The Snake Tattoo by Linda Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

for stoning buses full of black kids. Mooney got tired of being labeled a bigot on the basis of his address and moved to the Hemenway Street apartment right after the cops nailed a ring of firebugs who were turning the Symphony Road area into a Beirut look-alike. His mom wanted him to come home to Southie when his father died, but Mooney’s stubborn. He kept his apartment, so Mom sold the family homestead, and moved in with her only son.
    I checked out the on-street parking, hoping to spot Mooney’s battered Buick. Seven cars sported parking tickets.
    Mooney doesn’t talk much about his mother. What I know about her can be summed up in few words: cop’s widow, cop’s mother. I met her once at the station and got the strong impression she didn’t care for female cops. Maybe that’s why I summed her up as a member of the Ladies Auxiliary, defining her in terms of her husband and son. I never do that to women I like—or even to women I know.
    I didn’t know much about Mooney’s mom. Not even her given name. To me she existed as a presence—stern, forbidding, righteously Catholic—and I wasn’t sure if I’d picked up the image from Mooney or constructed it on my own.
    Her sharp voice on the phone hadn’t helped.
    I patted my hair down before I rang the bell. The automatic gesture made me pause. I used to do it all the time, back when I was an insecure teenager. Now—well, if my hair’s too wild, too bad. But the instinctive response made me wonder if I wanted to impress Mooney’s mom. And why.
    The minute I hit the bell, her voice came over the loudspeaker. She must have been waiting for me. Maybe she’d watched me approach from a curtained window. When I gave my name, she buzzed me in. The interior door was heavy wood, solid, with bars blocking a dusty window. The foyer smelled musty, and the gray stair carpeting had seen long years of use.
    I didn’t have to search for 3B. The door was already open and Mrs. Mooney hovered in the doorway. I wouldn’t have known her.
    She wore a shapeless pink housedress that hung straight from her shoulders, covered by a worn beige cardigan. Her gray hair was full and lush, obviously a wig. The contrast between the glossy hair and the sunken face was too great. There was a hint of Mooney around her jaw. Heavy lines creased her brow and dragged her face down in discontented folds.
    She favored me with a faint smile, but she’d lost none of her peremptory telephone manner.
    â€œCome in,” she said, and it wasn’t an invitation but an order.
    â€œHow do you do,” I said formally, “I’m Carlotta Carlyle.”
    â€œPeg Mooney,” she said, extending a frail hand. “I remember you in uniform.”
    She closed the door after me, leaning on it heavily. Then she transferred her weight to the rubber grips of an aluminum walker.
    â€œPlease,” she said briskly, “have a seat on the couch. It takes me a little while to set myself up in the chair. Would you like some lemonade?”
    There was a glass on the coffee table with a little lace doily underneath, sheltering the wooden table from harm. Not that it had ever been a good piece of wood, but whatever care and polish could do for it they’d done.
    The room was like that. The fabric on the green brocade sofa looked thin enough to shred, threadbare with careful cleaning. The smocked throw pillows were twenty years old if they were a day, their once-gold taffeta graying at the edges. Too much furniture had been stuffed in the small room, too many quaint little ornamental tables and footstools. Too many doilies and cushions and knickknacks. The effect was that of a larger room condensed. It made me claustrophobic and I wondered how Mooney stood it. Mooney who had a desk and a chair and a single picture in his office.
    I was certain the furnishings dated from the Mooney childhood home, too worn to resell and too