The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “What kind of charges are we talking about, exactly?”

  “Filing a false report—”

  “We didn’t do that.” Dr. Blount’s voice held a note of shrewdness, but it only served to make him more pathetic. “The family did.”

  “Based on information you gave them,” Tess said, unable to contain herself. “By the way, did you continue to bill them? I think that constitutes fraud. If an insurance company is involved, I feel sorry for you. I’d rather owe the meanest loan shark in East Baltimore than have an insurance company after me.”

  Tull gave Tess a warning glance over his shoulder. But she wasn’t sure he had worked out the fraud angle. It had only occurred to her when she had seen the clinic’s patients arrayed on the front porch, and begun calculating how much money each one brought in at $2,000 a day.

  “Who is she, anyway?” the doctor asked.

  “Trainee,” Tull said. “An overeager trainee, but with a good point. I’m sure the files the state police are going through will show if Gwen Schiller’s family was billed after the date she walked away.”

  “It was never our intent to defraud anyone,” Dr. Blount said. “We do good work here, important work. It didn’t seem fair to let a couple of people jeopardize it.”

  “A couple?” Tull asked.

  He hesitated. “Are you sure I don’t need a lawyer?”

  “There’s a difference, you know, between keeping quiet while someone does something you know is wrong, and doing it yourself.”

  Yeah, a difference of five-to-ten years. Tess was finding a perverse enjoyment in the scene. So far, the only interrogations she had been privileged to watch had put her on the doctor’s side of the table. Tull had a rep as an interrogator, and now Tess knew why. He was like a cat persuading a bird to take a nap between his front paws. Tull’s face even had a certain catlike cast, with his high cheekbones and glittering brown eyes.

  “It was Sheila’s idea,” the doctor said.

  “Sheila?”

  “Sheila Hollinger. The redheaded woman. She’s the director here. I’m in charge of the medical division, but she’s the administrator. She keeps the beds full, and the waiting list long, so we don’t have to worry about meeting our monthly bills. I know it sounds like a lot, what we charge, but this is an expensive operation. When Gwen started kicking up a fuss, she could have really hurt us.”

  “Kicking up a fuss,” Tull’s voice was at once knowing and inviting, creating a silence for the doctor to fill.

  “She said one of the staff members raped her,” Dr. Blount said, as if remembering a minor annoyance. “A teacher, who oversaw the girls’ lesson plans. We confronted him immediately and he admitted the incident, only he said it was consensual. We fired him. What else could we do? It’s not as if we were negligent. We do a background check on everyone who works here. It was an isolated incident.”

  “An isolated incident.” Tess didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Tull glanced at her.

  “He said, she said,” the doctor said helpfully.

  Tess pressed her palms against the cream-colored wall. It was cool to the touch, smooth as ice cream. Everything was so pretty here, so perfect. Everything except the patients themselves, who had destroyed their bodies, their complexions, their teeth, even their organs. Yet Gwen Schiller’s beauty could not be snuffed out; she had still been beautiful when Sukey saw her. She had a bloom that nothing could strip from her—not her own habits, not the streets, not this clinic.

  “But Gwen said she was raped. She didn’t describe it as ‘consensual.’” Tess loved Tull for pressing this point home.

  “Yes, that was her story. But she would have said anything to leave here, to force her father to come get her. She was very fixated on getting his attention, on disrupting his new marriage any way she could. I am a psychiatrist, I understood the dynamics of the situation very clearly.”

  Tull let this pass. “What was the time frame? When did Gwen arrive, and when did she make the complaint?”

  “She arrived in late August and hadn’t been here two weeks when she went to Sheila with her story.” The doctor pulled himself up, a little self-righteously, puffing out his chest and his shoulders. “The staff member was dismissed by the end of the day, I can tell you that much.”

  Tull nodded, as if admiring the doctor’s decisiveness. “So Gwen tells you she was raped, and you fire the guy. Did you have her examined, or ask if she wanted to file a criminal complaint?”

  “She didn’t say anything until several days after the incident.” That word again. Tess wanted to tell the doctor a fender bender was an incident, rape was a crime. “And, as I said, there was no way of knowing what really happened.”

  “Didn’t you find it coincidental that she ran away a few weeks later?”

  The doctor’s narrow shoulders sagged, but his pity was only for himself. “We thought she would contact her father immediately, and that would be that. Then, a few weeks after she disappeared, her father wrote to her via the school’s e-mail account and we realized he didn’t know she was gone. It was our computer system. It was easy enough to change Gwen’s password and send her father e-mail. We had kept her disappearance from the other girls, so we didn’t have to worry he might hear from anyone else. We didn’t see the harm in letting her father think she was still here, as long as we continued to look for her. Her eighteenth birthday came and went, and we never found her, so we told her father she had checked herself out, which really wasn’t that far from the truth. As for the billing—we didn’t know what else to do. But of course, we’ll give the money back, every penny of it. We never meant to deceive anyone.”

  Dr. Blount looked at them beseechingly. Criminals were always so sure of their right to empathy. Tull turned to Tess, disgust sharp in his face, even as his expression warned her to control herself. He need not have worried. She was still standing by the wall, her palms pressing against it hard enough to leave grimy marks, or so she hoped.

  Her only fear was that if she lost contact with the wall, her hands would wrap themselves around the doctor’s throat and never let go.

  chapter 17

  “I NEED YOU.”

  The voice was Crow’s, coming to Tess through the fog of sleep. For once they were in his apartment, because they had drunk too much at dinner, and Crow’s small nest had the virtue of being within stumbling distance of the Brewer’s Art.

  Half-awake, Tess rolled into him. Dream and reality merged, enriching the other. They often came together this way and she liked the illicit, phantom quality of these meetings. Not even Crow’s fumbling in his nightstand drawer disturbed the mood.

  “I need you,” he repeated.

  “I need you, too,” she assured him. At other times of the day or night, they were more apt to say “I love you,” possibly “I want you.” Or, in imitation of a song that Crow particularly liked: “Baby, take it all off.” But in the middle of the night, it was always: I need you.

  The only problem was that Crow’s midnight raids tended to wake Tess up, while he slept more soundly than ever. She lay in his arms, feeling last night’s alcohol buzz shift into this morning’s hangover. Martinis, followed by many glasses of red wine, and a memorable dinner, not that she could remember a bite of it. Veal? Lamb? Something tender and young and decadent. They had been celebrating, but Tess was no longer sure why.

  The events of the past two days ran through her mind like a slide show. There was Tull, presiding over a press conference at the state police headquarters, explaining how she had identified Gwen Schiller, and how the clinic how deceived Gwen’s parents. He held back the information about the sexual assault—even in death, Gwen deserved her privacy. It would get out, eventually, as state agencies moved to close down Persephone’s and strip the clinic of its license. But Tull was determined the information wouldn’t come from him.

  Next slide. Tess saw Herman Peters, the boy-wonder police reporter who looked so deceptively innocent, scribbling away in his notebook with
an excitement that bordered on the sexual. She saw the gleam in his eye when she began telling how she had faked the capsize, remembering to give Whitney full credit for the idea and the execution. Some reporters had laughed, and she hadn’t liked that part. A girl is dead, she had wanted to say. A beautiful girl is dead, and she shouldn’t be, and the only thing I’ve done is make it possible for her father to take her remains from a pauper’s grave at Crownsville. Tess saw herself, angry and flushed. She mentioned going to Philadelphia, although she didn’t name Devon. Tess’s mother called the next morning and asked why she couldn’t have put on some lipstick, if she was going to be all over the news, maybe comb her hair. Her father said she looked great, but could she smooth things out with Ruthie, who wasn’t too happy to learn about the break in the case at the same moment the rest of Baltimore did. “Sorry, Dad, we were running against the clock,” Tess said, but she saw his point.

  A booth in Frigo’s Bar. Ruthie Dembrow’s mouth was a grim, straight line, no lipstick to brighten it. Tess had done what she had asked her to do, yet she had not found what Ruthie wanted. There was no connection between Henry and Gwen. The people who knew the secret of Gwen’s identity had no idea she was dead, so how could they have sought revenge against Henry?

  “But this hospital, this clinic,” Ruthie had said, her overarched brows drawn down in a frown, her eyes locked on Tess’s. “If they knew it was her, wouldn’t they want it to be secret, so they didn’t end up in all this trouble?”

  “You mean, did the people at the clinic have Henry killed, in case it turned out he did know who his victim was? I honestly don’t think so, Ruthie.”

  “It doesn’t feel right to me,” Ruthie insisted. “He was talking about a new trial, an appeal. Did I tell you that? He said there were mitigating circumstances.”

  Didn’t they all, Tess thought. She thought again about the rubber tube, how Henry had stopped to play a joke on Gwen’s corpse. Ruthie didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. Even with the cops, he had played the stoned huffer for all it was worth. “I know he didn’t mean to kill her, Ruthie. But he did.”

  She thought her voice was gentle. Ruthie was beyond being comforted.

  “You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You can’t imagine anyone in your family getting into trouble like this.”

  In fact, she couldn’t, but she wanted to be conciliatory. “You forget my Uncle Donald worked for a senator who was convicted of mail fraud, and we make it a point not to inquire too closely about Uncle Spike’s business dealings. My family’s not so clean.”

  “You can say that again.” Ruthie looked at the check on the table. Tess had refunded part of the retainer, which she thought generous—in truth, she had earned every last cent. But she felt guilty that the case, which had brought her glory, had done nothing for Ruthie’s grief, provided her no closure. “So you’re done now.”

  The implication being that Ruthie would never be done, that for her, this would never be over.

  “Look, you did a good thing, Ruthie. I know you don’t have any feelings for Gwen Schiller, but there’s a father who knows where his daughter is, who can begin to grieve for her, and it’s because of you. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the answer you wanted. Even if it’s not an answer at all. Sometimes, there is no ‘why’ to things.”

  “Henry was so scared of going to prison,” Ruthie said. “He thought if things dragged on long enough, he might be able to serve his whole time in city jail. Just his luck, he had to be the one guy in Baltimore to get a speedy trial.”

  The city courts were famously clogged and had gone through an embarrassing period in which case after case was thrown out because of unconstitutional delays or lost evidence. Tess had heard of other men awaiting trial who preferred the city jail to the state prison system. But the finer points of incarceration escaped her.

  “He confessed,” she reminded Ruthie.

  “Who doesn’t when they get a hold of you? In the end, when he saw he was going to go to Hagerstown, he tried to take it back, but the judge wouldn’t hear of it. He had a crappy lawyer, the guy shoulda done something. You get what you pay for, or so I thought.”

  “I gotta go,” Tess told Ruthie. It was past eight, Crow was waiting for her at the Brewer’s Art.

  “Yeah, I guess you do,” Ruthie said. “It’s funny about your family, how things always work out for the Monaghans.”

  Tess stopped. “What do you mean by that?”

  Ruthie tapped a cigarette out of her pack, whacking the pack with great force.

  “Nothing, nothing at all. Thank your father for me. He owed me a favor, and you were it. You did your job. I guess if I don’t like the way it turned out, I got no one to blame but myself. And my stupid brother.”

  Eight hours ago, Tess had been inclined to agree. Now, awake in the dark, she found herself thinking about Henry’s death. Life was built on coincidences, but this one did have a stink to it. Sure, people died in prison, given the nature of their roomies, but it happened far less often than it did in the world at large. In Henry’s case, a fight had broken out in a different part of the cell block, yet he was the one who had been killed. It had the earmarks of a hit, a planned execution.

  Ruthie had come to Tess thinking there was an Old Testament logic to her brother’s death, an eye for an eye. Someone who knew Gwen, but didn’t want to own up to her identity for whatever reason, had sought to avenge her death.

  But what if Henry was killed to end a trail, to silence someone who knew more than he was telling? What had happened to Gwen in the weeks she was missing? What kind of life had she led on the streets of Baltimore?

  The place where I was it had a name like Domino’s, but I guess you could call it the Sugar House, too, she had told Sukey. That wasn’t Persephone’s.

  Tess dressed quickly in the dark, left a note for Crow on his bedstand, and walked-ran through the deserted streets to the parking garage where she had left the Toyota. The world was dark at four A.M., although not as dark as it might have been, given the Christmas lights everywhere. She drove to her office, taking care to lock the door behind her, and pulled her file on Henry Dembrow.

  She read his confession again, the transcript from the tape that police had made. It was different, somehow, knowing Jane Doe’s name and background. Small details took on a new poignancy.

  I told her about Locust Point, my dad, how Domino’s used to be called the Sugar House. Yeah, yeah, I know that, she said.

  That matched Sukey’s story. Everyone said Sukey was a liar, but so far Tess had caught her in nothing but truths, at least when it came to Gwen.

  She scanned through the other papers Tull had given her—the charging documents, the official notices that went back and forth throughout the trial. She had paid only cursory attention to these before. Henry Dembrow’s trip through the legal system hadn’t been about identifying his victim.

  But there was a memo, noting that Henry Dembrow was changing representation in the case. Henry had apparently dropped the public defender, someone named Hank Mooney, and switched to a private attorney. Common enough. Baltimore’s P.D.s were good, but a lot of criminals made the mistake of thinking you had to pay for value. Never mind that one of the city’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys had watched as a mentally retarded client went off to serve a life sentence, for a crime it was later proved he didn’t commit. “You get what you pay for, or so I thought,” Ruthie had complained. Henry went to prison on the private attorney’s watch, not the P.D.’s.

  A private attorney named—Tess flipped through the papers—Arnold Vasso.

  Arnie Vasso, power lobbyist. Arnie “I don’t practice law, I perfect it” Vasso. Arnie Vasso who had no rep as a criminal attorney, but sometimes did favors for friends, as he had told Tess over their Piccolo Roma lunch. Arnie Vasso, who had engineered the bogus license for a bar called Domenick’s, had represented Henry Dembrow, who had killed a girl who said she once worked at a place that sounded li
ke Domino’s.

  The world was full of coincidences. Where would Reader’s Digest and movies-of-the-week be without them? But in Arnie Vasso’s world, nothing happened by accident.

  Tess checked the “It’s Time for a Haircut” clock that hung on her wall, an artifact from a Woodlawn barbershop where her mother had taken her for buzz cuts. Hence today’s long braid. Tess sometimes wondered if everyone’s life was lived in reaction to those first ten or fifteen years, when one had no control. The clock said 4:30 A.M., much too early to call anyone.

  She didn’t need to call anyway. She knew how the conversation would go.

  She’d ask Ruthie if she had hired Arnie Vasso.

  Ruthie would say no, Vasso had phoned her up and offered to take the case pro bono, as a favor to a pal at the Stonewall Democratic Club. Something like that.

  Tess would ask Ruthie if a good night’s sleep had changed her mind, if Ruthie still believed Henry’s death was connected to Gwen’s death.

  Ruthie would say yes, she would always believe this, she didn’t care about all the reasons Tess had piled up, the neat little sandbags of logic intended to hold back her intution. She knew the two things were related, she would go to her grave believing it.

  And that’s when Tess would say: Me too.

  chapter 18

  THE PUBLIC DEFENDER WHO HAD BEEN ASSIGNED TO Henry Dembrow’s case was a large man. Not fat, but huge, tall, and broad-shouldered, with a frame so big he appeared to have been made from leftover dinosaur bones.

  “Hank Mooney,” he said, standing up when she entered the Hasty Tasty, a diner favored by courthouse types. His knee bumped the table, and his coffee sloshed from cup to saucer. “Shit.”

  His voice was mild, as if he were used to such accidents, as if his size put him on a constant collision course with life.