Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  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.

  “Let’s go watch from the front,” Rock said. “I like thunderstorms.”

  They left through their respective dressing rooms, meeting in the large hall that ran the length of the building’s north side. Although this room was decorated with plaques, photographs, and etchings of rowers and their shells, real rowers seldom ventured into it. The city rented it out every weekend for wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, and banquets. A plain room, it was in demand only because of its sweeping view of the Patapsco and the city beyond—Camden Yards, the three large gas tanks that rose and fell depending on the city’s natural gas supply, downtown’s ragged skyline. The view was better at night, all white lights and silhouettes.

  “Maybe lightning will strike the IBM building,” Tess said, referring to a white skyscraper usually listed among the city’s top ten architectural offenses.

  “Or the Maryland National Bank tower,” Rock said. “Excuse me, the NationsBank tower. I still can’t get used to that, this North Carolina company owning Maryland’s biggest bank.”

  “Hey, I haven’t gotten used to Friendship Airport becoming Baltimore-Washington International, and that must have happened over twenty-five years ago.”

  “Sometimes I think Baltimore is a city that defines itself by what’s gone, what used to be.”

  “Well, the Star is a parking lot across from Harborplace.”

  “The Colts—the Ravens can’t make up for losing Johnny Unitas’s team.”

  “Hutzler’s department store is the Department of Human Resources.”

  “McCormick moved to the suburbs, so there’s no more cinnamon smell drifting over the harbor.”

  “And the flea market at the old Edmondson Drive-In is a Home Depot now.

  This was how they spoke: They built lists together, stacks of loosely related facts. Tess did not know if this was a generally masculine way of speaking, or a style specific to Rock. At any rate, she liked it.

  He looked over the water, watching the lightning strike. Tess looked at him, remembering Jonathan’s questions. Where was he from? Does he have a history of assaulting people? She knew only that he wasn’t born here, although he had been in Baltimore long enough to consider it home. Their friendship was built on the present, and they seldom spoke of the past. Tess had assumed this was how men became friends—through activities, innocuous riffing and banter, sports scores. How ’bout them O’s? She liked it. Besides, Baltimore was filled with people who knew her life story. It had been a relief to find a friend who wanted to talk about nothing more than current events, or whether antioxidants boosted performance.

  The storm was moving east. Tess could have taken a crayon and drawn a line straight up the floor-to-ceiling windows. To the right of the line the sky would be black, shot through with lightning; the left was washed-out and clear. An eerie sight, this black and white Baltimore. She slipped her hand into Rock’s. Nothing about Tess was dainty, but her hands were especially large, with ragged nails and a rower’s calluses. Rock’s hand was larger and rougher still. She liked him for that, too. Folding her hand inside his, he squeezed gently. He did know his strength, how to be gentle, how to curb his power. But he had to think about it, Tess realized. He had to try.

  Chapter 10

  Whitney—former college roommate, sometime best friend, sometime toughest competitor—called at nine that morning, when Tess had finally started to transcribe her tapes and notes. She was grateful for the distraction. She could have written a news story or a press release about her meetings with Dumbarton and Miles, but a report was a foreign form to her. Did one include everything, or edit judiciously? Could she record her own impressions, or did objectivity rule here, too? Hopelessly blocked, she lunged for the phone.

  “Word is, you had another Jonathan encounter,” Whitney said by way of greeting.

  Tess sighed. “I bet he came into work this morning and sent an electronic message to everyone on the Beacon-Light computer system: ‘Tess Monaghan will sleep with you, but she won’t tell you anything.’”

  “No, but he
did stage one of his special scenes for my benefit, pacing madly around his desk when I walked by, complaining loudly to the city editor about how ‘she’ wouldn’t leak. Lovely imagery.”

  “I don’t leak. It’s one of my best qualities.”

  “Why don’t you meet me for lunch at the Tate—on the paper, of course. I can always claim I was wooing a recalcitrant source. But I’m leaving if you start to leak. Or even ooze. I’ve had enough dates like that recently. It’s like a science fiction novel. All they leave behind are little puddles.”

  “Talk about lovely imagery. Noon?”

  “Twelve-fifteen. If I’m late order me a crab cake and coleslaw. The patty, not the sandwich. Broiled, not fried.” Whitney never meant to sound imperious, but certain tones came naturally to a Talbot.

  The last name was pronounced not like the chain of preppy clothing stores but like the Eastern Shore county where Whitney’s family summered. “Tall, but.” Tess had been struck by Whitney’s drawling rendition of her name when they met freshman year in college. “Whitney Tall-but,” she said, squeezing Tess’s hand quite hard, as if to measure her strength. Tess squeezed back, staring skeptically at this fabulous creature—straight blond hair, narrow green eyes, long bones, and a jaw so sharp she could have cut cheese with it. I can like this woman or hate her, Tess told herself, but I’ll never be indifferent to her. She decided to like her. It was a decision she seldom regretted.

  Still, they could never stop competing. Whitney was the best rower, Tess the strongest. Whitney was rich and thin, Tess wild and impulsive. In the classroom they fought for top honors and dreamed of the Sophie Kerr prize, a no-strings endowment granted to the school’s best writer. Whitney took herself out of the running, transferring to Yale to major in Japanese. Tess lost the Kerr prize to a quiet, long-haired young man she had never noticed.

  Maybe I chose wrong that day, Tess thought as she waited for Whitney in the Tate’s fusty dining room. Maybe I should hate her after all.

  “If I ever pay for lunch, can we go someplace decent?” Tess asked when Whitney finally arrived. “You Wasps have the worst taste buds in the world.”

  “This is the perfect comfort food. Iceberg lettuce with bottled thousand island dressing. Macaroni and cheese. Go up the street”—Whitney pointed with her cameo-perfect chin to the nearby Tuscany Grille, currently Baltimore’s trendiest restaurant—“and it’s food miscegenation. Pistachios and mint jelly. Fajitas with leeks. Goat cheese and peanut butter. Give me a break.”

  “Miscegenation,” Tess mused. “That’s not a word you hear much these days.”

  “Keep reading the Beacon-Light. I think they’re going to ask me to write an editorial against it next week.” She took a sip of iced tea—presweetened, and overly so—and sighed as if it were pure nectar. The old women in the dining room gazed approvingly at the young woman with her blond hair twisted into a soft chignon, her elegant frame encased in a sea green knit dress from Jones & Jones. Whitney’s taste was everywhere but in her mouth, Tess marveled, although she did have a nose for fine whiskey. Even in college she had preferred good Scotch, and she had been almost tiresome in her quest for the Eastern Shore’s best martini.

  Without a trace of self-consciousness, Whitney rapped a spoon against the glass, as if calling a meeting to order. After all, she came from a long line of garden club presidents. The North Side Chapter of the Washington College Alumnae Fund was now convened. Any old business? No. Any new business? Yes, ruthless prying.

  “So, what’s up with your new career, whatever it is. Private investigator? Paralegal? And working on one of the hottest cases in town. Tell all.”

  This was Whitney’s style, straight up the middle, but Tess had eleven years of experience deflecting Whitney’s frontal assaults. “Are you asking me as a friend or as a Beacon-Light employee? Either way I can’t tell you much. I’m working for his lawyer. Everything I know is confidential.”

  “Fair enough. What about the rumor that you caused it all, telling your friend Rock that his girlfriend was cheating on him?”

  Her casually inaccurate version of events stung. Obviously Whitney had done more than just eavesdrop on Jonathan’s conversation with an editor.

  “You know, this is the second time in two days a Beacon-Light employee has tried to chat me up on this. Don’t you have any other ways of getting information?”

  “‘Chat you up.’ That’s an interesting term for Jonathan’s method of information gathering. Did you do a lot of ‘chatting’ last night?”

  Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney’s mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil’s advocate? Whitney could have been the devil’s mentor.

  “Stop milking me,” Tess said. “I told you I can’t talk about the case, and I can’t.”

  “Oh, Tesser—” Whitney was truly contrite. “I didn’t come here to milk you. In fact I’m going to feed you. I just thought I could have some fun first. When did you get so damn prickly?”

  She took a manila folder out of her briefcase and dropped it on the table with a heavy plop. Photocopies and clippings about Michael Abramowitz spilled out. Computer printouts of recent news stories, photographs, a résumé, biographical information. Only the Beacon-Light’s library, off-limits to civilians such as Tess, could have provided this treasure trove.

  “I glanced at the stuff after one of the librarians pulled all the material for me,” Whitney said. “Nothing jumped out, although he was quite the controversial little public defender before he went into business for himself. Recently he’s been in chin-and-grin mode, trotting around town in a rented tux.”

  Tess extracted a glossy black-and-white of Abramowitz from last year’s Black-Eyed Susan Ball. He stared dutifully at the camera, drink in hand, his narrow shoulders lost inside his tuxedo. She didn’t need Whitney’s eye to see it was a rental, and a particularly ill fitting one at that. Thin women in ugly dresses, the kind that cost more than pretty ones, stood on either side of him, faces forward but bodies angled away, as if embarrassed to be seen with the once notorious lawyer.

  “Interesting—but I’m not sure what to do with all this. Tyner has defined my role in the case pretty narrowly.”

  “Balls.” Whitney’s voice was only a shade below a hoarse cry. Luckily most of the women who lunched at the Tate were too vain to wear hearing aids, so they continued to steal fond looks at the elegant young woman. Why can’t our granddaughters be so ladylike? they asked one another. “OK, I confess: Jonathan told me you were working for Tyner. Interviewing security guards and custodians—too boring. You need to start tracking down anyone who’s ever held a grudge against Abramowitz. It shouldn’t be hard. He was a world-class shit who defended scum. Then he was a world-class shit who helped scum sue scum. He ended up defending an asbestos company, scum par excellence. There should be no shortage of people who loathed him.”

  “Yes, but Tyner said—”

  “Tyner said. Since when do you give a fuck what anyone tells you to do? When did you become this cautious little mouse, waiting for permission all the time, terrified to take the initiative on something?”

  Direct hit.

  “I became a cautious little mouse, to use your perfect phrase, at precisely the same moment I realized my last fling with initiative may have inspired one of my dearest friends to kill someone. You see, the grapevine has it more or less right, Whitney. I got Rock’s fiancée to confess to him she was sleeping with her boss. I thought he would break up with her, not break the guy’s neck.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “He says he didn’t, and he’s not a liar. But if he had been angry enough…” Tess didn’t want to finish her own thought.

  “I remember him from some of the races.” Whitney hadn’t kept up with her own rowing, but she still attended the big events. “He struck me as one of those guys so immense and strong he has to be gentle, or else he’d destroy everything in his path.”

 
“Like Lennie in Of Mice and Men.”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s only one problem with that comparison, Whitney. Lennie had a bad habit of breaking people’s necks by accident.”

  Back home, Tess changed into a T-shirt and shorts and turned on her stereo. Although she had a CD player, she owned almost no compact discs—she had signed on to the technology revolution about a month before the Star folded. By financial necessity she listened primarily to the albums and tapes of her college days. Alternative stations kept her current with new music, but she found herself more interested in old music: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Rodgers and Hart. All the standards, except Irving Berlin. She had been forced to play the Statue of Liberty in eighth grade and never quite gotten over “Give me your tired…” And one of the immigrants had pinched her ass.

  The Abramowitz file was a mix of old and new technologies. Photocopies of old clips, printouts from microfiche, the computerized printouts of a Nexis search, which scanned a national data base of newspapers. The Beacon-Light librarian had even found a fawning profile of him in the city magazine, a deservedly defunct rag called B-more.

  Her desk was too small to hold these riches. She spread the contents of the folder across the floor, separating the clips and photos into three piles representing the distinct phases of his career. Public defender. Plaintiff’s attorney. Corporate.

  The first phase of his career seemed the most promising, given that many of the people he defended had already either killed or raped someone. Tess knew a disgruntled defendant was much more likely to track down his own lawyer than a prosecutor or a judge. After all, the prosecution is supposed to put you away, and the judge is just following a rule book, but your lawyer is paid to put up a good fight. Even if it’s not your nickel, as in the case of Abramowitz’s early clients, one expects to get his money’s worth. As a reporter Tess once saw a nineteen-year-old react to a guilty verdict for manslaughter by grabbing his P.D. by the back of the neck and methodically pounding her head against the table until the bailiff intervened.