CHAPTER 12

If you think parking in Chinatown is impossible, try the streets around 40 New Sudbury Street, home of the Area A cops, patrolling Downtown, Chinatown, Charlestown, and East Boston. After cruising a few blocks, competing with the Faneuil Hall tourist brigade, I decided to risk a spot marked POLICE BUSINESS ONLY, FIFTEEN MINUTES MAXIMUM. There is nothing you can get done at the Area A station in less than fifteen minutes.

Up the steps, turn right, turn left. I could have walked the pattern in my sleep, did sleepwalk it often enough during my two-year stint at Area A. The smell—a blend of bad coffee and fear that seems to have soaked into the beige walls and checkered linoleum—brought the memories back, made my shoulders stiffen as though I was wearing the uniform again.

I don’t miss it, most of the time.

I didn’t recognize the desk sergeant. I almost said “Lieutenant Mooney” when he asked me who I wanted to see. That’s how far I’d repressed his suspension. I caught myself and asked for Joanne Triola instead. Joanne came up with me from the Academy. She’s better at putting up with guff than I ever was or will be, and as a result she is still a cop, a rising star. The desk sergeant said Detective Bureau, Second Floor.

He gave me a clip-on visitor’s pass, and I headed up the stairs. The fifth step was still missing its rubber retread, and the eighth step still creaked if you hit it dead center.

The rookies who’d responded to last night’s accident had been strangers from Area D, and matter-of-fact to the point of boredom. The gist of their chat was: What the hell did I expect driving at night in Franklin Park? And couldn’t I keep my damn cab on the road?

I don’t take kindly to aspersions cast on my driving skills. The three of us did not hit it off.

They’d listened to my forced-off-the-road story with such undisguised skepticism that I’d gone no further. If they didn’t believe in the car that shoved me into the tree, how were they going to grasp the news that I’d been tailing yet another car complete with missing witness inside?

I should have told them, I suppose, should have demanded they call in an accident team to check my rear bumper for paint chips, but just as I opened my mouth, the two of them exchanged The Look. You know, the why-do-they-let-these-crazy-broads-out-at-night look. And I’d decided to save my breath.

Joanne, I could talk to.

She was slouched in a chair in the bullpen, a warren of desks that serves as combination typing pool and doughnut dispensary. Every once in a while somebody shrieks about privacy and efficiency and tries to install dividers, but most of the time there aren’t that many cops around. They’re on the beat, or talking to snitches, or tracking down leads, or growing old in courtrooms waiting to testify about crimes that occurred three and a half years ago.

Today, the bullpen was graced by one old cop named Foley, a desk jockey who’d retired in all but name a couple years back, and a young Hispanic guy who looked eighteen max, but was acting like a cop, pounding away on his typewriter and shooting questions at a young woman in his guest chair. The lady wore black—blouse, skirt, tights, and boots—and handcuffs. I don’t know much Spanish but I recognized several words Paolina would not have used in polite conversation.

Joanne was gabbing on the phone, speaking loudly, gesturing freely. She must be almost fifty and she’s energetic enough for three normal people. She has a round, gentle face, a puff of graying hair, a ready smile, and one of those laughs that makes people turn around in a restaurant.

She can outscore me on the target range, either hand.

She hung up, glared at the phone, and started dialing again. I cleared my throat and she looked up, a smile breaking across her face.

“Why, it can’t be,” she said. “Why yes, the height is right. Didn’t you used to be a cop?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’d love to sit and chat a while.” I slid into her visitor’s chair, thankful to get the weight off my knee. It felt stiff and swollen, and I hoped I wasn’t going to have to cut off my very best pair of jeans. What I needed was a long soak in a hot tub.

“I’d ask you to join me in a cup of coffee,” she said, “but I seem to recall—”

“Still that bad?” I said. The woman in black jumped off her chair and swore in good old Anglo-Saxon. The cop who was booking her chuckled and said her English was getting much better.

“Honest to God, Carlotta,” Joanne said, taking no notice of the outburst from across the room, “you stir it with one of those plastic gizmos from McDonald’s, and the little spoon dissolves.”

“Coke machine work?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

Her phone rang, so I went over to investigate the vending machine, trying not to favor my left leg. The machine blazed with red warning lights that declared it gave no change and was out of every beverage it was supposed to stock. I gave it a gentle kick for the old days. I’d forgotten the crazy rhythm of the bullpen, the counterpoint of bells and questions and typewriters, entrances and exists, long calm afternoons broken by sudden, brutal emergencies.

Joanne was signing off when I came back.

“Jo,” I said, “I got run off the road last night.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Where?”

“Franklin Park.”

Her eyebrows shot up and she grinned. “Way to go,” she said. “And lived to tell about it.” Then she held up a hand like a traffic cop, requesting silence while she shuffled through a stack of paper.

“Here it is,” she said finally. “Area D. You got a big two sentences in the occurrence book.”

“The jerks wrote it up,” I said. “I’m flattered.”

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “Two sentences.”

“Where’re they getting the rookies these days?” I asked.

“Well,” said Joanne, “with our incredible benefit package and high starting salary we have to fight off those Harvard MBAs.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see.”

The woman in black rattled her handcuffs and called the Hispanic cop a son of a mangy yellow dog, in both Spanish and English. It was more effective in Spanish.

“You wanna come back?” Joanne asked.

“No, thanks,” I said.

She smiled. “So who’s after your ass?” she said. “You working a case?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“And this is just a social visit, right?” she said.

“I got a license plate,” I said. “I was wondering if you could run it.” A phone rang somewhere, ten times, twelve times, stopped.

“You give it to the boys last night?” she asked.

“No.”

“Carlotta, they may be jerks, but they can run a plate.”

“I’ve got a plate, but it’s not the car that rammed me,” I said. The phone started up again. Six, eight, ten rings before someone mercifully plucked it off the hook.

She said, “Let me get this straight. You just wrote down a license for the hell of it?”

“Hey, it’s connected,” I said. The Hispanic cop finished his paperwork and escorted the woman in black to a holding cell. Close up, under her eye makeup, she was a teenager. The right sleeve of her blouse was ripped, and her skinny yellow arm showed needle tracks.

“How?” Joanne asked.

“I’ll know once you run it, Jo. Maybe.”

“This have to do with Mooney?” she asked, leaning over her desk and getting all quiet and confidential.

God knows what the station house grapevine says about Mooney and me, but I’m sure it’s juicier than reality. “Would that make you run the plate any faster?” I asked.

“I’m just curious, you know,” she said.

“Seen Mooney?” I asked.

“He’s not allowed in. It might be catching.”

“I thought he had to come by and testify about something.”

“Oh, that,” she said, elaborately casual. “That’s over at county courthouse.”

“What’s it about?”

“Confidential?” She shot a careful glance around the bullpen. The old cop, Foley, was learning how to type with two fingers.

“Sure,” I said easily.

“Cheating on paid detail,” she said.

“Mooney?” I said quietly. The Hispanic cop wandered back to his desk. He propped his feet on his blotter, dialed his phone. Joanne waited until he started talking before she answered, very softly.

“The way I heard it, is somebody offered him five bills to alter records, right after the probe started. It wasn’t that obvious. Oblique as hell, really, but Mooney, well, you can imagine.”

I felt my stomach muscles unknot. “I knew it,” I said. “He frothed at the mouth, right? He’s cooperating with Internal Affairs.” I smiled and issued a silent apology for my thoughts over the morning Herald.

“Keep it down,” Joanne said. “He’s a perfect witness. These cops are gonna get strung by their thumbs.” She walked over to the bullpen’s central table, picked up a pink-and-white box, and came back. “Want a doughnut?” she asked.

The box was half-full. Cinnamon and chocolate. I liked glazed and jelly.

“No, thanks,” I said. “But there is something else you can do for me, besides running the plate, I mean. I’m looking for a runaway.”

“Good luck,” she said, her voice back to full volume now.

“A repeater. There ought to be paper,” I said. Two cops, one black, one white, came through the swinging doors, supporting a man between them. He could have been drunk or doped or dead. They passed by and the smell made me glad I hadn’t taken the doughnut.

“Juvie?” Joanne asked. Nothing seemed to sway her, not the noise, not the smells. I must have been like that once, before I got rid of the badge.

“Yep,” I said.

“Probably sealed.”

“I don’t think it went to court. It’s just paper lying around someplace.”

“Look, are you helping Mooney?” she asked.

“I’m trying,” I said.

She pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. “Write down the plate, and give me the girl’s name while you’re at it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you.”

“Say something nice about your local police department,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. “We can use it.”