Baltimore Blues (15 page)

In contrast the woman at his side could have been a vampire’s victim. Pale Luisa J. O’Neal had a bruised look around her eyes and she was thin, almost too thin. Tess knew instantly she was one of those loathsome people who can never keep weight on, who regularly misplace five pounds as if they were car keys. Luisa O’Neal looked as if she lived on weak tea and water biscuits, with an occasional cup of beef broth to liven things up. No wonder her childhood nickname, Ellie Jay, was still in use: She had a birdlike, fragile air. She wore an ankle-length flowery skirt with Fortuny pleats, pearls, and a Chanel-style jacket of deep green, a perfect match for the skirt’s background.
Not Chanel-style
, Tess corrected herself.
This would have to be the real thing
.

Still, she was far less intimidating than her husband, and Tess found it easier to answer her. “If this were my house, I guess I’d be looking out the window all the time.”

“I do spend most of my time here,” she answered in the
accentless voice common to Baltimore’s best families. “The view changes constantly. And because it faces west, there are lovely sunsets over the hill. I also like it because the stream at the bottom—you can barely see it this time of year, the trees are still so thick—is named for my father and my mother. Cross-Tree Creek.”

“Cross-Tree Creek!” Mr. O’Neal interrupted with a snorting laugh. “Only the Trees ever called it that. It’s Little Wyman Falls on any city map I’ve ever seen. The city renamed it thirty years ago, after William sold off that parcel. Of course, now it’s worth a hundred times what he sold it for.”

Tess was used to such sniping in her own family, but it made her uncomfortable here. Unsure of what she should say, if anything, she stared at Mr. O’Neal’s teeth through her eyelashes. They were long and ocher colored, very refined in her opinion. Perhaps they were dentures, made to look so unappealing no one would guess they were fake.

Husband and wife took their seats in matching wing chairs as Mrs. O’Neal launched into a droning litany of hospitality. Coffee, tea, wine, beer, whiskey, a cocktail, water, Coke, ginger ale, juice? Tea, Tyner and Tess agreed, although Tess secretly longed for one of those mellow amber whiskeys she saw in crystal decanters on a butler’s bar. But even tea, it appeared, was not a simple choice. “Hot or iced?” Mrs. O’Neal asked. Hot, they agreed. Herbal? Sure. Lemon. Of course. Or cream? No, lemon. One lump or two? Two, they guessed. By the time she finished quizzing them, the maid had arrived pushing a rolling cart with a teapot in its cozy and plates of petit fours, cheese straws, and crustless sandwiches. The cozy was dingy looking, covered with an unskilled cross-stitch. Probably the handiwork of a Tree ancestor and already promised to whatever museum had agreed to put up the requisite plaque: Donated by Seamon P. and Luisa J. O’Neal, on behalf of the William Tree Foundation.

Tess was so overwhelmed by the tea’s production values
that she almost forgot she and Tyner had been summoned here.

After a few observations about the weather and the Orioles, O’Neal segued neatly from a humorous anecdote about his latest case to the matter at hand. “Now, you’re representing that Paxton boy, is that right, Tyner?”

Tyner nodded.

“Yes. Tragic situation. And a very…public one. We wonder—at the firm, the partners—if it might be the sort of thing best suited to a plea bargain. We might even be able to help the young man if that was the case, call on some of our contacts in the state’s attorney’s office. Although I’ve never done any criminal defense work, I do have some ties there.”

“Plea bargains work best for guilty people,” Tyner said.

“Of course. Yes.” Mr. O’Neal added another two lumps of sugar to his tea and stirred it energetically. “My understanding is your client might fit that, uh, profile. The evidence is, I understand, quite damning.”

“Circumstantial.”

“Yes. Well.” O’Neal whipped his tea madly again, then put it aside. Tess sensed he had put his manners aside, too, that the conversation had shifted suddenly. “We think it would be better for everyone if it didn’t go to trial. Perhaps Abramowitz was a pig, but what’s the use of going over that in a courtroom? A lot of people’s lives could be upset, and the conclusion probably will be the same, albeit with more jail time for your client. A trial would just be an exercise in vanity—your vanity, Tyner. I have it on good authority the prosecutors will settle for manslaughter and a sentence of ten years. He could be out in five. That’s nothing.”

Tess tried to imagine Rock in prison for five years. He would never last. Oh, he could protect himself against the most vicious inmates, but weight lifting and basketball could never replace his rowing routine. And nothing would compensate for the crush of people. He would hate that most of all.

Tyner regarded O’Neal quizzically. “When you repre
sented Nance Chemical, did you advise the CEO of that company to pay the fine and be done with it? Did you ever tell the folks at Sims-Kever to forget about a trial, just go ahead and pay those pesky asbestos victims?”

“That was different.”

“Exactly. Your clients were guilty. Mine isn’t.”

The two men stared at each other across the expanse of a kilim rug that Tess estimated to be worth her take-home pay for the year. O’Neal’s face had flushed a deeper shade of red, but he seemed calm, almost jovial. She
had
seen that face before, she decided. The photo in the newspaper file? No, in that one, he had been looking down, so all one saw was the part in his hair. She had seen him laughing and smiling, enjoying himself immensely. Pleasant and harmless, the way he had seemed when their tea party began. A benign grandfather, showing a favorite grandson his back swing. Not, not back swing—a backhand. And not a grandson. A girl. A woman.

“You look different with your clothes on,” she blurted.

If O’Neal had been sipping his tea, he might have executed a perfect spit-take. Instead he stammered and blustered while his wife fastened her bruised eyes on him. Mrs. O’Neal did not seemed altogether surprised, but she was certainly interested.

“I saw you at the Sweat Shop talking to Ava Hill the other night,” Tess said. “You weren’t
not
dressed—I mean, you weren’t naked—but you had on workout clothes. Or squash clothes, I guess. That’s what I meant.”

“Of course.” He turned to his wife. “Ava stopped me at the club, worried to death about the implications of her fiancé’s arrest.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Tess said, knowing she should stop, yet incapable of shutting up. “Because this was more than a week before Abramowitz died. Did you talk to her before
and
after the murder? Or were you lying just now?”

She was glad then for the length of the room and its high ceilings, for a smaller room could not have held the ensuing silence. O’Neal was now the color of a plum tomato. Mrs.
O’Neal’s face was impassive, staring off into the hills as if the matter was of no interest to her. Every inch a lady, Tess noted. Tyner looked furious—probably with her because she had spoken, and because she had not shared an important fact earlier. He didn’t like surprises. But she hadn’t realized what she knew until she watched O’Neal speak, seen the same bobbing gestures he had used when Ava had stalked him at the Sweat Shop. She was often the last person to realize what she knew.

“Oh, the sun is going down!” Mrs. O’Neal cried, clasping her hands together. It was the bland, borderline insipid remark of a woman trained to defuse tricky social situations, a woman who never had trouble setting a table, no matter how many sworn enemies were invited to the same dinner party. It worked, for her husband suddenly found his tongue, as smooth as ever.

“I talk to Ava all the time. She is an associate at our firm, with a promising future,” O’Neal said. A vein throbbed at his temple, but he was otherwise composed. “Her fiancé’s murder trial could damage that future. Clients don’t like lawyers who have been too close to felonies and felons. Or law firms where people are murdered. O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill doesn’t deserve this. We’ve always avoided publicity, good or bad.”

“You brought Abramowitz in as a partner,” Tyner said. “You must have known publicity would come with him.”

“It didn’t, not at first. He was happy to go to charity balls and have his picture taken. And, to be fair, it’s really not Abramowitz’s fault he became front page news by becoming a corpse. Your client gets the credit for that.”

In the space of ten minutes Tess had reassessed her opinion of Seamon P. O’Neal almost ten times. He had seemed silly and harmless, then harmful. He had lied; she was sure of that. An associate who had failed the bar twice didn’t have a promising future. But he wasn’t a stupid man, merely someone with a radically different viewpoint. He had spent his career protecting large corporations from the complaints
of individuals. It was consistent he should hold to this view when it struck close to home.

“My firm means the world to me,” he said. “Its reputation is priceless. If you insist on going to court with this case and trying to build a defense on whatever your client
thinks
was going on between Mr. Abramowitz and Ms. Hill, I can promise you we will be of no help. The tiniest thing you want from us—a file, information about the girl’s employment history, interviews with employees—will have to go through a judge. You’ll need a court order to call me on the phone. And I don’t think you’ll get any cooperation from Ms. Hill, either. Wouldn’t it be better if we were all on the same side?”

“Only for you.” Tyner said. “And I could give a fuck about the Triple O. I would consider it a bonus if this trial damaged the undeserved reputation of O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill.”

O’Neal’s eyes flicked across Tyner’s wheels. With his red face and beaky profile, he reminded Tess of a copperhead snake.

“I’d forgotten what a bitter bastard you are,” he said. “I suppose I would be, too, if I were a cripple with only one accomplishment of note, and it was more than forty years behind me.”

Mrs. O’Neal picked this moment to ask: “More hot water, Tyner?”

But her good manners could not save the tea party twice. “Don’t worry about it, Seamon,” Tyner said, his voice oddly jovial. “You’ve got a few years. With some luck you might have something to be proud of, something better than a law firm and your father-in-law’s millions.”

Tyner’s line cried out for a grand departure, but the O’Neals’ home, for all its graciousness, did not provide him with the unfettered passage needed to roll out dramatically. Tess helped him navigate the kilim rug and the slippery runner in the hallway, a thin rug that bunched up under his wheels. At the front door she had to help him back away from the door before she could wrench it open. When she
finally threw it open, a screeching noise filled the air, a horrible sound that echoed endlessly up and down Cross Place. She had set off the O’Neals’ alarm system, apparently programmed for automatic, as if they expected Tyner and Tess to bolt.

Tyner made his way down the driveway and swung himself into the van’s passenger seat. The days were growing shorter, and the fading light barely penetrated through the trees along Cross Place. In the doorways of the houses to the left and right, Tess saw silhouettes of men drawn by the still-shrieking alarm. As her eyes grew used to the dusk, she saw one had a lacrosse stick and another held what appeared to be an antique revolver. Slowly the men started moving toward the van. Tess threw the wheelchair in the back, not taking time to fold it. The Wasp avengers had reached the end of their curving walkways and were still approaching, silent and sure of themselves. Tess leapt into the driver’s seat and floored the engine, backing out of the driveway and burning rubber as she accelerated off Cross Place, the alarm screaming in their ears, the neighbors almost on them. She was on St. Paul, heading back to the city, before she realized the blue and white flag still flew from the antenna.

“I think I’ll save that,” she told Tyner, pointing at the wind-whipped flag. “After all, we might be invited back for tea sometime soon.”

A
fter dropping Tyner and his van off at his office, Tess walked up to the Brass Elephant and ordered a Scotch and water at the restaurant’s upstairs bar. The long, narrow bar deserved to be famous, if only for its martinis. Its regulars, however, were jealous and, as if by unspoken agreement, brought few new customers. Tess had some unresolved feelings about vermouth, but she drank martinis here because she believed in supporting artists at work, and Victor the bartender was nothing if not an artist.

Tonight, however, she was still thinking about all those golden liquids lined up in crystal decanters at the O’Neals. She was convinced their liquor was finer than anything she would ever taste, finer than anything she could buy, no matter how much money she had in her pocket. Then again, perhaps the O’Neals were cheap, the sort of rich people who bought inexpensive brands of Scotch and bourbon and cognac and put them in decanters so no one knew their pedigree. Scotch and water wasn’t what she really wanted. Gloomy and out of sorts, she left her drink unfinished on the bar and went home.

Kitty and Officer Friendly were in their bathrobes, wolfing down one of those postcoital picnics peculiar to a relationship’s beginning, when sex brings other appetites to life. Tonight they were working on a hunk of summer sausage, Italian bread slathered with olive oil, sliced apples, and Cam
embert. They invited Tess to stay, but her memory of O’Neal’s blood red face robbed her of the usual pleasures she found in cholesterol.

“Not even some bread?” Thaddeus asked. “Olive oil is a relatively benign monosaturate.” She wondered if Kitty had taught him that, or if he had unplumbed depths. Shaking her head no, Tess grabbed an apple, sawed off two thick slices of bread, poured a healthy slug of white wine, and carried it all to her rooftop. She would rather have her own solitary picnic than be an unwanted guest at someone else’s.

Her dinner finished, Tess felt so cozy in her wallow of self-pity that she decided to smoke a joint. She didn’t pay much attention to the harmonica tune wafting up from the alley below. Fells Point had no shortage of panhandlers who tried to pass themselves off as musicians. And this was a particularly overachieving busker who seemed to fancy himself the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica, segueing raggedly from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a blues song.
Oh say can you see…that my woman done left me
. No, this was a song about a
good
woman, someone who washes out a man’s knife wound and doesn’t mind when he leaves in the morning, having drunk all her whiskey and left nothing but a bloodstain behind in her bed.

“Oh, shit.” She knew this song. It was Jonathan Ross’s mating call.

That should have been number five on this fall’s list
, Tess thought.
Stop seeing Jonathan
. She could, she knew she could. It was her choice to let him in. She flicked the last bit of joint off the roof, crawled back inside, and pressed the buzzer that let him in the side door.

Jonathan took the stairs two at a time and began kicking the door lustily, his harmonica still wheezing in his teeth. She knew by the sound of his cowboy boots on the door that he had come to crow. Tess experienced Jonathan only at his extremes—cocky and in need of affirmation, or depressed and in need of affirmation. Once, in conversation with Whitney, she had compared her Jonathan encounters to eating Oreos without any filling.

“Well, that’s what you sign up for when you keep company with men who are virtually engaged to other people,” Whitney had said in her blunt way. “Licked-clean Oreos.”

Tonight the plain chocolate cookie in question had brought, along with the harmonica, a bottle of mescal, a Big Mac, and a large order of fries. He pressed the warm, grease-stained bag into Tess’s middle as he hugged her, giving her a wet kiss tasting faintly of salt and Hohner Marine Band steel.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Tess trilled in falsetto, cradling the brown paper bag. “Let me get a vase for these fries.”

He grabbed the bag back from her, growling deep in his throat, and began to cram French fries in his mouth by the fistful. When obsessed at work Jonathan sometimes forgot to eat until his need for food became so acute he almost fainted. Once he did find sustenance he guarded it as jealously as a dog. Tess knew what a hunger like this meant.

“Big story?”

“Huge,” he said around a mouthful of fries. “Enormous. Gargantuan. Pulitzer material. Do they give the Nobel in journalism? I’ll win that, too.”

Tess felt her stomach lurch. Feeney, damn Feeney. If he had told Jonathan about her call, Jonathan might be following the same lead now. He would find the mystery man with the Louisville Slugger first. He would solve the murder. He would win.

“Abramowitz?”

Jonathan held up his hand as if he were a traffic cop, motioning her to wait while he worked his way through the last handful of fries. “Better. Much better than any dead lawyer.”

He offered Tess the mescal bottle, but she shook her head. With a glass of wine at her side and a half-joint still in her system, she had enough substances going. Jonathan took three swallows, then began pacing back and forth, bent over in an unconscious parody of Groucho Marx.

“Tell me,” Tess wheedled, unconvinced Abramowitz was not part of it. “You know you’re dying to tell someone.”

“No. Not yet. I don’t have it on the record yet, but I will. I will!” Jonathan dumped a shot of mescal on the Big Mac, then consumed the burger and his own special sauce in three bites. Like Kitty and Thaddeus gulping summer sausage, Jonathan’s appetite had little to do with his stomach.

“Give me a hint. Tell me something. Tell me how big it is.”

Jonathan stopped pacing, if not chewing, and considered her question. “It will change…everything. It will be like a coup, by journalism. Killers will roam the streets of Baltimore. Institutions will be suspect.”

“And the president will resign, right? You don’t have to hype your story to
me
, I’m not the page one editor. And I’m not buying it.”

“You’ll buy it eventually. You’ll take your fifty cents down to the newspaper box and you’ll buy it along with 300,000 other people. No, make that a dollar fifty and 500,000 people. This is a Sunday story, all the way.
The New York Times
and the
Washington Post
will woo me. Movie producers will want the rights. Actors—the dark, brooding, romantic kind—will vie to play me.” He grabbed her hands and pulled her to him. “Reporters will want to interview
you
, because you knew me.”

“My dream come true.” Tess pulled away. Jonathan oversold all his stories, so it was hard to know if this one was truly special. But something told her the little boy who cried wolf—this little boy who called, “Extra, extra, read all about the wolf!”—was going to come through this time. He had unearthed a journalistic treasure. And she was the first to know, the unnamed native servant, following the great white hunter into the forbidden temple and watching in pagan terror as he contemplated a sacred object she had never dared to touch. Once he lifted this golden artifact from its perch, nothing would be the same. The earth would move, the temple would rumble, and Jonathan’s future would be made in the brief moment when he decided to run with his treasure. And he would run with it. Of that she had no doubt.

Still, she could not give him the satisfaction of seeming
impressed. “I’ll believe it when I see it. As you said, you don’t even have anything on the record.”

“But I will. You know I will,” he said, pulling Tess down on top of him, a new hunger in him.

The imminence of fame and success was an aphrodisiac to Jonathan. He was tender and insatiable, as if Tess embodied the dreams hovering close. They made love once, twice, three times, drinking mescal shots between bouts of lovemaking, talking of everything but the source of Jonathan’s excitement. They still had not slept when Tess’s alarm went off at 5:30
A.M
., summoning her to the boat house.

“Skip your workout for once,” Jonathan murmured wetly into her neck. For once Tess did, although she had a slight twinge of guilt about Rock. He worried when she missed practice, assuming she must be gravely ill.

She made a pot of coffee and they climbed to the roof to watch the sun rise. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees overnight as a cool front moved through, and Baltimore looked glorious. No polluted haze over the harbor, just a clear, almost white sky, the kind that would deepen to cerulean blue as the day wore on. A bright red tug moved slowly across the harbor. The bay was green gray. Even the seagulls looked fresh and clean. Tess felt closer to Jonathan than she had in years, as if they were the couple they had been in their
Star
days. She tried not to think about his girlfriend, waking up alone somewhere outside D.C. At least she assumed the girlfriend woke up alone. Maybe their relationship was more complicated than she knew.

“Great view,” Jonathan said admiringly. “Some people pay two thousand dollars a month for this view, and you get it for almost nothing.”

“Yes, I lead such a charmed life.”

“Well, you do, you know. I’ve always envied you.”

“My fabulous career? My riches?” Tess tried for a light tone, but Jonathan’s praise felt like pity to her.

“Your family, your sense of place here. In some ways I’m still this schmuck from the suburbs. I don’t know the city the way you do. I don’t have your credentials.”

“You have talent, which is better.”

“But I feel like such a fake sometimes.” This was familiar territory, the other side of the Oreo, Jonathan ebbing, surrendering to every neurotic doubt, expecting her to prop him up.

“I still remember my first day at work, when I didn’t know the city at all but pretended I did. ‘Oh, yeah, I went to Hopkins, man, Russell Baker’s alma mater. I know this place cold.’ They sent me to a fire, and I couldn’t find it. I fucking missed a five-alarm. I had the address, I had my little grid map. I could see the smoke, I could hear the trucks, but I couldn’t find the fucking fire. It was in one of those odd little wedges off Frederick Road, you know?”

Tess knew. Southwest Baltimore was a series of such wedges, where streets disappeared only to begin again several blocks later. A lot of her father’s people had lived there when it was still semirespectable.

“Nick, the rewrite man, got more by phone than I did by going out,” Jonathan continued. “He had everything just from working the crisscross, calling neighbors. And when I came back to the office with absolutely nothing, he looked at me and said: ‘Nice job, Sparky.’ Everyone laughed. He called me ‘Sparky’ for two years. Right up to the point when the
Star
folded. Then he went off to the unemployment line, and I went to the
Beacon-Light
.”

“I kind of remember that. But I always thought it was sweet. You know, well-intentioned hazing.”

“Trust me. It wasn’t sweet. There’s not a day I go to work and don’t think about Sparky and Nick.” He struggled to his feet. “In fact, I need to confront the beast right now, after a quick shower and some aspirin. It will probably be the first time in a decade someone has shown up with a hangover at the
Beacon-Light
. Half the people there are in AA. The other half have families and can’t stay out all night drinking.”

“Hey, face it.
The Front Page
is history. Most journalists aren’t much different from the pencil pushing bureaucrats they cover.”

“Watch that kind of talk, or I might have to take a piss
off the roof and pretend the alley is the Chicago River, just to show you the old tabloid spirit lives.”

Jonathan punched her shoulder. Why did every man she know give her these comradely pokes?

“Jimmy’s is open,” she said, trying not to sound wistful. “Want to grab breakfast?”

“No time to eat. I’m not even hungry.”

They climbed back into her apartment. Jonathan pocketed his harmonica and ran down the stairs at top speed. He whistled as he ran, tunelessly but happily. She watched him go, feeling pretty shitty herself, in need of ibuprofen and sleep. He should be crawling into bed, hung over and miserable, Tess thought.
He should feel as bad as I do
.

She did feel bad. Her stomach hurt and her head ached, and there was a bad taste in her mouth. Mescal and lack of sleep probably explained the first two symptoms. Eating the worm may have caused the third. She had a vague memory of doing just that at 3
A.M
. That had been her idea; she had no one else to blame. And she had no one else to blame for the way she hated Jonathan, at least a little bit, as he rushed headlong toward his brilliant career.