Snapshot (23 page)

“Rust,” Mooney repeated. “Thanks. I'll catch the rest in a minute.”

The man shrugged, closed the door.

“Tina Sukhia?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Rust on her dress?”

“A few spots. In front, near the hem. That suggest anything to you?”

“What color dress?”

“Tan, beige, sorta light brown.”

I thought it over. Maybe nothing more than a lousy dry cleaner. “No,” I said.

“Too much to ask,” he muttered.

“You have time to run that guy for me? Sanchez?”

“The Firebird guy? He's clean,” Mooney said.

“Just hasn't been caught yet,” I corrected him. “Mooney—”

“What?”

“Is there really a warrant out on me in Winchester? Are they going to pursue this? I need to call my lawyer, or what?”

“You got an alibi?”

“Yeah.”

“Good one?”

“Yeah.”

“The Gianelli guy?” Mooney stuck his chin out. He doesn't approve of Sam.

“Gianelli,” I admitted.

“Well, I might be able to kill it.”

“Why don't you do that?”

“As a favor,” he said.

“Does that mean I'll owe you?”

“A very big one. Keep it in mind.”

27

Paolina, full of doughnuts and good cheer, chatted with the desk sergeant while I dropped change into a pay phone and placed a call to Woodrow's house.

He'd involved his wife in a murder investigation. And he'd been worried about
me
being indiscreet.

Was he just stupid and angry, or worse?

Had someone actually broken into his home? Why?

I'd intended to search the house. Armed with the now-useless threat of police involvement, I'd planned to check whether Emily had left any vital information under her mattress. Had someone beaten me to it?

“Come on,” I ordered the ringing phone.

Woodrow didn't answer. And if he had, he'd probably have hung up at the sound of my voice. I cradled the phone in disgust. I'd have to drive out there, maybe break in after all. If you're going to do the time, you might as well do the crime, I thought.

I got the number of Harold's law firm from Information. A snotty-voiced clerk who informed me that Mr. Woodrow didn't wish to be disturbed, reluctantly took a message.

I couldn't involve Paolina in a Winchester trip. I'd promised Marta I'd have her back in the morning, and it was almost noon.

I glanced at my little sister, grinning and joking with the sergeant, so far removed from the waif of last night. A quick-change artist.

Maybe if Emily Woodrow had been younger when her daughter died, she could have made the adjustment. Younger, she could've had another child.

I stared at Paolina. If something had happened to her, if she'd caught her plane last night, vanished entirely—

“Come on,” I said to her, my voice rough. “Your mom's worried about you.”

I rang Marta's buzzer as a formality. Paolina's got a key. She used it and we ascended the steps in silence. I could hear the TV from the landing, even louder than usual.

Marta staggered to the door as we entered, in a torn nightgown, her long hair uncombed. Murmuring in Spanish, she lunged to hug Paolina, missed, and landed on the floor, a tangled heap of arms and legs, making a keening noise somewhere between laughter and tears. Her unfocused eyes stared at an unseen horizon.

“Mama, Mama, what's wrong? What's wrong with her?”

I thought she was drunk, so I didn't answer. I knelt near her head, bent forward, and tried to sniff her breath. Sour, but no trace of alcohol.

“Marta!” Her eyelids fluttered. I found her pulse, which seemed strong, arhythmical.

“Creo que estoy enferma,”
she mumbled.

“Is it your stomach?”

“No. Sí
. I get
pastas. Estómago
. They say maybe is
úlcera.”

“What pills?”

She waved an arm in the direction of the kitchen, then clutched her stomach.
“Por favor, llame at médico.”

“Paolina; see if you can find a new pill bottle. It'll have the doctor's name on it. I'll get her into bed.”

“She's not gonna—”

“She'll be okay,” I said as reassuringly as I could.

Marta's sudden full-blown laughter was more disconcerting than weeping. Scary. She looked like a harpy, like a Victorian caricature of a madwoman, all snaky hair and crimson fingernails and white nightgown.

“See what's on the kitchen counter,” I urged Paolina. “Maybe she took too much of whatever it was.”

Marta babbled and giggled while I half carried her into the other room and tucked her into bed. Her forehead was icy. She stared at me as if she didn't know me, called me Lilia. Abruptly she threw all the bedcovers on the floor.

“
Muy calor
. I'm hot,” she said. “Freezing hot.”

“Here.” Paolina rushed in, speaking fast. “It's a doctor I never heard of.”

“Call four-one-one and get his phone number,” I said.

“Is she—?”

“She'll be fine. Call.” I humped the sheets and blanket back on the bed, made soothing noises, and hoped the phone company had delivered on its promise.

“I called,” Paolina said, five long minutes later, on the verge of hysteria. “He's on hospital rounds. He'll call back.”

“Let me see the bottle.”

I read it and something clicked.

Marta seemed calmer. “Sit with your mom for a minute,” I said. “I'm gonna make a call.”

Paolina, her cheeks pale, was far too quiet and obedient.

I grabbed the pill bottle from her unresisting hand.

Information gave me Donovan's number quickly. Maybe they heard the urgency in my voice. He did.

“What's wrong?”

“Xanax. You gave it to Emily Woodrow.”

“So?”

“What is it?”

“It's a tranquilizer. A benzodiazepine.”

“A friend of mine went to a new doctor who said she had an ulcer. She's got rheumatoid arthritis, too, and she takes a lot of drugs that hurt her stomach. He gave her Xanax and now she's talking crazy and she doesn't know who I am.”

“Wait a minute. She said Xanax, not Zantac?”

“I'm holding the pill bottle in my hand.”

“Which?”

I spelled it.

“Shit. She got the wrong one. Maybe the doc wrote illegibly. Maybe the pharmacist screwed up.”

“She's hot and cold and confused as hell.”

“Look, Xanax is like a big aspirin. It's mild. It's almost impossible to OD on Xanax.”

“She said her stomach hurt pretty bad.”

“Count the number of tablets.”

“There're a lot of them.”

“Count them!”

Eleven were missing.

“Get her to an ER,” Donovan said.

28

I don't recommend visiting both a police station and a hospital in the same day.

Mass. General made the cop house look both efficient and humane. Of course, if I'd entered the police station under arrest, I'd probably have had a different take on the situation. In the emergency room at MGH, Marta came off as a prisoner.

Nothing against the individuals—the nurses couldn't have been nicer, even the ones stifling exhausted yawns. A young Hispanic woman with placid brown eyes took Paolina under her wing while I answered questions and filled out forms and waited, waited, waited. The doctor, once we saw one, clucked sympathetically. I found it amazing, considering the surrounding sights and sounds, that he could still summon sympathy.

Overnight hospitalization was recommended. Observation. An unusual reaction, white-coated strangers declared. Definitely atypical. No acute danger.

Words I didn't understand floated past my head. Alprazolam and Ranitidine. IV infusion and polypharmacy. Codes and colors were called over loudspeakers. Beepers bleeped, and machines that looked like they'd be at home in spaceships flashed their lights and sang electronic songs.

I dropped change into a pay phone. Lilia swallowed her indignation and agreed to fetch and temporarily care for Marta's boys. The sour-voiced receptionist at IWP insisted that Harold Woodrow was still unavailable. In a meeting. Again.

“An in-house meeting?” I inquired.

“If you don't wish to leave a message, you might try again in an hour,” she said, slamming the phone down before I got a chance to reply.

It was past four o'clock. I wondered if she would deign to pick up the phone after official quitting time. I checked the street address of Irwin, Woodrow, and Place, Attorneys-at-Law, in the Boston directory. Then I hustled back to Paolina.

The Hispanic nurse nodded vigorously when I said it was time to leave. Her mother would be in the best of hands, she assured Paolina, and when her own shift ended, she'd make sure that responsibility for Marta's care passed to a Spanish-speaking night nurse.

“Gracias,”
Paolina said.

“You're terrific,” I added. “Thanks.”

Paolina denied any hunger, but I stopped at a nearby Burger King anyway, ordered a bagful of assorted takeout.

“Where are we going?” she finally asked, settling back in the passenger seat and glancing out her window for the first time in ten minutes.

“Nowhere,” I said disgustedly. We were crawling up Huntington Avenue behind a loaded Green Line train, at rush hour, an experience to be avoided. Traffic was snarled as Northeastern students tagged across the street like a flock of abandoned sheep.

“You okay, Paolina?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, her voice unsteady.

“Your mom will be fine.”

“Yeah.”

“You feel okay? Cramps?”

“No.”

“Look,” I said, “I've got a problem. I don't want to drop you at Lilia's. I don't want you to be by yourself—”

“Why can't I stay with you?” she asked quickly.

“Exactly. I want you to stay with me. But I have work to do, and it's not the kind of thing where I'd normally take you along.”

“Is it dangerous?” She perked right up; I knew she would.

“Boring, more likely. Here.” I groped in my purse, handed over my case notebook. “This should be on page three or four. Read me the make and license plate number for any car registered to Harold W. Woodrow. Do you need the overhead light?”

“Not yet. He a crook?”

“Not that I know of, baby.”

“I wish you wouldn't call me baby.”

“I won't. I'm sorry.”

“Two cars,” she said, wrinkling her forehead over the scribbled notes from my conversation with Patsy Ronetti. “A BMW seven-three-five-I and a Saab nine-thousand. Rich guy?”

“Lawyer.”

“We going to his house?”

“His office. The slow way.”

“Why?”

“To see if he's there.”

“Is he a bad guy? Is he doing something bad?”

“I have to keep secrets in my business, Paolina.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

“But, if you want to, you can help me out.”

“And stay with you?”

“Sure. As long as you do exactly what I say.”

“Deal,” she said.

Most Boston law firms, I wouldn't have had a chance. They're huddled around Federal Street, jammed close together with no parking, except for the major underground lots. But IWP has offices in a converted brownstone on Newbury Street—very tony, very quiet, with private parking off the back alleyway.

Once I abandoned Huntington, the crush eased. I semicircled the Pru and eased onto Boylston, turned left at Berkeley, passed Newbury, turned left again.

I drove behind the IWP offices, not too slowly. The alley was a one-way affair, wide enough to admit a garbage truck. The mouth of the tiny parking lot was visible, but not the cars.

“Okay,” I said to Paolina. “You know the plates?”

She rattled off two sets of six numbers and letters.

“This lawyer might recognize me,” I said. “So I'm gonna send you instead. I want you to walk back as far as the lot, stop, and look around like you're lost.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Be casual about it. Don't come racing back if you spot his car. Just decide you're going the wrong way and look at your watch, like you're late.”

“I'll be cool,” she assured me. And then she was out of the car and walking.

The Back Bay is Boston's safest neighborhood, far less crime-ridden than Paolina's project. Still, I felt funny, sending her like that. Even if it would take her mind off her mother.

I don't think I breathed until she climbed back into the front seat.

“The BMW's there,” she said excitedly. “What do we do now?”

“Eat dinner,” I said.

“In the car?”

“Don't worry about the upholstery. Ketchup could only be an improvement.”

I parceled out wrapped bundles—sandwiches, shakes, and fries—and we ate heartily, having devoured nothing but doughnuts all day. I kept an eye on my rearview mirror and I even rigged up the side mirror so Paolina could assist. And, after a little prodding, Paolina started to tell me more about Paco Sanchez and how she'd met him in the neighborhood, and liked the way he looked at her and talked softly to her and treated her like a grown-up woman.

“Did Paco suggest the plane trip?” I asked.

“No,” she said firmly, looking me straight in the eye, which could have meant she was lying. Could have meant she was telling the truth.

“He loaned you money.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

She set her jaw. “Because he likes me.”

Sure, I thought.

“Was he planning to go with you? To Florida? To Colombia?”

“He always wanted to visit Colombia,” she said defensively.

“You gonna finish your hamburger?”

“You want it?” she asked.