Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  “Are you looking for the bingers?” Big Red asked. “They’re in 211. We’re 221. A lot of their people come here by mistake.”

  Her sense of mission protected Tess from obsessing over the insult, real or imagined.

  “No, I’m looking for Victims of Male Aggression.” The women stared back blankly. “This is it, right? VOMA?”

  “Oh.” The redhead considered Tess carefully. The other women kept their eyes downcast and hands folded, as if embarrassed by the card table of childish sweets. Or perhaps the bourbon was outlawed, given that half the people on the floor could lose all twelve steps if they knew a fifth was in room 221.

  “I’m Pru,” the redhead said brightly, sticking out her hand. “And if we seem caught off guard, it’s because you’ve caught us in a rather…out-of-the-ordinary meeting. One of our members, little Cece, is getting married, and we wanted to throw a wedding shower for her.”

  “Does that mean your next regular meeting won’t be until next week? Should I come back then?”

  “Well, it depends. Do you have a referral?”

  “A referral? No, I saw the group’s listing in the City Paper’s calendar and thought it might help me. You see, I’ve just come to accept that I was the victim of an acquaintance rape in college—”

  “Date rape!” Pru interrupted. She seemed relieved. “Your therapist needs to put you in touch with another group. You do have a therapist? Because VOMA is only for women who have been through the criminal system, the double-raped as we call them. Did you press charges? Can you still take him to court, or has the statute of limitations passed?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then we’re just not for you,” Pru said, shaking her head adamantly. “You need the DAR.”

  “The Daughters of the American Revolution?”

  “No, DAR, Anonymous. Date-acquaintance rape. I think they meet at one of the local elementary schools.”

  “Union Memorial has a space for them,” offered a petite woman with brunette hair cropped so close that Tess wondered if she had recently undergone chemotherapy. “They meet the first Wednesday of the month. The hospital switchboard should have the phone number.”

  “Thanks, Cece.” Pru turned back to Tess, who had the distinct impression the woman wanted to put her hands up to her chest and give her a gentle shove. I guess I’ve outstayed my welcome. Then again, Tess had the sense she had never been welcome here at all. Pru had wanted her to leave from the moment she saw her.

  She looked around the room one more time, taking in every detail. Fifteen women, all white. Typical of segregated Baltimore. Statistically black women were the more likely victims, but white women formed the groups. Tess swept her eyes over all the faces; without names she would never keep them straight. She’d remember Pru, of course; she may even have a few nightmares about her. And the little one, Cece, whose impending marriage they were celebrating. She had a strange look on her face, sort of terrified and determined at the same time, but Tess assumed most brides-to-be looked the same. And a rape victim going through chemo would probably have more fears than average.

  She waved good-bye, wishing she could fake a few tears. Of course, trying to fake one’s way into a support group was arguably much worse than running an exclusive one, but Tess was still inexplicably angry at VOMA for rejecting her. Groups for rape victims should welcome everyone.

  “I guess I’ll go check out the Bingers,” she said as she left. “But they’ll probably kick me out because my devotion is to Goldenberg Peanut Chews instead of doughnuts.”

  Tess ran down the hall, enjoying the loud, smacking noise her shoes made on the old linoleum. Once outside she got in her car and pulled up to the corner, then turned off the engine and waited for the meeting to break up. She still wanted to find the woman quoted in the clipping. Pru, of course, would not help, although she wouldn’t be surprised to find out the woman was Pru. Mousy, distracted Cece—that was another story.

  All the support groups left at 9 P.M., but it was easy to spot the women from VOMA. They carried flashlights and cans of mace, held stiffly in front of them like bayonets, then linked arms, walking the member who was parked farthest away to her car, working back toward the old school. Cece drove off in an old Mustang. Tess quickly jotted down the tag numbers, which would get her the address from the MVA in case she lost her tonight. Then she pulled out behind her.

  Cece headed downtown, stopping at a coffee bar. Although Baltimore was generally known as a place where trends came to die, the city had anticipated the national mania for coffee. Tess watched from the street as Cece ordered a cappuccino from the counter and took her steaming cup to a shadowy corner, wedging herself in as if she didn’t like to have her back to anyone. She pulled some papers from her purse and studied them. Tess waited two minutes, then sailed in and ordered a decaf latte, ignoring Cece. If she sees me first, Tess reasoned, it will seem more like a coincidence. She sat at the counter with her profile turned toward the young woman, staring intently into space, but Cece never lifted her eyes from her work. It wasn’t part of Tess’s plan to dunk her biscotti, miss the glass, and spill the whole operation, but it worked. Cece’s eyes met hers. She then looked away, skittish and uncomfortable, gathering up the papers spread out in front of her.

  “You’re the one getting married, right? Cece?” Tess said, walking up to her table.

  “Cecilia. Cecilia Cesnik. Cece’s a nickname I’m trying to outgrow, only no one will let me.” She blushed and looked down at the table.

  If Tess hadn’t met her through VOMA, she would have assumed Cecilia was one of those people who had never overcome the adolescent habit of finding everything about themselves embarrassing. There was a lot going on behind the delicate face—edginess, fear, irritation at having her solitary moment disturbed. In Cece’s case—Cecilia’s case—it was probably her history as a rape victim that made her want to disappear.

  “I’m sorry if Pru seemed kind of rude,” Cecilia said. “But VOMA really is very specific. It’s not for everyone.”

  “I felt as if I had walked in on one of those girls’ clubs that were always forming in grade school.”

  “It’s in your best interest. I mean, it would be even worse to get into a group and find out it couldn’t help you. You’re not the first person Pru has turned away. Sometimes even men have tried to join.” She lowered her voice when she said “men,” as if the word itself were an obscenity. “We couldn’t have that.”

  “Why would men want to join?”

  “They have daughters or wives who have been raped, and they’re looking for a way to make sense of it. But VOMA isn’t for them, either.”

  “How long have you been a member?”

  “Six years, from the beginning,” she said with a small sigh. “Pru recruited me. The group was her idea, and she spent time at the courthouse, going through files and looking for victims whose rapists walked. I was raped almost seven years ago.”

  “And now you’re getting married. I bet there was a time when that seemed remote.”

  “Yes. Very remote.” She laughed. “I can’t quite believe it myself.”

  They sat in awkward silence. Tess wondered if her face betrayed her conflicting emotions. The idea of anyone hurting this tiny girl made her sick. She was glad, now, that she hadn’t told her rehearsed story. They would have known she was making it up. This was a kind of pain one couldn’t fake. Then again, VOMA, with its celebration of victimhood, gave her the creeps. She just wanted to find the woman quoted in the piece and find out if she still was harboring a grudge against Abramowitz.

  She slid one of her business cards across the table. Luckily it gave nothing away. “Well, if VOMA ever changes its policies, give me a call.” She was hoping her overture would prompt Cece to offer her number, but she just pocketed Tess’s card. Then she reached toward her head to play with the hair that was no longer there. Her hand dropped abruptly back into her lap.

  “You know, you actually look pretty good with suc
h short hair,” Tess said. “Not many women would.”

  “Yeah, I had a pretty bad case.”

  “Um, cancer?”

  Cecilia laughed again, a full-bodied laugh this time. “No, although you’re not the first to think that. I had Highland-town hair—dyed, permed, with the little side bangs in the front and the rest hanging down to my shoulders.”

  Highlandtown was an East Side working-class neighborhood, home to the city’s tallest beehives and thickest accents. Tess had never heard of Highlandtown hair, but she understood instantly what Cecilia meant.

  “Why did you cut it off? The neighborhood must be shocked.”

  “Not as shocked as they were when I quit my secretarial job and got a scholarship to the University of Baltimore’s law school. Or when I stopped pronouncing the second ‘r’ in ‘warter’ and ‘Warshington D.C.’ People told my pop I was getting uppity.” Cece—Cecilia—was suddenly sitting up straighter, and she had lost the shy, shambling style. “They were right. I am.”

  “What prompted all the changes?”

  “VOMA. It brought me together with a lot of women I might not have met otherwise. Rich women, from Roland Park and Guilford. Accomplished women. Pru really encouraged me. But she thinks I’m uppity, too.”

  “Why?”

  Cecilia shrugged. “It happens. Someone’s your mentor, then suddenly you don’t need a mentor anymore. Hey—what was yours like?”

  “My mentor?”

  “No, your rape.”

  Tess stared into her glass, mumbling: “Oh, typical date rape. I was helping a guy study, and we went up to his room.”

  “Mine was a burglar. I asked him to…pull out. I was scared of, I don’t know, pregnancy, or AIDS. I think I had this idea it would be more tolerable if he didn’t come inside me. Of course he found the whole thing hilarious.”

  “How did he get off?”

  “His lawyer used the thing about pulling out. He said I was so calm, so thoughtful, it must have been consensual. That it was my form of birth control. But that’s not the reason he got acquitted. Someone, the lab or the cops or the prosecutors, lost the physical evidence, the swab. The case fell apart without that.”

  “How does VOMA help?”

  “Oh, self-defense classes. Lectures. We even looked into some kind of civil suit.”

  “Against the lab, for losing your results?”

  “Something like that. VOMA worked pretty well.”

  “Worked, past tense? Are you quitting because you’re getting married, or because of law school?”

  “Right. Exactly. Because I’m getting married.” Cecilia jumped to her feet, gathering up her purse and the sheaf of papers on the table. In her haste she knocked everything to the floor. When Tess tried to help her pick the fluttering papers up, she panicked.

  “Don’t touch anything! Just let me put it back in order!” she shouted, her voice as shrill as a police whistle. It was a commanding sound, coming from such a tiny body. But Cecilia’s voice merely startled Tess into holding the papers even tighter, crumpling the sheets in her fist.

  Cecilia dropped into a practiced crouch, fingers curved as if to gouge someone’s eyes or stab a larynx, but her self-defense training was of little use unless someone came at her. Tess merely stood there, staring at her, along with everyone else in the coffee bar, except for two chess players who were using a timer for their game. Cecilia knew how to defend, but not how to attack. Tess knew how to attack, but she had no intention of doing so. After a few moments of this standoff, Cecilia improvised, throwing her body against Tess’s knees in a blatantly illegal tackle and bringing her crashing to the floor.

  As Tess fell she reached out blindly with both hands, dropping the crumpled sheets. Cecilia grabbed them and bolted, leaving Tess in a puddle of steamed milk and crockery.

  “Just another coffeehouse brawl,” Tess told the manager when he rushed over to examine the damage, not to her but to the heavy cups and saucers. “Caffeine makes some people very aggressive.”

  It hurt, being dumped on one’s butt on a concrete floor. Of course, Tess thought, a coffeehouse couldn’t have anything warm or soft underfoot. As she pulled to her feet, she saw a coffee-splattered piece of paper under the table. Greasy and gray, it appeared to be a page from some company’s articles of incorporation. Tess remembered seeing such documents when she was a reporter. This was the last page of the charter, bearing two signatures: Prudence Henderson, president and treasurer of VOMA, and the lawyer who had filed the charter for her: Michael Abramowitz.

  Chapter 15

  The president of the United States came between Tess and her bagels the next morning, and it wasn’t in one of her strange dreams.

  Nor was it the first time. Like most Baltimoreans, Tess had more experience than she wanted with visiting presidents, First Ladies, cabinet secretaries, and their ilk. Just forty-five miles up the parkway from Washington, Baltimore had become the destination of choice during the last decade, an easy photo op for those who wanted to surround themselves with local misery or color. Real folks. Even the queen of England had felt obliged to put in an appearance at an Orioles game. But whether it was a monarch or a president, a Democrat or a Republican, it all meant the same thing for the local populace—traffic jams and security checks, breathless reports on television for a week before and after, a disruption of life in general.

  Cranky at being deprived of her breakfast routine, Tess splurged on a chocolate-filled croissant and a cup of hazelnut coffee from one of the stalls inside the old Broadway market. She had planned to savor the high-calorie treat and gourmet coffee, but she ended up bolting both when she saw the bus crossing Broadway. One reason her Toyota had survived this long was because she used public transportation when possible, as long as she didn’t have to transfer. Baltimore’s bus system didn’t make it easy. Today she ended up six long blocks from her destination, the complex of state office buildings at Preston and Martin Luther King Boulevard.

  The bland gray towers here housed hundreds of state employees from several divisions. Tess took the elevator to room 808, home to all corporate charters filed in the state of Maryland, for businesses and nonprofits alike. Cecilia’s smeared copies must have come from here, from the old microfilm files, a technology now almost as quaint as telegraphs and Morse codes.

  It was a dusty, overheated room, always crowded and tense. When Tess was a reporter, jazzed up on caffeine and deadlines, just being here had pushed her to the edge of teeth grinding irritation. The too-small room seemed to affect everyone’s reflexes, until employees and visitors alike moved as if suspended in honey. There was always a crowd at the banks of filing cabinets, always a line at the front desk, never enough clerks to help out. Strange little gnomes, male and female, hogged the microfilm machines and tables. Tess had never known, or cared, who these people were or what they were doing.

  Now she was one of them. A free spirit, liberated from the forty-hour-a-week grind. Tess waited to surrender to the same lethargy the others had, to shuffle to the front desk, where she would get the folio number for the file she wanted, then to the cabinets where the files were kept, and to the machine where she could scan to the page number she needed. But the only feeling she had was her usual urgent desire to get out as quickly as possible. It took a mere five minutes to get the reel of microfilm, but the microfilm readers were already taken by people with piles and piles of film stacked at their sides. A bad sign, Tess decided, a very bad sign. She would have to rely on her more devious instincts, becoming sharper by the day, to jump ahead in line.

  “Anybody parked on Howard Street?” she asked brightly. “Because they’re ticketing.”

  Immediately three people rushed for the doors. One left a microfilm reader vacant and Tess usurped it, ignoring the glares of those who had not moved quite so quickly. She scanned on fast, which made her head ache as the pages rushed by in a blur. The machine gave off a noxious smell, a combination of ink and dust, laced with a burning odor from the old motor. VOM
A’s charter began on page 1,334, fairly deep into the file. She slowed the scan to a crawl, but she had already passed it by and had to reverse direction for several hundred pages before she could zero in.

  She was looking for more names to add to her growing list. Tess knew from writing about charities that a nonprofit typically had officers and a board. A lawyer filed the incorporation papers, but the lawyer usually didn’t have any further dealings with the group. Still, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that Abramowitz filed the papers for a group that had at least one member who hated his guts. The original filing for VOMA, the Victims of Male Aggression, listed only Prudence Henderson as president-treasurer, and the “agent,” lawyer Michael Abramowitz—the same names she had found on Cecilia’s fragment in the coffehouse. No board, and nothing unusual in the bylaws, basically a statement of purpose (“a nonprofit that seeks to educate about sexual assault”) and a promise not to support or oppose individual political candidates. That was boilerplate, a federal law any tax-exempt group had to follow.

  Tess scanned idly through the other charters in the file, curious to see if Michael Abramowitz often helped out with filings. His name did not come up again. But there were hundreds of thousands of corporations on file here. Abramowitz could have filed for any number, or helped out on just this one. Searching for his name this way was useless. She scanned back to the VOMA charter and pushed the “print” button. The greasy, smudged copies were free, and Tess believed one should always take advantage of government freebies. Your tax dollars at work.

  Before she left, she asked at the front desk to see the group’s latest filing, an annual update known as the pink sheet, because of its color. If a board had been installed since the original filing, or if new officers had been named, VOMA would provide the list with its annual statement, another source of names and leads. When Tess was a reporter, a clerk would bring out the entire file, standing guard to ensure one looked only at the top pink sheet, which was public. The rest of the file was confidential. It had been a simple and painless process. Too simple and painless apparently: The legislature had changed it. The clerk told Tess she now needed twenty-six dollars, check or cash, to get the pink sheet today, nothing if she could wait for them to mail it, which could take up to two weeks. Tess wondered if she could bill it to Tyner without explaining to Tyner what she was doing. Nope. Better to go the cheaper route. Why gamble twenty-six dollars on a long shot?