The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “Back to Locust Point?”

  “No.” Funny, she had been speaking just to be speaking more or less. But Tyner’s question made her focus, made her see where the beginning was. “Back to the liquor board. That’s where I found the discrepancy in the license, where I found Arnie Vasso’s name in the file.”

  It also happened to be where her father worked. Her father, who knew all about favors.

  She found him at his desk the next morning, doing whatever he did at his desk. Funny how little she knew about his work. Liquor board inspector had always sounded so self-evident. Had she ever asked her father a question about his job beyond, “How was your day?” She didn’t think so.

  Nor had she registered how impersonal his office was, for a man who had been in the same job, the same cubicle, for thirty years. The only touches he had added were three photographs. One of him with Senator Ditter at the annual Crisfield Bull Roast; a startlingly sexy photograph of her mother, when she was still Judith Weinstein; and an old photo of Tess, circa junior high. Taken during her plumpest period, it showed a girl with a face as round and shiny as a full moon, hair in two thick plaits. All she needed was a horned helmet and she’d have been Ring Cycle-ready.

  “I really wish you’d get rid of that,” she said, as she had said every time she visited the office since it had appeared on his desk.

  “It’s cute,” her father protested, truly perplexed. “You look so healthy.”

  Presexual, he meant. Climbing trees instead of boys.

  But she was still his little girl, even at five-nine and God knows how many pounds. Mindful of this, she edited carefully as she told him about the parts of her investigation that had touched on Domenick’s.

  He was worried, even after hearing the P.G. version.

  “Nicola DeSanti,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus, Tess, she’s bad news.”

  “I picked up that much.”

  “Why are you still poking around, anyway? You did what Ruthie asked. Don’t get caught up in her sickness about Henry. It’s normal for family to want to think the best of family, but you don’t have to fall in.” He shook his head again. “Ruthie. She always was a pit bull when it came to her little brother.”

  “Daddy.” He was usually Dad to her, sometimes Pop. He hadn’t been “Daddy” for twenty-five years. “Did you ever work that territory?”

  “No.” It took him a second to get the intent behind the question, then he was wounded. “No. Jesus, Tess. You think I’d be mixed up with something like that? Thanks a lot. In fact, the territory belongs to one of the new guys, straightest arrow in the office. One of Dahlgren’s handpicked boys. Eric Collins. He doesn’t even drink.”

  “It’s not drinking we’re talking about.”

  “Look, I saw him this morning when I came in. Let me see if he’s still out there; you can talk to him yourself about Domenick’s.”

  Her father’s office was a place entirely without distractions, not even a view. There was a window, but her father left it covered by heavy, old-fashioned Venetian blinds. Tess tried separating the blinds so she could peek through, but the window was so dirty that it might as well have been opaque.

  “Here’s Eric,” her father said. “What do you want to ask him?”

  The man was young, and earnest looking, with freckles and a cowlick. He wore gray trousers, Tess noticed, but then, so did her father. So did a lot of men in Baltimore.

  “Have you picked up on anything at Domenick’s?” she asked him. “Any complaints, any hints that they’re doing something other than serving beer?”

  He shook his head. “It’s one of the few places over there no one ever complains about. They close on time, they don’t make noise, they don’t serve underage kids.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “What girls? I’ve seen a barmaid here and there, but it’s not like they’ve got B-girls at the counter, trying to hustle guys for dollar drafts, or dancing on the tables. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it. It’s a neighborhood joint. Yeah, Nicola DeSanti may be running her rackets through it, but that’s not my problem, you know? I can’t even catch her paying off on video poker. And she’s death on drugs, I can tell you that much. She’s old-fashioned that way.”

  “What about the fact that a dead man is listed as the owner?”

  The young inspector rolled his eyes. “So, I haul them in, and next thing you know it’ll be her daughter or her cousin. Everyone knows how that works.”

  A straight arrow, and not stupid, but uninterested in converting the rest of the world.

  “Sorry, Tess,” her father said. “You’re not going to find any answers here. You may have to accept there are no answers, not to the questions you’re asking.”

  She left, feeling dejected. It had seemed so promising. Gene Fulton fell into step beside her as she walked down the stairs to the street.

  “Looking good, Tess,” he said. “I saw you on the television the other night.”

  She was surprised to find him so determinedly chummy. She thought the bit about her imminent engagement would have killed his fleeting interest. Maybe she could show him the photo of herself in her father’s office. That should dampen any man’s ardor.

  “Well, you know what they say, Mr. Fulton.” She deliberately avoided using his first name. “The camera adds ten pounds. But it’s good for business.”

  “Guess you don’t get to take much time off, being self-employed and all. You working through the end of the year, or you going to give yourself a little holiday, hit the party circuit?”

  Oh please, not an invitation. She was not up to the tact required to deflect an unwanted date.

  “I thought I was going to be working, but now I’m not so sure. My dad says I’ve got a dog by the tail, and he just might be right.”

  “Well—” they were down at the street now, and Gene had his keys out, twirling them in his fingers. “Give yourself a break. Take it easy. You’re young, you should be having fun.”

  She braced herself, but there was no followup. He simply waved and crossed South Street to his car, parked illegally in a loading zone. A ticket was on the windshield, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Why should it? It was probably a point of honor with him that he could get his tickets fixed. Lord knows no one in Tess’s family had ever paid a parking ticket. Fulton took the white sheet from the windshield, crumpled it and threw it in the trash. Tess watched the maroon Mercury pull away from the curb and head down South Street.

  Maroon. She remembered a car just that color. Granted, she had only seen the bottom six inches of fender, but it had been maroon. She darted across the street and found Fulton’s ticket, crumpled, but at least on top of the trash heap.

  She knew before she checked that the license plate would match the one she had glimpsed yesterday in the alley behind Domenick’s, that she wasn’t going to have to drive to the MVA in Glen Burnie after all.

  She started back into her father’s office, brandishing the ticket and her notebook. But before she could call upstairs from the lobby, she stopped and retreated to her own car. Loyalty had long ago replaced Roman Catholicism as her father’s religion. Confronted with this scrap of information, he’d make excuses for Gene. Worse, he’d probably ask Gene about it, which would tell the folks at Domenick’s more than she wanted them to know just yet.

  She folded the ticket and put it in her pocket, trying to decide where she should go next. So far, there was one person who had been consistently truthful in talking to her about Gwen Schiller, the only person who had been helpful to her in any way.

  Wouldn’t you know, it was the one person everyone said was a pathological liar?

  chapter 22

  SHE FOUND SUKEY IN LATROBE PARK, READING THE latest issue of Teen People.

  “Do you think I could ever look like this?” she asked Tess, pointing to a photo of the latest teen sensation, female variety, a toothpick girl with absurdly large breasts on her bony chest. She reminded Tess of the drawing of the bo
a constrictor in The Little Prince, the one that showed the snake with a pig halfway through its digestive system. Put this girl on her back, and she was more or less the same shape.

  “No,” Tess said. “Because no one actually looks like that, not even her. Jesus, those can’t be real.”

  “Oh they are,” Sukey assured her. “She says right here that she’s never had plastic surgery.”

  “Sukey, do you always tell the truth?”

  The girl looked down at her feet, hurt. “Most of the time.”

  “Which is what everyone does. So why would you assume she’s telling the truth?”

  This seemed to cheer Sukey up. “Hey, can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  Uh-oh. “Why does it have to be a secret?”

  “Don’t worry, he’s not one of those old guys you warned me about. I mean, he’s older ’n me, he can drive and all. His name is Paul.” Sukey paused. “He’s not a boyfriend-boyfriend. He has a girl. But he likes to talk to me, when she’s being a bitch.”

  “Sukey—” Tess didn’t know what to say without sounding as if she were forever contradicting herself. True, she had told Sukey to avoid the boys who wanted girls for their parts. But the talkers could be dangerous, too, in another way. They usually came so much later in one’s life. She had known one in her twenties, a man who dropped by to “talk” late at night, after his fiancée had gone to sleep.

  “Go on,” Sukey said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me he’s using me. Tell me he’s using me to make his girlfriend jealous, that he’ll always go running back to her. That’s what my mother says.”

  If Mrs. Brewer had been briefed, then Tess was off the hook, freed of feeling she had to be in loco parentis.

  “He does sound a little, well, confused, but I didn’t come here to talk about our love lives.” Sukey beamed at the implication she and Tess were equals, two girlfriends with the same set of problems. “I’m here because we never finished our conversation the other day, the one about the girl I was looking for, Gwen Schiller.”

  “I figured you didn’t need me anymore, once you knew who she was.”

  There was a sad, lonely note in Sukey’s voice. It wasn’t reproachful, but it was a reminder to Tess that there were infinite ways in which to use people.

  “I never would have found her without you. I said your name on television, didn’t you hear?”

  “Just my first name,” the girl said sulkily.

  “As if everyone in Locust Point didn’t know who Sukey Brewer was. Besides, I thought your mom might not like it, if I used your full name. She certainly wasn’t happy the day she found us talking,” Tess said. “She interrupted us, remember? I thought maybe there was something else you were going to tell me, something more about Gwen.”

  “She didn’t look like a Gwen,” Sukey said thoughtfully. “She should have had a more flowery name, like Heather. Or Shania.”

  “Sukey, have you told me everything you know about Gwen?”

  For a girl known as a liar, Sukey wasn’t much good at hiding her emotions when she was interrogated directly. She made things up, but only for fun, Tess realized. Give her a piece of paper, and she’d just be another novelist.

  But for now, she squirmed, refusing to make eye contact.

  “Sukey?”

  “She needed to make a call. She asked if she could come to my house, but I couldn’t let her. My mom would kill me if I let someone in. But I told her there was another way to make her call—” she stopped.

  “What, Sukey?”

  “You can’t tell this part. I’d be banned.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  She rolled her magazine into a tight log, pressed it against her mouth, muttering into it as if it were a bullhorn. But she ended up muffling her words, not amplifying them.

  “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying, Sukey.”

  “She didn’t have any money, and I sure didn’t have any. But she really needed to make this call. So I swiped a phone card. Off the counter, at the mini-mart. From Brad, which made me feel awful, but she needed it so bad. It was only a five-dollar one, and it was a rip-off, the way it counted the minutes. One call, just to leave a message, and it was almost used up. She used it at a pay phone. She made a call, and she said someone would be here to get her in a few hours. She was sure of it. She said she’d have to wait in the park, because Fort McHenry closes at sunset. She said she was going to be okay.”

  Sukey was close to tears. Tess looked away, letting her use whatever tricks she had mastered to keep them from coming. Why was it so important not to cry when you were a child? She couldn’t remember the logic, but she knew the feeling, knew Sukey would feel she had lost face if Tess saw her tears.

  “It’s not your fault, Sukey. You tried to help her. In fact, you might be one of the few people who ever tried to help Gwen Schiller. There are a lot of people who should feel guilty about what happened to her. You don’t happen to be one of them.”

  “It’s so strange,” the girl said, sniffling. “Knowing someone who died. I mean, a someone who wasn’t a grandmom, or an old person.”

  “I know,” Tess said. Boy did she know. “Let’s go to the mini-mart.”

  “You’re not going to make me confess, are you? My mom did that once. She made me go into this store and tell I boosted gum. I couldn’t ever go back. I only did it the once.”

  “Only once?”

  “Only once in that store,” Sukey confessed.

  “I’m not worried about your shoplifting. You should stop stealing, though. You’re going to get caught, and there will be consequences.”

  “I might not get caught.” Offered cautiously, as if she were curious to see if Tess would contradict her.

  “Maybe not. But you probably will. Everyone gets caught.”

  “Everyone? Then there’d be no unsolved crimes, I guess.”

  “One way or another, everyone gets caught,” Tess amended. “If not in this world, then the next. Now let’s walk down to the mini-mart.”

  At the mini-mart, Sukey bought a fan magazine and a bag of Utz cheese curls, but she found what Tess was doing far more intriguing than the latest news about the pretty-boy band of the moment. Sitting on the curb, her orange-coated fingers dipping in and out of the bag, she watched Tess as if she were a television program, although Tess thought even C-span would balk at airing something this boring. She wrote down the numbers on the three phones outside. Like a lot of the city’s pay phones, they were programmed not to take incoming calls, but by calling her own cell phone and using the Caller ID function, she was able to verify each number.

  “Is the phone company going to give you a list of the outgoing calls from there on the day before she died?” Sukey asked.

  “Not me,” Tess said. “But a certain police officer I know will be able to get the numbers. He owes me a favor. I think.” Actually, she had lost track on who owed what in the Martin Tull-Tess Monaghan favor exchange. She might have to ask for credit.

  “Cool,” Sukey said. “You know, I think I want to be a private investigator when I grow up.”

  “Oh lord, Sukey. Please try to find a real job.”

  “What’s a real job?”

  Tess thought about this. “One with paid medical, and a lunchroom with a microwave, maybe even a cafeteria with hot food. Better yet, free long-distance phone calls and co-workers to waste time with. One with United Way drives and employee-of-the-month contests and a company newsletter and endless requests to kick in five dollars here and ten dollars there for Susie in accounting who just had a baby or a wedding or a divorce or a new filling.”

  She warmed to the subject. “One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you’re getting two percent raises from a company that’s returnin
g twenty percent to its stockholders. That’s a real grown-up’s job, Sukey. Not what I do.”

  Thank God, she thought. Thank God.

  “So what are you going to do when you grow up?” Sukey smiled, pleased with herself at being able to turn that dreaded question on someone else for once.

  “I’ll worry about that when the day comes.”

  “Don’t be so impatient,” Crow said, rubbing the knot that had taken up residence at the base of her neck. “You can’t rush the phone company. It’s like poking a sleeping dinosaur with a twig.”

  “I know, I know,” Tess said. “But I had hoped to hear from them before the weekend. Waiting is much less tolerable when no one is footing the bill for it.”

  She took a sip of her eggnog, the sensible kind that was almost all brandy. They were at an open house held every year by one of the old Star columnists, who built an elaborate Christmas garden in his basement. In his version of Baltimore, it was still the 1970s, with all the old stores open for business—Read’s Drugs, Hutzler’s, Hoschild’s. He also had learned how to make it appear as if the Beacon-Light were on fire.

  “The little figures, screaming in the windows?” he told Tess and Crow. “Those are all the editors who refused to hire me when the Star folded. The bastards.”

  “Cool,” Crow said.

  “Tull says I’ll probaby have it first thing Monday morning,” Tess said. “It’s hard to wait, though.”

  “I guess it is,” Crow commiserated. “Hey, is that supposed to be the governor tied to the train tracks?”

  Tess looked closely. “No, it’s the senator who blocked the gay rights legislation last session.”

  Crow wrapped his arms around her from behind, rested his chin on her shoulder. “Now this is my idea of a Christmas tradition. What do you want for Christmas, anyway?”

  “A neon sign that says ‘Human Hair.’ How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Funny, that’s exactly what I want.”

  What I really want, Tess was thinking, is a resolution to this mess before the end of the year. She wanted to look at the log of numbers called from that pay phone on November fifth, and find—find what, exactly? Gene Fulton’s home number would work. A call to Domenick’s. Then she would feel comfortable telling her father what she knew about his co-worker. He would be outraged, shocked, surprised.