A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes Page B

everybody does. Unlike everybody else, I stayed in my lane.
    Left at the Jamaica Pond boathouse. Right on Centre Street. I followed the tracks of a trolley line that hasn’t run in God knows how many years. Jamaica Plain’s a real part of Boston, a neighborhood, a nontourist section of town. I remember.
    Centre Street lined with shoe repair shops, laundries, mom-and-pop convenience stores, and restaurants with counters where the regulars stopped for eggs, bacon, and political arguments on their way to work.
    Now Centre Street has florists, at least I think they might be florists. One had two pink lilies plunked in a single vase by way of window display. Another, fearful of garish overstatement, featured a single spray of orchids. I counted three croissant bakeries, four small shuttered restaurants with hand-lettered menus, two shoe boutiques. The signs of gentrification.
     
    Where will all those young urban professionals get their shoes resoled?
    Give me an address anywhere in Boston and I can find it cold. Margaret Devens had started to babble directions over the phone, but I’d shut her down. Cabbies know.
    I took a right onto a quiet residential street of big old Victorians; a few weary down-and-outers with chipped aluminum siding, some newly pastel-painted numbers with
    geranium-filled window boxes. Big houses for big families.
    Most of the Boston Irish who’d escaped the Southie slums made a beeline for the elegant South Shore suburbs, but some, particularly the ones with city government ties, headed for areas of Jamaica Plain like this one. Lace-curtain Irish, it must have been once, with a lively parish church, and houses bursting with kids. Now, most of the better decorated places looked like they’d been sliced into separate apartments, probably condos. They didn’t look as luxurious as the dream townhouses my cat and I were invited to view at Cedar Wash, but I bet the price tags were pretty steep.
    When I saw the white Victorian monster on the corner, I stopped wondering why Margaret and Eugene hadn’t exchanged many confidences. If just the two siblings lived at number 19, they could use separate floors and never meet.
    They’d need two phone lines so they could call each other in case of emergency.
    There must have been money in the family once, to buy that house. There’d have to be some left over, to pay the property taxes, refresh the gleaming white paint, keep the sloping lawn neatly manicured, the yews and azaleas trimmed.
    Well, Margaret had a stash of crisp hundred-dollar bills.
    And Eugene drove a hack.
    One thing about Jamaica Plain, you never have much trouble parking. I pulled the Toyota to the curb smack in front of the Devens house.
    A walkway of concrete squares and grass rectangles tempted me to hopscotch up to the porch. I controlled myself in case my client was peering from behind one of the window shades.
    The front door wore a polished brass knocker in the shape of a pineapple. I ignored the doorbell for a chance to get my fingerprints on its bright surface. It clanged a bold satisfying note.
    I waited awhile, humming a tune Paolina had taught me, something that named a lot of animals in Spanish, then tried the bell. I could hear it buzz and echo inside. I rang again, hollered Margaret’s name.
    Damn. I checked my watch. Eleven-twenty. I’d spent longer than I meant to in Cambridge, but surely Margaret would have waited an extra twenty minutes.
    Well, maybe she’d forgotten. She was old, after all.
    Maybe she was at church, or visiting some neighbor, gossiping over coffee while I shivered in the chill. Just for the hell of it, I turned the front door handle and gave the door a push.
    It opened easily and I stood there gaping.
    City people lock their doors.
    “Margaret!” I called again, yelling it loudly, as much to warn anybody in the house of my approach as to get a response.
    My hand reached reflexively for the gun on my service belt, the way it used to when I entered unsecured