CHAPTER 22

The mailman came up my front walk as Stuart Reardon, holding his wadded handkerchief against his temple, staggered down. I hadn’t offered my assailant any cold towels or ice cubes. As a matter of fact, I hoped his head hurt like hell.

T.C. got bills, circulars, a copy of Mother Jones, and a sales pitch from a Hong Kong tailor who didn’t carry his size. I was about to dump the whole lot in the waste basket when I noticed the Colombian stamp.

I slit the envelope with Reardon’s knife.

Dear Carlotta—

She’d used regulation airmail stationery and drawn faint lines to help keep the letters straight.

I skimmed it to see if she said when she’d be back.

Dear Carlotta—

How are you? I want to come home. Have you ever heard of a man named Carlos Roldan Gonzales? My mother and the man they say is my grandfather fight all day.

I hate it here. I’m going to run away. Maybe I can stow away on a boat and come back to you.

Love ya,

Paolina

Terrific, I thought. Another runaway. I stuck Reardon’s knife in my top drawer, thinking how upset and angry Paolina would be if I let some jerk kill me while she was away. She was always scared something would happen to me while I was a cop.

I wondered why Marta was fighting with her father. And who Carlos Roldan Gonzales was, and what the “man they say is my grandfather” business was all about. Since Bogotá isn’t a seaport, I wasn’t too worried about boats and stowaways. But I was worried about Paolina.

I’ve never been to Bogotá, so my image is warped by news accounts of kidnappings and drug wars. I remembered a Channel 5 special report featuring gangs of hungry beggar children, and I prayed Marta would keep a sharp eye on her daughter.

Her daughter, I’d almost thought my daughter, but Paolina wasn’t mine.

I took her letter into the kitchen. It wasn’t dinnertime by a long shot, but hunger gnawed. Getting almost stabbed had something to do with it. Every time I’ve stared down a gun barrel or hit the floor under fire, I’ve gotten incredibly ravenous, or felt terribly sexy, or both.

Considering the state of my social life, I was glad I was only hungry. I had a sudden vision of Sam and how great he’d looked at the garage. I focused on food.

I stood on tiptoe and reached way in the back of the tiny cupboard over the refrigerator for my secret shrinking hoard of TV Time popcorn. Roz thinks I hide dope there. TV time is great popcorn, but damned if the manufacturers haven’t joined the microwave revolution. When my stash runs out, I’m going to have to buy a microwave just so I can make decent popcorn.

There’s progress for you.

I shook the stuff in a battered four-quart pot over an old-fashioned gas flame, feeling righteous. None of this stick-the-bag-in-the-oven-and-wait laziness for me. I melted too much butter, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and figured I’d skip dinner.

Red Emma joined me at the kitchen table. She adores popcorn, practically inhales it. Then she has coughing fits because she gets salted out, and I have to feed her about a gallon of water.

“So,” I said to her, “think he’d have knifed me, with you there as a witness and all?”

“Fluffy is a pretty bird,” she said.

I extended my index finger, cautiously because sometimes she bites. She hopped on board, encouraged by the popcorn kernel I held just out of her reach.

Since she was in a chatty mood, I tried her out on a few Socialist slogans, “Workers of the world, unite!” and that ilk, the maxims of my mother’s union-organizing life.

“Pretty bird,” she said stubbornly, mimicking my Aunt Bea.

“Dumb cluck,” I said.

She dug her claws into my finger and got skinny and mean-looking.

“¿Habla espanol?” I tried, mindful of Paolina’s directive.

“Buenos dias,” said the bird quite clearly, ruffling up her feathers. God knows what she’d have said if I’d asked her to say buenos dias.

I let her perch on the rim of the popcorn bowl as a tribute to her bilingualism.

My fingers kept wandering to my neck, tracing the faint scratch. It interfered with my appetite, but not until I’d almost emptied the bowl.

I left a few kernels for Esmeralda-Red Emma-Fluffy, dialed Joanne at Area A, and lo!, she picked up the phone.

“Carlotta,” she said in an odd voice. I got the feeling she’d been expecting somebody else.

“Busy?” I asked.

“No more than usual,” she said too heartily, “But, uh, I haven’t got anything on that licence plate.”

“Nothing? As in zip?”

“I ran it and there’s no listing. You probably got the digits mixed up.”

“Joanne, that’s the plate.”

“What can I say, kid? I can’t help you on it.”

“Can’t?”

“That’s what I said. Sorry.”

I hung up slowly, puzzled because Joanne didn’t sound like herself. Puzzled because I knew I’d gotten the damn numbers right. It was a Mass. plate, and the Registry should have had a title to match.

I found the phone book and wrote down Geoffrey Reardon’s Somerville address. Then I folded the contract brother Stuart had signed, and stuck it in my handbag. It never hurts to carry an official-looking form.