Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  They worked in silence until Alison hurried in again, full of her own importance as she announced a phone call from Seamon P. O’Neal.

  “Of O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill,” she added as Tyner picked up the phone. Tess tried to eavesdrop, but Alison wanted to chat.

  “I didn’t make the connection at first,” she said, wrinkling her perfect, perky nose. “He pronounces his name ‘Shaymun.’ Isn’t that funny? I thought it was Seamen.”

  “It’s Irish. And Shaymun is preferable to Seamen, don’t you think? Consider the homophones.” Alison blushed and practically ran from the room. Tess couldn’t be sure if it was the oblique reference to semen, or the word “homophone,” that Alison thought obscene. She turned her attention back to Tyner, but the call was already over.

  “He wants to see us—to see me,” Tyner said, hanging up the phone. “He says it’s about Rock’s case.”

  “Are you meeting him at his office?”

  “No, at his house. ‘Sixish, for cocktails,’ he said. But I have a feeling he expects us at six sharp and drinks will be an afterthought. Successful lawyers usually do not arrive home by six, ready for cocktails. Not even founding partners with wealthy wives.”

  “Expects us. You said, ‘Expects us.’”

  Tyner sighed. “It will probably be a boring little fencing session in which Seamon tries to figure out what we know and the implications for the firm. That’s all he cares about, his law firm’s reputation.”

  “And I’m the one who knows where and when the star associate spent her lunch hours with the newest partner.”

  Tyner threw up his hands. “You want to go, you can go, as long as you drive and stay quiet. I’d like to think you have something better to do with your evenings.”

  They left the office at 5:30, usually more than enough time for the three-mile trip to Guilford, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods within the city limits. But the O’Neals lived on Cross Place, a hidden cul de sac unknown to Tess and Tyner, both Baltimore natives. After several wrong turns they finally found their way to the street, a leafy enclave set off by a stone archway thick with ivy. A small sign advised them it was a private block, which may have explained why it was missing from the city map they had studied futilely. NO TRESPASSING, it warned in black, curving letters.

  “Cross Place. Of course,” Tyner said. “William Tree, Seamon’s father-in-law, married Amelia Cross and bought this property for her. It was a huge estate at one point, almost two hundred acres. But Tree, always a developer at heart, couldn’t resist subdividing his own land over time.”

  “I thought the philosophy was to hold on to land, because they’re not making it anymore.”

  “That’s fine if you don’t need any cash flow. Tree had expensive tastes. The center house was his, and the houses on either side were for his two children, William Jr. and Luisa Julia—Ellie Jay. William Jr. died young in an influenza epidemic. The O’Neals took over the center house when her parents died. The O’Neals have a son and a daughter, too, but they apparently gave up on living here in harmony. The other houses were sold a few years back, almost as soon as William Tree, Sr., was in his grave.”

  Rambling, redbrick mansions, the houses were identical in almost every aspect. But the middle house had a subtle grandeur its mates could not match. Its lot was a little larger, its lawn crosshatched like the field at Camden Yards. Ancient crepe myrtles wrapped around the house, their blooms just past. A few tiny blossoms, in hues ranging from pale pink to almost purple, littered the grounds, faded confetti after a parade.

  As soon as Tess pulled into the driveway, a maid came running to meet them, a pale blue and white banner in her hand. She tied it to the antenna of Tyner’s van.

  “The neighborhood watch group gives these out,” she explained matter-of-factly. “It means you’re invited. When people see strange cars these days, they get jumpy.”

  This nervousness was new, Tess realized. Once, Guilford had been a safe neighborhood, its grand homes untouched by crime and larceny as if by some secret arrangement. This summer, people in the poor sections to the south and east had started making forays into Guilford. An armed robbery here, a break-in there, at least one rape—the sort of things the rest of Baltimore had lived with for years. But Guilford’s residents were outraged. A covenant had been broken. The homeowners, many of whom were paying as much as $15,000 a year in property taxes alone, lobbied city hall for the right to hire their own security force. Grudgingly the city had allowed them to pay for the services it could not provide.

  The concern for security did not stop at the curb. Waiting in the O’Neal foyer, Tess peeked into the closet and saw the green and red lights of a complicated alarm system. It even had a “lock down” designation, a term Tess had heard only in connection with prisons.

  “Why do we have to wait?” Tess whispered. “They told us to be here at six and it’s past that.”

  “We wait for the same reason one always waits in these situations. Shay O’Neal has to remind us he’s more important than we are and his time more precious.”

  Exactly nine minutes later the maid took them into the sun room at the rear of the house. This was the O’Neals’ version of a den or family room, although Tess knew the furniture cost more than the living room set her mother kept encased in plastic slipcovers. But she was less interested in the room’s plush furnishings than she was in the view, something one never suspected from the house’s staid, formal front.

  “Look, Tyner,” she said, walking to the bank of louvered windows. “They did save part of the estate after all. It’s like the rest of Baltimore doesn’t even exist back here.”

  It was no backyard, but a wooded hill where leafy paths wove in and out. The trees were just beginning to turn, so glints of red and gold shone among the green. One could barely see the houses on the hill’s far side, their windows winking through the trees.

  “It’s a woodland garden,” a woman’s voice began before it was quickly overwhelmed, then smothered by a man’s booming voice.

  “We both enjoy our garden. We’ve certainly paid enough to get it to look as random as it does.”

  Tess turned and faced two of Baltimore’s most famous citizens, expecting to know them instantly—and realized she had never seen them before. Their faces were at once familiar and strange. Just as she had thought Abramowitz was an old friend because he had been on television, she had imagined she knew the O’Neals because their names were everywhere. On museum wings and soup kitchens, on fat checks to charities. On programs at the symphony and every year’s list of big United Way contributors. Seamon P. O’Neal and Luisa J. O’Neal, on behalf of the William Tree Foundation. It was always worded this way, presumably because Shay did not wish his dead father-in-law to reap all the credit for the fortune he had made and Shay had enlarged.

  Still, they looked as Tess might have predicted. Shay was a dead ringer for the generic man featured in the background of catalogs from Talbot’s and J. Crew, always slightly out of focus. A white-haired man with rosy skin and bright blue eyes, he looked as if he feasted on rare roast beef, washed down with robust burgundies or cabernets, followed by a good dose of port. He looked the way Tess had always thought a vampire should look after a good meal—not pale, but suffused with blood, red and vivid.

  In contrast the woman at his side could have been a vampire’s victim. Pale Luisa J. O’Neal had a bruised look around her eyes and she was thin, almost too thin. Tess knew instantly she was one of those loathsome people who can never keep weight on, who regularly misplace five pounds as if they were car keys. Luisa O’Neal looked as if she lived on weak tea and water biscuits, with an occasional cup of beef broth to liven things up. No wonder her childhood nickname, Ellie Jay, was still in use: She had a birdlike, fragile air. She wore an ankle-length flowery skirt with Fortuny pleats, pearls, and a Chanel-style jacket of deep green, a perfect match for the skirt’s background. Not Chanel-style, Tess corrected herself. This would have to be the real thing.
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br />   Still, she was far less intimidating than her husband, and Tess found it easier to answer her. “If this were my house, I guess I’d be looking out the window all the time.”

  “I do spend most of my time here,” she answered in the accentless voice common to Baltimore’s best families. “The view changes constantly. And because it faces west, there are lovely sunsets over the hill. I also like it because the stream at the bottom—you can barely see it this time of year, the trees are still so thick—is named for my father and my mother. Cross-Tree Creek.”

  “Cross-Tree Creek!” Mr. O’Neal interrupted with a snorting laugh. “Only the Trees ever called it that. It’s Little Wyman Falls on any city map I’ve ever seen. The city renamed it thirty years ago, after William sold off that parcel. Of course, now it’s worth a hundred times what he sold it for.”

  Tess was used to such sniping in her own family, but it made her uncomfortable here. Unsure of what she should say, if anything, she stared at Mr. O’Neal’s teeth through her eyelashes. They were long and ocher colored, very refined in her opinion. Perhaps they were dentures, made to look so unappealing no one would guess they were fake.

  Husband and wife took their seats in matching wing chairs as Mrs. O’Neal launched into a droning litany of hospitality. Coffee, tea, wine, beer, whiskey, a cocktail, water, Coke, ginger ale, juice? Tea, Tyner and Tess agreed, although Tess secretly longed for one of those mellow amber whiskeys she saw in crystal decanters on a butler’s bar. But even tea, it appeared, was not a simple choice. “Hot or iced?” Mrs. O’Neal asked. Hot, they agreed. Herbal? Sure. Lemon. Of course. Or cream? No, lemon. One lump or two? Two, they guessed. By the time she finished quizzing them, the maid had arrived pushing a rolling cart with a teapot in its cozy and plates of petit fours, cheese straws, and crustless sandwiches. The cozy was dingy looking, covered with an unskilled cross-stitch. Probably the handiwork of a Tree ancestor and already promised to whatever museum had agreed to put up the requisite plaque: Donated by Seamon P. and Luisa J. O’Neal, on behalf of the William Tree Foundation.

  Tess was so overwhelmed by the tea’s production values that she almost forgot she and Tyner had been summoned here.

  After a few observations about the weather and the Orioles, O’Neal segued neatly from a humorous anecdote about his latest case to the matter at hand. “Now, you’re representing that Paxton boy, is that right, Tyner?”

  Tyner nodded.

  “Yes. Tragic situation. And a very…public one. We wonder—at the firm, the partners—if it might be the sort of thing best suited to a plea bargain. We might even be able to help the young man if that was the case, call on some of our contacts in the state’s attorney’s office. Although I’ve never done any criminal defense work, I do have some ties there.”

  “Plea bargains work best for guilty people,” Tyner said.

  “Of course. Yes.” Mr. O’Neal added another two lumps of sugar to his tea and stirred it energetically. “My understanding is your client might fit that, uh, profile. The evidence is, I understand, quite damning.”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “Yes. Well.” O’Neal whipped his tea madly again, then put it aside. Tess sensed he had put his manners aside, too, that the conversation had shifted suddenly. “We think it would be better for everyone if it didn’t go to trial. Perhaps Abramowitz was a pig, but what’s the use of going over that in a courtroom? A lot of people’s lives could be upset, and the conclusion probably will be the same, albeit with more jail time for your client. A trial would just be an exercise in vanity—your vanity, Tyner. I have it on good authority the prosecutors will settle for manslaughter and a sentence of ten years. He could be out in five. That’s nothing.”

  Tess tried to imagine Rock in prison for five years. He would never last. Oh, he could protect himself against the most vicious inmates, but weight lifting and basketball could never replace his rowing routine. And nothing would compensate for the crush of people. He would hate that most of all.

  Tyner regarded O’Neal quizzically. “When you represented Nance Chemical, did you advise the CEO of that company to pay the fine and be done with it? Did you ever tell the folks at Sims-Kever to forget about a trial, just go ahead and pay those pesky asbestos victims?”

  “That was different.”

  “Exactly. Your clients were guilty. Mine isn’t.”

  The two men stared at each other across the expanse of a kilim rug that Tess estimated to be worth her take-home pay for the year. O’Neal’s face had flushed a deeper shade of red, but he seemed calm, almost jovial. She had seen that face before, she decided. The photo in the newspaper file? No, in that one, he had been looking down, so all one saw was the part in his hair. She had seen him laughing and smiling, enjoying himself immensely. Pleasant and harmless, the way he had seemed when their tea party began. A benign grandfather, showing a favorite grandson his back swing. Not, not back swing—a backhand. And not a grandson. A girl. A woman.

  “You look different with your clothes on,” she blurted.

  If O’Neal had been sipping his tea, he might have executed a perfect spit-take. Instead he stammered and blustered while his wife fastened her bruised eyes on him. Mrs. O’Neal did not seemed altogether surprised, but she was certainly interested.

  “I saw you at the Sweat Shop talking to Ava Hill the other night,” Tess said. “You weren’t not dressed—I mean, you weren’t naked—but you had on workout clothes. Or squash clothes, I guess. That’s what I meant.”

  “Of course.” He turned to his wife. “Ava stopped me at the club, worried to death about the implications of her fiancé’s arrest.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” Tess said, knowing she should stop, yet incapable of shutting up. “Because this was more than a week before Abramowitz died. Did you talk to her before and after the murder? Or were you lying just now?”

  She was glad then for the length of the room and its high ceilings, for a smaller room could not have held the ensuing silence. O’Neal was now the color of a plum tomato. Mrs. O’Neal’s face was impassive, staring off into the hills as if the matter was of no interest to her. Every inch a lady, Tess noted. Tyner looked furious—probably with her because she had spoken, and because she had not shared an important fact earlier. He didn’t like surprises. But she hadn’t realized what she knew until she watched O’Neal speak, seen the same bobbing gestures he had used when Ava had stalked him at the Sweat Shop. She was often the last person to realize what she knew.

  “Oh, the sun is going down!” Mrs. O’Neal cried, clasping her hands together. It was the bland, borderline insipid remark of a woman trained to defuse tricky social situations, a woman who never had trouble setting a table, no matter how many sworn enemies were invited to the same dinner party. It worked, for her husband suddenly found his tongue, as smooth as ever.

  “I talk to Ava all the time. She is an associate at our firm, with a promising future,” O’Neal said. A vein throbbed at his temple, but he was otherwise composed. “Her fiancé’s murder trial could damage that future. Clients don’t like lawyers who have been too close to felonies and felons. Or law firms where people are murdered. O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill doesn’t deserve this. We’ve always avoided publicity, good or bad.”

  “You brought Abramowitz in as a partner,” Tyner said. “You must have known publicity would come with him.”

  “It didn’t, not at first. He was happy to go to charity balls and have his picture taken. And, to be fair, it’s really not Abramowitz’s fault he became front page news by becoming a corpse. Your client gets the credit for that.”

  In the space of ten minutes Tess had reassessed her opinion of Seamon P. O’Neal almost ten times. He had seemed silly and harmless, then harmful. He had lied; she was sure of that. An associate who had failed the bar twice didn’t have a promising future. But he wasn’t a stupid man, merely someone with a radically different viewpoint. He had spent his career protecting large corporations from the complaints of individua
ls. It was consistent he should hold to this view when it struck close to home.

  “My firm means the world to me,” he said. “Its reputation is priceless. If you insist on going to court with this case and trying to build a defense on whatever your client thinks was going on between Mr. Abramowitz and Ms. Hill, I can promise you we will be of no help. The tiniest thing you want from us—a file, information about the girl’s employment history, interviews with employees—will have to go through a judge. You’ll need a court order to call me on the phone. And I don’t think you’ll get any cooperation from Ms. Hill, either. Wouldn’t it be better if we were all on the same side?”

  “Only for you.” Tyner said. “And I could give a fuck about the Triple O. I would consider it a bonus if this trial damaged the undeserved reputation of O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill.”

  O’Neal’s eyes flicked across Tyner’s wheels. With his red face and beaky profile, he reminded Tess of a copperhead snake.

  “I’d forgotten what a bitter bastard you are,” he said. “I suppose I would be, too, if I were a cripple with only one accomplishment of note, and it was more than forty years behind me.”

  Mrs. O’Neal picked this moment to ask: “More hot water, Tyner?”

  But her good manners could not save the tea party twice. “Don’t worry about it, Seamon,” Tyner said, his voice oddly jovial. “You’ve got a few years. With some luck you might have something to be proud of, something better than a law firm and your father-in-law’s millions.”

  Tyner’s line cried out for a grand departure, but the O’Neals’ home, for all its graciousness, did not provide him with the unfettered passage needed to roll out dramatically. Tess helped him navigate the kilim rug and the slippery runner in the hallway, a thin rug that bunched up under his wheels. At the front door she had to help him back away from the door before she could wrench it open. When she finally threw it open, a screeching noise filled the air, a horrible sound that echoed endlessly up and down Cross Place. She had set off the O’Neals’ alarm system, apparently programmed for automatic, as if they expected Tyner and Tess to bolt.