The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  The various minute hands of the various clocks made their way back to twelve and Tess went on her way, her stamped card a reminder this was, in fact, probation, a punishment. Five more months. She’d make it. She was sure of that much.

  She was also sure she had no use for the doctor’s theoretical questions. How would you feel if someone else were to die now? It was just the usual psychoanalytic, hypothetical, hyperbolic crap, she told herself.

  And so it was, and so it remained—for the next twenty-four hours.

  Things are not going according to plan. He is not used to that. Everything always goes according to his plans. He has been so thorough, so careful, ever since—well, since he had to be. And now, to be undone by a single man, a stupid man. He knows it must be that stupid Barney Fife’s fault. How did this happen? He’s not sure, he can’t be sure, he can’t get close enough to be sure.

  But the fact remains, she is no longer going to Pikesville every day. She is barely leaving the house, as best as he can tell. And yet there has been nothing in the papers, no announcement of any discoveries. He wonders if the men are cutting her out. Yes, of course. He has once again underestimated the perfidy of his own sex. He has been spending so much time with women—thinking about women, listening to women, catering to women—that he has forgotten how men operate. Their methods are clumsy, barbarous, even—but effective. He wishes he could teach those state cops a thing or two. But he has to hold himself in check, stay in control. It’s all about control. Ego must be held in check.

  Tonight, for example. He has to be precise yet restrained and remember the objective. A lesser man would be tempted to make some sort of grand flourish, to call attention to himself. But he has always prided himself on his subtlety, his modesty, his ability to keep souvenirs without attracting attention.

  He pulls his van into the alley and waits. The city’s grid of criminal activity has shifted slightly in the time since he last roamed these neighborhoods in search of her. The cops closed down the old markets, but new ones have opened just a few blocks away. God, junkies have so little imagination. They use all their ingenuity to procure the substance they need to destroy themselves. He knows she’ll be here because it’s Friday night, and she likes to score on Friday night. Besides, he left a little message on her pager, one guaranteed to bring her here. He knows what she wants.

  True, he doesn’t know her as well as he knew the others. He didn’t have the time to study her. But he knows her tastes, her weaknesses, what motivates her. He knows she is lazy and sly, in equal measure.

  But the main thing he knows about her is she fooled him. He can never quite forgive her for that. When he left, he told himself he was done with her. Yet in the back of his mind he must have always suspected this wasn’t true. Even before this unexpected contingency arose, he had a score to settle with her. He doesn’t like being played.

  It’s nine o’clock and the spring night should be completely dark by now, but it’s never truly dark in the city’s worst neighborhoods. She pulls her car into an alley and walks out to the street, where the touts wait, singing the praises of their poisons. She’s no crackhead; her taste runs to methamphetamine and heroin. And she won’t make a buy on the street, she’ll visit the rowhouse where a dealer waits, happy to resell the heroin he bought just that afternoon. Why not, if there’s money in it? If the cops gave a rat’s ass, they could make her six blocks away, and not just because she’s white. She’s so small, so obviously out of place. Once she’s gone down the block, he rolls his van into the alley behind her car, blocking it in. Now all he has to do is wait.

  In less than ten minutes she’s heading back, her walk almost a run now. She’ll take her treasure home or to her new boyfriend’s house—assuming she has a new man, and she usually does. In her mind, waiting for her blast means she’s in control, not a junkie. “It’s no different than going out and having a beer on a Saturday night,” she had said in her defense, the first time he caught her shooting up. Maybe. But when your girlfriend went out for a beer on Saturday night, she didn’t spend Sunday through Friday robbing you blind.

  He still likes that walk, that silhouette, the side-to-side roll in her slender hips. Given the chance, he’d pick her out again. And again and again. She was his type. It kills him, admitting that. But you have to know your weaknesses. You have to be honest about the things that defeated you in the past if you hope to succeed in the future. She was his one mistake. Well, second, although you couldn’t call Saint Mary’s a mistake. More of a detour.

  Here she comes, almost skipping, like a little girl on her way home from the candy store. The only difference is that she’s holding a bag of heroin cut with baby laxative. God, she was such a drag high: stupid, insolent, useless. He hadn’t given up on her right away. If rehab had worked, if he had gotten her straight, she might have been his most satisfying transformation ever. But she had only pretended to clean up because it kept his money flowing. Cunning, that was a word for her. Cunning cu—but he promised his mother he would never use that word. It was crude.

  She gets into her car and starts the motor, assuming he’ll move so she can get out. Dumb bitch. She honks. He cuts the engine, as if he has no intention of moving. She honks again. He shrugs. She gets out, stalks up to his van, fearless because she’s stupid. Fearless because she’s avid for her treat. She slaps the side of his van, as if it’s a horse she’s trying to shoo from a pasture. But he still doesn’t move, so she marches up to the front of the van. Objects in the mirror, he reminds himself, may be closer than they appear. Still he waits, patient as time, until she’s pounding on his door, calling him all kinds of names, too crazed to realize she knows that profile. He listens to the familiar voice on the other side of the glass, waiting to see if he feels anything, even a trace of the usual wondrous sorrow he brings to his chore. But all he wants to do is get it over with.

  Her voice keeps coming, at once hoarse and shrill. “C’mon, you jerk, move this piece of shit. Move, move, move.” She is beating, pounding, slapping the van door, as if she could push the vehicle back with her own impressive energy. She’s that desperate to get home. Oh, yeah, honey. You don’t have a problem. It’s no different than a few drinks on a Saturday night.

  He lets her go on for a few more seconds. Then, calmly, always calmly, he lowers the window and shoots the dumb bitch in the face. She doesn’t have time to register what’s going on. If her life passed before her eyes, her only thought was a flicker of regret that she would never enjoy her last dime bag.

  He has to shoot her in the face instead of the chest. He hopes that won’t throw anyone off. Because this one—this one he doesn’t love.

  CHAPTER 27

  Tess was coming off the water late Saturday morning when she saw Whitney on the dock. A former rower, Whitney knew better than to stand in the middle of the boathouse’s morning rush hour, creating an obstacle for the college teams staggering beneath the weights of their fours and eights. Yet there she was, in everyone’s way, arms folded across her chest. When Tess pulled parallel to the dock, Whitney ran to the side and grabbed one of the Alden’s oars so forcefully she almost flipped the shell with Tess still in it.

  “Whitney, I’ve been getting up on this dock for years without your help. I think I can manage.”

  “We need to talk,” she said. Whitney always considered all her needs urgent.

  “Fine. Just let me get out and rinse the boat off, put everything away. And if I were you, I’d want me to shower first. It was steamy this morning, almost like summer.” Tess indicated the patches of sweat on her chest and back, beneath her arms.

  “We need to talk now. You’re the last one in; it’s not as if you’re blocking anyone.”

  Tess glanced around and saw this was true. There were no other boats coming in behind her.

  “Let me get out. I feel odd sitting here, with you looming above me.”

  Whitney looked as if she were going to fly apart from nerves. Her usually smooth hair was almost sta
nding on end, her pale face was white and drawn in a way that Tess had never seen. But she nodded her assent, jaw muscles twitching, and waited for Tess to climb out and carry the boat to a pair of saddle horses in preparation for its daily bath. Hosing down the shell was an essential step for those who rowed the filthy Middle Branch of the Patapsco.

  “Did you read the paper before you came down here this morning?” Whitney was sitting on the grass now, digging through the voluminous leather pouch she used as a purse.

  “Glanced at the front page, read my horoscope. And the dogs’ horoscopes, which they seem to enjoy. Esskay’s apparently due for a favorable business transaction.” Whitney didn’t smile. “Jesus, what’s up? How bad could it be?”

  Whitney continued to dig through her bag, removing all sorts of strange and wonderful objects—a Swiss army knife, a leather journal, an antique ivory bracelet—until she found a piece of newsprint ripped from what appeared to be an inside page of that morning’s Maryland section.

  “The name didn’t mean anything to me at first—to tell you the truth, I was reading it over breakfast, laughing at the Beacon-Light’s naïveté, because it’s so clearly a drug deal gone bad. But she’s white and she’s from the county, so they turn it into one of those ”sweet suburbanite mowed down in inner city‘ stories, as if she were a random victim. Granted, they were on deadline, and they were probably trying to find an angle to make it fresh, after it led all the late-night newscasts—“

  “Whitney, slow down and start over. You’re not tracking.”

  “Julie Carter was killed last night. Shot in an alley in Southwest Baltimore.”

  Tess’s legs were often quivery and weak after a good workout, but not in this way. She sank to the ground next to Whitney. If she had anything in her stomach, she might have felt sick. But there was never time to eat in the morning. No time to eat, no time to read the paper properly…

  “My Julie?” she asked, but that didn’t sound right. “Our Julie?” That didn’t sound right either. “It’s a common name. Common enough.”

  “This Julie Carter lived out near Beckleysville. Near Prettyboy Reservoir. Ring a bell?”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tess sat on the ground, hers legs splayed out like a Raggedy Ann. Whitney crouched next to her, looking as if she wanted to sprint away, if she could only figure out where to run. The humidity was burning off as the sun rose. It was going to be a beautiful day, for those privileged enough to wake up alive. The blue skies, the subtle spring smells—Tess and Whitney could have been college roommates again, sitting on the banks of the Chester River after a workout. Tess wished they were. To be twenty-one again, to be free of the knowledge she had gained in the last ten years, or even in the last ten minutes, seemed an excellent idea.

  Julie Carter had been twenty-one. Just. But hers had been a hard twenty-one, with hints of more troubles than Tess had ever known.

  “It could be a drug deal,” Tess said. “She clearly had some problems in that sphere.”

  “Could be,” Whitney said. “Could be just the biggest fucking coincidence to ever come down the pike.”

  “We have to call Major Shields, over at Pikesville.”

  “I did. Paged him immediately.”

  “And?”

  “And he said that’s exactly what it was. Just one big co-inky dink.”

  “Did he say co-inky dink?”

  “He might as well have. He considers me part of the problem, you know? Me and the board. Thanked me very kindly for the tip, as he termed it, and said they would consider it, but they’re still working under the presumption that the man who killed Tiffani and Lucy is dead.”

  “Unless he didn’t die. Unless Carl’s right.”

  “Or if there’s another someone and has been all along.”

  “Who? No one knows who was on that original list, except for your own board members.”

  “I don’t know. Someone who knows what the other guy did?”

  Tess was no enemy of coincidence. It permeated life, it powered the daily newspaper, and, as even Mary Ann Melcher knew, made for the best television movies. Most of the stories worth telling, even the smallest anecdotes, begin with a coincidence. You don’t tell people about the 364 days you got on the number 11 bus and didn’t run into your best friend from grade school. You tell them about the one day you did.

  But Julie Carter’s demise was a chronicle of a death foretold. Whoever made up that list knew she would join the others as a homicide. Even the cause had been right, a gunshot to the head. That made her death just violent enough to warrant mention in the morning paper, arriving like a sinister greeting card sent by a secret admirer. Here’s another body. Thinking of you.

  “Whitney. Did we ever learn the name of the volunteer who put the list together?”

  “We know it now. After I talked to Major Shields, I called that jerk attorney for Luisa O’Neal’s foundation. Would you believe he tried to claim privilege? I told him I couldn’t decide if I was going to come to his home with my shotgun or go to the state’s attorney’s office and file a complaint against him.”

  “What kind of complaint? It’s not illegal to be a sleazy dumb-ass in Maryland.”

  “I was bluffing. That’s why I put in the part about the shotgun. He decided the person in question wasn’t exactly a client, at least not in this capacity, and he was within his rights to tell me.”

  “Who gave the board the list, Whitney?”

  But even as Tess asked, she knew. Somehow she had always known whose elegant fingerprints she would find on this case.

  “Your all-time fave Baltimore philanthropist, Luisa Julia O’Neal herself.” Whitney dug her fingers into her forehead, as if she felt a headache coming on or wanted to claw a memory from her overactive mind. “It was her idea all along, Tess. Looking into these cases, hiring you to do it. She was behind the whole thing, and I never knew. I’m as big a dupe as you in this, maybe bigger. Because I never understood why you thought she was so horrible.”

  “But not this horrible,” Tess said.

  Whitney lifted her face from her hands. “What do you mean?”

  “I hate Luisa O’Neal, but this isn’t her style. She’s been used as surely as we have. Besides, she’s in a nursing home, right? Maybe she didn’t do it. Maybe she’s someone’s fall guy. Where did you say she was?”

  “Keswick, I think.”

  “Let’s hope they have Saturday morning visiting hours.”

  The nursing home on the hill, looming above Baltimore’s pricey Roland Park and not-so-pricey Hampden, had acquired a newer, blander name. But old-timers and old families still knew it as the Keswick Home for Incurables.

  That seemed right to Tess. She didn’t know the exact nature of Luisa’s physical ailments, but she had never doubted the rot in her soul was beyond repair.

  Luisa was in the clinic, the last stop before the mortuary. Her decline must have been a rapid one to put her there less than a year after taking her own apartment in the residential wing. Tess and Whitney signed in on the depressingly blank visitors’ log for the health care center. The attendant then wrote down three numbers on a sheet of paper and passed it to them.

  “Her room number?” Tess asked.

  “No, it’s the daily code.”

  “Code?”

  “To get out.” He gestured to the control pad by the double doors, which had locked behind them. “Our residents aren’t allowed to leave on their own.”

  “Grim,” Whitney said.

  The atmosphere only got grimmer as they took the elevator to the second floor. Their youth was an affront here, an obscenity. The women they passed in the halls—all women, nothing but women— looked up from their walkers and wheelchairs with undisguised envy. Tess heard a voice calling, weak and empty, a voice with no expectation of a reply.

  “And this is the top of the line,” Whitney whispered. “Can you imagine what the bad ones are like?”

  Luisa had a private r
oom, which was little more than a glorified hospital room, although she had been allowed to add a few pieces of her own furniture—a chest, a small table, a flowery chintz chair that Tess remembered from the O’Neals’ sunroom. Luisa had sat in that chair when she explained to Tess just what she had done to keep her only son from facing criminal charges for the murder he had committed.

  But she didn’t sit in her chair anymore. A large white-uniformed nurse overflowed in it, eyes fixed on the television in the corner. Redhaired and freckled, with olive skin, the nurse would have stumped any census taker who tried to guess her race. Luisa was in a hospital bed, propped up. A hand-lettered sign above the bed reminded the night staff that she was to wear cloth diapers, not plastic, because she was allergic to the plastic ones.

  Tess had never thought anything could make her feel sorry for Luisa O’Neal, but that sign came close.

  “Money not only can’t buy you love,” she said to Whitney, out of the side of her mouth, “it apparently can’t even guarantee you a dignified old age.”

  Luisa’s pale blue eyes narrowed. She picked up a large sketch pad and a black marking pen.

  I cannot speak, she wrote, but my hearing is fine.

  “She’s such a liar,” said the nurse, one of those stoic, placid souls well suited to the profession. “She can talk, but she won’t, because she sounds funny, and she won’t do her therapy.”

  Luisa turned to a fresh page. I do not like to do things if I cannot do them well.

  “Big surprise,” Tess said. “But you could at least fill up a sheet of paper before starting on a new one. It’s wasteful, what you’re doing with that sketchbook.”

  She shook her head, but it might have been a spasm. Then she wrote, Donna, would you leave us alone, please? The request clearly bothered the nurse, but she didn’t talk back. She heaved herself out of the chair, switched off the television, and marched out of the room. The nurse had a wonderful, insolent walk, her large backside swaying slowly back and forth.