The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  Horns sounded angrily as she squeezed down the narrow channel and into the intersection. Tess assumed the other drivers were just angry they hadn’t thought of the idea first, or because their cars were too wide. Served them right for driving SUVs.

  “And once the Cupids go up, they’ll already be thinking about shamrocks, green foil and Saint Patrick’s Day.”

  “As one of our local literary lights likes to say, welcome to the church of the next right thing,” Tess said, thinking of a short-story writer who had given a reading at her Aunt Kitty’s store just a few nights back, an exuberant man with the unlikely name of Ralph Pickle. He had filled Women and Children First with his ex-girl-friends, ex-fiancées and ex-wives, who bought multiple copies of his book. Kitty had encouraged him to write more—and date more.

  Tess was now in the middle of Madison Street, where she braked sharply, jerked her steering wheel to the right, then headed up the Fallsway, which ran between the JFX and the prison.

  “Like a hostess, who puts out guest towels, then paces in the hallway, worried someone might actually use them,” Crow continued.

  But Tess, glancing at the prison wall that ran the length of the block, was thinking about Henry Dembrow now. She still couldn’t imagine a scenario in which someone would allow a loved one’s body to go unclaimed, yet went to the trouble of exacting revenge against her killer. Ruthie was grasping at straws. Well, as long as she willing to pay her usual hourly fee, Tess was more than happy to indulge Ruthie in this particular game of pickup sticks. Besides, her father had said he owed Ruthie a favor, and her father considered favors a kind of currency, more important than money. She was really indulging him.

  She took the Preston Street overpass above the clogged highway, then headed north, feeling smug. So smug that she shot past her turn at 29th Street, losing any advantage she had gained.

  “Damn, now I’ll have to double back.”

  “It’s eight-fifteen,” Crow said. “We’re supposed to meet Whitney in fifteen minutes.” He sounded worried. Whitney scared Crow a little. Whitney scared almost everyone, except Tess.

  “She’s always late.”

  “She’s always late, except when we’re late, and then she gives us unmitigated shit.”

  “Let me try one more approach into Hampden, this time from the north.” Tess had a peculiar vanity about her ability to find shortcuts and new routes through her hometown. They had set out to see the lights in Hampden, and she would not be denied.

  They were in Baltimore’s richest precincts now, Guilford and Roland Park, where the homes were decadently large and the tax bills were a kind of status symbol. Look, the houses seem to proclaim, we’re paying $12,000 a year in property taxes and we still send our kids to private schools! These rambling mansions filled Tess with loathing—and yearning. One stone house had stood empty for years, neglected and haunted looking, until an exasperated neighbor purchased it to protect his property values. She could never forget that story, never stop marveling at the idea that some people bought houses the way she bought sweaters at The Gap.

  The truth was, she often thought long and hard about that second sweater.

  “What’s up there?” Crow said, pointing to a side street after she turned onto Cold Spring Lane.

  “More rich people, I suppose.”

  “No, these houses look much smaller. Turn up there, Tess. I’ve never noticed this neighborhood before.”

  “But the lights—”

  “They’ll be there for the rest of the month. We’re here, right now. Besides, you promised you were going to be more spontaneous, remember?”

  She remembered no such promise. But it did seem unlikely they would make it to 34th Street with enough time left to take in the full spectacle, so she headed up the dark road. A few modest strings of Christmas lights illuminated the hodgepodge of houses. There were semi-shabby shingle-sided affairs, old farmhouses and duplexes. Semi-detatched as they were known in Baltimore. Tess always thought this would make a good term for relationships as well. Not hers, though. She and Crow were semi-attached—together, joined at the hip, and other body parts as well. She had lost him once, through carelessness and stupidity. She couldn’t quite say to him, forever and ever, but she could and did forswear stupidity.

  “There’s a meadow back there, and a park. You’d hardly know you’re in Baltimore proper at all,” Crow said. Tess didn’t point out they could still hear the traffic on Cold Spring. “What is this place?”

  “Evergreen.” She wasn’t sure how she knew the name, but she was confident of it from the moment she said it. “These duplexes—this is where the people who built the big houses in Roland Park lived during the construction.”

  “Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,” Crow said solemnly. Facts were serious, sacred things to Crow, but then—he had never been a reporter. “Roland Park had the first shopping center in the United States.”

  “I know, I read the historic marker outside the old Baskin Robbins, too.”

  “Let’s bring Esskay up to run in that meadow,” Crow said. “When spring comes. We could bring a picnic, explore the woods over there.”

  “It’s not even winter yet, and you’re talking about spring. Don’t get so far ahead of yourself. That’s what you promised, remember? One day at a time.”

  “Do you think,” Crow said with the smallest of sighs, “that the AA motto is really appropriate for a relationship?”

  She turned into a narrow lane, thinking it was an alley, but houses hugged the hillside here. Most were large, the legacy of Baltimore’s Catholic roots. Tess had grown up among people who had five children, eight, ten, even thirteen. Now her friends who had three children seemed vaguely apologetic.

  But there were some small cottages here, too, tucked among the rambling old Victorians. It reminded her of the Black Forest, not that she had ever seen the Black Forest. But she had been raised on Grimm’s, the real Grimm’s, where Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilated their feet to get into that glass slipper, and a father cut off his daughter’s hands and breasts out of pure spite.

  The words Black Forest made her think of cake, which made her realize how hungry she was. Time for dinner.

  Whitney Talbot had already been seated at their table in the Ambassador, a once fusty restaurant that had found a new, improbable second life as a lushly appointed Indian restaurant. Her face was turned away from the door, but Tess knew her by the long, sharp bones poking through her winter white pantsuit, the arrogant lift of her head. Really, Tess thought, all she needed was a pith helmet to complete the illusion that she was on the veranda of a grand old Calcutta hotel, snapping her fingers impatiently for another gin rickey.

  “Don’t tell me,” Whitney said in the clear, ringing tones of a Baltimore valley girl. “You were dressed and ready to go, then took one look at each other and ripped one another’s clothes off, carried away by the passion of your rediscovered love.”

  “Not at all,” Tess muttered, blushing, in part because Whitney’s voice carried so well and in part because she was not far wrong.

  “Hi, Whitney,” Crow said, taking the seat farthest from her. “How’s the job hunt?”

  “I’m not on a ‘job hunt,’” she corrected, lifting her chin higher still. “I’m trying to decide what I want to do with my life. My future vocation is just one element of my quest, and probably the easiest to solve. The Beacon-Light has already offered me my old position, but I don’t want to write editorials anymore. I seem to have run out of opinions.”

  Tess almost snorted water through her nose. “That’ll be the day. But I am surprised they wanted you back, given the way you left.” Whitney had quit the paper under a cloud, although the only thing she had ever done wrong was save Tess’s life. It turned out there had been an office pool, and one of the clerks made $200 for having Whitney as the “one most likely to go postal.” Terribly unfair and not at all accurate, but what could one do?

  “New management,” Whitney said airily. “The fiv
e top editors aren’t even sure who Spiro Agnew was, and his past is much more accessible than mine.”

  “Didn’t they keep your personnel file?”

  “Shredded. My mother’s lawyer made a call.”

  Tess looked fondly at her old friend. It’s a rare person who can get away with the sentence, “My mother’s lawyer made a call.”

  “Well, I’m on a job hunt,” Crow said cheerfully. “Shockingly, a degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art is not a hot commodity on the market. So Tess is the only one of us who’s gainfully employed.”

  “Gainfully might be stretching it, but I do have some work. Interesting work at that.”

  “Details?” Whitney pressed.

  “Confidential, dearest. You know that.”

  “Of course. Why else would I care? Besides, maybe this is what I was meant to do with my life. We can be Starsky and Hutch. It goes without saying that I’ll be the tall blond one.”

  “Wasn’t he the wife beater?” Tess asked. “Which would be forgivable, since he got counseling, but he also sang that awful, awful pop song. The one where he rhymed ‘reminiscing’ with ‘kissing.’ Hutch was really much sexier.”

  “Does this scenario make me Huggy Bear?” Crow wondered. Ah, Nick at Nite and TV Land, Tess thought, our true universal language.

  “Can’t you tell me anything?” Whitney asked.

  “I can tell you it’s a Jane Doe case. I’m trying to identify a dead girl, a homicide victim. Hey, why is it Jane Doe? Or John Doe? How did that usage enter the language?”

  “It’s from common law,” Crow said. “John Doe was the plaintiff and Richard Roe was the defendant.”

  Whitney was not put off the scent so easily. “No, really, why couldn’t I be your partner?”

  So many answers occurred to Tess that it was hard to pick just one. “Because I work alone. Because I can’t afford you. Because you would go cross-eyed with boredom the first time you had to do surveillance, or sort through receipts found in a dumpster dive. Besides, what use are you now that you no longer have access to the Beacon-Light’s resources? I have to pay Dorie Starnes for the kind of stuff you used to give me for free.”

  “Oh well, it was just a passing fancy. I think what I really want is my own talk show, one of those NPR ones, all erudite and earnest,” Whitney said. “You know, one of the really boring ones, where the guest is always some State Department undersecretary no one has ever heard of.”

  “How does one go about getting a talk show?” Crow asked.

  Whitney waved her hand in the air. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. But how hard can it be?”

  A waiter was unloading a trayful of appetizers at the table—meat and vegetable samosas, nan, a round of Kingfisher beer. Apparently Whitney hadn’t waited for them to order the first course. Tess wondered if she had allowed them their choice of entrées. The maddening thing was, Whitney often did know better than Tess what Tess really wanted, or needed. If she had saved her life once, in the literal fashion, she had saved it a hundred times over in other ways. Tess was never bored when Whitney was around.

  “I think,” Tess said, “you should get an advice column, one where people write to you about their most heart-felt problems and you respond by telling them the proper timetable for wearing white shoes, and why it’s gauche to get the Caesar salad at Eddie’s already mixed, instead of with the dressing packaged on the side.”

  “I’ll add it to the list, dearest. Right after ballet dancer and just before fireman.” Whitney’s voice sharpened. “Oh stop it, you two, just stop it.”

  Beneath the white tablecloth, Crow’s hand returned guiltily to his own lap.

  chapter 4

  IT WAS A BUSY MONDAY MORNING AT THE MORGUE ON Penn Street, the corridors overflowing with the weekend catch from throughout Maryland. Nothing like the combination of hunting season and Christmas cheer to up the number of bodies who needed their passports stamped before they could continue on their journey. Tess, trying to act nonchalant in the extreme, waited among the gridlocked gurneys for the assistant medical examiner who had autopsied Jane Doe a little more than a year ago.

  She had been here before, the first time as a rookie night cops reporter, learning the ropes. An older reporter tried to test her mettle, but it had been Tess’s good fortune to arrive on a day when death, if not exactly on holiday, was definitely slacking. Only one body was out in plain view, an overweight young man who had died of a heart attack while interviewing for a job at JCPenney’s.

  In the eight years since then, Tess had seen many more bodies—unexpected bodies, fresher bodies, riper bodies, in less contained circumstances. But a girl never forgets her first corpse. He had been blue, the pale blue used in raspberry-flavored Ice Pops. Tess had felt, well, mortified on his behalf. Whatever his life plans, they hadn’t included being a blue, naked prop in the ritual hazing of some cub reporter. He had looked unreal, and Tess found it hard to imagine he had ever been flesh-colored, much less alive.

  She had been only twenty-two.

  “Miss Monaghan?” Dr. Olive Horvath, the assistant M.E., motioned for her to follow her into a small conference room. Harried, bristling with impatience before Tess had spoken a single word, she made it clear that Tess was at the bottom of the list of things she had to do today, and she was eager to draw a line through her.

  “Here,” she said, brandishing a folder.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  Tess had expected an attendant to lead her to a drawer somewhere and slide out the preserved remains of Henry Dembrow’s victim. She had steeled herself for this, in fact. But Jane Doe’s body was long gone. No room at the inn, not with the city homicide rate still in the top five nationwide.

  “Buried in a pauper’s grave down at Crownsville,” Dr. Horvath explained. Pink-cheeked, with sky-blue eyes and thick, honey-colored hair, she was not so much pretty as in vivid good health, which was jarring in this setting. “We have her DNA, prints, and blood work on file, but we don’t have the room for that kind of storage, not for a closed case. It’s standard practice with the Jane and John Does, or anyone whose body isn’t claimed.”

  “Do you know that name has an origin?” Tess asked, thinking to delight the woman with her scrap of knowledge. “John Doe, I mean. My boyfriend explained—”

  “Nope, never really thought about it.” It was clear that the living, and their customs, held little interest for Dr. Horvath. “Look, do you want a copy of my report? It’s fifty cents a page.”

  Tess was familiar with this racket: City, state and federal agencies charged ten times the going rate for photocopies, if only to keep the nuisance factor down. Normally, she wouldn’t have thought twice about taking this out of her expenses, but Ruthie Dembrow’s finances were limited. As was her father’s patience, if he found out she was featherbedding a client he had referred to her.

  “Is there a break room, where I could read it and take notes? I’ll let you hold my driver’s license for collateral.”

  “No need for that,” Dr. Horvath said. “I’ll find a spot for you, and you can drop the report off at the front desk when you’re done. Tell them if you need any copies, and they’ll help you out. I’ve got work to do.” She led Tess to a small room with a coffeemaker and an old-fashioned vending machine that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. Tess wasn’t sure if they even made Zagnut bars anymore.

  “Our old smoking lounge,” the assistant medical examiner said, her voice wistful. “Now we have to go stand in front of the building, like addicts on some drug corner.”

  “You smoke?”

  “When you spend your day looking at healthy young men, with pristine organs and beautiful arteries—young men who just happen to have bullets in their brains—you become a little more fatalistic, I guess. Death has its own timetable.”

  Her eyes lingered briefly on Tess as if she could see through her, as if she could gauge every slice of pepperoni pizza devoured, every drink consumed, every joint
smoked. Tess felt like the transparency in the old World Book Encyclopedia, the one she had studied to master the rudiments of male anatomy. She couldn’t help wondering how her arteries would rate with Dr. Horvath.

  Suddenly, a Zagnut bar seemed like a very good idea.

  The autopsy report was slow going for someone whose last science class had been the required chemistry lab for Western High School sophomores. Where the science was clear, the English was murky. The bureaucrat’s motto: Why say it once, if you could say it three times, in three increasingly clunkier sentences? Tess read carefully, taking notes as she went, backtracking over and over again. At the end of the hour, she had only a page of notes.

  Jane Doe, estimated age 15-25. Caucasian. Cause of death: head injury, consistent with a fall. Length of rubber tubing tied at neck post-mortem. 5-7, 118 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes. Black tattoo, on left ankle a straight line, two inches long, appears to be quite recent, still some blood and scabbing around it. Enamel on teeth badly decayed. Fingerprints taken, no matches found. Has never given birth. No scars.

  A photograph was stapled inside the file. Tess avoided it for as long as she could, but she finally confronted Jane Doe’s death mask. Death by a massive head injury, combined with living on the streets, didn’t bring out the best in a person. Jane Doe’s eyes were closed, her face bruised, at once lumpy and hollow. The tip of her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth, her farewell to the world that had treated her so badly. The rubber tubing around her neck, fashioned into a bow, was particularly obscene somehow, an ugly posthumous joke. Henry must have lingered over the body, Tess thought, needing to defile it for some reason. Why?