The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “Strange bedfellows?” Tess offered.

  “No. I was going to say politics makes me hungry. What are you having?”

  They ordered, and Vasso seemed almost amused at the amount of food Tess required. In fact, now that she was sitting across from him, Vasso seemed amused by everything Tess said and did.

  “Are you really a private investigator?” he asked.

  “Yes. I got my license by apprenticing with a former policeman.” A former policeman who did nothing more than lend his name, Keyes, to her business and take a small commission at month’s end.

  “Gun and badge and everything?”

  “Not a badge,” she corrected. “A license. But a gun. A thirty-eight Smith and Wesson.”

  “Do you have it with you right now?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Just curious. I don’t think I’ve ever met one of you before. Except in divorce cases, you know. The usual surveillance thing. I hired one for my second divorce. I’ve been divorced four times. Now ask me how many times I’ve been married.”

  Tess was feeling agreeable. “How many times have you been married?”

  “Three!” He smacked the edge of the table, pleased with himself. When Tess didn’t laugh, he added helpfully. “It’s a joke. My last marriage was so bad, I always say I divorced her twice, just to make sure.”

  “But that’s not the one where you used the private detective.”

  “No, that one wasn’t about cheating. It was just about hating each other’s guts.”

  A fragment of a story came back to Tess, something about Vasso breaking into an ex-wife’s house and leaving behind a large hog in gastric distress. By the time his wife returned late that evening, the carpeting throughout the first floor of the home was ruined. He had avoided criminal charges, though. His wife had ended up selling the house, at a loss, so Vasso was out a good chunk of the equity. But that hadn’t been the point for him. Winning had been the point and, according to his internal scoreboard, Vasso had done just that.

  Vasso was now looking intently at Tess’s hands, which embarrassed her. Even facedown on the white tablecloth, so her rowers’ calluses were hidden, they were not her best feature. As short as she kept her nails, they always looked a little ragged. She put them in her lap, beneath the tablecloth.

  “You’re not married,” he said. “See? I could be a detective, too.”

  “Maybe I just don’t wear a ring.”

  “Women always wear their wedding bands.”

  “Maybe the fifteen-karat diamond is loose in the setting and I dropped it off at a jewelry store to have it repaired.”

  “I don’t see you with a big diamond.” Vasso studied her. “Because I don’t see you keeping company with the kind of men who can afford big diamonds. But you could, if you wanted to. In fact, maybe you’d be interested in meeting some of my clients during the session. Some of the ones who come in from out of town, don’t know anybody in the area. I give a little party in January, you should drop by.”

  Was Vasso trying to pimp her? Tess decided not to think about it. “So, Lawrence Purdy, owner of Domenick’s. Ring a bell?”

  “Not really. I probably did it as a favor, you know. Stepped in, helped out a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “I have a lot of friends. I have a lot of friends because I don’t tell their business to just anyone who drops by. Lawmakers have to make disclosures, I don’t. But it wasn’t a big deal. A guy needed a license to run a bar, that’s all. I went before the commission with him.”

  “So why doesn’t his wife know about this, or you?”

  “Look, liquor laws are crazy—”

  “I know, my father is a city liquor board inspector.”

  Vasso gave her a hard look. “So you know. Law says you have to live in Baltimore City if you want to own a bar in Baltimore City. Is that fair? Is it even constitutional? Or maybe you had a little youthful indiscretion, ended up with a rap sheet. Law says you can’t own a bar in that case, either. So there are owners, and there are owners of record. I’m sure the gentleman whose name appeared on the license was the owner of record.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “I guess the city liquor board doesn’t stay on top of its paperwork. But you can ask your daddy all about that.” Vasso squinted at her again. “Patrick Monaghan, right? Tight with Senator Ditter? Related somehow to old Donald Weinstein, as I recall.”

  “My mother’s brother.”

  Vasso smiled knowingly. “He was good, your uncle. You know, with that kind of pedigree, I’d think you’d be down here. I could see you as a lawyer on one of the committees.”

  “That would require going to law school.”

  “Then you could be a lobbyist. Although I suppose you’d be one of the do-gooder kinds. Not much money in that, but with the right wardrobe, you could do all right.”

  “Sure, as long as I let the committee chairman grab my knee under the table.” One of the state’s most powerful delegates had done just that and lost the judgeship he so coveted, only to be re-elected to the General Assembly. “Do you think that’s what the early Marylanders were thinking when they chose ‘Womanly Words, Manly Deeds’ as the state motto?”

  “Here’s the thing.” Vasso had a piece of lettuce half in, half out his mouth, but he didn’t seem to notice. “If some senator wanted to grab my dick before he voted for one of my bills, I’d say ‘Help yourself.’”

  “Here’s the thing” Tess parroted back. “How often does that really happen?”

  Vasso slurped in the leaf he had left dangling on his lip.

  “I’m just saying women have some advantages, if they want to tap into them. Some do. Believe me, some do.”

  “How am I going to find out who really owns that bar on Hollins Street?” Tess wasn’t even sure why it seemed so important. The discrepancy in the bar’s ownership didn’t make it any more likely that Jane Doe had worked there. But it was a lie, and other people’s lies made her crazy.

  “Ask your daddy.” The simple phrase sounded ugly, insinuating. “Not that he knows anything. But he should know enough to tell you to drop it.”

  Tess looked at Vasso, who was bent over his plate, dredging a large piece of foccacia through olive oil. From this angle, she could see the tanned bald spot at the crown of his head, see the way his neck oozed from his collar in tight little rolls. For the first time in her life, she knew how to use “oleaginous” in a sentence.

  “I’m not really hungry,” she announced.

  “But you’ve got all this food coming.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way to write it off. Or find some senator who’s willing to eat my leftovers. Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky and he’ll grope you under the table.”

  Vasso’s mask of bonhomie slipped just a little then. Without his fake smile in place, he looked shrewd and not a little scary.

  “Maybe you don’t want to be my friend, but you don’t want to be my enemy, either. I’m a hired hand, I work for those who pay me and stay on the good side of those who can help me bring home the goodies for my clients. Someone asks me to go to a liquor board hearing, help a guy out, it’s no skin off my butt. And it’s not exactly a conspiracy, you know what I mean? If you were one of those little Columbia J-School grads that the Blight sends down here from time to time, I’d understand why you had such a big stick up your ass—”

  “Your butt, my butt, could you work your way toward a different kind of imagery?”

  “Hey, I gave you polite already. All I’m saying is your uncle worked for one of the biggest crooks that ever came through Annapolis, and that includes Spiro T. Agnew and Marvin Mandel. Your dad was appointed by Senator Ditter, who wasn’t exactly racking up high scores on Common Cause’s list of good legislators. So who are you to get all huffy and holier-than-thou about how business is done down here? Let me put it for you this way: It’s none of your fucking business. I don’t know from any dead girls, but I know you’re going to be one sorry little
girl if you don’t leave some stuff alone. Just let it be. Now let’s have some antipasto, talk about the weather, and why the Ravens suck.”

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t have any appetite.”

  Vasso laughed, and grabbed another piece of bread from the basket. “See, it’s all personal with you. I guess I was wrong. Even with the right clothes, you’d never make it down here.”

  Tess got up to leave, bumping the table with her hip so that a glass of ice water toppled into Vasso’s lap.

  “You stupid—”

  “An accident,” she said, and it was, except in the Freudian sense. “Don’t take everything so personally.”

  chapter 10

  HIGHWAYS WERE TOO CONDUCIVE TO THINKING, AND Tess didn’t want to be alone with her own thoughts. She bypassed 97, smooth and new, and took Route 2, the old Governor Ritchie Highway. It was a relief to concentrate on the stop-and-go traffic and potholes, rather than reflect on her almost-dinner with Arnie.

  The thing was, he was right: She did take things too personally, and now she had made an enemy for no good reason. Even sleazeballs had their uses. Especially sleazeballs. Her mother’s voice scolded inside her head, recounting the virtues of honey versus vinegar, vis-à-vis fly catching. Then Ritchie Highway rewarded her with its endless snarls and wretched drivers, and Tess managed to crawl outside of her own head and stay there for most of the way back to Baltimore.

  Her brain kicked in again as she crossed the Patapsco on the Hanover Street Bridge. By force of habit, she glanced west first, toward the boat house. No one on the water at this time of day, this time of year. Then her eyes tracked east, toward the Key Bridge, Fort McHenry, and Locust Point.

  Locust Point. What if Sukey had been lying about everything? Or not lying exactly, but so desperate to please that she had made up the little shred of conversation with Jane Doe, just to have something to say, just to please another grown-up. Tess decided to detour through Locust Point and question the girl again, ever so gently. She couldn’t get back the time she had already dribbled away, but she could stop throwing good effort after bad. Why did she even care who owned Domenick’s? The bar’s screwed-up license didn’t have anything to do with Jane Doe. Once again, she had mistaken momentum for progress.

  So, find Sukey, put it down. The only problem was, Tess couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, or where she lived, and she didn’t want to wander the streets of Locust Point, asking if anyone knew a round-cheeked girl named Sukey, given to fantastic tales.

  The mini-mart at the gas station seemed a logical place to start.

  “Try Latrobe Park,” advised Brad the convenience store manager. “She got a new book out of the rack today, said she was going to read.”

  “A little raw to read outside, isn’t it?”

  “She always says to me she doesn’t like to be inside unless she has to.” Brad tapped his forehead. “She’s odd, that girl. She’ll tell you blue is orange, and not know the difference herself. She can’t help it. When she’s saying it, she believes it.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.”

  Tess left her car and walked to the park. Locust Point was a strange mix of residential and industrial. It seemed amazing that people would have chosen to live cheek by jowl with marine terminals and manufacturing plants, but this had been the norm for Baltimore’s lower-middle-class families after World War II. If there were still good jobs here, it might still be the norm. Today’s kids, faced with so few opportunities, left these neighborhoods readily enough, but the older folks stayed on and on. Down at Wagner’s Point, where the neighborhood was little more than a toxic dump, people had fought leaving even when the city announced a buyout.

  It was home, they said. How can you put a price on my home?

  Tess found the swings, but Sukey was nowhere in sight. She sat in one, imagining she could channel Jane Doe, that the young woman had left some trace of her identity on this rectangular piece of wood. The autopsy said she could be anywhere from her late teens to her early twenties, but Tess knew, just knew, she was on the younger edge of that range. Maybe seventeen, eighteen tops.

  She dragged her toes in the groove beneath the seat, much too long-legged to make it go. And much too old, not that such a consideration would have stopped her. She remembered the wondrous discovery that a swing would move, would soar ever higher, through the simple pumping action of one’s own legs. Her earliest physics lesson. Actually, her only physics lesson. At seventeen, informed that she was not required to take any more science classes under state law, Tess had decided she knew enough about light and particles and inertia.

  At seventeen, she thought she knew enough about everything.

  Seventeen. Junior year. She had a boyfriend, she was on the honor roll and the track team, and she could make calories disappear by sticking her finger down her throat. She ate whatever she wanted and never gained weight, thanks to her magic finger. Poor Billy Baker. She couldn’t have been fun to kiss, given her hobby, but he never complained. They had met in his parents’ basement rec room after school, stealing shots from the wet bar, messing around, solving a few algebra problems in their downtime. Latchkey kids. Funny to think about all the dire predictions people had made about such arrangements.

  Funny to think how many of them had come true. And yet here she was, relatively unwarped, and Billy was a lawyer last she heard. Corporate, on a partner track with a staid firm, but with a little do-gooder vein, which he indulged through the board of some nonprofit. The thing was, every generation had done such things, but parents once had the good taste not to confront their children so directly. The more the behavior was dragged out into the open, the worse things seem to be. If Tess’s parents, God forbid, had sat down with her and tried to have a Meaningful Chat about contraception and alcohol and marijuana—and how using the second two tended to compromise one’s ability to focus on the first—she would have felt obligated to find other ways to rebel.

  A string of popping sounds and a girl’s high, thin wail jolted Tess out of Billy Baker’s basement. Once, she might have mistaken the strangely hollow sound for gunfire, but Tess knew the kind of noises guns made. Yet the girl’s cry was clearly a distressed one, almost involuntary. The sequence repeated itself—pop-pop-pop, the thin, keening wail.

  Tess jumped to her feet, but the source of the noise was hard to track in the open park, where sound bounced erratically, competing with the chatter of seagulls and the traffic along Fort Avenue. Tess began to walk swiftly in what she hoped was the right direction. She climbed a small rise, so she was now looking toward the Patapsco River’s Middle Branch. The day was cold, but bright, and the water appeared darker and bluer than it normally did, with diamond-bright froth on the breakers. Three boys ran into her line of vision, tossing something. She heard the pops again, saw long thin lines of smoke rising above their heads. Firecrackers.

  Another scream, and there was Sukey, well ahead of the three boys, but steadily losing ground, perhaps because she was running with her hands clutched to her head, a paperback book pressed against one ear.

  “Jesus, drop the book, Sukey,” Tess muttered to herself, even as she found her own legs sprinting across the park. “You can always get another goddamn book.”

  She was running on an angle, trying to intersect the boys before they reached Sukey. She wished she had her gun, then damned the wish as irresponsible and callow. Waving one’s gun in public was not effective problem solving. Besides, any one of these boys might have a gun, or another weapon.

  The bottom line was, she had nothing.

  Except her mouth. A stray piece of poetry flickered through her brain—All I have is a voice—and she found a banshee cry rising in her throat. If it startled her, it flabbergasted them. The boys stopped, taking in this strange apparition, this Amazon of the Patapsco, this Valkyrie, running toward them and screaming.

  “What the fuck?” one asked, while the others merely gaped, open-mouthed, providing an excellent view of South Balti
more dentistry, or the lack thereof.

  Now just a few feet from the boys, Tess slipped her backpack from her shoulder and began swinging it by the strap, screaming all the while and continuing to run straight toward them. She thought, to the extent that she was thinking at all: They’re going to stop in their tracks from sheer shock, and then run away, or they’re going to attack me instead of Sukey, and she can run for help.

  Instead, they began screaming and laughing, pointing their fingers at her and chanting, presumably the same chant they had been using to torment Sukey.

  “Fat pig, fat pig, fat pig, fat pig.”

  The words hurt, nonsensical as they were, or would have hurt if she hadn’t been almost blind in her rage and fear. How could anyone tell children that only sticks and stones caused pain? Tess felt as if she were thirteen again, running from the neighbor boy, Hector Sperandeo. He had done far more harm with his taunts than with the lacrosse ball he slammed repeatedly into the small of her back. But she wasn’t running away this time. These boys were thin and gawky, South Baltimore rednecks so malnourished from their junk food diets that they probably had rickets or scurvy. She could take them.

  She saw the tallest boy pull another firecracker from the pocket of his denim jacket and light it with a Bic, holding it aloft with a snarky grin. Twirling her knapsack like a bolo, she swung it forward and landed it in his midsection, knocking him to the ground, the burning firecracker still clutched in his hand.

  “Let it go, Noonie, let it go,” one of the others screamed as the stunned boy tried to get his breath. “You’ll lose a finger, the way Joey Piazza did.”

  The boy uncurled his fingers and the firecracker rolled away, but only a few inches. One of the other boys then kicked it with his foot, just before the fuse burned out. Set off in the grass, it seemed so innocuous. Pop-pop-pop, a small puff of smoke. Tess watched to make sure it didn’t ignite the dry grass.

  Noonie clambered to his feet, still breathing heavily. All three looked at Tess uncertainly. Logic must have told them she was no threat—she was alone, and a female at that, armed with nothing more than a knapsack.