have for a long time. I done a lot of things for him that I ain’t proud of. But I hate him because he killed my brothers.”

“What?”

“You let my wrist go so I can have a cigarette and I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

Pamela let go, keeping a wary eye on the woman.

Emma tapped a cigarette out of a nearly empty package, the shaking of her hands making the task take a minute. “You want one?”

Pamela shook her head, feeling a sudden terrible pang for Casey. Ridiculous as it seemed, she even missed the smell of his smoking.

Emma took a long drag, sighing as the nicotine hit her blood stream. “My daddy, as you know, was a cop. Big, freckle-faced Irish bastard, and my mom came from Polish immigrant parents. That’s where I get the blonde hair. Joe and Anna Malone, sort of the walking, talking version of the American dream. Couple of working class kids with immigrant parents making their way in the Promised Land. I was the oldest, and then there was my twin brothers, Stephan and Donal. Two blonde angels when they was little,” she said, “couple of hellraisers when they wasn’t so little.”

Emma looked down, skin tightening over the Slavic cheekbones. “I miss them. People always thought my baby brothers were nothin’ but trouble, but I still remember when everything about them was pure, y’know? I’d help momma bathe them, and after they’d smell so sweet, all those gold ringlets damp on their necks. That’s how I remember them.”

“What happened?”

“Drugs,” she shrugged eloquently, “what the hell else ever happens in this neighborhood? Stephan overdosed on heroin on his twenty-first birthday; he’d started using when he was fifteen. But he’d been clean for six months by then, no one believed that later, but I knew. I’d held his hand through the shakes and helped him to the toilet when he had to throw up. He went cold turkey, thought it’d kill us both before he was through. But he made it, thought he owed it to Donal.” She paused to take another long drag, yellow eyes heavy with memory. “Donal got shot ‘cause someone mistook him for Stephan. Stephan was into his dealer for a big wad of cash, somebody was putting pressure on the dealer and I guess the dealer thought he’d warned Stephan enough. Big old Eldorado drives past him on Broadway one night and
bang
he’s dead. Only it ain’t Stephan, it’s Donal.”

She tapped the ashes off her cigarette into a tin can on the table. The short-bitten nail of one thumb dug into the scarred melamine surface of the table.

“A week later Stephan decides he’s gonna’ go join Donal an’ ODs. Didn’t take, though his heart stopped a coupla’ times before the doctors were sure he’d survive. It changed things for him though, an’ he went straight after that. Six months clean, had a job at a garage down on Lancaster, wasn’t much but he was there every day on time, had regular pay. Then he goes missin’. Didn’t think much of it at first, I knew he was havin’ a hard time without Donal. Two days later he’s still gone, though, an’ hasn’t shown up for work. I knew he was dead then. Cops call my mom ‘bout a week later an’ tell her they need her to come an’ identify a body some jogger saw stuck in the shallows in the Neponset. It was Stephan alright, still had the black rubber tubing round his arm. Cops figured he stumbled into the river when he was high an’ that was that. Case closed.”

“But you knew better?”

“Yeah I knew better, but what did that prove? Cops knew Stephan, knew he’d been a junkie for years, he sure as hell wouldn’t have been the first to fall off the wagon an’ go back on the shit.”

“Why would anyone want him dead then, surely he wasn’t a threat?”

Emma shook her head, “It don’t need to make any kind of sense in this neighborhood. There’s people here, you piss ‘em off once an’ that’s enough. They’ll bide their time.”

“People like Blackie?”

The thumb had moved from digging at the table to scratching at the scars on Emma’s inner elbow, “Maybe, maybe not. You wouldn’t be the first to suspect it lady, but provin’ it, that’s somethin’ else. Besides, Blackie’s not the one givin’ orders, he’s just following ‘em.”

“I don’t understand,” Pamela said, thinking aloud, “Love’s been rich now for years. He doesn’t need the money anymore. What’s in it for him?”

“It’s not the money,” Emma shook her head resolutely, “he likes to own people, he likes to have their soul right there in the palm of his slick little hand. He’s like the devil that way—wants your soul and then when he’s got it he moves on to the next victim. You think you know, lady, but you don’t, ‘cause you ain’t made him mad yet.”

“How do you know that?”

“You’re sittin’ here with me ain’t you? Mmn-mn, you don’t know.”

“Then tell me, Emma, tell me who this man really is.”

Emma gave her a hard look, eyes like dull metal. She hugged her arms across her thin chest, shivering though it was abysmally hot in the small apartment. Pamela could see ancient track marks crisscrossing the delicate underside of the woman’s arms. She’d been an addict, but had been clean for a while to judge by the scars.

“Maybe you can’t tell so much anymore, but I was real pretty at one time. Half the boys in Southie had the hots for me. Never looked like you, mind, but I was pretty enough to turn heads in the street. I knew it too, wore tight little dresses and high heels, painted my toes and fingers bright red all the time, did my hair up in one of those slick little French twists. I thought I was something else, was gonna blow this neighborhood and never look back,” she smiled wistfully, “never made it farther than Haverhill on a Sunday afternoon.” She sighed. “This neighborhood does something to you, takes something out of you that makes you feel scared everywhere else. Like bein’ from Southie is all you got, y’know? You can be somebody here but when you take the train up north of the river you’re just another face in knock-off designers and cheap shoes. An’ you realize the only place you’re ever really gonna’ be somebody is in Southie.”

“Why didn’t you leave, Emma?”

Emma gave her a weary look, “You can’t guess?”

“Love.”

“Got it in one, lady. But don’t get me wrong, I was in trouble before he came along but maybe there was a minute or two I’da had a chance to get clear of this fucking neighborhood if he’d never looked my way.”

“Five years ago,” Emma squinted as though trying to peer backward into her mind, “a boy got pushed off the top of an apartment building down in Old Colony. People said it was an accident, but everyone knew he didn’t just fall. Story was he got in an argument over drug money with this black kid from Jamaica Plains, but nobody could ever put the finger on who this mysterious black kid was. Truth was he didn’t exist; whisper got round that Blackie had pushed the boy off, ‘cause the kid was mouthin’ around town that Love Hagerty was his daddy.”

“Was he?”

Emma gave another expressive shrug, “Don’t know for sure, bastard’s actually pretty discreet with the ladies, generally. Only God an’ the FBI know who he’s banging.” Pamela just barely missed spitting her beer out at that statement. Fortunately, Emma was too deep in her story to notice. “Anyway the kid looked like him, sure enough, but then black hair an’ blue eyes ain’t exactly rare in this neighborhood.”

“What do you think? Was the boy his?”

Emma looked down, thumb still digging at the table surface. “What I think, lady, is that if a man is willing to kill a boy that might be his own kid, then that’s a man you better be real careful around.”

Pamela nodded and took a deep breath, knowing the sort of chance she was taking asking this woman for help. “What I need, Emma, is help taking him down. I need something big, something that will assure he doesn’t see the outside world for a very long time.”

Emma’s mouth hardened into a tight line and Pamela’s heart began to thud as she wondered if she’d made a fatal mistake in coming to this woman. Then Emma seemed to find what she was looking for in the face before her, and nodded.

“There’s a pipeline of heroin that runs the East Coast up from Florida. Everybody knows the Bassarelli family’s got the market tied tight from Albany on up to the Canadian border. But even they need a little help keeping their turf protected. Huey Somers and his boys used to provide the muscle, but Love provides it now. Through Blackie, of course, but everybody knows who really sent the Somers gang up the river. There’s been a flood of the stuff on the streets in the last few years, lotta’ dealers between here and Roxbury, Jamaica Plains, City Point and the Flats, but there’s only one supplier. But
that,
lady,” Emma’s hand picked at the hair around her ear again, “ain’t something that just anyone knows. That’s the sort of information that can get you killed.”

“So what do I do, Emma?” Pamela asked, voice quiet but with a core of steel at its center.

“You watch Blackie, he maybe ain’t so careful as he once was, somewhere there’s a trail leading back to Love.”

“Just how far back do those two go?”

“About a thousand miles on a piece of real bad road,” Emma said. “They met as altar boys at St. Thomas’ when they were about twelve. People said Love looked like an angel in his robes, but that Blackie just looked like the little crook he was, even then. Blackie’s bad, but he don’t ever pretend to be anything else. You need to be careful, even if you got Love fooled now.”

“What makes you think I’ve got him fooled?”

“Hear people tell it, he’d hang the moon an’ stars off your ears if he could.”

“What people?” Pamela asked sharply, panic cutting a cold slice through her middle.

Emma gave her a speculative glance. “You’re scared of him, ain’t you, lady? Smart to be scared of Love.” There was a challenge of sorts in the woman’s eyes. “Maybe not just God an’ the FBI huh?” Emma said softly, “Why you doin’ it, lady, if you hate him so much you wanna’ destroy him?”

“I’d like to keep my husband alive. I don’t much care what it takes to do that.”

“Oh Jesus, the feds got you on a string don’t they?” Emma’s face had gone from gray to ash, “You be careful, lady, you are in the middle of one big shitstorm you don’t know the first thing about. They’ll promise you anything to get what they want. You wired up now?” There was real fear in the woman’s face for the first time.

“No, they don’t know I’m here either. I’ve got the day off, so to speak.”

Emma laughed, but there was nothing humorous about it. “Well they don’t look like your average pimp but I guess they got some real motivatin’ forces on their side. They tell you they can keep your man safe?”

Pamela nodded.

“You must love him an awful lot, takin’ a chance like this?” Emma said, voice slightly wistful.

“More than anything,” Pamela replied honestly.

“I think that’s where Love underestimated the both of you. That you got something real. He don’t know what that looks like.”

“Did you ever love him?”

The thin fingers were flicking at the hair around her ear again. “I was only eighteen the first time he took me to bed, he was thirty-three, he had this kind of glamor—like a movie star or somethin’, y’know? I never had a prayer.”

“I’m hardly in a position to find fault,” Pamela said quietly.

Emma nodded, lashes flicking down to the tabletop. “He’s in love with you.”

“I know,” she replied, “but I never wanted him to be.”

“Gives you a lotta’ power, lady, I don’t think he ever even loved his wife. Gives you somethin’ on him ain’t nobody else ever had.”

“Never, Emma? Didn’t he love you?”

The amber eyes met her own once more. “No, I loved him, but he didn’t never love me. I know that now.”

“How?” Pamela asked, an icy shiver travelling along her spine.

Emma ran a hand under her nose, eyes suddenly bright with tears. “’Cause I seen his face when he talks about you.”

“Does he still come here, Emma?”

Emma blinked, tears replaced with wariness. “No, not much these days. It’s how I knew, see, that he had someone else, ‘cause before he’d talk about you but I knew he couldn’t have you, ‘cause he kept comin’ here to get laid. Round three months ago he stops comin’ here at night, an’ I knew he’d got what he wanted. Three months sound about right?”