The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “You talked to her, but she didn’t tell you her name.”

  “We’re talking, and we haven’t exchanged names, have we?”

  “Sukey.”

  She tossed her head. “You only know my name ’cause Brad used it.”

  “Tess Monaghan.” She held out her hand.

  Sukey put down the magazine and came out from behind the aisle of canned goods that had hidden her body from Tess’s view. She was plump, even by South Baltimore standards, so her age was hard to ascertain. Packed into jeans, a tee-shirt, and a Starter jacket, she was full of jiggling curves. Early adolescence, Tess thought. Or a steady diet of Mounds bars.

  “Sukey Brewer.” She took Tess’s hand tentatively, shaking more at the fingertips than at the palms. “Are you really a private detective?”

  “It’s not something you lie about,” Tess said. “Unless you’re really twisted. How come you’re not in school, Sukey Brewer? You don’t look old enough to be a dropout.”

  “Field trip day. My class went to the Smithsonian. My mom forgot to fill out the permission slip on time, so I’m hanging out here. I’m sure as shit not going to go to school if no one else is there.”

  “She’s a good kid,” Brad volunteered. “She helps me out here, sometimes, doing inventory. I told her she can have a real job here when she turns sixteen next year, and has a work permit. But don’t believe a damn thing she says.”

  “That’s not fair, Brad,” Sukey said. “Most of my stories are true. I just don’t get all the details right, sometimes. Like the newspaper, you know?”

  “Tell the lady about the bank robbery you saw on your way over here this morning, even though there’s no bank between here and your house.”

  “You weren’t listening. It was an armored truck, one of those red-and-black ones,” Sukey said. “Money was flying through the air, and people were grabbing it, then running away. It was wild.”

  “Wild,” Brad repeated dryly, giving the word its Baltimore pronunciation: Wahhhhld.

  Tess was not interested in that day’s robberies, real or imagined. “So, a year ago, you noticed this girl in the park. A girl in a fuzzy coat with a fur collar. What time was this?”

  “About two or three.”

  “She was dead by then.”

  “The day before, I mean. I saw her the day before.”

  “Why weren’t you in school that day?”

  “Half day, teachers’ conference. I had a book I wanted to read—I read a lot.”

  Brad nodded. “She does, she reads a lot. Which is why her head is so filled with nonsense.”

  “I like to read on the swings. If there are mothers there, with the little kids, it’s…” Her voice trailed off. Tess, taking in Sukey’s round figure and guileless face, could imagine why she might want to be in sight of someone’s mother. She wished she knew a way to tell the girl that everyone’s adolescence was horrible, that no one was spared. But people had tried to tell her the same thing fifteen years ago, and she hadn’t believed them.

  “You said you talked.”

  “We did, kinda. I mean, I said ‘Nice day,’ and she said she’d seen better. I showed her the book I was reading and she said it looked pretty good.”

  Sukey looked at Tess expectantly, as if hoping for praise. Tess tried to smile and nod, although the girl hadn’t told her anything helpful.

  “Was that all you said? Did you see her leave?”

  “I left first. My mom calls at three-thirty, I’m supposed to be home by then. But the girl—this was funny, I remember it almost word for word—she said: ‘Tell me what you think you’ll be when you grow up.’ And I said, ‘I dunno. I’ll probably just work at the Sugar House after I graduate from Southern. Get married, have some babies.’”

  A modest goal, but at least she was trying to do it in the right order. So many local girls omitted the getting married part.

  “And she must not be from here, ’cause she said ‘The Sugar House? What’s that?’ So I told her about Domino’s and she smiled, in a kind of weird way and said: ‘That’s funny, because I worked at a place with a name almost like Domino’s, and it could have been called the Sugar House. Then again, maybe the Sugar House is where I lived before, although I always thought of it as the Gingerbread House. You know, Hansel and Gretel, the witch in the oven. Other people said it was a cake, but I never saw that. It was the Gingerbread House, and I never could get that witch in the oven. In the end, every place you go is the Sugar House.’ She asked me if I knew what she meant, and I said, yeah, I did.” Sukey looked mystified. “Actually, I thought she might be a little crazy.”

  Brad rolled his eyes. “All lies, I’m betting. When Sukey tells a story in so much detail, it’s always lies. Why do you make things up, Sukey? What book did you get that from?”

  Sukey’s eyes seemed on the verge of tearing up, but this was a girl with plenty of experience at stemming her own tears. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes very wide, and the film of tears receded. “I’m telling the truth this time. I do sometimes, you know. She said more stuff, too, stuff I wasn’t supposed to tell. She said she was a runaway. She had lived in a big mansion and gone to boarding schools. She said her father was the richest man in the world, and he was going to miss her like crazy.”

  Even Tess could tell this part of the story wasn’t true. But she held up a hand before Brad started to berate Sukey again. “If I learn one new thing about a case, I’m doing well. You saw the woman I’m trying to identify, the two of you spoke. As far as I’m concerned, I owe you. Could I buy you that magazine you were reading, or one of the paperbacks in the rack? My way of saying thank you.”

  Sukey sucked on her plump lower lip. “Can I have both?”

  Brad looked ready to scold the girl again, but Tess’s laugh kept him from saying anything.

  “Why not?”

  Sukey picked out a Teen People and a thriller, something that was all Swiss numbered accounts and globetrotting psychopaths, with a lovely but lethal lady in pursuit. The cover showed a woman’s shapely legs, cut off at mid-thigh, a 9 mm dangling by her lace garter belt.

  “This is sort of what your job is like, right?” Sukey asked, studying the cover.

  “Sort of,” Tess said. “Although I tend to cover myself below the waist when I’m working.”

  She didn’t have the heart to tell Sukey what her job was really like, how boring it could be, how routine. Tess was going to spend the rest of her day poring over phone books and CD-Rom telephone directories, looking for places with names like Domino’s, which should be called the Sugar House, unless it was the Gingerbread House, or a cake. It was her willingness to share details like this that had put Tess on the “do-not-call” list for every city school’s Career Day. She also didn’t see any point in mentioning that she was going to check to see if there had been an armored car robbery in Locust Point this morning.

  The truth was, she couldn’t imagine any assignment more dangerous than being a teenage girl, at large in the land with an overripe body and a face full of yearning. Bring on the globetrotting psychopaths. They couldn’t be anywhere near as terrifying as adolescent boys.

  chapter 6

  SOME PEOPLE PANIC AT DECEMBER’S DARKNESS, DESPAIRING to see the sun go down before they leave work. But Tess had always found comfort in the shorter days. The winter months gave her permission to relax. It was pleasant, cozy even, to sit in her office and feel the shadows encroach around her and her computer screen. On this particular afternoon, the ebbing light was at least a sign of progress. The sun came up, the sun went down, and the only thing she knew was what she already knew: Jane Doe had a conversation with Sukey on the swings at Latrobe Park.

  Unless she didn’t. Sukey wasn’t a liar, Tess realized. She wasn’t mean, she wanted nothing from her stories, except a little attention. The robbery tale even had a germ of truth in it. The desk sergeant at the Southern Precinct confirmed a bakery truck had hit a light pole in the neighborhood, and some kids had carried away
cakes and pies before police arrived. Sukey had changed the bakery truck to an armored car, the sweets to money, thinking, in her innocence, to make the story better. Yet the truth was so much more entertaining. Tess had even phoned in the item to her Beacon-Light friend, Feeney, made an early Christmas present of this slam-dunk brite. No, Sukey was a fantasist, trying to make something out of the dreary reality of the life around her. Then why couldn’t she imagine a life for herself that would take her down Fort Avenue and out of Locust Point? Why was she cutting school and thinking her own future was limited to a job at the Sugar House?

  A knock sounded on the door, slightly tentative. From the outside, the office probably looked dark. “Come in, it’s open,” Tess called out, turning on the desk lamp and feeling as if she had been caught doing something. What, she wasn’t sure.

  Her father’s red head poked around the door, the way he had poked it into her bedroom all those years—unsure of his welcome, a little nervous about entering what he considered a feminine precinct.

  “I can’t believe you don’t keep this locked,” he said. “You should have a buzzer system, throw the deadbolt the minute you come in.”

  She usually did, but being scolded by her father made her feel contrary.

  “I don’t worry too much. After all, I have this fine watch dog—” the greyhound, Esskay, unrolled stiffly from the sofa, did her salaam stretch, and presented herself to Patrick for the obligatory tribute she demanded from everyone who crossed the threshold.

  “And a gun in my desk drawer.”

  If Tess were in therapy, a psychiatrist probably could have spent many, many hours on the immense pleasure she took in brandishing her .38 Smith & Wesson at her father just then. But, really, the gesture said more about her relationship with her gun than it did about her relationship with her father. When she first opened the office, she had kept it in the wall safe. She had been literally gun shy, afraid of her own weapon. She soon found there was no percentage in having a permit to carry if she didn’t keep the gun close at hand. The fact of gun ownership didn’t intimidate anyone, she needed the weapon nearby.

  Besides, she had fallen a little in love with her Smith & Wesson. It felt good in her hand and it was much more reliable than other tools of her trade—the cell phone, the computer, her instincts.

  “Put that away,” her father said. “It’s not a toy.”

  “No, but it looks like one, which is probably why kids are always picking them up. What brings you here?” she asked. It occurred to her that this was only his second visit to the office, the first being the “grand opening” where her mother had tried not to weep and Patrick had recommended burglar bars for all the windows.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, and she let the lie pass. She knew—and he knew that she knew—the East Side had never been his territory.

  He glanced around her office, which she thought looked best in evening’s dim light. The walls, which probably had layers of lead paint beneath the eggshell white Tess had slapped on last summer, didn’t look as rough, the floors weren’t as noticeably wavy. “I keep hoping you’ll do well enough so you could afford a nice little office in one of those strip centers out York Road, or toward Ellicott City.”

  “I could swing that, if I wanted to,” Tess said, her tone a little curt. Maybe she should have brandished her bank book at her father, instead of her gun. “But some of my clients couldn’t. I need to be near a bus line, or the Metro, limited as that is. Not everyone owns a car, you know.”

  “But that’s not the kind of clientele you want,” her father said. “You want to be in a place where suburban ladies feel comfortable pulling up in their mini-vans.”

  “The suburban ladies like this location just fine. It gives them a thrill, as if they were coming into the city to score crack. They already feel degraded, hiring a private detective, so they might as well get the full slumming experience. I think they’re disappointed that I don’t have my name on the door in gilt letters, and a secretary named Velma out front.”

  “Still, if you want to impress someone—”

  “I can always meet them at the bar at the Brass Elephant, or the coffee bar in the Bibelot bookstore in Canton. But I don’t much care for clients I have to impress.” She had clawed some wisps of hair loose while working on the computer, now she pushed them back behind her ears. “Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’m doing fine.”

  “I know you are.” Patrick took the seat opposite her desk. She could tell he didn’t like being on that side of the desk, sitting across from his daughter. Esskay hooked her nose in his armpit, trying to lift his hand toward her head. Esskay believed all human hands existed to rub her, just as all sofas were invented for her to sleep on.

  “If you know my business is going well, why did you send Ruthie Dembrow to me with a loser case that I have about a one-in-a-million chance of solving?”

  “I told you, I didn’t do it for you, I did it for Ruthie,” he said slowly. “I think Ruthie’s crazy, you want to know the truth. What happened with her kid brother tore her up. Maybe she should be spending her money on a therapist, or going to some spa. I told her that, she said this is her cure, finding out what happened.”

  “How do you know Ruthie?”

  “I told you. She was a cocktail waitress in Locust Point years ago. Even worked for your Uncle Spike for a summer.”

  “I don’t remember her.”

  “There’s no reason you would. It was around the time you went off to college.”

  Tess wanted to ask her father a few more questions about Ruthie. But she wasn’t sure she was ready for the answers.

  “It’s late, for you to be out. Mom will be holding supper, wondering where you are.”

  “Not tonight. She’s in a book club.”

  “She’s in a book club?” Tess had not heard about this development, and she subscribed to a strict double standard with her parents: She told them nothing, no matter how important, they must tell her everything, no matter how insignificant. Her father looked forlorn, and his drop-by suddenly seemed less sinister. He just didn’t want to go back to the dark house in Ten Hills and eat whatever Judith had left him in her color-coordinated Rubbermaid containers.

  “You want to grab a bite?”

  “Just us?” he asked, and she realized it was never just them, there was always Uncle Donald or Uncle Spike or Judith.

  “Why not?”

  They sat in silence, mulling their own answers to that question. Finding none, they ended up at the Austin Grill, part of the renovated American Can Company complex, one of the many unlikely success stories in the once-working-class neighborhood of Canton.

  Tess wanted to go Salvadoran—her taste buds had been somewhat transformed by her recent trip to Texas. But the Austin Grill was about as far as her father could go, culinarily.

  He studied the menu as if it were in Sanskrit. “It all looks very…exotic.”

  “Have the fajitas,” she said. “It’s just meat in some bread, think of it that way. I’m going to have migas. Oh, and two Shiner Bocks on draft, please.”

  Her father frowned. “You’re driving.”

  “You’re driving farther. It’s one beer, Dad. Get a grip.”

  He looked around the restaurant, surveying it with a practiced eye. Like an architect who couldn’t help seeing the details that went into a building, Pat was never truly off-duty when he was in a bar. His gaze was drawn not to the sponge-painted red walls and industrial pipes running through the ceiling, but to the patrons in the high booths, the bartender behind the counter.

  “Ten years ago—heck, five years ago—I would have taken odds they’d never get this old place developed. Wish I’d bought me some real estate in Canton. Never did have an instinct for making money. If you had told me people would want to live in these little old rowhouses, just because they can see water—” he shook his head. “But what do I know? Other than the fact that if I was on duty, I’d be writing this guy up for serving underage drinker
s.”

  Tess looked at the crowd, which was chic, by Baltimore standards. Almost everyone was wearing black, although there were a few patches of bright, preppy colors bursting through, the usual pinks and greens.

  “They don’t look like college kids to me,” she said.

  “That’s because they’ve put a lot of effort into not looking like college kids. Too much effort. The drinks give them away. The boys go cheap and the girls go sweet. See that table over there. The guys all have Budweisers, the girls have—what is that, anyway? Strawberry margaritas.”

  “Swirlies, as the menu would have it.”

  “Yeah, well I bet a lot of them will be going swirlie before the night is over. But it’s not my problem, not my territory.” He took a chip from the basket, held it tentatively toward the salsa, then decided to eat it plain. “Oh, like an Utz corn chip,” he said. “Where’s the boyfriend tonight?”

  The boyfriend. As if saying the name was too painful.

  “I’m not sure. We have a new policy. If we want to see each other, we have to ask at least twelve hours in advance, make a real date. No—” she stopped, blushing, realizing she had almost used the term “booty call” in front of her father. Dear Mom. I’m sorry I gave Dad that fatal heart attack at the Austin Grill. Apparently, he didn’t know his thirty-year-old daughter was having sex.

  Her father was blushing an even deeper red. It must be awful, in some ways, for a man to have daughters. Fathers knew how men think.

  Several silent swallows of Shiner Bock later, her father thought of something to say.

  “So now you know how a liquor board inspector looks at a bar. What does the private detective see?”

  Tess looked around. “The couple in the corner? One of them, maybe both of them, is stepping out on someone. My guess is he’s married—he has a ring, and he’s older than she, by a good bit. He’s eating, but she’s not. In fact, she looks as if she’s been living on fumes for a while. Her eyes are fixed on his face, while he’s looking at his enchilada.”

  “Maybe she’s in love and he’s not.”