By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "We had a wonderful marriage."

  "No disagreements, no tensions?"

  "Nothing out of the ordinary. There was a slight age difference…"

  So that's where the dog was buried, as her Grandma Weinstein might say. "How much?"

  "Twelve years. I married relatively late, at thirty-one."

  Funny, Tess was thirty-three, and she considered that a damn early age for matrimony.

  "You're… what?" She checked her notes. "Forty-one. So she was only nineteen when you married?"

  A slight defensiveness crept into his tone. "Yes, but Natalie was an unusual woman, more mature at nineteen than most women are in their thirties." Was it Tess's imagination, or did he glance at her neon human hair sign just then? A gift from her boyfriend two Christmases ago, it complemented the "Time for a Haircut" clock nicely.

  "How old are the children?"

  "Isaac is nine, the twins are going on five. We wanted more, but it was not to be. I had hoped to have a houseful of children."

  "And your wife?"

  "Of course I want my wife in my house. That's why I'm here."

  "No, I meant… did your wife want a lot of children, too?"

  "Absolutely. It's our way. It's what God wants."

  Mark Rubin's very certitude seemed a bad sign to Tess. It was bad enough to claim you knew your wife's mind, another to assume you knew God's as well.

  "She had absolutely no reason to leave?"

  "None." The reply was too firm, too automatic. He wasn't allowing anyone to question this fact, beginning with himself.

  "What about addictions? I'm not talking just about drugs or alcohol, but gambling or other compulsive behaviors, such as eating disorders. Even shopping."

  "No, nothing like that."

  "Does she spend a lot of time on the Internet?" A new wrinkle in divorce cases, stealth adultery, which didn't reveal itself until the person ran off to be with his or her virtual love. Installing spyware was one of Tess's first steps in any case where a spouse suspected another spouse of fooling around.

  "She barely knows how to use a computer. Our oldest son had to set up her e-mail account."

  "And there was no"—she took a breath and plunged ahead—"no violence in the household?"

  "No." Here, at least, he was utterly convincing.

  "It's just that it's very unusual for a woman to up and leave, taking her three children. Does she have a job?"

  "No matter my circumstances, I would never allow—I mean, I would never expect my wife to work outside the home."

  "Then how would she support them? Does she have her own money? Family?"

  A slight hesitation here. "Not one that she can rely on. Her mother is still here in Baltimore, but she and Natalie have been estranged since her parents' divorce, back when she was a young teenager. Her father's completely out of the picture now, has no contact with her at all."

  Tess wondered if Rubin's marriage had been an arranged one, then wondered if the Orthodox still used arranged marriages. Her upbringing had been bicultural primarily in the culinary details. The Weinsteins went out for Chinese and held backyard crab feasts, rationalizing that anything eaten outside wasn't really treyf. The Monaghans had lesser palates, but they loved the Sour Beef dinner put on by the ladies of Good Counsel every autumn. On St. Patrick's Day, they drove for lean corned beef to what Tess's paternal grandfather called Jewtown. Pop-Pop Monaghan had called the neighborhood that to the day he died, literally. In his bed in the old house on Wilkens Avenue, he had reached for Tess's hand, mistaking her for his only daughter, Kitty, the youngest and best loved of his seven children.

  "Well," he had said, "Patrick married a Jew. What do you know about that, Kitty? A Jewess from Jewtown."

  There was no meanness in his tone, no censure. He was just calling a spade a spade, a Jew a Jewess. As for Jew-town—well, that designation had appeared on some local maps well into the 1930s, and Pop-Pop Monaghan's world-view had pretty much jelled by then.

  "I know," Tess had replied, trying to find something that would be neither rebuke nor agreement, "that he loves her."

  "Love," her grandfather scoffed.

  Some men might have been smart enough to exit on a line like that, but Brian Monaghan, a belligerent Irishman to the end, wore out his welcome, coming back from death several times in that last day. Finally life seemed to tire of him and shuttered itself against his return, like a tavern giving someone the bum's rush.

  But her Monaghan side was of no use here. Today Tess needed to rely on her Weinstein genes if she was going to find any affinity with this prickly man who clearly had the wherewithal to help her out of her financial slump.

  "Do you have any leads at all? A vehicle, a name she might use, a place, a friend she might reach out to, a list of long-distance phone calls from before she left?"

  "All our cars are in our garage, untouched. My guess is she'd revert to her maiden name, or some form of it. Natalie Peters." Tess idly wondered what the surname was before it was changed. Her grandfather had been too stubborn to consider such a thing, and he was proud of having the Weinstein name on his stores until the day they sank into bankruptcy. "As for family or friends, it's only her mother, and, as I said, they have no relationship. I think she lives up on Labyrinth Road. Vera Peters."

  "Still, it's a place to start. Now, has Natalie drawn on any accounts—checking or savings—since she's been gone? Used a credit card?"

  "No, nothing like that."

  "And the police didn't find that suspicious? That's usually a sign of… well, it's certainly something they look at."

  She had not wanted to say, It's usually a sign that a person is dead.

  "They know what you know, and they still don't think this is a matter for them. They have these, too."

  He took a folder from his briefcase and brought out three photographs. The first could have been a miniature Mark Rubin, a boy with the same dark eyes and hair, although not the somber expression. He beamed at the camera, a little self-conscious, but clearly happy at whatever moment he had been captured. He was holding a plaque, so perhaps it was an awards ceremony.

  "Isaac, my oldest."

  The next photo showed a boy and girl of the same height. Their hair was several shades lighter than the older boy's and their features sharper—narrow eyes with a hint of a tilt, prominent cheekbones that gave them a foxy look. They must favor their mother.

  "The twins, Penina and Efraim."

  He was shy about sliding the last photograph to Tess, or perhaps just reluctant to surrender it. The woman in the picture was gorgeous, an absolute knockout, with the lush lips and heavy-lidded eyes of a movie star. Not just any movie star but a specific one, although Tess couldn't pull up the memory. Ava Gardner? Elizabeth Taylor? One of those smoldering brunettes from the studio days. The dark hair was perfect, cut and shaped into curls that looked too natural to be anything but labor-intensive, and the makeup had the same deceptively simple aspect. She had taken less care with her clothing, content with a simple cardigan that was buttoned to the top, the wings of a white collar visible above the dark wool.

  She also was the unhappiest-looking woman Tess had ever seen, a woman whose very expression—the dark eyes, the set mouth, which really was the shape of a Cupid's bow—bespoke a secret burden. But Mark Rubin looked at the photo as if all he could see was the beauty.

  "Your wife—did she have a history of psychiatric problems?"

  "Of course not."

  "Why 'of course not'? There's no shame in having emotional problems." Tess didn't bother to tell Rubin that she had just finished her own course of court-ordered therapy. It was simply too long a story. "It's all chemicals, just another organ in your body having problems."

  "I know that." Still too sharp, too defensive. "But chemicals are not the issue here."

  "What about organs?"

  "Excuse me?"

  But that was as close as Tess would get to asking Mark Rubin if he and his wife had a fulfilling sex life.<
br />
  "So there were no problems, and you don't have a clue why your wife left, and you're not even sure she wanted to leave, yet you don't think there's foul play involved?"

  "Sometimes—I mean, I have no evidence of this—but sometimes I think maybe she left to protect me from something."

  "Such as?"

  "Nothing that I know of. But I can think of no other reason she would leave. Whatever she does, she always puts her family first."

  "Is there anything to support this, um, idea?"

  "No, not really." His shoulders, which he had been holding so straight and square, sagged. "I honestly don't know what is going on."

  Tess looked at the photos in front of her. If there had been only one, and it had been the wife, she would have advised him to save his money and go home. She might have even recited the dorm-wall-poster wisdom of letting something go if you really loved it. But there were the children to consider. They were entitled to their father. He was right, even admirable, in his desire not to let them go.

  "I'm going to scan these pictures into my computer, so you don't have to leave them with me. Besides, then I can print them out as necessary, show them to people, create flyers."

  "And then?" he asked.

  "I never promise results in any case, and I'm not starting with a lot of leads. But I have some ideas about how to proceed. Meanwhile, I'll need you to sign a letter of agreement and pay the equivalent of… eighty hours up front, as my retainer."

  Tess had an unofficial sliding scale for her work. She didn't gouge anyone, but a man like Rubin could subsidize some of the less prosperous clients who found their way to the detective agency officially known as Keyes Investigations. She had been having a run of such clients lately, down-on-their-luck types and flat-out deadbeats. After making a quick calculation, she tossed off a figure that seemed fair to her, only to watch in amazement as Rubin pulled out a wallet and paid in cash.

  "Maybe I'll remember more, or come up with some other leads for you," he said, counting off the ATM-crisp bills. "I'm still a little… numb. My only comfort is knowing that Natalie is a good mother. She's a good wife, too. I don't know why she decided to stop being one. If I failed her—if I worked too hard or was too inflexible in my ways—I'm willing to change. But I have to find them first, right? Without my family I'm nothing, just a man who sells coats."

  Tess didn't have the heart to tell him that the best she could do was find his family. In a case like this, Tess was all the king's horses and all the king's men, picking up the broken pieces at the foot of the castle wall.

  Mark Rubin stood, then reached for Tess almost as if to tuck a loose strand of hair behind one ear. She recoiled instinctively, nervous about allowing any strange man too close to her, confused at how Rubin could attempt this kind of contact when he had made such a point about refusing her hand. But his hand quickly retreated, holding a quarter he had pretended to pluck from behind her ear.

  "I used to do this for my oldest son," he said. "You see, I'm actually a funny guy. I make people laugh. I was a joyous man—it's one of the tenets of Hasidism I happen to embrace as a Modern Orthodox, the idea that one honors God by being full of joy. But you'll just have to take my word for that for now."

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  TESS FOUND A TOEHOLD ON A METAL HANDLE JUTTING from the side of the Dumpster, scrambled to the top, and swung her legs so she was perched on the lip. She was now staring down into, if not the abyss, a reasonable and pungent facsimile. Even in hip waders and the decontamination suit she had acquired from a friend in city Homicide, she was less than eager to take the plunge.

  "Baruch ata Adenoid, Mark Rubin," she said, pronouncing the blessing as she had misheard it in her childhood, when she believed her Aunt Sylvie was offering a prayer to cure her cousin Deborah of her allergies. "If working for you means no more Dumpsters for a while, I won't complain about what a deluded tight-ass you are."

  Meanwhile, a girl had to eat, although at this exact moment it seemed unlikely that food would ever interest Tess again. The Dumpster was one of three behind a popular Fell's Point bar, and it smelled strongly of stale beer, processed cheese, and rancid meat. As a bonus there were bright yellow and blue newspaper wrappers tucked among the dark green garbage bags, knotted in a way that any responsible dog owner would recognize.

  Feeling only mildly ridiculous, Tess secured a surgical mask over her face and scooted down the interior wall in her best Spider-woman fashion, landing as softly as possible. The garbage bags were packed closely, and the effect was not unlike a Moonwalk ride at a small-time carnival, albeit one with occasional crunchy sounds underfoot that she tried not to ponder. Bottles? Crack vials? She took small, tentative steps, hoping to feel something relatively solid beneath her. She walked the perimeter, circling toward the center. No, her quarry was definitely not here.

  On to the next Dumpster, which smelled more like secondhand margaritas under the late-afternoon sun.

  "Divorce," Tess said, speaking out loud to keep herself company, "makes people do some weird shit. Or hire those who will do it for them."

  To think she had been cocky enough to imagine matrimonial work was behind her forever. But a string of clients, stung by this strange hit-or-miss economy, had told her to line up behind their other empty-handed creditors. So Tess found herself with no choice but to take on the soon-to-be-ex of a city official, a harridan who swore that her husband had ordered sanitation workers under him to remove incriminating files from his office and leave them in these Dumpsters.

  Like most novice criminals, the public-works boss had been a little too in love with his cloak-and-dagger maneuvers. Because these Dumpsters were privately owned, their debris should have ended up in a private landfill. He must have figured that no one could tie the king of public waste to trash serviced by private contractors. But he had chosen a bar that had a habit of stiffing hauling companies, so the garbage tended to sit for a few days. Hard on the nose, unfortunate for the neighborhood, but very good for Tess and the soon-to-be-ex-wife.

  Assuming that the documents were actually here. The wife could be wrong. Divorcing spouses were often clueless about each other. Hence the impending divorce. Tess was almost to the center of the third Dumpster before her foot hit an unusually solid bag that neither cracked nor oozed. Crouching down, she made a slight tear in the plastic with her gloved hands and saw reams of documents on Baltimore City letterhead. Score.

  The bag was heavy enough that the seams might pop if Tess heaved it over the side. Resignedly, she ripped it open and ferried the papers out an armful at a time, which took almost a dozen trips but allowed her to skim some of the documents as she worked. They did make for interesting reading.

  It was all here, just as the wife had promised, a history of bribes and kickbacks that helped explain how a midlevel city bureaucrat had come to own a vacation home in Rehoboth Beach and a timeshare in Steamboat Springs. Sure it was graft, but even graft was marital property under Maryland law. If the IRS could tax ill-gotten gains, the wife's slicky-boy lawyer was going to argue, then a spouse could claim half of it, too. The argument was a bluff, but one her husband would never dare to call. A settlement would be reached quickly and quietly once Mr. Public Works knew that his wife had these documents in her possession.

  The bottom of the bag yielded an unexpected bonus, a memo that was small potatoes for the divorce but a big find in the annals of city folklore—the official plowing list. Here was the shifting hierarchy of city power brokers, with names crossed off and reinstated according to how the political winds blew in any given year. There was even an enemies list, stipulating which streets should not be plowed, such as the cul-de-sac of a former mayor.

  Tess put that aside, reserving it for her one friend left at the Beacon-Light, Kevin Feeney, a throwback who still cared about good old-fashioned politics. She loaded the rest in the trunk of her ancient Toyota, while the dogs, who had been tied to a nearby utility pole, began panting and pulling at thei
r leashes, anxious to leave.

  "Good girls," she cooed as they sniffed her legs, intrigued by the smells that clung to her. No anthropomorphizing here—dogs really did grin. Better yet, they loved you when you stank of garbage, loved you just for coming through the door at the end of the day or putting down a dish of food, which made it easy to love them back. "Just let me scald myself in the office shower, and we'll convene to the branch office for our coffee break."

  " 'My appetite comes to me while eating,'" Tess announced upon taking one of the outdoor tables at Pearl's, dogs still in tow. Her apt quotation of Montaigne did not seem to impress the sullen waitress, much less the dogs. The attitudinal blonde simply disappeared inside to place Tess's usual order—a chocolate-pumpkin muffin, a latte, and two large bowls of water. Tess's usual orders were known all over Baltimore, from the mozzarella en carozza at the Brass Elephant to the lamb lawand at the Helmand and the veal scallopine at Pazza Luna. Ruts weren't ruts if you varied them, Tess had reasoned.

  Pearl's was new to Baltimore, and Tess had been prepared to object to it on principle, the principle being that three-dollar muffins might be the final straw in a wave of gentrification that would price her out of her Butchers Hill office. But the small cafe, which was as cheerful as its waitstaff was sullen, was simply too convenient to ignore. And it wasn't a franchise, Tess reminded herself every time she dropped six dollars for her afternoon snack. She was supporting a local merchant, a dog-friendly one who served bird-friendly coffee and appeared to have a thing for shorthaired German pointers. How else to explain the small bookshelf that held nothing but Robert B. Parker novels?

  She spooned up a bit of frothed milk, then held her face up to the sun, trying to be mindful of her good luck. She was outside, unlike Baltimore's office-bound drones. She was her own boss. She was alive, and she had learned the hard way not to take that for granted. Persuaded, she turned on the clam-shaped plastic monster that ran her life and, through a technology she couldn't begin to understand, grabbed an open line from thin air and jumped into cyberspace via WiFi.