Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  “It had not been my plan, Your Honor, but it could be arranged.” Tyner tried to conceal his delight. Things were working out better than he had planned, Tess realized. The judge had just made it possible for him to deduct, as a business expense, his usual fall trips to the head races.

  “Then it is the opinion of this court he can go.” The judge stood and left so rapidly that he was gone before the clerk barked out, “All rise.” As Tyner had predicted, the hearing had been easy. Now came the hard part: leaving.

  At Tess’s signal the three put their heads together. “Let’s just pretend to confer urgently,” she said in the huddle. “That will keep the reporters at arm’s length.”

  “The judge looked familiar,” Rock whispered.

  “He’s on the board of the Baltimore Rowing Club,” Tyner said. “Lightweight four, Princeton.”

  The Beacon-Light’s Feeney, who probably would write no more than a brief on this routine court action, sauntered out. The television women had bolted for their cameramen and were outside, white lights blazing.

  “Here’s my plan,” Tess said once the courtroom was cleared. Rock knew part of it already. She had prepared him that morning at the boat house. Tyner listened, grasping it immediately.

  Minutes later they burst out of the courtroom at full speed, and the camera crews trotted through the hallways in orgasmic delight, recording the fleeing Mr. Paxton with jacket over his head and attorney rolling alongside. The elevator arrived quickly, but that didn’t stop the reporters and their crews. Some crowded on, while others ran down three flights of stairs and met the elevator on the courthouse’s first floor.

  “Why is it so important for you to row, Mr. Paxton?” “Did you kill Michael Abramowitz?” “How do you feel about being allowed to leave the state?” The questions came, fast, furious, and dumb. Tyner just kept rolling. He still had a lot of upper body strength and could move quickly along the smooth floors. The TV crews followed him through the hallways of the first floor, picking up speed. But Tyner appeared to be outpacing them until they split into two groups, then cornered him in a long hallway on the building’s west side.

  Here, benches along both walls were crowded with young men just starting out in the criminal world, parents accused of abuse and neglect, children caught up in nasty custody cases between their parents and the state. There were a lot of tired-looking women, surly teenagers, and screaming children, but no men. No fathers. Tired and bored, they welcomed Tyner’s little sideshow.

  Sure he had everyone’s attention, Tyner nudged his jacketed client. Tess whipped Rock’s blazer off her head and smiled broadly at the cameras. Given her height and Rock’s huge jacket, which hung well below her hips when draped over her piled-up hair, no one had noticed they were following blue-jeaned legs instead of khaki ones.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” Tess said, bowing. “Darryl Paxton has left the building.”

  “As you can see,” Tyner said, “this is not Mr. Paxton. And if you show videotape tonight suggesting this was Mr. Paxton running through the courthouse, you can expect a lawsuit by tomorrow morning. Of course, you are free to report you chased Tess Monaghan through the courthouse, as long as you report she is my assistant, and is accused of no crime. Thank you.”

  The teenage boys in the hallway, many of whom could look forward to a day when they would make their own desperate runs past television cameras, began whistling and stamping their feet. They didn’t know what was going on, but they knew someone had been humiliated, and they liked it. The weary mothers began laughing; the children clapped their hands and shouted. Bailiffs came running from nearby courtrooms, demanding silence, but the laughter and shouts only escalated. Tess’s trick seemed to free something in that sad place, and she and Tyner began giggling as well. Only the television reporters were unamused, their lipstick-thick mouths thinning into severe lines.

  Rock, of course, was long gone. He had slipped out a side exit, one used primarily for the incarcerated men brought to the courthouse from city jail. His bike had been in the trunk of Tess’s Toyota, parked a few blocks away. He had taken it out with Tess’s spare key, leaving her blazer in its place. He would be crossing North Avenue by now, Tess calculated. Almost home, if not home free.

  Chapter 12

  Friday night. The Shabbat candles burned brightly on the mantel, creating a redundant halo effect for the cheap watercolor of Jesus hanging above them. Tess pushed her pot roast around on one of her mother’s “meat” plates, hoping to create the illusion of eating. At the end of the table, her father was eating a cold cut sub on a paper plate and drinking a Pabst from the can.

  Her mother, a striking woman despite the deep frown lines cut deep along her mouth and forehead, ate daintily from her steaming plate, wiping sweat from her face between bites. She wore a toast-colored dress of polished cotton, flattering to her dark eyes and hair, her tanned face and arms. Although her legs were also deeply tanned, she had sheathed them with panty hose, one shade lighter than her dress. Her suede pumps were also toast colored. Bite, chew, wipe. The weather had turned warm again, but Judith Weinstein Monaghan did not believe in air-conditioning or cold suppers after Labor Day any more than she believed Jesus Christ was the son of God.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, not fooled by Tess’s childhood habit of pretending to eat. “It’s pot roast. You love pot roast.”

  “Not when it’s ninety. I can’t believe you cooked on a day like today. Cold cuts for everyone would have been fine.”

  Her father, whose bright red hair and clear skin made him look fifty instead of sixty, belched.

  “Nice,” her mother said. Her voice was mean, but the look she gave her husband was sultry. “Very nice.”

  “A man’s home,” her father said, belching again, “is his castle.”

  They all fell to eating and not eating again, and silence filled the room. It had always been a quiet house, a house deprived of the children Patrick Monaghan, the oldest of seven, and Judy Weinstein, the youngest of five, had assumed were their due. Tess, born less than a year after their wedding day, had been an only child. “I wasn’t planned,” she liked to say, somewhat inaccurately, “but the others were, the ones who were never born.”

  Her mother had insisted on putting Weinstein on her birth certificate, claiming: “They do it in Mexico.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Tess had said when she was older. “The only thing you know about Mexico is that Uncle Jules got the trots in Cancún from having ice in his gin and tonic.”

  As a child Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan had called herself Tesser. Her doting aunts and uncles called her that, too. They changed it to Testy when she showed her temper, which, contrary to stereotype, came down from the Weinstein side of the family.

  As a teenager Tesser became Tess, who complained endlessly about her name.

  “It’s a compromise,” her mother said.

  “A compromise means picking an alternative course, not choosing everything. You and Dad just force your incompatible choices to live side by side, much as you do.”

  Her parents were united on one subject: the shame of her vocational limbo.

  “You found a job yet?” her father asked her now, after coming back from the kitchen with another can of Pabst. Her mother was drinking hot coffee, while Tess had a Coca-Cola in front of her. It had never occurred to her parents to offer her beer, wine, or a good stiff drink.

  “Not exactly. I’m doing a little work for a lawyer—”

  “As a paralegal?” Her mother’s voice was pathetically hopeful. “They make very good money.”

  “Nothing permanent, nothing like that. A little freelance.”

  “And how does a little freelance pay these days?” Her mother sawed through her meat, trying for a casual, uninterested tone she had never mastered. Tess could tell she was driving her crazy.

  “A little pays a little.”

  “There’s no need to take that tone with me, Theresa Esther.” Tess took a bite of h
er pot roast, hoping the several minutes necessary to chew the meat would give her, and her mother, a chance to cool down.

  “Well, why not think about being a paralegal,” she wheedled. She had a way of making Tess feel like a ragged cuticle on her perfect hands. “It’s a perfectly good job, and it would pay the bills.”

  “I’m paying my bills.”

  “With what Kitty and Donald pay you.”

  “It counts. It’s work; they give me money, not Green Stamps.”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind Donald stripping his nest egg bare.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Patrick Monaghan glared at his wife and belched again, perhaps to distract her, or Tess. But Patrick Monaghan had been given to gas all his life, and it had been a long time since a well-timed belch could distract either woman.

  “Do you really think Donald has state money to pay an assistant? And if he did, he would be allowed to hire you? Donald pays you out of his own pocket because he feels sorry for you. He even has you fill out those time sheets so it looks legitimate. He never expected it would go on this long. No one did.”

  Tess replied almost automatically: “Hey, if Uncle Donald wants to give me money, he can just write a check every month. I’m not proud.”

  Strange, the words were true before she said them, but once out she could hear how false and hollow they were. It was bad enough to be someone who would do anything for money. It was worse to be someone who would do nothing for money. But that was her arrangement with Uncle Donald and, in her heart, she had always suspected it.

  “Gotta go,” she said, rising, the dutiful daughter, heading toward the kitchen sink with her plate and glass.

  “Oh, Tesser,” her mother said. “Don’t go off in a huff.”

  “I’m not, I’m not,” she assured her. “I just realized I have to be somewhere.”

  No, it wasn’t a huff. More of a funk, as dark as the moonless night.

  Her mood did not improve when she finally got to Fells Point, only to find no free parking spaces within eight blocks of Kitty’s place. It was almost nine, and Fells Point’s nightlife was coming to life. She circled the bookstore several times, then crawled up Broadway, looking for a spot. No luck. She ended up parking in the pay lot at the foot of Bond. She had only recently spent the better part of a day at city hall getting a permit so the two-hour restrictions throughout the neighborhood didn’t apply to her. The permit was a hollow badge of honor when there were no places to be had.

  On this particular night the crowd at the bookstore ran heavily to embroidered dresses and fiesta skirts. Oh shit, Tess remembered. Frida Kahlo night. Kitty was offering a twenty dollar gift certificate to the couple who most resembled the Mexican artist and her husband, Diego Rivera. The more serious contestants had penciled in heavy mustaches and forced their dates to stuff their shirt fronts, the better to resemble Diego’s girth. But the winner had really stacked the deck: She not only had a rotund Diego, but another man dressed as Trotsky, who was believed to be Frida’s lover.

  “Todos vuelven,” Ruben Blades sang seductively from the stereo system. Kitty had translated the song for her once. Everyone returns. But first you had to go somewhere.

  The contest over, most of the couples were now drinking sangria and snatching up books. Kitty held court in one of those slit-skirt Mandarin dresses requiring a perfect body. She didn’t let the dress down. Officer Friendly was at her side, wearing a poncho and looking vaguely lost without his gun and bicycle but absolutely devoted.

  “These theme nights seem to be working out,” Kitty said to Tess. “What should I do next? A ‘George’ night, with Eliot and Sand? Rita Mae Brown? Or suppressed Catholic girls night, with McCarthy’s memoirs? We could put little girl mannequins in the windows, in Catholic girl uniforms and those shiny shoes.”

  “Do people still read McCarthy?”

  “Good point,” Kitty turned to her Zapata-ed beau. “Thaddeus, do you know who McCarthy is?”

  Officer Friendly looked panicky, and Tess found herself rooting for him. This obviously had not been on the civil service exam.

  “Normally I would say the witch hunt guy from the fifties,” he said. “But I guess you’re talking about some woman writer I never heard of.”

  Good answer. Thaddeus was a tad brighter than he seemed, smart enough not to bullshit, a rare quality in a man. Kitty almost cooed with pleasure at her protégé.

  “There’s nothing wrong in saying you don’t know something, Tad. We’ll read some McCarthy together later tonight.”

  She gave him a large, wet kiss on his left ear. Tess looked at them and all the happy couples around her—boy-girl, boy-boy, and girl-girl alike—and had an overwhelming need to be alone. No one was stopping her. She went to Kitty’s kitchen, hijacked a bottle of Riesling, and climbed the stairs to her apartment.

  The piles she had made of Abramowitz’s life just two nights earlier still sat on the floor. She had a sudden desire to kick them into the air, or shred them into confetti and toss them from the roof. Instead she sat down and reviewed what she had written so far. Lists and lists of names. Rock’s chronology of the night of Abramowitz’s murder, side by side with Joey Dumbarton’s account, and Mr. Miles’s. Something was missing. Someone was missing.

  Ava. Rock had never mentioned if Ava was at his apartment when he returned. Where had she been when the police arrived and arrested him? If she had still been sleeping there, they would have taken her in, too, for questioning. But the police didn’t find Ava until later, which is why Jonathan had known so little about her when he came by two nights after the murder.

  “I guess I do have a job to do,” Tess said aloud. Really two jobs—her official chores for Tyner and these unofficial chores she kept assigning herself. If she had not earned Rock’s money before, as Tyner had suggested, perhaps she could now.

  Chapter 13

  Ava may have sinned, but she had not been forced out of Eden. Late Saturday afternoon, Tess stood across President Street from the luxurious apartment building, trying to think of how she could slip past the uniformed doorman who guarded the entrance to Eden’s Landing. At least she assumed it was a uniform and not his clothing of choice: Bermuda shorts, hiking shoes, a pith helmet. She walked around the corner to the underground garage entrance on Pratt Street. No sentry here. She slipped inside and checked to see if Ava’s silver Miata was there. It was, a guarantee Ava was home. Except for work, Tess hadn’t seen Ava walk anywhere. And Ava didn’t strike her as the kind of person who went to work on weekends unless she was trying to impress the boss. If the boss was dead, what was the point?

  The parking garage had an elevator leading to the apartments, but one needed a key to summon it. Tess patted her pockets frantically, as if looking for a key ring, until she saw an older woman, loaded down with shopping bags and a bakery box, heading to the elevators. Tess ran toward her, pretending a fit of gracious concern.

  “Let me help you,” she practically sang to the woman, taking the box by its red and white string. The woman looked a little nervous, as if Tess might be a mugger who prowled Baltimore parking garages for baked goods, but she didn’t protest. When they reached the elevator Tess again made a show of trying to find her keys, but her hands were full of cake.

  “Let me,” the woman said quickly. She keyed the elevator, got on, and pushed four. Tess pressed the top button, but insisted on walking the woman to her door. In their three minutes of acquaintance, she told the woman she was new in the building, living in a studio apartment, and studying at the Peabody Conservatory.

  “What instrument do you play?” the woman asked politely in the bored tone of someone who couldn’t care less.

  “I’m a vocalist,” Tess said. “Soprano, but I have an enormous range. I’ll be appearing with the Baltimore Opera this fall.”

  Unfortunately this piqued the woman’s interest. “Really? What role? My husband and I are subscribers.”

  Tess thought for a moment. She had ne
ver been to the opera and, although she knew a few titles, she couldn’t describe any plots or name any characters. But there was one opera the local company seemed to produce year after year. She tried to recall the ads she had heard on the radio.

  “La Bohème?”

  The woman did not notice she had answered in the form of a question. “Are you singing Mimi? Musetta? Or are you in the chorus?”

  They had reached the woman’s door. As long as she was committed to lying, Tess decided, she might as well lie big. “Mimi. I’m playing Mimi. If I don’t go to New York first. The Met has a standing offer for me to sing Mimi there.”

  The woman, now thrilled, put her packages on a small table inside the door, but she made no move to take the cake box from Tess. Instead she handed her a pen.

  “I know it’s silly, but could I have your autograph?”

  Tess signed the box with a flourish. Teresita L. Mentiroso. If she remembered her high school Spanish correctly, that translated to little Theresa, the liar.

  Her opera career behind her, she ran up the stairs to Ava’s apartment on the sixth floor. Feeling smug and devious, she rang the doorbell. But when Ava opened the door, her face quickly deflated Tess. She registered no surprise, no interest. For a moment it wasn’t clear if she even recognized Tess. What did Rock see in this incurious, self-absorbed woman?

  “Well, come in then,” Ava said at last, gesturing with a half-empty glass of white wine.

  She led Tess through the apartment toward the terrace without even a perfunctory show of hospitality. Unlike Joey Dumbarton or Frank Miles, Ava did not mistake this visit for a social call.

  Her apartment faced the harbor and downtown, which added at least $30,000 to the price, Tess estimated. Whatever the extra cost had been, it appeared to be a stretch Ava could ill afford, even on a lawyer’s salary. The one-bedroom apartment had a sparse, undernourished look, and it wasn’t because Ava liked minimalism. The apartment simply didn’t have enough furniture. And what was there looked shabby and worn. Ava was living paycheck to paycheck.