Southwest Baltimore was an object lesson in what can happen when a neighborhood’s ballyhooed renaissance falls short of the mark. Dingy and defeated, it reminded Tess of someone who jumps from one rooftop to the next, only to dangle by his fingernails from the downspout. Most of the restaurants that had cropped up in the neighborhood’s hour of hope had moved on, as had their bohemian clientele, artists attracted by the low rents. Hampden, up north, was the happening neighborhood now. No more Mencken’s Cultured Pearl, or Telltale Hearth, or Gypsy Café. At one point, the city had even put H. L. Mencken’s house on the block. Officials backed off, claiming it was a misunderstanding, but Tess never doubted they would have sold the place if they could have. The sad fact was that the biggest tourist site in the area was “The Corner,” an open-air drug market immortalized in a book by the same name. Politicians held press conferences there and the city routinely swept it clean, as if it were the only place in Baltimore to buy crack cocaine. When Hollywood came to town to film The Corner, the real corner wasn’t even good enough. The caravan of movie trailers—and, more important, the trail of money left in their wake—had ended up in East Baltimore.
But even in the most depressed areas, people need a place to throw back a drink or two. Domenick’s, housed in an end-of-group rowhouse, provided a clean, quiet place to do just that. The sign out front said only Bar, as if it were a generic place to drink. Inside, it proved to be just that. A place for regulars, this was clear to Tess when every pair of eyes in the quiet bar fixed on her. It was one o’clock, a little early to begin drinking, but not so early as to be ashamed of it. Besides, these were men and women whose days started earlier than most, if they started at all.
She took a seat at the bar and asked for a beer.
“What kind?” asked the bartender. He was a thin man in his middle forties, with a stoop and a very bad toupée. Hard to imagine telling your troubles to him.
Tess recognized the question for the test that it was.
“Not Natty Boh,” she said, “not after they left town. And I guess I can’t have a Carling Black Label either. What do you have on tap?”
“Michelob.”
“Michelob’s fine.”
“Not light beer, you understand. Just Michelob.”
“I never opt for the ‘light’ version of anything,” Tess said. “Do you serve any food?”
He tossed her a stained paper menu, which featured the usual bar delicacies and a few local specialties. Tess, who had been skimping on vegetables of late, soothed her conscience with an order of green pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar. Then she sat back and studied her surroundings, trying not to be obvious, given that the other customers continued to steal looks at her.
It was a plain, no-nonsense bar. One television set, tuned to ESPN and muted. The lower part of the walls was paneled, while the upper portion was covered with gold-flecked mirrors, which may have been intended to make the bar seem wider than it was, but the mirrors were now so smeary with age that they had a funhouse quality. A minimum of neon signage, a cigarette machine, two video poker machines, with the usual disclaimers about being for recreation only. Right. The booths along the wall were filled, mostly with men. One woman, maybe in her sixties, with dark hair and a doughy face creased by a lifetime of Luckies. No one was speaking, and no one else was eating. The only sounds were the bells and whistles of an old-fashioned pinball machine, over which two stringy young blond men were practically davening.
Perhaps no one ever ate here, for the young waitress who brought out her green pepper rings was clearly overwhelmed by the task. She held the tray out in front of her, arms locked, eyes almost crossed in concentration. She traversed the short distance from the kitchen door to Tess’s barstool as if walking across ice. No wonder—she wore ridiculous shoes for a waitress, lace-up platforms with four-inch heels. Tess had waited tables off and on during college, and she knew you had to sacrifice style for comfort. This girl would learn.
“Green pepper rings?” she asked in a sweet, high voice. Well, it was clear why she was hired. She was extraordinarily pretty in a fresh, wholesome way that made Tess feel craggy, old, and tough as leather. Pink cheeks, shiny brown hair, big blue eyes, and an almost comically perfect figure, an hourglass perched on long, coltish legs.
“Just put ’em down, Terry,” the bartender said, obviously unimpressed with her skills.
She placed the plate in front of Tess with a hard clatter, so the pepper rings jumped, and she did, too. Then she scurried back into the kitchen.
“You the owner?” Tess asked the bartender, fairly sure of the answer.
“Manager.”
“How long you worked here?”
“Off and on since it opened.”
She pulled her wallet from the knapsack she carried in place of a purse—a wallet thick with bills, she let the bartender’s eyes take that in—and showed him her license, then the sketch. Even before she could explain what she wanted, he was shaking his head. “No one I ever knew.”
“What about the other folks here?”
He held up the sketch. “Anyone know her?”
A few customers squinted at the sketch, but no one got up to take a closer look.
“Sorry.”
“Is the owner around?” she asked.
“The owner?”
“Lawrence Purdy. I checked your file at the city liquor board.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because this girl, the one I’m looking for, told someone she worked at a place with a name like Domino’s. When I checked the files, I found Domenick’s and thought that might be it.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
“Anyway, Lawrence Purdy—”
“He’s not real active. Bought the place as an investment, I run it. Never shows his face around here. He probably couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.”
“Interesting figure of speech,” Tess said. “You ever been in a lineup?”
The bartender’s eyes met hers, and he grinned. “Nope.”
Her fingers were caked with powdered sugar. She wiped them off on the paper napkin as best she could, then counted out several bills for the check that the bartender had left by her plate. Five dollars total. Not bad for such a nutritionally complete lunch.
As she stood to leave, the waitress skittered out of the kitchen and began clearing her place. She almost made it back to the swinging kitchen door before she dropped the plate on the worn linoleum floor, where it shattered into dozens of white shards.
“Your tip will just about cover that,” the bartender told the girl, and the patrons in the bar laughed, with the exception of the guys at the pinball machine, who didn’t seem to notice anything but their game. The girl flushed, but she did not look particularly embarrassed, or cowed. More puzzled than anything else, Tess thought. It was as if she had awakened from a dream and found herself in this musty little tavern, wearing an apron and waiting tables, but she couldn’t quite believe it. She had the look of a girl who was waiting for her life to begin.
Tess wasn’t going to be the one to break it to her that it already had.
chapter 8
TESS WANTED TO GO IN SEARCH OF LAWRENCE PURDY, Domenick’s owner, that very afternoon, but she had a long-standing date to go Christmas shopping with Whitney.
“I’ve done most of my shopping,” Tess had objected, when Whitney demanded her company. “I did it early so I wouldn’t have to go into a mall this time of year.”
“But I need moral support,” Whitney had said. “Besides, you can use the time to browse, figure out what you want for Christmas. Crow told me he’s asked you a dozen times what you want, and you always say nothing.”
“I tell my parents the same thing,” Tess said. “Can I help it if I’m the girl who has everything?”
She really was having trouble coming up with a list of anything she needed, much less wanted. Having lived close to the bone for a few years—although not quite as close as she now remembered those time
s—Tess had broken herself of the habit of desiring things. Besides, knowing you could afford what you wanted made these items less urgent. The problem was, she was scared to invest her money; she kept everything in her checking account, so her bank balance was now almost embarrassingly large. Even Whitney was impressed; she whistled when she saw the balance on the ATM slip. Whitney being the sort of friend who would look, unself-conciously, at a friend’s ATM slip, if it were left out in public view. Tess caught her reading it when she came back from the bathroom.
“Sorry,” Whitney said, but she didn’t sound particularly contrite. “Old habits die hard. Reading upside down is one of my talents, I like to keep my hand in.”
Tess sighed and dropped into her chair. The greyhound, fast asleep on the sofa, mimicked the sound exactly.
“Esskay sounds just like you,” Whitney said. “So put upon.”
“I don’t know why. Her friends respect her privacy.”
“Bad day at the office, dear?”
“Futile one. I didn’t have much to begin with. Now I seem to have less. The Sugar House. I thought it seemed too good to be true, and it was.”
Even while Tess was speaking, Whitney continued to snoop, her restless hands poking at various items on the desk. She examined a framed photograph of Crow and Esskay, opened the lid of the old blue Planter’s Peanut jar that Tess used for receipts, looked skeptically at a skeleton in a rowboat, a piece of Mexican folk art that had arrived just yesterday from San Antonio, an early Christmas gift. When Whitney reached for the Dembrow file, Tess stopped her.
“Confidential.”
“But surely that doesn’t extend to me.”
“Especially you. I’ve never known anyone who liked to trade in privileged information the way you do. You’ll be out on the Christmas cocktail party circuit, entertaining your mother’s friends with the sordid details about my Jane Doe.”
“I should be able to read the autopsy,” Whitney wheedled. “It’s a public document, and I’m a taxpayer.”
“It’s not the official autopsy, it’s my summary of the autopsy. No one is entitled to it except me, and my client.” But Tess extracted her typed notes from the folder, placing the rest of the file in her desk drawer, and locking it. Whitney was like a toddler. When she wanted a lollipop, you diverted her with a carrot, and she eventually forgot the lollipop had ever existed.
Once she had permission to look at the report, she quickly lost interest, skimming the page, making a face where the information was particularly graphic, stopping at another point to nod, then moving on. Then her green eyes narrowed, and jumped back to whatever had caught her quicksilver attention the first time.
“You say her teeth were rotted.”
Tess knew where Whitney was going, she had been there herself. “Yes, I asked the assistant medical examiner about that. But you can’t make an ID through dental records unless you know which dental records to check. It’s not as if there’s some computer database and you can plug in the description of the molars and it will kick the match back to you in twenty seconds. Although I suppose it could happen one day. Online teeth identification, DNA testing—”
“That’s not my point,” Whitney said impatiently, jabbing her finger at the line. “The report said the back teeth are eroded, the enamel gone. You know what that means.”
Tess did, or she did now that Whitney had reminded her. How embarrassing to have missed this detail. It was as if an alcoholic had looked at an autopsy in which someone’s liver was clearly diseased, and been too deep in denial to make the connection.
“Eating disorder,” she said, smacking her own cheek, punishment for her own tunnel vision. “Bulimia. A habit of long-standing, if her teeth were showing signs of decay.”
“And?”
“And, what? So she had an eating disorder. What am I going to do with that information? It’s an interesting detail, but it’s not going to help me identify her.”
“It narrows the range of possibilities. Now you know she was from a middle- or upper-middle-class family.”
“That’s a stereotype, Whitney. All classes, all races, experience eating disorders. Even some men have been diagnosed with bulimia and anorexia.”
“Yes, and every now and then some Eastern Europe pituitary case finds a job in the NBA. There’s a difference between stereotypes, based on bigotry, and generalizations, which are extracted from the fact that some groups do dominate in certain areas. Well-to-do white girls rule in the world of eating disorders.”
“Really? Then how come little working-class moi flirted with bulimia in high school, while you never had a problem?”
“Oh, you were more of a social climber than you’ll ever admit. Going to Washington College, trying out for crew. I used to worry you’d go whole hog, marry some guy named Chip who wore plaid pants and loafers with no socks. Besides, who said I got off scot-free? I had my own brush with it, back in college.”
Tess shook her head, annoyed that her friend’s competitive spirit never seemed to rest. “I don’t think so, Whitney. I was your roommate, remember? You couldn’t have hidden it from me. I can spot compulsive overeaters in the grocery store, just by the way they load their carts.”
“Not at Washington College, at Yale.” Whitney had transferred after their sophomore year, correctly deducing that, in a world gone label mad, a brand-name college was essential. Back then, her ambitions had been aimed, laserlike, at the New York Times and a foreign assignment. “I missed an entire semester. Didn’t you ever wonder why I graduated six months after you did?”
“I assumed you lost some credits in the transfer.”
“What I lost was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for almost three months. I had to be hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance.”
Tess’s mind wanted to reject this information. Whitney had never had a weight problem. Then again, eating disorders weren’t about weight. They were about everything but weight. The scale’s daily verdict was simply a way to measure one’s entire self, and you always came up wanting. It was just a number, they kept telling you. But this was a world where numbers mattered more than anything, a place of ceaseless top 10 lists, top 100 lists, the Forbes 500 and the Fortune whatever. Homeless men knew how high the Dow closed yesterday, and everyone wanted to be number one. All Tess had wanted was to weigh 120 pounds.
Twelve years ago, after waking up in the hospital, her stomach pumped of the Ipecac she had used to purge, she had made a deal with her body: Tell me what you want, really want, and I’ll give it to you. A brownie when you want a brownie, a piece of fruit when you want a piece of fruit. It wasn’t always easy to hear her body over the roar of the other voices in her head, the ones that swore a bowl of raw cookie dough would solve all her ills, but she could usually zero in on the right signal. She hadn’t weighed herself for ten years, and she closed her eyes when she climbed on a doctor’s scale.
“How did it happen to you, Whitney?”
“Rowing was a lot more competitive at Yale. My only shot was the women’s lightweight four. But I’m tall as you, and leaner. I didn’t have much fat to lose. But I tried. God knows I tried.” Whitney’s thin mouth curled at the memory. “Only problem was that, once I got my weight down, I kept passing out. Hard to win a race when a rower loses consciousness.”
Tess had a guilty desire to know more. She and Whitney had traveled in the same dark country, they spoke a language only a few knew. It was so tempting to delve into the details—laxatives or self-induced vomiting? What was the biggest binge you ever went on? Did you ever wrap yourself in plastic while doing sit-ups? Run seven miles after eating a half gallon of chocolate chip ice cream?
Tempting, but probably not healthy.
“Okay, say you’re right. Jane Doe had an eating disorder, and she took it a lot further than we ever did. Which, you think, means she’s not some street kid, but a nice little middle-class girl. So why hasn’t her family come forward? Why isn’t there a missing persons report on file?”
“Really? How does one manage that?”
Whitney stood up and stretched, gave her friend a knowing smile. “As if you could survive without your parents. You’d die if you didn’t have them meddling in your life. Speaking of parents—I have a very precise list from my mother, telling me the exact brand of suede gloves I am to give my father for Christmas this year, and where to find the linen handkerchiefs for Marmee—”
“God, I’d forgotten you call your grandmother Marmee. How Louisa May Alcott. Is she as much of a sanctimonious prig as the real Marmee, making you give away your Christmas gifts to the less fortunate?”
“—and, of course, mother has ordered my Christmas cards for me, from Down’s Stationers, and given me a list of people I might have overlooked for my gift list. In fact, she’s put everyone on the list but herself, claiming she doesn’t want anything. What she really means is there’s not a thing I could give her she wouldn’t return, so why bother? I think I’ll find something especially hideous, something monogrammed that can’t be exchanged.”
“How do we reward ourselves at the end of this ordeal?” Tess asked. She disliked shopping under most circumstances; the mere thought of a mall in high season made her feel claustrophobic. There would be crowds and Christmas music and, she knew with a sudden and certain dread, robotic figures standing in mounds of white cotton, waggling their heads to and fro.
“We could head back to Belvedere Square, go to Café Zen or Al Pacino’s.”
The Sugar House Page 8