Coyote (6 page)

“
Señorita
,” the voice whispered. “
Es … es Manuela. ¡Ayúdame, por favor! Yo sé que usted me va a ayudar. Veinte uno Westland. ¡Pronto, señorita!
”

I replayed the message because the voice was so soft. It came in gasps and starts, and that made it harder to understand. The Spanish was basic enough: “It's Manuela. Help me, please. I know you will help me. Twenty-one Westland. Hurry.”

I tugged at a strand of my hair, a rotten habit that will one day leave me bald. A single hair came loose. I ran it through my fingers.

I've gotten messages like that before, and one thing I have learned is that hurrying to the rescue is one thing and racing off without thinking is another.

I knew where Westland Avenue was, in a student-infested area near Northeastern and the Fens. I thought the voice was Manuela's, but I couldn't be sure. I'm good with voices, but the woman who'd called sounded terrified. Her whispery voice was high and breathy, and I couldn't be sure it belonged to the same woman I'd talked to last night.

Wednesday evening. And it was well into Friday morning now.

Nor did I know when the call had come in.

I'd have to roust Roz, no matter what she and Lemon were up to. I knew Lemon was still around because I'd noticed his van blocking the
RESIDENT PARKING ONLY
sign. I made my tread especially heavy on the narrow wooden steps leading to the third floor, knocked loudly, and opened the door carefully, which was just as well, because Lemon, clad only in Jockey shorts, was standing behind the door ready to clobber me.

Roz was sound asleep, mouth open, snoring faintly. I roused her by tugging and hollering.

“When did the phone ring?” I asked when she finally sat up, covering herself with the sheet. She sleeps on these tumbling mats she's got all over the floor. Tumbling mats and old black-and-white TVs are her major furniture. It was nice to know she used sheets and pillows. Maybe she'd hauled them out in Lemon's honor.

“Phone,” she mumbled.

“There was a call at ten and another maybe half an hour later,” Lemon said briskly. I shouldn't have bothered waking Roz.

“Want to earn a few bucks?” I asked Lemon. His illustrious family had cut him off without a cent, and his performance-art career is mainly doing juggling and mime in Harvard Square and passing the hat afterward. I don't know whether Roz pays for her karate lessons or not.

“Sure,” he said.

“Me too,” Roz said, struggling naked out of the sheets and pulling a selection from her incredible wardrobe of T-shirts over her head. This one was electric blue and said
CAPTAIN CONDOM
across the front. It was illustrated.

Before we left for Westland Avenue, I dialed Homicide. Mooney wasn't in.

8

We took Lemon's van. He drove, and I watched for followers. A cold drizzle slicked the pavements and I huddled in my peacoat, glad of the warmth of the three of us jammed in the front seat. Roz sat between us, by virtue of her barely five foot height, her short legs straddling the hump. I wasn't sure she was awake at first, but gradually she came around. I could tell because she started firing questions.

“It's probably nothing,” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied warily.

“Could be genuine, could be a trap,” I said.

“Meet me at the abandoned warehouse at midnight,” she mumbled. “Expecting anybody in particular?”

“I met an INS agent who doesn't like me,” I said. “But I don't think this is his style.”

“Immigration and Naturalization,” Lemon said proudly. He's a bright kid, really.

“If they wanted to know if I knew where the woman was, they might have faked a help message, but they wouldn't have given me an address,” I said. “They'd have waited outside the front door to tail me.”

“So then it's not the INS,” Lemon said. “Probably.”

“Yeah. So what I want here is backup. I don't go scooting off in the middle of the night to rescue damsels in distress. Not solo. Not since I read my first Nancy Drew.”

“What kind of backup?” Lemon asked.

“I go in alone. I don't come out or give you an all-clear signal in five minutes, you come in.”

“You armed?” Roz said, proving she was still awake.

I nodded. My .38 Police Special was tucked in the waistband of my slacks, under my sweater, the metal cold against the small of my back. I keep it in the locked bottom drawer of my desk, unloaded and wrapped in one of my ex-husband's undershirts.

“Okay, then,” she said, and seemed to go back to sleep. I didn't have to tell her how much I'd hate to use it. Guns are necessary in the business, what with all the crooks waving them around. I admit that—and I keep my hand in at the pistol range—but I don't like guns. I've killed two men with guns, one when I was a cop, one after I turned private. Both killings had to happen, and I don't spend a lot of time rehashing my life, but neither was easy to swallow.

Lemon drove well, effortlessly shifting the gears on the old van. The rain was the kind of stuff that messes up your windshield, too light for the regular swipe of the windshield blades. The glass steamed up, and Roz leaned forward and wiped a ragged circle with a wad of Kleenex. It fogged again immediately, so we cracked the windows open and froze.

The journey took maybe twenty minutes. Memorial Drive, then over the B.U. Bridge, along Park Drive to Brookline Ave. Lemon took a wrong turn and I had to straighten him out.

The detour took us back along the Fenway, and that's when I noticed the flashing lights. Automobile accident, I told myself, although the first worry pangs hit my stomach just about then. I remembered the newspaper article Manuela had shown me, about the body in the Fens. It must have been found nearby.

Up close I could tell the flashers belonged to police units. No wreckers, no tow trucks. When I saw Mooney's battered Buick parked with two wheels up on the curb, I hollered Lemon to a halt. Then I was out of the car and running, and Lemon was yelling after me, something about where the hell was he supposed to leave the damned van.

I didn't care.

The cops hadn't set up a cordon yet. They were milling and talking, and only one of them tried to head me off, worried I might be the advance press guard. I brushed him off with Mooney's name, and one of the other guys knew me and gave the first guy a wink.

I don't know what Department gossip says about Mooney and me, but it's a hell of a lot more colorful than reality. I'm not a cop now, so it doesn't matter. And yet I guess I still resent it. Otherwise I wouldn't get so pissed, right? Over a simple leering wink from a guy whose IQ was probably a tenth of his badge number.

The old anger gave me something to concentrate on while I sped down the path toward a stand of elms, eerily lit by flashlights and rotating cherry beacons.

Mooney loomed up out of the dark, all six-four two hundred and forty linebacker pounds of him.

“A body?” I said, dreading the answer.

“What are you—”

“Let me see her,” I said. “I think I can make the ID.”

“It's not pretty,” he said.

“It never is.”

“Why are you—”

“I got a call. I tried to get you—”

“This way,” he said. “If you puke, the medical examiner's gonna give me hell.”

I followed him, biting my lower lip, hardening myself, getting ready. “Just another stiff,” I murmured to myself. “Just another body. Nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do.”

They hadn't bagged it yet. A police photographer stood at her feet and the sudden explosion of light temporarily blinded me.

The height and weight seemed right. The dark hair. The face was bruised and swollen, unrecognizable, cut and covered with dark blood. And the hands were gone. Just gone, hacked off at the wrists.

“Well?” Mooney said.

I couldn't say anything.

Not until I saw something sparkle on the ground.

It was a thin silver band. The filigree ring I'd last seen on my client's left hand.

9

“Twenty-one Westland Avenue.”

I guess I must have mumbled the address as I stared at the dead woman's mutilated arms, because that's what Mooney said to me when he forcibly turned me around by the shoulders.

“Twenty-one Westland,” I echoed slowly, looking into his eyes and still seeing the corpse. “Come with me.”

“What the hell, Carlotta—”

I started talking and yanking him by the hand at the same time, because I didn't want to lose minutes while I explained. He hollered something over his shoulder to another cop and came with me. I babbled out the tale of the late-night phone call.

“Then you can identify the corpse as the woman who came to see you?”

“The ring on the ground,” I said. “She was wearing it.”

“Could have been planted,” he said.

“It was loose. She kept twisting it, fiddling with it.” I remembered her hands—small, hardworking hands with bitten nails.

Lemon had pulled his van onto the grassy verge, shielded by two patrol cars. A cop was quizzing him, and I waved and yelled at him to go on home before he and Roz got arrested.

Mooney had two uniforms tail us in a unit. We took his Buick, with me automatically scrambling into the driver's seat and sliding over to the passenger side. Mooney refuses to get his passenger door fixed. He says every time he gets his car shipshape, somebody else bangs into it.

It took us maybe four minutes to find 21 Westland. It shouldn't have taken that long, but none of the apartment buildings, a string of four-story, yellow-brick jobs, seemed to have an address, the same way Boston streets never have street signs. The cross streets sometimes do, but the main thoroughfares, never. It's a way of telling tourists they don't belong.

We finally caught a glimpse of a 43 on a fanlight and got a fix on the proper side of the street. Then we nailed a 57 and turned back, closer to the Fens.

Number 21 didn't seem to have any identifying marks, but it sat next to 23, and that was good enough for me.

There were no parking places. By no parking places I mean
no
parking places. Even the fire hydrants and the handicapped slots were taken. Mooney left the car double-parked with the unit tucked in behind us, its cherry lights flashing. We were both careful to lock our doors, police vehicles not being off-limits to the Massachusetts car thief.

Number 21 was a weathered brick building like the rest, narrow enough to appear taller than its four stories. It had a street lamp close by; from four feet away I could barely make out faint numerals on the cracked glass of the front door.

The door opened easily to a small, dimly lit vestibule; the four of us entering at once made it even smaller. One of the officers in the unit must have been a cigar smoker. I hacked out a cough while we studied our surroundings. There were five mailboxes and five doorbells, which made it one resident per floor and some poor soul in the basement. None of the names under the mailboxes belonged to Manuela Estefan. Nobody had the initials M. E. Mr. Y. Thompson had the top floor, Mr. and Mrs. Keith Moore (Shellie) the third, Lawrence Barnaby the second, R. Freedman the ground floor. The basement apartment was rented out to A. Gaitan, and that was the button Mooney pushed.

I'm not sure if he pushed it because he thought the super might live in the basement or because A. Gaitan had a Hispanic surname.

No response. The cigar-smoking cop was for pushing every goddamn bell until somebody got the hell out of bed and let us the fuck in.

I pressed my nose against the glass of the inside door, and that's when I noticed that someone had slipped a little piece of wood, like half a shim shingle, between the jamb and the door. Nobody was going to have to buzz us in.

There was an elevator in a hallway lit by a single forty-watt bulb. The linoleum on the floor looked like it couldn't stand brighter lighting. There were two doors down the hall past the elevator. One said 1A, so I supposed it belonged to R. Freedman, although I didn't understand the need for the
A
since there was only one apartment per floor. The other door led to a staircase, again lit with a single bare bulb. I glanced at Mooney, and we both nodded at the same time and started down the stairs. One officer followed us. The cigar smoker stayed in the hall, his .38 already out of its unsnapped holster.

The stairway led to a damp corridor lined with old pipes. Somewhere a furnace banged and whimpered. Mooney listened for a moment at the Gaitan apartment door, then knocked loudly and scooted to one side. The other officer, taking the cue, flattened himself against a wall and drew his weapon. I stayed out of the line of fire, well back in the hallway. I make it a policy never to get in between guys waving loaded guns.

Nobody answered.

Mooney glared at me. I elevated my shoulders. I didn't know which apartment the call had come from, any more than he did. Maybe while we were down here the killer was escaping out some back door or scrambling down the fire escape from the fourth-floor apartment.

I was going to urge Mooney to call for more backup when he got a stubborn set to his jaw, reached over, and turned the doorknob. It clicked the way doors do when they're left open, and the eyes of the patrolman who'd been up against the wall went cold and wary. He shifted his hands on his gun.

The two cops went through in an instant, noiselessly. I knew they were checking the rooms, the closets, behind the doors. That's what cops do first, search for victims and perps. I went in. Nobody told me not to.

There was no one inside Gaitan's apartment. I could tell by the deflated air of the young advance cop, his weapon now sheathed, his adrenaline still pumping.

“Only the two rooms,” he muttered, his face pale. He seemed to be taking extraordinary care with his breathing, in and out, making sure he got it right. “You better see the other one.”