Coyote (5 page)

I just sat there.

“So aren't you going to ask me why I'm not in school?” she said angrily, throwing a pair of mismatched socks on the floor.

“You want to tell me?” I asked, feeling my way on unfamiliar ground.

“It doesn't make any difference,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Huh?”

“Telling me doesn't make any difference, or going to school doesn't make any difference?”

“Nothing makes any difference, that's all,” she said, and she turned her face away so I could study her profile and think about how much older she looked than the girl I'd first met, the one not quite seven years old, with the hand-shaped bruise across her cheek.

“I'm sorry you had to stay in Bogotá so long,” I said. “It must have been tough, missing the first days of school. They probably assigned seats and everything, and you're not near your friends—”

“Kids are dumb,” she said.

“Did something happen in Bogotá?” I asked.

“
Nada
,” she said. “
Nada especial
.”

“But you'd rather stay here than go to school? Is it a teacher?”

“You don't understand,” she said, and her sad voice echoed in the tiny room. I could hear myself, age ten, saying the same thing to my mom:
You don't understand. You don't understand
.

“Honey,” I said, “I try, but I can't read your mind. You have to tell me.”

“Didn't you talk to Marta about me?” she asked bitterly.

Usually she calls Marta Mom.

“Should I?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did anything happen to you in Bogotá?”

“Is not telling the truth the same as telling a lie?” she countered.

“Sometimes I suppose it would be, and sometimes not. It would depend on the situation, I guess.”

“Oh,” she said, turning away from me again and staring out the dirty window.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't think so.”

Great, I thought. No evidence of drugs in the room. Just a kid who used to be open as a sunflower closed as a fist.

“If you didn't come to make me go to school, then why did you come?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “to find out if you or your mom knows a woman named Manuela—”

The door opened and a torrent of Spanish burst out of Marta, so quick that I didn't have a chance to translate half of it. But I got enough. Paolina was not to talk about things that didn't concern her.

She was grounded. She could go to school or she could go nowhere. Maybe it wouldn't be a good thing for her to see me on Saturday.

“Marta,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm with an effort, “I need to ask her about this woman, Manuela Estefan. It's a simple question. Maybe it's a teacher at school, somebody she knows.”

“Tell her,” Marta commanded.

“I don't know anybody like that,” Paolina said sullenly. “What's the big deal?”

I apologized for upsetting everybody and left, with none of my questions answered and plenty more bothering me than when I first came in.

6

At seven o'clock that night, fed up with my failure to find a trace of my client, I decided to do something practical: earn a few bucks. Manuela's five hundred would not last forever, and I find I can always use cash, to buy cat food and size-eleven shoes—which are practically impossible to find on sale—not to mention paying the taxes on my old Victorian.

The house is mine, absolutely. Aunt Bea paid off the thirty-year mortgage eight months before she died. The only hitch is that the place is so close to Harvard Square, in such a desirable neighborhood, that property values shot through the roof. I pay so much in taxes that it might as well be rent. High rent. I think of it that way and stick it in the bank monthly so I won't die of shock when the twice-yearly bills come through.

I prefer to earn the rent as a private detective, but I still moonlight as a jockey for Green & White Cab Company. I've been doing it for years, ever since I started college. It suits me a whole lot better than waitressing. I like to drive—it's something you can do while listening to music—and I know the city. Mooney chides me about hacking, says it's dangerous for a woman, as if it weren't dangerous for a man, and as if my cop experience counted about as much as holding down a desk job with the phone company.

When I was a cop, I got to carry a gun. Cabdrivers are forbidden to carry firearms, but I have yet to meet one who doesn't keep a chunk of lead pipe under the driver's seat.

I've got mine.

Before heading over to G&W, I reviewed my day. After striking out with Marta and Paolina, I'd visited a Cambridge church that provided sanctuary for illegal aliens. Either they'd never heard of Manuela—the one who'd made the paper posthumously or the one who'd visited my office—or they weren't about to say so to any investigator who spoke halting Spanish. Then I'd gotten thumbs-down from a couple of lawyer acquaintances who dealt with immigrants, although one said he'd spread the word that I was looking for the woman. He'd also recommended another place in Cambridge, a legal service agency that helped illegals. Their secretary treated me like an undercover INS agent, which pissed me off.

So I'd gone home to lick my wounds. I consider myself such an obviously trustworthy person that it irritates me when people don't take me at face value. I know that's dumb. Especially coming from an ex-cop who's always telling her little sister not to trust strangers. I guess I have trouble realizing I'm a stranger sometimes.

Hungry as usual, I'd made dinner out of leftovers, chili and Monterey Jack spiced with jalapeño peppers being the main ingredients. Put enough jalapeños in your food and you can't tell its actual age. I fed my cat, who is a far more refined eater than I am, his can of FancyFeast in his ritual spot on the kitchen floor. I even changed the water in Red Emma's cage.

Then I'd phoned in an ad, to both the
Globe
and the
Herald
, urgently requesting Manuela Estefan to get in touch with Carlotta Carlyle concerning her card. I decided to run both ads for two weeks: $12.95 at the
Globe
, $8.95 at the
Herald
, where they were having a special. Both of them let me charge it on my Visa.

I'd mailed a third bill to a woman whose runaway daughter I'd retrieved, printing “final notice” in red at the bottom of the page and wondering just what the hell I was going to do if she continued to ignore me. Repossess the daughter?

Roz, my third-floor tenant, housecleaner, and sometime assistant, was upstairs taking her karate lesson. I could tell by the thumps on the floor, and by Lemon's van, which was parked outside. Lemon, Roz's karate instructor, has some three-piece-suit banker's name, Whitfield Arthur Car-stairs III, I think, and doubles as a performance artist. They're occasional lovers, although Roz is not the monogamous type, and when their thumping grew more rhythmic, I decided to leave the house for a while.

It's not that I'm horny all the time. As Bonnie Raitt, one of my favorite blueswomen, sings, “I ain't blue, just a little bit lonely for some lovin'.” Still, I figured I'd rather drive a cab than listen to Roz's bliss. Roz puts a lot of volume into her love-making.

So I yanked a windbreaker over my jeans and T-shirt, and tried to break my speed record for the two-plus miles to G&W. I didn't crack it, but neither did I get caught by the cops.

Instead of picking up a set of car keys and taking off, my usual procedure, I decided to chat with Gloria, G&W's main asset, dispatcher, and co-owner. She sometimes sends me clients, and she just might have referred the lady who'd called herself Manuela.

Gloria motioned me toward her guest chair while she crooned murmuring reassurances into the phone. I sat down, balancing my boom box on my lap. I never like to put anything on the floor in that place. The concrete has the sticky quality of old movie-house floors after fifty years of spilled orange drink and ground-in popcorn.

I always bring a tape deck when I'm going out to pilot a cab. The radios Gloria's got in her old Fords can barely catch the AM top-forty stations, the ones that broadcast at twenty million kilowatts.

My eyes scanned the garage, carefully not lingering in any corners. G&W is ugly but reliable. Nobody ever tries to pretty it up with a poster here or a vase of flowers there. It's too drab to invite that kind of interference. A bright spot would make the rest of the blight unbearable. So, wisely, Gloria does nothing, and the most attractive item in the room remains a square of corkboard with keys hanging on it.

Not that Gloria could do a lot more than organize and order people around, the two things she does best. Gloria operates G&W out of a wheelchair.

“How you doin'?” she asked in her silky voice between phone calls and bites of Milky Way. Gloria eats nonstop and has the bulk to prove it. I have never seen anything nutritious pass her lips.

“One of your cabs is off the road every moment we speak,” I reminded her with a grin. “So tell me, you give out my business card to any Hispanic ladies lately?”

“Why? Your ears been tingling or what?”

“Simple question, simple answer, Gloria,” I said.

The phone rang, and her hand swooped down on it like a bird of prey. While she soothed an irate customer who'd been waiting two minutes longer than promised, I eyed her desktop.

There was an airmail envelope, addressed to Gloria in a familiar scrawl, lying in the center of the blotter. From Italy. I caught myself before my hand reached out and grabbed it. I glanced up, and Gloria was staring at me.

If I ever blushed, I would have. The letter was from Sam Gianelli, half-owner of G&W. Gloria likes to keep tabs on my love life, and I didn't want her to know how eagerly I awaited Sam's return. Hell, she'd probably tell him all about it.

“I ain't blue, just a little bit lonely …” I hoped I'd brought the right tape along. I could hear Raitt's high, fine voice singing in my head.

Gloria hung up, her mellow voice having done its work. “So,” she said, carefully not mentioning the envelope, “what Spanish lady? I got a few Spanish-speaking guys working here. I don't remember any of 'em needing a private eye.”

“Ever give one of them my card?”

Gloria took another bite of Milky Way. “Nope,” she said finally. “What's up? You got a paying job?”

I wouldn't have shaken free without a detailed cross-examination, except that the phones started going crazy. I grabbed some cab keys and left.

A Dodge Aries practically clipped my fender as I drove off the lot.

I ferried conventioneers from their Anthony's Pier Four dinners to their Westin and Marriott hotels, earning enough cash to keep me going at a modest clip for a week. Then I cruised Jamaica Plain, one of Boston's neighborhoods. J.P. has a high-density illegal population, both Irish and Hispanic, with a lot of landlords doing big business renting tiny two-bedroom apartments to ten or so aliens.

I stopped at an all-night grocery store, a mom-and-pop place with Spanish signs in the window. I thought I'd describe my Manuela to the proprietor, but without a picture or a great command of the language, the project seemed silly, so I just bought a can of Pepsi and left, smiling at the guy behind the counter.

A little after midnight that damn white Dodge Aries came by for the third time, parked up the street, and started tailing me. I toyed with him a little while, trying to lead him down one-way streets and into dead-end alleys, but whoever it was knew the city too well to let me backtrack and get behind him.

“INS,” I said to myself, turning up the volume on Rory Block's “Gypsy Boy” and helping her out with the scat-singing part. Jamieson, that goddamn INS agent, was trailing me, trying to get a line on Manuela Estefan.

I let him tail me into the North End. It took me two minutes to lose him in its winding maze.

7

By the time I got home—a little past two
A
.
M
.—it seemed like weeks had passed since Manuela Estefan's visit. Part of me felt I'd already earned her advance. Hell, I'd earned it just listening to that INS jerk at lunch, not to mention paying for the ads in the
Globe
and the
Herald
, not to mention the gas I'd used traveling to places where I'd earned nothing but
gringa
insults.

Five hundred bucks a day is what I charge my high-toned, Gucci-shoed lawyer clients. I don't have a lot of those. The rest pay on a sliding scale. I go by shoes a lot. I remembered Manuela's worn heels. Five hundred would buy her another day or two.

While making a sandwich—hard salami, Swiss cheese, and fairly suspicious turkey on rye—I checked the refrigerator door for messages. It's our communal bulletin board. Roz is in charge of keeping it neat and tidy, and it will soon qualify for federal disaster funds. She leaves hastily scrawled messages on crumpled scraps of paper under an assortment of magnets, ranging from the plain silver disks I originally bought to the beer cans, horses' asses, and Day-Glo hamburgers she prefers. There were two notes—one from Roz to Roz to buy more peanut butter, the other warning that T. C. was running low on liver and bacon, his preferred flavor of FancyFeast.

I've learned it's wise to cater to T. C.'s culinary whims.

I was down to the last bite of my sandwich before I noticed the flashing red light on the answering machine. I punched the buttons that ran the Panasonic through its paces. There was a message from Sam—still in Italy, dammit. He has a wonderfully deep voice even transcontinental phone connections can't screw up. He thought he'd be home in a week, maybe a week and a half. He was stuck in some hotel in Turin in a room with a huge canopied bed.

There was a beep signaling the end of his message and then a long enough pause that I thought the machine had gone into some kind of trance. I could hear breathing, shallow and fast.