Baltimore Blues (8 page)

Tess couldn’t let that pass. “We’re not so sure he did, Mr. Miles. Kill him, I mean. He very well may have hated him, but I don’t think Rock—Mr. Paxton—killed him.”

He smiled. “That’s
right
, Miss Monaghan. Innocent before proven guilty, that’s what they say. I tell you, though, I wouldn’t begrudge him a bit. I heard on the news at noon that Mr. Abramowitz may have been bugging that boy’s girlfriend. A jury hears that, I wouldn’t be surprised if he walked. That’s not right, what that man did. He was a bad man.”

Great. Television had the Ava angle, if not her name. The
police must have leaked a few details this morning, feeling expansive after making a quick arrest. And if TV had that much, the newspaper would want more. Tess knew by the time the morning newspaper came out, Baltimore could know how many silver fillings Ava had in her mouth, and if they tingled when she ate frozen yogurt.

The Hydrox cookies were gone, and even the affable Mr. Miles seemed ready for the visit to end. Tess drove home, thinking about what a wonderful witness he would make for the prosecution and listening to an intriguing noise in her engine. It sounded like a $200 noise. If she was lucky she might break even after all this.

Home. She took the back stairs, ducking Kitty. She’d want a complete rehash of the day. Tess just wanted to transcribe her tapes and written notes for Tyner, then sit on the floor of the shower and let the hot water beat on her.

But she had company—the kind of company who lets himself in with his own key, strips down to his underwear, and crawls beneath the covers. Jonathan Ross had come to call.

J
onathan Ross had seemed shockingly original to Tess once, but she soon learned every newspaper had a Jonathan Ross. Someone who covers cops, and wants to be a cop, too, dressing like the television version of an undercover vice detective—longish hair, a leather thong at the neck with a charm dangling from it, a diamond stud in one ear. Someone who lards his stories with unnamed officials and “sources close to the investigation.” Someone who speaks in the latest street slang, and almost pulls it off. Some of these guys were heroes, some jokes. In his time Jonathan had managed to be a little of both, but his star was rising and fewer people were laughing. Tess still laughed, one reason he kept coming around. She knew him when. They had started out together on the
Star
—her first job, his first big-city gig.

Back then, all of four years ago, they had something called a relationship, complete with dreary late-night arguments that were always about the same thing: What was the point of being together if you knew one day you were going to be apart? They had broken up when the paper folded, a time when a lot of people seemed to be leaving Tess behind, as if her joblessness might be contagious. Then, about a year ago, his latest relationship heading into deeper waters, Jonathan popped up again. Tess became his shield against the new woman. He came, he went, he never called. Tess told herself she didn’t care. She preferred it this way, she told
others. Jonathan was just another piece of fitness equipment, her home gym. She tried not to think about his girlfriend, and if she did she shrugged and thought:
Well, I was there first
.

From her bed, Jonathan asked, as he always did: “Still got that body?”

Tess replied, as tradition required: “I don’t know. Let me take my clothes off and check.” She did.

“That body.” Her shape had not changed since she was fifteen, when her mother declared it obscene and began the struggle to keep it from public view. Tess, naturally modest, immediately became an exhibitionist, running around in the tiniest two-piece bathing suits she could find. To her surprise this was a much better way to get boyfriends than hitting home runs over their heads and skimming hard red rubber balls off their backs in dodgeball. She had been a popular teenager.

“What are you working on?” Tess asked not much later, grabbing beers from her refrigerator and carrying them back to bed. “I don’t recall seeing your name in the paper for a while.” She always pretended to have missed his byline, no matter how prominent.

Jonathan didn’t bother to remind her he had been splashed across page one just yesterday, with the story on Abramowitz’s death. Disdainful of any story reported and written in less than six weeks, he pitched in on dailies only when his sources gave him something too juicy to waste. Productivity cheapened a man, Jonathan liked to say.

“I’ve been following some guys on Death Row. Ever since Thanos was put to death, they’ve started feeling like they might really go. You know, some of them have been there forever, long enough to forget they’re supposed to be executed. They don’t feel so complacent anymore.”

“I can’t see how his case affects these guys, if they’re not begging to die. The law hasn’t changed.”

“But the appeals have to run out eventually,” Jonathan insisted. “Thanos will open—”

“The floodgates? Let me guess—your nut graph is already
written. Your
whole
story is already written.” She spoke into her beer bottle as if it were a microphone, putting on the officious voice of a newscaster. “We begin with three moving paragraphs on one inmate—‘John Smith sits in his cell on Maryland’s Death Row, counting down the two hundred forty days left in his appeal’—a little background on Thanos, woven seamlessly in, and then, whammo! The obligatory fourth graph nut, which reads: ‘Inmates on Death Row believe Thanos’s execution opened the floodgates for a rash of executions in Maryland, where a complicated appeals process once made Death Row a misnomer.’”

“Bitch,” Jonathan said, but there was no edge to it. As an excommunicated journalist, Tess could get away with mocking him. “Not bad, though. Maybe I’ll steal it.”

His beeper went off and Jonathan lunged for the phone. The city desk. “No. No. Hey, I’m
trying
. No.” He winked at Tess. “I’m working on that right
now
.” Then he put down the phone, pulled her on top of him and started over, taking his time. Better, Tess thought, much better.

Later, the room dark, six empty bottles of Molson on the bedside table, Jonathan hooked his fingers in Tess’s unbraided hair and said: “So you know this Darryl Paxton guy, don’t you? One of your rowing buddies?”

Tess freed her hair and slid across the bed, trying to put as much distance between them as she could find on the full-size mattress. “You still working that story?”

“Not officially.” He was cool, not at all embarrassed. That was one thing about Jonathan. His unabashed ambition, his sheer candor about his motives, made his manipulation and callousness almost charming.

“But you could be, if you got some wonderful stuff, I suppose.” Tess was determined to be as cool as he was, a poker face. “Sorry. I don’t have any wonderful stuff.”

“You know something, though,” he wheedled. “Maybe a little bit more about the motive? Everyone knows it was over a woman, but we don’t have any specifics. Did Abramowitz make a pass at her? Was he doing her?”

“Can’t help you, Jonathan.”

“A name.”

“No.”

“A great detail—one fabulous detail no one else has. Something about Paxton. Does he have a ferocious temper? Maybe a history of punching people who piss him off? Where’s he from originally? I could work sources, see if he had a history as a juvie.”

Tess sat still. She wouldn’t even shake her head yes or no.

“We could go with the angle on Paxton hiring an ex-Olympic rower to defend him, and getting a rowing buddy to help investigate the case.” He smiled, not very pleasantly. “Oh yeah. I called Joey Dumbarton today to see what else he knew. He’s a good guy, gave me the tip about the sign-in sheet. But he had already talked to someone today and was tired of being bugged. He called you a babe, by the way.”

“Well, that’s the only reason I’m doing this, to meet eligible men.”

“The rowing angle could make your friend look stupid. Irrational.”

Tess shrugged. It was good for a paragraph. Not even Jonathan could build it into an entire story.

He got up, pulling on his clothes. “I would have come by anyway. I missed you. Missed that body. No hard feelings?”

“Jonathan, if I was going to have hard feelings over any rude, insensitive behavior I suffered at your hands, I’d have turned into a pillar of salt a long time ago.”

“That’s not why Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. She turned back to look at Sodom. As a Catholic-Jew, you should at least know the Old Testament.”

“I’m not a Catholic-Jew. I’m nothing, not even an atheist. Just nothing.”

“Have it your way.” He kissed her neck. “See you later, nothing.”

“Whenever. You better get home. Isn’t it almost time for bed check?”

She knew almost nothing about his girlfriend, not even her name. Some girl he had gone to high school with down in
the Washington suburbs. Probably rich, if she even existed. Sometimes Tess wasn’t sure. If she did exist she might as well get used to Jonathan cheating on her. For a good story Jonathan Ross would crawl in with anybody.

Tess’s Toyota ended up behind Rock’s bicycle on Light Street the next morning. She chased him along Hanover Street and down Waterview to the boat house. The attendant was missing in action again, so Rock unlocked the door with his key.

“Catch you on the flip side,” he said to Tess. To get to the exercise room and the stairs beyond, one had to pass through the men’s or ladies’ locker rooms. Tess threw her keys in an empty locker, stopping to examine her face in the long mirror. Gray, a little puffy under the eyes, as she always was at 6
A.M
. Jonathan’s visit hadn’t left any unusual marks. She pushed through the swinging door into the small anteroom, crammed with weights and Concept II ergometers. Rowing machines to laymen. Torture devices to Tess.

Rock was staring out the window to the west.

“Downpour in fifteen minutes,” he said authoritatively, like some movie Indian predicting a herd’s movement by pressing his ear to the ground. Tess thought the clouds were the kind that burned off with the rising sun, but she didn’t care enough to argue.

“Good,” she said. “It’s God’s way of telling me to go back to bed.”

“How about a challenge on the erg? A five-thousand-meter piece?”

“Terms?”

“Breakfast for the one who comes closest to his personal best.”

“Above or below?”

“Right. If I come in ten seconds over my best time, and you’re nine over, you win.”

“Assuming I’d take this bet, what’s your personal best for five thousand? Mine is…twenty-two minutes.”

“You’re such a liar. I was here the day you did sub-twenty-one and threw up on your shoes.”

“OK, twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds for my mark. But don’t forget I’ve seen you do five thousand in eighteen.”

“You’re on.”

Tess set the distance on the erg and strapped her feet into the blocks. Despite her height she had to stretch to reach the wooden pull bar, worn smooth by rowers’ rough hands. The bar was attached to a chain, the chain connected to a large flywheel. She slid the bicycle-like seat to the top of the metal shaft, knees bent, her right arm between her legs, her left arm outside, head down. At Rock’s signal she pulled the bar into her rib cage, sliding back, then up, and the meters started clicking by on the odometer. But as fast as the meters went by, the seconds flew faster.

The erg, unlike most exercise machines, measured how hard one worked, precisely the reason Tess loathed it. Unlike a stair-climber, on which she could lock her arms and spare her legs, or a stationary bike on which she could ease up for a few miles, the erg knew if she was trying. Pull hard and efficiently, and the meters mounted up. A fast stroke rate—the number of pulls per minute—wouldn’t fool the machine, not if there was no power behind the strokes.

The digital readout said her stroke rate was twenty-five per minute, her five hundred-meter time just over 2:10. Tess closed her eyes and settled in this groove, simulating a head race, powering on and off, barely aware of Rock at her side, locked in his own fantasy race. She was on the Chester River now, eyes fixed on the bony spine and white neck of the team’s stroke, Whitney Talbot.

Tess opened her eyes. The first 2,500 meters had clocked in at 9:35, but she knew she could never keep up a sub-twenty-minute pace. She backed off, cruising on the strength of her legs. All she had to do was try. Rock was going to buy her breakfast no matter what. She would shock him, shock everyone in Jimmy’s by ordering something completely different. Fried eggs. Scrapple.

Thinking about food actually increased her speed. If she
could pull the last 500 in under two minutes, it would be a personal best for her. Rock was partially right, her previous best was 21:02; only it had been
his
shoes she had vomited on. Only a good friend could forget that salient detail. Pulling at full power for fifty strokes, she began to feel the dizzying nausea of a race. Nothing was like this—not a hard run, not benching 100 pounds, not even throwing one’s self at a heavy bag, something she did when the seedy little boxing gym in her neighborhood was empty. Her calves ached, her stomach hovered dangerously near her throat, her forearms burned, her skin felt as if it might fly off. She had nothing left, yet she had to find more. With one final, wrenching pull, she traveled her last ten meters: 20:55, seven seconds off her best time. She let go of the bar and put her head between her knees, gasping and heaving.

“You win,” Rock said.

Tess shook her head, unable to speak. Rock had finished aeons ago. Even when he tried to handicap a race for her sake, his competitive nature took over and he won. She lifted her head to read the figures on his clock: 18:30. Possibly a personal worst for Rock, at least thirty seconds off his best.

“I guess I’m a little distracted,” he apologized. “But I’m proud of you, Tess. You really pushed today.”

She smiled weakly and struggled to her feet. Her legs buckled and she had to lean over, hands propped above her knees, to keep from falling down. Her breath came in ragged, panting gasps. Her brain was forming words, but her mouth refused to say them. It wanted only to gulp down air.

Rock held a plastic wastebasket up to her chin and placed his hand on the back of her neck. “Don’t hold it down. It feels better to let it go.” Her stomach was empty, so all she produced was a thin, clear drool, like a dog that had been eating grass. Rock wiped her face with the tail of his sweat-drenched T-shirt, then helped her to the room’s one chair, massaging her calves after she sat down.

It was strange to have a man move his hands along her body and feel nothing, no sexual tingle. It had always been this way with Rock. They were too large, she thought, almost
freakish together, to even think about being a couple. Apparently he thought so, too: His occasional girlfriends had all been tiny, although none so tiny as Ava. So there was no subtext, no tension as he rubbed Tess’s legs. How different things might be if there had been. No Ava. No dead Abramowitz.
Not free to choose
, Tess thought wryly,
but free to fall
. And, oh, had they fallen.

“You’re good to me, Rock.”

“Well, you’re good to me, too.”

“No. I—I screwed things up. I got in over my head, and I dragged you in with me.”

“It was my idea, remember? Don’t listen to Tyner, Tess. God knows, I don’t.”

Now was the time to confess, to tell him how she had manipulated him, tried to manipulate Ava, tried to arrange things so she could take his check without breaking his heart. She said nothing.

Suddenly the rain Rock had predicted began in earnest, a heavy, lashing downpour, with flashes of lightning. If he hadn’t warned her she would have been on the water by now, far enough out to be in real danger. In a storm like this it was risky to ride it out, equally risky to try to make it back to the boat house.