Coyote (7 page)

The last comment was addressed to Mooney, but I tagged along.

The front room was ugly enough, mottled paint, a sprung beige sofa, two narrow cots, and one wall containing something an optimistic landlord might describe as a kitchenette if a two-by-four refrigerator, a hot plate, and a cupboard qualified as a kitchenette.

The back room was worse, much worse. Someone had painted it dull green thirty years ago. A wooden cross bearing an elongated, suffering Jesus was tacked to the back wall. There was barely space for three more narrow cots and a metal rod on wheels that made do for a closet. Two white shirts and two pairs of tan chinos hung crookedly on the rod. The odor of unwashed bedclothes filled the air. That, and something else.

One look, one smell, and Mooney sent the uniform out to fetch a warrant and notify a crime-lab unit One unmade cot was blood-soaked, rusty in the dim light. Blood had splashed the other two cots, the wall, the cross. An old black dial phone rested on a rumpled pillow, its receiver dangling.

“Don't touch anything,” Mooney said sharply.

I gave him a faintly disgusted look. My hands were already in my pockets. They'd made the journey automatically.

“If she'd lost her hands here, the ring might be a plant,” I said, just to be saying something. The words came out funny.

“Don't get your hopes up,” Mooney said. “Especially if you recognized the voice on the phone …”

“I think so, I'm not sure.”

“You didn't erase the tape?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Think there's enough blood for him to have sawed her hands off here?” I asked.

“How the hell would I know? Depends on whether she was dead or not, how much she'd bleed, I guess.”

All the time we were talking, we were looking, the way cops look at crime scenes, mentally tagging the evidence, asking the questions they'll ask the medical examiner, wondering about fingerprints on the phone, hairs on the pillowcase.

I shivered. “She must have been alone when she called,” I said.

“Or somebody might have been holding a knife to her throat,” Mooney muttered. Then he seemed to see me for the first time. “You shouldn't be here when the squad arrives,” he said.

“I'm a witness,” I said.

“To a phone call,” he said. “That's all. And maybe you shouldn't get any more involved.”

“Involved,” I repeated. “She called me for help.”

“Look, the INS guy told me this business has nothing to do with stuff here. It's leftovers from Central America. Hit squads. Death squads.”

“Mooney,” I protested, “I wouldn't believe anything that guy said.”

“I don't know what the hell we've got by the tail here,” he said sharply, “but I know I don't like it. And I don't like you in the middle of it.”

“And there's nothing you can do about it, Mooney,” I said evenly, “because here I am. And if I were you, I'd be a hell of a lot more interested in the whereabouts of A. Gaitan than any Salvadoran hit squad.”

Mooney opened his mouth to argue. He can't help it. He's Boston Irish, born and bred, and instinct tells him to get the women and children to shelter. He opened his mouth, glared at me, and silently closed his mouth again. Bless him for that.

10

I couldn't sleep when I got home. Big surprise. Roz and Lemon had given up on me and retired for the night, or so the blackness of the third-floor windows seemed to indicate.

No further messages on the machine. I rewound the tape and listened to Manuela's plea, trying to match tone and timbre to the voice I'd heard in my office. I played it again. And again. When I caught myself nodding off, I removed the cassette and slipped it into my handbag.

Upstairs I got ready for bed, splashing noisily in the bathroom sink, humming to crack the silence, undressing and donning one of the men's V-necked T-shirts I prefer as nightwear because they're cheap and comfy with no lacy things that itch. I put on my red chenille bathrobe to ward off a chill that was mainly interior, sat cross-legged on the floor, and yanked the hardshell guitar case out from under the bed.

I used to worry about insomnia, but nobody ever died from it that I know. The best cure I've come up with is my old National steel guitar.

Me and the devil, we're walking hand in hand.

Me and the devil, we're walking hand in hand.

I couldn't remember who wrote it, but I was trying to play it the way Rory Block does, with a thumping bass line, making the guitar moan and talk. I can't match Block's voice. She's got too wide a range for me, able to make those low-down groans and then hit those high, wailing shouts. But if I keep in practice, which I try to do, I can damn near imitate her playing. I even bought her instructional tape, because some of her weird tunings and hammerings had me totally frustrated, and I work at it hard.

I have perfect pitch. That and a dollar fifty will get you coffee and a doughnut.

Bury my body down by the highway sign.

Bury my body down by the highway sign.

No cheerful stuff tonight.

Usually my eyelids give out before my fingers, but I didn't even try sleep until long after my calluses started to ache. By the time I stretched out on the bed it was almost dawn, and visions of that bloody bed kept yanking me back from the edge of unconsciousness. The alarm clock buzzed way before I was ready for it.

I'd set the alarm for Friday morning volleyball, forgetting that the tournament schedule had effectively canceled it. By the time I quit functioning on automatic pilot, I was at the Central Square Y, feeling fuzzy and disoriented. There weren't enough players for a pickup game, so I ran the track and tacked an extra twenty pool laps to my regular twenty. The pictures in my mind were still ugly. I kept seeing the crucifix on the wall over the stained cot, wondering if it was the last thing Manuela had seen, wondering if it had been any comfort to her.

I dressed and went across the street to Dunkin' Donuts, weaving to avoid the Mass. Ave. traffic, ordered coffee and two honey-dipped as usual, sat at the orange Formica counter, and reviewed Mooney's moves of the night before.

Letter-perfect. Except for letting me stick around.

He'd talked to every tenant in the building. He'd rousted the owner out of bed as soon as he found out where the rent checks were sent. There was no superintendent in the building. Three buildings, all owned by the same company, shared a super who lived in the basement at 23 Westland. Mr. Perez had been summoned and questioned. He'd rented the basement flat five months ago to a woman named Aurelia Gaitan. She'd paid two months in advance, two months' deposit, and that was the last he'd seen of her. Must have sent in her rent checks or he'd have heard about that, all right. Mr. Canfield, the landlord, didn't put up with any deadbeats, no way, no how. Hispanic lady, yeah. Short, dark. That was all he recalled. Legal, illegal, he didn't know and he didn't care. People had to live someplace, and thank God he'd had somewhere to live before he'd finally gotten his green card, and he was going to be a citizen in maybe three years, and then the police wouldn't wake him in the middle of the night, no, by the Holy Mother, they wouldn't. He'd have some rights then.

And no, he didn't have any idea that more than one woman might have lived in the basement. All these cots, somebody must have moved them in at night while he was sleeping. He had to sleep sometime, didn't he? It was a free country, wasn't it?

He was a short, swarthy, barrel-chested man with a lot of bravado and a bald head. I could tell some of the cops liked Perez as a suspect on the spot. He had an accent and he smelled of liquor and tobacco. But Mooney hadn't been able to shake him, and there was no way to say if he was lying or telling the truth about the woman named Aurelia Gaitan, whether she was my Manuela or not. They had the green card sent over from headquarters, but the super just shrugged when he saw it, saying he sure couldn't tell from a photo the size of a postage stamp whether the two women were the same and what the hell was all the fuss, anyway, and maybe if he were a citizen, he'd call a lawyer or something.

The landlord, Harold Canfield, showed up in a chocolate Mercedes with a lawyer in tow. Aside from the fancy car and the legal help, he didn't fit my image of a landlord. Tall and skinny, with darting eyes and too-short sleeves on his brown suit, he looked like a man who never ate a decent meal. Too much nervous energy for that; he'd just grab a bite standing at the counter the way I sometimes do.

His voice was surprisingly deep and calm. He used it to say that he hadn't a clue as to who was leasing his apartments. All he cared about was getting the rent on time. It was odd, maybe, that the Gaitan woman sent cash in an envelope instead of a check like most of the other tenants, but cash was still legal, wasn't it? And you know how some of these foreigners are, don't hold with banks.

None of the tenants except Lawrence Barnaby admitted seeing anybody associated with the basement flat, and he only said he saw a “Spanish girl” in the hall occasionally. He hadn't even exchanged hellos with her. Maybe he'd seen more than one woman, he wasn't sure. He hadn't paid much attention. Nobody knew anything about the basement flat. Nobody had any idea how many people lived there. Urban isolation.

The index fingerprint on Manuela's green card ought to be some help. The crime lab might be able to tell if she'd been in the apartment.

Of course, there was no finger to match the print to.

I shuddered and spilled a little coffee, wiped it up with a paper napkin.

Scrubbing at the stupid counter top, I realized I wasn't shuddering at the handlessness of the corpse. I've seen worse things than that. You don't stay a cop for six years in Boston without viewing some sights you'd rather not see. What was giving me the shakes was the suspicion, deeply buried in my mind, that I'd pointed the killer at Manuela.

I kept remembering that car, the white Dodge Aries, following me. I'd been so sure it was an INS car, I hadn't even tried to get the plate number. And I'd been so open in my questioning, talking to lawyers, asking for Manuela at the sanctuary church, at the Cambridge Legal Collective.

What if somebody at one of those places had known Manuela, realized I was on her trail, and eliminated her before I could find her? Poor Manuela. Or Aurelia. Or whatever her name really was. The dead woman. The corpse.
La mujer muerta
.

Or worse, what if I'd been home when the phone rang?
I know you will help me
.

I swallowed my last doughnut without tasting it and headed for the car.

11

The Cambridge Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, the one that offered sanctuary to illegal aliens, was a whitewashed clapboard cube with a steeple set back twenty feet from Massachusetts Avenue. I had more difficulty parking than getting to talk to somebody in authority. Yesterday I'd been treated with suspicion. Today the handful of people busily stuffing envelopes with church newsletters reacted as if I were a leper. They'd evidently read their morning papers.

While I waited, I studied the walls. A poster advertised a Walk for World Peace beginning on Boston Common. Another begged for volunteers to solicit funds by phone. Three quarters of the signs were in Spanish. I picked up a copy of a handout newspaper, the
Central American Reporter
, the monthly outlet of CASA, the Central America Solidarity Association.
BETWEEN WOMEN THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES
was the headline on the front page. I read an article on a women's peace convoy to Central America. One of the women in the convoy had met with Pancho Villa's granddaughter.

“Follow me, please,” a cold voice said. “Father Emmons will see you.”

I was ushered into his office by one of the starch-faced women who'd given me the brush-off yesterday. She handed my card to a man seated at an oak desk and gave me a withering look. I assumed it was meant to reek of pity or piety, but I wasn't sure which.

The minister pushed aside a stack of papers he appeared to be sorting into three unequal piles, stared at my card for a while, and, by means of a curt nod, invited me to sit across from his desk in a straight-backed chair. He was a stoop-shouldered man of over fifty with graying hair, graying skin, and a thin, sharp nose. His eyes were pale watery blue. They reflected the gray of his suit and fit into the overall monochrome. A pot of red geraniums on the corner of the desk seemed positively flamboyant.

“So you're the one,” he said very quietly, almost as if he were conducting a conversation with himself.

I intruded. “The one what?” I asked.

“They gossip.” He made a vague gesture that included everyone from his immediate staff to the world in general. He didn't seem to know where to put my card, whether to return it to me or to file it in one of the piles on his desk. “I tell them that gossip can hurt the people we work with, harm them beyond measure, but they gossip nonetheless, and your visit here was, uh, a topic of conversation even before they read about the poor woman's death, about which I'm somewhat confused, since she seems to have died twice in the newspapers.”

“They misidentified an earlier corpse,” I said tersely, not wanting to explain further, although his watery eyes invited confidences. The rest of his face was curiously immobile; only the eyes seemed really alive.

He made a rumble deep in his throat, coughed into a white handkerchief, and continued his conversation with himself. “They do gossip, I'm afraid. This has made quite a sensation. And now, of course …” His voice faded.

“What?” I asked. “Do they have me pegged as the leader of some right-wing hit squad? Reverend, I assure you—”

“You have no reason to assure me of anything,” he said gently. “I'm not accusing you.” He glanced up at me suddenly, and his eyes no longer seemed vague. “Why did you come here?”