Charm City (18 page)

"I dictated from a pay phone
outside a Royal Farm on Reisterstown Road."

"But the story said the cops
didn't arrive until ten-thirty, so you had to be right behind
them. Who tipped you off? County police? The medical examiner? An
ambulance driver?"

"I didn't get there
right behind the cops, Tess. I got there right before them."

Tess stopped at the bottom of the long, low
steps in front of the
Blight
and grabbed Feeney's arm, forcing him to stop and look at her.

"Wink? Wink called you?"

"He called my beeper and left his
phone number. I recognized the number—I'd been
dialing it almost every day, if only to get a ‘no
comment' from him or a ‘drop dead' from
his wife. I called back, no answer. I figured if Wink was ready to talk
to me, I shouldn't let the mood pass, and I drove out there.
The garage was closed and locked, but the front door was unlocked, as
if he had been waiting for me all along. And I guess he was, in a way.
Wink always did do things with flair."

"What did you do?"

"I called the cops from his house.
And then I got out my notebook, took down all the information, and
filed my story, like a good boy."

"The story said the cops found the
body."

"No, we neatly sidestepped that
detail. I wanted to put it in—I thought it made for a nice
ironic touch. You know how the editors like those phrases
‘The
Beacon-Light
has learned,' or ‘As the Beacon-Light first
reported.' I dictated: ‘The
Beacon-Light
last night discovered the body of Wink Wynkowski, an apparent
suicide.' Colleen and Jack over-ruled me."

"It
is
a little melodramatic."

"Have
you
ever seen a dead body?" Feeney asked, then blushed,
remembering Tess had seen her share. He jammed his hands in his pocket
and began walking north along Eutaw. She fell in step beside him, too
intent on their conversation to be put off by his rudeness.

"You shouldn't feel
guilty, Feeney. I bet Rosita doesn't have any guilt pangs,
and she's as responsible as you are."

"Rosita's young.
She's probably mad he didn't beep
her
.
Rosita always thought she could crack the story wide open if she had a
few minutes with Wink. She does get people to open up to her,
I'll give her that. I don't know how she does
it."

I do. She
doesn't let their quotes get in the way of the story
.

"How much reporting did she
contribute to the first story? Without any help from you, I
mean."

"Most of the personal stuff about
Wink, the details about his marriage and his childhood. And she was the
one who got the call from the guy who knew him at Montrose. She wanted
to do that interview by herself, but Sterling was skeptical about the
guy, wanted to good-cop/bad-cop him, make sure he wasn't some
petty psycho. Rosita went in all empathetic, while I was the hard-ass.
The guy was solid, though, and my courthouse source backed him
up."

"Did the courthouse source help
you out on the first story? Was he one of the people you
didn't want to identify?"

"Yeah, he's given us
lots of stuff over the years, it would be crazy to burn him. But the
key was the financial source, someone who—well,
let's just say he was a former business associate whose
creative accounting tricks for Wink could have resulted in jail time.
Now he's born-again, the father of three little girls, soccer
coach, PTA president. I was so careful to protect his identity I never
even wrote his name in my notebook. He was just U.C.—the
Unknown Citizen."

In her memory, Tess tasted gin, heard the
congenial buzz of the Brass Elephant, saw Feeney's red face
as he slurringly declaimed a few lines of poetry.

"That's
what
you recited to me in the bar, the allusion I couldn't place.
Auden's ‘The Unknown Citizen.' ‘
Am
I happy? Am I free
?'"

"Did I?" Feeney asked
unhappily. "I don't remember."

"It was your exit line,"
Tess reminded him. "When you stormed out at eight
o'clock and left me alone with your tab." He
squirmed a little, as she had expected he would, as she wanted him to.
Good: now they had acknowledged the lie between them, the way he had
used her.

"Well, obviously he was on my
mind," Feeney offered. "I'm surprised I
didn't blurt out his name, in the state I was in."

"Go ahead and blurt it out now.
I'm an old friend, you can trust me."
Tess's mind was racing ahead: if Rosita had conducted any of
the interviews with the Unknown Citizen, perhaps she had twisted his
words the way she'd twisted Linda's. It was worth
checking out.

Feeney's face was pensive, the way
he sometimes looked before a poetry jag, although he was obviously
stone-cold sober now.

"Tess, as long as you work for
management, you're not my friend and I don't trust
you. And if you want to continue this conversation, I suggest we find
my union rep."

He turned and began walking quickly toward
the Shrine of St. Jude. Tess stood on the corner, as breathless as if
he had just punched her in the stomach. How had Feeney gotten things so
twisted? She was here because of his deceit, because he had used her as
his alibi, and if she didn't make the case that Rosita had
sneaked the story into the paper out of unalloyed ambition, Feeney
might take the fall. Typical Feeney, going on the offensive when he
should be offering profuse apologies.

"Fuck you, Kevin
Feeney," she called after him, although he was already too
far away to hear her. "You can take care of yourself from now
on."

The sleet had finally stopped, but the wind
had picked up, stinging and bitter.
That's
the only reason my eyes are tearing
, Tess told
herself as she walked back inside.
Because of the
wind
.

A
dispirited Tess left the
Beacon-Light
at 4:30, sick of the media, only to arrive home in time for the
tail-end of a press conference at Women and Children First. All four
local television stations were crowded into Kitty's
bookstore, along with the reporter from the
East
Baltimore Guide
, a neighborhood paper, and
someone from the city's alternative weekly. The object of
their attention was a quivering Esskay, whom Kitty had brushed to a
high shine and beautified by intertwining a green velvet ribbon through
her collar. It was a toss-up who was going to lose control of her
bladder first—Esskay, or Tess, who couldn't believe
Kitty was pulling a stunt like this.

"Yes, this dog was an outstanding
racer," Kitty was saying, in response to someone's
question. "The top earner at her track in Juarez last year.
But her owner decided to let her retire at the top of her game and
become the official mascot of Women and Children First.
Esskay—that's her nickname, her full name is Sylvia
Quérida—will also serve as a model for a
children's book I plan to write and illustrate about the
greyhound rescue movement."

Illustrate a book
?
News to Tess. Kitty couldn't draw a stick figure with a ruler.

"How's a high-energy dog
like that going to get all the exercise it needs when you
don't have a real yard?" asked one reporter, a
hard-nosed skeptic by television's standards.

"As some of you know, residents
near Patterson Park take their dogs on patrol every night, in an
attempt to discourage prostitution and drug-related crimes.
We'll walk Esskay as part of the patrol at night. As for her
morning walks, some old friends of mine have volunteered to take her
out."

Kitty waggled her fingers at two muscular
men in Spandex leggings and tight T-shirts. "These police
officers plan to jog with Esskay as part of their conditioning program.
But if this wintry weather doesn't go away, we'll
have to get Esskay a sweater—she doesn't have any
body fat to protect her. Then again, neither do the officers."

The reporters laughed as the officers
blushed a bright, happy red. Kitty then fished a dog biscuit out of a
box propped next to the cash register, climbed to the top of the
counter, and held the treat straight out from her shoulder, about eight
feet above the floor. In one graceful movement, Esskay leaped up and
snatched the bone from Kitty's hand.

"Beautiful visual," Tess
muttered to herself. "That's going to be on every
channel tonight."

So it was. But the stations cut away from
the next shot: Esskay, crouched over her treat, looking up to see four
television cameras approaching her. The overwhelmed dog made a strange
yodeling noise deep in her throat, lost control just as Tess had
thought she might and, profoundly humiliated, bolted from the room at
top speed.

"That which you cannot hide,
proclaim," Kitty expounded to Tess and Crow that night, after
a dinner designed to chase away the winter blues while it packed on
pounds: corn chowder with sherry, a chicken-and-rice casserole,
Crow's home-made rolls, and gingerbread with a heated caramel
sauce
and
fresh-whipped
cream. Stuffed and contented, they sat in Kitty's kitchen,
listening to the wind whipping around the building as if looking for
someone it had a long-standing grudge against. Kitty and Tess sipped
coffee with healthy slugs of Kahlua, while Crow settled for straight-up
caffeine. He still had to take Esskay out for her first jaunt with the
Patterson Park patrol.

"Okay, so we've
proclaimed Esskay," Tess said. "But we've
also taken out an advertisement for our friends in the shit-and-salmon
car.
Hey guys! Come and get her. The dog
you're looking for is at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare
Street
."

"They would have found you
eventually, if they haven't already," Kitty said.
"Now that Esskay is famous, those men who have been dogging
you—if you'll pardon the expression—will
have to be much more careful. They won't go after two police
officers jogging with a dog. And they're not going to wade
into that pack of dogs who roam Patterson Park with their civic-minded
owners."

"What about the stuff you made up,
like her racing record?" Crow asked. "What if the
reporters check?"

"Even if they do think to call a
dog track in Juarez, I think there's going to be a slight
language problem."

Crow laughed, but Tess sighed.
"Still, I wish you hadn't brought the cops into it.
Remember, we don't know how Spike came to have this dog, or
what he has to do with her altered tattoo. The less the cops know, the
better."

"I thought of that,
too," Kitty said, her voice a smug purr. "The
‘officers' are actually bartender friends of
Steve's. The reporters think they're police
officers because I told them they were. Perception is more important
than reality."

"My, you're just full of
aphorisms tonight. When do we get to hear the one about the penny
saved? Or how about the early bird, Aunt Kitty? Will you tell us that
one, pretty please?"

Kitty bounced a leftover roll off
Tess's head, which Esskay caught neatly on the rebound and
devoured. "I was thinking more of gift horses and the bodily
cavities you're not supposed to inspect, a train of thought
that leads me directly to your uncanny impersonation of another part of
the horse's anatomy."

"Ladies, ladies." Crow
still didn't know what to make of the way Tess and Kitty
bickered with one another, even if it was all in good fun. His parents,
onetime Bostonians who had fled the winters and settled in
Charlottesville, Virginia, were almost painfully civilized in their
affection for one another. Esskay, however, liked the mock yelling and
rushed to the fray, eager to see if more food bits might fly.

Crow snapped a leash to the excited
dog's collar. "I hate to leave this warm kitchen,
but we might as well get this over with, girl. Maybe you'll
make friends with the other pooches."

"Don't talk to
strangers," Tess advised, half-serious.

"We won't. And we
won't take any dog biscuits from strangers, either."

Almost an hour later, Tess was stretching on
the bedroom floor when she heard Crow and Esskay clattering up the
stairs. Her muscles were tight—she hadn't been
cooling down after her workouts and the lapse was catching up to her, a
sure sign of age. Only twenty-nine, and yet twenty-nine was old in some
ways. By twenty-nine, for example, it was too late to improve
one's bone density; all you could do was protect what you had
with high calcium food, exercise, and daily doses of Tums. By
twenty-nine, baby-oil sunbaths from high school had already damaged
your skin irreparably. And by twenty-nine, it was too late to have a
baby to reduce one's risk of breast cancer. Tess imagined she
could feel the engine of her body slowing down, burning fewer calories
every day. Eventually, she would have to work out more or eat less. The
first option seemed impossible, the second highly undesirable. She
calculated quickly: running one extra mile a day burned an additional
100 calories, which could offset a weight gain of ten pounds over a
single year. One mile, not even ten minutes. She could probably squeeze
it in.

Esskay, fur cold, nose colder, pounced on
Tess, ending her aerobic reverie. Tess wrapped herself into a tight
ball and the dog took her braid in her mouth as if it were a toy,
shaking it with surprising vigor.

"Boy, she's revved
up," Tess said, rescuing her hair as Crow flopped on the bed
with a groan. "She must have had a good time."

"Too good a time. I never noticed
how aggressive she is with other dogs. She tried to pick a fight with a
Rottweiler, for God's sake. He snapped at her and she backed
down, but I still had to choke up on her leash."

"Did you see any prostitutes
working the park?"

"A few brave ones, but they
weren't doing any business. I don't think the Pooch
Patrol can claim credit, though. You take anything out of your pants
tonight and it's going to snap off."

Crow, who didn't own a real winter
coat, had dressed in several ratty layers—a leather jacket
and wool muffler over three sweaters and a thermal undershirt. Now, as
he stripped down to the undershirt, he reached inside the leather
jacket and pulled out a long manila envelope from its breast pocket.
"I almost forgot. This was on your car when we got back. I
thought it was a ticket at first."

"Probably some new advertising
gimmick dreamed up by one of the megabars," Tess said,
opening it. Photocopies spilled out, along with two pieces of
cream-colored stationery, a stark black name emblazoned across the top.

Rosita Ruiz.

"What is it?" Crow asked.

"Rosita's
résumé." Tess was bewildered.
"And her cover letter, as well as copies of stories she wrote
for the San Antonio newspaper, and her evaluation at the
Blight
.
It's her whole personnel file, a highly confidential thing.
Crow, did you see who left this on my car, by any chance?"

He shook his head. "All I saw was
the envelope beneath your windshield wiper."

Tess turned the envelope inside out and
shuffled all the papers. "No note. Well, it's
obviously not Colleen, and Sterling would just hand it to me. It must
be one of her underlings, Hailey or Whitman. But what's the
point? I don't see any smoking gun here."

"Editors as anonymous sources?
This job is getting stranger and stranger, Tess."

Tess, still thinking about those extra
calories that her thirties would demand, decided she better go back to
two-a-days at the gym until it was warm enough to row. She stopped by
Durban's the next morning, resigned to a long session with
the weight machines.

Weights require unrushed discipline, perfect
form, concentration—not Tess's strengths,
especially when she worked on her lower body, whose creaky joints
protested that running, cycling, and rowing should be quite enough,
thank you. Sweating lightly in the overheated room, she lay on her
stomach on the Keiser hamstring machine and jerked her heels toward her
butt, feet hooked beneath padded bars. Right side, then left side. Up
on a two count, release on a four. What could be more boring? At least
mornings were quiet at Durban's, a bored attendant the only
other person in the room.

She zipped through a second set, then pumped
the button for more resistance. As usual, she felt invincible on the
first three reps, increasingly mortal on the next five, painfully
decrepit by the last two. Rushing the last rep just a little, she
sensed more than saw a movement in the room, some-one lumbering toward
her. Before she could push her upper body away from the bench, a
man's large bulk flattened her into the vinyl. She wrenched
her face to the side, assuming she would see one of the men from the
shit-and-salmon car.

"So how's the jewelry
business?" asked Paul Tucci.

"A little slow right
now." Tess tried to raise her head, but Tucci pressed his
palm against her ear, pinning her head until she heard the ocean. He
was such a dead weight across her back she couldn't even ease
her feet from under the pads without wrenching a knee. Weight-training
equipment that doubled as a torture device—now
that
was cross-training. Where was Durban's attendant?

Tucci didn't move his hand, but he
shifted his bulk until he rested more comfortably on Tess's
fleshier parts.

"It took me awhile to remember
exactly where I had seen you," he said. "Once I
did, I knew how to find you. What were you doing, sneaking into see Lea
with that stupid bracelet story? And you went to see Linda, too. What
lie did you tell her?"

"Someone I know was worried about
Lea." A truth, more or less. "A lot of people are
worried about her. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to
be worried about a widow with three kids under the age of five. Linda
was an…afterthought. She lost someone, too."

"Look, if you're from
one of Wink's creditors, you're gonna have to get
in line. And if you work for some shyster lawyer, you can forget about
it."

"Lawyer?" she asked, in
what she hoped was an innocent voice, but there was something about a
palm pressing against one's ear that made every utterance
come out whiny and defensive.

"Every personal injury shark in
town has sent someone to Lea's door, although the rest
weren't as clever as you. They think there's gotta
be some deep pocket to sue. A psychiatrist who didn't realize
Wink was suicidal? Wink didn't have a psychiatrist.
Malfunctioning garage door opener? It's not like he tried to
open it at the last minute and it failed. He didn't want it
to open. Booze and drugs? Hey, it says right on the label not to mix
them. And not to operate heavy machinery, which takes us back to the
car. What are you going to do, sue Ford Motor Company because the
'67 Mustang didn't have an automatic shut-off to
stop someone intent on killing himself?"

"How do you know he had drugs in
his system?" Tess asked. Tucci had loosened his grip
slightly, but she could still feel the blood pounding in her ear.
"The tox screens aren't back yet and there
hasn't been anything in the papers about the cops finding
drugs at the scene. All they tested for that night was
alcohol."

Tucci grabbed her braid with two hands,
pulling her head back the way Esskay had the night before, only not as
playfully. "i know Wink. He wouldn't have been able
to go through with it unless he was knocked out. He would have lost his
nerve, bailed at the last minute. He was kind of a wuss, when you get
down to it. The cops told Lea he broke open a new bottle of Jack
Daniels that night, had two, three glasses at the most. His blood
alcohol wasn't even .10, he was legal to drive. That
was
in the paper. So I figure he took some over-the-counter shit to speed
things up. Makes sense, doesn't it?"