Free A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes Page B

each doorway. Picking Eugene’s room seemed easy. Only the left front bedroom, a largish room, maybe twelve by sixteen, lacked a pastel dust-ruffle and frilly lace curtains.
    Standing in the dimly lit hallway, I tried to imagine the room before the whirlwind struck, make a few guesses about the guy who’d slept there for sixteen years’ worth of nights.
    It didn’t seem like the room of a fifty-six-year-old man. I wondered if I’d stumbled on Gene’s boyhood bedroom, preserved intact as some family shrine.
    I checked the other rooms again, just to make sure. Frills and lace. Scented dusting powder. Only one room smelled of cigar smoke, the one I’d singled out first.
    The narrow bed’s brass headboard was barred and knobbed. The mattress had been yanked onto the floor, and slit repeatedly. Coils of wire poked out of the springs like jack-in-the-box toys. Over the bed hung a giant poster of young Carl Yastrzemski, Red Sox hero.
    So the searchers had been looking for something substantial, not a key, or a photo, or anything flat that could be taped behind smiling Yaz.
    I took a few steps into the room, letting my eyes wander.
    It’s hard to get to know a guy from his room when that room’s been trashed by persons unknown, and possibly rifled by the cops to boot.
    On surfaces not graced by old baseball posters, Eugene favored taped-up pages from girlie magazines. That was the total of his decorating pizazz, at his age, unless the previous searchers had stolen the Picasso prints off the paler rectangles on the walls. More likely Miss September had fallen into disfavor, or under the bed. Eugene read soft-porn “male adventure novels” that looked like Harlequin Romances for men. I loved the titles: Beyond Glory, Glorious Flames,
     
    Gunrunner to Glory. A whole lot of glory on the covers; that and big-breasted women falling out of slinky nightgowns.
    The day after I covered my first homicide as a cop, I went home and scoured my bedroom. Threw out all that embarrassing junk I’d hoarded, marveling at the bizarre items I’d thoughtlessly shoved into the bottom drawer of my dresser for the cops to smirk at on that inevitable day. The gonzo Diet Aids I’d purchased, convinced I was two pounds over the fashion limit for my latest bikini. They made me throw up, but I’d paid so much for those dumb pills, mail order, sight unseen, that I’d been too angry to toss them in the trash. So I’d heaved them in the bottom drawer instead, along with the book of illustrated religious poetry (can you believe it?) that was the very first gift my very first boyfriend gave me when I was an old maid of fourteen. I tossed out the early letters from Cal, my ex, letters I suppose could be called love letters, if you stretched the bounds. Out went the old tube of birth-control foam, along with one of those sexy uplift bras, and the torn jeans I’d worn, almost exclusively, my eighteenth summer. I found and discarded a coupon for breast enlargement cream, corny birthday cards, a mercifully brief attempt at a diary.
    If the cops come and toss my room tomorrow, they won’t find much of a personal nature. Pictures of my mom and dad. My wedding album, a curiously impersonal item, since the smiling bride seems a total stranger to me. Aunt Bea’s oval gold locket, with its two photos of faded young men.
    My aunt Bea never married. I have no idea who those men were or what they meant to her, but she treasured that locket, and I shine it up every once in a while in her memory. Probably the most personal item in my room is my old National steel guitar, and there’s no way those cops will ever know what that guitar means to me.
    My worst cop trait was insubordination. My best was sheer stubbornness, and I haven’t lost it. Even though I knew the place had been plundered by the bad guys and the good guys both, I searched it again. I shook out the pages of those trashy novels, twisted the stupid knobs off the brass headboard, poked inside them