Yesterday's News

temples like a cocktail lounge mentalist going into her act. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I have a splitting headache.”
    “I think I have some aspirin.”
    She shook her head again. “Can’t. I mean, I can’t abide pills. Probably psychosomatic, but I can’t swallow anything medicinal, not even those little cold things. I throw up.”
    “I think they have—”
    She cut me off by saying, “I’ve got to get back. I’m supposed to be working on a series about redevelopment, and this real estate guy who’s getting more than he’s paying for. Speaking of which...” She began rummaging through her shoulder bag... here, let me give you a check.”
    “Jane, I haven’t said I’d take you on yet.”
    Rust pushed toward me a pale blue draft with the spidery imprint of a sailing ship. She already had filled in the date, my name, and her signature. “The proverbial blank check.”
    “Jane—”
    “And this is my business card, with my home number.”
    “I won’t accept a blank check.”
    “What’s your daily rate?”
    “Three hundred. Plus expenses, which would mean travel, meals, and hotel down there if I did take your case.”
    I hoped the amount would discourage her. It didn’t.
    She entered “$900.” and “Nine hundred and no cents” on the appropriate lines and got up to leave. “Three days’ worth. This way you can think about it and still have to get back to me. Good reporters make people get back to them.”

    I spent the next two hours catching up on paperwork. I focused on one item in particular. The police commissioner had lifted my permit to carry a concealed weapon because of a failure to report my gun being stolen. I was told on the sly that if I submitted a second request through headquarters on Berkeley Street , the permit would be reinstated.
    I kept Jane Rust’s check and card, paper-clipped together, on top of the in-box. That forced me to think about her. I really didn’t want the case. I really didn’t want to spend a week or so living out of a motel in a decaying industrial city with a stinking harbor. And I especially didn’t want to make cops there overly eager to roust me for looking into one of their own.
    On the other hand, I wasn’t going to be a private investigator very long if I had to rely on public transportation to get around. And there was one person within walking distance who might tell me whether Ms. Rust was a client who’d bind.

“Twenty dollars, John, twenty dollars. Can you believe it?”
    “That’s steep, Mo. ”
    “Steep? Steep? I’ll give you steep, alright.” Mo Katzen squared his stubby shoulders, the too-wide tie riding like a scarf beneath the unbuttoned vest to a suit jacket I’d never seen him wear in all the years I’d known him. He ran a hand through his snowy hair and then shook the fire-orange parking violation at me like a medicine man with a gourd rattle. “Time was a citizen could feed a family of four on twenty a week. Of course, time was a citizen could leave his car at the curb in his own city without a Resident Parking sticker, too.”
    “Mo, I need—”
    “You got one of those?”
    “One of what?”
    “Those. Those parking decal things.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re a traitor to your roots, John.”
    “I’m sorry, Mo. ”
    “Goddamnest idea.” Mo spun the ticket down onto his desk. I wasn’t sure whether the surface of the desk was metal or wood, since I’d never seen it through the town dump of sandwich wrappers, Red Sox programs, almanacs, Playbills, and probably Mo’s own high school yearbook. “Imagine, the Athens of the Atlantic restricting parking to ‘Residents Only.’ ”
    “An outrage.”
    “Mild, John, too mild. Granted, I should have my head examined for even trying to drive into Yuppiedom over by you, but I got invited to a dinner, and I’m not about to pay ten bucks for two hours in one of those private lots.”
    “And not many of them left.”
    “Of course not. If there were, the developers couldn’t get their price for selling the spaces behind the condo buildings. You know what a space goes for now?”
    I decided not to mention the one I rented from my landlord. “No.”
    “Forty to fifty grand. For an eight-by-twenty table of tar that you couldn’t fit a decent-sized car into. Assuming Detroit made decent-sized cars anymore. Which if they did they couldn’t sell, because everybody’s buying these foreign jobs. You ever see a foreign car in Southie when you were growing