“This has something to do with that basketball rally, doesn’t it? The story you wouldn’t tell me about last night.”
Feeney picked up his fork and began stabbing the happy hour ravioli, until little spurts of tomato sauce and cheese freckled the tablecloth. “Well, I can tell you now. In fact, the only way anyone is ever going to hear this story is if I tell it to ’em. Maybe I could stand on a street corner with a sign, offering to read it at a buck a pop.”
“How good is it? How big?”
He slipped back into his singsong poetry voice. “Wink Wynkowski, Baltimore’s best hope for luring a basketball team back to Baltimore, has many things in his past he prefers no one know about, especially the NBA. His business is a house of cards, perhaps on the brink of bankruptcy, beset by lawsuits, from ambulances to zippers. He may be able to get up the scratch for a team, but he isn’t liquid enough to keep it going.”
“Then why buy it if it’s going to make him broke?”
“Good question. Two answers. He’s a fool—doubtful. Or he plans to unload the team pretty quickly, as soon as the city builds him that brand-new arena, which will double the team’s value overnight.”
“That seems a little far-fetched.”
“Hey, remember Eli Jacobs? He bought the Orioles for $70 million in the 1980s. When his business collapsed in the recession, he sold them for almost $175 million and it was Camden Yards, paid for by the state, that made the team so valuable. If Wink can keep all his spinning plates aloft for a couple of years and sell the team before his creditors come calling, he stands to see a huge profit.”
“Is there more?” Feeney scowled. “Not that there has to be,” she added hastily. “You connected the dots, and I can see the picture.”
“But there is more. Much more. Dark secrets. A rancorous first marriage. Bad habits, the kind professional sports can’t abide. How much would you pay for this story? $39.95? $49.95? $59.95? Wait, don’t answer—what if we throw in a set of ginsu knives?” He began to laugh a little hysterically, then caught himself. “Trust me, Tess. It’s solid. I wish my house had been built on a foundation half as good.”
“Then why won’t the paper print it?”
“All sorts of reasons. They say we don’t have it nailed. They say it’s racist to cover an NBA deal so aggressively when we let football, which appeals to a white fan base, slip into town without a whimper. They say we used too many unidentified sources, but some of the people who talked to me still work for Wink, Tess. They have damn good reasons to want to be anonymous. One guy in particular. The top editors told us this afternoon we had to turn over the names of all our sources before they ran the story. They knew I couldn’t do that, I’d see my story spiked first. Which was the point. They want an excuse to kill the story because they don’t trust us.”
“Us?”
“Me and Rosie. You met her. She’s good, for a rookie. You ought to see the stuff she dug up on Wink’s first marriage.”
“It’s probably her they don’t trust, then. Because she’s new, and young.”
Feeney shook his head. “New and young is better than old and old at the Beacon-Light these days. Her. Me. Both of us. I don’t know and I don’t care anymore. I’m tired, Tess. I’m so tired, and it’s such a good story, and all I want to do is go to sleep right here on the table, wake up, and find out they’re going to print it after all.”
“Feeney, I’m sure they’ll do right by you, and you’ll have your big scoop,” she said, pushing his water glass closer to him, hoping to distract him. He seems to be settling down, she thought. Maybe the evening can be salvaged.
Feeney lurched to his feet, martini glass still firmly in hand. “This isn’t about me, or my big scoop!” he shouted. The other people in the bar looked up, startled and apprehensive.
“Okay, it is about me,” he hissed, bending down so only Tess could hear him. He had drunk so much that gin seemed to be coming through his pores. “It’s about my career, or what’s left of it. But it’s also about all that important stuff newspapers are suppose to be about. You know—truth, justice, the first amendment, the fourth estate. We’re not suppose to be cheerleaders, going ‘Rah-rah-rah, give us the ball.’ We’re the goddamn watchdogs, the only ones who care if the city is getting a good deal, or being used by some scumbag.”
He swayed a little as he spoke, and his words were soft, virtually without consonants, but he wasn’t as drunk as she would have been on five martinis. His melancholy had a stronger grip on him than the liquor.
“Feeney, what do you want me to do about it?” Tess wasn’t the best audience for a speech on the glories of journalism.
“Why, drink to the end of my career!” he roared, toasting the room with his now empty glass. The crowd, mostly regulars, raised their glasses back in fond relief. This was the Feeney they knew, acting up for an audience.
“What are you so happy about?” a white-haired man called out from the bar.
“Am I happy? Am I free? The question is absurd! For it is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done before!”
Feeney smashed his ratty cap onto his head and swept out of the bar, the tasseled ends of his plaid muffler flying behind him, martini glass still in hand. Tess was left behind with a half-finished martini, Feeney’s tab, and no company for the tortellini she had planned to order. Feeney knew how to make an exit, credit him that. Only the Tale of Two Cities allusion was the slightest bit off—too recognizable for Feeney’s taste. He preferred more obscure lines, like his penultimate one, Am I happy? Am I free? It was tauntingly familiar, but she couldn’t place the source.
It wasn’t even eight o’clock and she was now alone, as well as ravenously hungry. And Tess loathed eating alone in restaurants. A character flaw, she knew, and a reproach to feminists everywhere, but there it was. She finished her drink, took care of Feeney’s staggering bill, along with her own, then left. She could stop at the Eddie’s on Eager, grab a frozen dinner for herself, maybe a stupid magazine to read in the bathtub. Damn Feeney. Her big night out had been reduced to no company, one gulped drink, and a frozen low-fat lasagna.
But when she reached her apartment thirty minutes later, the fragrant smells in the hallway came from her own kitchen, not Kitty’s. Her nose identified lamb, hot bread, baking apples. She took the steps two at a time, leaping as wildly as Esskay had that morning.
Crow met her at the door, wrapping his lanky frame around her before she could take off her coat or put down the grocery bag.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she muttered into his scratchy wool sweater, hoping he couldn’t see how pleased she was. “I left a message on your machine that I was going out with Feeney tonight.”
“I closed for Kitty tonight, so I figured I’d let myself in and make some dinner. Worst case scenario, you’d come home from your drinking date all giggly and fun, I’d tuck you in, then eat lamb stew and apple pie for lunch tomorrow.”
“Trust me, Feeney was neither giggly nor fun tonight.”
Crow wasn’t really listening. He was kissing her brow and her ears, patting her all over, always a little surprised to see her again, even in her own apartment.
“Your face is cold, Tesser,” he said, using the childhood nickname she had given herself, a blending of her two names, Theresa Esther. A name reserved for family and very old friends. Crow was neither of those things, not in five months’ time. He was twenty-three to her twenty-nine, a happy, careless twenty-three, with glossy black hair almost as long as hers, although usually with a green or red stripe, and a bounce in his walk. It still surprised her that she had to look up to see his thin, angular face, as if their age difference meant he must be shorter, too.
“What do you think of the new addition?” she asked, pointing with her chin toward Esskay, who was staring at Tess as if trying to place her.
“She’s cool. Kitty and I took her out for a walk earlier, then made her some rice and steamed vegetables. She’s a very old soul, our new dog.”
Tess frowned. “Our” was a word to be avoided at all costs. Their rules of engagement—more precisely, their rules of disengagement—said no shared books or CDs, dutch treat for all meals out, and no joint purchases of any kind.
But all she said was: “I don’t know why you made it rice and vegetables. I have a twenty-pound bag of kibble.”
“I like to cook for my women,” he said, pulling out her chair at the mission table that did double duty as a dining room table and Tess’s desk. “Hey, did I tell you Poe White Trash has a gig Saturday?”
“Where?”
“The Floating Opera.”
“I guess this means I can’t request any Rodgers and Hart,” she said, trying not to make a face. The Floating Opera was an ongoing rave with no fixed location, hop-scotching across the city—or, at least, its more fashionably decadent neighborhoods—according to a pattern understood only by its denizens. As a result, the F.O. had none of the amenities of a real club, such as alcohol, food, or bathrooms, and all the drawbacks: cigarette smoke, too-loud music, too-young crowd.
“Rodgers and Hart,” Crow groaned. “We don’t go in for that retro crap.”
“Elvis Costello sang ‘My Funny Valentine.’”
“Tesser, Elvis Costello is old enough to be my father.”
“But not old enough to be mine, right?”
He smiled, disarming her. “Was Feeney’s mood contagious? Or are you itching for a fight tonight?”
“A little of both,” she confessed, and, embarrassed by her crankiness, scooped up her stew meekly and quietly.
With dinner done, she put the bowls in the sink, only to have Crow snatch them back for Esskay, who made quick work of their leftovers. Crow patted the dog and thumped her sides. For a skinny dog, she had a lot of muscle tone: Crow’s affectionate smacks sounded solid, drumlike.
“Is stew good for her, after all that rice and vegetables?” Tess asked, remembering Steve’s dire predictions from the morning.
“Kitty had this book, in the ‘Women and Hobbies’ section, on greyhounds,” Crow said, rubbing Esskay’s belly. The dog had a glazed look in her eyes, as if she might faint from pleasure. “It said they usually need to gain weight after they leave the track, so I don’t think a little stew will hurt, although the woman who wrote the book recommended making your own dog food, from rice and vegetables. She also said you’re suppose to put ointment on these raw patches, like for diaper rash.”
The dog shoved her nose under Crow’s armpit and began rooting around as if there might be truffles hidden in the crevices of his fraying thrift shop sweater. Crow laughed and gave the dog another round of smacks, then sang, in a wordless falsetto, “Rou-rou-rou.”
Esskay answered back, in a higher key, the vowel sounds slightly more compact, “Ru-ru-ru.”
“I’m not really a Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy fan,” Tess said, turning on the stereo. Sarah Vaughan’s voice filled the room, drowning out the Crow-and-canine duet. “And I’m beginning to feel like three’s a crowd. Would you two like to be alone?”
Crow walked over to her and gave Tess’s backside the same affectionate thump he had given the greyhound. Tess was solid, too, but meatier, so her tone was deeper, mellower.
“I’d put ointment on your raw patches if you had any,” he whispered. “Do you have anything that burns, Tesser?”
Through her clothes, his hands sought out the places where bones could be felt—the ribs below the heavy breasts, the pelvis bones sharp in her round hips, the knobby elbows. He pulled her blouse out of her long, straight skirt and stuck one hand under the waistband, rubbing her belly as he had rubbed Esskay’s. With the other hand, he traced the lines of her jawbone and her mouth, then moved to her throat and the base of her neck, where he freed the strands of her long braid.
“Do you like this, Tess?” She could only nod.
Sarah was running through the list of the things she didn’t need for romance: Spanish castles, haunting dances, full moons, blue lagoons. The greyhound moaned to herself, softly now, almost in tune. “Ru-ru-ru.” Tess’s breath caught and she reached for Crow’s face. Sex would seem almost less intimate than this, and therefore much safer.
“Tesser?” Crow held her wrists, forcing her to meet his gaze.
She waited, apprehensive about what he might say next. Afraid he would start lobbying to move in again. Afraid he would say he loved her. Afraid he would say he didn’t.
Sarah sang that her heart stood still. Tess’s was beating faster and faster.
“Let’s go to bed,” Crow said.
Chapter 4
The Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, like most bureaucracies, ran inefficiently. Unless, of course, one was trying to stay away from work. Then it was suddenly a model of speed and productivity. On Wednesday morning, Tess, desperate for five minutes to herself, didn’t even have a chance to take her Beacon-Light out of the plastic yellow wrapper before a cheerful clerk brought out the batch of driving records Tyner had requested. Oh well, there was no law against lingering here on a bright blue bench, drinking scorched take-out coffee and watching the frustrated drivers and driving aspirants. They, unlike her, were in a hurry and therefore must be thwarted at every turn. It was MVA policy.
“I’ll pay you ten bucks if you’ve got a number lower than mine,” a harried businessman whispered to Tess. She knew the type, someone who was Much Too Important, who rushed through every chore as if he were the Secretary of State and needed to jump ahead of you at the dry cleaners, or cut you off in traffic, because he was en route to board Air Force One for some summit in the Middle East.
“I don’t have a number at all,” she said complacently, smiling at the way he edged away from her. Yes, only a real sicko would hang out at the MVA on her recognizance, as Tommy would say. But Tess had been on the run all morning, since the alarm failed to go off, putting her thirty minutes behind. She had lost another thirty minutes when Esskay had decided to throw up on the living room rug. Tyner, to punish her for her tardiness, had sent Tess on his version of a scavenger hunt, with a list of documents that required visiting five government offices in two jurisdictions. Now it was almost eleven, her first chance to sip a cup of coffee instead of dumping it on her lap in the car. It was also the only time she had to call the hospital for an update on Spike.
“Still stable,” said a cheerful nurse, whose uncle presumably was not lying in a coma.
“Still stable. Isn’t that a redundancy?” Tess snapped, banging the pay phone down. She gulped her coffee, hot and strong enough to provide a stinging pain behind the breastbone, then skimmed the front page. Nothing of interest above the fold. Her eyes worked down to the bottom of the page, the part usually reserved for features and boring-but-necessary stories. Tidal wetlands, budget votes, welfare reform. “Duty fucks,” as one of her old editors had put it so elegantly.
But Feeney’s byline was anchoring this particular piece of front-page real estate. And there was nothing boring here, except for the headline.
RECORDS, SOURCES INDICATE
WYNKOWSKI HAS PROBLEMS
by Rosita Ruiz and
Kevin V. Feeney,
Beacon Light staff writers
Gerard S. “Wink” Wynkowski, the self-made millionaire who has promised to bring professional basketball back to his hometown, may never realize his dream, given the precarious condition of his financial empire and his own checkered past, which includes domestic violence and a compulsive gambling problem, the Beacon-Light has learned.
“‘Checkered past’?” Tess said out loud, prompting the vibrating businessman to take a seat even farther away. “Oh, Feeney, tell me you didn’t write that line.”
Otherwise, it was Feeney’s story, exactly as he had described it to her. How could he not have known it was to run today? Was he that far gone? No, even drunk, he’d have a sense if his story was going into the paper. Something or someone had changed the editors’ minds late last night. Maybe one of the TV stations was close to brea
king a piece of it, improbable as that seemed.
Wynkowski’s business, Montrose Enterprises, is a veritable house of cards, in which money is moved from one subsidiary to another in an attempt to maintain cash flow and obscure shortages. His creditors literally run the gamut from A to Z—from AAA Ambulance Services to Zippy Printing Services, which printed up the fliers for his Inner Harbor rally.
Wynkowski always manages to pay his biggest suppliers, but small-time creditors often are forced to sue to collect on old debts, a situation that raises doubts about whether Wynkowski has the cash on hand—an estimated $95 million—to bring a team to town.
Even if Wynkowski can put the deal together financially and cover the monthly costs of owning a team, a background check may prove to be his undoing with the NBA, when the league discovers:
Wynkowski is an inveterate gambler, according to friends and associates, who has dropped large sums on sporting events.
He had a tempestuous first marriage, in which police were frequently summoned on complaints of domestic violence, according to sources close to the couple at the time. He pays his first wife generous alimony because the damage inflicted by her years with him makes it impossible for her to hold a job.
Wink’s activities as a juvenile delinquent, which he has portrayed as harmless boyhood pranks, included a string of armed robberies while he was still in junior high.
It was then that Wynkowski ended up at the Montrose School, the notorious and now closed juvenile facility whose name he took for his business. A source confirmed he remained at Montrose for almost three years, an unusually long sentence.
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