The Snake Tattoo (9 page)

The good news: I nabbed one of Gloria's best cabs. When I flicked on the engine, warm air poured out of the heating vents.

The bad news: I waited two hours for the cab, so it was well past one in the morning with no sight or sound of Janine, the hooker, or Valerie, the runaway.

Mrs. Haslam hadn't called me off, so I assumed the girl was still missing. On the other hand, Mr. Haslam hadn't given me a buzz either. Probably Mrs. H. had tossed my phone number in the wastebasket as soon as I'd hung up.

I was parked near the same Combat Zone alley, my home away from home. Gangs of tough young Orientals patrolled the street corners, speaking words I couldn't understand. White-clad Danish sailors passed by—boyish, cold, and eager. One pounded on the hood of my cab. The sudden noise startled me, but he was just making a point to two gents sharing a bottle in a brown paper bag. Over on Washington Street, cars honked and gunned their motors. A saxophone player practiced the same mistakes, over and over. I didn't know the song.

I hadn't really minded waiting for the cab. Leroy, Gloria's baby brother, had been visiting. Gloria has these three brothers, each bigger and meaner than the last, all protective as hell of their sister. Leroy's my favorite. The youngest and smallest, rumor says he got kicked out of the NFL for biting some guy's ear off.

Leroy blows a mean blues harmonica, and Gloria owns an old guitar she never plays—an Epiphone that won't stay in tune more than a minute at a time. So Leroy and I left Gloria to juggle the phones, adjourned to her high-tech room-and-bath behind the garage, and jammed till my fingers bled. The action on that Epiphone is brutal.

I took off my gloves and explored the tips of my left-hand fingers with my thumb. My calluses aren't what they used to be.

I half hoped Sam Gianelli would drop by the garage. He hadn't, which was probably a good thing. I have mixed—very mixed—feelings about Sam.

Sam Gianelli owns half of Green & White Cab. We have history—the ancient kind from before I got married, back when I was just a kid hacking part time, and dumb enough to sleep with the boss.

We tried again six months ago. It didn't work out. For a lot of reasons.

That old Willie Brown blues ran through my mind again:

Can't tell my future, Lord, I can't tell my past.

Maybe the line was really “Can't tell my future, Lord,
if
I can't tell my past.” I'd have to see if I could find it on a record. It's hard to understand the lyrics on some of those old-time recordings.

Sam is six-three and well-built, with a bony face and a stubborn jaw. My spine aches when he walks into a room.

If I'm physically attracted to a guy, if I breathe a little faster when he's near, it's practically a disaster warning. When that red flag goes up, I know I ought to run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Reverse chemistry, I call it. Whatever it is, I've got it with Sam.

He's the absentee partner in G&W. Gloria's the other half, and a more unlikely partner for gorgeous Sam Gianelli you'd need to scour the city to find. Gloria is a self-proclaimed “three-fer” who swears she's going to run for City Council some day and get elected so all the white males can say they've got a black, a woman, and a handicapped person on the job.

She'd get the overweight vote, too.

Gloria is not overweight through any metabolic trick. She's fat because she eats nonstop, junk food only. She's the world Tootsie Roll-eating champion, and she's gaining on the record for most Hostess Cupcakes consumed in a single day. Why she seems as cheerful as she does is a mystery to me. If I'd been paralyzed from the waist down in a car crash at nineteen, I'd be damn bitter. Maybe Gloria was, too, for a while, but now you can't even think about self-pity and Gloria at the same time. Maybe she takes it out in eating. I don't know.

Gloria is the queen bee of G&W. She rules the roost, which fronts on the less-than-scenic Mass. Pike in Allston, nestled in the middle of a row of cut-rate auto-glass replacement shops and used rug stores.

G&W's heartbeat issues from an ugly rectangular cell whose most attractive item of decor is a pegboard dangling with keys. It makes Geoff Reardon's office at the Emerson look like a
Better Homes and Gardens
spread. The floor is wavy linoleum, curled at one edge. The walls are army-surplus-green cinder block. A calendar, the gift of some defunct insurance company, livens up one wall. The matchstick blinds are broken. The file cabinets are gray and dented. Light is provided by unshaded hanging bulbs.

I don't go to Green & White for the atmosphere. I go to work, or I go to visit Gloria.

She has the world's most spectacular voice—mellow, rich, and deep, like a gospel singer's. I didn't meet her until long after I'd heard her belt out names and addresses over my cab radio. Green & White gets a lot of business from men who just want to hear that voice say she'll pick 'em up in five minutes.

A light flickered on in the building I was watching. I counted windows. It was one apartment over from Renney the pimp's place. No luck.

After Leroy had to leave for his club bouncer job, I flopped in Gloria's orange plastic guest chair, after checking it for roaches. I always catch little streaks of movement in that place. Small mice or big roaches, I'm not sure which. They banquet on the crumbs from Gloria's Twinkies.

“What do you hear, Glory?” I'd asked.

“Nothing,” she'd said, feeling real conversational. She took a couple calls, moving cabs around the city. She can do five things at once, punch buttons on the phone console, relay addresses, play solitaire, eat Milky Ways. I spent some time admiring her outfit, which looked like a purple pup tent, to tell the truth.

“You working?” she'd asked after a while.

“Two cases,” I'd replied.

“Who-ee,” she'd said. “Money pourin' in.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna have to hire a Brink's truck.” I didn't feel like telling her one of my clients was under age and the other was a freebie.

“You seein' that cop?” she'd asked.

“Mooney?” I'd answered cautiously. “Sometimes. Why?”

“You and he, uh, you dating or what?”

Dating is such a quaint word. “Nope,” I'd said. I think Gloria likes to keep tabs on my love life, because of Sam. Maybe she reports to him.

“I hear he's gonna testify.”

“Testify?” I'd repeated.

“At those hearings. You know,” she'd said.

“What hearings?”

“Cops earning overtime for no-shows. Goosin' the bars that aren't connected. Givin' zero protection and takin' big bucks.”

My stomach had contracted. If Mooney was going to testify, he must be involved.

The light in the flat next to Renney's died. I put my gloves back on and sat on my hands to warm them up.

My dad was a cop. Even now, hours after leaving Gloria, my stomach felt the way it used to when he and Mom had one of their roaring fights, way back before the divorce, when I was too small to remember much. I recalled one of their fighting words: “pad.” “Pad,” “on the pad,” and its variations were unerring advance signals of pitched battles with pots and jars and ugly words hurtling through the air. I'd sit on the porch with my hands over my ears till the storm passed. I didn't find out what the words meant for years.

By then my dad was dead. I couldn't ask him.

A red Chevy Camaro, the car most likely to be ticketed by a cop or boosted by a thief, passed within inches of my fender, flying low, and brought me back to the present. It left a contrail of blaring acid rock.

I consulted Valerie's expressionless eyes. Was that her kind of music?

Fourteen and a half years old. I tried to remember fourteen, more than half a life ago. The quality of time had been so different. Everything, every single tiny want or need, had been urgent, immediate, absolutely wonderful, devastatingly awful. What would have made the fourteen-year-old me run from the Emerson School?

My mind balked. I couldn't picture myself there. What would make a kid from the suburbs run to the Zone? Had she run here? If not, why the hell had Jerry Toland followed? Why hadn't he reported his stolen wallet? Maybe he'd given it to Valerie. Maybe she'd lifted it while they argued.

I shifted position and started the engine, grateful for the rush of hot air. I decided to switch focus, forget Renney's place for the night, search for Valerie instead of Janine. Every cop in the city was probably keeping an eye out for bleached-blonde prostitutes, trying to get Mooney off the hook. As far as I knew, I was the only one looking for Valerie.

Maybe, said a small voice in my mind, if I keep a watchful eye on Valerie, someone will do the same for Paolina. I don't believe things balanced out that way, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

I cruised the boundaries of the Zone, then crisscrossed the neon streets. I wondered how long it would take before the adult entertainment zone disappeared for good, what with Chinatown gaining on one side and New England Medical Center nibbling the other flank.

As soon as I stopped looking for Janine, I saw her.

She was moving toward a car. A man was with her. I couldn't see his face. He had an arm around her shoulder, squeezing hard. Hell, I couldn't see Janine that well, either. It just looked like her, from the staggering high-heeled walk to the tilt of her blonde head.

They got into a gray Chevy Caprice sedan, a driver already behind the wheel. The guy held the passenger door and waited while Janine scooted to the middle of the front seat. Then he shoved in beside her. He was heavyset, dark.

I was following the car before I remembered I was going to find Valerie first.

CHAPTER 10

The Chevy squealed away from the curb. In the front seat, Janine's frizzy blonde hair was sandwiched between a ducktail and a conservative banker-cut. The driver had narrow shoulders compared to the burly guy on the passenger side. I figured we were off for a quick romp to a nearby hotel.

We followed Washington Street to the turnpike access road, but instead of getting on the ramp to the Pike, the Caprice zigzagged onto Columbus Avenue and I started to worry.

Now I like tail jobs, but one-on-ones are tough. Darkness gave me the advantage. Taillights are individualistic. The Caprice had two rectangular panels, each made up of six red glass plates, three on top and three below. They worked in tandem, two plates to a set. The outside pairs blinked as turn signals. The inside and outside pairs of each set lit up when the driver hit the brakes. Either the left turn signal was broken or the man behind the wheel didn't believe in signaling lefts.

Most headlights look the same. With my rooflights off, I was just another set of round eyes in his rearview mirror. I kept well back, two hundred, three hundred yards.

When I drive I like music. Gloria's cabs, even the new ones, have dime-store radios, so I carry a mini-boombox that fits nicely on the passenger seat. I punched on my local blues station, came in on the tail end of an old Bonnie Raitt cut, and sang along, cruising easily behind the Chevy. I even cracked the front window, hoping for a breath of spring.

Columbus Avenue is not the place to smell spring. It's a place to lock your doors. I'm pretty comfortable just about anywhere in Boston, thanks to the anonymity of cab jockeys, but I'd have preferred a route that didn't take in the highlights of Roxbury. Don't get me wrong; I wasn't about to call off the chase. There's nothing like surveiliance to make you eager for action. I mean, I didn't want to drive deep into Roxbury, but I had no desire to hang around the Zone looking for Janine forever either. I wanted to track her down now, get this business over with, and start work on finding Valerie, the high-school runaway.

I'm a good driver. I can leave my cab on automatic pilot while I puzzle things out. I wondered about Elsie's “Ask Jerry why she left” remark. Had Jerry driven Valerie away, then hired me to soothe his guilt? Would Valerie run from a rough pass? How shy was she? How grown up? I've seen girls sell their bodies at eleven and brides blush at twenty-eight, so you can't tell. On the dashboard, Valerie's photo, dark and uncommunicative, stood out against the fake grained wood. Between pothole lurches, I grabbed it and tucked it into my purse.

Columbus Avenue doesn't get much in the way of maintenance. Some say that's because Boston is a racist city and nobody cares what happens in the black areas. I suspect it's true. I mean, the Red Sox used to have one black player. They'd get two, they'd trade the old one. Slow white boys were their specialty.

The Sox are getting better, but the Celtics are still one of the palest teams in the NBA.

I composed a blistering mental letter to the Department of Public Works, accusing them of racism in pothole repair. I was glad I wasn't driving a small foreign car. In the dark I couldn't keep an eye on the Chevy and watch for craters at the same time. I hit one the size of a canyon and cracked my skull on the padded roof. I didn't hear any hubcaps fall off, for which I was grateful. Thank God, the guys ahead of me weren't speeding.

If anything, they were driving a little too lawfully for two gents with a hooker between them. No weaving, no sign of the one-handed wheeling required for groping a thigh or hoisting a beer. I wondered if they'd spotted me, but they didn't speed up or turn. I dropped back, took a place in line behind a Pontiac Turbo. But I kept my eyes on that Chevy's tail.

They turned into Franklin Park. I cursed, but followed. Franklin Park was once a well-tended gem in Boston's chain of Emerald Necklace parks. When the whites left the area the money went with them, and the golf course went to hell and so did the zoo. They keep talking about revivals and kite festivals and bringing the park back, but all the cash that goes into the zoo seems to disappear into some construction company's pockets, and the golf course clubhouse has been a burnt-out shell for years.