A Trouble of Fools Read Online Free

Mom.
    One good thing. I had gotten through to the morgue, and they didn’t have any unclaimed corpses that matched up with Eugene Devens.
    “Budgies of the world, unite!” I said to the parakeet.
    “You have nothing to lose but your brains.”
    “Fluffy wanna cracker,” she replied hopefully.
    Seeing that we’d reached an impasse, I said good night, stuck her back in the cage, and yanked the hood down, providing instant sunset. That bird has my late Aunt Bea’s exact voice. She’s just as stubborn, too. Sometimes it’s like being haunted.
    I fed T.C. his dinner, pulled a windbreaker over my Grateful Dead T-shirt, and checked my jeans. Both knees intact.
    I made sure all the lights were on before I left. That way the burglars don’t trip over anything. I leave the radio blaring, too, since T.C. is not much of a watchcat.
    I was going to have to do some legwork for Margaret Devens’s thousand. Legwork I was looking forward to with, shall we say, mixed emotions.
    My old red Toyota kicked over on the second try. I love that car, first one I ever bought, and still feisty. I indulge my passion for red in automobile ownership. Cars don’t have to complement your hair.
    Green & White is not one of your more prosperous cab companies. It’s tucked into a block of cut-rate auto-glass dealers and used-rug shops that front on the less-than-scenic Mass. Pike. The garage is ugly yellow brick, with an interior done in Early Oilstain. Eight cabs can park inside, as long as nobody needs to open any doors. There’s one hydraulic lift,
     
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    just in case the mechanic gets ambitious. The mechanic they had in my day rarely had the energy to flip the pages on the girlie calendar.
    The office is the real treat. The two eight-by-four windows have never been washed. If you didn’t know that, you might think they were supposed to be opaque. The left-hand Venetian blind, a blotch of black smudges trisected by strips of yellowed tape, is out-uglied only by the right-hand one, which is dirtier, and broken to boot, so that the slats list to the left. A pegboard full of car keys is the most attractive item of decor. You wouldn’t want to peer in any of the corners.
    I
    hacked part-time while I majored in sociology at U.
    Mass.-Boston. It taught me how to get around the city without ever being obliged to stop for a red light. It also kept me away from waitressing, which was a good thing because I’ve never gotten the knack of taking orders.
    I worked nights. From eleven to seven the voice of the late-night dispatcher came over so smooth and fine it was a pleasure to hear the squawk box. I bet we got a lot of business from guys just dialing for the pleasure of hearing that sexy contralto say she’d pick ‘em up in five minutes. I didn’t meet the owner of the voice till months after I’d formed a picture of her in my mind.
    I guess I’d always imagined her black. A deep huskiness in her voice, the kind I associate with gospel singers and fire-and-brimstone preachers, gave it away. In my imagination she was tall and svelte and exotic as hell, breathing heavily into the microphone, a future Motown R&B star.
    Her color was the only thing I got right.
    Gloria. Her immense bulk caught me totally off guard.
    Not to mention the wheelchair. I mean, that low sexy voice never gave a hint of anything but ease, even when the board was lit up from here to Tuesday and all the cabs were broken down and a hurricane was set to blow.
    Gloria. Spinal cord injury in a car crash at nineteen.
    Lived in a room at the back of the garage; no steps to interfere with the motorized chair. She kept herself to herself, seemed to socialize only with her three behemoth brothers.
    When the cabbies joked about her—which wasn’t often, and always in stifled tones coupled with quick over-the-shoulder glances in case said brothers were present—they’d say she was suicidal, eating herself to death.
    I got in the habit of dropping by her office, shooting the