The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  Hammersmith blinked his turtle eyes, blinked them again. “I am Senator Dahlgren’s finance chairman. My only concern is to amass a war chest so formidable that other Democrats will think twice before entering the race. Adam is on Dahlgren’s legislative staff. He has no official role in the campaign, although he does occasionally help us with opposition research.”

  “Opposition research? Oh, you mean digging up dirt on potential rivals.”

  “As you wish,” Hammersmith said.

  “Do you limit yourself to research, or do you actively create opportunities for blackmail, by sending Nicola DeSanti’s girls to local hotels to meet lonely politicos?” She was thinking of Gene Fulton, escorting the pseudo-waitress from Domenick’s to Harbor Court Hotel.

  If there was any expression to be read on Hammersmith’s face, it was boredom. “An interesting idea and I wouldn’t be surprised if such things have happened. Nicola has been very active in Democratic politics over the years. But you don’t have to fight that dirty, Miss Monaghan, when you have money and a squeaky clean candidate. Backbenchers have their advantages. They’re too unimportant to be bribed, or get into trouble. No one has anything on Kenny Dahlgren, because he hasn’t done anything. He’s never even carried a major piece of legislation.”

  “Then why did you have my parents’ house torched? Why did someone try to kill Devon Whittaker, just because she was the last person to speak to Gwen Schiller?”

  Tess did not flatter herself by thinking she was a remarkable judge of character, not with two men this calculating. But it seemed to her there was a subtle difference in their reactions. Adam looked at Hammersmith as if to say, What she’s talking about?, while Hammersmith merely looked to the side, studying the long, lean face of his Modigliani.

  “Surely you’re mistaken,” Hammersmith said. “This has no connection to us.”

  “I think it does.” Her voice was still hesitant and deferential, but she was feeling stronger. If Hammersmith and Moss had withheld secrets from one another, it gave her leverage. “A week ago, I asked for phone records from a pay phone in Locust Point. Adam Moss requested the same records, even before I did. One of the calls on that log was to Devon Whittaker. I don’t know who Adam gave the information to—maybe he used it himself, although I rather doubt it—but Devon’s companion was killed and the killer was waiting for Devon when I got there.”

  Now Hammersmith appeared genuinely confused, while Adam Moss glanced nervously from him to Tess and back again. “I didn’t—I mean, yes, I picked up the phone logs. Dahlgren said he had a constituent who needed those records. I didn’t ask why.”

  “Did Dahlgren tell you the constituent’s name?”

  Adam Moss shook his head. “Part of my job is knowing when not to ask questions. He told me it was a favor for someone from the Stonewall Democratic Club. It’s the kind of favor he does all the time and it’s not completely kosher, but it’s pretty harmless. But I’d never be a party to—I mean, murder. That was never part of the arrangement.”

  “What was the ‘arrangement’?”

  The two men were eyeing each other now, each suspicious in his own right. Hammersmith had not known about the phone logs. Adam had not known about the house fire, or the attempt on Devon’s life. Yet neither man had asked her: Who is Gwen Schiller? Which meant they knew.

  Hammersmith spoke first: “About two years ago, I asked Kenneth Dahlgren to take Adam Moss on as his aide. Dahlgren did this as a personal favor to me. He was resistant at first, for Adam’s résumé was—well, let’s say it had some gaps. But he has a natural instinct for politics and Dahlgren has been extremely happy with his performance.”

  “Did you agree to become his finance chairman in exchange for his hiring Adam?”

  “No,” Hammersmith said. Another surprise for Adam Moss, Tess noted. He looked truly perplexed now, brows drawn tight over his dark eyes. “That was an unrelated negotiation.”

  “Made about a year ago?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I signed on last December, although we didn’t announce the fact for several months.”

  “You took the appointment just after Gwen Schiller was killed.”

  It was a guess, a feint, nothing more. But Tess knew she had closed the circle. She waited, letting the silence in the room grow, determined not to be the next one to speak. She would stand here for hours, if necessary, until one of them told her what she needed to know.

  As it happened, she had to wait only a few seconds. But it seemed much longer.

  “We knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith said. “Elizabeth March.”

  “We?”

  “I.”

  “We,” Adam Moss corrected. “In fact, I introduced her to Meyer. We were horrified when we realized she must be the girl who was killed in Locust Point, but what could we do? I made an anonymous call, but her name turned out to be fake, as we always suspected.”

  “How did you know her?”

  Another silence. Again, Tess waited it out.

  “She lived here, very briefly,” Hammersmith said carefully. “As did Adam. And Wendy.”

  “Wendy? You mean the girl from the gallery.” Tess saw another link, a visual one, spread out on the walls around her. Beautiful faces. Beautiful, beautiful faces of all types, male and female, and no two alike. So art was not the only thing Meyer Hammersmith collected.

  “How do you know about Wendy?” Adam asked.

  “I followed you one night, then checked the property records for the gallery. So you got a job with a state senator and Wendy got her own business. What was going to be Gwen’s reward?”

  “She did not stay long enough for me to help her,” Hammersmith said. Help her? Tess wanted to throw the words back at him, but there was no irony in his voice, no self-awareness.

  “You mean she wouldn’t sleep with you.”

  “You misunderstand our arrangement.” Meyer Hammersmith actually looked offended. “I’m a mentor. I take in protégés, people who need molding, give them a leg up.”

  “Gwen Schiller was a billionaire’s daughter from the Washington suburbs,” Tess said. “She didn’t need your ‘leg up.’” Or your scaly little hand up her skirt.

  “I knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith repeated, as if the name made all the difference. “A runaway. If I had known who she was—if Adam or Wendy had known who she was—they never would have brought her to me. They picked her. I knew her as Beth.”

  Tess looked questioningly at Adam.

  “You have to find your own replacement,” he muttered, looking at the floor. “Wendy didn’t understand Meyer’s tastes as well as I did, she was having trouble finding someone new. We were eating in a bar in South Baltimore one night when Beth came in, looking for work. She didn’t have an ID, or a Social Security number. I knew Meyer would approve of her, once we got her cleaned up.”

  “You took her to Domenick’s.”

  “I took her to Domenick’s.” Adam seemed relieved, as if he had yearned to tell this story to someone, anyone, over the past year. “The DeSantis aren’t so picky about things like work permits and they know about Meyer’s…proclivities. They’re always happy to help him out. The strange thing was, Beth was actually happy there, living in an apartment above the bar, waiting tables, being left alone. Me and Wendy, we couldn’t wait to get out of there, but Beth—I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to think of her by any other name—didn’t want to go when her time came.”

  “You brought her here, to begin her tenure as a ‘protégé,’ and she ran away.”

  “I guess so,” Adam looked at Meyer. “I assume so. I’ve never asked too many questions about what happened.”

  Adam Moss made it a habit of not asking too many questions, Tess realized. No wonder he was so highly regarded in political circles.

  “When the replacement bolts, what happens?” She was thinking of the terrified girl in the gallery, Wendy, her shrill insistence that she had fulfilled the contract.

  Adam looked as if he might say someth
ing, but Hammersmith cut him off. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened. She decided she didn’t want the life I was offering her, and she left. Now that I know she was Dick Schiller’s daughter, it’s all a little clearer to me, I admit. I haven’t had a protégé for quite some time.”

  He had the gall to sound wistful, as if he had been denied something that was his due.

  “But only because the waitress from Domenick’s wasn’t quite right,” Tess said, and she knew she had gotten it right this time. Gene Fulton had brought the girl to Meyer, not to some political rival. “You were the tea at Harbor Court, the job that Fulton described as one of the best gigs in the city. I guess Nicola DeSanti knows your ‘proclivities,’ but can’t quite nail down your taste. Pretty isn’t good enough. They have to be extraordinary.”

  “I am interested in young people who want to better themselves, people I can help.”

  “Yes. You take them in, and you buy their silence by promising them what they most desire. But Gwen didn’t get anything from you, so she wasn’t bound to keep your secret, was she? You must have been terrified when she ran away. She might have ended up telling someone about your little scout troop.”

  “I’m sorry she didn’t like it here,” Meyer said. “But, really, she overreacted. She wasn’t my prisoner, she was free to leave any time. I just needed to ensure her discretion. When I asked Nicola to help me out, I expected a very different resolution. I thought she would put Gene on it, as she usually did. Gene was competent, and levelheaded. The boys are so…unpredictable.”

  “The boys?” She wanted to be wrong about this, but knew she wasn’t.

  “Her grandsons, I believe. No—her grandson and great-grandson. Have you see them? They look amazingly alike. Very unusual faces. Not handsome, but distinctive. Feral, even.”

  Caught up in trying to describe Pete and Repete, Hammersmith had already forgotten the girl he knew as Beth. But Adam Moss was horrified.

  “You knew,” he said, stepping around Tess and toward his old mentor. “You knew all this time. They killed Beth, to protect you, and framed the dumb addict. Let me guess what happened next. Gene Fulton carried the tale back to Dahlgren, to get him off his back at the liquor board, and that’s how Dahlgren got you for finance chair. Beth was dead, and all anyone could think of was how to turn it to their personal advantage.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Hammersmith protested. “I didn’t want her dead, and I certainly didn’t want to work for a troglodyte like Ken Dahlgren. But one does what one has to do. Noblesse oblige, Adam. Didn’t I teach you that very concept, over the year I spent transforming you from rough trade to senator’s aide?”

  “Noblesse oblige,” Adam Moss repeated, his voice bitter, his beautiful mouth trembling with emotion. “As I recall, you were born in Pigtown and made your first million as a slumlord. You learned to buy fine things, Meyer, but you never truly appreciated them.”

  “I bought you,” he said matter-of-factly, reaching out to touch Adam’s face. The younger man backed away so quickly he almost fell over the chaise longue. “I appreciated you.”

  Tess pulled her gun from her pocket, and aimed at the center of Meyer Hammersmith’s speckled forehead. She heard Whitney’s voice in her head: Heads are too small, aim for the torso. She could miss, even at this range. But it was so much more satisfactory to point a gun at his face, his unbeautiful face. She squinted her left eye, remembering to adjust for the slight recoil on the Smith & Wesson.

  “What are you doing, Miss Monaghan?”

  “I came here today because I thought you could protect me, that you must be at the top of this conspiracy, because you’re rich and powerful. But you’re as much at Nicola DeSanti’s mercy as I am. You don’t do anything for yourself, whether it’s procuring the beautiful young people you desire, or arranging for their silence when they disappoint you.”

  “You don’t understand,” he began, licking his lips.

  “I understand as much as I can bear.”

  “What do you presume to do, then?”

  “With this?” She looked at the gun in her hand, as if surprised to find it there. “Nothing, actually. I just wanted you to know, for a moment, what Gwen Schiller felt when she saw Nicola DeSanti’s progeny coming toward her. Gwen Schiller—not Beth March, or Jane Doe. Gwen Schiller, a seventeen-year-old runaway, whose only crime was wanting one man in the world, her father, to notice her. I wanted you to feel the panic she felt when she saw Pete and Repete. That’s when she twisted away from Henry Dembrow, right? He lured her to his house, probably by promising her she could use the phone. He would have been so easy to buy off, all they had to give him was a can of spray paint. And when Gwen died, it was such a joke to the two men who made it happen that they tied a rubber tube around her neck, just for the hell of it. That was for you, wasn’t it, Meyer? Your gift, your package, courtesy of the DeSanti family.”

  “She shouldn’t have run,” he said. “I’d have let her go, I wouldn’t have forced her to stay. I never force anyone, do I, Adam? And I don’t hurt them. Tell her, Adam. Tell her how I saved you, tell her everything I did for you.”

  But Adam Moss was out the door, running.

  He was waiting for her just outside the iron gates.

  “Were you scared?” Tess asked him.

  “Scared that you would kill him, and I wouldn’t stop you,” he said. “I can’t believe Dahlgren knew, all this time, that he set me up like that. I’m an accessory, aren’t I?”

  They were walking up the hill, toward Tess’s car. The city of Baltimore was spread out before them. The top of Federal Hill was possibly the best vantage point from which to view the city. From here, one could take in downtown, Fells Point, the harbor, and Locust Point. The whirligig at the American Visionary Art Museum twisted in the wind. The Domino Sugars sign blazed red in the night. It was a funny thing about that sign. Wherever you went in Baltimore, it seemed to follow you.

  “If the police ever come looking for you, tell them what you know and I think you’ll be okay. But don’t stick your neck out, Adam. Nicola DeSanti is willing to kill to protect her grandson and great-grandson.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “But it’s still hard for me to believe. She’s a small-timer, content with prostitution rackets and black market cigarettes. You know she’s death on drugs, fires her girls if they get caught using. She has her own weird moral compass, however skewed. Dahlgren’s the one who scares me. Mr. Law and Order, Mr. Family Man, using a girl’s murder for his political gain. I can just see how it went down, how Fulton carried the story of Gwen’s death and Meyer’s involvement to him, like some dumb, eager bird dog. Love me! Pat me! Don’t fire me! It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for Meyer, getting caught up in that.”

  “Then you’re a bigger person than I’ll ever be. I can’t imagine anyone more loathsome than Meyer Hammersmith.”

  Adam looked back at Meyer Hammersmith’s house. At night, in the streetlights, the limestone glowed white. Another Sugar House, Tess thought. The world was full of Sugar Houses, places that looked so sweet, and left such a bitter taste.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “He doesn’t want sex. He wants people to think he’s having sex. He wants to own things of beauty, things that everyone else wants, and can’t have. It was a good deal for me. I didn’t even graduate high school. I was a hustler in New York. Meyer was a step up for me. Wendy’s from some Virginia backwater where you’re lucky to get out without having your cousin’s baby. We thought Beth—Gwen—was one of us. More naïve, perhaps, but scrappy. We never would have brought her to him if we hadn’t thought she was strong.”

  “She was strong, that was her problem,” Tess said. “She was stronger than you. She’d never consent to be someone’s slave.”

  “I wasn’t his slave,” Adam said, his voice sharp. “More like an indentured servant. It’s a contract. You put the time in, you leave set for life. It’s not that different from being in on the ground floor of one of those Int
ernet companies, or some start-up like, well, Dick Schiller’s. I slept with a lot of men and women before I met Meyer, and all I ever got out of it was spending money and some new clothes. He gave me a new life.”

  They had stopped beneath a streetlight, where Tess had parked. She was still thinking about Gwen, her death, the details of the autopsy. She felt unfinished somehow. Unfinished—she remembered the fresh tattoo on Gwen’s ankle, the line on her leg.

  “Show me your ankle,” she said to Adam Moss.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Show me.”

  Reluctantly, he propped his loafered foot on the hood of her car and rolled down his sock. There it was, the same black band that police had found on Gwen’s ankle. Only this one went all around the ankle.

  “Meyer’s mark,” she said. “And you think you weren’t a slave. They branded slaves, Adam. Holocaust victims, too. You sat there and took it, but Gwen Schiller wouldn’t. That’s why she ran.”

  She turned her back on him as she unlocked her car, overwhelmed by the unbidden image of Meyer Hammersmith, leaning over Gwen Schiller with his needle, slowly and deliberately inking a black band around her ankle so she would forever be his. Had she kicked him before she ran, jackknifed her legs into his soft stomach, bruised his chin with her flailing feet? Tess hoped so. She really hoped so.

  “Look,” Adam said, “we can get them back. We can avenge Beth’s—Gwen’s—death. I know enough to destroy Dahlgren. There’s all sorts of sleazy shit going on with his campaign, stuff that could land Meyer in jail.”

  “Dahlgren’s only a small part of the problem. He can’t help me.”

  “But he’s my part.”

  “Fine, you take care of your part, and I’ll take care of mine. Just stay out of my way, Adam. Because when it comes to protecting people I love, Nicola DeSanti has nothing on me.”

  chapter 31