20

I looked under the front stoop on the way out, even though I knew it was wasted motion. It used to be Paolina’s refuge when tragedy struck. Tragedy was anything from bad grades to lost boots, but she hasn’t hidden there in years.

The rotted side board had been replaced. Even if it were loose, there wouldn’t have been room for Paolina to squeeze through.

I was glad of that. I remembered the scurry of rats down there. I’d never seen one, but I remembered the noise.

Maybe she’d spotted my car. Maybe I’d yank open the front door and find her sitting there. Not so easy. She couldn’t be in the car, since I’d locked all the doors, and the Cambridge public schools don’t teach ten-year-olds to boost cars yet, although sometimes I wonder. But maybe she’d be standing nearby.

She wasn’t.

So, I told myself, she went to Lilia’s or a friend’s house. I decided I’d call Marta in an hour or two and find out which.

I still circled the block and made a series of passes through the project, keeping my eyes on the sidewalk, looking for her. A new Chinese take-out had opened on the corner. Two young boys with shaved heads and cropped T-shirts wrestled near a fire hydrant. I felt like I was a cop again. After a couple of months in a radio unit you stop thinking about driving and concentrate on the street. Your eyes pick out anything off, as if it were a color image smack in the middle of a black-and-white photograph.

I hadn’t heard Marta mention her long-missing husband twice in three years. Why the burst of anger today? Had she heard from him? Was he in town? Was that the reason for Paolina’s bizarre behavior, her shaky school attendance?

I shook off the thought. I’d ask Paolina flat out the next time we spoke. If Dad had turned up to make trouble, we’d deal with it. I’d deal with it.

I gave up and headed home. For now my job was to find out more about the pillow factory, if possible without shutting the place down. Poor Lilia. With citizenship so close, her fear had scared her off, and now she’d be working at Hunneman’s Pillows with its foul air and machine-gun racket for all eternity, afraid to ask for a raise or a day off, expendable for life.

I wondered about Marta’s conviction that cops were paid off to ignore Hunneman’s. Marta couldn’t be discounted on statements like that. She had an uncanny sense of what was going on, the kind of intuition men label “woman’s” and scoff at.

My mom used to say that intuition was what slaves had and bosses never bothered to acquire. It grew from the need to please without calling attention to yourself. The slave learned to catch hidden signals, subtle signs of approval and disapproval, learned to anticipate events, to soothe tempers, to make nice.

Who took bribes? The cops, the INS, city code inspectors? All of the damned above?

By the time I reached home I’d decided. If cops were taking bribes, Mooney wasn’t one of them. It’s not his district, and it’s not his style. So I phoned him, and of course he was out. I didn’t try him at home because his mother answers the phone. Cop’s widow, cop’s mother, traditional Irish Catholic to the core, she disapproves of me. And she always provokes me into giving her more reasons to disapprove.

Stymied, I wandered into the kitchen and came upon Roz. What the hell she was wearing, I don’t know. To tell the truth, it looked like rags. A consignment-shop special or a designer original. Probably the former. It was black, like almost everything she wears besides the T-shirts—short, tight, and, at least from the rear, definitely eye-catching, due to a highly slit skirt and a few scattered sequins. Her hair was brassy blond, which it has been before, but not yesterday. It disoriented me. I wasn’t entirely sure who she was.

The smell of turpentine was reassuring. Who else would be painting in my kitchen? More to the point, who else would be painting a still life of a giant-sized can of Ajax, a moldy potato, and, yes, a rubber glove, stuffed so it looked like it was reaching for something?

I rarely comment on Roz’s art. I used to, but then she’d explain the symbolism of each painting in great detail.

“Hi,” I said when her paintbrush was away from canvas. Far be it from me to mess up a painting of a rubber glove fondling our Ajax.

“Yo,” she said, “give me a minute to wind this up, okay?” She didn’t turn around. Her attention was riveted on the label of the Ajax can.

Fine with me. I went over to the fridge, pulled two slices of ham out of a plastic package, used two slices of cheese for bread, stared at the clock, and called it a late lunch.

Roz laid down her brush and turned around with a satisfied sigh. “A guy came,” she said.

From the front her appearance was startling. Her brassy hair had a streak of coal black starting at her part and running down one side.

She strolled over to the refrigerator and seized a jar of peanut butter, her principal diet. I don’t know why she doesn’t have scurvy.

“Guy have a name?” I asked.

“Guy had a bod,” she said, forming her lips into a soundless whistle. “You don’t want him, let me know.”

“But did he have a name?”

“Clinton,” she said.

“That’s not a man,” I said, “that’s an Immigration agent.”

“Look again,” she advised with a grin.

“What did he want?”

“You,” she said sadly. “Not me. He’ll call later.”

“You busy?” I asked.

She stared critically at her work. “Busy meaning what?”

“You free for a job?”

“Sure,” she said.

Someday when I ask her, Roz is going to ask me what job, or how much I’ll pay her, or whether it’s legal or illegal, and then maybe I’ll think of her as real. I don’t know what I think of her as now. Some kind of phenomenon.

I sent her out to research Hunneman’s, City Hall stuff—who owns it, who leases it, corporate or individual ownership, tax records. I could tell she was disappointed by the job.

“And,” I added, “you might go over to the Cambridge Legal Collective. Ask for Marian Rutledge. See if she’s got any clients who live on Westland Avenue. Get her to search files. There’s a good-looking guy secretary. Maybe you can vamp him and see if he’ll find you the stuff.”

“Vamp him?” she asked. “Did you really say that?”

“Forgive me,” I said. “It’s your dress.”

“Well, I think I know what you mean,” she said. “It’d depend on whether he’s built.”

“The important thing is who owns Hunneman’s.”

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“Be discreet.”

I actually said that to somebody who looks like Roz.