Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  Tyner made his way down the driveway and swung himself into the van’s passenger seat. The days were growing shorter, and the fading light barely penetrated through the trees along Cross Place. In the doorways of the houses to the left and right, Tess saw silhouettes of men drawn by the still-shrieking alarm. As her eyes grew used to the dusk, she saw one had a lacrosse stick and another held what appeared to be an antique revolver. Slowly the men started moving toward the van. Tess threw the wheelchair in the back, not taking time to fold it. The Wasp avengers had reached the end of their curving walkways and were still approaching, silent and sure of themselves. Tess leapt into the driver’s seat and floored the engine, backing out of the driveway and burning rubber as she accelerated off Cross Place, the alarm screaming in their ears, the neighbors almost on them. She was on St. Paul, heading back to the city, before she realized the blue and white flag still flew from the antenna.

  “I think I’ll save that,” she told Tyner, pointing at the wind-whipped flag. “After all, we might be invited back for tea sometime soon.”

  Chapter 17

  After dropping Tyner and his van off at his office, Tess walked up to the Brass Elephant and ordered a Scotch and water at the restaurant’s upstairs bar. The long, narrow bar deserved to be famous, if only for its martinis. Its regulars, however, were jealous and, as if by unspoken agreement, brought few new customers. Tess had some unresolved feelings about vermouth, but she drank martinis here because she believed in supporting artists at work, and Victor the bartender was nothing if not an artist.

  Tonight, however, she was still thinking about all those golden liquids lined up in crystal decanters at the O’Neals. She was convinced their liquor was finer than anything she would ever taste, finer than anything she could buy, no matter how much money she had in her pocket. Then again, perhaps the O’Neals were cheap, the sort of rich people who bought inexpensive brands of Scotch and bourbon and cognac and put them in decanters so no one knew their pedigree. Scotch and water wasn’t what she really wanted. Gloomy and out of sorts, she left her drink unfinished on the bar and went home.

  Kitty and Officer Friendly were in their bathrobes, wolfing down one of those postcoital picnics peculiar to a relationship’s beginning, when sex brings other appetites to life. Tonight they were working on a hunk of summer sausage, Italian bread slathered with olive oil, sliced apples, and Camembert. They invited Tess to stay, but her memory of O’Neal’s blood red face robbed her of the usual pleasures she found in cholesterol.

  “Not even some bread?” Thaddeus asked. “Olive oil is a relatively benign monosaturate.” She wondered if Kitty had taught him that, or if he had unplumbed depths. Shaking her head no, Tess grabbed an apple, sawed off two thick slices of bread, poured a healthy slug of white wine, and carried it all to her rooftop. She would rather have her own solitary picnic than be an unwanted guest at someone else’s.

  Her dinner finished, Tess felt so cozy in her wallow of self-pity that she decided to smoke a joint. She didn’t pay much attention to the harmonica tune wafting up from the alley below. Fells Point had no shortage of panhandlers who tried to pass themselves off as musicians. And this was a particularly overachieving busker who seemed to fancy himself the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica, segueing raggedly from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a blues song. Oh say can you see…that my woman done left me. No, this was a song about a good woman, someone who washes out a man’s knife wound and doesn’t mind when he leaves in the morning, having drunk all her whiskey and left nothing but a bloodstain behind in her bed.

  “Oh, shit.” She knew this song. It was Jonathan Ross’s mating call.

  That should have been number five on this fall’s list, Tess thought. Stop seeing Jonathan. She could, she knew she could. It was her choice to let him in. She flicked the last bit of joint off the roof, crawled back inside, and pressed the buzzer that let him in the side door.

  Jonathan took the stairs two at a time and began kicking the door lustily, his harmonica still wheezing in his teeth. She knew by the sound of his cowboy boots on the door that he had come to crow. Tess experienced Jonathan only at his extremes—cocky and in need of affirmation, or depressed and in need of affirmation. Once, in conversation with Whitney, she had compared her Jonathan encounters to eating Oreos without any filling.

  “Well, that’s what you sign up for when you keep company with men who are virtually engaged to other people,” Whitney had said in her blunt way. “Licked-clean Oreos.”

  Tonight the plain chocolate cookie in question had brought, along with the harmonica, a bottle of mescal, a Big Mac, and a large order of fries. He pressed the warm, grease-stained bag into Tess’s middle as he hugged her, giving her a wet kiss tasting faintly of salt and Hohner Marine Band steel.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Tess trilled in falsetto, cradling the brown paper bag. “Let me get a vase for these fries.”

  He grabbed the bag back from her, growling deep in his throat, and began to cram French fries in his mouth by the fistful. When obsessed at work Jonathan sometimes forgot to eat until his need for food became so acute he almost fainted. Once he did find sustenance he guarded it as jealously as a dog. Tess knew what a hunger like this meant.

  “Big story?”

  “Huge,” he said around a mouthful of fries. “Enormous. Gargantuan. Pulitzer material. Do they give the Nobel in journalism? I’ll win that, too.”

  Tess felt her stomach lurch. Feeney, damn Feeney. If he had told Jonathan about her call, Jonathan might be following the same lead now. He would find the mystery man with the Louisville Slugger first. He would solve the murder. He would win.

  “Abramowitz?”

  Jonathan held up his hand as if he were a traffic cop, motioning her to wait while he worked his way through the last handful of fries. “Better. Much better than any dead lawyer.”

  He offered Tess the mescal bottle, but she shook her head. With a glass of wine at her side and a half-joint still in her system, she had enough substances going. Jonathan took three swallows, then began pacing back and forth, bent over in an unconscious parody of Groucho Marx.

  “Tell me,” Tess wheedled, unconvinced Abramowitz was not part of it. “You know you’re dying to tell someone.”

  “No. Not yet. I don’t have it on the record yet, but I will. I will!” Jonathan dumped a shot of mescal on the Big Mac, then consumed the burger and his own special sauce in three bites. Like Kitty and Thaddeus gulping summer sausage, Jonathan’s appetite had little to do with his stomach.

  “Give me a hint. Tell me something. Tell me how big it is.”

  Jonathan stopped pacing, if not chewing, and considered her question. “It will change…everything. It will be like a coup, by journalism. Killers will roam the streets of Baltimore. Institutions will be suspect.”

  “And the president will resign, right? You don’t have to hype your story to me, I’m not the page one editor. And I’m not buying it.”

  “You’ll buy it eventually. You’ll take your fifty cents down to the newspaper box and you’ll buy it along with 300,000 other people. No, make that a dollar fifty and 500,000 people. This is a Sunday story, all the way. The New York Times and the Washington Post will woo me. Movie producers will want the rights. Actors—the dark, brooding, romantic kind—will vie to play me.” He grabbed her hands and pulled her to him. “Reporters will want to interview you, because you knew me.”

  “My dream come true.” Tess pulled away. Jonathan oversold all his stories, so it was hard to know if this one was truly special. But something told her the little boy who cried wolf—this little boy who called, “Extra, extra, read all about the wolf!”—was going to come through this time. He had unearthed a journalistic treasure. And she was the first to know, the unnamed native servant, following the great white hunter into the forbidden temple and watching in pagan terror as he contemplated a sacred object she had never dared to touch. Once he lifted this golden artifact from its perch, nothing would be the same. The ear
th would move, the temple would rumble, and Jonathan’s future would be made in the brief moment when he decided to run with his treasure. And he would run with it. Of that she had no doubt.

  Still, she could not give him the satisfaction of seeming impressed. “I’ll believe it when I see it. As you said, you don’t even have anything on the record.”

  “But I will. You know I will,” he said, pulling Tess down on top of him, a new hunger in him.

  The imminence of fame and success was an aphrodisiac to Jonathan. He was tender and insatiable, as if Tess embodied the dreams hovering close. They made love once, twice, three times, drinking mescal shots between bouts of lovemaking, talking of everything but the source of Jonathan’s excitement. They still had not slept when Tess’s alarm went off at 5:30 A.M., summoning her to the boat house.

  “Skip your workout for once,” Jonathan murmured wetly into her neck. For once Tess did, although she had a slight twinge of guilt about Rock. He worried when she missed practice, assuming she must be gravely ill.

  She made a pot of coffee and they climbed to the roof to watch the sun rise. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees overnight as a cool front moved through, and Baltimore looked glorious. No polluted haze over the harbor, just a clear, almost white sky, the kind that would deepen to cerulean blue as the day wore on. A bright red tug moved slowly across the harbor. The bay was green gray. Even the seagulls looked fresh and clean. Tess felt closer to Jonathan than she had in years, as if they were the couple they had been in their Star days. She tried not to think about his girlfriend, waking up alone somewhere outside D.C. At least she assumed the girlfriend woke up alone. Maybe their relationship was more complicated than she knew.

  “Great view,” Jonathan said admiringly. “Some people pay two thousand dollars a month for this view, and you get it for almost nothing.”

  “Yes, I lead such a charmed life.”

  “Well, you do, you know. I’ve always envied you.”

  “My fabulous career? My riches?” Tess tried for a light tone, but Jonathan’s praise felt like pity to her.

  “Your family, your sense of place here. In some ways I’m still this schmuck from the suburbs. I don’t know the city the way you do. I don’t have your credentials.”

  “You have talent, which is better.”

  “But I feel like such a fake sometimes.” This was familiar territory, the other side of the Oreo, Jonathan ebbing, surrendering to every neurotic doubt, expecting her to prop him up.

  “I still remember my first day at work, when I didn’t know the city at all but pretended I did. ‘Oh, yeah, I went to Hopkins, man, Russell Baker’s alma mater. I know this place cold.’ They sent me to a fire, and I couldn’t find it. I fucking missed a five-alarm. I had the address, I had my little grid map. I could see the smoke, I could hear the trucks, but I couldn’t find the fucking fire. It was in one of those odd little wedges off Frederick Road, you know?”

  Tess knew. Southwest Baltimore was a series of such wedges, where streets disappeared only to begin again several blocks later. A lot of her father’s people had lived there when it was still semirespectable.

  “Nick, the rewrite man, got more by phone than I did by going out,” Jonathan continued. “He had everything just from working the crisscross, calling neighbors. And when I came back to the office with absolutely nothing, he looked at me and said: ‘Nice job, Sparky.’ Everyone laughed. He called me ‘Sparky’ for two years. Right up to the point when the Star folded. Then he went off to the unemployment line, and I went to the Beacon-Light.”

  “I kind of remember that. But I always thought it was sweet. You know, well-intentioned hazing.”

  “Trust me. It wasn’t sweet. There’s not a day I go to work and don’t think about Sparky and Nick.” He struggled to his feet. “In fact, I need to confront the beast right now, after a quick shower and some aspirin. It will probably be the first time in a decade someone has shown up with a hangover at the Beacon-Light. Half the people there are in AA. The other half have families and can’t stay out all night drinking.”

  “Hey, face it. The Front Page is history. Most journalists aren’t much different from the pencil pushing bureaucrats they cover.”

  “Watch that kind of talk, or I might have to take a piss off the roof and pretend the alley is the Chicago River, just to show you the old tabloid spirit lives.”

  Jonathan punched her shoulder. Why did every man she know give her these comradely pokes?

  “Jimmy’s is open,” she said, trying not to sound wistful. “Want to grab breakfast?”

  “No time to eat. I’m not even hungry.”

  They climbed back into her apartment. Jonathan pocketed his harmonica and ran down the stairs at top speed. He whistled as he ran, tunelessly but happily. She watched him go, feeling pretty shitty herself, in need of ibuprofen and sleep. He should be crawling into bed, hung over and miserable, Tess thought. He should feel as bad as I do.

  She did feel bad. Her stomach hurt and her head ached, and there was a bad taste in her mouth. Mescal and lack of sleep probably explained the first two symptoms. Eating the worm may have caused the third. She had a vague memory of doing just that at 3 A.M. That had been her idea; she had no one else to blame. And she had no one else to blame for the way she hated Jonathan, at least a little bit, as he rushed headlong toward his brilliant career.

  Chapter 18

  It was almost noon before Tess could face being vertical. She sat on the floor of the shower and let hot water pound on her, trying to decide if this made her feel better or worse. It was a draw. Finally she slicked her hair back into a tight, damp ponytail—the tension from the elastic band seemed to help her headache—and set out for the courthouse pressroom.

  “Feeney’s law,” a sign on the door warned. “The second-worst editor is a failed reporter. The worst editors were all successful reporters.”

  She pushed open the door and found the Beacon-Light courthouse reporter leaning back in his ergonomic chair, his feet on the antique rolltop he had salvaged with the help of a friendly custodian. He had the phone cradled in his ear, a computer keyboard in his lap, and an entire bag of Utz potato chips in his mouth. Sour cream and onion. She could smell them from across the room.

  “I don’t care what you told ’em at the eleven o’clock budget meeting,” he drawled, crunching between words. “You see, unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. The judge just didn’t understand your need for simplicity, for—what do you call it?—a hard, clean narrative line. Maybe by the time you go to the three o’clock budget meeting you can get it right. If not, try for the four o’clock meeting. Hey, but it’s not your fault. You’re an editor. You’re a moron.”

  He placed the phone carefully back in its cradle. If Feeney had slammed down phones or raised his voice, he might have been fired long ago for insubordination. That or the death threats he made against editors every other day. But he was so calm, almost jovial in the way he verbally abused his bosses, that they assumed his attitude was a joke. They never guessed, or at least never admitted, that Feeney’s contempt for them was genuine.

  Feeney was everything his office sanctuary was not—untidy, with hair forever straggling over his collar and his shirttail always slipping out of baggy khakis. He ate only those foods that could be purchased within fifty yards of the courthouse, a self-imposed restriction guaranteeing a steady diet of hot dogs, which had added a slight paunch to his lanky frame now that he was in his forties. Once a month he shaved, usually on the day he went in to file his expense account. He had been at the newspaper for almost three years, and most of his coworkers were not sure what he looked like. He preferred it that way.

  “Darlin’ Tess—what can I do for you? Are you going to run around again with a man’s coat over your head? I didn’t get a chance to see that, but it’s the talk of the courthouse.”

  “Next time I’ll tip you off. Today I just want to figure out how to track down an individual asbestos plaintiff.”


  “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s an elderly man.”

  “You’ve really narrowed it down. Next I guess you’re going to tell me he worked at the shipyards.”

  Accustomed to Feeney’s sarcasm, Tess pulled out the clipping and consulted it. “He was awarded $850,000 in one of the last nonconsolidated trials, whatever that means. And Sims-Kever was the only defendant, at least in his case.”

  “That’s a start.” The keyboard still in his lap, Feeney tapped in the command for the Beacon-Light’s library system. “Luckily I got a hard drive. A lot of the bureaus don’t have the library hookup, but I told ’em I did too much deadline work not to have access.”

  “It keeps you out of the building, right?”

  “You got it. Now I’m trying to convince them to give me my own Lexis/Nexis account. But they keep bitching about the invoice I put in for a microwave. Damn, the system’s slow today.” He punched the keys viciously and, eventually, a form appeared on the screen, requesting information for a search. Feeney typed: “Sims-Kever” and “asbestos.”

  “I’m gonna put in a time line,” he explained to Tess as he jabbed at the keys with two fingers. “They consolidated all the asbestos cases into one big trial a few years back, trying to free up the courts, but before that there were dozens every year. I’m going to tell the computer to search before consolidation.”

  He pushed a button. Ninety-seven items found, the computer replied.

  “Jesus, ninety-seven stories. That’s way too much to go through. We gotta narrow it down. Hand me that clip.” He skimmed it. “Whatta piece of shit. Why’d they give this guy a column, anyway? Wait, here’s another little detail.” He typed in “Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”