TMonaghan 12 - Hush Hush

by Laura Lippman

  Another Cheshire cat smile. It did nothing for that plain, froggy face. “Any answer I give to that question would violate my client’s privilege. Sorry.”

  “I don’t think you’re the least bit sorry. What has she been saying to you? Why do you dislike me so much? You know, everything that happened, to me, it was probably because I had an undiagnosed mental disorder and now Alanna may have it, too. You need to be aware of that. I feel horrible because that’s my true legacy to my daughters. But if Alanna killed Stephen, then you have to consider that. She was probably not in her right mind at the time.”

  “I don’t dislike you, Melisandre. I didn’t like you, twenty years ago, when you swanned past me with your nose in the air. You were just one of those people who was always looking over the shoulder of the person in front of you so you could find the next person over whose shoulder you wanted to look. But I didn’t dislike you. The two things are distinct, like and dislike. I never knew you well enough to dislike you.”

  “I think Tyner has chosen poorly,” Melisandre said. “I am going to speak to him about this. I am paying, after all. Will you still be sitting here when my checkbook closes?”

  “I might. It’s a darn interesting case. Besides, Tyner left an hour ago, to be with his wife.”

  That hard crunch on that last word. What did this toad know?

  “He’ll be back here in fifteen minutes if I call him and tell him I need him. Besides, I want him here when his niece returns from New York.”

  He was there in ten minutes.

  6:15 P.M.

  When Tess saw Johns Hopkins Hospital on its hilltop perch in East Baltimore, she called Kitty to say she would be at her home in less than twenty minutes.

  “Is Tyner there with you?” she asked.

  “No, he went back to the office. Melisandre called.”

  “I need to talk to him. Face-to-face.” Tess was dreading the conversation, but having it over the phone would be a big mistake. She wanted to show him the receipts, lay out Harmony’s theory. He would know that Harmony was the source, but that was okay. As long as Melisandre didn’t know what Harmony had indicated, she should be fine.

  Tess had read Tyner’s transcript on the train. It was disturbing. The fact that Melisandre had hired a lawyer before Isadora died—what was that about? Tess might as well get the conversation over now, go straight to his office, then pick up Carla Scout at Kitty’s.

  “Look, I hate to impose, Kitty, but can you keep Carla Scout another hour or so?”

  “No imposition.” But Kitty’s voice sounded strained.

  “Oh, shit, I’m so inconsiderate. She probably needs dinner. Look, she eats anything. Or doesn’t eat anything, sometimes, but I don’t worry about that. Feed her whatever you have on hand. I would say order a pizza, but only if you know a place that meets Crow’s standards.”

  “When Crow dropped her off, he said she could have Papa John’s.”

  “He did? Wow, interesting change of heart. I don’t think she’s ever had a pizza that wasn’t made at home, or in some place that uses the word artisanal on the menu. Then again, everything is artisanal now. Okay, then Papa John’s it is. Just cheese, though.”

  “And you’ll be here when?”

  “Soon, I hope. Maybe an hour or so.”

  “Crow told her she could have a Berger cookie, too.”

  “Sure. Train going into the tunnel. See you soon!”

  Tess surrendered herself to these final seconds of solitude, unsure when she would be alone again. She could have made an earlier train, but she had availed herself of her free hour in Midtown—walking around, absorbing the city’s energy, stopping at the Algonquin for a martini, which meant she had had to refuse the free wine in first class. She needed two hours and twelve minutes to burn off the effects of that martini. The trip home had not been quite as pleasant as the one to New York. She was dreading trying to persuade Tyner that Melisandre had tainted her own sugar bowl. And it didn’t mean anything, in the big scheme of things. It was the least important allegation against Alanna. This fact also seemed to indicate that Tony Lopez was telling the truth. He hadn’t used his hotel connections to get into Melisandre’s suite.

  Tess gathered her things, which included a bag of bagels for tomorrow’s breakfast. Her car had fogged up in the humid chill of the parking garage and, as she waited for everything to defog, she told herself she didn’t need another bagel right now. Oh, Berger cookies. She had to get Berger cookies.

  Wait—Berger cookies had trans fats. It had been all over the paper at the end of last year. Berger cookies had trans fats, and the small Maryland-based company claimed it couldn’t make them any other way if the substance was banned as proposed.

  And Papa John’s—whatever the quality of the pizza, Crow would never suggest buying pizza from a business owned by someone who had tried to circumvent the affordable health care act. Had Kitty lost her mind?

  No, not Kitty. Never Kitty. Kitty was sending Tess a message: Things were not as they should be. She was in trouble.

  Which meant Carla Scout was in trouble, too.

  6:20 P.M.

  “When will she be here?” the man with the gun asked.

  “In an hour or so. She has to go see my husband at his office.”

  “Will he be with her when she comes back?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly.” Would it be better to tell the man that Tyner was in a wheelchair? Would that make him calmer? Or simply more lethally confident?

  “Does she have a key? Can she get into the apartment on her own?”

  “No, I’ll have to go to the door. I mean, we don’t even have a buzzer. I’ll have to go down in the elevator and let her in.”

  “An elevator for a three-story building. You must be pretty lazy.” So he didn’t know about Tyner. “Well, I’ll be up here, with her. I’ll hold her in my lap.”

  He tried to pick Carla Scout up. She wriggled away. “NO HUGS.” She was playing with a toy from Kitty’s girlhood, a large cloth painted to look like a town, with roadways and green spaces and railroad tracks.

  “Do you really know how to use that? The gun?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t think you can get it away from me.”

  “I wouldn’t dare try. I just worry—the way you gesture with it. That strikes me as dangerous.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “My life was ruined. I’m going to ruin her life.”

  “How?”

  The question flustered him. He was about forty, but an old-looking forty—pudgy, with a patchy red complexion. He had come to the bookstore ten minutes after closing, knocking frantically on the door, saying it was an emergency, he had to buy a gift for his young daughter. The employees had gone home and she was almost finished balancing her receipts for the week, but Kitty took pity on him and let him in, led him to the nook of children’s books, where Carla Scout had spent much of the afternoon and was still playing.

  It was then that he showed her the gun and told her to take him upstairs.

  He did not offer his name, and he refused to say what he wanted with Tess, other than the chance to ruin her life. Kitty prayed that he did not have the imagination necessary to realize what would truly be the worst thing he could do to Tess.

  “I used to date a cop,” she told him now. This was true. “Your gun looks very new. Shiny.”

  “Bought it three days ago. All nice and legal. I didn’t have any problem with the background check or the fingerprints. I’m entitled to own a gun. And yet— Well, never mind.”

  It was not a particularly powerful-looking gun. It wasn’t the weapon that a crazy man would take into a schoolhouse or a mall. But it wouldn’t take that powerful a gun to destroy Tess’s life. One bullet would do it.

  “How did Tess hurt you?”

  “She knows.”

  “But she didn’t do physical harm to you, or anyone you love. I’m pretty sure of t
hat.”

  “As good as. And she’s a hypocrite. She’ll take anyone’s money. She’ll work for a baby killer if there’s money in it. She was working for that Melisandre Dawes woman.”

  Lord knows, Kitty didn’t want to argue Melisandre’s side of anything right now. “She was acquitted. Not guilty by reason of criminal insanity.”

  “She had a good lawyer. I had a bad one. That’s how this country works. If you can’t afford a good lawyer, you’re screwed.”

  “We have at least an hour. And I’m a really good listener. Maybe if you talk to someone, you’ll feel better.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “It’s been five years and I feel worse every day.”

  6:35 P.M.

  Tess made it to Kitty’s in under ten minutes. If a cop tried to pull her over, she would just lead him straight to the bookstore. She had considered calling 911, but what would she tell them—My aunt wants to give my daughter Berger cookies, so clearly something is wrong? No, she would get there, assess the situation, and then call 911.

  Before Kitty had married Tyner, Tess had lived on the top floor of the building that housed the bookstore, in a small apartment with a large deck. She had locked herself out often enough to know how to break into what was now Kitty and Tyner’s master suite. She climbed the fire escape along the back of the building, poking her head cautiously above the deck railing. The bedroom was dark. Unfortunately, the French doors to the deck were locked, as were all the windows. But Tess knew that the old windows could be opened from the outside if one had the patience to fiddle with them—to push and lean, push and lean. It was hard to have patience when all she wanted to do was smash the window and go crashing into the apartment. But, no, she had to be careful. She had no idea what awaited her. And she had no weapon. She couldn’t have taken her gun on the train, and she hadn’t wanted to keep it in her glove box while the car was in a public garage, so it was at home, locked away in the gun safe.

  After an interminable five minutes of pushing and leaning, the screws lifted from the old, soft wood—thank God Kitty had never replaced the windows on the top floor. She had, however, blocked the window with a dressing table that was slightly higher than the sill, and Tess had to wiggle around it, trying not to disturb Kitty’s myriad perfume bottles. One went over, but the floor had a fluffy rug that muted the sound. Alas, the perfume spilled from the old-fashioned cut-glass bottle that Kitty used, and some got on Tess as it toppled. Great, she was now the Joy-scented ninja. If they didn’t hear her coming, they’d smell her.

  The old staircase, used only by Kitty now, was creakier than Tess remembered. She took off her boots and crept down in stocking feet. There was a door at the foot of the stairs, a leftover from the days when the top floor was a separate unit. This led directly into Kitty’s living room. Tess cracked the door, dropping to her knees. The living room was dark, but she could hear voices, Kitty and a man. The tone was strangely conversational. Had Tess overreacted? Continuing on hands and knees, she followed the sound of the voices into the large kitchen and dining room.

  Unfortunately, this put her at eye level with Carla Scout, who looked up and cooed in the sweetest voice possible: “MAMA!” She then held out her arms to Tess and tried to run to her. A man stood up, a man with a gun in his hand. Tess had the shortest second in history to decide what to do next.

  She punched him in the balls, which were conveniently at eye level. He went down, she grabbed his gun and started kicking him. And kept kicking him until the blood in her head and ears subsided and she realized that Carla Scout, safe in Kitty’s arms, was screaming for her to stop. She stood over the man, who was curled in the fetal position, shielding his testicles from a second assault.

  “Who are you?”

  “You know me. You ruined my life. You took my daughter away from me. You know me.”

  She didn’t.

  7:30 P.M.

  They did have pizza, after all, although not Papa John’s. Tess called Crow, who left work and brought them Matthew’s pizza, which they offered to the detectives. As they ate, they tried to explain to Carla Scout why Mama had beat the shit out of someone in front of her, but it was difficult.

  “He was a bad man,” Crow said.

  “Like Captain Hook?” Carla Scout asked.

  “Sure.”

  “But we don’t hit!” Carla Scout pointed out. “We never, ever hit.”

  “No, we don’t. But he was a very bad man. He was going to—to hurt someone. Mama had to hit him to make him stop.”

  “But, Dada, hitting is always wrong.”

  “It is. Mama’s sorry.”

  And Mama was sorry. Truly. The man with the gun was Emmett Verlaine, and his surname jogged Tess’s memory in a way his face never would. Verlaine v. Verlaine, an ugly divorce; not that there were any pretty ones in Tess’s experience, but maybe only the ugly ones made it to the desk of a private detective. Tess had worked for his ex-wife. Verlaine had wanted joint custody but didn’t get it. This had nothing to do with Tess’s work, which had centered on Verlaine’s financials, and everything to do with his track record for violence against his former wife. But someone had to be blamed, and Verlaine decided that it was Tess, that everything that had gone wrong with his life—quite a bit—had started with her accessing his credit score and doing a sweep of his financial life. His wife had moved to Texas in January, and there was nothing he could do to stop her. Then he had seen Tess with her daughter. He had started following her, meaning at first only to scare her, upset her. But when he realized she was in Melisandre’s employ, some switch had flipped. He wanted to teach her a lesson.

  “She’s a hypocrite,” he told the detectives. “Cares only who’s paying her bills.”

  He claimed it had been his intention to kill himself, to make Tess and her daughter watch the horror of a man blowing his brains out. Maybe it had been. The police took him away, and Tess had to keep herself from calling after him: “Do you really think I’m a crappy mother?”

  Instead she asked Kitty, who had poured healthy glasses of red wine for both of them. Crow had taken Carla Scout home. The girl was still worrying over Tess’s bad behavior. “No hitting, Mama,” she called out as she left. “Never, ever.”

  Great. She was probably worried that Tess was going to kick her in the crotch one day.

  “No, Tess. I already told you once. I think you’re doing a good job.”

  “It’s just so hard. And it’s forever. You can walk out on a marriage. You can’t ever walk out on a kid.”

  “And yet people do. Every day. I did.”

  “No, you— What?”

  “I got pregnant when I was in high school. I don’t think I have to tell you that abortion was not an option for Kitty Monaghan. So I went to a home for wayward girls, as we were still called then, had a baby girl, and went back to school in the fall as if nothing had happened. And, in a way, it hadn’t. You were born the same month. So, ever since then, I’ve had a sense of what my daughter would be doing, developmentally. When she would have talked, walked. Started pistol-whipping strange men.”

  “I didn’t pistol-whip him. Jeez. But, Kitty—I’m a private investigator. If you wanted to find her—”

  “No, no. That’s her choice, not mine. There’s a double-blind registry, called ISRR. I’ve known about it for a long time, but I’ve always been afraid to put my name in.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once I do that, I’ll know for sure that she hasn’t put her name in.”

  “Aunt Kitty, that logic is flawed on about a half-dozen points. She might not know about the registry. She might be in there, waiting for you. What do you want?”

  “I don’t know. When I was a teenager, I knew I didn’t want to be a mother. And I still know that about myself. I have no regrets. I just hope she has a nice life, that I did give her a better chance than she might have had with two teenage punks. God, I hope she got my brains.”

  “You mean, you hope she’s shrewd enough to know that d
ropping the names of certain cookies and pizzas would trip the alarm bells in my head? I bet she is. And gorgeous, too.”

  Kitty turned her back, busied herself with rinsing dishes. Was she crying? Tess thought it better not to inquire. And then she decided it was better still to go put her arms around her aunt and just, for once, say nothing at all.

  Sunday

  3:00 A.M.

  Tess had been asleep for only an hour when she jerked awake. Carla Scout was crying, probably reliving the fight in a nightmare. Well done, Emmett Verlaine, well done. We’ll be dealing with this for a while.

  By the time Tess got her daughter back to sleep, she was too wired to return to bed. She wandered through her slumbering household. Tomorrow—today—she still had to talk to Tyner. She didn’t want to bring up his odd interview with Melisandre. It wasn’t germane, although she had shared the transcript with Sandy. Then again, the transcript was probably the reason Melisandre was freaking about those “proprietary materials,” why she had been so urgent about Tess’s mission to New York.

  Tess moved silently through the house, setting things to rights, picking up books and toys, washing her own wineglass. She had used wine to blunt the day’s emotions, to no avail. Emmett Verlaine had meant nothing to her. If his name weren’t unusual, she wouldn’t have remembered him at all. Yet she had come to mean everything to him. She reached for her left knee, for the scar that reminded her she was lucky to be alive. A friend had died the night she tore open her knee. His name had been Carl. In the Jewish tradition, Tess had named Carla Scout for him, allowing Crow to choose the middle name.

  “I guess someone with a daughter named for a character in To Kill a Mockingbird should expect to have a Boo Radley encounter,” she had said to Crow in bed that night.

  He had laughed. “Tess, you had a Bob Ewell encounter. You’re Boo Radley, coming out of nowhere to save your family. The Tiger Mothers have nothing on you.”