Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  “Yes. Yes I did.” Linda almost seemed to be in a trance before the mirror, eyes locked on her own reflection.

  “May I see them? Could I see what you used to”—she didn’t want to use the term blackmail—“to convince Wink?”

  “So Bertie knew all along, huh? She tell anybody else?”

  “With Wink dead, I don’t think anyone will be coming around to ask her.”

  Linda gathered up the long, shaggy skirt of her ballgown and swept out of Jones & Jones in her stocking feet. Tara the salesgirl, wiser than Marianna at Octavia, simply watched her leave, allowing a tiny whistle of a sigh to escape.

  “If she doesn’t come back in twenty minutes,” the older saleswoman said, “we’ll wrap up what she left and send it to the apartment, along with a bill for the dress. It won’t be the first time.”

  Tess followed Linda out of the store, assuming she was headed for her apartment, just straight ahead, not even 100 yards away. Instead, she turned right and led Tess to the branch bank in the shopping center.

  “I keep all my important papers in a safe deposit box at the bank here in Cross Keys.” Linda was strangely manic, as if she had wanted to tell someone this story long ago but had never dared—first because she was scared, then because she was paid. “That’s the wonderful thing about Cross Keys, everything is right here. It’s so convenient.”

  Linda pushed through the bank’s double set of glass doors. No one raised an eyebrow at her ballgown and stocking feet; the bank employees must know her as well as the salesgirls. Soon, she was unlocking her safe deposit box on the counter just beyond the security gate, Tess at her side.

  “You know, for a long time, it didn’t even occur to me I had anything to tell,” she said, as Tess’s hands closed greedily on the photocopies, folded into careful fourths so long ago that the creases had turned gray. “Then, when that stupid story came out, I hated everyone thinking—but $20,000 a month. Well, it makes up for a lot.”

  Tess skimmed the hospital forms, with their coded comments on the various injuries treated. A broken collarbone. Lacerations. A concussion. A broken nose. Oh, Jesus, this must have been the night the ambulance was called. First-degree burns from hot grease, and the spleen so badly injured the doctors had almost removed it. And yet the hospital didn’t even have the decency to grant Linda her own name on the forms. They just listed her as Gerard S. Wynkowski. His property. His chattel. His to do with as he pleased. Gerard S. Wynkowski. Not even a “Mrs.” You would think Wink had been the patient.

  “I can’t believe they kept getting the name wrong, as many times as you went in there.”

  “Hell, no one can spell Wynkowski. Took me years.” Linda looked over Tess’s shoulder. “No, no, that’s right. Gerard S. Wynkowski. The S is for Stanislaus. He hated it, how the hospital would call him Gerard instead of Wink, and use his middle name. He said that was the worst part of going, hearing them call out his full name in the emergency room.”

  “Call out his name? Why would they call out his name?”

  “When the doctor was ready to see him. Haven’t you ever been in an emergency room?”

  “But they call out the patient’s name—” And finally Tess understood.

  “But you said you knew,” whined Linda Stolley Wynkowski, pushing Tess against the bank of metal boxes. It was a child’s petulant, impetuous shove, the opening salvo in a full-fledged tantrum. But unlike a child’s shove, it was really hard: Tess’s shoulders smacked the wall with enough force to leave a bruise, and she remembered the frightened salesgirl at Octavia, how Linda had ground her heel into her foot. “You said Bertie told. Bertie told!”

  Tess sat in the parking lot of Eddie’s on Charles Street, eating her way through a half-pound of Eddie’s peanut clusters, her lunch for the day. She had been yearning for chocolate-covered nuts since Tommy had held his picked-over box of candy out to her, and she was a great believer in yielding to temptation. To her way of thinking, the one part of her body that actually knew what it wanted deserved to get it.

  After leaving Linda Wynkowski, she had driven straight to the gourmet grocery store, her car homing in on the nearest source of peanut clusters as if it had a microchip designed just for that purpose. Eight ounces gave you about a dozen pieces. Between bites, she took huge draughts from a twenty-ounce Coca-Cola. But all the sweetness she forced down her throat couldn’t wash away the sour taste of the story Linda Wynkowski had told when her fury had passed. It had passed pretty quickly, too, for Tess had done the one thing Wink apparently had never dared—slapped Linda square across the face and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her until she calmed down.

  The first time, we had been married about six weeks and he went out drinking with his buddies, that greaseball Paul Tucci. And he didn’t get home until four A.M., and he didn’t call, and I was hysterical, asking where had he been, why hadn’t he called. I was scared to go out by myself, and I was scared to be there alone. He just shrugged, you know, the way men do when they’re saying you’re just some little bug they can’t be troubled listening to, so I picked up this ashtray—we smoked then, both of us—and threw it at him. My aim wasn’t very good, but it caught part of his cheek and left a good bruise.

  Put it to music and it could have been a country song. Substitute Wil E. Coyote and the Road Runner for Wink and Linda, you had a Warner Brothers cartoon. Rig up a puppet show and it was Punch ’n’ Judy time.

  Wink just wouldn’t hit back. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was a woman, maybe because he couldn’t ever forget what had happened to that old guy. He wouldn’t even run away, just go limp. It made me so mad, the way he wouldn’t fight; I’d go wild, I’d hurt him more and more, trying to get some reaction out of him, but I never could. Finally, he said we had to live apart, he thought I might kill him the next time. He paid me support and I really couldn’t complain. But then he got rich and he wanted to marry again. So I told him: you give me what I want financially, or I’ll tell everybody Wink Wynkowski, Mr. Tough Guy, is a little wimp who let his wife beat up on him. He gave me what I wanted then, and I moved here. Nothing goes wrong here.

  How surreal it had been, standing in the alcove of safe deposit boxes with prom queen Linda as she’d told her story. A story, not incidentally, that happened to be the complete opposite of what the Beacon-Light had reported. When did you stop beating your wife, Mr. Wynkowski? Actually, she beat me. Oh sure, Mr. Wynkowski. Even the bit about Linda’s agoraphobia had been made up. The only reason she never left Cross Keys was because she was a lazy eccentric without any friends.

  As a dead man, Wink couldn’t be libeled, not in this state. Yet he hadn’t been dead when the story had first run. Maybe the widow Wynkowski had a wrongful death suit on those grounds. Unfortunately, Tess did not work for the widow Wynkowski, she worked for the Beacon-Light, and all her information belonged to them, even information that had nothing to do with how a certain story got into the paper, and everything to do with how screwed up it was once it got there.

  Rosita’s use of checkbook journalism had been a toss-up, slimy but not illegal. Paying and getting the story ass-backwards—Tess couldn’t keep this to herself. Gee, if only Bertie had known the real story, she could have made so much more. Not as much as $20,000 a month, perhaps, but definitely more than fifty bucks. But Bertie, peering through the curtains in the darkness, had seen what she’d expected to see, and Rosita had found what she’d expected to find.

  She finished off the dregs of her Coke, then put her car in gear. Despite having consumed almost 100 grams of simple sugars, she felt sluggish and still had a brackish taste at the back of her throat that the Coke couldn’t wash away. Strange, she had thought victory was suppose to taste sweet.

  Tess found Jack Sterling in the Blight’s basement level canteen. The room’s vending machines, the only source of sustenance in-house, gave new meaning to the phrase “strictly from hunger.” Olive loaf sandwiches, tins of stew, lots of pork rinds, rock-hard Gummi Bears. And according to the l
ights on the soda machine, the only drink selections were practically fluorescent—orange, grape, and diet lime.

  Sterling stared longingly at some of the dusty chocolate bars in the candy machine’s metal coils, sighed, and resignedly settled on a bag of honey-mustard pretzels. Ever the gentleman, he offered the bag to Tess first, but she shook her head.

  “I just had lunch,” she said.

  “I hope it was something elegant and fattening. A metabolism like yours is a terrible thing to waste.”

  “Well, it was from Eddie’s,” she said. “Look, remember when you asked me to talk to Wynkowski’s wife?”

  “Of course I do, Tess. I told you how much I appreciated that, what a relief it was to know she didn’t think we were culpable. Perhaps I didn’t stress my gratitude enough—”

  “No, no, I’m not digging for a compliment. It’s just—well, I didn’t stop there. Some things she said made me curious, and I decided to look at Wink’s divorce papers. And I noticed something odd in the file, so I went to talk to the first Mrs. Wynkowski.” She decided to skip over the detail about Rosita’s personnel file ending up on her windshield. That would only confuse things. “The next thing I knew, I was canvassing MacTavish Avenue in Violetville, trying to figure out who could have told Rosita about the domestic abuse, because it sure wasn’t the first Mrs. Wynkowski.”

  Sterling tried to keep his voice even and calm, but Tess could tell he was annoyed. “I arranged for you to be able to come and go as you pleased so you could look into your uncle’s beating, not so you could meddle in a story that the Beacon-Light is still pursuing. What in hell were you thinking? You could have compromised our coverage, or worse yet, inadvertently let it slip that the first story was published by accident.”

  Tess folded her arms across her chest, chastened and defensive. So much for the pat on the head she thought was her due. “Rosita had some problems in San Antonio. Someone down there suggested if I followed in her footsteps, I would find the same pattern here. I did, and I did. Wink never hit his wife, Jack, she hit him. Rosita paid someone for her information, and she didn’t begin to try to check it out. I mean, she got a no comment, but she even twisted that to make it sound as if Linda Wynkowski was scared to confirm the story—”

  Sterling held up a hand. “Slow down, Tess. Take a deep breath, start over, and tell me everything in straight chronological order, okay?”

  And so Tess did—almost. She still held back the detail about the envelope she’d found on her car. Perhaps because it seemed a little sleazy, as if she’d been manipulated by an unknown source whose agenda was still unclear.

  “I know I wasn’t asked to do any of this,” she finished. “But sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me. You were the one who asked me what I thought about that story, on a gut level, and I really didn’t have an answer at the time. Now I think it was the combination of solid reporting and sordid gossip that made it seem slightly off. Rosita’s work undermined Feeney’s at every turn.”

  “Feeney is a friend of yours, isn’t he, Tess?”

  Uh-oh. “Baltimore is a small town of 650,000 people. Everyone knows everyone here.”

  “Do you know him the same way you knew Jonathan Ross?”

  “No!” Shit, she was blushing. “I mean, we’re friends. We have a drink from time to time, that’s all.”

  “Don’t you think it was an ethical breach for you to take this job, given your relationship with him?”

  “Well, yes.” Something in Sterling’s gentle manner tempted her to tell the truth—it would feel so good to get some of those lies off her ledger. Besides, she no longer felt a need to protect Feeney, not after his behavior yesterday. Still, if she veered from the official version, things would get tricky.

  “I was told he had an ironclad alibi for the night, so it wasn’t an issue.”

  “You were told. Nice little wiggle phrase, there.”

  “What does it matter now?” she said, feeling a little desperate under Sterling’s questions. She suddenly realized what a good reporter he must have been in his day. “Doesn’t what I’ve learned today make it pretty obvious Rosita slipped the story into the paper? She’s ruthless as hell.”

  Sterling stood up, crumpled his pretzel bag in his hand, and flicked it at the trash can for a clean two-pointer. “Your information doesn’t suggest or confirm anything about the original incident. But I want you to come with me now and talk to Lionel about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think Rosita Ruiz’s days at the Beacon-Light are coming to an end.”

  Chapter 23

  It snowed on Friday morning, a heavy, wet snow with fat flakes that stuck only to the grass, but it was enough to throw the morning commute into complete chaos, as cars spun out in anticipation of spinning out and the local schools announced they would start one hour late, two hours late, then not at all. Tess had tried to take the bus to the Beacon-Light, thinking it might be marginally faster, but the bus had been sideswiped, which was seen as a kind of open lottery in most city neighborhoods, and pedestrians began climbing on until it was standing-room only. Finally, a young security guard got on and held the doors shut, as thwarted plaintiffs surrounded the bus and pounded on its sides. Tess squeezed out the back door, letting a few more potential plaintiffs on in the process, and hailed a taxi. In fact, her neck and shoulders were sore, but she had a hunch it was the Blight, not the transit system, that was at fault.

  Although she was twenty minutes late, the meeting in the publisher’s conference room had yet to start. Five-Four and Lionel Mabry, who lived far out in the suburbs, were still en route, and Sterling was sequestered with Rosita. Colleen Reganhart sat glumly at the table with Guy Whitman, whose face brightened when Tess walked in.

  “Snow, and this weekend is Palm Sunday. It’s certainly been a strange winter,” Whitman said, making conversation. “Now, is Friday the good day for firing, or the bad day? Or is it neither? I always get confused. What do you think, Tess?”

  Tess, who had been laid off on a Wednesday, thought every day was a bad day to lose one’s job. How unexpected it had been, how ill prepared they all had been, when the Star’s publisher had asked the staff to gather in the newsroom soon after their afternoon paper had gone to bed. As a coup de grâce, the Star’s corporate owners had not even allowed its workers the catharsis of putting out a final edition about their paper’s demise. Tess’s last piece of journalism had been a four-paragraph story about a water main break downtown.

  Whitman answered his own question. “Actually, there are several schools of thought about terminating employees. If you worry that an employee is prone to, uh, severe emotional responses, a Friday might be ill advised, as the employee could harm himself over the weekend. Others hold that Monday is the best day for firing from the management point of view; otherwise, the task would hang over the manager’s head throughout the week, providing an unwarranted distraction. Violence cannot be discounted as a possibility. When the Los Angeles Times had to down-size by reducing its staff by more than a hundred people in a single afternoon, the company issued a directive stating—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Guy,” snapped Colleen, who had gotten up and started pacing the room with a lighted cigarette.

  “You know, you’re not suppose to smoke in here,” he countered.

  “For now, I outrank everyone in here.”

  “For now.”

  It all began here, Tess thought, and now it’s going to end here. Sterling had promised her the Blight would buy out the rest of her contract, as long as she agreed to appear here today, and, if necessary, present her notes about Rosita’s reporting methods. Although they couldn’t prove Rosita had slipped her story into the paper, Lionel and Five-Four were convinced she was the culprit. But she would go down for paying Bertie. It seemed highly unorthodox, perhaps even illegal, but Tess was so anxious to be free of the Beacon-Light at this point, she would have agreed to almost anything.

  Five-Four’s secretary opened t
he door and announced: “They’re on their way.” Colleen sucked down every drop of nicotine she could extract from the butt-end of her cigarette, then opened the window and tossed it to the street below. She had just slammed the window shut when Five-Four arrived, trailed by a chipper Lionel Mabry, absentmindedly whistling a pretty tune. It took Tess a few bars to identify it: “There Is a Rose in Spanish Harlem.” Now, that seemed in dubious taste. He seemed to realize this, too, and the song stopped abruptly as Sterling and Rosita entered.

  “Have a seat, Rosita.” Sterling’s voice was disarmingly gentle, but Tess suspected he was probably the angriest of all those assembled. Rosita took the chair at the far end of the table, opposite from Five-Four. The big chair seemed to swallow her and Tess was moved to something almost like pity—until she saw Rosita’s hard, defiant face. The little reporter had waived her right to bring a union representative to the meeting. She had, in fact, forbidden the shop steward from accompanying her. She was so sure she didn’t need anyone. She didn’t think she needed Feeney to get the story, she didn’t think she needed the union to keep her job.

  Sterling looked down at a blank legal pad as he spoke. “I briefed you earlier on the evidence Tess Monaghan has gathered about your, uh, methods. We also have a signed statement from Bertie Athol that she was paid for information on the Wynkowski story, information that turned out to be exaggerated and false. And we can get photocopies of the papers Tess saw yesterday, the ones that establish Wink Wynkowski was the victim in his marriage, not the aggressor. We believe the cumulative result of these findings warrants your immediate dismissal. However, we are prepared to give you six months’ severance—you’d only be entitled to two, normally—and assistance in finding another job. Some of us feel—I feel—we failed you here. Perhaps at a smaller paper, where the pressures to perform would not be so great, you could concentrate on some of the basics you appear to have skipped over in your career to date.”