Laura Lippman (3 page)

The moment was tense, and it was a godsend when plates started appearing before them. They had given their food orders to a short, wizened woman with cropped gray hair and bifocals on a beaded chain. The woman who returned with their food was considerably younger—and friendlier, at least to the men.

“An
extra
extra dumpling for you, hon,” she said to Pat. She was around forty, with the kind of compact, curvy body that aged well, as long as the waist stayed slim. Hers had. In a tight green sweater and matching eye shadow, she was a classic Baltimore hon, knockout variety.

“Thanks, Ruthie. You already know Spike. This is my daughter, Tess.”

“And Crow,” Tess prompted. “Crow Ransome, my
boyfriend
.”

“And Crow,” her father echoed weakly.

Ruthie inspected Tess. “This the one?”

“My onliest one.”

“She looks awfully young.”

“She’s thirty.”

“Well, honey, that is young.”

“She’s wise beyond her years, though. And a hard worker, too.”

What was her father doing, trying to sell a horse? Tess had an uneasy feeling Ruthie was about to pry open her mouth and start counting teeth.

Instead, the waitress frowned and said: “Well, I’m pretty busy here.”

“Sure. I just wanted you to meet. We’ll talk later, all of us. Maybe go to one of the old places around here.”

“Not around here,” Ruthie said shortly. “I like to get out of Locust Point sometimes.”

“Frigo’s then. For old time’s sake.”

“Frigo’s?” Ruthie took a minute to think. “Why not? It will bring back some memories, won’t it?”

She edged away, hips swaying in such an exaggerated fashion that they bounced off men’s shoulders as she moved between the tables.

“What was that about, Dad?”

“Nothing much.”

“Dad.” Tess crammed thirty years of hard-earned petulance into that one whine of a syllable. “What are you and ‘Ruthie’ going to discuss at Frigo’s?”

“You’ll be there, too,” her father assured her. “It’s not as if we’re plotting behind your back.”

“
Dad
.”

Her father pressed his fork through one of his
dumplings and took a large mouthful that apparently required much careful chewing before he could speak again. “She needs a private investigator. I recommended you.”

“I don’t need the work,” Tess said reflexively, almost truthfully. Between her last case, which had paid far more than she ever dreamed, and the recent sale of some family property, she was flush by her standards. Five figures in her bank account, and that wasn’t counting the zeroes to the right of the decimal point.

“It’s an interesting case,” her father said. “I’ve never heard of anything quite like it.”

“Tell me in twenty-five words or less.”

“Tonight. Frigo’s. That’s two words. Look, you’ll like Ruthie. She’s good people. We go back.”

“How far back?” Tess asked.

“She was a barmaid around here, then at Frigo’s, while she was going to community college for a bookkeeping degree. Didn’t she even work for you for a while there, Spike?”

“Yeah, just for a little while, before she went to Frigo’s. Fifteen years ago? Something like that.”

“Thirteen years ago,” her father corrected.

“How
precise
your memory is,” Tess said. “If Ruthie is such a dear friend, how come I’ve never heard of her before?”

“Maybe he’s taking ginkgo biloba,” Crow suggested. “Although it’s my theory that memory isn’t really affected by age. You just have so much more to remember, the longer you live. And, unlike a computer, you can’t run a program to tidy up everything in there.”

Now that he was the beneficiary of Crow’s aimless chatter, Patrick seemed to find him absolutely charming. “You know much about computers? I hear that’s a good
field to get into. Lots of money. Start a little company and then—boom—you’re a rich man.”

“It’s not for me,” Crow said. “I need more interaction with people. I was thinking of going to Baltimore Culinary College, but I feel as if I’ve been in school forever. Don’t worry about me, Pat. I’m finding my way.”

He smiled sunnily at Pat, who tried to smile back. Such a slacker mentality must be pretty alien to her father, Tess thought. At Crow’s age, Patrick Monaghan had been a husband and a father, working in the job he held to this day. If he were ever unhappy or unfulfilled in his work—well, he had never assumed there was an alternative.

Tess’s eyes tracked Ruthie as she worked the parish hall. She had the moves of a former barmaid—she could dip and weave with the heavy trays, pivot at a moment’s notice, without ever spilling a drop of gravy. She also could turn her “customer face” on and off at will. At one point, she ended up in the senator’s path, and the two orbited one another, fake smiles in place. The only difference was that Ruthie dropped her smile once their little dance was done, while Dahlgren’s never slipped.

“So did you and Ruthie decide on a time for ‘our’ meeting?” Tess asked.

“After I get off work, about six-thirty? You like Frigo’s, they have good mozzarella sticks.” Her father knew her so well. Well enough to know she’d be hungry in five hours, no matter how many dumplings she had. Well enough to know that her curiousity alone would pull her to Frigo’s, with or without good mozzarella sticks.

“That would work,” Crow said. “We’re going to drive up to Hampden to see the miracle on Thirty-fourth Street. You know, the one block that goes crazy with Christmas lights? Then we’re meeting Whitney for dinner. But our reservation isn’t until eight-thirty.”

Spike looked up from his food. “Whitney? You mean the scary one?”

“No, you know Whitney. She was my college roommate, the one who just got back from Japan,” Tess said.

“Like I said,” Spike said around a mouthful of food. “The scary one.”

The senator was homing in on their corner of the parish hall. “Monaghan,” he said, clapping Patrick on the back. He was good, Tess decided, he had the politician’s hale and hearty moves down perfectly. Then again, if he were really good, she wouldn’t have noticed it was an act.

“Senator Dahlgren,” Patrick said, beaming at the recognition. “And Adam, Adam Moss, isn’t it? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Up close, Adam Moss’s dark eyes were heavy-lidded and secretive, while his cherry-red mouth made Tess finally understand what it meant to have Cupid bow lips. He was poised, too. He didn’t play the usual game of pretending horror at the idea that others had been talking about him. In fact, he didn’t even bother to reply. His face was impassive, as if it were a given of his existence that people talked about him. They probably did, Tess thought, when you looked like that. What had Kierkegaard written about actresses? They knew they were on everyone’s lips, even when they wiped their mouths with their handkerchiefs. She bet Adam Moss was coming up on a lot of local handerkerchiefs.

Dahlgren shook hands all around, making eye contact, pretending fervent interest in the person at the other end of the arm, at least for the three seconds that the hand clasp lasted.

“Nice to finally meet your family, Pat,” the senator said. “Family’s very important.”

“Thank you, Senator.” Tess disliked seeing her father
so puppy eager for the good opinion of a backbencher like Dahlgren. Oh well, anyone who had a job had to brownnose now and then. She did it, too, and hated herself in the morning—until she made her bank deposit. “Any chance you’re going to be making an official announcement soon about your status? I hear you’ve been raising money hand over fist since Meyer Hammersmith signed on as finance chairman.”

“Well, Meyer’s not on board officially,” Dahlgren said, his fixed smile never wavering. “As for my future plans—I like to say discretion is the better part of valor.”

“Shakespeare,” Crow said. “
Henry the Fourth, Part One
.”

“Really?” Dahlgren said. “I mean—of course.”

“It’s not like you don’t have plenty of things to keep you busy in Baltimore and Annapolis. Like, these houses that keep gettin’ tore down because they screw up the demolition permits.” Spike’s low grumble seemed to startle the senator, as if a family pet had begun speaking. “Or maybe this could be the year the senate scholarship program finally gets defunded. I guess you’ll support that change, you being Mr. Ethics and all.”

Dahlgren’s smile was beginning to look a little strained. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not hearing a lot of complaints about senators helping kids go to college.”

“I think it’s the fact that the aid package seems tied to the parents’ political patronage that has people upset,” Spike said, his tone as pleasant, and insincere, as Dahlgren’s.

Adam Moss leaned forward and whispered something into his boss’s ear, his voice so low that even an expert eavesdropper such as Tess was at a loss to catch a word. Dahlgren listened intently, his head cocked in the manner
of the RCA dog. Nipper and his master’s voice, but which was which in this relationship?

“Adam reminds me the ethics committee is meeting in Annapolis in less than thirty minutes and I am the chair, after all,” Dahlgren said. “Even by legislative standards, I’m running late.”

“You gonna bounce him?” Spike asked.

“Bounce him?”

“Senator Hertel. You know—the poor dumb sap who didn’t get his hand out of the cookie jar fast enough when you all decided to clamp the lid down. That’s his crime, innit? Not being a crook, ’cause you’re all crooks, just being dumb enough to get caught. Kinda like musical chairs. The cheese stands alone.”

“Farmer in the Dell,” Crow said under his breath.

“My committee meets privately, but I can assure you we are taking the accusations against our colleague very seriously,” Dahlgren said. The answer didn’t quite match up to Spike’s question. It was probably the rehearsed sound bite the senator used for television interviews, where there was little risk of follow-up. “We need to work swiftly, so we can settle this matter before the General Assembly convenes in January. But we are not acting hastily.”

“If there’s anything worse than a lynch mob, it’s a lynch mob that takes its time,” Spike observed.

Adam Moss was already leading Dahlgren away from them, his arm a rudder in the small of the senator’s back. Angrily, Patrick pointed his fork, half a dumpling on the end, at Spike.

“I can’t believe you needled him about senate scholarships,” he said. “Who do you think you are, that shit-for-brains who writes editorials for the
Blight?
”

“I got no problems with senate scholarships,” Spike
said. “It’s nice, old-fashioned, out-in-the-open patronage. Tess even got a little one, didn’t she? But I do like yanking Dahlgren’s chain. First Ditter, now Hertel.”

Crow said: “Did anyone else notice how good-looking he was?”

“The senator?” her father asked.

“No, the guy with him. Didn’t you think he was good-looking?”

Spike looked confused by the question, while Patrick appeared horrified. Tess squeezed Crow’s knee beneath the table, and he squeezed back. It was nice to be in synch. She felt she had to defend him, get back at her father for the way he had treated him today.

“About Frigo’s tonight—” she began.

“You can’t back out,” her father said. “I promised.”

“No, I’ll be there. But
you
won’t. My business dealings are confidential. You may have acted as matchmaker, but that doesn’t entitle you to sit in on the wedding night.”

Her choice of metaphor was exact. She wanted him to wince this time, and wince he did. “I already know what she’s going to tell you. So how can it be confidential?”

“My business, my rules. You want to shop around for another private detective to help your old friend, feel free.”

“She’s not an old friend, exactly,” Pat said. “But, okay—your business, your rules.”

He returned to his food, leaving Tess to wonder just what Ruthie was to her father, if she wasn’t an old friend, exactly.

“T
HANK
G
OD FOR BARS
.” R
UTHIE
D
EMBROW LEANED
back in a booth at Frigo’s and, after a quick, guilty glance around the old neighborhood tavern, lit a cigarette. “Smoking is beginning to feel like a criminal act, you know? And when I come here, I always feel like I should be working, even though it’s been years.”

“Come the day, you might not even be able to smoke in bars,” Tess said. “I hear Montgomery County wants to ban it
everywhere
.”

“Well, that’s D.C.,” Ruthie said, in a tone that suggested a place thousands of miles away, instead of forty-five minutes down the Interstate.

“Smoking isn’t my vice of choice, but I can’t imagine bars without cigarettes.” Tess liked going home with smoke in her hair and clothes, waking up to the smell the next morning. It reminded her that she had had a good time the night before.

“Henry used to give me such a hard time about my
Kools.” Ruthie’s lips twitched. “Said it was going to kill me one day. I guess the joke’s on him.”

“Henry?”

“My brother.” Her lower lip continued to tremble, until she finally sucked it beneath her top teeth and bit down hard. She had plump, cushiony lips beneath the coat of coral lipstick she had more or less chewed off. On a richer woman, Tess might have suspected silicon injections. But Baltimore hons started lower when they resorted to plastic surgery.

“My brother was named Henry Dembrow,” Ruthie clarified, in case Tess couldn’t put that together. Her dad must have done quite a sales job on her abilities.

The conversation stalled, as it had stalled several times in the ten mintues they had been sitting in the bar. Ruthie Dembrow didn’t seem to have a clue how to begin her tale of woe, which made her unusual in Tess’s experience. Sure, she had known would-be clients who hemmed and hawed at first, primarily because they disliked telling a stranger about intimate problems. She also was used to people who couldn’t tell a story for anything, who thought the beginning went about as far back as Genesis, and that every tangential thought, every narrative cul de sac, must be explored en route.

But even the worst of the lot—the stammerers, the blushers, the liars,
especially
the liars—had an opening line or two. They had rehearsed them, standing in front of bathroom mirrors, or talking under their breaths as they drove. They were Hamlet, this was their soliloquy, the first and last time they might hold an audience in their hands.

Not Ruthie, though. Tess was going to have to pull it out of her.

“Why do you need a private detective?”

“Last year…well, almost thirteen months ago.” She
took a long swallow on her Miller Lite. Her hands were shaking. “I’m sorry.”

“Take your time.”

“It’s like this, Tess.” Her named sounded strange, coming from those plump, coral-flecked lips, although Tess couldn’t have said why. “My brother Henry killed a girl last year. It was an accident—they were sniffing glue in my backyard. He panicked when she tried to get into our house. He thought she was going to try and take some stuff, I guess. Anyway, she fell, cracking her head open on the pavement. But he admitted it, he took responsibility for what he did. Right from the very beginning, he didn’t try to make any excuses.”

She paused, green eyes wide and solemn, as if waiting for Tess to acknowledge the remarkable moral fiber of her brother, this veritable modern-day George Washington. I cannot tell a lie, I cracked her head open while fighting over some airplane glue.

“Uh-huh,” Tess said, nodding and smiling. As long as you nodded and smiled, she had learned, it didn’t matter what you were saying.

“He went to trial, got ten years, and was sent to Hagerstown this past summer. It wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.”

“No, not at all.” It was, for example, better than having your brains oozing out of your head on some concrete patio in Locust Point.

“It was his last chance to clean up, you see. Prison, I mean. They have a Narcotics Anonymous group there. It was his chance to get clean for once. I hope you don’t think I sound cold, but in some ways it was the happiest day in my life when I saw Henry go off to Hagerstown. Nothing else had worked. No matter what I did, he always went back to huffing.”

“I hear that literally destroys brain cells,” Tess offered, then felt fatuous. Ruthie was probably an unwilling expert on the topic.

“It’s a stupid high,” Ruthie said, inhaling fiercely on her cigarette. “Look, I’m no angel. I like to drink. If I have a gentleman friend, I drink with him. If I’m alone, I might drink a beer or two. When I was working two jobs and going to community college, I took speed to get through exams. But sniffing glue and spray paint, sneaking up on gas pumps—I can’t imagine anything dumber. I kicked Henry out three times in the last two years.”

Tess dropped the smile, which now seemed inappropriate, but continued to nod.

“I also took him back three times. He was my baby brother, I practically raised him after our mother died.”

“Was there a big age difference?”

“Eighteen years. He was a change-of-life baby. Mother died of lung cancer before he was two.” Ruthie sucked on her cigarette as if to taunt whatever gods she believed in. “She was forty-seven. Dad made it to fifty-five before he went. Brain tumor.”

In another city, or another neighborhood, perhaps this double dose of tragedy would have been shocking. But cancer was one area where Maryland stayed competitive, year in and year out, thanks to families like the Dembrows. Bad habits, bad diets, bad workplaces.

Tess realized Ruthie had spoken of her brother in the past tense.

“Henry didn’t make it, did he?”

Ruthie shook her head. “He was stabbed to death his first month in Hagerstown. His first month. There was a fight, and the guards all went running to one part, Henry was left where he was, nobody around. But when it was
over, Henry was the one who was dead. I thought Hagerstown was going to save him, but it ended up being the death of him.”

Fairly classic prison shanking scenario, but Tess didn’t think this assessment would comfort Ruthie Dembrow. It was a sad story, too, and one Ruthie carried with not a little guilt. Maybe her eyes, and her mouth and her hair had not always been so hard.

Still, Tess couldn’t see where a private investigator came into play. She wondered if Ruthie was going to try and sue the state, claim the guards were negligent in her brother’s death. If so, she wanted no part of it. Tess was probably Ruthie’s last resort, the only person left after being turned down by every ambulance chaser in the city. There was just no money to be made suing state government. They were careful to write the laws so their mistakes carried no penalties. A guy who had served ten years for a robbery he hadn’t committed, who had lost most of his twenties to the state prison system, had gotten $250,000, parceled out over six years. The credit card commercials said some things were priceless, but Maryland’s Board of Public Works had come up with a pretty exact figure for a man’s youth.

But that man had been innocent at least. Henry Dembrow had killed a woman. Tess didn’t believe in the death penalty, but she didn’t lose too much sleep over fate getting the job done.

“I’m not a lawyer, Ruthie. I’m an investigator.”

“I know that.”

“So what do you want from me?” She knew she sounded impatient and not a little crass, but she was to meet Crow for dinner in less than forty-five minutes.

“I want to know why my brother was killed.”

“Ask the prison officials.”

“They say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Not very satisfying, but the truth seldom is. Why would they lie?”

“I don’t think they’re lying. I think they don’t care.” Ruthie leaned toward Tess. “But isn’t it awfully coincidental, my brother getting killed after he killed someone?”

Tess managed, with great effort, not to sigh or shrug. “I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Killers serve time alongside other killers. I’ve even heard that some of these guys are not successfully rehabilitated by the system.”

“You know, you remind me of your dad.”

“Really?” Tess almost never heard this. Although her hair had glints of red in it, and she freckled during the summer, her mother’s dark good looks and strong features had crowded most of the Monaghan influence out of her face.

“Yeah, you both think you’re funny, but you’re not.”

“My dad thinks he’s funny?” Tess wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, it just slipped out. She had never noticed Patrick had much of a sense of humor. Then again, maybe this was his idea of a joke. “Look, you said I was going to be intrigued by what you had to tell me. So far, I’m not exactly on the edge of my seat.”

“Maybe it’s time to strap yourself in. Ever heard of a Jane Doe killing?”

Tess finished off her beer and looked for the waitress, hoping to signal for the check. “Sure. They find a body, they can’t identify it at first, maybe not ever. Jane Doe, John Doe. Happens all the time.”

“My brother was convicted for killing a Jane Doe. How often does that happen?”

“It can’t.”

“It does. It did.”

Ruthie smiled triumphantly, aware she had Tess’s full attention. Her mind raced, trying to fit the pieces together. “How could that be? If they know who killed her, they have to know who she was. No victim, no murder.”

“Oh, there was a victim. They had a body. They just didn’t have a name. No ID, and her fingerprints didn’t match up, either. Not in all the country.”

“Missing person?”

“They ran down some leads, but it never came to anything. When the trial was over, she was history. If anyone’s mourning her, they’re doing it privately.” Ruthie leaned forward. “I think they’re getting their revenge privately, too. Henry was killed because of who he killed. What other explanation is there?”

Tess leaned back against the cracked leatherette of the booth, still trying to fathom how anyone could swim through all the identity nets of the modern age, untouched, unknown, untraceable. No fingerprints meant no criminal record. It also meant she hadn’t worked for certain government agencies, or applied to be in the Big Brother/Big Sister program. The lack of a missing persons report indicated no one cared when Jane Doe didn’t come home one night.

“If someone cared enough to kill Henry,” Tess said slowly, “why didn’t the person come forward and claim her body? Why would someone let her continue to be known as Jane Doe?”

Ruthie had an answer at the ready. “There are people who don’t much care for police, or official channels for things. They’re the same kind of people who might kill a man in prison, you know what I mean?”

She knew. “But you’re not asking me to find them,
right? Because if such people exist, I don’t want to know them.”

“All I want is a name, an ID. I’ll take it from there.”

A Christmas carol boomed from Frigo’s jukebox, so tinny and speeded up that Tess needed a moment to place the familiar tune. “What Child Is This?” Very appropriate. She was still thinking about Ruthie’s theory, trying to find all the flaws. Like a bridesmaid’s dress made by a neighborhood woman who tippled, it didn’t hang quite right.

“Ruthie, is this your way of making amends, some sort of Christmas mission? If I find the girl’s name, are you going to track down her family, give them a chance to reclaim her bones and lie beneath her own marker, in her hometown cemetery?”

Ruthie’s green eyes were even greener above her tight turtleneck, the same one she had worn at the Sour Beef dinner, to such great effect. “I don’t care what happens to that glue-sniffing skank in the next life, or the life after that. I want to know who my brother killed because I know he died for a reason. I’ll start with a name, if you can find one.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Merry Christmas, you still get your fee. Pat explained that part to me.”

Tess sensed this toughness was an act, but she couldn’t figure out whether it was for her benefit, or Ruthie’s. “Look, I understand. You want a reason for your brother’s death. You want it to matter. Has it occurred to you that Jane Doe has family out there somewhere, family with even more questions than you have?”

“Fuck them. Fuck
her
. She shouldn’t have tried to get into my house. Then Henry wouldn’t have pushed her, and none of this would have happened. Okay, maybe
Henry isn’t dead directly because of her. But the two things are connected. I want to know who she was, how she came to meet my brother that day, why she was in a neighborhood where she didn’t belong. That’s all.”

No, Tess thought, you want someone to blame, someone other than yourself. She hadn’t been able to save her brother, so what? They would have been okay if Jane Doe’s family had been able to save her. It was a head-on collision, and all Ruthie wanted was the comfort of knowing her brother wasn’t the one who crossed the center line.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“You’re a good kid, Tesser.”

If her name had sounded odd enough in Ruthie’s mouth, her family nickname seemed a sacrilege.