Laura Lippman (5 page)

“Actually, it looks…happy. You look happy, ever since you got back from Texas. And back with Crow.”

“I guess I am,” Tess said, then looked around nervously. Too late—there wasn’t even a splinter of wood to knock in this room of formica tables and plastic chairs. She rapped her knuckles on her forehead, figuring it was hard enough to count.

T
ESS SUPPOSED THERE WERE WORSE THINGS THAN FINDING
one’s erstwhile boss at the breakfast table almost every day, wearing his robe and eating bran flakes, but she had yet to think of any.

Oh yes, there was one—knowing that said erstwhile boss was sleeping with one’s aunt.

“Hello, Tess,” Tyner Gray greeted her the next morning, his smile so smug that it could make the Chesire Cat disappear from shame. “We didn’t hear you come in last night, but then—we were busy.”

“Roll a little closer to the table,” she said, nudging his wheelchair with her hip. “I need to get into the refrigerator.”

“I thought you ate at Jimmy’s most mornings,” he said, even as he complied. The kitchen was large, or so it had seemed before Tyner came along. “Is it true that you got one of the new waitresses fired for putting cream cheese on both your bagels, or is that just more Fells Point apocrypha?”

Tess leaned into the refrigerator, checking out her options. “In the off season, when we’re not rowing, I like to come downstairs and have breakfast with Kitty and her man of the moment. Some of them even cook. The one before you made Belgian waffles.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d become resigned to toasting my own bagels this winter,” he said. “Kitty’s talking about installing an elevator so we can use her rooms on the second floor.” Since taking up with Tyner, Kitty had limited herself to the cramped rooms behind the store.

“Don’t count on it. Kitty has been in the boyfriend-of-the-month club for as long as I’ve lived here.” Tess sniffed the half-and-half. Kitty drank her coffee black, so the cream she kept for guests and her tenant-niece sometimes went bad. “Why do you think she’d change her ways for you?”

“Because I’m so good,” Tyner said. The waxy container of half-and-half slipped through Tess’s hands, but she caught it before it hit the floor.

“
Gross
. If the cream wasn’t sour to begin with, then that remark definitely would have curdled it.”

“Crow said he was going to pick some up while he was out walking Esskay,” Tyner said complacently, turning a page of the newspaper. “Rumor has it that your apartment has a kitchen, but you can’t prove it by me.”

“Are you two sniping at each other again?” Kitty’s voice was sleepy as she padded into the kitchen, tying the sash of her peach robe. Fifteen years older than Tess, she looked much better in the mornings, with her fair skin and tousled red hair. But it was her sweet, open disposition that bound men to her. “They come for the curls,” Crow once said, “but they stay for the temperament. Kitty’s like a hearth where every man wants to warm himself.”

“Then why isn’t Tyner burnt to a crisp by now?” Tess had lamented.

It wasn’t that she disliked the irascible older man. He was a good rowing coach and a decent lawyer, who threw her work and represented all her clients for a small fee, so she could claim privilege if the police ever hassled her. But Tyner in love was unbearable. He beamed. He smiled. He gazed adoringly. Some mornings, it was all Tess could do not to toss her waffles on the
Beacon-Light’s
local section, which happened to be the only part of the paper that Tyner didn’t commandeer.

“You can’t expect our relationship to change just because you two are boyfriend and girlfriend now,” Tess told her aunt. “This is how Tyner and I always talked to each other. You just used to take my side, remember? You’re a traitor to your gender and your blood.”

But Kitty wasn’t listening. She leaned over Tyner’s shoulder, pretending interest in the newspaper he was reading, letting a hand rest on his shoulder. Tyner picked it up and kissed her palm.

“You know,” Tess said, aware no one was listening, “Jimmy’s is looking better and better. Tell Crow to meet me there.”

It was almost ten before she set out for Locust Point. Funny—she saw the neighborhood every day, from across the water, rowed her Alden along its ragged shore, yet all she really knew of Locust Point was Fort McHenry and the Domino Sugars sign, which she could see from the makeshift terrace outside her bedroom. She tried to remember to look at it every night, just before bed. So much had changed in Baltimore, it was reassuring to go
to sleep with that static neon vision blazing red in her mind’s eye. As a child, she thought God might be lurking behind the sign, because if she were God, that was where she would make her heaven. Atop a neon sign overlooking Baltimore, guarding a mountain of sugar.

On a map, Locust Point looked cramped and narrow. Yet once Tess crossed Key Highway, there was a feeling of expansiveness, as if the sky were deeper here, the city miles away. She had heard rumors of yuppies, drawn by inexpensive rowhouses with water views, but there was little evidence of such an invasion. Even with the big employers disappearing—Procter & Gamble, the shipping jobs—the neighborhood was strikingly unchanged. One could imagine Locust Point inside a plastic globe, synthetic snow sifting down, no one ever getting in.

And no one ever getting out. It seemed an unlikely place for anyone to die as a stranger, yet Jane Doe had done just that.

Tess parked her car on Hull Street, a few doors down from the Dembrow rowhouse. She was going to walk where Henry walked, or at least where Henry had said he walked the morning of Jane Doe’s death. She was even starting out at the same time, so the light would be more or less the same. Of course, December was not November, but it was close enough. Even the weather was the way it had been thirteen months ago, sunny and unseasonably mild. Henry had gone out the back door, so she walked to the alley and touched the gate, almost as if beginning a game, and started on her way.

She was not Tess Monaghan, she kept telling herself. She was Henry Dembrow, a twenty-one-year-old huffer aching for a high, seeing the world through itching, watering eyes that evaluated everything for its potential utility toward this goal. Such eyes would look for the glint of
coins on the sidewalks, or untended purses in cars. Would he notice copper downspouts, too, or iron balustrades? No, Henry wasn’t enterprising enough to gather metal to sell, to make the trip to the salvage places that asked no questions of the men with shopping carts. He wanted things easy.

He had remembered stopping at the corner gas station, so Tess stopped there, stepping into the warmth of the inevitable mini-market. The manager had chased Henry Dembrow from here the day of the killing, according to the police report, but hadn’t noticed any girl. Tess grabbed a handful of mini Goldenberg Peanut Chews from a box next to the cash register. To each his own high.

“Manager around?” she asked the young man at the cash register, whose coloring and dark hair suggested he was Middle Eastern. His badge, however, identified him as “Brad.”

“I’m the manager,” he said, in a Baltimore accent so heavy and thick that he must be a native, or someone who had immigrated in the cradle. Tess wondered if his parents ever second-guessed their sacrifices, coming halfway around the world so their son might have the opportunity of speaking a pitch-perfect Bawlmarese.

She raced through what she thought of as the hard part—her identity, what she was doing, how she knew to ask for him. In her experience, it was those first sixty seconds, from the moment she flashed her P.I. license to the end of her pitch, that she was most likely to earn someone’s cooperation. Older people were the easiest, if only because they were so often bored out of their minds that they welcomed any distraction. Men were curt, but they usually found the time, as long as she did the little-me, big-eye, big-chest thing. Women were more skeptical, because women spent their lives listening to bullshit.

Foreigners, those who had known less free societies, were the most leery. They didn’t believe anyone could speak openly, about anything. Throw in the words
police business
and they closed down completely.

Brad-the-assimilated was cooperative, he just didn’t know anything.

“I remember Henry, sure. I ran him off from the pumps at least once a month. But I didn’t see him with any girl that day. Or any day, for that matter. Girls liked him, he was shy, kinda good-looking. Henry didn’t care. He was interested in only one thing, getting high.”

“Maybe she came in on her own.” Tess showed him the sketch police had used a year before, probably shown to Brad at some point. It wasn’t great, but it was preferable to the corpse photo. “Forget about Henry. Did you ever see her?”

Brad shook his head. “Not that I noticed. Sorry.”

“I saw her.”

The voice, very high and sweet, came from the rear of the store, where there was a magazine stand. Tess glanced toward the sound and found herself staring at the cover of a fashion magazine, one promising failproof tips for thicker hair, thinner thighs and better orgasms. The magazine lowered, and the gaunt, painted, pouting model fell like a mask to reveal a pretty, moon-faced teenager. She looked young not to be in school. All the eyeliner in the world—and it appeared this girl had used all the eyeliner in the world—couldn’t age this baby face.

“Don’t fib, Sukey,” the manager scolded her. “This woman is doing serious work. She doesn’t need to hear your stories.”

“It’s not a story,” the girl insisted, cheeks flushing. “I did see her. Not with Henry, but in Latrobe Park, earlier that week. She had a fuzzy coat, with a fur collar. She was
waiting for someone. Someone was supposed to meet her, but the person never came.”

The detail about the coat was dead-on. It also was on the posters the police had distributed, so Tess wasn’t too impressed.

“Why didn’t you tell the police this a year ago, when they were trying to identify her?”

Sukey rolled her eyes. “Because I didn’t know her name, which was the point, right? You asked if anyone
saw
her, and I did. I even talked to her a couple of times.”

“You talked to her, but she didn’t tell you her name.”

“We’re talking, and we haven’t exchanged names, have we?”

“Sukey.”

She tossed her head. “You only know my name ’cause Brad used it.”

“Tess Monaghan.” She held out her hand.

Sukey put down the magazine and came out from behind the aisle of canned goods that had hidden her body from Tess’s view. She was plump, even by South Baltimore standards, so her age was hard to ascertain. Packed into jeans, a tee-shirt, and a Starter jacket, she was full of jiggling curves. Early adolescence, Tess thought. Or a steady diet of Mounds bars.

“Sukey Brewer.” She took Tess’s hand tentatively, shaking more at the fingertips than at the palms. “Are you really a private detective?”

“It’s not something you lie about,” Tess said. “Unless you’re really twisted. How come you’re not in school, Sukey Brewer? You don’t look old enough to be a dropout.”

“Field trip day. My class went to the Smithsonian. My mom forgot to fill out the permission slip on time, so I’m
hanging out here. I’m sure as shit not going to go to school if no one else is there.”

“She’s a good kid,” Brad volunteered. “She helps me out here, sometimes, doing inventory. I told her she can have a real job here when she turns sixteen next year, and has a work permit. But don’t believe a damn thing she says.”

“That’s not fair, Brad,” Sukey said. “Most of my stories are true. I just don’t get all the details right, sometimes. Like the newspaper, you know?”

“Tell the lady about the bank robbery you saw on your way over here this morning, even though there’s no bank between here and your house.”

“You weren’t listening. It was an armored truck, one of those red-and-black ones,” Sukey said. “Money was flying through the air, and people were grabbing it, then running away. It was wild.”

“Wild,” Brad repeated dryly, giving the word its Baltimore pronunciation: Wahhhhld.

Tess was not interested in that day’s robberies, real or imagined. “So, a year ago, you noticed this girl in the park. A girl in a fuzzy coat with a fur collar. What time was this?”

“About two or three.”

“She was dead by then.”

“The day before, I mean. I saw her the day before.”

“Why weren’t you in school that day?”

“Half day, teachers’ conference. I had a book I wanted to read—I read a lot.”

Brad nodded. “She does, she reads a lot. Which is why her head is so filled with nonsense.”

“I like to read on the swings. If there are mothers there, with the little kids, it’s…” Her voice trailed off. Tess, taking in Sukey’s round figure and guileless face, could
imagine why she might want to be in sight of someone’s mother. She wished she knew a way to tell the girl that everyone’s adolescence was horrible, that no one was spared. But people had tried to tell her the same thing fifteen years ago, and she hadn’t believed them.

“You said you talked.”

“We did, kinda. I mean, I said ‘Nice day,’ and she said she’d seen better. I showed her the book I was reading and she said it looked pretty good.”

Sukey looked at Tess expectantly, as if hoping for praise. Tess tried to smile and nod, although the girl hadn’t told her anything helpful.

“Was that all you said? Did you see her leave?”

“I left first. My mom calls at three-thirty, I’m supposed to be home by then. But the girl—this was funny, I remember it almost word for word—she said: ‘Tell me what you think you’ll be when you grow up.’ And I said, ‘I dunno. I’ll probably just work at the Sugar House after I graduate from Southern. Get married, have some babies.’”

A modest goal, but at least she was trying to do it in the right order. So many local girls omitted the getting married part.

“And she must not be from here, ’cause she said ‘The Sugar House? What’s that?’ So I told her about Domino’s and she smiled, in a kind of weird way and said: ‘That’s funny, because I worked at a place with a name almost like Domino’s, and it could have been called the Sugar House. Then again, maybe the Sugar House is where I lived before, although I always thought of it as the Gingerbread House. You know, Hansel and Gretel, the witch in the oven. Other people said it was a cake, but I never saw that. It was the Gingerbread House, and I never could get that witch in the oven. In the end, every place you go
is the Sugar House.’ She asked me if I knew what she meant, and I said, yeah, I did.” Sukey looked mystified. “Actually, I thought she might be a little crazy.”