One of her ribs sent up a little shoot of pain just then, as if to remind her not to be too cocky.
Funny, to think of the injustices to which Tess had been blind before Esskay had come into her life. For example: why was it so difficult to find a restaurant in Baltimore where dogs were allowed? The bars in Fells Point welcomed them, but Baltimore had few of the sidewalk-type restaurants that made it possible for a dog to enjoy a good meal. How species-ist.
She and Feeney settled on Donna’s, a local chain of coffee bars with pretty good food, once you got past its New York aspirations. And while Mount Vernon was a little grimy for outdoor dining, the day was too beautiful to waste: a cloudless sky, a light breeze that kept the sun from being too hot. Baltimore springs had the life span of a fruit fly, so it was important to cherish each fair day. Summer would be here soon enough.
Tess ordered wine, and after a brief inner struggle, decided on the mozzarella sandwich with pesto, on olive-oil-rich focaccia. She’d be back at full strength soon enough, she’d work those calories off. Feeney had the turkey sandwich with tapenade, on sourdough, while Esskay had the roast beef and provolone, hold the bread.
“This is a great story, almost makes up for me not being able to write about Sterling,” Feeney said, studying her notes. “Sure it’s mine?”
“As sure as I can be. There’s a reason he’s called the Lyin’ King.”
“Yeah, but he’s competitive. He’ll put the paper first. He always does in the end.”
“So did Jack Sterling. I wonder how he would have arranged for the Blight to get the exclusive on my death?”
Esskay, who had downed her lunch in seconds, was straining at her leash, desperate to chase the dogs she saw in the park across the street. Then her quicksilver attention turned to the trash blowing past in the breeze. A white hot dog wrapper caught an eddy of air, floated upward, then reversed direction and plummeted to earth. Had Rosita fallen like that? Had she known she was falling? Had she been knocked out, like Wink, or just woozy enough for Sterling—her former boss, her former lover—to pick her up in his arms for one last embrace, then toss her over the balcony before she realized what was happening? But maybe she had jumped, as Sterling still maintained.
“Detective Tull told me they’ll probably never be able to charge Sterling with Rosita’s death. If she had painkillers in her blood, like Wink, it would be different. But all they found was alcohol. And it made sense for his fingerprints to be all over the apartment. He searched it, remember?”
“The yearbook never turned up, did it?”
“No, Sterling tossed it in a land fill. Lea Wynkowski has gotten it into her head that it’s my fault somehow. I made it possible for her to collect the life insurance and kept her out of Paul Tucci’s clutches, and she’s pissed at me over a yearbook. Isn’t that rich?”
“A grateful mind/By owing owes not.” Feeney smirked at her blank look. “Milton. Paradise Lost.”
“Well, aren’t you branching out?” Her voice was harsher than it meant to be, her mind unable to turn off the image of Rosita falling through space.
“Don’t mind me,” she added contritely. “It’s just that I should have known. From the moment I saw that pizza, I should have known it was Sterling.”
“How?”
“Turkey sausage. You have to be a psycho to eat that stuff.”
Feeney pointed up the street. “Speaking of psychos, look at Whitney, trotting to keep up with Tyner’s wheelchair on the downhill grade. I didn’t know they were coming along today.”
“Whitney said she had something big to tell us. I assume she finally got Tokyo.”
They arrived a few seconds later, Whitney breathless from keeping pace, but still able to bark out an order for hot tea. Tyner motioned the waitress away impatiently, as if surprised that someone expected him to place an order at a restaurant.
“Hot tea?” Tess asked Whitney. “We know you’re going to Tokyo, you don’t need accessories to break the news.”
“I am going to Tokyo,” she said, “but not for the Beacon-Light. I resigned today.”
Tess looked at Feeney, but he was as baffled and surprised as she was. Whitney speared a sweet potato off Tess’s plate.
“It’s true,” Tyner confirmed. “She was in my office, going over the terms of her trust, making sure it could support her at the current yen-to-dollar exchange rate.”
“Tokyo on a trust fund,” Feeney said. “Very brave of you.”
Tess threw a piece of focaccia at his head, missing on purpose so Esskay could have a little more food. “Hey, it is brave. Whitney’s finally doing something for herself, instead of fulfilling everyone’s expectations of her. It may be the bravest thing she’s ever done.”
“I’m here,” Whitney said with uncharacteristic quiet. “I can speak for myself. The fact is, things aren’t going so well for me at the Beacon-Light. As it turns out, shooting an editor in the shoulder wasn’t the best career move.”
“You saved my life,” Tess said. “Isn’t that a mitigating circumstance?
“Only to the police and grand jury. At work, I make the other editors nervous now. Especially all the new ones they keep hiring. They point and whisper behind my back. ‘Shot a man in Leakin Park, just to watch him die.’ I had a disagreement with my boss over punctuation recently, and he called security.” Whitney sighed, then took a sip of Tess’s wine, ate another of her sweet potatoes. They were back in synch again. How could Whitney move to the other side of the world?
“It’s not forever,” Whitney said. “Six months, maybe a year.”
“But you’ll be on the other side of the international date line. You’ll know what’s happening before I do.”
“Tess—” Whitney’s smile would put a Chesire cat to shame. “I always did.”
Epilogue
Two weeks later, a package arrived from Tokyo. While Esskay watched, Tess pulled out a birdcage in the shape of a pagoda. The accompanying letter, on hotel stationery, said only: “Is it true the crow always flies in a straight line? I’m not so sure. Birds, like all of us, might need directions and encouragement.”
Certainly, it was all the encouragement Tess needed. As she dialed the phone, she realized she had been waiting all along for someone to nudge her into action. As usual, that person was Whitney, even if she was 5,000 miles away.
“Maisie? Tess Monaghan. Where’s the Floating Opera landing tonight?”
It was a new site, at least to Tess, an old cannery in West Baltimore on the same block as Bon Secours Hospital and several methadone clinics. Convenient for this crowd. She waited until 3 A.M. to show up, hoping Crow would already be on stage. He was, but without his band, or any instruments. He sat on a stool, microphone in hand, his black hair down his back in a long glossy braid without any of the not-in-nature highlights Tess remembered. He began to sing, a cappella.
The song wasn’t recognizable at first, not in this dirgelike incarnation. “Thunder Road.” Tess actually heard a few hisses in the audience, which apparently considered itself too avant-garde for Springsteen, Wink’s beloved Boss. But something about Crow’s face, and the unadorned beauty of his voice, snuffed out the crowd’s initial hostility.
Did Crow remember this was the song that had been playing on Wink’s stereo the night he died? He had been so taken with the detail at the time, intent on discussing various suicide-suitable songs. Now everyone knew it hadn’t been Wink’s choice at all, but Jack Sterling’s. A town full of losers, indeed. Baltimore did have a knack for memorable losses—the ’69 Orioles, the ’84 Colts, 1996’s American League Championship series, stolen by a twelve-year-old Yankee fan with a big glove—but it made for a gracious city. Anyone could win with élan. Baltimore knew how to lose, and how to go on, still strangely hopeful.
His song done, Crow tried to leave the stage, but the audience insisted on an encore, stamping their feet until he returned.
“It never entered my mind,” he said. At first, Tess thought he was acknowledgi
ng the crowd’s enthusiasm, but then he began to sing and she realized he had simply been announcing the song’s title, one of her favorite Rodgers and Hart ballads. Men seldom sang it, given that it was impossible to make the kind of rhyming cheats necessary to change the gender of the song’s forlorn lover, who worried about mudpacks and face powder.
Once, you warned me, that if you scorned me
I’d sing the maiden’s prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again
It never entered my mind.
Crow shook his head until the long braid unraveled and his black hair fanned out around his shoulders. He looks like someone I know, Tess thought. Willie Nelson? No, it’s me. That’s me up there, singing about the mistake I made when I let him go. Does he know I feel that way? Or does he simply hope I feel that way? Or do I hope he hopes I feel that way?
The set over, she worked her way down front, not caring if she was just one of several women working their way toward Crow at this precise moment. Lovely young things crowded around him, falling back when they saw her. Apparently Maisie and Lorna hadn’t gotten the news out that Tess no longer had any claim on Crow.
“Rodgers and Hart,” she said.
“It sank in.”
“I guess anything will, if you wait long enough.”
He shrugged noncommittally. This cool, taciturn Crow made her nervous, and she began babbling: “I still have Esskay. Spike got out of the hospital, and he’s okay—well, his leg bothers him, but he goes to therapy—but he let me keep her. Then Whitney sent me this birdhouse from Japan and it made me think—”
Crow stared at her. She had wanted him to be older, more mature. Now he was, thanks to her. She had hurt him into adulthood.
“I’m graduating,” he said at last. “My parents are so thrilled, they’ve given me the money they put aside for next year’s tuition. We—the band and I—are going to Texas. To Austin.”
“To Austin,” she repeated stupidly.
“I know, it’s kind of a cliché, but at least people there still get excited about music.”
“For how long? I mean, how long will you be there?”
“I don’t know.” He hesitated—Crow, who never thought about what he was going to say next, or how to say it, or how it might sound when he did say it. “I might not like it, anyway.”
“Then where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
She cast around for something more to say, something that might shatter this stranger’s mask and reveal the man she had known, the man she had loved without knowing she loved him, without knowing he was more of a man than the illusion of one she had desired.
“Crow—I made a mistake.”
Again, he thought before he said anything. “Yes, you did.”
Tess wandered outside, where she briefly considered some Scarlett O’Hara histrionics: throwing herself to the ground with wracking sobs, then lifting a luminous tear-streaked face to the heavens, vowing to get him back tomorrow. But in this neighborhood, hurling one’s body about in such a heedless fashion would only result in contact with a discarded needle or a broken bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. She sat down gingerly on the curb, wishing she had a drink or some chocolate. But there was nothing close at hand. Even the methadone was locked up securely for the night. Methadone, now there was a concept: a drug for life that blocked the effects of the drug you really yearned for. Were there such remedies for one’s heart?
Now, if Feeney were here, he would have quoted poetry, pointing out there would be world enough and time, or that we must love one another or die. But Feeney was at home, sleeping the contented sleep of a reporter with a great story. Besides, as his good buddy Auden liked to say, poetry never made anything happen.
Kitty would have said something at once maddeningly wise and banal, the lover de nuit bobbing his head in dreamy agreement. Tyner would have recommended stepping up her workouts: no time for your heart to hurt while your muscles were sore. Spike would advise playing the odds.
And inscrutable Whitney was in scrutable Japan, where it was already tomorrow. Perhaps Tess should call her and find out what the next day held. No—she’d much rather be surprised.
About the Author
LAURA LIPPMAN was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for fifteen years. Her Tess Monaghan novels—Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House, and The Last Place—have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony and Nero Wolfe awards, and her novel, In a Strange City, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest standalone crime novel, Every Secret Thing, was published by William Morrow in September 2003. You can visit her website at www.lauralippman.com.
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Books by
Laura Lippman
TO THE POWER OF THREE
BY A SPIDER’S THREAD
EVERY SECRET THING
BALTIMORE BLUES
CHARM CITY
BUTCHERS HILL
IN BIG TROUBLE
THE LAST PLACE
THE SUGAR HOUSE
IN A STRANGE CITY
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CHARM CITY. Copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader June 2006 ISBN 0-06-119355-0
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