Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  “I write my own copy—” the anchor began. Wink cut him off with a flap of his hand.

  “Go ahead and use it. I’m not going to sue you. Besides, you won’t think of anything better. Now, what do you want to do, get some shots of me moving, maybe talking to the other guys here?” Wink was a natural boss, directing the television segment as if it were a subsidiary of Montrose Enterprises. “You know, these are just regular guys, black and white, working out together, the kind of people who really want to see a basketball team in their hometown. How’s the light in here? A little harsh, don’t you think? When I started my chain of workout places, the first thing we did was move away from this fluorescent crap. People want to look good when they’re working out. I mean, that’s the point, right? If you look good in the gym, maybe you won’t have to go any farther to find someone to cozy up to, she’ll be right there. But Durban and I go way back, so I wanted to drop by. I fought Golden Gloves when I was seventeen, I ever tell you that? Welterweight. Won, too. You can look it up.”

  Tess caught Durban’s eye. He shook his head, mouthing “Glass jaw.”

  “You going to get in the ring today, Wink?” That was the oh-so-chummy cameraman.

  Wink looked around the room. His eyes rested on Tess for no more than a second, then moved on quickly, taking in the rest of the equipment.

  “The bike. I think I’ll warm up on the bike.” He hopped up on the Lifecycle next to Tess, only to find the seat was too high: his height, what there was of it, was in his torso. Debonairly as possible, he set the seat three notches lower, and started pedaling.

  “Which program you using?” he asked Tess, leaning over to see the readout on her machine, which happened to be covered by her book. His breathing sounded ragged, for he had started out much too quickly.

  “Manual. Level six.” She knew the drill: short, curt answers, no questions, no eye contact. This method was the best way to kill a conversation at the gym, or anywhere else, for that matter.

  “I do the random program. Much more challenging.”

  Honor dictated a reply. “Not really. You have some tough intervals, but you also have a lot of downhill stretches. Manual is flat and constant. At this level, I’ll burn about 750 calories in an hour. You’ll be lucky to burn 450—assuming you can last an hour.”

  The cameraman, who had been creeping across the room, turned the light on full in Tess’s eyes and began filming this exchange. Reflexively, she held up Don Quixote, shielding her face.

  “Excuse me, but I’d prefer not to be on the evening news.” Her voice, although somewhat muffled by Cervantes, was nevertheless distinct. “This is private property, and I didn’t give you permission to photograph me.”

  “Oh, you’re not in the shot,” the cameraman lied smoothly. He probably assumed everyone secretly yearned to be on television. “I’m just shooting Mr. Wynkowski here for a story we’re doing on him. It’s a tight shot. No one will see you.”

  “What about sound? Don’t you have a built-in microphone, which picks up everything I say?”

  “Everyone has those now. Don’t say anything, and you’ll be okay.”

  Tess lowered the book to chin level, stared into the camera, and recited in a bored monotone, “Fuck. Shit. Bite me. Eat me. Piss on you, asshole.” Then she smiled sweetly. “Did you get that?”

  Wink laughed so hard he almost fell off the bike, while the cameraman flushed with anger and turned his camera off.

  “We could still use it, you know,” he said. “We could use that part of the video as B-roll if we really wanted to, putting in a voice-over.”

  “You could,” Tess agreed. “But when you look at the tape, you’ll see I was giving you the finger the whole time, on both sides of my book.” She demonstrated. “I don’t think that would look very nice on the station that bills its six o’clock program as ‘Good news for the whole family.’”

  Irritated, she was cycling faster and faster without realizing it, while Wink had given up any pretense of working out. He leaned toward her again, as if they were co-conspirators. Just two private citizens, ambushed by the local television station. He waved his entourage away, Paul Tucci practically leering at them as he retreated. Wink then dropped his voice, so Tess had to move her head closer to his in order to hear.

  “You’re pretty ballsy. I find that attractive in a woman.”

  “I don’t want to infer too much from what I’m sure is an innocent, heartfelt compliment, but aren’t you married?”

  “I am married,” he confided, “but my wife lets me date.”

  “What do you let her do?”

  “Have babies and buy things.”

  Although she was not belligerent by nature, Tess briefly considered punching him. She was sure one well-placed sock would knock him from his perch on the bike, maybe even knock out a few teeth if he fell against the pedals on the way down. There was a perverse fairness to hitting someone who hit on you. Wink Wynkowski, reared on the playgrounds of Southwest Baltimore, would understand a good solid thump to the jaw.

  But hitting him was just a fantasy, and a stupid one at that. Tess opted to hide behind her book, rereading the scene in which the muleteers beat Sancho Panza.

  “You’d rather read a book than talk to me?”

  “I’d rather be set on fire than talk to you.”

  Wink dismounted, grabbing her left arm as if to balance himself, although his footing seemed sure enough. She tensed, hoping he could feel the clenched bicep, the long tricep beneath it.

  “I guess you don’t want to watch basketball games from the floor. It’s a good way to meet good earners. Unfortunately, we tend to be married, us rich guys.”

  “From what I read in the papers, you’re not so rich.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll get richer, courtesy of the Beacon-Light. Maybe I’ll have some of the Pfieffer family’s millions before this is all over.”

  “Are you saying the newspaper libeled you? I’d like to hear more about that. I’m sure a lot of people would.” The Blight editors hadn’t asked her to probe Wynkowski’s legal intentions, but it couldn’t hurt.

  “I’m saying they’ll be sorry. Like you, honey.” This time, he ran his index finger along the inside of her arm. “You listen to the Boss, or are you one of those younger kids who thinks you’re too cool?”

  “Actually, I like Springsteen.” I’m just not queer enough to call him the Boss.

  “Well, the Boss may have been from New Jersey, but he coulda been writing about Baltimore all these years. This is a town full of losers, baby, people who are so scared of the future, they end up talking about the past all the time. There’s more to life than getting Barry Levinson to make some fucking movie about you. No one made a movie about me, but I’m going to be bigger than any of ’em. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

  A parting squeeze of her arm, then he returned to his satellites, who had been lost without him, bumping into each other and looking around. Relieved, they clapped him on the back, although a little gingerly, in case there was any moisture left over from his five minutes of activity. Paul Tucci glanced back at Tess curiously, then limped out after them.

  That night, Tess and Crow tried to watch the 6 o’clock news from bed, while trying to protect the perimeter from Esskay, who circled them, intent on stealing their Chinese food or curling up on their pillows, maybe both.

  “What a hedonist,” Tess complained, rescuing a carton of General Tso’s chicken from the nightstand just as Esskay tried to clamp down on it. Thwarted, the dog grabbed one of the pillows and carried it off into the corner, where she appeared to be making a nest. So far, she had kidnapped an old, stuffed bear of Tess’s, placing it in the center of a pile made from one of Crow’s T-shirts, tissue salvaged from the trash, and several pairs of Tess’s underwear.

  “Have a heart,” Crow admonished. “You’d need pillows, too, if you were all bones.”

  “You’re saying I’m not?” Tess asked in mock outrage. “Hey, tu
rn up the sound. They’re doing the piece on Wink.”

  The TV showed several television crews massed in front of Wink’s fake Tudor mansion, an overdone confection of turrets and stained glass. Stock footage, Tess realized, shot the day before, when the Blight’s story had run and all the TV reporters had camped out in front of Wink’s property, waiting in vain for him to comment.

  “What’s the point of a new house designed to look old?” Crow wondered.

  “I guess it’s for people who have to have wainscoting, ivy, and a subzero refrigerator. Louder, please. I still can’t hear.”

  The anchor’s voice, so deep and rich it vibrated on Tess’s cheap set, filled the room: “Channel Eight has learned tonight that Wink Wynkowski plans a news conference Monday to respond to the charges against him in the local press.” The footage changed to shots from the gym—Wink pedaling, Wink thumping the heavy bag, Wink flirting.

  “That’s your arm!” Crow exulted. “I recognize the mole on your elbow.”

  “And although he took time out to sweat at Durban’s gym today, Wink assured me, in an exclusive interview, that he wasn’t sweating the basketball deal.” So the reporter had stolen the line after all.

  Cut to a shot of Wink outside Durban’s gym, breathing clouds of smoke in the wintry air as he spoke into a microphone. Tess was thankful he had put a jogging suit on over his singlet.

  “All I want to tell my supporters—and I know I have a lot of them—is to rest easy. I always knew we’d have people fighting us on this. I just didn’t expect they’d be right here in my hometown.” He paused, as if he expected cheers or applause, then remembered he was being taped for television. “You know, maybe when I wrap this deal up, I ought to look at starting a new newspaper, or convince one of the big chains to buy the poor excuse for the one we got. You know what they say about Baltimore? It’s the biggest city in the country without a daily newspaper.”

  “What about those charges in the Beacon-Light, Wink?” the anchor asked, puffed up with pride at his daring. “Any truth to them at all?”

  Tess rolled her eyes. “He’s going to hit this one farther than the home run Frank Robinson hit out of Memorial Stadium.”

  “I can’t comment on that now, but I expect to have a detailed response by Monday after talking to my advisers. It’s a complicated situation and I have to keep my priorities straight, not get distracted. The game plan is, number one, buy the team, number two, get it here, and then, number three, I’ll worry about those little dogs nipping at my heels.”

  “But what about the information on your, uh, youthful transgressions? Can you elaborate on that? Some people have noted that three years is a long time to send a juvenile away on robbery charges.”

  To Tess’s surprise, Wink’s eyes began to tear up in what seemed to be a genuinely spontaneous show of emotion. He started to speak, stopped, cleared his throat, and continued, almost seething and crying at the same time.

  “There’s a reason they keep your name confidential when you do things as a kid, you know. It gives you a chance to start over, get things right. And I did pretty well with the chance I got, better than most. Yet I get singled out. Is that fair? You gonna open up the records of every guy in town who went to Montrose? Because I’m not the only one, you know. I’m not the only guy in this town who needed a fresh start.”

  Tess and Crow were so mesmerized by this performance that Esskay was able to make another lunge toward the Chinese food, snaring a gnawed sparerib from Crow’s plate. Her victory was short-lived: she began retching, the bone lodged deep in her throat.

  “Try the Heimlich maneuver,” Tess cried, panicking. Unruffled, Crow reached his hand down the dog’s throat and extracted the rib, gooey with drool and sauce. Esskay stared at the bone as if she had never seen it before, then tried to snatch it back from him.

  “Pavlov, indeed,” Tess snorted in disgust, but her heart was still beating a little fast. “This stupid mutt can’t learn anything. She can’t even remember she almost choked to death on that same damn bone ten seconds ago.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Crow said, forgiving as always. “We all have things we desire even though we know they wouldn’t be good for us. Don’t you have a few spareribs in your life?”

  A rhetorical question, one of Crow’s flights of fancy, nothing more. To Tess’s consternation, an image of Jack Sterling flashed through her mind—his blue eyes, the strange little sensation she had felt when they shook hands, as if he had caught a spark of static electricity from the carpet in the conference room and passed it on to her. Blushing, she hid her hot face in Esskay’s hotter neck, stroking the dog until she was sure the telltale color had subsided.

  Chapter 8

  “I can think of five other things I should be doing right now. I really don’t have time to be your tour guide.”

  It was Friday morning, and metro editor Marvin Hailey was leading Tess through the newsroom, which looked more like an insurance office gone to seed. Scurrying behind the reluctant Hailey, Tess tried to keep tabs on where she was going in this maze of cubicles, dented metal filing cabinets, and ancient computers rigged with various accessories to make them slightly less lethal to the users and their wrists. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around some desks, creating makeshift walls, while old newspapers rose toward the ceiling in shaky yellowing towers. Recycling was apparently too avant-garde for the staid Beacon-Light.

  “It looks like you’re running out of space,” Tess said, trying to make conversation with the unsmiling editor.

  “We are,” Hailey said, glancing over his shoulder as if acknowledging even this obvious fact was fraught with risk.

  “Any chance of the whole operation moving out to the ’burbs? I know you’re already printing the paper out there.”

  “We had to have new presses, and it made sense for delivery purposes to be outside the Beltway. But the other departments will remain here until Five—uh, Pfieffer—can get a good price for the property.”

  “Forever, in other words.”

  Hailey grunted, a safely neutral noise.

  It was 9 A.M., a rare quiet moment in the cycle of an all-day newspaper. Within an hour, the skeleton crew of overnight editors would put to bed the “evening” paper, a publication identical to the morning paper except in layout and the updates on predawn carnage provided by a lone police reporter. Most of the other reporters had yet to arrive, with the exception of a dark-haired woman with her feet propped on an open desk drawer, reading the morning paper while she listened to a police scanner. A phone rang on the city desk, but no one was there to answer it.

  “So this is where you make the magic happen,” Tess said.

  Marvin Hailey lunged for the still ringing phone, succeeding only in knocking over an old mug of coffee. Tess watched him try to stem the milky-brown spill with wadded-up newspapers, only to spread the puddle over more of the desk top. Such a dry husk of a man—shoulders speckled with dandruff, lips whitish and cracked from constant, nervous licking. He looked as if he might break up and blow away in a strong breeze.

  “Oh, hell,” he sighed. The newspaper had finally absorbed the coffee, only to leave his hands black with ink. Resignedly, he tossed the crumpled sheets into a nearby trash can, wiped his palms on his pilled trousers, and sat down at his computer.

  “We’ve got you all set up on our system. To sign on, you hit this button and type in MONAGHAN,” he said, doing just that. Even his typing had a jumpy, paranoid rhythm, as if he expected someone to creep up behind him and find fault in whatever he did. “Now the computer wants a six-letter password. You want me to pick something out for you? It’s not as if you’ll need a secret one.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll do it.” Tess slid the keyboard away from Hailey and tapped in the first six-letter word that came to mind: E-S-S-K-A-Y, which showed up on the computer only as a series of asterisks. Who knew what secrets she might want to keep as this progressed? “Now what?”

  “Well, I assume you’re going to st
art interviewing people. I drew up a list of people we know were here that night. Editors, reporters, custodial staff, the printer who set the bogus—um, unofficial—story. You should be able to get to most of them today, except for Feeney and Ruiz. They flew to Georgia yesterday, aren’t expected back until late tonight.”

  “Georgia? For the Wink story?”

  “I guess so, but no one’s informed me officially.” Hailey allowed himself a small, bitter smile. “This is so hot only Colleen, Mabry, and Sterling are in the loop. I guess I’ll find out when the Sunday paper comes out, like everyone else in Baltimore.”

  “Don’t be so bitter, Marv. They haven’t clued me in, either, and I’m the sports editor. The story came out of my department, don’t forget that.” A grinning, square-jawed man appeared out of the warren of desks and cubicles to offer his arm to Tess, which she declined to take. “Guy Whitman. I’m here to lead you to the system manager, who will explain what happened electronically Tuesday night. The computers are part of my province.”

  “What do computers have to do with the sports department?” Tess asked, as she began following him along a new path through the newsroom labyrinth.

  “I’m also in charge of Beacon-Light 2000, a task force set up to examine the paper’s information services, what we’ll need to go into the twenty-first century.”

  “Aren’t newspapers already in the information services business?”

  Guy looked as if he wanted to pat her on the head. He was handsome, in a fluffy-hair kind of way rare in a newspaper editor. And didn’t he know it. Too bad his taste in ties appeared to be terminally whimsical. Tess tried not to make a sour face at the dancing lacrosse sticks.

  “You sound like everyone else around here, Theresa. Haven’t you noticed the times, they are a-changing? You can read virtually every major metropolitan newspaper on the World Wide Web. The Washington Post has its own on-line service. But the Beacon-Light, one of the last family-owned papers in the country, has only started beta-testing its Web site, and they’re doing it on the cheap. They think they can continue to work primarily in paper.” He spat out the last word as if it were something caught in his teeth.