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.”

The last comment was addressed to Mooney, but I tagged along.

The front room was ugly enough, mottled paint, a sprung beige sofa, two narrow cots, and one wall containing something an optimistic landlord might describe as a kitchenette if a two-by-four refrigerator, a hot plate, and a cupboard qualified as a kitchenette.

The back room was worse, much worse. Someone had painted it dull green thirty years ago. A wooden cross bearing an elongated, suffering Jesus was tacked to the back wall. There was barely space for three more narrow cots and a metal rod on wheels that made do for a closet. Two white shirts and two pairs of tan chinos hung crookedly on the rod. The odor of unwashed bedclothes filled the air. That, and something else.

One look, one smell, and Mooney sent the uniform out to fetch a warrant and notify a crime-lab unit One unmade cot was blood-soaked, rusty in the dim light. Blood had splashed the other two cots, the wall, the cross. An old black dial phone rested on a rumpled pillow, its receiver dangling.

“Don’t touch anything,” Mooney said sharply.

I gave him a faintly disgusted look. My hands were already in my pockets. They’d made the journey automatically.

“If she’d lost her hands here, the ring might be a plant,” I said, just to be saying something. The words came out funny.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Mooney said. “Especially if you recognized the voice on the phone …”

“I think so, I’m not sure.”

“You didn’t erase the tape?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Think there’s enough blood for him to have sawed her hands off here?” I asked.

“How the hell would I know? Depends on whether she was dead or not, how much she’d bleed, I guess.”

All the time we were talking, we were looking, the way cops look at crime scenes, mentally tagging the evidence, asking the questions they’ll ask the medical examiner, wondering about fingerprints on the phone, hairs on the pillowcase.

I shivered. “She must have been alone when she called,” I said.

“Or somebody might have been holding a knife to her throat,” Mooney muttered. Then he seemed to see me for the first time. “You shouldn’t be here when the squad arrives,” he said.

“I’m a witness,” I said.

“To a phone call,” he said. “That’s all. And maybe you shouldn’t get any more involved.”

“Involved,” I repeated. “She called me for help.”

“Look, the INS guy told me this business has nothing to do with stuff here. It’s leftovers from Central America. Hit squads. Death squads.”

“Mooney,” I protested, “I wouldn’t believe anything that guy said.”

“I don’t know what the hell we’ve got by the tail here,” he said sharply, “but I know I don’t like it. And I don’t like you in the middle of it.”

“And there’s nothing you can do about it, Mooney,” I said evenly, “because here I am. And if I were you, I’d be a hell of a lot more interested in the whereabouts of A. Gaitan than any Salvadoran hit squad.”

Mooney opened his mouth to argue. He can’t help it. He’s Boston Irish, born and bred, and instinct tells him to get the women and children to shelter. He opened his mouth, glared at me, and silently closed his mouth again. Bless him for that.