Charm City

by Laura Lippman

  Chapter 24

  Tess was too anxious to take the time necessary to wrestle Esskay up three flights of stairs and settle her down with water, supper, and a post-walk treat. Friday was grocery shopping night in the Monaghan household, a time-consuming ritual in which Judith and Patrick worked the aisles at the Giant side by side, picking fights over virtually every item. Creamed corn, pro or con? Was there really a difference between name brand toilet paper and the generic store brand? But now it was almost eight, which meant Tess had less than an hour until they returned. It would be better to find whatever Spike had hidden, take it, and leave, allowing her parents to remain in blissful ignorance.

  She parked on the street and walked up the driveway, Esskay trotting happily alongside her, just pleased to be in on this adventure. The garage was padlocked, but the side entrance, where her mother kept her potting bench and gardening tools, was always open.

  Inside, the naked sixty-watt bulb wasn’t a match for anything past dusk, and the corners of the shed were lost in gray shadows that made every shape sinister and suspect. Ten plastic garbage bags sat in the back like huge toad-stools, fat and poisonous. She opened one, sniffing. The fragrance was sharper than whatever Crow had been using, but this was definitely mulch. Now what?

  She plunged her arm into the elbow, then to the shoulder, fingers wiggling in search of anything that was not mulch. It might be hard or soft, as big as a gold brick, as small as a diamond ring. Again and again, eight times in all, she repeated the exercise, coming up with nothing more than a sleeve loamy with traces of tree bark. But on the ninth bag, the mulch was only a soft, shallow cover for something harder. A handful of little triangles, dried and stiff, like misshapen tortilla chips.

  Curious, she pulled a few out. Esskay sniffed experimentally, then backed away, whimpering strangely. Tess held the triangles closer to the light. No, they weren’t chips, and they weren’t edible, not unless a dog was a cannibal. The triangles were made of flesh and hair, and although they had shrunk when they dried, the tattooed numbers were still visible.

  The ears. The ears. That’s what Spike had seen, not the years.

  Tess dropped them on the floor, recoiling at the light clattering sound on the concrete floor. Her first instinct was to run, as if by fleeing she could put some distance between herself and a world where someone methodically sliced the ears from greyhound corpses, ensuring they could never be traced, then beaten her uncle so he couldn’t tell what he had seen, or share what he had found.

  But she couldn’t just run away. She had to gather up the evidence, gruesome as it was, and take it to someone. The police? The Humane Society? She’d figure it out later. Grabbing her mother’s rake, she pushed the scattered ears into a pile, then dropped to her knees to put them back in their bed of mulch. Esskay’s whimpering escalated into a high-pitched wail, a dirge for her fallen comrades. Ru-ru-ru-ru.

  Perhaps it was this plaintive sound that masked the footsteps in the driveway. At any rate, it was only when the door creaked behind her that Tess stood and turned, but before she could make a sound, her face was smothered in a man’s leather jacket—the leather jacket of someone broad-shouldered and at least 6’ 6”.

  “Finally,” a familiar gravelly voice said from somewhere behind the man, who held the back of her neck just hard enough to let her know he could crack her spine if he wanted to.

  “Is it just the one bag?” her captor asked.

  “Looks that way, but we better take ’em all, just in case. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the other thing, too.”

  “We could look around. It could be somewhere else in here.”

  “No time. But we’ll take her, see if she has any ideas.”

  Leather Jacket released the pressure on Tess’s neck slightly and shoved a handkerchief into her mouth. His callused hand smelled of onions and motor oil. She thought of biting the hand that gagged her, but it seemed futile and most unsanitary. From behind her, another hand fished through her pockets for her car keys.

  “Let’s go,” Gravel Voice said. The two men linked arms on either side of her, as if she were Dorothy, ready to gambol down the Yellow Brick Road with Tin Man and Scare-crow. When she tried to go limp, forcing them to drag her away, one poked a hard object in her ribs—presumably a gun; she didn’t have the heart to find out for sure by struggling. Where was the Ten Hills neighborhood watch when you really needed them? Why wasn’t one of her mother’s nosy friends peeking out her window now, taking in this scene? Esskay jogged beside them, determined not to be left out.

  “Like the new car?” Gravel Voice asked, as they pushed her into the backseat of a black Oldsmobile, a far more discreet car than either of their previous vehicles. Esskay hopped in beside her. There, yet another man in a leather jacket forced her head down below the seats, using his armpit like a vise, a leathery, sweaty vise. “We realized the other one was a little too recognizable, so we traded up.”

  Tess’s muffled voice almost managed to sound confident. “My parents are going to come home soon and when they see my car at the curb, they’ll have the cops out looking for me immediately.”

  “Why do you think we took your keys?” Gravel Voice asked from the front seat. “Our friend’s going to follow us in it. There’s not going to be any car at the curb when your parents come home, or any bags, or any dog. They’ll never know you were here, and I don’t think the cops are going to put out an all-points-bulletin for a bunch of dirt.”

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” The man who had been holding Tess loosened his grip, letting her up for air, just in time to smell something even less appealing than the poorly aged leather of his jacket. Esskay, overwhelmed by the evening’s events, had emptied her bladder on the floor of the car. The armpit returned, dragging Tess back into its rancid world.

  She muttered into the crook of his elbow: “If I promise to keep my head down in my own lap, would that be okay?”

  No verbal reply, but the arm released her and she pressed her face into her thighs. Her black wool trousers carried a faint whiff of mothballs. Mothballs, and it was almost time to put them back in storage. It depressed her, yet another sign of incompetence on her part.

  Beneath her, she felt the car make two right turns and a left, then head down a long straight-away marked by frequent intersections, judging by the stops every 100 feet or so, and more frequent potholes. This was probably meaningful information, but Tess had no idea what to do with it. The Oldsmobile also had bad shocks and a few empty cans of Miller Lite rolling around on the floor. Esskay whined at each jolt.

  “Look, you’ve got the ears,” she said. “Once you take them, there’s nothing anyone can do to you. What else are you looking for? What do you want with my dog?”

  Gravel Voice said, “The last thing we need is another fuckin’ dog.”

  The man next to her shook with suppressed laughter; Tess felt the vibrations where their hips touched. Then the car was quiet, rolling to a stop in what appeared to be a long driveway.

  It took a few seconds to stand straight again, once she was out of the car. Tess pretended to be stiffer than she was, which allowed her to steal a glance at the neighborhood as she stretched and stamped her feet as if they had fallen asleep. Large Victorians, set far back from the street, big lawns. Suburban, but not overly so. A block away, she could see the haze of streetlights along a fairly busy street. The traffic sound was constant, and they couldn’t have driven more than twenty minutes. Catonsville, only a few miles due west of her parents’ house. Either these guys didn’t care if Tess knew where she was, or they didn’t think she was going to have a chance to tell anyone.

  They dragged her into a once-grand house, seedy after what appeared to be many months of vacancy. In the living room, with its high ceilings and old-fashioned chandelier, a man sat in a slightly ramshackle Morris chair, the only furniture in the room, holding a small dog in his lap. Tess didn’t recognize the man, but she remembered the yapping dog from their encounter on South Street. Charlton
? Carleton? Something like that. The dog had silky red-gold hair and an ugly rat face. The man had plain brown hair and an ugly rat face.

  “We tried to tell you your uncle had things that didn’t belong to him,” the man in the Morris chair said. “I don’t know why you couldn’t help us recover our property sooner.”

  “I didn’t know what you wanted. I only found the—them—on a hunch.” She didn’t want to say out loud what she had seen, what she had touched.

  “But there is something else he has stolen from our employer, and it is urgent we find that as well.”

  “It might help if you told me what you were looking for. All this time, I thought you wanted my greyhound.”

  Morris Chair shook his head. His face was long and thin, with deep hollows in his cheeks that gave him a wasted look.

  “This dog was part of an earlier program that proved to be too, uh, labor-intensive. It’s of no interest to us, and frankly, neither are you. But I guess you’re going to be our guest for a while. Perhaps your uncle’s friend, the little dishwasher, will suddenly remember where our property is, if he has some incentive.”

  “Tommy doesn’t know anything.” Tess felt desperate, thinking of her fate in Tommy’s hands, imagining Tommy opening up a box with, say, her index finger in it. He’d probably deep-fry it and serve it during Happy Hour. “You know, when I went out tonight, I told my aunt to call the police if I didn’t return within the hour.”

  All the men laughed at that. Tess wasn’t sure if they didn’t believe her or were simply confident it didn’t matter. Nonplused, she gave Esskay a little slack on her leash, hoping the dog might pee on someone’s leg. But the greyhound simply stared with bright eyes at Morris Chair, her brain’s signals almost audible. Dinner, dinner, dinner. Tess would have been hungry, too, if her stomach wasn’t so tight with fear.

  “You won’t be returning within the hour,” Morris Chair advised her. “You won’t be returning at all until your uncle’s friend cooperates.”

  His lap dog jumped to the floor and sniffed her owner’s shoes. Shiny slip-ons, sort of like patent leather bedroom slippers. And he wore a leather blazer, fingertip length, over a navy blue polyester sports shirt. All the men were dressed the same, more or less. Leather jackets or blazers, knit shirts, polyester pants, and shiny, soft loafers. Despite herself, Tess wondered where they shopped.

  “Now, are you sure you don’t have any ideas about where else your uncle might have hidden something?”

  The little dog saw something move near the fireplace—a roach, a rat, a shadow—and gave chase, yapping excitedly. Tess felt a strange burning sensation against her palm as Esskay’s metal chain jerked through her fingers before she could grab it. The greyhound had joined the hunt. But Esskay didn’t want the small dog’s prey. She wanted the small dog, whom she quickly trapped in the corner.

  “Charlton!” Morris Chair screamed, rising from his chair. Too late. Esskay sank her teeth into the dog’s soft belly, shaking it ferociously from side to side. The race was won! And Esskay had caught the rabbit, something no other dog at the track had ever done. She was almost delirious with joy, prancing around the room like a majorette.

  Morris Chair made a horrible keening sound. The three other men rushed into the fray, then backed away, unsure what to do. Esskay kept her jaws clamped on the smaller dog, shaking it as if it were a small dust mop. Tess began edging toward the door, but stopped when she saw one of the men, the tall one who had first grabbed her, reach into his jacket and pull out a gun.

  “Are you crazy?” she screamed, pushing past him and seizing Esskay by the snout, forcing her jaws open easily. After all, this wasn’t a pit bull, or a Rottweiler. There was no strength here, no danger, nothing to fear except halitosis. The smaller dog writhed on the floor, possibly in shock, but the only visible damage were two small puncture wounds to its abdomen.

  “Charlton,” Morris Chair whimpered, when she picked up the little dog and handed it to him.

  “There’s a twenty-four-hour vet not far from here,” Tess offered, surprised that she could feel some empathy for the man and his hideous little dog. “Out Route 40.” Her three captors just stared blankly at her, as Morris Chair cradled Charlton in his arms.

  “It’s probably the road you brought me here on,” she explained. “At least, I think that’s the route, unless we came out Frederick Road. Route 40 runs off the Beltway, parallel to Frederick, you can’t miss it. The vet is opposite the Toys R Us.”

  “You stay here with her,” Morris Chair told Leather Jacket number 1, the tall one who had grabbed Tess in her parents’ garage, as he rushed out, followed by Gravel Voice and Leather Jacket number 2.

  “He loves that dog,” her remaining captor said, putting his gun on the mantel, as if to remind Tess it was still at hand. “Anything happens to it, your dog’s dead. Probably oughta be put down anyway, vicious as it is.”

  He spoke without irony, this thug who had kidnapped her, beaten her her uncle, and tried to shoot Esskay.

  “I think Charlton’ll be okay. It was only a puncture wound.” She sank into the vacated Morris chair, her knees a little wobbly. Esskay tucked her nose under her elbow, looking for the treat she was sure she deserved.

  “Wish we had a TV here,” he said. “NCAA basketball is on.”

  Not a Baltimore accent, but close. Obviously not familiar with the city at all, if they needed directions to Route 40. Philadelphia? Wilmington? Spike had claimed to be coming from the Delaware racetracks when he’d left the mulch for her mother. And Spike didn’t go in for elaborate lies, preferring simple sins of omission when he couldn’t tell the truth. What was the other thing they wanted? How could she find out?

  “I know a good way to pass the time. Do you know how to play Botticelli?”

  “Is that Italian for ‘Spin the Bottle’?”

  “No, it’s like twenty questions. You see, you pick a letter—say, S—and I ask you a question about a person whose name begins with S. For example, say your person was Mike Schmidt—”

  “Greatest third baseman to ever play the game.”

  Definitely from Philadelphia, Tess decided. A local would pick Brooks Robinson every time. “Whatever. Anyway, if your letter is S, I might ask, ‘Are you a classical composer?’ If you can’t think of an answer—say, Stravin-sky—I get to ask a yes-no question about your person, until I have enough clues to finally guess the identity. Get it?”

  Long pause. “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now to make it really interesting, why don’t you tell me the letter of what you’re looking for, and we can play for that.”

  “I dunno—”

  “Oh, c’mon. What are the odds I’ll actually guess?”

  Another round of deep thought, as if he were actually calculating her chances. “You got a point.”

  “Good. Now what’s your letter?”

  “I guess it’s V. Could be C—no, it’s V, definitely V.”

  “Okay. Are you a twentieth-century writer with a cult following?”

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  Tess imitated the sound of a game show buzzer’s rude call. “You’re not Kurt Vonnegut. Now I get to ask a yes-no. Are you—the item you’re looking for—related to betting?”

  “Can I say kinda?”

  “Usually not.”

  “Well, I’m gonna say kinda. It’s kinda about betting, but not really. Tangential, you might say.”

  “Fair enough. Next question. Are you Lolita’s creator?” The real rules were clear that only last names could be used, but Tess had been deliberately vague in explaining the rules.

  “I am not…I am not…I am not Valentine? Volare? Some Greek god, right?”

  “Good try. Vladimir Nabokov. Do you have a monetary value?”

  “No, I mean, it could, but only to a few people. You couldn’t sell it from the back of a truck, but some people might pay you big money for it.”

  “Okay. Are you the Pope’s residence?”

  Her com
petitor looked insulted. “I’m not the Vatican.” He crossed himself.

  “Good. Very good.” A right answer would soften him up, she decided, although she hadn’t intended to ask him anything he knew. “Are you a UN official with Nazi past?”

  A blank look.

  “Kurt Waldheim,” she said, giving it the German pronunciation. He wouldn’t know how it was spelled. “Was this thing ever alive? Or part of something alive?”

  “That’s two questions. But no to both of them.”

  “Well, I guess that’s a good sign.” Esskay stuck her snout in her lap, insistent on affection. Tess rubbed the dog under the neck, trying to think of her next question. Botticelli was harder with an it than with a person. Esskay’s fur was matted and chafed beneath her collar. She could ask him a question about Voltaire, or Venus. The greyhound books said you were suppose to use a nylon leash, but there had never been time to replace this length of chain, Spike’s improvisation. Sid Vicious? Dick Van Dyke? She played with the catch, clicking it open and closed, holding the dog close to her all the while.

  “C’mon, ask me another question. This is kind of fun.”

  “Are you a moron?” Tess asked.

  “Wait, I know this one. Some comedian, right? The guy who plays retards in all his movies. I am not…I am not…”

  Tess leaped from the chair and lashed out at him with the chain, catching him across the face. He wasn’t quick enough to grab the lethal leash, and he wasn’t close enough to grab her. Tess backed away from him, moving toward the door and away from the fireplace, where his gun still sat on the mantel. He kept advancing, so intent on taking the chain away from her that he didn’t think to retreat and grab his gun.

  “Stupid bitch,” he panted. “I am going to” —another futile grab—“make you so sorry.” He caught her left wrist just then, but Esskay interceded, sinking her teeth into his hand. Not much of a grip, but she could do some damage. He yelled and fell back, then scrambled for the other side of the room, where his gun waited. But Tess and Esskay were at the door by then and Tess wrenched it open, letting Esskay go first and set the pace, praying the dog would have the good sense to run toward the streetlights, not into the alleys, where they were less likely to be seen. Her keeper might have enough power to overcome her in a sprint, but she was sure she could outlast him over anything more than a few blocks. And she was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to fire his gun on this quiet suburban street.