Hardware
Authors: Linda Barnes
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Hardware
A Carlotta Carlyle Mystery
Linda Barnes
BlackNet is in the business of buying, selling, trading, and otherwise dealing with
information
in all its many forms.
Our location in physical space is unimportant. Our location in cyberspace is all that matters. Our primary address is the PGP key location: “BlackNet
BlackNet is nominally nonideological, but considers nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations, and the like to be relics of the pre-cyberspace era.
âIntroduction to BlackNet
Downloaded from the Internet
Tue Feb 15 12:38:44 1994
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
â“Gerontion”
T. S. Eliot, 1917
ONE
Drey kenen haltn a sod as tsvey zaynen meysim
, my grandmother used to say. Translated from the Yiddish: “Three can keep a secret if two of them are corpses.” I'm tempted to print it on my business cards.
Every going concern needs a catchy slogan.
The catch here is “going concern.” I'm a private investigator. If people kept their secrets to themselves, I'd be out of a job.
If
I
had a secret, the Green & White Cab Company is definitely not the place I'd choose to dump it. Too many shell-like ears, too many clackety-clack tongues. One thing about cabbies, they talk. Especially after working the graveyard shift.
It's something about night driving; it revs, wires, gives me a rush. By morning I have tales to tell, of weird traffic and wacko fares.
Bars are locked tight at 7
A.M
., so I wind up at G&W with the rest of the graveyard jocks, swilling coffee, listening to bad jokes, bitching about meager tips. All of us on a talking-jag high. Maybe a survival high.
It's a fact: More cabbies than cops get killed in the line of duty.
When I first started driving for G&W, working my way through college, Gloria, dispatcher and co-owner, described her drivers as the Geezers and the Wheezers. To put it bluntly, they were old, the last of the Irish-American career cabbies and proud of it. Held no truck with these new immigrants who could hardly speak the mother tongue, God love 'em.
Four Geezers had a poker game going in a dark corner,
all the better to cheat you in, my dear
.
“Make any dough?” Fred Fergus called in a quavery tenor. “Glad to take it off ya, darlin'.”
“You can deal your dirty seconds to somebody else,” I said with a grin. Only one of the bunch still cabbed. The others seemed to have taken up residence, smoking and choking, enjoying the clubhouse ambiance.
A guy I knew only as Bear, a diminutive soul with an outsize nickname, was giggling and whispering at a pimply youth, outlining obscene curves with both hands. I'd heard his routine before: Sports and tits, sports and tits, sports and tits. Endless variations on a theme.
Beneath a bare lightbulb, a skinny, underemployed Ph.D. named Jerome Fleckman was earnestly discussing free-market economics and the Marxist social dialectic with “Not My Fault” Ralph. Ralph, in tummy-bulging T-shirt and tight pants, had a miles-away expression on his face. Jerry might as well have been chatting with his refrigerator.
“Looking for Sam?” he asked as soon as he saw me.
Green & White's other proprietor, Sam Gianelli, is also my on-again, off-again lover. In many ways he marks a turning point in my life. If he hadn't dumped me to marry “a suitable girl,” who knows? I might never have married Cal on the rebound, never have become a cop. I might be a Mafia wife, instead of a divorcee currently sleeping with her first flame, a man as divorced as a Catholic can get, short of annulment.
Everybody asks about Sam. It's irritating, near-strangers knowing my love life.
I said, “You want to grab Ralph's attention, Jer, ask him how he feels about cab leases.”
Ralph began whining his signature tune. “Not my fault,” he declared.
“Sweatshops on wheels,” Jerry said dismissively. Then he got a panicky look in his eyes. “Sam's not planning to switch to leases, is he?”
Anything bad happens at the garage, Sam's behind it. Anything good, it's Saint Gloria.
I could see her behind the phone console, waving a meaty, beckoning arm. The dispatch area has few distractionsâa rusty desk, a few cast-off plastic chairs, the kind you might find in a welfare office or an unsuccessful dentist's waiting room. A wheelchair-bound three-hundred-pound black woman wearing a scarlet dress stuck out.
“Relax,” I said to Fleckman. “No leases as far as I know.”
“Don't drive another shift,” he counseled. “You're tired. Bosses, man, they suck your blood.”
I find it hard to regard Gloria as a bloodsucking boss.
“Glad to see you, babe,” she said, waving a Hostess Twinkie under my nose. “Want to eat?”
Twinkies don't do it for me. I found a lone doughnut in a wrinkled sack.
“This spoken for?”
“Help yourself. Hardly stale.”
The phones lit up. She murmured, “Stick around.”
I plunked myself into a chair molded to someone else's contours, rose immediately, and ruefully rubbed my backside. Light filtered through the front window. I walked over and lifted the corner of a broken Venetian blind. Its slats were thick with dust.
G&W, where I moonlight to afford such luxuries as Fancy Feast cat food and quarterly tax payments, is wedged behind Cambridge Street on an ugly commercial strip in Boston's Allston-Brighton area. Neither Allston nor Brighton is eager to claim it. Understandably so: the exhaust fumes from the nearby Mass. Pike are less than a draw. A huge rug store dominates a nearby corner. There's a food co-op, a cleaning plant, another rug wholesaler, and a restaurant that advertises itself as the pinnacle of casual dining, which means they keep a squadron of large-screen TVs blaring all hours of the day and night.
“Green and White,” Gloria sang over the line. “Where are you now, and where do you wanna go?” She has one of the world's great voices, a deep Gospel-touched melody that speaks to my Motown roots.
I consider G&W an endearing eyesore, a semi-remodeled warehouse resembling a vandalized Taco Bell. Gloria insists the stucco started out white, but turned grit-gray so quickly there was no point swimming against the tide. Busted wooden garage doorsâno excuse from Gloria, just a fact of lifeâadd to the general air of dilapidation.
“You think I'm losing weight?” Gloria, off the phone, smoothed the red tent over her massive contours. “You seen Sam lately?”
“No,” I said, “and no. In that order.”
Gloria sighed. “Diet place my brothers signed me up for this time does packaged meals. Frozen gunk-in-a-box. Supposed to be healthy.”
“Huh?” I said, gazing out the window, wondering if the glass was frosted or filthy.
Gloria ordered a Green & White to 700 Comm. Ave. “Careful 'bout those B.U. kids racing across the street,” she admonished the driver. “Dummies run smack into traffic.”
“I'm talking diet here,” she said to me, sticking the handset back in the cradle. “Healthy food.”
Gloria's brothers are concerned about her weight. Someone ought to be.
Gloria works full-time and three quarters. She lives in the back room. A hard worker before the auto accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down at nineteen, a hard worker she remains.
She used her insurance settlement to buy into Sam Gianelli's latest failing business venture. Together they form an unlikely teamâAfrican American and Italian, street-raised and Mafia bredâand run one of the few successful small cab companies in town. Dispatching is Gloria's vocation, but by preference and inclination she is an information trader, and what she doesn't know about city politics and the cab scene in particular is not worth knowing. Sam handles the money side. He rarely hangs out at the garage.
Gloria doesn't miss the company; she substitutes food. Bags of Cheetos, boxes of Mallomars. Cold Pop-Tarts. Nothing remotely nutritious crosses her lips. Junk food is her chosen comfort and solace.
“You mentioned Sam,” I said, dropping the blind back into place. “Do
you
know where he is?”
“Nope,” Gloria said cagily.
“You eat the diet stuff?” I asked. On her desk, within gobbling distance, an enormous jar of Bacon Bits dwarfed a box of double-cream-filled Oreos and a can of ready-made Betty Crocker chocolate frosting. As I watched, spellbound, she dipped an unresisting Oreo into the frosting, coating it liberally.
“Can hardly choke it down,” she said, admiring her creation before engulfing it in a single bite.
“You eat
it
âand
only
itâyou ought to lose something,” I ventured.
“I'm losing patience is what. Eating cardboard lasagna's bad enough, but I won't listen to another âmotivational' tape, and if I have to go to one more crappy seminar, I'm gonna call the Better Business Bureau, close 'em the hell down. These folks have probably killed half a dozen people. You should taste what they call tuna casserole. Bean sprouts in it.”
“You don't follow the diet, you don't listen to the tapes, you don't go to the seminars, why are your brothers doing this?”
“Makes 'em feel useful.”
Another Oreo smeared with Betty Crocker's best went down the hatch.
“I bring Tootsie Rolls to class, chew 'em in front of the other fat folks. Counselor's gonna toss me out, give the boys their money back.”