The Snake Tattoo (28 page)

“What card?” I asked. “An identification card? Was yours stolen?
¿Por un ladrón
?” The only reason I remembered the word for “thief” was that Paolina had just come back from Bogotá, where she'd lost her camera to a horde of gamins, abandoned children who'd become experienced
ladrones
. It was a cheap camera. I couldn't remember the word for “stolen.” I wished I'd paid more attention to Paolina's attempts to improve my Spanish.

Manuela didn't answer, but I'm pretty sure she understood the question. Undaunted, I tried another one.

“Who is she?” I asked, pointing at the article but getting no response. I tried in Spanish. “
¿Cómo se llama, la mujer
?”

“
No sé
,” Manuela mumbled. I don't know.

While she answered, she twisted her silver ring some more. She wouldn't meet my eyes.

“Manuela, we need to go to the police,” I said slowly in careful, if possibly incorrect, Spanish. “I'll go with you and nothing bad will—”

“No,” she said immediately. “Police” she understood.

“I'll go with you. I know who to see.”

“No,” she repeated firmly. “
Usted. Sola
.”

“Why?
¿Por qué
?”

“Tell them,” she said slowly, feeling for the foreign words. “Tell
policía
she is no Manuela. My card, get it back for me.”

“They'll ask me how I know she's not Manuela.
¿Comprende? ¿Cómo yo sé
?”

Manuela bit her lower lip and worried at her ring. “Tell them you know,” she insisted.

“You must tell them.”

“
No es posible
.”

“You told me.”

“
La Migra
,” she whispered, glancing quickly around my combination living room and office, as if agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service were ready to spring from behind the worn velvet sofa.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath. “You're illegal.”

“I no go back.”

I knew too many immigrants, legal and illegal, to disagree with her. Instead I reread the brief news article and ran my tongue over dry lips. “It was brave—
valiente
—for you to come to me,” I said very slowly. “Tell me about this other Manuela, the woman they think is you. Tell me her name.
Dígame su nombre
.”

I'm not sure if she understood what I said, but suddenly she started to cry, her breath coming in short, jerky sobs. She grabbed at her chest, and her skin got pale and blotchy. She made a motion in the air, like she was clutching a glass, drinking, and she said, “
Por favor, señorita
.”

I figured she needed a glass of water, if not something a hell of a lot stronger, so I sped out to the kitchen.

It must have taken me all of thirty seconds, finding a relatively clean glass, running the tap water till it was as clear as Cambridge water gets. I didn't even take time to see if Roz had stocked up on Scotch.

When I got back, she was gone.

I ran out the open front door in time to see a car careen around the corner, a beige clunker with a dented fender and a plate I couldn't make out.

I cursed, went back inside, and drank the stupid glass of water. I'd abandoned it on Aunt Bea's best mahogany end table, and the wet circle it left behind seemed like a reproach. I gave it a swipe with the edge of my shirt, went back into the kitchen, found a raggy old dish towel, and polished the offending mark out of existence.

Then I plunked down in my desk chair and reread the article in the
Globe
.

Massachusetts private detectives are forbidden from meddling in murder cases, unless the case is already sub judice and the PI is working for a lawyer, gathering evidence. But the article didn't mention cause of death. It could, I supposed, have been natural causes, exposure, a lightning bolt for all I knew.

I lifted the
Globe
off the desk and an envelope fell to the floor. Just a white envelope with five hundred-dollar bills inside.

The bills were crisp, folded once in the middle. I smoothed them and counted them again. Manuela hadn't said anything about murder. All she wanted was to get her card, her
tarjeta
, back.

I considered her plastic handbag, her cheap shoes. I wondered what she'd done to earn those brand-new bills. I sat at my desk a long time, fiddling with the cash, watching the sun sink in a flash of crimson, followed by violet and a deepening blue. Then, prompted by my stomach, I went to the refrigerator and whipped together a couple of huge BLTs on toast. I washed them down with enough Pepsi to keep my kidneys afloat.

Also enough to keep me awake for the night.

I tried everything. A long hot soak in the tub, even a meaningless Red Sox game on my flickering black-and-white TV. Finally I hauled my guitar out from under the bed and set about practicing some tricky riffs, hoping some of the magic feeling of the volleyball game would return and inspire my fingers. But the picture of that silver ring on Manuela's work-roughened hands kept edging between me and the blues.

2

“You're absolutely right,” Mooney said the next morning at nine through a mouthful of doughnut.

He wasn't talking to me. Lieutenant Joseph Mooney of the Boston Police Department rarely says things like “absolutely right” when he's talking to me. He was addressing the phone, and from the look on his face he'd been murmuring polite little nothings for some time, doing a lot more listening than talking, and not particularly liking what he heard.

He yawned, carefully turning away and covering the receiver with one hand so the listener on the other end couldn't catch the noise. He had a dab of powdered sugar on his chin.

As soon as I'd entered his cubbyhole at Southie's old D Street station, he'd nodded me into a chair and winked. Not really winked. He has this trick where he lowers the eyelid of his left eye. No squint. No wrinkles. It looks like half his face has fallen asleep.

I tapped my chin on the spot corresponding to his powdered sugar. He picked up on it immediately, rubbing his jaw. Mooney and I communicate well, part gesture, part mind reading. It helped a lot when I worked for him.

Mooney's got a good face, sleepy or not. Maybe a little too round, on the big-nosed side, definitely Irish. He used to be my boss when I was a cop. He's still my friend, although it's a complicated relationship. I'm getting so I hate the word
relationship
. There are romantic overtones and undertones, mostly coming from his side. On my side there's a lot of warmth. Not heat. Warmth.

Mooney says I don't know how to love a guy who attracts me as a friend. You know, a guy I enjoy, a guy I like to talk to. And considering my history with men, he may have a workable theory. Who knows? A relationship with Mooney might be okay, in a warm kind of way. But the wild and crazy chemistry's not there. Mooney, who's eight years older than me, nudging forty, says someday I'll grow out of the wild-and-crazy-chemistry stage.

I say, who wants to?

Amid the jumble of printed forms, plastic coffee cups, crumpled papers, pens, and pencils on Mooney's desk sat a newspaper. The
Herald
. I picked it up, although it's not my paper of choice, wondering how they'd handled the Manuela Estefan story.

I found it on page seventeen, well after the important stuff like Norma Nathan's gossip column.

While the
Herald
didn't have anything the
Globe
hadn't run, the tone of the piece was of the breathless, breaking-news variety. There were hints at “sexual mutilation” and a coy reference to a key discovery. The name Manuela Estefan was there.

Sexual mutilation would make it murder.

I wondered if Manuela Estefan was a common name, like Jane Smith.

Mooney grunted at the phone, sandwiching it between chin and shoulder while his hands frisked the desk and finally came up with a full cup of coffee. He must have been hiding it in a drawer. He raised his eyebrows at me, and I helped him wrestle the plastic cover off the cup. I wondered who was on the phone. The police commissioner? The mayor? A city councillor? Mooney didn't suffer long telephone conversations as a rule.

His office didn't offer much in the way of entertainment beyond the single wooden chair I was sitting on, and its hard seat didn't encourage long visits. I knew where the coffee machine was, but the smell from Mooney's cup was not tempting enough to draw me into the hall. I figured if there were any remaining doughnuts, Mooney would have pointed me in their direction. So I was left with the contemplation of either the
Herald
or Mooney's ugly office, which didn't sport so much as a poster on the cinder-block walls. Maybe he hadn't had a chance to decorate since they'd moved him back to Homicide from his liaison position down at headquarters.

Come to think of it, he didn't have a poster at his place on Berkeley Street either. Not even a plant. Bare desk. Bare walls.

I did a complete one-eighty and discovered a map tacked on the wooden door behind me. A close-up of the Back Bay with three pushpins stuck in fairly close together—red, white, and yellow. I stood up to take a look.

“I'll get on it right away,” Mooney promised the telephone, and hung up so quickly that I got the feeling the guy on the other end was still talking.

“Carlotta,” Mooney said, shoving back his chair. “Sorry. I can't talk. I've got a meeting downtown. I was trying to convince the bastards I'd be more use here, but—”

“I'll drive you,” I said.

“Got the cab?”

“Nah, my car. You can make some flunky cruise you back in a unit.”

He studied his watch. I don't think Mooney likes my driving.

“Hell,” he said. “Sure, why not?”

When we were settled in my red Toyota, seat-belted in and trying to wedge ourselves into an endless stream of traffic, I said, “I hear you got an ID on this Fens corpse.”

“That's what they tell me,” Mooney said.

“You sure of it?”

“Why should I be sure of it yet, just because the papers are printing it?”

“You working it?” I asked.

“I didn't exactly catch the squeal, but I'm involved.”

Like most cops, Mooney doesn't give information away freely.

“Do you know if they have a picture ID,” I said casually, “or what?”

“Let me see,” he said, and I wondered if the pause was for recall or to stare at me out of the corner of his eye. “I think it's a green card. The victim was an immigrant.”

“A green card,” I started to protest, “but—”

“But what?” Mooney said when I stopped abruptly.

“So that's a picture, right?” I said.

“Yeah, but from what I understand, once the guy finished with the victim, she didn't look so much like her picture.”

“I thought it was—how did the
Herald
put it?—sexual mutilation.”

“The brain is the ultimate sexual organ, Carlotta. I keep telling you that.”

“Not funny.”

“You haven't been doing Homicide for a while, kiddo,” he said. “Everything's funny on Homicide.”

A green card. That I didn't understand at all. A green card is a permanent resident card, a ticket that entitles the holder to live and work in the U.S. for an unlimited time, a prized possession that can be used to apply for citizenship. Not a privilege granted to illegals.

I have had clients lie to me before.

“Where did the lady come from?” I asked. “You know yet?”

“We got her point of entry. Texas. Probably from someplace in Central America,” he said, gripping the door handle while I zoomed by a Buick that seemed afraid to take a tight curve. “Guatemala, El Salvador, maybe. I mean, think of the crap she must have gone through—all that shit down there—and then she goes for a walk through the Fens, and bingo, she's a crime stat.”

Mooney winced as I made a sharp right to avoid a Volvo wagon that thought it owned the road. I could have just taken Dorchester Avenue to East Berkeley Street, but I was trying to avoid the late commuter traffic, taking cabbie shortcuts. Mooney didn't seem impressed. Of course I had to cross the Fort Point Channel somewhere, and bridges always get backed up. While we were sitting still, breathing exhaust from a heating-oil truck, I brought up the reason for my visit.

“Mooney,” I said. “Something funny happened yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“It makes me think your green card ID may be wrong.”

“This I need to hear,” he said. “Watch out for that car.” It was well worth watching out for, a rust-eaten Plymouth Volare, hogging two lanes.

I gave him Manuela's story, not word for word but pretty complete.

“And she just walked away,” he said with a deep sigh.

“Ran is more like it,” I said.

“I'm going to need a description.”

“I'm going to give you one,” I promised. “I already wrote it up. I'm cooperating.”

“Yeah. How come?”

I ignored that.

“Carlotta, am I going to have to remind you to stay out of homicide investigations?”

A Town Taxi tried to cut me off at the bridge. I refused to make eye contact, kept going, and he backed down. Mooney had his hand on the door handle—ready to jump, I suppose.

“Mooney,” I said gently, “you've got a homicide investigation. I don't.”

“You're just going to forget about this woman?” he said. “I believe that like I believe in Tinker Bell.”

“I didn't say I was gonna forget about her. She hired me to do something. Something maybe you can help me with.”

“Aha,” Mooney said.

“Oho,” I responded. The Town Taxi was sitting on my rear bumper.

“You didn't just drop by to give me indigestion driving like a lunatic?”

“That's an extra,” I said. “And I've been driving conservatively, Mooney. If you're in a hurry—”