The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  Still, the vestiges of a pretty face remained. Jane Doe had a sensual mouth; a straight, neat nose; and the loveliest brows, thick and natural looking. Working-class Baltimore women tended to overpluck and tweeze, laboring over their eyebrows the way some worked their tiny rowhouse gardens. Ruthie Dembrow, for one, had that overarched, perpetually surprised look. She’d be better off if she misplaced her tweezers for a few months. Not Jane Doe.

  Tess handed the report back to the front desk clerk. “I’d like one page copied, if I could. Well, not a page, really—but this photo. Could you do that?”

  “It won’t come out very well,” the clerk warned her.

  “I know,” Tess said, pushing two quarters toward her. “But I want it anyway.”

  Funny, the Polaroid photo reproduced almost too well. Jane Doe’s face was so pale, her features so dark, the rubber tubing at her neck darker still. Tess folded the paper into fourths and hid it between the pages of her datebook.

  After the medical examiner’s office, Tess stopped at the police department to pick up the transcript of Henry Dembrow’s confession. No fifty cents a copy here, not as long as Homicide Detective Martin Tull was on the force.

  “You want to go over this with me?” he asked, and Tess knew he wanted to go over it with her. Tull did favors in exchange for full disclosure. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, quite the opposite. Tull had learned the hard way not to ignore Tess’s instincts.

  “We can walk over to that place on Guilford,” he said, his girl-pretty features wistful. “The one with Peet’s Coffee and all those bars.”

  “Bars?”

  “You know, the salad bar, the soup bar, the sandwich bar, the cookie bar, the juice bar…”

  Tess made a face. The morgue hadn’t dented her appetite, but she had other ideas for lunch. “I’d rather falafel.”

  “You mean you’d rather have a falafel, don’t you?”

  “No, I use falafel as a verb. Let’s go to Cypriana, I’ll falafel, then we can have coffee, after. My sandwich card is filled up, and I’m entitled to a free one.”

  “Falafel, it is. Hey, can you gyro, too? Or souvlaki?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Tess said. “Obviously, those don’t work as verbs at all.”

  Cypriana’s was housed in the old lobby of one of Baltimore’s many defunct newspapers, the American. Tess had worked down the block at the old Star, now an Inner Harbor parking lot. She wondered if the city’s sole surviving paper, the Beacon-Light, might one day fold, too, if its lobby would become a series of small shops, or an avant-garde art gallery. A world without newspapers seemed increasingly possible to her—and perhaps not that tragic. She had survived the transition. Others would as well.

  She ordered the “ultimate,” chicken, falafel, and feta cheese wrapped in a pita, drenched in a sauce whose ingredients were zealously protected. Garlic, however, was clearly part of the mix. Tull opted for a small salad, dry. They found a table next to one of the large windows overlooking Guilford. Tull cast a longing glance across the street, where his Peet’s coffee waited for him. The homicide detective was one of those odd people who didn’t care about food, who considered it nothing more than fuel. He probably wouldn’t bother to eat at all, but his stomach needed some lining for the ten-plus cups of coffee he drank every day.

  “So, Henry Dembrow,” he began.

  “Henry Dembrow’s victim,” Tess amended. “His sister thinks her brother was killed in prison for a reason.”

  “Which lies in the identity of Jane Doe.” Tull chewed on a forkful of greens. “She’s wrong, of course.”

  “Agreed, but I can’t see how it would hurt anyone, trying to find out who the girl was.”

  “No, it’s a good exercise for you, in fact. The question is, how do you, without access to all the tools and databases we have at the department—”

  “Without official access,” Tess said, smiling at him. Unattached, she had never allowed herself to flirt with Tull. Now that she was back with Crow, it seemed perfectly safe to flutter her lashes a little. Tull was fine-boned, an inch or two shorter than she was, with even, perfect features thrown into sharp relief by his acne scars. It was those little scars that made him so attractive, not that Tull ever seemed to notice. “I was married once,” he liked to say, in a tone suggesting it was a childhood communicable disease, like measles or chicken pox. Once you had it, you had it.

  “Without access,” he repeated now, in a firm tone. “So, what can you do that we didn’t do?”

  “Not give up.”

  “Don’t be rude, Tess.”

  “I’m not, but it’s true, isn’t it? With Henry’s confession in hand, it had to be less urgent to identify Jane Doe than it was to close your other cases. You’re supposed to catch the killers, not identify their victims.”

  “You’d be surprised how a case like this eats at a detective. I was the secondary. The primary on the case, David Canty, took it very much to heart. He did everything possible, even planted a few stories in the Blight, hoping to stir up some leads.”

  Tess couldn’t help smiling at this. Newspaper reporters liked to think they used people. They hated to acknowledge how they were used and manipulated. But it was a two-way street, this avenue paved with rationalizations about the public’s right to know and the public good.

  “I noticed she had a tattoo, a fresh one, a line at the ankle—” Tess began.

  “We checked,” Tull said. “I personally called every goddamn tattoo parlor in the city and the county, to see if anyone remembered a girl like her coming in just before she was killed. No one did. Although if she had a tattoo, she was at least eighteen, or had a fake ID. It’s not legal to tattoo a minor.”

  “Could have been a do-it-yourself job.”

  Tull shook his head. “Too professional looking.”

  “I assume you tried to match her with missing persons reports, too?”

  “Yeah. That’s the worst. Families coming in, looking at a dead body to see if it’s their dead body. They’re relieved when it’s not, but they’re also frustrated, because it means all they can do is go home and wait.”

  Tess’s sandwich was long gone, but Tull was still picking at his salad. From here, she could see the corner of Baltimore Street, the Block—the Tick-Tock club, the sad little sex shops and peep shows. Once, all runaway girls had ended up here. Now there was so much competition.

  “Someone, somewhere must miss her,” Tess said. “Every death has to alter the world in some way, don’t you think?”

  Tull gave her a fond smile, the kind Tess hated. “Most people get tougher, the more death they see. But you, you’re still all squishy and sentimental. Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’ve found religion, and you’ll start lugging your little piano down to the Block, playing for the passersby. Sister Tess Monaghan, in her black orthopedic shoes, running her own mission of mercy.”

  The image made Tess laugh. She knew those women; she had tossed coins in their cups on Friday afternoon, glad someone wanted to save a few souls. “If I find religion, I’ll have to embrace the Muslim faith so both parents can be furious with me.”

  Tull surprised her by leaning forward and wiping a piece of feta from her cheek. His touch was a father’s touch—well-meaning, but too gentle to get the job done. Mothers knew how hard to rub a stained cheek. “You know, if you plan on any more human contact today, you might consider a breath mint.”

  Tess took over, cleaning her own cheek. “I think I’m just going to go back to my office, read these files, and canoodle with Esskay, whose breath is always much worse than mine.”

  “And someone pays you for this? Man, I want a gig like that someday. You need a partner?”

  “Everyone wants to be my partner these days.” Tess thought about Whitney’s similarly facetious offer just the other night. At least, she hoped it was facetious. “Why is that? Does my life really look so cushy from where you sit?”

  “Actually, it looks…happy. You look happy, ev
er since you got back from Texas. And back with Crow.”

  “I guess I am,” Tess said, then looked around nervously. Too late—there wasn’t even a splinter of wood to knock in this room of formica tables and plastic chairs. She rapped her knuckles on her forehead, figuring it was hard enough to count.

  chapter 5

  TESS SUPPOSED THERE WERE WORSE THINGS THAN FINDING one’s erstwhile boss at the breakfast table almost every day, wearing his robe and eating bran flakes, but she had yet to think of any.

  Oh yes, there was one—knowing that said erstwhile boss was sleeping with one’s aunt.

  “Hello, Tess,” Tyner Gray greeted her the next morning, his smile so smug that it could make the Chesire Cat disappear from shame. “We didn’t hear you come in last night, but then—we were busy.”

  “Roll a little closer to the table,” she said, nudging his wheelchair with her hip. “I need to get into the refrigerator.”

  “I thought you ate at Jimmy’s most mornings,” he said, even as he complied. The kitchen was large, or so it had seemed before Tyner came along. “Is it true that you got one of the new waitresses fired for putting cream cheese on both your bagels, or is that just more Fells Point apocrypha?”

  Tess leaned into the refrigerator, checking out her options. “In the off season, when we’re not rowing, I like to come downstairs and have breakfast with Kitty and her man of the moment. Some of them even cook. The one before you made Belgian waffles.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d become resigned to toasting my own bagels this winter,” he said. “Kitty’s talking about installing an elevator so we can use her rooms on the second floor.” Since taking up with Tyner, Kitty had limited herself to the cramped rooms behind the store.

  “Don’t count on it. Kitty has been in the boyfriend-of-the-month club for as long as I’ve lived here.” Tess sniffed the half-and-half. Kitty drank her coffee black, so the cream she kept for guests and her tenant-niece sometimes went bad. “Why do you think she’d change her ways for you?”

  “Because I’m so good,” Tyner said. The waxy container of half-and-half slipped through Tess’s hands, but she caught it before it hit the floor.

  “Gross. If the cream wasn’t sour to begin with, then that remark definitely would have curdled it.”

  “Crow said he was going to pick some up while he was out walking Esskay,” Tyner said complacently, turning a page of the newspaper. “Rumor has it that your apartment has a kitchen, but you can’t prove it by me.”

  “Are you two sniping at each other again?” Kitty’s voice was sleepy as she padded into the kitchen, tying the sash of her peach robe. Fifteen years older than Tess, she looked much better in the mornings, with her fair skin and tousled red hair. But it was her sweet, open disposition that bound men to her. “They come for the curls,” Crow once said, “but they stay for the temperament. Kitty’s like a hearth where every man wants to warm himself.”

  “Then why isn’t Tyner burnt to a crisp by now?” Tess had lamented.

  It wasn’t that she disliked the irascible older man. He was a good rowing coach and a decent lawyer, who threw her work and represented all her clients for a small fee, so she could claim privilege if the police ever hassled her. But Tyner in love was unbearable. He beamed. He smiled. He gazed adoringly. Some mornings, it was all Tess could do not to toss her waffles on the Beacon-Light’s local section, which happened to be the only part of the paper that Tyner didn’t commandeer.

  “You can’t expect our relationship to change just because you two are boyfriend and girlfriend now,” Tess told her aunt. “This is how Tyner and I always talked to each other. You just used to take my side, remember? You’re a traitor to your gender and your blood.”

  But Kitty wasn’t listening. She leaned over Tyner’s shoulder, pretending interest in the newspaper he was reading, letting a hand rest on his shoulder. Tyner picked it up and kissed her palm.

  “You know,” Tess said, aware no one was listening, “Jimmy’s is looking better and better. Tell Crow to meet me there.”

  It was almost ten before she set out for Locust Point. Funny—she saw the neighborhood every day, from across the water, rowed her Alden along its ragged shore, yet all she really knew of Locust Point was Fort McHenry and the Domino Sugars sign, which she could see from the makeshift terrace outside her bedroom. She tried to remember to look at it every night, just before bed. So much had changed in Baltimore, it was reassuring to go to sleep with that static neon vision blazing red in her mind’s eye. As a child, she thought God might be lurking behind the sign, because if she were God, that was where she would make her heaven. Atop a neon sign overlooking Baltimore, guarding a mountain of sugar.

  On a map, Locust Point looked cramped and narrow. Yet once Tess crossed Key Highway, there was a feeling of expansiveness, as if the sky were deeper here, the city miles away. She had heard rumors of yuppies, drawn by inexpensive rowhouses with water views, but there was little evidence of such an invasion. Even with the big employers disappearing—Procter & Gamble, the shipping jobs—the neighborhood was strikingly unchanged. One could imagine Locust Point inside a plastic globe, synthetic snow sifting down, no one ever getting in.

  And no one ever getting out. It seemed an unlikely place for anyone to die as a stranger, yet Jane Doe had done just that.

  Tess parked her car on Hull Street, a few doors down from the Dembrow rowhouse. She was going to walk where Henry walked, or at least where Henry had said he walked the morning of Jane Doe’s death. She was even starting out at the same time, so the light would be more or less the same. Of course, December was not November, but it was close enough. Even the weather was the way it had been thirteen months ago, sunny and unseasonably mild. Henry had gone out the back door, so she walked to the alley and touched the gate, almost as if beginning a game, and started on her way.

  She was not Tess Monaghan, she kept telling herself. She was Henry Dembrow, a twenty-one-year-old huffer aching for a high, seeing the world through itching, watering eyes that evaluated everything for its potential utility toward this goal. Such eyes would look for the glint of coins on the sidewalks, or untended purses in cars. Would he notice copper downspouts, too, or iron balustrades? No, Henry wasn’t enterprising enough to gather metal to sell, to make the trip to the salvage places that asked no questions of the men with shopping carts. He wanted things easy.

  He had remembered stopping at the corner gas station, so Tess stopped there, stepping into the warmth of the inevitable mini-market. The manager had chased Henry Dembrow from here the day of the killing, according to the police report, but hadn’t noticed any girl. Tess grabbed a handful of mini Goldenberg Peanut Chews from a box next to the cash register. To each his own high.

  “Manager around?” she asked the young man at the cash register, whose coloring and dark hair suggested he was Middle Eastern. His badge, however, identified him as “Brad.”

  “I’m the manager,” he said, in a Baltimore accent so heavy and thick that he must be a native, or someone who had immigrated in the cradle. Tess wondered if his parents ever second-guessed their sacrifices, coming halfway around the world so their son might have the opportunity of speaking a pitch-perfect Bawlmarese.

  She raced through what she thought of as the hard part—her identity, what she was doing, how she knew to ask for him. In her experience, it was those first sixty seconds, from the moment she flashed her P.I. license to the end of her pitch, that she was most likely to earn someone’s cooperation. Older people were the easiest, if only because they were so often bored out of their minds that they welcomed any distraction. Men were curt, but they usually found the time, as long as she did the little-me, big-eye, big-chest thing. Women were more skeptical, because women spent their lives listening to bullshit.

  Foreigners, those who had known less free societies, were the most leery. They didn’t believe anyone could speak openly, about anything. Throw in the words police business and they closed down completely.


  Brad-the-assimilated was cooperative, he just didn’t know anything.

  “I remember Henry, sure. I ran him off from the pumps at least once a month. But I didn’t see him with any girl that day. Or any day, for that matter. Girls liked him, he was shy, kinda good-looking. Henry didn’t care. He was interested in only one thing, getting high.”

  “Maybe she came in on her own.” Tess showed him the sketch police had used a year before, probably shown to Brad at some point. It wasn’t great, but it was preferable to the corpse photo. “Forget about Henry. Did you ever see her?”

  Brad shook his head. “Not that I noticed. Sorry.”

  “I saw her.”

  The voice, very high and sweet, came from the rear of the store, where there was a magazine stand. Tess glanced toward the sound and found herself staring at the cover of a fashion magazine, one promising failproof tips for thicker hair, thinner thighs and better orgasms. The magazine lowered, and the gaunt, painted, pouting model fell like a mask to reveal a pretty, moon-faced teenager. She looked young not to be in school. All the eyeliner in the world—and it appeared this girl had used all the eyeliner in the world—couldn’t age this baby face.

  “Don’t fib, Sukey,” the manager scolded her. “This woman is doing serious work. She doesn’t need to hear your stories.”

  “It’s not a story,” the girl insisted, cheeks flushing. “I did see her. Not with Henry, but in Latrobe Park, earlier that week. She had a fuzzy coat, with a fur collar. She was waiting for someone. Someone was supposed to meet her, but the person never came.”

  The detail about the coat was dead-on. It also was on the posters the police had distributed, so Tess wasn’t too impressed.

  “Why didn’t you tell the police this a year ago, when they were trying to identify her?”

  Sukey rolled her eyes. “Because I didn’t know her name, which was the point, right? You asked if anyone saw her, and I did. I even talked to her a couple of times.”