Swan Dive

of the reasons I had to get out of the house just now. I couldn’t stand the hypocritical men standing around trying to console my parents about what Theresa had become while they were probably kicking themselves for never trying to... never trying to see her, too.”
    ”Tell me about Theresa personally.”
    ”Personally?”
    ”Yes. What was she like?”
    ”Pretty. No, more flashy, like the kind of girl the guys would always be watching. She knew it, too. And she had this great smile and way of talking to you, that made you feel better even though it wasn’t so much what she said as what she let you say.” Sandra smiled, but it didn’t make her look happy or pretty. ”Maybe that’s why she was good at what she did.”
    ”You ever meet Roy Marsh?”
    ”No. To be honest, I’d really only see Theresa when she’d come up to the house for family stuff. Dinner once in a while, holidays. She never brought anybody with her. Or invited us down for anything. I don’t think my parents ever even saw her apartment.” She broke off, her expression hardening. ”You guys decided when I can finally get in there and get her stuff?” I remembered lunch with Niño and his possibly taking me there. ”Not up to me. The one to call is Lieutenant Holt. Try him tomorrow and he’ll probably okay it.”
    ”So long as I can get in by the weekend. I want this all... all cleaned up by then.”
    ”I can understand that. Did Theresa ever talk with you about her clients?”
    ”No. I know she had a guy managing for her. She took up with him after she had the trouble in Salem . And there were a couple of other girls working with her for him. But I don’t remember their names.” She half laughed. ”Probably only heard their street names anyway.”
    ”You said she got into trouble where you work?”
    ”Where I... oh, no. Not up there. Salem , Massachusetts . She got arrested, for soliciting I guess they call it. But that was a long time ago. I was just, what, maybe thirteen.”
    ”Anything happen from it?”
    ”I don’t think so, but I was kind of young to really understand, and she didn’t exactly talk about it at the dinner table, you know?”
    ”She ever talk about leaving, about finding another line of work?”
    The half-laugh again. ”Not exactly. She always wanted to be a movie star. Even when she did go to school, she never really studied, just came home and read the fan magazines. She thought she looked like a young Natalie Wood. That was how she said it too, ‘a young Natalie Wood.’ She kept thinking that somehow she’d be able to get into movies through somebody she’d meet. How she thought that was going to happen for her when she lived here instead of out in California someplace...”
    We’d made a circuit of the block and were drawing even with her parents’ driveway.
    She said, ”Any more questions for me?”
    ”Not for now. I’m really sorry about Theresa.” Sandra kicked a stone off the sidewalk and onto her father’s lawn. ”Save your sympathy for Teri. She’s the one who died Monday. Theresa I lost a long time ago.”
    She turned away from me and walked resignedly back up the path to the house.

    ”John! Christ, I haven’t seen you in, what, five years.”
    ”More like seven, Ed.”
    I grew up in South Boston with Ed. He’d wanted to attend college and law school, but his steady girlfriend’s pregnancy intervened. Starting out as a night janitor in the South Boston courthouse, he slowly moved up the chain to an assistant clerk’s job. He’s active in court administration across the Commonwealth and knows everybody.
    ”What brings you back to God’s Little Acre? Oh, shit,” he said, striking himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. ”I forgot about Beth. I’m sorry.”
    ”No need to be sorry. I’m here officially. Sort of.” Ed leaned over the counter and looked in every direction before saying, ”What’s the trouble?”
    ”You know the killing over at the Barry?”
    ”Just what I read in the Herald. A hooker and her john, right?”
    ”Right. My gun was found at the scene, and I need some information I can’t look up for myself.”
    ”Christ, John. A double murder, that’s pretty heavy stuff. How deep are you in this?”
    ”I didn’t do it. Somebody mugged me and took my gun to frame me.”
    ”The paper just said something about ‘unidentified’ weapon.”
    ”Yeah, but it’s not the weapon I’m interested in. It’s the hooker.”
    ”I don’t get