Baltimore Blues (22 page)

It was like a little boy writing on the blackboard after school, but this little boy had devised his own punishment. It was like
Finnegans Wake
, if Joyce had been a pudgy Baltimore lawyer without much feel for language. It was like a frog dissecting himself. Fascinated, she continued to work her way through the dense, difficult prose.

He wrote about Northwest Baltimore in the 1950s, going to synagogue in the old Park Heights neighborhood, where many of his mother’s people still lived. His family apparently was Orthodox, and he was obsessed with
trayf
.

“
I am nine
,” he wrote. “
I must eat something nonkosher. I have thought about my betrayal at great length. My sin must be a large sin. I walk miles, so I am far from the neighborhood, so I am somewhere no one I know has ever been. Or so I think. I order a cheeseburger and a milk shake. It is
amazing how much significance I place on these two foods. I am certain that the world will change when I take a bite from that cheeseburger. And I’m right. I still remember that first bite, juice coming out of the burger like venom, cheese running down its side. I have high expectations for sin, and all of them are met. Sin is wonderful. I will be drawn to it all my life
.”

The Proust of Park Heights, she thought. What an odd little guy. Then, just as the narrative seemed to be leading somewhere, he spent ten pages writing the Bill of Rights over and over again, italicizing different words in each version. Was he having a nervous breakdown, or just trying to fill his days, days that were mysteriously empty? A little of both, she suspected.

The Bill of Rights gave way to a discussion of the death penalty, filled with legal cites. Now he appeared to be working on a brief, aimed at releasing everyone from Maryland’s Death Row. But the legal argument gave way abruptly.

“
Because I didn’t want to face the difficult decisions posed by my personal life, I chose a professional life. Now that I’ve lost my professional life, I have no personal life to go back to. After being asexual for much of my life, how do I start being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two? I don’t have a clue
.”

Homosexual? Tess did a double-take, reading the sentence again. Michael Abramowitz was gay. No, he must be bisexual; he had made a pass at Ava, after all. The circumstances of their affair may have been in doubt, but she had seen them together, and Abramowitz had admitted the relationship to Rock.

Or had he? She went to her desk, where she kept copies of the transcripts she had prepared for Tyner. What had Rock said?

“And he said, ‘But she really is beautiful.’ So I hit him.” Rock had treated this as a confession, much as Mr. Macauley had assumed Abramowitz was a smart ass when he agreed someone should kill him. Macauley had tried to pummel Abramowitz, and Abramowitz had held him in his arms and
protected him from arrest. Rock and Macauley had expected a villain, and so they found one. But what if Abramowitz had been sincere? Then, “But she really is beautiful” became a compliment from someone trying to be polite. And “Maybe you’re right,” the rejoinder to Macauley’s assertion that someone should kill Abramowitz, was simple agreement.

She scrolled through the memoirs, looking for some other reference to his personal life. She was barely fifty pages into the 1,000-plus pages and Abramowitz had returned to his brief, slogging his way through case law again. Then she found these words.

“
Burned all your bridges. I know the term, of course, but I always saw it as linear. You burned a bridge and moved on. There was always another road ahead, a place to go. I burned a bridge at the public defender’s office, got out. I burned another bridge, came here. Now I see I am a little island and I have burned every bridge that led to me. I am alone now, isolated, and no one can help me. I put myself above the law and, by doing so, lost it. I have nothing now but time
.”

“Wrong again, Abramowitz,” Tess said to her computer screen. “You didn’t even have that. C’mon, give me a clue. Who wanted you dead?”

She instructed the computer to search for Macauley’s name. Nothing. What about O’Neal? The computer came up empty again. Ava? No, no names were mentioned. A lawyer to the end, Abramowitz had violated no one’s confidentiality but his own.

“
How do I start being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two?
” Good question. She knew one person who could help her answer it.

T
he next evening, when Ava Hill opened her door at Eden’s Landing, Tess could see immediately that there had been significant changes in Ava’s life, or at least her bank account, since Tess’s last visit. The cheap-looking leather sofa had been replaced with a longer, better-made version, this time in a rich shade of dark green. The same color snaked through the navy rug, brushed the legs of a low coffee table, then disappeared only to reappear at the throat of a vase on the glass-topped table. Even Ava’s new briefcase, resting on an antique hall tree in the foyer, was the exact shade of dark green. Tess remembered this, the Coach bag Ava had stroked so lovingly before hurrying to the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel and Michael Abramowitz. It was a new decorating trend, Tess supposed, using an expensive handbag as a theme for an entire room.

“Your circumstances seemed to have changed,” Tess told Ava, whose dress, a burgundy coatdress, provided the perfect contrast against the sofa. Tess was seated in the old director’s chair, the one from the terrace, with the torn orange cover. Apparently the apartment was a work in progress, with some improvements left to be made. Tess would have liked to urge some restraint. From her perch she could see the once-empty dining room. Now the room was too full, overwhelmed by a glass-topped table and six sleek chairs of blond wood, upholstered with peach damask. Expensive, but impractical to
Tess’s eye. The seats would be destroyed by one stray buttered pea, or a sesame noodle slipping from its chopstick.

“Yes. I came into some money.”

“An inheritance from a dead relative?”

“No, no such luck.” She smiled at the expression on Tess’s face. “Oh, lighten up. I’m only trying to live down to your expectations of me. I assume, from your urgent phone call this morning, you have more accusations to hurl at me. You’ve always thought the worst of me. I’d hate to start disappointing you now.”

“I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Ava looked at her suspiciously, not persuaded by Tess’s conciliatory tone. “Wrong about what? It’s such a long list. As I recall you accused me of having an affair with my boss, then of setting up my fiancé to kill my boss. You even suggested I’d killed my boss. Is that everything?”

“Until now. I do have a couple of new ones, though.”

“This should be fun.” Ava cradled a glass of wine the color of her dress, warming the globe with her cupped palms. She had not offered Tess any. Her circumstances had improved, but not her manners.

Tess took a deep breath, trying to remember everything she must say, how to say it, the order in which it had to be said. She would have liked to use notes, but Kitty had thought it would make her look tentative and unsure of herself, and Officer Friendly had agreed.

After mulling over the one real revelation in Abramowitz’s diary, Tess had dragged the happy couple from bed the night before, almost literally, and begged for their help. Seated around the kitchen table, each with a legal pad, they had tried to fit together the pieces. Thaddeus wrote down what was known, irrefutable, absolute.
Fact
, he had written in bold, black letters.
Ava could not pass the bar. Fact: Ava was in a hotel with Michael Abramowitz
. Tess wrote down what she suspected. Kitty kept track of the theories linking the two lists. To Tess’s surprise Thaddeus had shown a real flair for fitting a puzzle together. Disinterested, with no knowledge of the personalities at hand, he had no agenda.
He was going to be a good detective one day. It was Officer Friendly who had found the place to start, who picked up on a discrepancy Tess should have noticed long ago.

“Remember the night I met you at The Point, when you didn’t know who my client was at first?”

“Of course. That’s the beginning, isn’t it? Do you ever wonder how things might be different if you hadn’t made those reckless accusations, forcing me to go to Rock before you could poison his mind against me? Do you ever think about that?” Ava sipped her wine, pleased with herself.

Every night, you bitch, every night
. But she couldn’t afford to play this little game of gotcha, what kids in Baltimore schools had called giving a tight face. “You seemed relieved when you heard it was Rock. I realize now you thought someone else might have had you followed, someone you couldn’t manipulate. Someone who could cause problems for you.”

Ava was still smiling over the rim of her glass, but only with the lower part of her face. Her eyes were narrow and there was a pinched look around her temples.

“You thought Luisa O’Neal had hired me.”

“Are you going to accuse me of sleeping with Mr. O’Neal now?” Ava’s indignant reaction was convincing. If Tess hadn’t seen her play the same part before, she might have been more easily persuaded. “You have an awfully one-track mind. You’re as preoccupied with sex as a spinster.” Tess was surprised she didn’t pinch her cheek between thumb and forefinger, as they would have done in junior high after such an insult.
Tiiiiight
.

“I do have a one-track mind. But I don’t make the same mistakes twice. You aren’t sleeping with O’Neal—not yet. You will, if it means keeping your job. That had been the plan with Abramowitz, right? You had all these bills, and if you didn’t pass the bar this winter, you were going to be out of a job with no way to pay them.”

“I thought you were going to cover some new ground today. This sounds suspiciously like what started all the trouble in the first place. I wasn’t sleeping with Abramowitz.
And he wasn’t sexually harassing me. I lied to you because I didn’t think you’d believe the truth, not when you had a sordid alternative.”

“What is the truth?”

“You’ll find out in court.” Ava smiled, then repeated happily, “I wasn’t sleeping with him.”

“Oh, I know that. And I knew you couldn’t testify to that in court. You weren’t Abramowitz’s type. Michael Abramowitz was gay. Or would have been, if he had any sex life at all.”

Ava’s face seemed to light up for a moment, then just as quickly shut down. Tess would bet anything she had agonized over Abramowitz’s indifference, worried she was losing her charm. But whatever personal vindication she found in Tess’s information, she wasn’t ready to change her story.

“How could you know that? I never heard—I mean, people in law offices gossip. It’s true, he never had girlfriends, but he wasn’t very attractive.” She laughed at herself. “That’s a euphemism. He was ugly. He may not have had girlfriends, but he didn’t have boyfriends, either.”

“As I said, I don’t make the same mistakes twice. This time I really do have proof, a long letter Abramowitz wrote at his computer when he was supposed to be working. A letter I’m prepared to give to a reporter I know, along with my own theory about what really happened between the two of you.”

“So? I told the police and the press that Darryl fantasized this whole thing. Revealing Abramowitz was gay is only going to make my story more credible. My statement,” she amended quickly. “It will make my statement more credible.”

“True. But what if there are other things in Abramowitz’s diary? He wrote more than a thousand pages, plenty of room to include your problems with the bar and his embarrassment at your attempted seduction.” Tess had leapt from Officer Friendly’s world of facts to her own list of suppositions, but Ava couldn’t know this. “If you didn’t sleep with Abramowitz, it wasn’t for lack of trying. The Renaissance Har
borplace Hotel was a nice touch. Your idea, I assume?”

“It’s probably not admissible in court, that journal of his. Mr. O’Neal will keep it out of court.”

“Good, very good, Miss Hill. You get an A in criminal law this semester. But it is admissible in a newspaper.”

Ava busied herself with the skirt of her dress, smoothing it under her, then adjusting the hem. Tess waited. She was learning how to be silent.

“Look, what do you want?” Ava asked at last. “You can make my life miserable, but it won’t help Darryl. I didn’t kill Abramowitz. His death actually jeopardized my job at the firm. They assigned me to him after I flunked the bar the second time, because they didn’t expect me to last out the year. When he died they could have fired me.”

“But they didn’t, and I need to know why. I also want you to fill in some blanks for me. You were as close to Abramowitz as anyone was before he died. You may actually know something without realizing what you know. You help me, and I won’t release his diary. Deal?”

Ava nodded warily.

“OK, here’s what I know. A year ago you joined the Triple O with a lot of debt hanging over you. You took the bar in February. You flunked. You took it again in July, flunked again. Now you’ve got even more debts, because you can’t stop buying clothes—and because your skills as a shoplifter are limited to the lighter stuff, underwear and jewelry.”

“I don’t know why you keep talking about shoplifting, I have
never
—”

“Save it, Ava. Let’s stay on point. You were desperate. You decided your best chance of staying on the payroll was seducing Abramowitz. I don’t know what interim approaches you tried, but eventually you convinced him to meet you regularly at a local hotel. I guess you thought he’d have to succumb to your charms in such a setting. How’d you do that, by the way?”

Sulky now, almost pouting. “He was helping me study for the bar. I told him it was one place we were assured of not being interrupted. He actually bought it.”

“Impressive. So you figure it’s just a matter of time before this guy is all over you. But he never touches you. In fact he really tries to help you with the bar, which isn’t exactly what you want. He even makes you cancel your vacation with Rock so you can study harder. He says he can whip you into shape.”

“I can’t pass the bar. I have this anxiety about it. It’s, like, a syndrome. It’s not my fault. I went to see a doctor and—”

“Of course it’s not your fault. You’re a victim. Everybody’s a victim. But Abramowitz, who didn’t have anything else to do, didn’t buy it. He loved the law and he wanted you to love it, too. In fact I bet he was driving you nuts, making you work too hard. So you started working on a contingency plan—Seamon P. O’Neal. If you’re sleeping with the big boss, who needs the little one? And, who knows? You might pass the bar after all. You were studying with one of the best lawyers in the state.

“But you’re so busy with Plan A and Plan B, you start neglecting Plan C—your fiancé, a nice guy who happens to have a nice big nest egg. A big enough nest egg to pay off all your student loans and most of your credit card debt, if it comes to that.”

Ava looked toward the lights of downtown and the harbor. “Darryl wasn’t a plan,” she said in a soft, almost regretful voice. “He was strong. I liked that. I thought he could protect me. He couldn’t help me with this, though. I needed my job if we were going to have any life at all together. He makes less than $50,000 a year. How can two people live on that?”

It wasn’t a bad speech, possibly even a sincere one. But Tess was unmoved.

“You might have to cut back on a few leather sofas, but it’s possible.”

“It wasn’t just money. Darryl didn’t want me to work at all. We fought about that a lot. I was so tired of arguing, I didn’t even mind when Abramowitz told me I should use my
vacation week to study. I was glad for an excuse to get away from him.”

She and Rock had fought? Funny, he had forgotten to mention that small detail. But she had to concentrate. This was the tricky part, the part where she had to admit how clever Ava was, how stupid she was.

“So, one day, some not-too-bright woman pops up.” She mocked her own voice, trilling in a falsetto. “’Hi, I’m a private detective and I know you’re having an affair.’ Of course it’s not true. But you’re fast on your feet. You see instantly the circumstantial evidence that convinced me—the hotel, the covert meetings—are enough to convince other people, too. Especially the increasingly sympathetic O’Neal. In fact this could solve all your problems. Maybe you’ll get a nice fat settlement. Maybe Abramowitz will get fired and you’ll get another chance. It was a good plan. With Abramowitz dead, it was an even better plan.”

“How do you figure that?” Ava’s voice was sharp again, stripped of the velvety tone she had used when talking about Rock.

“If Abramowitz is dead no one can contradict you, right? And I assume a firm that hates publicity would prefer to pay you off, as long as you agree to tell the press a more genteel version of events.”

Tess gestured at the new furnishings around them.

Ava sighed. “You’re right, more or less, but what’s the point? None of this changes the case against Darryl. He thought Abramowitz had forced me to go to bed with him. He went down there and he killed him. Don’t get me wrong, I hope he gets acquitted, or manslaughter, but I still think he did it. Frankly it’s a little frightening to think I came so close to marrying a man with that strong a violent streak.”

For the first time she seemed absolutely without guile. There was no indication that Ava remembered her own pivotal role in this, that her lies had sent Rock to Abramowitz’s office, that none of this would have happened if she hadn’t been such a schemer. They had both been so clever. But Tess couldn’t afford to think about this now.

“There are still some missing pieces. Why didn’t Abramowitz have any work to do? Did people in the firm know he wasn’t doing anything? Did he have something on O’Neal?”

“I asked Shay about that once.”
Shay
, Tess noted. “Of course, I didn’t ask it quite as rudely as you did. He told me Abramowitz had screwed something up, an important case. He didn’t really have a lot of experience in this kind of practice, you know. He knew the law, but he didn’t have the style the firm’s clients expected. He upset an important client. So they stopped giving him work, hoping he would leave. That’s how they do things at O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill. But Abramowitz wasn’t gracious enough to cut his losses. He was greedy.”

Tess could hear the too-hearty voice of Seamon P. O’Neal—no,
Shay
—reeling off those last few sentences. Ava was a quick study, at least at some things.

“Did everyone know he was being frozen out?”