The Snake Tattoo (3 page)

See, as soon as Mooney left, I raced upstairs to check on the plumbers. Big mistake.

Let me tell you about Twin Brothers Plumbing Company.

Twin Brothers is not run by twin brothers or any kind of brothers. One guy is black, one white; one short, one tall. Both dumb. George, possibly the dumber one, had hired me two months ago to investigate a rash of company thefts. He hadn't read about my finer qualities in the newspapers or been referred by my buddies on the Boston Police. He hadn't even seen my big red ad in the Yellow Pages. Roz sent him.

Roz, a punk-rock artist, dwells in the attic of my old Victorian house in two semifinished rooms that she's painted a charming matte black. Her living room has kitschy furniture and five television sets; her bedroom is totally decorated in tumbling mats. Roz does karate, extremely weird acrylics, and dyes her hair a new color every week. She also handles the housework. In exchange for the latter she gets a vastly reduced rent on a place within spitting distance of Harvard Square.

When Roz fixed me up with a client I should have smelled trouble.

Now I don't screen customers for smarts because, quite frankly, my clients are not so plentiful that I turn them away in droves. Two months ago I'd been truly pleased to see George at my door, eager to hear about his misting U-pipes, wrenches, and snakes.

I staked out Twin Brothers Plumbing for eleven frigid nights before George's teenage cousin decided to help himself to some copper pipes. I'd intended to just take pictures, but the kid was slight, shorter than I am, and didn't look spunky enough to fight back. So I tackled him with one of my best volleyball leaps, only to discover I'd underestimated him. The jerk struggled, grubbed a fistful of my hair, and poked me in the eye. I held on, subdued his youthful enthusiasm with a few yards of rope, and introduced him to the gents he'd been stealing blind. That's where the trouble should have ended. Kudos all around and a fat paycheck, right? Instead, that's where the trouble began.

See, George didn't want me to catch a member of the family. George had his heart set on the entrapment of one Elisha Johnson, some poor SOB employee who hadn't done anything wrong except make eyes at George's sister. And it was about then that I discovered Twin Brothers Plumbing was so far in the red that catching their thief was not going to help. Bankruptcy loomed, and I was last on along list of creditors. It looked like I was going to have to take my paltry advance and chalk up the rest to experience.

But George, the tall dumb white guy with the sister, and Rodney, his short coffee-colored partner, were honest in their fashion. They offered to work off their debt in trade. An irresistible offer, right—especially if you've priced plumbing help lately. I mean, who can't use a plumber? I accepted eagerly because my old Victorian is long on charm and location, and short on convenience. My upstairs toilet gurgles, the sink is chipped and cracked, the bathtub is designed for a midget, and the floor, far from being level, collects dust puppies in the back corner. I had visions of gleaming tile, tasteful wallpaper. Hell, maybe a Jacuzzi.

And now I was learning, firsthand, why Twin Brothers Plumbing went broke.

I had specified beige tile. The tile they showed up with was so dark brown, it was practically black. I wanted one of those pedestal sinks. They had a boxy number, complete with cabinet, in, I kid you not, Day-Glo orange.

Now I'm good at saying no. But I hadn't reckoned with Roz. Roz is not just a tenant. She is my sometime assistant, and, more importantly, my housecleaner. I need her. I can't stand housework. Because she's an artist, albeit the punk variety, and because I was grateful she'd steered clients my way even though they turned out to be almost deadbeats, I'd assured her that she could work with the Twin Brothers on redesigning the bathroom.

I should have realized, once I'd seen the guys, that whatever judgment Roz possessed couldn't be trussed.

Roz has basically lamentable taste in men; that is, she judges them purely by exterior charms. A good bod is all to Roz, so it's not hard to guess how she became acquainted with the Twin Bros. George, the tall guy, has muscles, or at least he looks like he's got muscles until you see Rodney, the short guy, who's really got muscles. Both of them won Roz's nonmonogamous heart, and her artistic sense, such as it is, succumbed.

That the two brothers are both married, each to a woman named Marie, hopefully not the same woman named Marie, makes little difference to Roz. Me, I never mess with the married kind. Life is tough enough.

A shadow moved on the window overlooking the fire escape, and I straightened up. It was a skinny gray cat whose eyes caught the glare from the window and lit up like emergency flashers.

I relaxed my grip on the steering wheel and unclenched my teeth. Just thinking about Twin Brothers Plumbing can do that to me. I decided that storming out of the house had been a wise move. Otherwise I'd have tossed the tile (still the wrong color), the sink (a new weird avocado shade), and the two stooges out the bathroom window. Maybe they'd have landed in a snowdrift. Maybe not.

I huddled deeper into the folds of my inadequate coat. If I'd thought about more than escape, I'd have grabbed my parka instead of my old wool peacoat. I jammed my hands into my pockets. No gloves.

If I'd gone back for gloves, I'd have fired them. If I'd fired them, I'd have had to live with an unfinished bathroom—no toilet, no sink, no bathtub—for eternity. If I'd fired them, I'd be sorry. Sorrier. I was already sorry I'd ever heard of Twin Brothers Plumbing.

The left front window of the cab didn't quite close, so a gale blew into my ear. The heater was so feeble a blanket in the backseat was standard issue. Since the cab had the required-by-Boston-law dividing shield, the only way I could snatch the blanket was to get out, open the back door, and generally draw attention to myself. So far, I'd resisted. Every half-hour I fired up the engine, eked out a little heat, and got by on that. I tried to think warm thoughts.

A cab is a good surveillance vehicle, almost but not quite on a par with a telephone company van. People don't pay much attention to cabs unless they need one, and hailers only pay attention to cabs that stop. Pedestrians and other drivers expect cabbies to be rude, erratic, and apt to make sudden U-turns. Cabs blend into the background.

Behind the wheel of a cab I blend into the background, too, which can be a challenge for a six-foot-one-inch redhead who's thin enough to make every inch count. Driving, I wear an old slouch cap that hides my hair, and since I'm sitting down, people don't make comments about the quality of the air up here. “My, you're tall for a woman,” people tell me when I'm standing, as if I might not have noticed otherwise.

I like driving a cab. It got me through college without waitressing and taught me how to get around the city without ever stopping for a red light. Late nights on the streets of Boston, I feel at home. I get off on finding the fastest shortcut, the quickest bypass. After graduation, I gave up cabbing for police work. I liked that, too, but I had trouble taking orders. I wound up getting fired.

Well, that's not exactly true. They let me resign. If it hadn't been for Mooney, I'd have been fired.

From the mouth of my alley I could see the main drag, Washington Street, where stall-and-crawl traffic prevailed, much of it slow because the gents inside the BMWs and Volvos were trolling for hookers. Business is down because of AIDS, but business goes on.

Much of my least favorite cop time was spent in the Zone. I was in great demand because none of the guys wanted to wear heels and play hooker. God, I hated decoy patrol. Aping a lady of the night and arresting some poor slob who wanted his sex on a pay-as-you-go basis was not why I'd joined the force.

A lean black hooker made her way up the fire escape into Renney's place. She was wearing heels so high the tendons on her legs stood out like cords, and a skirt so short it disappeared under her leather jacket. I couldn't remember her name. I thought I'd seen her before. Mitzi, maybe.

I wasn't absolutely sure Janine would turn up at Renney's. I wasn't even sure Janine was the one. But sometime between Mooney's departure and the moment I slammed out my front door, Janine had sprung to mind.

Janine used decals. Rinse-off tattoos. Vegetable coloring. She used to say guys would pay extra for a tattooed woman, but they also craved variety, so tattoos of the evening were her specialty. She used to design some pretty elaborate ones, and that snake sounded like Janine to me. And back when I used to arrest her, say, twice every three months, she homed to Renney.

So why not dial Mooney and give him the information? Because Mooney and I have a complicated history of debits and credits, and I hate it when he's one up in the favors department. Why not call any cop and tell him how to help one of his own? Because I would like the PD to owe me a big one. If I handed them Janine on a platter, saved Mooney from the disgrace of a hearing, maybe they'd tell a few lawyers what a good evidence hunter I am, what a dogged tailer, et cetera. The old boy network operates here in full strength.

Also, I hadn't seen Janine in maybe a year and a half. The life of a street hooker is short and brutal, and for all I knew Janine was now a suburban mother of two. I didn't want the cops to share a giggle at my expense.

So I watched the fire escape. I waited. I saw two plain-clothes cops arrest a lady who looked too old to be selling her body and a boy who looked too young to know he had something to sell. I saw glassine packets slip into chino pockets, and folding money fold itself very small and disappear. Somebody tossed a beer bottle out a window. But no Janine.

I was resting my head on the headrest, practically unconscious, when the door opened, the backseat creaked, the door slammed, and a male voice, young by the cracking adolescent sound, said, “Please! Drive.”

Maybe it was the youthfulness, maybe the urgency. Whatever, I bit back my off-duty reply and drove.

I took two quick rights because the traffic opened up that way and the kid seemed to be ducking down in the cab like he didn't want anybody to see him. I hoped I wasn't participating in a robbery. Bank robbers seldom take cabs, but after my experience as a cop, nothing would surprise me.

I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see my fare.

He was huddled in a corner, legs pressed tightly together, hands balled into fists on his thighs. I took a long look at his face, memorizing it for a potential police artist sketch. I've made that a practice ever since the first time I was robbed by a fare.

He couldn't have been more than sixteen. His face was long and thin and practically blue from cold. His eyes were close together under a bony ridge of brow and were so deep set it was hard to tell their color. I decided on gray, like pale stones. His nose was thin too, jutting out like a beak, giving him a faintly arrogant air offset by ears that stuck out too far. His hair was cornsilk blond, kind of wispy, a little bit punk. He wore black jeans, a T-shirt, and a thin windbreaker, not much for April winter. He'd probably grow into his height in a couple years, but for now his hands were outsize and his chest practically concave. He was shivering, but he hadn't touched the blanket.

I reached back and opened the talk square in the shield, thinking I'd tell him to wrap up.

“Damn,” he was saying quietly. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.” The litany trailed off, then he looked around, suddenly aware of his surroundings, got a new note of panic in his voice, and said, “Pull over, okay?”

We hadn't traveled more than eight blocks. I parked underneath a streetlamp. I maintain that people are less likely to rob you under streetlamps. I'm a firm believer in them.

He was quiet for so long I turned around. He seemed to be searching through his pockets, patting his shirt, pants. He turned the pockets of his windbreaker inside out and stared at the lining in disbelief that was either real or well-counterfeited. “Damn,” he said again, loudly, explosively. “Look, I don't have any money, but if you could take me home, trust me for it, I can pay you when I get there. Honest, I'm good for it.” His eyes were red. It might have been from the cold or he might have been crying. Through the shield I couldn't tell.

“Where's home?” I asked.

“Lincoln.”

Lincoln is about as far from the Combat Zone as you can get. Not in miles—it's less than an hour away—but in character. Lincoln's a ritzy little bedroom suburb. Clean, fresh, perfect. The lawns are manicured. The leash law is of burning concern at town meetings. The churches are white with steeples. The populace is white with 2.4 kids, healthy collies, and Volvo wagons. The garbage fairy takes the compacted trash to the dump without dirtying the winding streets.

“Look,” I said, “If you got robbed, maybe you want to report it to the cops?” I was thinking that Lincoln was a long drive and Janine was not going to amble into my cab while I was on the road.

“I'll pay you, really. My folks will.”

“You sure they're home?” I didn't want the thirty-mile trek out to Lincoln. I wanted Janine.

He folded his arms, sank back on the seat, and looked longingly at the blanket. He was at that age where he couldn't admit he was cold enough to need it. “I'm pretty sure they're home. If they're not I could, like, write you a check or something, or borrow it from the neighbors.”

He felt around in his pockets some more, said “damn” a few more times, and then said, “I can't believe this. I really can't believe this.”

“Look,” I said, “Did you get rolled?”

“Rolled?” he said.

“By a hooker? Get your wallet stolen, you know?”

He blushed to the roots of his hair. Then he tried to act cool, like he picked up hookers all the time.

“No, it's not that. Really.” He stared around the cab some more, not looking at the blanket. “Well, I don't know. Look, maybe if there's a police station near here … Well, at least I could call somebody to come and get me.”