Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  Jesus, Tess thought, all roads led to Rosita, at least in her mind. The domestic violence was sweetly salacious, and the gambling could be a huge stumbling block, but that was nothing but hearsay. The financial angle was the real story.

  “Are you from Texas?”

  “Texas? Oh, because of San Antonio. God, no. I spent one year and seven months in that godforsaken place and it seemed as if the temperature was above ninety for all but three days. I’m from New England. I like seasons, and I prefer cool ones to hot ones.”

  “Baltimore’s summers are pretty wicked.”

  “Yeah, and the winters are wimpy, with people going crazy at the sight of the first snowflake. It’s still an improvement, for now. I’ll get to the Globe yet.”

  “Just the Globe? Why not the New York Times or the Washington Post?” Why not the Vatican?

  For all her instructions on how to conduct an interview, Rosita wasn’t a very good listener. “What I really need to do is get back into sportswriting. It’s still something of a novelty act, the woman in the locker room. Some 22-year-old in overalls won a Pulitzer this year for an umpire story, for Christ’s sake. No, there aren’t many more female sportswriters than there were ten years ago. The difference is, editors don’t feel as guilt-ridden about it.

  “You sound like one of those people with a five-year plan you update every December thirty-first.”

  “I am. Two five-year plans, actually, one for work and one for my alleged personal life. Work is proving to be more manageable.” Her smile this time wasn’t her usual fake grin. It was tiny and rueful, fading away quickly, the Cheshire Cat in reverse. She glanced past Tess, who followed her eyes to the clock in the kitchen gallery. No wonder Tess had cats on the brain: the clock was one of those insanely grinning Kit-Kat Klock tchotchkes, sequined tail swinging back and forth in time with round eyes that cased the room.

  “Look, I really don’t have any more time for this,” Rosita said abruptly.

  “Sorry, you obviously have plans. Big date?”

  “No, no, just dinner with a friend. You know, the usual unattached single woman’s routine for a Saturday night. Are you married?”

  “God, no,” Tess said.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Sort of. I mean yes, yes I do. In fact, his band is playing tonight, so I have to go do the band member’s girlfriend thing. Stand in a crowd, stare adoringly at him.”

  “In my experience, it doesn’t matter what your boyfriend does. Sooner or later, you’re expected to stand in a crowd and stare at him adoringly.” Rosita almost seemed likable to Tess now. She was sharp, she had a certain wit. Then she reverted to being merely sharp. “Of course in Baltimore, there are no available men, not if you have standards. I’d rather be dateless.”

  With someone else, it might have been mere tactlessness. In this case, there was no doubt the remark was deliberately waspish, an intentional implication that Tess did not have standards.

  “Protect those toenails. I’ll let myself out.”

  It was dark now along University Parkway and Tess, a born voyeur, glanced into lighted windows as she walked to her car. This stretch of buildings was older than Rosita’s tower, with the elegant touches once common to the city’s apartments—dark wood paneling, high ceilings, crown moldings. Why did people’s lives, captured on the sly like this, look so enticing, like old photographs unearthed in an antique store? Tess caught glimpses of women her age, yet so much more polished looking in their real Saturday night date clothes. She saw their men, in jackets and ties. Grown-ups, headed to restaurants and Center Stage, perhaps the symphony. And where was she going to be on Saturday night? Lost in the funhouse of the Floating Opera until the wee small hours of the morning, keeping company with wee small minds.

  Chapter 10

  “How much do you weigh?”

  The voice, thin and high, interrupted Tess’s reverie. She was keeping herself awake by coming up with new nicknames for Baltimore neighborhoods. They were in an old ballroom in SoWeBo, Southwest Baltimore, once home to H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe, now home to restaurants like Mencken’s Cultured Pearl and the Telltale Hearth. But how about SoO (South of Orioles Park at Camden Yard) or SoPoeBo, near where Poe was buried? So-SoBo, which could encompass the isolated south side neighborhoods. It was a mark of how tired she was that this seemed incredibly witty.

  “What?” she asked groggily, stealing a look at her watch. Almost 3 A.M., up for twenty hours. She had caught a second wind about 11, over Afghan food followed by a round of Galliano liqueur. She was reasonably sure the Galliano was not authentically Afghani, but it had made a nice kicker. The licorice-like syrup reminded her of prescription cold medicines, the old-fashioned kind that really made the pain go away for a while. And it had kept her going through the first three bands, but it was wearing off now, just when she needed to radiate the kind of mindless devotion and appreciation expected of a Musician’s Girlfriend. Not to mention a certain proprietary zeal. While her mouth smiled at Crow, her eyes were suppose to flash “no poaching” signals to all the females present. It took a lot of energy, this Musician’s Girlfriend gig. But she really did care about Crow, who was possibly the nicest man she had ever known. And he would get over being twenty-three. After all, she had.

  “I asked how much you weigh,” the chirpy little voice repeated. It was Maisie, one of her two cohorts in the Poe White Trash Ladies’ Auxiliary. She was sure it was Maisie, because Maisie had the pierced nose. Actually, the nose stud was a fake, a gold ball she attached to her nostril with a small magnet. Maisie’s boyfriend, the bass player, had told Crow, who then shared this useful piece of intelligence with Tess. It allowed her to tell Maisie apart from Lorna, the one who wore those tight little necklaces that appeared to be choking her. But that was probably just wishful thinking on Tess’s part.

  “I don’t know. I don’t own a scale.”

  “She doesn’t own a scale,” Maisie told Lorna, who squealed in delight.

  “What about at the doctor’s office?” This was a familiar topic, but a favorite one, the tyranny of the tiny. Their weight barely registered in the three digits. Lorna could be particularly tiresome, talking about the high-protein shakes she had to drink because pounds just fell off her.

  “I don’t look.”

  “She doesn’t look,” Lorna informed Maisie, giggling.

  “But, like, what if you had to tell someone your weight?” Maisie persisted. “What would you say? Like, if a cop stopped you and wanted to know if you fit the description of some crazy woman who was killing a bunch of people, and she was, like, two hundred pounds?”

  “I’d tell him to lift me over his head and make his best guess.”

  Maisie and Lorna stared at Tess, unsure if this was a joke. With their curveless bodies and fluffy hair, they always reminded her of the not-quite-human girls in some Dr. Seuss stories, Cindy Lou Who carving the roast beast for the Grinch. Tess reminded them of their parents. Al though she had done the math for them several times, they refused to believe she was only nine years older. To them, twenty-nine was Almost Thirty, which was Awfully Close to forty, which meant she was almost their parents’ age, for God’s sake.

  Luckily, Poe White Trash crashed into its opening number just then, so Tess could pretend absolute absorption in the music and ignore Lorna and Maisie. It was not unlike exchanging nails on a chalkboard for longer nails on a chalkboard. Despite Crow’s sweet, true tenor, or perhaps because of it, Poe White Trash was determinedly anti-melodic, chaotic, assaultive. They were loud. Maisie and Lorna couldn’t quite make Tess feel old, but putting that adjective in front of music did the trick.

  When she’d first started going with Crow, she had tried hard to pretend an interest in his musical ambitions, had even trotted out the little intelligence she had gleaned from the city’s almost-progressive radio station, WHFS. Crow had laughed, convincing her she could never keep up, so she might as well fall behind. She wished he would sing just one standard, one ballad, for
her. Sid Vicious had sung “My Way.” No one did “So in Love” better than k.d. lang. Certainly Crow could assay “All the Things You Are.” Or “My Heart Stood Still.” Just once, just for her.

  A stray lyric became audible, probably the result of a malfunctioning sound system, “tongue-kissing the black dog.” Inspired by Esskay? At any rate, it was as close as she would get to a ballad tonight.

  She leaned back against the wall, sending little flakes of lead paint into the air, and took a long drag on her drink. No alcohol was allowed at the Floating Opera, only LSD and various new synthetic potions, so Tess had settled on one of those ubiquitous iced teas that seemed more religion than beverage. Behind her closed eyes, she imagined young people running down a beach, hand in hand, deliriously happy because they had raspberry-flavored iced tea. The boy looked like Crow. The girl was skinny and short. Unlikely as it seemed, she dozed off. It was morning when she opened her eyes again, or some time of day that passed for morning, and Crow’s band was taking a final bow. Time for breakfast.

  Jimmy’s had just opened its doors by the time they returned to Fells Point. Tess was feeling much older than the twenty-nine years Lorna and Maisie found so fascinating. For once, she was glad the waitresses at Jimmy’s automatically served her the same thing, even when she didn’t want it. Today, their presumption saved her from the effort of forming words. Her bagels were on the griddle the second she crossed the doorstep, along with toast for Crow’s egg-and-hash browns plate. Her coffee reached the table before they did. Tess thought of asking for decaf, then decided against it. If she fell asleep now, it would only screw her body up more. Might as well push on through the day and go to bed a little early. Say, at 6 P.M.

  Crow was quiet in the morning, especially after a gig. He chewed ice, drank tea with honey, and skimmed the soft sections of the Beacon-Light while Tess pretended to read the New York Times. Well-kept secret of the news business: Sunday papers were comfortingly soporific, devoid of any real news. The usual words swam before her groggy eyes, as familiar and sweet as lullabies, so familiar as to be meaningless. Bosnia. Pact. GOP. Dow. Future. Remains to be seen.

  Crow crunched a large piece of ice, inhaled it by accident, and started choking. “Sweet shit Jesus,” he said, after coughing it out.

  Tess, who knew that many things could prompt such a response in Crow—an interesting fact about wool-gathering in China, for example—did not react immediately. The soothing gray of the Times had begun to resemble one of those hidden 3-D pictures. The copy swam in front of her eyes so she couldn’t make out the words, only shapes. She was seeing the paper the way Dorie Starnes and Howard Nieman did. Computer coding. Black stuff on white stuff. Big boxes and little boxes.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Crow said, shoving the front page of the Blight toward her. Tess had no problem making words from the bold black lines she saw there.

  WINK WYNKOWSKI FOUND DEAD, APPARENT SUICIDE;

  BEACON-LIGHT HAD UNCOVERED SECRET PAST

  By Kevin V. Feeney

  and Rosita Ruiz

  Beacon-Light staff writers

  Gerald “Wink” Wynkowski was found dead last night, an apparent suicide victim discovered just hours after he had learned the Beacon-Light planned to publish a story about his role in the death of a West Side shopkeeper almost thirty-one years ago.

  Wynkowski was discovered in his running ’65 Mustang about 10:30 in his closed and locked garage. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No note was found, but a Bruce Springsteen song, “Thunder Road,” was playing on the car stereo when police arrived.

  Although Wynkowski had always acknowledged his time at the Montrose School for juvenile offenders, he had characterized his crimes as “one notch up from Andy Hardy—a little vandalism, a little larceny.” Sealed juvenile records had made it impossible to contradict this account before now.

  But a former Baltimore man now living in Georgia told the Beacon-Light this week that Wynkowski had bragged about causing a man’s death while incarcerated at Montrose. The man—who passed a polygraph test, but asked that his name not be revealed because his own delinquency is not widely known among his associates in Georgia—said Wynkowski claimed to have beaten the man to death during a hold-up.

  A source familiar with the state’s juvenile justice system yesterday confirmed that Wynkowski was sent to Montrose on a manslaughter charge, although the circumstances were slightly different. Nathaniel Paige, a shopkeeper on Gold Street, was pistol-whipped during a hold-up there in the summer of 1969, but the official cause of death was a heart attack. Under Maryland law, Wink, who had been involved in several minor crimes before this, was charged with manslaughter.

  Contacted yesterday for comment, Wynkowski said he wanted to speak to his lawyer and would have no statement until Sunday morning. He was found dead 12 hours later, and his lawyer, Michael Ellenham, said he had not been in contact with his client all day.

  Tess skimmed through the rest of the story, but most of its length was devoted to the Georgia interview and a rehashing of what the paper had already reported. She tried to work out the timing in her mind. If police had been called at 10:30, Feeney couldn’t have arrived at the scene before 11—just enough time to call in two paragraphs to the night rewrite, who had done a pretty good job blending the new information into the existing story. Under the circumstances, the Beacon-Light had been lucky to get the story at all.

  “What would you want to be listening to as you die?” asked Crow, for whom all news tended to be abstract, impersonal. “I don’t think I’d pick Springsteen. Yet it would be unseemly to die with Poe White Trash playing. Everyone would assume I did it because I was a failure at my music. The blues would be too obvious, opera too pretentious. Hey, maybe that Chet Baker album you’re always playing. ‘It Could Happen to You.’”

  “Sounds good,” Tess muttered absently, rereading the story in case she had missed anything. No suicide note. Blood alcohol 0.1—too drunk to drive, but not drunk enough to die. Cause of death pending toxicology reports, due in two weeks, but that was a pro forma check for drugs that the blood test would have missed. Mrs. Wynkowski and the children were at her mother’s place in New Jersey, where they had been spending the weekend.

  Tess and Crow sat in silence, except for the occasional cracking sound from his mouthful of ice. So one of the city’s longest winning streaks had come to an end in a chugging Mustang, with a soundtrack by Bruce Springsteen. Tess knew she should be thinking deep thoughts about the past and personal responsibility, about what it was like for a beloved figure to face the loss of the public adoration he enjoyed.

  But all she could wonder was if she still had a contract with the Beacon-Light.

  Chapter 11

  When Tess switched on her computer at the Beacon-Light Monday morning, she found three messages waiting: a perfunctory note from Dorie Starnes about basic computer commands she might need, another lunch invitation from Guy Whitman, and a polite, professional welcome from Jack Sterling. “Welcome aboard,” he had written. “Let me know if I can do anything.” Sent on Friday afternoon. Did the offer still stand? And was there anything personal to be gleaned from the impersonal words? Even as she was deconstructing his first message, another notice from him flashed across the top of her screen: “U there? 10:30 pre-meeting to daily 11 o’clock in Colleen’s second office. BE THERE. But U didn’t hear it from me.”

  Like all newspaper editors, the Blight bosses met constantly, in various sets and subsets. There were two news meetings a day, one feature meeting, two metro meetings, a Page One meeting, and a sports meeting. When the editors weren’t in formal meetings, they were in informal ones, dashing into offices and shutting doors to whisper conspiratorially. The 11 o’clock was the first news meeting of the day, mandatory for all department heads. But what was a pre-meeting? And where was Colleen’s second office? Jack Sterling gave her too much credit, Tess thought, dialing Whitney’s extension.

  “This is Whitney Talbot.” Tess waited a second, uns
ure if she had reached a real person. Whitney was one of those people who sounded exactly like her voice mail.

  “Well, is someone there?” Whitney snapped impatiently.

  “Hey, it’s Tess. I’m here. But I’m not sure for how long. I’ve just been summoned to Colleen Reganhart’s second office, whatever that is.”

  “Look, Reganhart might act as if she has the authority to dump you, but she doesn’t. Only Lionel or Five-Four can terminate you. Don’t let her bluff you.” Whitney actually sounded concerned, as if Tess were still an under-employed bookstore clerk who needed the Blight’s fee to keep body and soul together.

  “Don’t worry, I have a little advantage where that’s concerned. But I’m not sure what I can do for the Blight, with the union on my back and Wink dead. Obviously, he’s not going to bring suit now, so what’s the point?”

  “You were hired to look into the computer sabotage, remember? Wink’s death doesn’t change the fact that someone, most likely Rosita, compromised the paper’s integrity. What would the paper look like if every reporter greased the skids for her pet project?”

  “Look, I’d better find this meeting. Where can I find Reganhart?”

  “On the fourth floor, behind the door marked ‘Ladies,’ an irony that quickly becomes apparent in any prolonged discussion with Colleen Reganhart.”

  The fourth-floor women’s bathroom was a suite with a large anteroom separated from the facilities by the kind of double doors usually associated with saloons. Tess, pushing her way into the sitting area at 10:25, reflected that the size, placement, and fixtures of such restrooms could give future archaeologists much to ponder about the late twentieth-century workplace.