Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  “Why would you want to do that?” Tess asked.

  “’Cuz a few bad trainers can’t be bothered to do the right thing when the dogs can’t race no more. They’d just as soon kill ’em and dump ’em. The ear tattoos make that hard to do.”

  “So who was Esskay’s trainer? How do we track her number?”

  “You can’t. That’s what I’m tellin’ ya.” Tommy ran his finger over the smooth skin inside the dog’s left ear. “Someone put a new tattoo on this dog, a home-made job like you see in prison. See? Where this dog once had numbers, all she has now is these red Xs. It’s like filing down the serial number on a car or a TV set. Untraceable.”

  Tess looked at the crude markings inside both ears. Although a vivid red, they would be easy to miss unless you knew to look for them, or spent a lot of time playing with a dog’s ears, something Tess was not inclined to do. Esskay’s breath had kept even Crow from going nose to nose with the dog. The marks still looked a little raw, and there were tiny scabs. It must have been painful, being on the receiving end of a tattoo gouged with penknife and filled in with ballpoint. No wonder Esskay had been so fearful at first.

  “Okay, so you cover up the dog’s tattoo and no one knows who it belongs to. Seems like a lot of work to dump some racing dog. And this dog is still alive. So what does it all mean?”

  “That,” Tommy sighed, “is what Spike and only Spike knows. Look where it got him. You know what? He did say ignorance is piss. Ignorance is piss, and knowledge ain’t shit, that’s exactly what he said the last time I talked to him.”

  Armed with Tommy’s tissue-thin leads, Tess headed to the Beacon-Light, figuring its computer databases could help narrow her search. But Tommy’s scraps led nowhere fast. In the Beacon-Light’s Nexis account, Tess searched for “greyhound” and “ears” in various combinations, but found only a few stories from the country’s major newspapers, most of which recounted successful rescue efforts. There was no Jim Parlez at all in the court files, no matter how she spelled it, and no possible explanation for why someone would go to so much trouble to change a greyhound’s tattoo.

  As for the MVA, its records claimed there were no salmon Buicks in all of Maryland, and there were too many brown ones to count. That didn’t surprise her: the car had probably been stolen, then hastily painted so it was as untraceable as the greyhound its occupants sought. The only thing left to do was to go to the courthouse and feed Parlez’s name through the computers there, just in case he had a record that predated the Blight’s system, which only went back to the late ’80s. Spike’s associates usually had had at least one brush with the city’s criminal system, although Spike himself had never been caught doing anything illegal.

  Baltimore’s Clarence Mitchell courthouse is an unspeakably sad place, a limestone-and-marble reminder of how innocent the city had once been. Imagine the folly of a public building with entrances on four sides, as if people could be trusted to come and go at will, without passing through metal detectors and opening purses and briefcases in front of armed guards.

  Tess surrendered her Swiss Army knife to the security guard. Now her only problem was to figure out where to go. Normally, she would have relied on Feeney to walk her through the circuit court computer files. But some newbie she didn’t know was filling in for Feeney while he continued to chase basketballs and millionaires. Tess was on her own.

  She fed Parlez into the criminal system. No dice. She then tried the civil system, but still came up snake eyes. Tommy had probably mangled the name beyond recognition. For all she knew, she was really looking for Hervé, St. Tropez, or Parsley.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am?”

  Unaccustomed to being ma’amed, Tess didn’t respond to the earnest young voice until she felt a tentative tap on her shoulder. She turned to face a nervous young man with an amazing mane of bushy brown hair falling to his waist. Despite temperatures in the forties, he wore only a denim jacket over a faded black T-shirt.

  “I don’t work here,” Tess snapped. Why did people always assume a woman was a clerk, ready to serve?

  “Oh.” He looked forlornly at the computer next to her. “I just thought you might be able to tell me if you can find divorces here. I’m looking up my wife.”

  “Shouldn’t you know if your wife has gotten a divorce?”

  “Yeah, sure—if it was from me. I need to find out if she ever got one from her first husband. I’m her second husband. She’s Mrs. Roger Hehnke now.” He thumped his chest with his index finger. “I’m Mr. Roger Hehnke.”

  Disarmed by his pride in acquiring a wife, Tess showed Mr. Roger Hehnke how to look for the file. She was glad she did. It was gratifying to hear his relieved giggle when he found his wife had remembered to end the first union before starting a second—at least, in the legal sense.

  “See, her first marriage ended on April second last year, and we got married on April fifth. Our baby wasn’t born until May, so we’re totally cool.”

  “Congratulations.” Mr. Roger Hehnke didn’t look old enough to drive, but you didn’t need a driver’s license or a high school diploma to be a father in Maryland. Unless you planned to marry, which required one be at least eighteen or sixteen with parental consent. By local standards, Mr. Roger Hehnke was quaintly old-fashioned.

  “Thanks. Hey, you know how the first anniversary is paper? Would tickets count? I thought if Hammerjacks had a band that night, we could go there.”

  “That’s good, but I think you should take her to dinner, too.”

  “Oh, of course. We’re going to Chi-Chi’s. And we’re gonna have the gold margaritas, the ones they make with the good tequila. They cost five dollars!” Mr. Roger Hehnke held up his palm and Tess high-fived him, thinking: I hope it lasts forever. But I give you three years at the outside.

  Who would she have married at age eighteen? Joel. Joel Goodwin. A neighborhood boy she had chosen precisely because he seemed so safe and pliable, someone with whom to practice sex and love before she left for college. Today, she probably wouldn’t recognize him if he passed her on the street.

  How long had Wink and his first wife lasted? It was of no concern to her; she had kept her bargain with Sterling and didn’t have to worry about Wink any more. Still, Tess found herself tapping out Wynkowski’s full name, if only because she longed to have something to show for her field trip to the courthouse. At least she knew Wink’s name wouldn’t disappoint.

  Sure enough, dozens of files came up, most of them the civil suits Feeney had documented. Wink had sued and been sued, in that never-ending shell game some sleazy businessmen played. Tess had to go back almost fifteen years to find the case she wanted, Wynkowski v. Wynkowski. She wrote down the number, then asked the clerk for the complete file.

  The file was thick with papers, but in the end it shed little light on the marriage or its dissolution. Linda had petitioned for the divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences and mental cruelty, but made no mention of Wink’s physical cruelty. Well, alimony was more common at the time; maybe Linda didn’t need to drag Wink through the dirt to get the financial settlement she wanted. Although the two had no children, she was to receive $500 a month, as long as she lived. That wasn’t so much. What had Lea been complaining about?

  Tess paged through the file. There was a revised order from five years ago, upping the alimony order to $20,000 a month. And the revised order included a rider that stipulated that in the event of Wink’s death, his estate would continue to support Linda through an irrevocable trust, an annuity independent of any life insurance policy. So the first Mrs. Wink was better off than the second, since Wink had killed himself.

  She looked at the date again. Right around the time Wink had remarried. Was Wink afraid his first wife would scuttle his marriage to Lea if he didn’t give her what she wanted? Had the first Mrs. Wink used his abuse to blackmail him into higher payments? And once the abuse became public knowledge, did Wink no longer have a reason to honor this commitment?

  Tess checked Wink’
s name in the criminal system. He had no record for assault, but that wasn’t a surprise. Prosecutors had only recently started pursuing cases where wives wouldn’t testify against abusive husbands. The city police department hadn’t even kept separate statistics on domestic violence until 1994. During Wink’s first marriage, it was likely that the cops who’d answered calls to the house hadn’t considered domestic violence a crime. They had probably taken Mrs. Wink’s statement, then taken a beer from Wink, laughing with him. Dames, Broads. Bet she was on her period.

  What had really happened between Wink and his first wife? Kitty, who had been married for exactly six weeks in her twenties and seldom spoke of it unless she had too much to drink, liked to say there were only two people who knew the truth about any marriage.

  In Wink’s case, there was now only one.

  Chapter 18

  There were only two Wynkowskis listed in the Baltimore phone book and Tess had already made the acquaintance of the first. The second, Linda Stolley Wynkowski, lived in Cross Keys, one of the city’s first gated communities. An understated cluster of townhouses and high-rise condos on the city’s north side, Cross Keys over the years had attracted such disparate individuals as John Dos Passos, onetime NAACP director Ben Chavis, and—most impressive to Tess—the original Romper Room teacher, Miss Nancy. Tess still had a soft spot for Romper Room, despite the fact that the Magic Mirror never saw a Tess, or even a Theresa, in all the years she watched.

  She had not called ahead. It was so much harder to say no to a face than it was to a voice, especially someone who looked as harmless as Tess. Her mother might have despaired of her hair and clothes, but mild dishevelment worked for Tess. She looked like a jock, or jockette, and people equated jocks with stupidity, or at least a certain rah-rah thickness. It wasn’t flattering for people to assume you were dumb, but it was often an advantage.

  Sure enough, the building’s front desk clerk—Karl the concierge, according to his name tag—was positively chummy when Tess asked him to ring Mrs. Wynkowski’s apartment.

  “I should have made an appointment, but I happened to be in the area and it is terribly urgent,” she said, then lowered her voice. “It’s about her ex-husband’s will.”

  As she had hoped, the concierge was the type of young man who loved being taken into one’s confidence.

  “You just missed her,” he said in an affected, campy voice, his eyebrows twitching in a way that suggested his every utterance arrived with an overcoat of irony. “Wednesday is Octavia day.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “At least, I think it’s Octavia day. Or is it Ruth Shaw day? I do have trouble keeping them straight.”

  “She alternates Octavia and Ruth Shaw,” said the doorman, who was leaning against the front desk, seeking refuge from the day’s sleety rains. “Octavia or Ruth Shaw on Wednesday, Jones & Jones Thursday, the shoe store on Friday, Betty Cooke jewelry from the Store, Ltd., on Saturday. I know because she always has the packages dropped off later, and I have to carry ’em up to her apartment.”

  “And on the seventh day, she rests,” Karl said. “But only because the stores in Cross Keys are closed on Sunday.”

  “The malls are open,” Tess said. “If she’s such a shopaholic, she could go find plenty of other places to go.”

  “True, in theory,” Karl the concierge said. “But in practice, Miz Rhymes-with-Witch never leaves Cross Keys. Hasn’t been off the reservation in years, to my knowledge. Says everything one needs can be found right here—shops, restaurants, the tennis barn. Doesn’t need a gas station because she never takes her car out of the garage. And she may be the only person in America who doesn’t own a VCR, because you can’t rent videotapes in Cross Keys. Thank God for cable and pay-per-view, or she wouldn’t even know who Brad Pitt is, and that would be truly tragic.”

  Tess glanced at a framed Christmas photograph of Karl, a heavy-set woman, and five children who favored him, with their lean builds and mean little mouths.

  “I’m getting the impression you don’t like Mrs. Wynkowski very much,” she said.

  “Moi? Dislike anyone? Why, I adore the woman, especially at Christmastime, when she gives me ten whole dollars for all the little extra services she expects through the year. You trot over to Octavia and I’m sure you’ll see just how charming Miz Rhymes-With-Hunt Cup can be.”

  The shopping center at the heart of Cross Keys was small and set on an open plaza, an arrangement that seemed quaint and dated in this age of malls. Tess did not see how its dozen or so shops could keep one busy for a single day, much less fill six days a week.

  There were no customers in Octavia and the sales clerks were too dispirited by the gloomy day to force themselves on Tess. She held a plain black dress in front of her, glancing at its price tag. Too rich for her blood, but then, she wasn’t guaranteed $20,000 a month for life. As she returned the dress to the rack, a frosted, frosty blonde stalked out of the dressing room in a bright turquoise suit and stocking feet.

  “Marianna,” the blonde whined. “Marianna, this doesn’t hang right. The jacket should be more fitted through the waist, don’t you think?”

  “Would you like to have it altered, Mrs. Wynkowski? You know we’re always glad to have alterations done for you.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure the color is right, either. And it feels awfully heavy for a summer-weight wool.” Glumly, she walked over to a rack of suits and began shoving the clothes back and forth as if she wanted to punish them for not being exactly what she wanted.

  Studying her, Tess again was struck with the sense that Wink had gotten his wives in the wrong order. Here was what one expected in a second wife—a bottle blonde, pampered and reconfigured. If something could be painted, tugged upward, or filled with plastic, Linda Wynkowski had tended to it. And unlike Lea, her eyes were not red and underscored by black circles. She hadn’t been losing sleep lately.

  “None of these is right,” the first Mrs. Wink muttered to herself. “I hate all these Easter egg colors they’re showing this year.”

  “What about this?” Tess held out the black dress, whose only real distinction was its price. “This would look great on you.”

  The first Mrs. Wink snatched the dress from Tess’s hands. “Not bad,” she agreed. “But I probably have fifteen black dresses. I’m not sure I need another one.”

  Fifteen black dresses, yet she never left Cross Keys? Why did she need even one?

  “You’re Linda Wynkowski, right?” Tess asked. “Actually, I came here looking for you. We need to speak.”

  Linda frowned slightly, then willed her face back into blankness, as if conscious of the wrinkles caused by too much animation.

  “About what?”

  “The annuity, which guarantees your alimony, now that Wink is dead.”

  “Are you from the insurance company? You should be talking to my lawyer, not me. He’ll explain how it works. No matter what else Wink owes, I still get my money. That was the point.”

  Tess allowed the misunderstanding to stand. “His wife says—”

  “The little breeder? She’s nuts. You’d think I’d stolen her husband instead of the other way around, that girl is so jealous of me.” Without a trace of self-consciousness, Linda began disrobing in the store, unbuttoning the turquoise jacket and exposing a royal blue slip with lace inserts. “Look, if you wanna keep talking about this, you better come into the dressing room with me.”

  Tess followed Linda to a curtained cubicle with a chintz-covered chair and at least a dozen outfits, most of them wadded up and left on the floor.

  “What’s your problem with Lea?” Tess asked, as Linda quickly stripped down to her camisole and pantyhose. Although thin and surgically improved, her body had the soft, oily sheen and consistency of Brie at room temperature. “Your marriage to Wink was long over before she showed up.”

  “I don’t have a problem with her. She has a problem with me.” Linda looked Tess up and down. “Are you one of her lawyers, trying to
figure out how to break the annuity? Don’t waste your time. It’s air-tight. Besides, it’s not my fault Wink offed himself and she won’t get anything from the life insurance. Maybe she should have made him happier, you know what I mean, and then he wouldn’t have been so quick to take a one-way trip in his Mustang.”

  Tess decided trying to fake an identity would be too complicated. “I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not from an insurance company. I work for the Beacon-Light, where I was …double-checking some of the files on your husband today. I saw your alimony had been increased several years after the original divorce decree. That’s a pretty unusual arrangement, and I thought there might be some explanation.”

  Linda slipped a cashmere turtleneck over her head, then stepped into a knee-length plaid skirt, apparently her own. “Let’s just say Wink finally did the right thing by me. About five years ago, I was diagnosed as an agoraphobic and couldn’t work anymore. He came through for me. I asked him to set up the trust because I always had a hunch Wink would die before I did. I didn’t expect it to happen this soon.”

  “Lea told me she and Wink were really strapped. She thought you might have coerced him into signing that agreement.”

  “Lea shouldn’t try and think,” Linda said. “She’ll get dents in her adorable young forehead.”

  “Did Wink threaten to cut you off after the story came out and the secrets of your marriage were exposed? Did he tell you all bets were off?”

  Linda Wynkowski smiled strangely. “If anything, the stakes were higher than ever after the story came out.”

  “Did you talk to the Beacon-Light? Were you the source?”

  Linda’s eyes remained fixed on her image in the mirror. “Wink and I had an agreement to never discuss our marriage with anyone. I kept my part of it. I told that other girl from the Beacon-Light that I wouldn’t comment at all.”