A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes

disappear without a trace?
    Eugene Paul came to the States at the age of five and was educated at the usual assortment of Catholic schools. I wondered if his mom had meant her only son for the priesthood, been disappointed when he’d quit high school. I wondered if she’d been disappointed or relieved when he’d finally married at thirty-five. Married Mary Elizabeth Reilly in 1964.
    Wife died six years later, sixteen years ago. No kids.
    Nobody had mentioned vices other than drink and ladies in connection with Gene. I hadn’t found any involvement with, say, the numbers or the track, but if there were heavy loans involved, if Gene couldn’t pay the sharks, that would be a hell of a reason for him to stay lost.
    Eugene Devens did not own a car, which might seem strange for a cabdriver in any other city. In Boston, which has ample parking for, say, one in ten of its residents—not to mention commuters—not owning a car makes sense. You save—not only on parking tickets, but on medical expenses for mental-health-related ailments. Unfortunately, one of the best ways to trace a missing person is through automobile registration. Eugene’s gain was my loss.
    The Central Square Dunkin’ Donuts has a phone booth at the back, one of the few real phone booths left in the world where you can talk with any privacy. By using up a lot of dimes and impersonating a dotty travel agent cursed with a missing middle-aged tourist, I learned that no Eugene Devens had traveled via Aer Lingus from Logan to either Shannon or Dublin. Aer Lingus is it as far as direct flights from Boston to Ireland. I figured anyone who felt as Eugene Devens did about the British would hardly set foot on the hated soil of Heathrow, but I checked out British Air and TWA and Pan Am. Nothing. I even checked People Express out of Newark, in case he’d gone cattle car.
    I called a genuine travel agent, and discovered that the only charters to Ireland departing within the past two weeks had consisted entirely of M.I.T. faculty members, a group with whom Gene Devens would hardly have felt at home.
    No, she had not heard of any travel organization with the initials GBA. Ships she eliminated in no time. Boston is not the great port it once was. Zip. Nada. No passenger ships had sailed for the Emerald Isle in the past month.
    So if Gene was in jolly old Ireland, he’d traveled incognito.
    Walked across the water. Sailed solo. Parachuted from a secret military jet. And pretty soon, he’d send a postcard to Billy the bartender, and all would be well, except I’d feel morally obligated to refund most of Margaret Devens’s thousand.
    I checked my notebook again, searching for God knows what. My notes looked like an obit. Born, schooled, married.
    Everything but date of death.
    I shook the thought away with the doughnut crumbs. It was time to speak to my client again. I needed a look at Gene’s room.
    My car was parked in one of those back lots off that narrow street right behind Mass. Ave., Bishop Somebody-or Other Drive. It’s the kind of street that makes you think the bishop wasn’t held in high esteem. My little red Toyota was still there though, untouched. Did you know that when a woman who grew up in Detroit buys a Japanese car, it’s close to treason?
    Before heading to the Devens house, I swung by
    Paolina’s housing project. It’s one of those low-rise brick townhouse developments, better planned than the ghetto towers, with less concentrated poverty and hopelessness, an occasional tree, a small square of grass. It’s tucked in a back pocket of East Cambridge. The steel skyscrapers of the high-tech boom have grown up around it, encircling it, blocking the sun.
    It’s not so bad in the daytime, but nights, I want to haul Paolina’s whole family out of there. Paolina’s mom, Marta, is Colombian. She married some Puerto Rican guy over here, and he scampered after the fifth kid. There’s a rotating mass of visiting cousins and uncles. Marta’s a