The Sugar House

by Laura Lippman

  “Biography doesn’t interest me. People are boring. Including me.”

  “That guy who was just in here didn’t look so boring. Boyfriend?”

  “Jane Doe” retreated behind the sales counter, a too-precious little desk with spindly legs and a frosted glass top.

  “Who are you?” she asked, her voice stripped of its snotty veneer. “Who sent you here?”

  “I find names boring,” Tess dead-panned.

  “I fulfilled my contract,” the woman said. “We’re not supposed to be hassled, after. It’s not my fault, what happened.”

  She had pulled a pair of scissors from the desk, but her hand was shaking so hard that Tess felt more pity than fear.

  “I’m not anybody. I’m just a Christmas shopper trying to make conversation. Who do you think I am?”

  “Please leave,” the woman said. “Once it’s over, it’s over. That’s what they promised.”

  “I’m not affiliated with any ‘they,’” Tess said, trying to make her voice as neutral as possible. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know anything about you, or what you’re talking about.”

  “Get out, get out, get out, get out.” The woman’s voice rose until it was a feral shriek. Shoppers on the Avenue glanced up, startled. Public brawls were not unknown in Hampden, but they were usually confined to side streets, on hot summer nights, when too much beer had been consumed.

  Tess left, making a mental note of the number painted on the transom over the gallery’s door. Sometimes numbers were more important than names.

  Sometimes numbers led to names.

  chapter 27

  TESS HAD A LAPTOP THAT HAD SO MUCH RAM COURSING through its system, so much power, according to the Crazy Nathan’s salesman who had talked her into it, that it might arise from her desk one day and start cleaning her apartment, or prepare a Cordon Bleu meal.

  But now, when Tess wanted only to use the Internet to check the city real estate database, her laptop was useless. Not because it wasn’t fast, but because the human being on the other end hadn’t updated the file for at least three years. She felt a perverse pride in her fellow Baltimoreans for rendering technology so powerless.

  The only thing to do was head down to the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse and look up the records in the dusty old plat books. It wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. She could chat up her friend Kevin Feeney while she was there, find out if there were any juicy rumors about Dahlgren or Adam Moss, the kind of rumors that never made the pages of the Beacon-Light, yet all the reporters traded, like baseball cards.

  “Juicy bits?” Feeney’s natural expression was a scowl, so he had to work a little harder to give the impression that he was frowning. His careworn face folded itself into a series of creases and furrows. “You mean, like butt buddies?”

  “No. You know, not everything is about sex.”

  “Tell me about it.” He sighed at some private memory. “So you’re asking if we’ve ever heard any rumors about Dahlgren we couldn’t find a way to squeeze into the paper, one way or another? Not that I recall. Until this ethics thing came along and he hooked up with Meyer Hammersmith, he was a classic backbencher. As for Adam Moss, I know less than nada. Did you Autotrack him?”

  Autotrack was a costly computer search, which reporters took for granted, largely because they didn’t pay for it. Reporters took it so much for granted that they used it to look up ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, or just to update their Christmas card lists, cheerfully racking up hours of charges. It wasn’t something a one-woman private detection agency could afford.

  “What a great idea,” Tess said. “Can you Autotrack from here?”

  “Nope,” Feeney said emphatically. “They’re not dumb enough to give me access at the courthouse, I have to go into the office. Besides, each of us has his own password. They’d trace it right back to me.”

  Tess saw no reason to tell him that Dorie had given her the password of one of the paper’s lazier reporters to do searches on the Blight’s other, less costly databases. “It’s not as if you wouldn’t have a legitimate reason to look into Adam Moss. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Maybe he’d make a good profile.”

  Feeney shook his head. “I’m not risking it. Sorry. They’re in a budget crisis this quarter, so they’re nickel-and-diming us to death.”

  “Budget crisis? The paper’s so fat with ads I can barely lift it from the doorstep in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but the new managing editor went on a hiring binge at some job fair. He woke up the next morning, young Ivy League bodies littered around him.”

  “Whitney said they might hire her back.”

  Feeney shook his head. “They made her an offer. It’s one of those rare times when the lack of institutional knowledge pays off. The M.E. may not know Spiro Agnew was once Baltimore County Executive, but he also doesn’t know why Whitney left in the first place. I wish she would come back. The new breed—man, it’s total Village of the Damned time down there.”

  “Village of the Damned?”

  “You know, that movie about those little kids with those big staring eyes? You should be glad you got out of the business when you did.”

  “Trust me, I am. About Adam Moss—”

  “No. Besides, you know how many Adam Mosses are going to be in Autotrack?”

  “We could get his DOB from DMV.” Talking in acronyms, sure sign of bureaucratese. How had she ended up sounding so wonky? “I just want to see if he has a criminal record.”

  “So ask your buddy down at the police station. Won’t he run stuff through the NCIC for you?”

  Tess had no ready answer. Yes, under certain circumstances, Tull might help her out. But she was trying to keep Tull at arm’s length. She was trying to keep everyone at arm’s length, and it was proving increasingly difficult.

  “Want to walk down to the document room with me?”

  “Darling, I can think of nothing more I’d like to do, but I have a hearing in five minutes. Give my love to our always cheerful civil servants.”

  Walking through the courthouse corridors, Tess had a moment of paranoia. No building was more public than the courthouse, yet it was full of shadowy corners in which to hide and watch someone. All the time she had been following Adam Moss, she had also been trying to ascertain who was following her. Someone had been watching her, paying close attention. She had said at the press conference she had a source in Philadelphia, an unnamed friend who had known Gwen Schiller, but it was only when she ordered the phone logs that Hilde’s killer made the connection. But how had Adam Moss known to ask for the phone logs before she even did it? Was her phone bugged? Her office? Tull’s office?

  For all I know, she thought, flipping through the plat book, the hands of Hilde’s killer have held this book recently, have touched the pages I’m touching now. She ran her index finger down the column of listings, feeling the shadow of another finger beneath hers. The finger jumped to her spine, a particularly icy finger with a long pointed nail, and she shuddered.

  The owner of the property on 36th Street was listed as a corporation, M.H. Hammersmith Properties. Tess didn’t have to be a cryptologist to figure out that the man behind the company was one Meyer Hammersmith, campaign chairman for Kenneth Dahlgren, boss of Adam Moss. You also could be as ignorant of the city’s history as the Blight’s new managing editor and be aware that Meyer Hammersmith owned dozens, possibly hundreds, of properties throughout the city. It was how he had made his millions. He probably owned properties he didn’t know he owned, including this modest storefront on 36th Street.

  And yet.

  Meyer Hammersmith was Ken Dahlgren’s finance chairman.

  Adam Moss, Dahlgren’s aide, had paid a visit to the gallery owned by Hammersmith.

  The woman behind the counter, the woman who didn’t believe in names, had shown real fear when Tess had come by. But she had been comfortable with Adam, she hadn’t been afraid of him.

  Tess was on a cul de sac, a big,
looping one, but a cul de sac nonetheless, in which every road led back to Ken Dahlgren. Yet there was nothing to connect Dahlgren to Gwen Schiller, or Henry Dembrow, or Devon Whittaker. In fact, there was nothing to connect Dahlgren to anyone. Adam Moss had requested the telephone records. Meyer Hammersmith owned the building. Dahlgren was just the grinning figurehead at the center, the pet that they were grooming to win best of show in a year or two. A former backbencher, as Feeney had said, stunned by his good fortune. He wouldn’t ask any questions, as long as the money kept rolling in, and rolling in.

  She and Whitney had worked out a system: Tess could page her via beeper if she needed her urgently. She did this now, punching in her cell phone number, then going outside and waiting on the courthouse steps for Whitney to find an outside line.

  The courthouse steps always felt like the wings to a dozen different dramas. Today there was a wedding party, posing for a photograph, the bride so pregnant that it appeared the baby had achieved legitimacy by mere minutes. Newly broken families, divided into sullen, smoldering camps, tried not to make eye contact as they headed into the building. Lawyers in cheap suits raced by with speeded-up walks that only exposed them for the ambulance chasers they were. Some trial was hot enough to bring out the television vans as well, and the reporters were lining up, ready to go live at noon, even if the trial had yet to recess. Given the choice between gathering information and going live, television reporters always chose the latter. After all, you couldn’t have dead air.

  Tess’s phone rang, and she pulled it out.

  “What’s up?” Whitney sounded breathless, excited.

  “Have you worked your way up to opening the mail yet?”

  “Have I? I’m covered with paper cuts. So I started using my Swiss army knife, which seems to make the other volunteers ever so nervous.”

  Tess had a mental image of Whitney, slicing carelessly through the day’s mail.

  “Do you see the checks when they come in? Do you have access to the files where campaign contributions are listed?”

  “Sure, but can’t you get them up at the Election Board?”

  “Not the current ones. Besides, I’m looking for certain names, certain addresses. I’m especially curious to see if anyone’s bundling—you know, trying to avoid contribution limits by parceling out donations to relatives, or neighbors. I want you to look for donations from Southwest Baltimore, which isn’t in the first, or even in the forty-ninth. And I want you to look for anyone who has the last name DeSanti.”

  “I don’t dare take notes,” Whitney said, bless her quick, steeltrap mind. She understood instantly what Tess wanted. “At the very least, they’ll think I’m another candidate’s spy, and they’ll can me.”

  “Just remember as much as you can for now. If I’m right, we’ll find a way to come back and get the files.”

  “He has a big fund-raiser at Martin’s West in a few days,” Whitney said. “Five hundred dollars a head, and the checks are pouring in. Maybe, if I’m very, very good, I can get them to send me to the bank with the daily deposits. Then I can stop en route and copy down all the names on the checks. Although a lot of it is cash.”

  “Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Tess said. “Hey, how well do you know Meyer Hammersmith, anyway?”

  “My folks know him. He always seemed like a sweet old man to me, essentially harmless—assuming any real estate billionaire can be essentially harmless. When he comes out to the house, he almost drools, thinking about what he could do with my parent’s property. But they’re not really friends so much as they’re allies, sitting on all these arts boards. My mother was shocked when he signed on with Dahlgren, he’s such a philistine. Look, I better get back. I told them I had to go to the drugstore. And when they asked why, I just lifted an eyebrow in that don’t-ask-female-trouble kind of way, and the guy let me go. But how long can it take to buy tampons, you know?”

  “Whitney—” Tess thought of Hilde, dead simply because she happened to stand between Devon Whittaker and her would-be killer, about Gwen Schiller, about the frightened no-name woman in the no-name gallery. “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she assured her airily. “The Swiss army knife isn’t the only thing I’m packing, I can tell you that much.”

  chapter 28

  IT TOOK A MERE TWO DAYS FOR WHITNEY TO SECURE THE privilege of making the Dahlgren campaign’s daily deposits.

  “They’re talking about making me a paid staffer before too long,” she told Tess over the phone on Thursday, almost preening. Only Whitney could go undercover and turn it into a career opportunity.

  “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for you to draw a paycheck from these people,” Tess said worriedly.

  “Oh, I know. I told them I was doing this for love, not money.” Her voice lowered, as if she were trying not to be overheard, although she was calling from her snug little cottage. “And there is so much money, Tess. The guy has a real war chest. I know congressional races cost a lot these days, but do you think he might be keeping his options open? Maybe he’s really going to run for governor, or U.S. Senate.”

  “Only if it’s an open race. He’d never take on an incumbent. Look, as Deep Throat said to Woodward—”

  “Assuming Deep Throat ever existed. I have my doubts.”

  “Whatever. Follow the money, Whitney. Find patterns, any patterns—in names, in addresses, in fund-raisers. I’m here in my office with Jackie right now, going over Dahlgren’s past finance reports, but it’s pretty Mickey Mouse stuff. Running for state senate, he was lucky to get $200 from his own father-in-law. It sounds as if he’s now raising more in a week than he did for all his other campaigns combined.”

  She hung up her phone. It was late, almost ten, and she was exhausted. Not so much from working—Whitney was doing more than she was—but from all the lying and deception. If her father was to believe that she had dropped her inquiry into Henry Dembrow’s death, then everyone else had to believe it as well.

  Even Ruthie Dembrow, who had hot, furious words when Tess told her she was suspending the investigation through the end of the holidays. But it was precisely because of Ruthie’s quick temper that Tess had lied to her. She was counting on her to complain to Pat yet again about his unreliable daughter, how she had started the investigation only to drop it for a second time. So Tess was not only working secretly, but for free.

  She had enlarged her conspiracy slightly, however, taking in Crow and Jackie. Crow was her sounding board, she needed him at night, when she chanted the litany of what she had failed to accomplish. Besides, he often had good ideas.

  Meanwhile Jackie, who had left political fund-raising for more legitimate work years ago, brought an expert eye to Dahlgren’s financial documents. She also had been willing to go to the ethics office in Towson and make photocopies. Still paranoid about being followed, Tess didn’t want to run the risk of being seen anywhere, doing anything.

  The problem was, they weren’t getting anywhere. Try as she might, she could not find the final connection that would link Dahlgren to Domenick’s or Nicola DeSanti. She sat at her desk with a sketchbook in front of her, trying to make the formula work. Meyer Hammersmith was Kenneth Dahlgren’s finance chairman. Adam Moss was Kenneth Dahlgren’s aide. Hammersmith owned a building that housed a gallery, a gallery Adam Moss had visited. Adam Moss had requested the phone list. But she could not find a link to the bar, or even to Gene Fulton, who had been a liquor board inspector long before Dahlgren came on the scene.

  “I can’t link anyone to Hilde’s murder except Adam Moss,” she said now to Jackie, “and that makes no sense.”

  “Why not? From what you’ve said, he sounds cold enough to do whatever his boss asked.”

  Tess picked at the cartons of Thai food spread before them, looking for something to drag through the leftover peanut sauce. They had been working for almost three hours. It felt like six.

  “Political aides don’t kill people, except in the movies. Even Gordo
n Liddy only went as far as burglary and conspiracy, and the bar for political scandal is so much higher now, in the P.L. era.”

  “P.L.?”

  “Post-Lewinsky. The first rule is still deny, deny, deny. But contrition goes a long way now, if you get caught.”

  Jackie rubbed her eyes and sighed.

  “Well, I just don’t see anything unusual, Tess,” she said. “Neither here, nor in the photocopies from his ethics file. This guy is so clean he reports the lunches that lobbyists buy him.”

  “I thought that was the law now.”

  “Doesn’t mean everyone does it.”

  Tess walked around the desk and bent over Jackie’s shoulder. “Does the name Arnie Vasso pop up?”

  “Sure, yeah. Lunch here, lunch there. But no more than any other lobbyist. Tell me again, what are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Tess said, falling back on her sofa with an exaggerated sigh. Esskay, unused to sharing her space, gave her a dirty look and stretched out, trying to push Tess away with her rear legs. “Anything, everything. It’s like I’ve got one piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and it’s a piece of blue sky, only maybe it’s really ocean, or the hem of some girl’s dress. But I only have one piece. If I had a few more, I’d find a way to make it fit, I’d pound it in with my fist. One piece doesn’t do anything.”

  “If you found a connection, what would it prove?”

  “I don’t know. That I’m not crazy.”

  Jackie smiled. “We already know you’re crazy. Look, it’s late. Help me load my things and the baby in the car, and you get out of here, too. Have a drink, let that sweet young boy of yours make you feel good.”

  “I’m beyond feeling good these days,” Tess said, lifting a sleeping Laylah from her portable crib. As Tess had told Jackie, she had no generic baby longings. But, oh, how she loved this one, with her chubby arms and legs, her puckish face. She hated to think of the day when Laylah would turn on her own reflection, when she would look in the mirror and yearn for the opposite of whatever she saw there. Yet that day came for every female she had ever known. Look at Gwen Schiller, as exquisite as a china figurine, or Devon Whittaker, her cousin Sarah. Men suffered no such self-doubt, even when they should. What Tess wouldn’t give to stalk through life with just a little of, say, Adam Moss’s arrogance and certainty.