Laura Lippman (25 page)

T
ESS HAD JUST CRESTED THE HILL AT THE TOP OF HER
parents’ street when she saw the shower of sparks go up, like the tail end of a low-rent fireworks display.

The roof just went
, she thought.
Which means the house is gone
.

Take the roof, she told whatever deity lurked in the night sky,
and I’ll believe in you
. Take the house. Take her bedroom, which her mother had turned into a sewing room eight years ago. Take the pine paneled basement, site of all her early forays into vice. Take the sunporch, where she had done her homework in the late afternoon. Take her mother’s carefully chosen furnishings, which matched so perfectly they made Tess’s teeth hurt. Melt the plastic covers on the living room furniture. Take everything, take whatever you need to be appeased.

But please, don’t take my parents. Not yet, not this way
.

She saw the body bag first, lying on a gurney, then
smelled the sweetish smell she knew from the fires she had covered as a reporter. Funny, she had never asked anyone what that smell was. It was probably insulation, or some other construction material, but Tess had always worried it might be flesh. She knew most people did not actually burn in fires—they died from breathing smoke, they were dead long before flames ever touched them. Still, she had never wanted to know for sure the source of that smell.

A firefighter stopped her, and it was only then she realized she had been running toward the house. Toward the body. “It’s my parents’ place,” she told the rubbery sleeve blocking her path. She kept trying to move toward the body, but the sleeve held her back. Only one body, she saw, only one. Not good enough. She wasn’t prepared to make such a choice.

The firefighter forced her to turn away from the house, to face across the street. She thought he wanted to shield her, but he was trying to get her to look at the neighbor’s lawn, where Patrick and Judith stood, holding on to one another. Their faces were impassive; they might have been watching someone else’s tragedy on the eleven o’clock news. The scene was made only more surreal by the Christmas decorations that surrounded them, an elaborate gingerbread house with grinning gingerbread men who twisted on mechanized bases. Six-foot candy canes, illuminated from within, lined the walkway.

Tess felt as if she had wakened from the worst nightmare of her life and found her parents at the foot of her bed, smiling, reassuring her.

The only difference was that their house continued to burn.

“Mommy,” Tess said, running across the street. “Daddy.”

They opened their little circle to her, and now they were all three clutching one another. Tess finally understood what it meant to hold on to someone for dear life.

“I never really liked that house,” her father said. “All these years, I never really liked it.”

They laughed, a little shakily, but they laughed. The smoking shell was a more traumatic sight for her than it was for her parents, even if they were the ones who still lived there. Tess had never known another home. She had gone from there to college, from college to an apartment on the North Side of Baltimore, and then to her little place at the top of Kitty’s building. But none of those had been home. In her mind, this white frame Colonial was the only house in the world, the place she thought of when she heard the word
home
. She had known it wouldn’t always belong to her family. In fact, she had thought her parents silly to cling to such an oversized place. But she had assumed the house would always be here, that she would have the rest of her life to drive by this spot and measure herself against the girl she had been fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago.

She knew too well that people died, but she had thought houses lived forever.

Crow arrived, alerted by Jackie, who had taken Esskay home when Tess went racing into the night. He didn’t try to join the circle of family, but stood respectfully apart, quiet and subdued.

“Arson,” he said after a while, and it wasn’t a question. He pointed with his chin at the investigators who were beginning to examine the scene.

“Where were you?” Tess asked her parents. “How is it that you weren’t here when it started?”

“We had an errand, then some dumb Christmas party,”
her father said. “The woman from your mother’s work, who makes that awful eggnog.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking eggnog anyway,” Judith said. “You have to watch your cholesterol. Not to mention what can happen eating raw eggs.”

Their house seemed to sigh and settle just then, as if to remind them cholesterol and salmonella were not the only threats to one’s longevity.

“Why would someone want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“It might not be arson,” Patrick said, but he didn’t sound convinced. There was, after all, the matter of a body on his front lawn. “The wiring’s always been a little off.”

The fire captain came over to them.

“If it hadn’t been for the wind tonight, we might have been able to save it. As it is, I’m afraid it’s a total loss.”

“That’s okay,” Patrick said. “I’ve got everything I need right here.” He hugged Judith and Tess closer to him. “Do you know what happened, though? I mean, the body you found—”

“We think he was an intruder. There’s glass inside the house, from where a pane on the kitchen door was broken. The fire appears to have been started there, and that’s where we found him when we arrived. The M.E. is going to have to autopsy him. My guess is he slipped on the gasoline he had spread and knocked himself out while trying to get away from the very fire he started.”

“An intruder?” Patrick asked. “You mean a burglar?”

“Well, he didn’t take anything out of the house, as far as we can tell. We’re assuming it’s his car we found parked in the alley, although we won’t be able to make a positive ID until he’s in the medical examiner’s office.
Car could be stolen, for all we know, but police say they have no report, not yet.”

Tess asked, “Did you check the registration?”

“Eugene H. Fulton, address on Erdman. Mean anything to you?”

The name seemed to float above their heads, another piece of charred debris from the fire. Gene Fulton. Her father’s colleague. The liquor board inspector with the side gig at Domenick’s.

“Why would Gene Fulton want to burn down our house?” Judith asked.

“I don’t know,” Pat said, looking at Tess. “What do you think, Tess? You got any theories about why Gene Fulton would be holding a grudge against me?”

Her mouth was dry, her throat raw from the smoke and the cold. “I’m not sure.”

The case was like a stray cat, she thought to herself. She kept trying to take it farther and farther away from herself and her family, only to come home and find it on the doorstep every night.

“You didn’t stop, did you? I asked you to do this one thing for me, I begged you. I told you that you were in over your head, and you still couldn’t listen to me.”

“No one knew what I was doing,” Tess said. “I was careful, I swear.”

“Why were you doing anything at all, Tess?” Her father’s voice was even, emotionless, and she realized he was as angry as she had ever seen him. “What’s really at stake here? The death of some glue-sniffing turd, a spoiled rich girl who ran away from all the help her parents were trying to give her, so she could be a whore in Southwest Baltimore.”

“I don’t think Gwen Schiller was—”

“A whore,” Patrick repeated. “A whore who was killed
by a junkie, and then someone killed him in prison, which is what he deserved. So what? Why are their lives worth so much to you, and mine so little? I’m homeless and I’ll be jobless before they get through with me. This was a warning, a little bonfire to scare you off, and it got out of control. But just because Gene’s dead from his own stupidity doesn’t mean it won’t get leaked, what I did all those years ago. Did for you, Tess. Only for you.”

Judith looked genuinely confused. So he had held her harmless, too, fed her the same bullshit story about the scholarship.

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I never meant for this to come back on you. I thought—”

“You thought you could do whatever you wanted to. You always have. Did I ever give you any grief for the decisions you made? Did I mind that you went off to some overpriced fancy college and majored in English? Did I ever ask you to get a real boyfriend, or even a real job, one where you don’t sit in a car all day taking photographs of people cheating on their spouses and insurance companies? Everything I did, I did for you. By the way—” he pulled a rectangular jewelry box from his pocket. “This is what I was doing tonight. This was my errand. We went to see your Uncle Jules, because he gave us a deal on your Christmas present. You don’t have to open it, I’ll tell you what’s inside. It’s a watch, a goddamn gold watch because I knew even if you made it fifty years at your crappy little business, there’d be no one to give you anything. Merry fucking Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.”

Her father walked away and Judith, after one anguished look back at Tess, followed him. The fire captain interceded, began asking them questions, wanted to know if they needed a place to stay this evening.
Do you have any family?
Oh yes, plenty, Judith replied. Tess just stood
where she was. It was bitter cold, she realized. But then it was December, it should be cold. The gingerbread men continued to twist in the wind. The gingerbread house had a gumdrop for a door knob. It was December. It was Christmas. It was cold.

Crow held her, angry not on his behalf, but on hers.

“He shouldn’t have said what he did. He’ll regret it. You were trying to do the right thing. One day he’ll understand that.”

“They could have died,” she said. “My parents could have been killed because of me.”

“Not even your father believes they were trying to kill him. Gene Fulton broke in while they were out. He wasn’t going to hurt them.”

“Not this time,” Tess said. “But what happens next? Last week it was Hilde. Tonight it was my parents’ house. Tomorrow it could be my parents. Or you. Or Jackie and Laylah. Or Whitney.” Tess realized she couldn’t begin to name all the people she loved, all the people who might be hurt in order to punish her. Such a list should have made her feel warm and happy, rich in relations. Tonight, all it made her feel was vulnerable.

“So what are you going to do, Tess?”

“The only thing I can do. Make a deal.”

M
EYER
H
AMMERSMITH LIVED IN THE ONLY DETATCHED
house in his block on Federal Hill. A limestone rectangle, it sat near the top of the hill that gave the neighborhood its name and it was in the Federal style, so its location could be considered doubly apt. The house was not particularly large—it was smaller, in fact, than many of the town houses arrayed in the same block—but because it stood apart, surrounded by an iron fence, it was a source of great status in Federal Hill.

Privacy
, Tess thought, pressing the buzzer at the front gate, announcing her name and waiting for the lock to be released.
Meyer Hammersmith is a man who values privacy
.

Adam Moss opened the door. Tess expected him. She had gone through him to arrange this meeting, and he had told her Meyer would insist on this location. Dubious, she had resisted at first. Take it or leave it, Adam said. She took it. She knew she was going to have to take a lot before this was through.

“He’s waiting for you in the library,” Adam said. She wouldn’t go so far as to say he was nervous, but his manner was a shade less smooth than usual. He reached for her coat, but Tess stepped back, pulling it tighter around her, as if the house were cold. If anything, it was overheated, with the dry, crackly heat found in a run-down nursing home, the kind that ended up getting closed by the state.

“I’ll keep it with me,” she said. Her gun was in the right pocket, her cell phone in the left. She didn’t expect to use either, but she liked having them close.

“As you wish,” Adam said, and he led her up a flight of stairs.

“Library” was a misnomer. One wall was filled with books, but the other three were covered with portraits—oil paintings, watercolors, charcoal sketches. No windows, Tess noted, and only one door. Only one way in, and only one way out. She studied the artworks, each hung as a museum might display them, in ornate frames and with indirect lighting. But they were so crowded, the effect was diminished. Why not spread them throughout the house? Tess recognized a Modigliani and a Dégas, but she knew the latter only because the girl wore ballet garb. It was a bit unsettling, all these faces staring at her.

Meyer Hammersmith sat in a high-backed chair, one of only two pieces of furniture in the room. The other was a chaise longue, whose red velvet upholstery and sinuous lines gave it a decadent feel. Tess could not see herself perched on such a thing under any circumstances, but especially not for this meeting. Adam Moss also declined the chaise, standing a few feet to Tess’s right, which happened to put him between her and the door.

“Miss Monaghan?” Meyer Hammersmith did not rise, nor offer his hand. This close up, he bore a marked resemblance to a snapping turtle, with his mottled tanned
skull, beaky nose, and downturned, rheumy eyes. Even the small hands that poked from the sleeve of his wool jacket were like a turtle’s stunted, wrinkled legs. Tess was reminded of an old-fashioned recipe for terrapin, once a prized delicacy in Maryland:
Throw the turtle in the pot for one hour, until all dirt is cleansed from the body. Then remove the toenails and the scales
—

“You are Miss Monaghan?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Adam said you had a favor to ask of me.”

“I’ve come to you to ask to guarantee my family’s safety. My family, my friends, my dog—if you can promise me that they’ll be safe, I’ll do whatever you want.”

Meyer held up a finger, as if to warn her. “You should be more careful. ‘Whatever’ is quite a lot to promise. After all, who knows what I want?”

Adam Moss shifted his weight from one side to the other, but said nothing.

“I’m ready to do whatever is necessary to protect the people I love,” Tess said. She reached into her pocket, made contact with her gun, withdrew her hand, feeling assured. “Or to stop doing it, to be more precise. I don’t know what I’ve done that has put them at risk, or what I’ve stepped in. But I give you my word I’m stopping. I’ll sign something, if that’s what you want, give up my investigator’s license if I have to. All I ask is that you stop.”

“Miss Monaghan, I don’t know who you are. I never heard of you before you sought this meeting, although I know your uncle, Donald Weinstein, by reputation.”

Something in his tone suggested it wasn’t a very good reputation. This hurt, but Tess knew she had to withstand such petty insults.

“Adam knows me.” Hammersmith looked at Adam, who gave the smallest of nods. “And you and Adam are
the powers behind the throne, right? You’re the ones who are orchestrating Dahlgren’s congressional run. Toward what end, I can’t guess and I no longer care. Just tell me what I have to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll forget about Gwen Schiller and Henry Dembrow and Domenick’s Bar. For what it’s worth, I never did figure out how it was connected to Dahlgren, or either of you.”

But I must have been close
, she wanted to say.
I must have gotten real close if people had to die and houses had to burn
.

In another part of her mind, she also wanted to say: I’m sorry, Gwen. I’m so sorry I have to give you up. But you’re dead, I can’t save you.

Hammersmith blinked his turtle eyes, blinked them again. “I am Senator Dahlgren’s finance chairman. My only concern is to amass a war chest so formidable that other Democrats will think twice before entering the race. Adam is on Dahlgren’s legislative staff. He has no official role in the campaign, although he does occasionally help us with opposition research.”

“Opposition research? Oh, you mean digging up dirt on potential rivals.”

“As you wish,” Hammersmith said.

“Do you limit yourself to research, or do you actively create opportunities for blackmail, by sending Nicola DeSanti’s girls to local hotels to meet lonely politicos?” She was thinking of Gene Fulton, escorting the pseudo-waitress from Domenick’s to Harbor Court Hotel.

If there was any expression to be read on Hammersmith’s face, it was boredom. “An interesting idea and I wouldn’t be surprised if such things have happened. Nicola has been very active in Democratic politics over the years. But you don’t have to fight that dirty, Miss Monaghan, when you have money and a squeaky clean candidate.
Backbenchers have their advantages. They’re too unimportant to be bribed, or get into trouble. No one has anything on Kenny Dahlgren, because he hasn’t done anything. He’s never even carried a major piece of legislation.”

“Then why did you have my parents’ house torched? Why did someone try to kill Devon Whittaker, just because she was the last person to speak to Gwen Schiller?”

Tess did not flatter herself by thinking she was a remarkable judge of character, not with two men this calculating. But it seemed to her there was a subtle difference in their reactions. Adam looked at Hammersmith as if to say,
What she’s talking about?
, while Hammersmith merely looked to the side, studying the long, lean face of his Modigliani.

“Surely you’re mistaken,” Hammersmith said. “This has no connection to us.”

“I think it does.” Her voice was still hesitant and deferential, but she was feeling stronger. If Hammersmith and Moss had withheld secrets from one another, it gave her leverage. “A week ago, I asked for phone records from a pay phone in Locust Point. Adam Moss requested the same records, even before I did. One of the calls on that log was to Devon Whittaker. I don’t know who Adam gave the information to—maybe he used it himself, although I rather doubt it—but Devon’s companion was killed and the killer was waiting for Devon when I got there.”

Now Hammersmith appeared genuinely confused, while Adam Moss glanced nervously from him to Tess and back again. “I didn’t—I mean, yes, I picked up the phone logs. Dahlgren said he had a constituent who needed those records. I didn’t ask why.”

“Did Dahlgren tell you the constituent’s name?”

Adam Moss shook his head. “Part of my job is knowing when not to ask questions. He told me it was a favor
for someone from the Stonewall Democratic Club. It’s the kind of favor he does all the time and it’s not completely kosher, but it’s pretty harmless. But I’d never be a party to—I mean, murder. That was never part of the arrangement.”

“What was the ‘arrangement’?”

The two men were eyeing each other now, each suspicious in his own right. Hammersmith had not known about the phone logs. Adam had not known about the house fire, or the attempt on Devon’s life. Yet neither man had asked her: Who is Gwen Schiller? Which meant they knew.

Hammersmith spoke first: “About two years ago, I asked Kenneth Dahlgren to take Adam Moss on as his aide. Dahlgren did this as a personal favor to me. He was resistant at first, for Adam’s résumé was—well, let’s say it had some gaps. But he has a natural instinct for politics and Dahlgren has been extremely happy with his performance.”

“Did you agree to become his finance chairman in exchange for his hiring Adam?”

“No,” Hammersmith said. Another surprise for Adam Moss, Tess noted. He looked truly perplexed now, brows drawn tight over his dark eyes. “That was an unrelated negotiation.”

“Made about a year ago?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I signed on last December, although we didn’t announce the fact for several months.”

“You took the appointment just after Gwen Schiller was killed.”

It was a guess, a feint, nothing more. But Tess knew she had closed the circle. She waited, letting the silence in the room grow, determined not to be the next one to speak. She would stand here for hours, if necessary, until one of them told her what she needed to know.

As it happened, she had to wait only a few seconds. But it seemed much longer.

“We knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith said. “Elizabeth March.”

“We?”

“I.”

“We,” Adam Moss corrected. “In fact, I introduced her to Meyer. We were horrified when we realized she must be the girl who was killed in Locust Point, but what could we do? I made an anonymous call, but her name turned out to be fake, as we always suspected.”

“How did you know her?”

Another silence. Again, Tess waited it out.

“She lived here, very briefly,” Hammersmith said carefully. “As did Adam. And Wendy.”

“Wendy? You mean the girl from the gallery.” Tess saw another link, a visual one, spread out on the walls around her. Beautiful faces. Beautiful, beautiful faces of all types, male and female, and no two alike. So art was not the only thing Meyer Hammersmith collected.

“How do you know about Wendy?” Adam asked.

“I followed you one night, then checked the property records for the gallery. So you got a job with a state senator and Wendy got her own business. What was going to be Gwen’s reward?”

“She did not stay long enough for me to help her,” Hammersmith said. Help her? Tess wanted to throw the words back at him, but there was no irony in his voice, no self-awareness.

“You mean she wouldn’t sleep with you.”

“You misunderstand our arrangement.” Meyer Hammersmith actually looked offended. “I’m a mentor. I take in protégés, people who need molding, give them a leg up.”

“Gwen Schiller was a billionaire’s daughter from the
Washington suburbs,” Tess said. “She didn’t need your ‘leg up.’”
Or your scaly little hand up her skirt
.

“I knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith repeated, as if the name made all the difference. “A runaway. If I had known who she was—if Adam or Wendy had known who she was—they never would have brought her to me. They picked her. I knew her as Beth.”

Tess looked questioningly at Adam.

“You have to find your own replacement,” he muttered, looking at the floor. “Wendy didn’t understand Meyer’s tastes as well as I did, she was having trouble finding someone new. We were eating in a bar in South Baltimore one night when Beth came in, looking for work. She didn’t have an ID, or a Social Security number. I knew Meyer would approve of her, once we got her cleaned up.”

“You took her to Domenick’s.”

“I took her to Domenick’s.” Adam seemed relieved, as if he had yearned to tell this story to someone, anyone, over the past year. “The DeSantis aren’t so picky about things like work permits and they know about Meyer’s…proclivities. They’re always happy to help him out. The strange thing was, Beth was actually happy there, living in an apartment above the bar, waiting tables, being left alone. Me and Wendy, we couldn’t wait to get out of there, but Beth—I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to think of her by any other name—didn’t want to go when her time came.”

“You brought her here, to begin her tenure as a ‘protégé,’ and she ran away.”

“I guess so,” Adam looked at Meyer. “I assume so. I’ve never asked too many questions about what happened.”

Adam Moss made it a habit of not asking too many questions, Tess realized. No wonder he was so highly regarded in political circles.

“When the replacement bolts, what happens?” She was thinking of the terrified girl in the gallery, Wendy, her shrill insistence that she had fulfilled the contract.

Adam looked as if he might say something, but Hammersmith cut him off. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened. She decided she didn’t want the life I was offering her, and she left. Now that I know she was Dick Schiller’s daughter, it’s all a little clearer to me, I admit. I haven’t had a protégé for quite some time.”

He had the gall to sound wistful, as if he had been denied something that was his due.

“But only because the waitress from Domenick’s wasn’t quite right,” Tess said, and she knew she had gotten it right this time. Gene Fulton had brought the girl to Meyer, not to some political rival. “You were the tea at Harbor Court, the job that Fulton described as one of the best gigs in the city. I guess Nicola DeSanti knows your ‘proclivities,’ but can’t quite nail down your taste. Pretty isn’t good enough. They have to be extraordinary.”

“I am interested in young people who want to better themselves, people I can help.”

“Yes. You take them in, and you buy their silence by promising them what they most desire. But Gwen didn’t get anything from you, so she wasn’t bound to keep your secret, was she? You must have been terrified when she ran away. She might have ended up telling someone about your little scout troop.”