Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  Chapter 22

  “No one murders reporters.”

  Tess sat at the big pine table in Kitty’s kitchen, surrounded by what looked to be the most unorthodox of families. Kitty, in a slip dress that covered less than most negligees, was Mom. Dad would have to be Thaddeus. Torn between the immodesty of appearing in his bathrobe, or the indiscretion of wearing his bicycle patrol uniform, he had chosen the latter. Rounding out the group was Gramps—Tyner, in a pale rose polo and matching sweats, cantankerous as always. At the emergency room Kitty had called him after Tess begged her not to call her parents. Now Tess almost regretted her injunction. Her parents, more respectable than this crew, might have given her some much needed credibility with the two traffic detectives she faced.

  “No one murders reporters,” detective number one repeated. Or was it the other one, echoing his partner’s sentiments? The two men looked so alike—medium height, sallow complexions, brown hair and eyes—that Tess worried her fall had made her see double. Only their names were markedly different: Ferlinghetti and Rainer.

  “Like the poets?” Kitty had asked Ferlinghetti, squinting at his ID.

  “If you say so,” he had said. “Can we talk to Miss Monaghan?”

  While Tess had been in the emergency room and Jonathan in the morgue, the detectives had spent the morning interviewing neighbors, pacing off the distance between the point of impact and where Jonathan’s body had landed, drawing little diagrams of the accident. The day was unseasonably warm, and both men now had half-moons of sweat under the arms of their short-sleeved dress shirts. They were hot and irritated, and their mood was not improved by Kitty’s hot, bitter coffee or Tess’s insistence the old cab had been lying in wait for her, for Jonathan, for both of them, for someone.

  “It looks like he was killed on impact,” one of the detectives said, as if this should be cheering news. Tess kept replaying the scene: Jonathan running toward open ground, trying to take refuge behind the parked cars on the other side of the street, the car bearing down on him, his graceless flight. He may have died instantly, but he had a lifetime to think about it. If she knew Jonathan he was composing his own obit just before the car caught up to him.

  “It looked intentional,” she ventured. Each time they asked her, she became a little less sure.

  “What do reporters know?” Ferlinghetti asked, for once desiring no answer. “What can reporters do? They’re just typewriters. You don’t throw a typewriter out the window when it gives you bad news. You don’t kick the floor because the roof leaks on it. You fix the roof. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Rainer assured him.

  The two detectives then looked sternly at Tess, waiting for her to echo her agreement. She wanted to, wanted desperately to be cooperative, if only so they would leave her alone with her scraped palms and splitting headache. But the events of the morning kept running through her head on an endless loop she could not control, or stifle.

  “That car was aiming for us,” she insisted.

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it couldn’t have been on purpose. I’m saying it’s not a workman’s comp case. Someone wanted to kill Mr. Ross, it probably had more to do with his hobbies. Does he have a wife? A girlfriend?”

  Tess shook her head “no” to the first question, nodded miserably to the second.

  “Maybe someone had the wrong idea.” Ferlinghetti took a sip of Kitty’s coffee and winced. “Maybe someone had the right idea.”

  He was repeating himself, or repeating what his partner had said. They had already discussed most of the particulars that led up to Jonathan being with her at 6 A.M., down to the scratches she had left on his face, the bruise on his cheekbone—but not the bite on his wrist. She had recited, like an inventory, every glass of wine they had drunk the night before, every bite of Swiss chocolate eaten. She had admitted they had an off-again, on-again sexual relationship. But she insisted it was off again, at least on this night. Jonathan had dropped by to sleep off a hard night of drinking. She didn’t care what the detectives thought of her, but she did want to blunt the pain for Jonathan’s girlfriend. Bad enough he was dead; did he have to be a cad, too?

  “His girlfriend—Daphne—didn’t like to see him drunk. At least that’s what he said.”

  “And when you found him at your door, where were you coming from?”

  “A date.” Crow would have liked hearing that.

  “Your date got a name?”

  Tess, realizing she had no idea what Crow’s real name was, looked blankly to Kitty for help, who swiftly provided the answer: “E. A. Ransome. He works for me. I can get his number if you want.”

  “It wasn’t a date date, exactly,” Tess confessed.

  “What was it?” Rainer asked.

  Oh, breaking and entering at the city’s biggest law firm, a few drinks at a neighborhood bar. “He’s a friend. We went to a bar and talked about books we liked. He’s six or seven years younger than I am, for God’s sake.”

  Kitty hid a smile behind her palm. Thaddeus nodded soberly, as if Tess had made an excellent point. He had long forgotten Kitty’s chronological age.

  “So he was a friend and Jonathan Ross was a friend. You have a lot of friends.”

  Tyner raised his right hand slightly, a signal to say nothing. Tess ignored him.

  “I just want you to understand this isn’t about Crow being jealous of Jonathan, or his girlfriend, Daphne, being jealous of me. Jonathan and I were old friends. There was nothing for anyone to be jealous of.”

  “You’d be surprised what makes people jealous. Sleeping with a woman’s boyfriend, for example. A lot of women don’t like that.”

  “Well, if she was the one, wouldn’t she have run me down? It would have solved everything.”

  “Hey, women drivers.” Ferlinghetti looked at his notes. “All I’m saying is, if you want to talk murder, don’t tell me it was because Jonathan Ross was some big shot investigative reporter. Who do you think it was? An editor, the cops he covered? He wasn’t that good a reporter.”

  Rainer snickered at that. “Not that good a reporter,” he repeated. Tess remembered not all police officers had loved Jonathan. While he had ingratiated himself with homicide detectives, portraying them as hero-warriors on an urban battlefield, he had ignored the more prosaic cops. Traffic investigators, for example, many of whom yearned for assignments to homicide.

  “What about me, then?” Tess asked. “Is it possible someone was trying to kill me, and Jonathan got in the way? Someone other than Daphne?”

  “You piss a lot of people off as a bookstore clerk? What do you do—shortchange people? Refuse to gift wrap?”

  She looked at Tyner, who again raised two fingers on his right hand, waggling them slightly. Don’t tell them anything they don’t know. Classic defense attorney, she thought. She yearned to brag to these unimpressed, smug detectives, and to Tyner as well. To tell them about her one-woman investigation into Michael Abramowitz’s death, or her night raid on the Lambrecht Building. Then they might understand why she thought someone other than Jonathan was waiting for her in the alley last night. But why? What did she know? If someone thought she had discovered something, anything, they were sadly mistaken. She opened her mouth, ready to confess, eager to boast, then closed it again.

  “No reason,” she said. Tyner nodded his head slightly, happy she had taken his advice for once.

  Tyner knew best. That’s why Kitty had called him while Tess was in the emergency room, where the resident on duty stuck a tongue depressor in Tess’s mouth, peered into her ears and eyes with the little light, and tried to convince her to have a series of X rays. Unsure if her HMO would pay for them, she refused and he gave her a faded pamphlet: What to do in case of concussion. When she asked for salve for her cuts, or a prescription for painkillers, or just some lovely tranquilizers to help her sleep, he shrugged and said: “Any over-the-counter antiseptic cream will work on the abrasions, and ibuprofen will take care of the aches. As fo
r sleeping—try a shot of brandy in your coffee.” She planned to do that as soon as the detectives left.

  “I still think the car was trying to hit us,” she said, but it came out as a question this time. She wasn’t sure what she thought any more.

  “Any other day of the week, I might agree with you,” Rainer said. “But on a Sunday morning? In Fells Point? Hey, in this neighborhood it could have been some college kid who drank all night, then scored a little flake and was still flying. We see hit-and-runs around here a lot on the weekends—not usually fatal, I’ll admit. Look, it’s a hit-and-run, which is bad, and if we catch the person he or she faces some tough penalties. But it’s not a homicide.”

  “Of course it’s not, officers. Would you like some more coffee? Another pastry?” That was Kitty, in her silkiest tones, a smooth contralto a full octave below her normal speaking voice. Only Tess, and maybe Thaddeus, knew her well enough to realize how angry she must be. Impeccable manners were a danger sign with Kitty. She had been icily polite right before she bounced the rutabaga off that disgruntled parent’s head. Apparently she was tiring of serving up pots of coffee and plates of kolaches to the good officers. Time to go, boys.

  The detectives looked down into their mugs of coffee, too bitter to finish, and their kolaches, too hard to eat, and decided their stomachs could not afford any more of Kitty’s hospitality. They left, promising to be in touch. As they walked out through the store, Ferlinghetti could be heard to say to Rainer, or vice versa: “This won’t go in the pool.”

  “Fuck no. This is staying in traffic where it belongs. Which suits me fine, I got stuck with a low number—three fifteen.”

  “We’ll hit that by Halloween. I drew three sixty-six—a murder a day and one to grow on.”

  Kitty looked at Thaddeus: “What’s that all about?”

  He ducked his head, embarrassed. “Some of the guys have a pool on the number of homicides this year. But they drew numbers out of a hat, because there’re only thirty numbers anyone really wants, three thirty-five to three sixty-five.”

  “Are you in it?”

  “Of course not,” he said, frowning. Honesty compelled him to add, “You had to put in a dollar to draw for one of the slots, then five dollars if you got the right to make a pick.”

  “Assholes,” Kitty said, taking the good coffee beans out of the freezer. She had been serving Ferlinghetti and Rainer four-year-old canned decaf from the back of the refrigerator and stale kolaches someone had brought her after the Polish Festival in June. She tossed the pastry into the metal trash can, where it thumped loudly, then put Thaddeus to work making huevos rancheros for everyone. Tess was so disoriented from the events of the day, she didn’t know if she was famished or nauseous. A little of both, she decided.

  “Do you really think the driver was after one of you?” Tyner asked a little later as she sopped up her eggs with wholewheat tortillas.

  She hesitated and watched again as Jonathan flew herky-jerky through the air. “I keep a pretty regular schedule, you know. Someone would only have to watch me for a day or two to know when I leave for the boat house.”

  “I hate to agree with detectives Ferlinghetti and Rainer, but why would anyone want to kill you, besides Mr. Ross’s girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know, unless it’s because I know something I don’t know I know. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I’ve, um, been doing a little work on Rock’s case on my own time.”

  Tyner gripped his coffee cup so hard, Tess thought it might shatter in his hand. She knew he was yearning to scream at her, as if she were some undisciplined novice, but felt he had to restrain his temper in front of Kitty and Tad.

  “How did you have time to do things on your own when I made you come to my office every afternoon?”

  “There are twenty-four hours in a day, Tyner. I knew I’d have to tell you eventually what I was up to, but I thought…I thought I’d have found out who killed Abramowitz, and then you couldn’t be too mad at me.”

  “And did you find out?”

  “No,” Tess admitted, frowning. “I found out a lot—but none of it seems to have anything to do with Abramowitz’s murder.”

  Her story tumbled out, a disjointed narrative that shot forward and back in time. The trip to VOMA, the strange visit from Cecilia. Her talk with Ava. Rock’s refusal to stay away from Ava, even though she wouldn’t return his phone calls or see him. Tracking down Abner Macauley. Trying to find Macauley’s gun.

  “Jesus, Tess—what were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it would show he was worried about his safety. It seems pretty lame now, I admit.”

  “Did you find anything at all?”

  “A floppy disk taped to his calendar. I was going to read it last night, but Jonathan showed up….” They all knew how that had ended. “It’s probably not anything. The weird thing is, all his files were empty. Does that mean anything? Could there have been something incriminating there?”

  “I’m sure moving his files to other offices would have been routine under any circumstances. Death can’t interfere with the business of law, not when one’s hours are billed at six hundred dollars per,” Tyner said. “That floppy you found is useless. No matter what’s on it, the prosecutor would have it barred from the trial. There’s no way to prove whose it is, or where it came from. It’s too easy to tamper with those things.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  Thaddeus slipped out, but Kitty stayed, sponging down counters that were already clean. Tess sat miserably, the complete failure.

  “So it was a simple hit-and-run,” Tyner said. “Some drunk at the wheel. Maybe he thought it was funny, chasing you two down the alley, then he panicked when he hit Jonathan. As the song says, it could happen to you. After all, it happened to me.”

  Kitty had taken all of this in, uncharacteristically quiet. Now, as she poured fresh coffee, she asked: “What about the possibility the car was after Jonathan, had followed him here? Maybe they waited all night for him.”

  Tess shook her head. “No, Ferlinghetti was right about that. You don’t kill the reporter, you kill the source.”

  Tyner chewed his eggs. “I think you’re a little paranoid. That’s what happens when you skulk around, poking through other people’s drawers, literally and figuratively. If you had followed my instructions, you might not be in conspiracy mode right now.”

  This was no fake gruffness. Tyner was angry. Then again, Tyner was always angry.

  “Can I ask you something, Tyner? Something personal?”

  “I did not kill Michael Abramowitz, Detective Monaghan.”

  “No, seriously. Were you always so mean, or did getting…hurt make you bitter, the way O’Neal said? The only time you’re nice is when you’re coaching. Even then you’re always yelling.”

  “No, Tess, getting hit by a car didn’t make me bitter. In fact I’m actually nicer than I used to be—but that’s about age, not about circumstances, about realizing that winning a silver medal in the Olympics isn’t something you can coast on forever, which I might have done if I had been able to keep rowing. Believe it or not, I don’t live my life in a perpetual state of before and after. The accident changed my life, but it didn’t define it. I’ve just got a lousy personality. And you seem to bring out the worst in me, Tess.”

  “Me? Why?” She had assumed Tyner’s constant fury was general, not specific.

  “Because you’re so goddamn lazy!” He banged his mug down on the table, so hard the silverware jumped. “You could be one of the best female rowers in Baltimore, but you won’t work at it. You could be a good-looking woman, but you run around in baggy clothes with that stupid braid hanging out of your head. You’re smart enough to find a new career, but you’d rather moon over your lost reporting job.

  “So I finally accepted you as you are. I told you: Don’t extend yourself, don’t take any initiative, do only what you’re told—and you do the exact opposite. You expend all your energy on fooli
sh causes. You’re a mule, Tess. A stubborn, cantankerous young woman wrapped up in herself. I could kick you, if I could kick at all.”

  Tess felt a strange, almost masochistic thrill at Tyner’s harsh words. It was at once awful and fascinating to hear her flaws enumerated so well.

  “Does this means I’m fired?”

  “It means you’ve fulfilled your contractual obligation to Rock.” Tyner’s voice was almost sad. “I don’t think I’ll need you anymore, Tess.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to fill my days.” Tess pushed away from the table and ran upstairs. His words hadn’t hurt her—her own parents had said much worse many times—but they had hit home in a way her parents’ criticism never could.

  Before-and-after mode. That’s how she had been living for two years, since the paper folded. No, not quite. She had been stuck on the fence, longing for “before,” refusing to let “after” begin.

  She sat on her bed, looking in the mirror over the bureau, the same mirror in which Jonathan had examined his face last night, so worried about his nose. The memory did not sting as much as she thought it would. She was still a little numb. Eventually, she knew, she would have a thousand memories to confront, tucked away in every corner of her small apartment. It would hurt more before it hurt less.

  She unlocked her desk drawer, fished out Abramowitz’s disk, and loaded it into her computer. Her Mac, an older model, almost seemed to shudder as the floppy went in. ABRAMOWITZ: A LIFE, was the floppy’s label, but it contained only one document. It had last been changed on September 12, the day Abramowitz died. Eagerly she called it up, noting the number of characters in the lower lefthand corner. It was a huge file, perhaps 1,000 pages, she calculated.

  Yet the screen she faced was nothing more than electronic wallpaper in a narrow font, single spaced. Nada. Nada, nada, nada. Nada, nada, nada—it filled the first page, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. She told the computer to jump to the end of the file. Still solid nada. Upper case, lower case. Sometimes separated by commas, sometimes set off by semicolons, sometimes underlined, but all nada, always nada. And it wasn’t a program, she was sure of that. Michael Abramowitz had sat at his desk, drawing a partner’s salary at the city’s biggest law firm, and written “nada” word by word, over and over again, playing with formats and fonts and point size. It was strange, it was crazy. It made perfect sense, for she felt like doing it herself right now.