Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  Three items found, the computer replied.

  “That tells me there are three stories in the system in our time frame that mentioned Sims-Kever, asbestos, and $850,000.” Tess looked over his shoulder, enthralled. Electronic data bases were new to her. The ailing Star had never been on-line. In fact the morgue at the Star was famous primarily for being about five years behind at any given moment. And for filing photos of Mickey Mouse under “Rodents, famous.”

  Feeney called up each story, the words rolling so fast beneath his fingers that Tess could barely skim them. “You’ve lucked out. Here are three plaintiffs who got $850,000 from Sims-Kever, two in the same trial, both in the same court, Judge West. If I were you, I’d take these names over to his clerk, see if any ring a bell. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I also could just call ’em up, if they’re still alive.”

  “Yeah, but what are you going to say? ‘Hey, are you the old dude who chased that lawyer with the bat?’ Or are you going to pretend to be doing a telephone survey on baseball bat ownership?”

  “Good point. You’re better at this than I am.”

  “What exactly is ‘this’? You a private eye now? Or are you planning on law school?”

  “I’m not sure, Feeney. But if there’s a story here, I promise to tell you before anyone.”

  “Even Jonathan?”

  “He’ll be the last to know. Hey—you didn’t tell him that I called the other day, did you?”

  Feeney shook his head. “I didn’t know I had anything to tell. Even now that I’ve seen the clip and know where you’re headed, it seems like a long shot, Tess. What are you trying to prove, that some little old man did the lawyer? It’s a big leap from running around with a baseball bat and banging someone’s head to a pulp.”

  The phone rang. He let it ring five times, then picked it up as if he had all the time in the world. His voice was sweet and mellow, even if his words were not.

  “Feeney here. What? Well, that’s the stupidest fuckin’ idea I ever heard. How’d you get this job anyway? You sleeping with somebody over there?” Tess could hear the editor’s nervous laughter on the other end. She pantomimed good-bye and slipped out. An old political reporter on the Star had once given her three rules for success in journalism: Be a star. Be a columnist. Report from a different city than the one in which your newspaper is based. Feeney had found his own city, just six blocks from the Blight’s offices.

  It was still lunchtime, but she thought she might find Judge West’s clerk at her desk, wolfing down a sack lunch. Courthouse employees didn’t make enough to dine out regularly at any place finer than Taco Bell. Sure enough, a round-faced young woman was hunched over her desk, a can of Coke, a bag of chips, and an egg salad sandwich on a napkin in front of her.

  “Hey, I’m Tess Monaghan. I used to work at the Star. I think we met a couple of times, Ms…. Collington.” She had never seen the woman before in her life, but the clerk was considerate enough to have a nameplate on her desk: D. COLLINGTON.

  “Donna. Donna Collington.” She was a black woman with a reddish undercast to her skin, no more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with a sweet baby face and fingernails long enough to rip someone’s heart out. Plump, she strained the seams of a tight purple dress, but in a way most men would find attractive.

  “I work for a local law firm now, and we’ve got this messy criminal case. I mean, it’s crazy.” So far, all true. “My boss wants me to find this guy who might be able to testify for our client, but all we know is he was one of two plaintiffs in this court two years ago, in an asbestos case. I have the names, but I can’t figure out which one he is.”

  “Why not call both?”

  Good question. “That’s what I thought. But my boss told my specifically not to call them. And when I asked why, he told me it was none of my business, just do it his way.”

  Donna Collington laughed as if she understood.

  “Been there, done that. But I still don’t know how I can help you. Those asbestos cases are all a blur. Just one long line of old men spitting into handkerchiefs and dragging their oxygen tanks around.”

  “Well, this gentleman would have been one of the last ones, before consolidation. He also appears to have been rather rambunctious.”

  “Rambunctious?”

  “Feisty. Bad tempered. Prone to outbursts. Maybe he made threats, or acted up.”

  Donna laughed again. “You mean like somebody who might have tipped the judge’s water pitcher on a lawyer’s head?”

  “Yes, for example.”

  “Not ‘for example.’ For real. He was this little guy, looked like an elf, cute as could be. He didn’t even seem that sick, compared to the others. But he got so upset when some of the others got more money that he grabbed the judge’s pitcher—splash, all over the lawyer’s head. His lawyer. I’d hate to see what he’d have done to the lawyer for the other side if the bailiff hadn’t cuffed him.”

  Yes, you would, thought Tess, who had seen the photographs in the autopsy report. “Do you remember his name?”

  “Only his first name. Because his wife was screaming it out over and over, trying to calm him down. ‘Oh, Abner. Oh, Abner. For the love of God, Abner.’ I almost wet my pants. And the judge was trying so hard not to laugh, he split his. Li’l Abner, we called him.”

  Tess checked the printout Feeney had given her. Abner. Abner Macauley. A match.

  “Thanks, Donna.”

  “No problem. You go make your boss happy, now.” She smiled sweetly, wagging a long red nail at her. “Tyner Gray should be real happy with you today. But next time don’t come in here telling me lies, girlfriend. I knew who you were working for all along. Everybody in the courthouse knows about that long-haired girl who ran the fifty-yard dash through here last week.”

  Tess blushed. She had forgotten what a small world the courthouse was, how little was secret here. All along, Donna Collington, with her innocent baby face, had known who she was and what her “messy case” was about. Humbled, she headed back to Fells Point and her shift at the bookstore, for which she was already late.

  Kitty gave her a baleful stare when she showed up at the register on a run from the bus stop. She was rearranging the children’s section, setting up for a House at Pooh Corner party for the weekend. After reading a magazine article about the increasingly competitive nature of children’s birthday parties, Kitty had decided to go head-to-head with Chuck E. Cheese, luring Baltimore’s more bookish parents into the store for theme parties—Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows. All the children received five dollar gift certificates to the store. A shrewd investment, as their parents inevitably dropped at least fifty dollars more when they came to pick the kids up.

  “Kitty!” Tess said, going on the offensive. “You’re actually wearing clothes! Is officer Friendly out making Baltimore safe for democracy?”

  Instead of her usual kimono Kitty wore black linen pedal pushers with tiny bows at the cuffs and a black cotton sweater several sizes too large for her small frame. It kept sliding back and forth, exposing first one shoulder, then the other. Crow, perched on a ladder in the women’s fiction section, was almost dizzy from watching the sweater swoosh back and forth.

  “At least I made it to my yoga class this morning,” she said. “I don’t let men disrupt my life. I disrupt theirs.”

  So Jonathan’s visit had not gone unnoticed. Kitty didn’t disapprove of casual sex, just of Jonathan. She thought Tess could do better. Tess knew she could do worse.

  “Look—some of us aren’t goddesses. We have to settle.”

  “Even goddesses don’t always settle.” That was Crow, from his perch. “Athena never wanted a man. The nymph Laurel turned into a tree rather than end up with Apollo. And he was a god.”

  Tess ignored him, lowering her voice so only Kitty could hear. “Jonathan’s not so bad. When he’s excited about something, about work, he needs someone who understands. His current girlfriend doesn’t.”


  “Doesn’t understand that he needs to sleep with someone else? No, I suppose she doesn’t.”

  Crow was staring at them so intently that Tess was sure he was going to fall off the library ladder. She whispered, “It’s not really about sex. The sex is secondary, almost…perfunctory.”

  “All the more reason not to have it,” Kitty said smugly.

  Tired and irritable, Tess was on the verge of saying something wounding to her aunt, something she might regret, when she noticed a wan, tiny figure approaching the register. Head down, the woman moved resolutely, a posture the store’s employees usually identified with someone intent on finding the Kama-sutra or a book with orgasm in the title.

  But it was Cecilia, the little Kung Fu-fightin’ bride-to-be from VOMA. Tess wondered what book she wanted. Kitty had an entire section about rape, including several books about trying to have a normal sex life again.

  “Your card didn’t say it was a bookstore,” Cecilia said. Her voice sounded faintly accusing but also confused.

  “I guess it didn’t.” Tess groped desperately for whatever persona she had presented the other night. What had she told her? Who had she been?

  “We’re partners,” Kitty said, a smooth and accomplished liar. It dated from her early days in the business when she was juggling bills and creditors.

  “Oh.” Cecilia rocked on her heels in front of the counter, her eyes on the wide wooden planks beneath her feet. “I called on the phone to get directions, but I’ve never been here before. I guess I wasn’t sure what it was.”

  Tess gave Kitty a look and she evaporated, gesturing to Crow as she retreated to her office that he should take over the cash register. Tess led Cecilia to one of the old library tables.

  “At first I felt bad about the other night,” Cecilia began, her eyes studying the grain in the oak table. “We shouldn’t be in the directory—almost no one who shows up meets the criteria—and we always end up turning people away. For some of them there’s not always another place to go.”

  “Well, no harm done,” Tess said brightly. Apology accepted. That’s that. Please leave, as I have no memory of what I told you about myself the other night. “I’m not holding a grudge.”

  “I said ‘at first.’” Suddenly Cecilia had no trouble making eye contact. Her transformation was swift and sure, much faster than it had been Monday night, when she had metamorphosed more gradually from little Cece to Cecilia. “But then I realized you weren’t really interested in joining the group. You were there to spy on us.”

  “What makes you say that?” Other than the fact that it’s true.

  “You went to all this trouble to find VOMA and made a big stink when you couldn’t join, presumably because you needed to talk about what happened to you. But in the coffee bar, when I asked you about your rape, you didn’t want to talk at all. I could tell from the questions you asked me that you didn’t know what it was like. You were too tentative, too polite.”

  Tess said nothing.

  “I want you to tell me why you were there.”

  “You tell me something first. Is there a woman named Mary in your group? A woman whose rapist was represented by Michael Abramowitz?”

  Cecilia smiled oddly. “No, no Marys. But we have lots of women who know Abramowitz’s work.”

  “How many?”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’m not sure I’m going to.” Tess felt an odd power. She wasn’t sure why, but she sensed Cecilia feared her. It was a novel experience, and an exhilarating one. “How many, Cecilia?”

  Cecilia looked to the ceiling and ticked the names off her fingers, as if calling roll. “Well, there’s Pru, Meredith, and Maria—but not Mary. Joan and Melody. Cynthia. Stephanie. Susan. Nancy and Hannah. Leslie, Jane, Ellen, and Lisa. Me—is that everyone? That’s the nucleus. A few others come and go, but those fourteen are always there.”

  “I guess that’s not a coincidence,” Tess said. “That others come and go. You seem intent on keeping it private.”

  “It makes more sense if you know the real name.” Cecilia leaned across the table, as if to take Tess into her confidence. Her mood seemed lighter, more carefree. Whatever brief power Tess enjoyed had now vanished. “Victims of Michael Abramowitz. Monday, of course, was our final meeting, our own little wake for the late, great lawyer.”

  “Nice try. But I saw the group’s charter, remember? You left it behind at the coffeebar. Its official name is Victims of Male Aggression, and Abramowitz filed the papers. Why would he help set up a group of women who hated him?”

  Cecilia gave her an appraising look. “Good question. It’s the one I asked Pru three weeks ago, when I looked up the charter. She told me it was her own little joke. She asked Abramowitz to file the charter when he was in private practice, playing on the do-gooding instincts he carried over from the public defender’s office, where he made a career out of putting rapists back on the streets.”

  “So Pru put the group together and keeps everyone else out?”

  “You got it. It’s not enough to be a rape victim. You have to have had the singularly unpleasant experience of watching your tax dollars at work, as Public Defender Abramowitz got your rapist acquitted.”

  “But that was his job,” Tess objected. “What would you rather have—public defenders who just throw their clients on the rocks, or people who really try? He wasn’t trying to hurt you. He was trying to help poor young men. It wasn’t personal. Besides, he left the public defender’s office years ago. Isn’t it time—”

  “To get on with our lives? Actually, for a while, I was getting on with my life. Then his face started showing up everywhere, and his voice. I saw him on television, heard him on the radio. I drove by his billboards on my way to work. That’s when the group started—when all these women saw that face again, heard his voice. It brought it all back.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been healthier to stop watching those UHF channels? Switch to NPR? Find a new route to work?”

  Cecilia slumped in her chair, as if worn out by the conversation. “You’re just proving Pru’s point. Other people don’t understand. I never thought I’d have to say this to another woman, but you just don’t get it.”

  No, she got it. She understood their anger and frustration. But she was uncomfortable around people who based their identities on being victims—even if she herself had done it from time to time. It was counterproductive. Instead of healing, these women ended up tearing off their scabs every week. Their idea of rebellion was to serve cupcakes at a wake, celebrating the fact that someone else had carried out their pathetic revenge fantasies.

  Assuming it was someone else.

  “So did VOMA ever talk about killing its raison d’être?”

  Cecilia rolled her eyes. “We’re victims of violence, not perpetrators. Most of these women are scared to go out alone after dark.”

  “Well, let me ask you this: Did the group discuss the murder? Do you know where everyone was that night?”

  “I know Pru was at the ball game, with two dozen kids on crutches and some other people from the accounting firm where she works. The other women were probably doing what they do most nights. Sitting up in bed, with all the lights on, afraid to go to sleep.”

  “What about you?”

  “Home alone. The classic alibi, right? My rapist planned to use it if the case hadn’t been thrown out of court. That’s the beautiful thing about a defense—it doesn’t have to be consistent. ‘I wasn’t there.’ ‘I was there, but I didn’t do it.’ ‘I was there, but she wanted it.’”

  “How consistent is your story?”

  Cecilia recited back in a bored monotone, “I was home alone. I was there, but I didn’t do anything. I was there, but he wanted it.”

  Tess remembered—her bruised rear end remembered—how Cecilia had taken her on in the coffee bar. Abramowitz was shorter than she was, and he probably didn’t spend two hours a day rowing and lifting. Yet life was unfair. A short, fat, out-of-sha
pe man was still stronger than she was. Cecilia wouldn’t have had a chance—would she?

  “So what’s the point of this visit, Cecilia? All you’ve done is convince me VOMA’s members should be deposed in Abramowitz’s murder case.”

  “I thought you knew something. I thought you wanted something. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “About Abramowitz?”

  “No. Actually it couldn’t have less to do with him.” She got up to leave. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but we’re not really happy he’s dead. At least I’m not.”

  “Maybe you can set up a support group for him. VOMAINSOMA: Victims of Michael Abramowitz in Support of Michael Abramowitz.”

  For a second little Cece, scared and vulnerable, appeared in Cecilia’s eyes. She raised her hand, and Tess was glad she had a heavy oak table as a buffer between them. But Cecilia was reaching for her missing hair, looking for a strand to wrap around her finger as she thought.

  “It must be nice to be so strong and to think it’s because you’re good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness,” she said, almost as if she was working this out for herself for the first time. “But there is such a thing as luck, and there’s more bad luck than good in this world.”

  With that she walked out of the store. She was tinier than Tess remembered. Prettier, too, especially when anger swept over her features and she found the courage to make eye contact. A man looking at her might be a little slower than usual off his reflexes, especially if someone had just finished banging him around. By the time he saw that little foot heading for his ear, it would be too late.

  Chapter 19

  Cecilia’s visit bothered Tess—and not only because there had been some truth in her parting words. It made no sense for Cecilia to seek Tess out, only to tell her more about VOMA than she had ever known, and then insist it had nothing to do with Abramowitz’s death. Then again Cecilia obviously had taken to heart the maxim that the best defense was a good offense. She might have miscalculated, thinking a preemptive strike would end curiosity rather than inspire it.