Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

  She thought it an innocent question, but the way Tony’s eyes cut from left to right to left indicated that the answer was not.

  “Around.”

  Sandy walked over to him, bent slightly at the waist, and forced eye contact. “That’s not an answer.”

  “All the one you’re going to get, old man.”

  Given the construction of the chair on which Tony sat, it was almost too easy for Sandy to push him over. Still, it was impressive when Sandy did just that, applying little more than the palm of his hand. Tess watched with great glee as Tony flipped over the back of his own cheap chair. He came up sputtering, ready for a fight, but the look on Sandy’s face seemed to convince him he was at a disadvantage.

  “You’re not cops. I don’t have to tell you shit.”

  “No,” Tess said cheerily. “You’re right on that score. The cops don’t know about you. Yet. And the cops are investigating the murder of Alanna’s dad. Should we tell them to pay you a visit?”

  “Alanna’s dad?” His voice squeaked on that one.

  “Stephen Dawes. Don’t you watch the news? Read the papers?”

  The confused look on Tony Lopez’s face indicated that Tess might as well have asked him if he spent his evenings contemplating the mysteries of quantum physics.

  “Did Alanna ask you to gain access to her mother’s suite at the Four Seasons? Or was that your idea, Tony? It’s no big deal. Yet.”

  “No—no. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Alanna didn’t ask you to do anything?”

  “With her mom? No. Was this Friday night? Look, I didn’t even want her to come see me Friday night. That was her idea.”

  Friday night. Sandy was poker-faced. Tess hoped she was, too. Alanna had been home Friday night. According to Felicia, Alanna had been babysitting her baby brother. But Joey wasn’t in a position to contradict his sister, and Felicia couldn’t know where the girl had been during the hours she was out.

  “You better tell us everything about Friday night, Tony. We’re not cops, and that’s in your favor. We’re interested in gathering facts. They’re interested in closing a case, fast.” If he didn’t know about the murder, Tess reasoned, he wouldn’t know about the arrest, either. “If they find out that Stephen Dawes’s daughter was dating an older guy, a guy with priors, and that she came into town the night Dawes was killed—”

  “Alanna told me she had to babysit, so I didn’t expect to see her. Then she showed up with her little brother, and what could we do with him around?”

  Yeah, what else was there to do with a girl but have sex with her? Tess felt a pang for Alanna Dawes, another girl giving herself away too freely to someone who didn’t begin to deserve her. But she had to focus on Friday night.

  “What time did you meet up?”

  “About seven-thirty, eight. We like Two Boots pizza, over by UB. She texted me, said she was free. I get there and she’s with the kid. What the fuck? So we had some pizza, but the kid was fussy, a real pain.”

  “So where did you go?”

  “I was with my guys by nine-thirty.” Tony produced his phone, proudly displayed an Instagram of five young men grabbing their crotches with one hand while holding bottles of Coors Light with the other. Of course, the time stamp was proof only of when it had been posted. But Tony had to be relatively sure that the four other men in the photo would vouch for where he was, when.

  “Where did she go? When you left?”

  “Home, I guess. What do I know? It’s not like there was anywhere we could go. Although—”

  He stopped. He was trying to be chivalrous, in his way. But he was scared, and the fear won out. He didn’t want cops coming to his door.

  “She has a key, you know.”

  “A key?”

  “To the old house. She goes there. We’ve been there. To—you know. We don’t go all the way. She’s a virgin. I’m kinda in love with her.”

  “You go to the house in Bolton Hill. To fool around.”

  “Yeah. After pizza.”

  “Look at you, Romeo,” Sandy said. “Do you even pay for the pizza?”

  “I love her, man. I really do. I met her down at the harbor last fall. She’s so pretty. I don’t know what she wants with me.”

  Tess did. It had started as a safe little rebellion, an older but not so smart guy, something sure to annoy one’s father. But perhaps it had progressed. Perhaps Tony Lopez was not only the reason that Alanna had sneaked out but the reason she had been grounded as well. Two Boots pizza was perhaps a two-minute drive from Bolton Hill—and the house where Stephen Dawes died. The house to which Alanna had a key. Yet Tony, based on what he was saying, hadn’t known until minutes ago that Stephen Dawes was dead.

  Pry open the window, Tyner had said of the evening’s time line. Introduce as many possibilities as you can. Find an alternative suspect.

  The problem with prying open a window is that you can’t control who crawls through.

  10:30 A.M.

  “Probably going to say she was crazy. After all, it worked before.”

  Melisandre couldn’t help overhearing what the woman was saying. And it wasn’t because her ear had, as one’s ear will do, separated out the sound of her own name in the jangling acoustics of this suburban Starbucks. This woman intended to be heard. The hand cupped by the mouth, the lowered head—it was all a pantomime of whispering.

  Melisandre knew what she needed to know. She should expect to be recognized, anywhere. She hadn’t been paranoid after all.

  She had driven out to the suburbs thinking to enjoy a moment of anonymity. Now it was official: She had no anonymity. Had it been like this after Isadora died? She couldn’t remember much about the immediate aftermath, which she had always considered a blessing. But she was sure that things had been less circus-like even when her trial was under way. Yesterday, back in her apartment after the bail hearing, she had seen her face over and over and over again on the various news channels. Melisandre Harris Dawes, acquitted of killing her child, now suspected in her ex-husband’s death. It was interesting to see how different points were emphasized depending on the channel’s slant. On the local news shows, they were almost giddy with the geography of it all—a big story! Happening here! The more conservative outlets leaned on the idea that justice had not been done the first time and now see what had happened, neener, neener, neener. But even the liberal ones, the programs that should have been allied with a woman who had been acquitted, indicated subtly that they were not giving her the benefit of the doubt this time.

  The one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that she was a big fat juicy bite for all of them to chew. She was a commodity, something capable of filling the infinite space on the Internet and cable television. “CRAZY” MOM MURDERS AGAIN. That headline, on one particularly scurrilous site, was wrong on so many levels that she couldn’t help deconstructing it. “Crazy.” Did they doubt she was crazy then, or were they anticipating that she would claim to be crazy now? Mom. She was not Stephen’s mother. Murders Again. But that was a legal term. She had never murdered anyone. That verb implied intent. Melisandre may not have practiced law for more than a decade, but she still understood the concept of intent.

  But now she knew the truth, all for the cost of a drive to Turners Grove. Her privacy was gone, and not only in Baltimore. Thanks to the Daily Mail, she was receiving attention in London. Probably Cape Town as well. A notorious figure on three continents. Should she buy a wig, wear dark glasses? Never leave her apartment?

  Over her dead body.

  She stood up and walked over to the whisperers, forced eye contact.

  “Thank you for your interest in my legal standing,” she said. “Although the details of my defense are not something I can discuss publicly, I thought you’d like to know that we do not currently plan to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The plea will be not guilty. Because I am. Not guilty.”

  The whisperer pressed her spine back agains
t the soft chair, creating the maximum space possible between her and Melisandre. But she was not completely cowed.

  “Baby killer,” she said.

  “How original,” Melisandre said. “Do you think I haven’t heard that before?”

  She raked her eyes over her accuser’s outfit, her nails, her hair. The woman reached out and put a hand on the stroller next to her, as if Melisandre were the bad fairy at the christening. What was the bad fairy’s name? Melisandre never thought she would forget a single word of the stories she had read to Alanna and Ruby. But she had deconstructed those stories for her children, too, and rephrased things as she saw fit.

  “Stay-at-home mom,” she said in the manner of a doctor making a nonserious diagnosis. “The little boy in the stroller isn’t your only child. The other is school age, or at least in preschool. Montessori, I bet. Well fixed. You have time to get your nails done, although your roots are due for attention. You’ve opted out, as they say. I did, too. Had a career, decided not to work anymore. I’m sorry—decided not to work outside the home. Opting out is a badge of status, as surely as your car is, probably a high-end SUV, with DVD player in the backseat and seat warmers. You spend your days taking care of two children, rushing here, rushing there, hunkering down in this coffee shop for a bit of gossip. And you are bored out of your mind.”

  “I’m not bored,” the woman said, but not convincingly.

  “Really? If you weren’t gossiping with your friend, I bet you’d be staring at your phone, checking e-mail and posting to Facebook.”

  The woman winced. Target located, hit.

  “One thing about having been crazy,” Melisandre said. “I get to tell the truth now. All the time. Twelve years ago, I wasn’t that different from you. Then something happened. This weekend my ex-husband was killed, tragically. My children, who lost their sister when they were small, have lost their father. Perhaps, instead of whispering about me, you might want to visit, show your concern. They live not twenty minutes from here. Do you know how to make a casserole?”

  She walked away, proud of her ability to remain composed. Melisandre had once had the makings of a good trial lawyer. Tyner had been the first to tell her that. “Whatever you do, you should be a litigator,” he said. “You’re a cool customer, hard to shake. Nothing rattles you.” But inside, she was jelly. It took a toll on her, saying such things. Sticks and stones—what a silly saying. Words were incredibly potent. Words wounded terribly. She would tell her daughters as much when they came back to live with her. Because they would. She had to hold on to that belief, her vision of her future. They were all she had now.

  She bided her time, waited until the two gossipers left, then trailed after them just to be provocative. Ah, a Porsche SUV. So she had been on the nose there. Melisandre drove a Lexus hybrid, for the sake of the environment, but she also liked the car’s quiet motor, how it crept through parking lots. Under the right conditions, you could sneak up on someone in this car. Minutes later, she glided past the woman, who was still struggling with collapsing the stroller, her toddler crying lustily in the car seat. Melisandre waved cheerfully.

  Maleficent, she remembered. The name of the bad fairy was Maleficent. How ham-handed, that use of Mal. Was that Disney or the source material? But the fact that it was close to magnificent—that was clever. There was a kind of magnificence in being bad. She felt better than she had in days.

  6:30 P.M.

  “A pizza party!” Tess told Carla Scout. “We’re having a pizza party!”

  The party was, in fact, an evening meeting at Tyner’s law office. He had asked to meet face-to-face after Tess told him about Lopez. All her emergency babysitters and backups were unavailable tonight, so Carla Scout sat at the conference table, drawing contentedly. Novelty went a long way with Carla Scout. An unusual place and the promise of pizza might keep her under control for however long it took Tyner to praise Tess and outline their strategy.

  “You did good work,” he said. Simple words, but not ones Tyner used easily, and Tess preened a little. Maybe he had demanded that she come downtown because he wanted to tell her face-to-face that she was getting a bonus. “Too bad we can’t use a bit of it.”

  “What? You asked me to develop alternative scenarios and I’ve given you three—her alone, him alone, or, my favorite, the two acting in concert. He’s got a B and E past, she’s as sullen and angry a teen as I’ve ever met. And she’s six blocks away the night it happens, a fact that she has kept to herself.”

  “Do you really think Alanna took her baby brother with her to murder her father?”

  “You’re not paying me to think. You’re paying me to develop new information. This is a gold mine. What did the police say when you told them?”

  “I didn’t. We work for Melisandre, not the city of Baltimore. And she’s furious. She asked me if I thought there was any circumstance under which she would implicate one of her daughters. Her only goal now is to clear her name so she can have custody of those girls.”

  “Aren’t you obligated to tell the cops what Sandy and I found out?”

  “All you found out is that Alanna left the house Friday night and went out for pizza.”

  Tess wanted to throw a Carla Scout–style tantrum. It was infuriating to have this information discarded. And possibly unethical. Wasn’t it Tyner’s responsibility to overrule his client when she wasn’t making decisions in her best interest?

  “This is crazy.” Tyner glared, and Tess realized her gaffe. “I mean, not crazy, but—No, sorry, crazy is the best word. I did exactly what you asked and now it’s not right? This is like some damn fairy tale where a mercurial princess keeps changing the rules.”

  “Tess—even if you had something more substantial, think about it from Melisandre’s point of view. She’s not going to save herself at her daughter’s expense. If anything, she might lie to protect her daughter. She could even be withholding key information.”

  “You can’t allow that.”

  “No. And as things progress, if we end up going to trial—then I’ll do my best to persuade her that there is no gain in her trying to paper over these facts. But we have to drop this for now. Forget Alanna.”

  “I should at least talk to her about that night. After all, she’s also the person who can ascertain where Felicia was, and when.”

  “Stay away from Alanna and Ruby. Those are Melisandre’s orders, and you work for her.”

  “Fine. She still owes me for the time that I put in, right?”

  “Of course she does. She’s not contesting your billable hours, just asking that we leave her children alone. How much time have you put in this week?”

  Tess pretended to do a swift calculation on her iPhone. “Ninety hours and about three thousand miles.”

  “Very funny, Tess.”

  “It’s hell finding parking in East Baltimore. I don’t know how many times we circled the block.”

  “I understand you’re upset. But, for now, concentrate on other things. Melisandre has suggested you talk to Ethan, Stephen’s best friend. When he was interviewed for the documentary, he indicated he’s not as close to Stephen as he was. Who knows what he might say?”

  “Okay. Maybe I should go through all the documentary interviews and notes then—”

  “No.” Tyner’s tone was sharp, even by his standards. “I mean, I just don’t want to open that can of worms yet. The state’s attorney’s office hasn’t requested them.”

  “But they will,” Tess said. “And we’ll need to know what’s on them.”

  “Harmony can brief me on that. Just go to talk to this guy Hinerman.”

  “What about the interview with Stephen?”

  “Harmony transcribed it. He gives a two-minute statement, saying he will not be participating in the documentary, but wishing Missy well.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Jesus, Tess, stop second-guessing me. I know what I’m doing.”

  Tess didn’t doubt that Tyner knew what he was doing. She w
as less sure of Melisandre. But she was being paid, so she went home and did as instructed. Made an appointment with Ethan Hinerman, read his interview, then watched it using an encrypted Internet link that Melisandre had provided. The interview seemed flat on paper, but seeing it—She watched it again. There was something pulling at her memory, but it wasn’t about Melisandre. No, there was another case, another mistrial. And Hinerman contradicted himself on a small but telling detail. Of course, people got stuff wrong all the time. But they got it wrong in the same way. He got it wrong twice within seconds. Where had he found the file of papers?

  After Carla Scout went to sleep, Tess sat in her own bed, laptop on her stomach, and Googled various search strings, each more horrific than the last. Strange to fall asleep in the middle of such a task, but it had been a long day. Hours later, she awakened to Crow’s concerned face—he clearly had seen the article on her screen, was possibly contemplating a call to social services. But Tess was instantly awake, jumping up so suddenly that she had to catch her laptop to keep it from sliding to the floor.

  “Nailed, him!” she crowed to Crow. “NAILED HIM.”

  Wednesday

  1:00 P.M.

  Ethan Hinerman’s office was in a mildly run-down block of Cathedral Street. The trash-strewn street depressed Tess. Baltimore had always had a scruffy side, but it had felt vibrant, a lovable mutt of a city ready to play or brawl. Now swaths of downtown were being replaced by apartments and condos, but there seemed to be fewer and fewer people downtown. Definitely fewer jobs. Hinerman was a holdout, someone who hadn’t decamped for a suburban office with convenient parking, and property records showed this elegant brownstone as his residence as well. She should like him for that.

  Inside, the first-floor office was gracious and well kept. An anxious or depressed person might start to feel better just sitting in this waiting room, with its working fireplace, lush rug, deep, soft armchairs. Oh, and new magazines! Tess, who was fifteen minutes early for the appointment she had arranged this morning, grabbed a People with someone on the cover whom she didn’t even recognize. This was happening more and more, and not because Tess lived in some rarefied cultural bubble. Now if a Wonder Pet had been on the cover—she opened the magazine, enjoying the fire’s warmth, reviewing her day in her head. Carla Scout went to day care on Wednesdays, then was picked up by Tess’s mother, then was taken to the house. Or was it the babysitter? Tess had to get to the dry cleaner’s before it closed today—never mind, read about the pretty people even if you don’t know them.