Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  “Don’t worry, you won’t lose points for drinking in front of me,” Sterling said, again guessing what she was thinking. “I’d love a drink myself, but my metabolism went south when I turned forty. Can’t afford those empty calories.”

  “I guess I do have a pretty good metabolism. Of course, I exercise every day.” Tess was aware she sounded boastful, yet she didn’t stop. She wanted Jack Sterling to know how strong she was, how fast, how firm. “On a typical day, I bet I burn at least a thousand calories from my workouts—rowing in the warm weather months, running and weight lifting year round. That’s five glasses of wine, or almost four packs of Peanut M&Ms.”

  “Well, you look very…healthy,” Sterling said. His naturally pink cheeks turned a little pinker and a dry cough almost choked him. He gulped his club soda, spilling some on his shirt front. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate.”

  Tess wanted to ease his embarrassment, the way he had eased her discomfort earlier. “You don’t know from inappropriate. You should have heard what Wink Wynkowski said to me when I ran into him at the gym.”

  “When was this?”

  “Friday. The day before…” she stopped, flustered.

  “You can say it, Tess. The day before he killed himself, thanks to the Beacon-Light’s enterprising reporters. Maybe I will have a drink after all.”

  The salad arrived, a welcome distraction. Tess watched the waiter as if she had never seen someone toss and cut greens before, then forked up several mouthfuls in a row to avoid saying anything. It seemed tactless to speak of Wink’s death to Sterling, although she wasn’t sure why.

  But Sterling wouldn’t let her off the hook.

  “Did we do it, Tess? Did the paper, in its zeal for a story, kill a man?”

  “Of course not. You didn’t know—you couldn’t have known what he would do when the story ran. It’s no different than what happened with Newsweek and Admiral Boorda. Wink made himself out to be such a tough guy. Who knew it was all an act?”

  “Who knows anything about anyone? I’m burning out on this business, and on the glib explanations we offer up for everything, as if we could ever really know a man’s soul. I’m no longer so confident I know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m not even sure Wink’s crimes are relevant. Wink Wynkowski left behind a wife and three children under the age of five. How do I weigh their pain against the readers’ ‘right to know’?”

  The entrees and side dishes arrived, along with a bourbon and water for Sterling. Although she knew form past experience how hot the potatoes were, Tess plucked a cube from the yellow-orange cheese sauce, which had tiny grease bubbles on the surface. Sure enough, it burned the roof of her mouth.

  Sterling stared glumly at his food. “I think about his widow a lot. I wonder if she spoke to him Saturday, if he told her what he was going to do. I wonder if she knew about the story before it was in the paper. Had Wink ever confided in her? Had he ever confided in anyone about his past?”

  “Are Feeney and Rosita working on a Sunday story about how it…happened?”

  “No—not if I have anything to say about it. I’m not worried about answering these questions for the Beacon-Light. I want to know for myself, for my conscience. But Mrs. Wynkowski’s not talking to anyone. I’ll never know how she feels or what she’s thinking.”

  Tess sliced off a piece of pork, chasing it with another potato cube. Still hot, but no longer lethal. “What if someone intervened, asked her a few questions? Questions you wanted asked.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “I would, if it counted toward my six hours daily of indentured servitude. I can’t take being on such a tight leash, Jack. I’m probably in trouble right now for not checking out with Colleen’s secretary before I went to lunch. Maybe if you told Colleen I was talking to Mrs. Wynkowski on your behalf…”

  “Why would Lea Wynkowski talk to you?”

  “Because I’m not a reporter. Which means I can misrepresent myself, becoming someone she might like, someone she would want to confide in.”

  When Sterling smiled, really smiled, his grin split his face like the crack in a cheap watermelon. “I think I know now why Whitney is so devoted to you. I couldn’t see it at first. The two of you seem so different, but you both have a devious side.”

  Tess probed the roof of her burned mouth with her tongue. Comparisons to Whitney seared in a way no potato could. “Are you saying you’re surprised we’re friends because she’s gorgeous, rich, and successful, and I’m a plain, poor failure?”

  “Don’t beg for compliments,” Sterling said, wagging his fork at her, still smiling broadly. The color in his cheeks was even higher than usual, perhaps because of his drink, and his hair was falling in his eyes again. Tess had a sudden desire to push it back. “You’re both good-looking women, and I suspect you know that. Which is the main reason I find your friendship intriguing. Most attractive women pick plain friends.”

  “Smart women prefer beautiful friends: you meet more men that way, especially if you complement one another. I’ve met a lot of my boyfriends through Whitney.”

  “Including Jonathan Ross?”

  The name, the too-casual way Sterling used it, made something catch in Tess’s throat. Before his death, Jonathan Ross had been one of the Blight’s star reporters. Obviously, Sterling would know that. He also had once been Tess’s boyfriend, and she wondered if Sterling had learned this as well. She saw Jonathan again, the way she saw him in her nightmares, in clumsy flight over Bond Street. He had saved her life, losing his in the process. Not my fault, she reminded herself. Not my fault.

  “Jonathan and I worked together at the Star years ago, then he moved to the Beacon-Light. We were friends, Whitney, Jonathan, and I. Friends. Men and women can be, you know.”

  “Sometimes I think Whitney would like to be a man.”

  “Whitney would like all the opportunities open to men. There’s a difference.”

  Sterling didn’t pick up on her dig. “Whitney reminds me of a man in one of those English hunting prints. I always expect her to stride into my office one day, a riding crop in one hand and a dead fox in the other. I’ve never really liked those blueblood types. Something androgynous there. You’re actually more feminine, even if you do spend a lot of time trying to hide it.” He turned pink again. “Sorry. There I go again, being inappropriate.”

  “More bizarre than inappropriate. Whitney’s not mannish at all.”

  “I’ve been known to hold minority opinions before. I didn’t get where I am by embracing the conventional wisdom.”

  “Obviously. The conventional wisdom is that you should let the widow Wink alone.”

  “I know.” He shook his head. “I know. But I have to find out how she’s doing, Tess. Won’t you talk to her for me? I’ll get the okay from Lionel, so you don’t have to worry about Cory any more. Whitney told me you’re trying to figure out what happened to your uncle. Do this for me, and you have carte blanche to come and go as you please for the next two weeks.”

  Tess raised her glass. “To unconventional wisdom.”

  Chapter 14

  It was almost 2 o’clock when Tess finished scraping the last bit of hot fudge from her ice cream bowl. Sterling, who had faded during the main course, watched with a slightly stunned look that might pass for admiration. Together they walked back to the paper, where her car was now safely parked in the visitors’ lot behind the building.

  “The shit-and-salmon gang,” she said out loud, remembering the brown Buick’s original color, outlandish enough so it might be possible to track the model and make through MVA. How many salmon-colored Buicks could there be in Maryland? Then again, they’d probably have a new car the next time she saw them.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just a stray thought. My brain sometimes doesn’t process a piece of information for days, but it never lets go of anything.”

  She felt a little giddy, as if returning from an unusually good first date, and had to remind herself not
to seize Sterling’s arm or touch him in any way. Wine at midday, even one glass, made the world a dangerously warm and tender place.

  They had agreed, somewhere over her dessert course, that she should start the new assignment immediately, going to call on the widow Wink this afternoon.

  “Their house is in that new development out Reisters-town Road,” Sterling told her when they reached the Blight. “The Cotswolds, I think. Or Tudor Village. Something English. He lives on Tea Rose Lane. I always remember that detail from the stories, because I thought it was funny, a tough guy who grew up in Violetville, then ended up on Tea Rose Lane. But I don’t have the number. Come upstairs and I’ll get it for you.”

  “No, I don’t want to run the risk of entering Colleen’s field of vision. She’s like one of those big dinosaurs, the kind who can’t attack unless she sees you moving. I’ve got a map in my car which should get me to Tea Rose. Then all I have to do is look for the place with a lawn trampled by all those camera crews. I may make one stop en route, pick up a little something I might have to put on my expense account. Is that okay?”

  “Whatever you need,” Sterling assured her.

  Whatever?

  The Costwolds seemed to feature every kind of architecture except for the modest cottages found in the part of England from which it took its name. The lots were deep but narrow. Huge houses crowded up against one another, almost as close as the city rowhouses the residents had fled. After a few wrong turns, Tess found Tea Rose, a looping cul de sac off the main road, Cotswold Circle. Her joke about the camera crews had been prescient. Although all the lawns here were still winter-brown, the yard at number seven had a particularly hopeless look to it.

  After several seconds of scrutiny through a fisheye in the huge oak door, Lea Wynkowski opened the door.

  “Yes?” she asked, eyes and voice dull.

  “Mrs. Wynkowski? I’m Sylvia Weinstein, from Weinstein’s Jewelers in Pikesville.” The lie almost made her lips pucker, as tight and unapproving as the lips of the real Sylvia Weinstein, widely believed to have been born with a lemon wedge in her mouth. Tess could think of few people she’d less like to be than her aunt. But she did exist, and she worked alongside Uncle Jules in his Pikesville store when the mood struck her, or when she wasn’t in Boca Raton. Her story would check out, if anyone thought to check it out.

  “Honestly, I don’t have as much money as everyone thinks I do,” Lea said. “Even if I did, I’m not exactly in the market for jewelry right now.”

  “But I’m here to bring you something, Mrs. Wynkowski, something Wink had been planning to give you. He stopped in the store last week and said he would pick it up after the weekend. It’s paid in full, it’s only right you have it.”

  She pulled out a box and showed Lea the simple gold bracelet inside. More than $100, even at cost, but she had told Uncle Jules to bill it directly to the Blight. She’d like to see Colleen Reganhart’s face when that expense came through for authorization.

  “Kinda plain, for Wink’s taste,” Lea said dubiously. “Did he say why he was buying it?”

  “Just because—just because he loved you.”

  To Tess’s horror, Lea burst into tears and embraced her.

  “I’m sorry, it’s only that it’s exactly what I would have picked out for myself,” Lea said, wiping her nose on the sleeve of a butter-yellow sweater, then grabbing Tess again. “I guess Wink finally noticed I didn’t wear that fancy stuff he was always giving me. Good thing. I’ll probably have to hock most of them now.”

  Money was certainly on her mind, Tess noticed. “Are you having, uh, financial difficulties?”

  “We’re having financial catastrophes. Wink had a five-million-dollar insurance policy, but it doesn’t pay off in the event of suicide. By the time you figure closing costs on this place, I’ll lose what little equity we have in it. I could sell the business. But the business isn’t worth anything without the basketball team, and there’s no guarantee there will be a basketball team, or I’ll get a piece of it if there is.”

  “Shit.”

  “You can say that again. Hey, you want a cup of coffee or something?” Lea asked. “My mom took the kids out for the afternoon so I could be alone for a little while. Although it helps a little, being so busy with the kids. Between cookies and diaper changes, I don’t have much time to feel sorry for myself.”

  “How many children do you have?” Tess asked, as she followed Lea to the rear of the house.

  “Three. Three kids in four years. What was I thinking? What was Wink thinking?”

  A family room as large as a hotel lobby ran across the back of the house. Tess suppressed a smirk at the needle-point pillows along the sofa, adorned with Springsteen titles: “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart,” and “She’s the One.”

  Tess could see how Lea Wynkowski might inspire that last sentiment. Young and fresh looking, she had the kind of beauty that stood up to crying jags and insomnia. Large brown eyes, brown hair a shade lighter, with the shine and bounce of hair in a shampoo commercial. She wore blue jeans, a yellow cotton sweater over a white T-shirt, yellow socks, and no shoes, and she looked better than most women would in couture clothes. Tess had thought men who traded in their first wives went for high-maintenance types the second time around. Lea looked like a first wife, or someone’s high school sweetheart. She could be the girl in an early Bruce Springsteen song, lured onto a motorcycle and out of town, knocked up and abandoned. Instead, she was living out the lyrics to “Hungry Heart”—the part about the wife and kids back in Baltimore, left by the guy who went out for a ride and never came back. In his own way, Wink had done just that.

  “How are you holding up?” Tess asked. Her sympathy wasn’t fake—if anything, the wretched success of her bracelet trick made her feel she owed Lea Wynkowski true compassion.

  “I’m not,” Lea said. She opened a wooden-and-copper box on the low, distressed pine table in front of her and took out a cigarette. She didn’t light the cigarette but held it in her right hand, twirling it like a miniature baton. “I’m in a million little pieces—one for every dollar Wink didn’t leave us.”

  “Your doctor could write a prescription for a sedative.”

  “I don’t want to be sedated. I want to feel what I’m feeling.”

  “What are you feeling?”

  “Pissed.” Lea smiled at Tess’s surprise. “I know it doesn’t sound very elegant, and it’s not in any of those grief books my mother keeps bringing me, but it’s what I am. I’m pissed. Furious with Wink for what he did to us.”

  She sniffed the cigarette she was holding, then placed it back in the box. “I gave up smoking the first time I got pregnant, but I never stopped missing it.”

  “Me, either,” Tess said, willing to say anything to find common ground with this strange young woman. Lea’s grief was sincere enough, but it was shot through with something darker, something disturbing.

  “You have kids?”

  “Uh, no, but I gave up cigarettes.” Not even this was true. It was one of the few vices Tess had skipped along the way.

  “Then you can’t know how weird it is. Killing yourself, I mean, when you’ve got three kids. He loved our girls. He would have killed anyone who hurt them, but now he’s hurt them more than anybody else could. I wish I could ask him why.”

  “Where did you two meet?”

  “In Atlantic City. Tooch—Paul Tucci, his best friend—introduced us. Tucci’s the one who really likes to gamble, not Wink. But I was a blackjack dealer, so he played blackjack. Won a date with me on a bet. We got married six months later. We would have gotten married even sooner, but—”

  “But?”

  “But we didn’t,” she said flatly.

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “Friday, in the afternoon. He called me at my mom’s house in Jersey. Whenever I went away, he called me every day. He was devoted to me.”

  Yes, a devoted husband, checking in by phone when he wasn’t
making passes at other women.

  “When did you hear about what was in the paper on Sunday?”

  “Not until Sunday night, after I got back. I don’t know why Wink killed himself over it. That guy who died—I mean, so he had a bad heart. He could have died if some kid jumped out of a closet and said ‘Boo.’ It wasn’t Wink’s fault.”

  Tess picked her words carefully as possible. “According to the account in the paper, Wink stood over the guy and pistol-whipped him, then bragged about it.”

  “That’s not true. Wink couldn’t have done something like that. He’s—he was—a pussycat. A sweetie. Anyone who ever knew him loved him.”

  She stood up and walked over to a large pine armoire, which Tess knew would store the requisite electronic toys. Sure enough, the doors opened to reveal a large TV, stereo, VCR, laser disc player, and two shelves of videotapes. Lea reached behind the videos on the lowest shelf and pulled out a slim book bound in bright blue. Tess read the white lettering on the spine: The Happy Wanderer.

  “This is Wink’s yearbook from junior high. Before he…went away,” Lea said. “He never knew I had it. I found it in his stuff, and I liked to look at it sometimes. Sometimes I wish we were the same age, that we had started going together in sixth grade and been together forever. I would have been good for him.”

  She handed Tess the book, and its well-worn spine opened automatically to a photograph of Wink, taken with the basketball team. He had been even scrawnier then, but his hair had been close-cropped, so you couldn’t tell how curly it was. What an unfashionable hairdo, among the bushy locks and sideburns of the early ’70s. Most of the boys looked like they were werewolves, caught in mid-transformation.

  “And look here,” Lea said, leaning over Tess and turning to the frontspiece. “Look at the things the kids wrote, boys and girls. They all loved him.” She traced her fingers over the faded ink. “Right back here and out of sight/I sign my name just for spite.” “Make no friends/But keep the old/One is silver/but the other’s gold. You’re golden, Wink. RGJH 4-ever.” “That means Rock Glen Junior High forever.” “Love, Lynette.” Someone else, presumably a boy, had signed nearby, “Silver and gold. Gag me. Ray-ray.”