In a Strange City Read online

He looked guilty, a little boy who remembers the admonishment not to tattle.

  "We were working in the Mencken Room one day toward summer's end, preparing for Mencken Day. That's the one day the room is open to nonscholars, and we sometimes put out items that aren't normally on display. Bobby and I were going through boxes of stuff. He was totally hipped on Mencken, knew quite a lot about him. He was telling me how he ended up in a feud with Dreiser, whose work Mencken loved—"

  "He wrote an introduction to An American Tragedy," Tess put in. "I found a copy at Kelmscott."

  Daniel nodded. Every Baltimore bibliophile knew Kelmscott, a used-book store.

  "We came across a pillbox. It wasn't a particularly interesting item in and of itself. It was said to have belonged to him, but it was china, with painted flowers, so who knows? He was sick for a long time before he died, and his wife had died before him. A pillbox would have raised allusions at odds with what we were trying to do, which was to put together a kind of visual display that would make visitors feel as if they had been inside Mencken's head. An exhibit about his intellectual life, his writing life. People might get excited about looking at the typewriter on which he worked, or his desk. But a pillbox? It had no context."

  "It didn't fit the myth," Tess said. "You didn't want people to think about the stroke and how he was incapacitated during those last years of his life."

  "Well, I'm not saying we were trying to propagandize—I don't care that much for Mencken; the revelations about all that racist crap in his diaries kind of killed it for me—but we were trying to find a way to create a display that would work for the people who are passionate about his work."

  Tess was familiar with these esoteric debates about context and historic accuracy in museum displays. They bored her cross-eyed.

  "Bobby agreed with me, although he went into this long soliloquy about how Mencken was something of a hypochondriac. Apparently, when Al Capone was hospitalized here, Mencken would badger Capone's doctors for confidential information about his condition. He was fascinated with the case."

  "I had forgotten Capone was treated for his syphilis here. He gave Union Memorial the cherry trees out front, right?"

  "They called it porphyria in the newspaper accounts—delusions of grandeur. Although in his case it might better have been called delusions of squalor. At one point, he thought he was the head of a large factory, which is a funny dream for someone as powerful as Capone. You know, it wasn't the only time he lived in Baltimore. He was a bookkeeper here."

  "Interesting euphemism."

  "No, truly. His patron had gone to Chicago, and Capone moved down from New York, waiting to be called up, almost like a ballplayer in the minor leagues. He was totally legit while he was here, working for a construction company and living in Highlandtown."

  Tess tried to envision what the world might be like today if Capone had fallen in love with his life here and decided to go straight. But the one thing she knew about history is that there is no shortage of men—or women—willing to step forward and play the role of villain. It's not unlike the NCAA tournament: The top seed may not win, but someone has to. That's why she could never warm up to science-fiction plots where people traveled back in time, intent on assassinating Hitler or Stalin, John Wilkes Booth or Timothy McVeigh. There would have been another Capone or McVeigh, another St. Valentine's Day massacre or Oklahoma City bombing. Evil isn't particular about its personnel.

  She didn't think it worked the same way for the good guys. Only one Lincoln, one Gandhi. Them she would save, if she ever happened on a time-travel device.

  "Bobby could talk," Daniel continued. "I mean, he could cast a spell with words, as surely as a snake charmer does with his little pipe. He was pouring it on, impressing me with his knowledge of Baltimore trivia, keeping up this stream of gossip about our colleagues. He was trying to distract me—because the minute he thought my back was turned, I saw him slip the pillbox in his pocket."

  "What did you do?"

  Daniel looked miserable. "Nothing. Not then, at any rate. I—I was scared to confront him."

  "Scared? Based on the description of Bobby in the newspaper, and what I saw of him at the grave site, you've got a good thirty pounds on him."

  "You were there? You saw the shooting?" Tess nodded brusquely, not wanting him to get off track. "Is that why you came to the library?"

  "Sort of. So Bobby intimidated you. Why?"

  "You know how there are these people who, even into adulthood, make you feel like the biggest nerd in the world? Bobby had that effect on people. He was… cool, for want of a better word. If I had said anything to him, he would have laughed at me—and ended up persuading me it was okay, somehow, to take the pillbox. So I kept quiet. Until the next day, when I told our supervisor what I had seen."

  "You got him fired."

  Daniel nodded, eyes fixed on his glass of beer. "He was allowed to resign, as long as he returned the pillbox and agreed not to use the Pratt for a reference for future library work. They tried to get him to confess that he had taken other things as well—mainly rare books and maps from the Maryland Room—but he swore up and down it was a one-time lapse."

  "But if he was a thief, why not call the police?"

  "Because they couldn't be sure. If the Pratt had called the police, nothing would have been gained, and the Beacon-Light would have gotten wind of it and run a story, which could have scared off people who were planning to donate things in the future."

  "I can't believe people would be so unforgiving."

  "Huh. Perhaps you know a different kind of rich people. The ones I've come in contact with are not only unforgiving but demanding. There was a small private museum up in Philadelphia that lost its endowment after it was revealed a rare piece of jewelry had been stolen. Everyone who had pledged money broke their pledges, and the museum never got off the ground."

  "All because of a single theft?"

  "A single theft worth an estimated five hundred thousand dollars. Anyway, it was the library board's decision to keep the Bobby incident quiet. It's not as if the library could file an insurance claim or replace what was taken. They were one-of-a-kind items."

  "Such as?"

  His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose again. Again, he pushed them up with his thumb. "An early map book of Maryland from the 1700s. A journal kept by one of the Calverts. A copy of the Saturday Visiter with Poe's "MS in a Bottle‘—you know, the story he won the prize for, right here in Baltimore. Some letters by Dunbar. That's what I remember hearing about. I was never convinced Bobby took them, to tell you the truth. Except maybe the map book. Bobby liked…pretty things. Given the choice between something truly rare and something merely beautiful, Bobby would choose beauty. He cared about appearances. That's why he took the pillbox. It was pretty."

  The bartender put down plates of food in front of them—a wild mushroom risotto for Tess, straccetti for Daniel—and replenished their glasses. Daniel began to eat quickly as if famished.

  "I forgot to pack a lunch today" he said, reddening in embarrassment when he caught Tess watching him plow through his food. But Tess felt nothing but admiration and kinship for his appetite. "And I can't work up much enthusiasm for the hot-dog stand outside the Pratt."

  "Really? I love them." About every three months, Tess had intense cravings for the grayish tubes found at the handful of portable carts on the city's corners. The lack of street food was one of her only complaints about Baltimore.

  "So the last time you saw Bobby Hilliard—" she began.

  "It has to have been at least a year."

  "You said not five minutes ago that it was six months ago."

  "I did?" Daniel looked panicky, as if she had set out to trap him, but the mix-up only convinced Tess of his sincerity. Average people contradict themselves endlessly. It is liars who seldom slip up, whose stories fit together too smoothly. "Actually it was last April—I remember it was cold and rainy, a typical Baltimore April—so I guess I was wrong on bot
h counts. I ran into him in a bar, after going to see those very early paintings by Herman Maril. Do you know his work?"

  Tess did, if only because Crow had taught her to love the late local artist, who used color with such tender precision.

  "His early stuff is very different from the more famous pieces at the Baltimore Museum of Art. You can see the artist he's going to become, but he's borrowing from the Impressionists, still trying to find his… I want to say voice, but I guess that's a mixed metaphor. I don't know much about art, but I do like First Thursdays."

  First Thursdays was a moniker the city had hung on a night dedicated to museum openings and gallery exhibits. It was one-third art appreciation, one-third singles gathering, one-third pub crawl. Tess wondered which third was the biggest draw for Daniel. He had almost finished his second Moretti, downing it like Gatorade.

  "What bar did you see Bobby Hilliard in?" Tess asked.

  Her question could not have been more innocent, but Daniel blushed. "The Midtown Yacht Club, okay?"

  "Okay."

  She had caught his emphasis. The Midtown Yacht Club was a manly place, where people drank beer, played darts, watched ESPN, and threw their peanut shells on the floor. She supposed this was Daniel's un-subtle way of telling her that he and Bobby had shared a profession once but nothing more.

  "So he told you he was making good money, waiting tables at his current overpriced-restaurant job— what else?"

  Daniel shook his shaggy head. "It wasn't a long conversation. Truthfully, I had the feeling he wasn't comfortable, running into someone from the library. He cut it short and left."

  "Alone?"

  Daniel's face lit up with another fit of blushing. "With a guy. Some older guy."

  "Someone you could identify if you saw him again?"

  "I doubt it—hey, why are you so interested in this, anyway? You're not a cop. What's in it for you? Is it because you were there? Are you a suspect?"

  Funny, how seldom anyone thought to ask Tess questions. Reared on megadoses of television and film, most people accepted the convention that private detectives came around asking questions. It was hard to get them started, but once she was in, she usually didn't have to explain herself.

  "I have a client," she said, thinking of her anonymous-note leaver. He had sent her to the Poe Room, and look what she had found: Bobby Hilliard's secret past. Then again, the cops knew too, had already been there. Was there something else she was expected to find, something Rainer wouldn't deem significant? "I'm trying to figure out why Bobby was there, why he went through the whole charade—and why someone wanted to kill him."

  "Maybe no one did."

  "Excuse me?"

  His glasses had slid down his nose yet again and were slightly fogged from the steam of his pasta. Daniel took them off and wiped them with the shirttail. Since she had seen him at midmorning, he had made real progress—his shirttail was now hanging out front and back.

  "I wouldn't presume to tell you how to do your job, but why assume someone was trying to kill Bobby? Maybe it was the other guy they wanted, and they got confused. Dark night, two men in capes—anything could happen. I wonder how Poe would write it?"

  "What a librarianish thing to say."

  Daniel put his glasses back on, nodded his head in a formal little bow. "I consider that a compliment."

  "I intended it as one."

  After dinner, he insisted on walking her back to her car, which Tess had left on Cathedral, ignoring the phantom's parking tip. They were on the north side of Mulberry Street, which bordered the Basilica of the Assumption. Tess looked toward the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral, where a psychic's neon sign beckoned. Perhaps that was the way to go. Certainly Poe would approve of such methods. A psychic, a'séance, a dream, a vision.

  She wondered how Poe would feel about the Baltimore of today. It was a brighter place since the invention of electric lights, with the dangers of his day eradicated, although new ones had taken their place. It was hard to imagine a cholera epidemic, for example, such as the one that swept the city in 1831 and was said to have inspired "The Masque of the Red Death." Then again, could even Poe's imagination have anticipated a city where one out of twelve adults was a drug addict? Baltimore also had the wonderful distinction of leading the nation in syphilis infection rates. Al Capone had been ahead of his time in more ways than one.

  What had Poe's Baltimore looked like? So little of it remained, thanks to two scourges, the great fire of 1904 and the mid-twentieth century's obsession with progress, which had razed so many important buildings before preservationists began to win their battles. Even now, the hospital where Poe had died was at threat for demolition. Soon, the only remnants of Poe would be his grave and the house where he had lived on Amity, ever so briefly. There also was the Poe statue outside the University of Baltimore and some historic markers here and there.

  Here and there. And here. Right here. Around the corner from the library. To think she would see it on Mulberry Street, where her anonymous adviser had recommended she park. The Poe Room was a good place to start, but perhaps it wasn't meant to be her final destination. Tess dashed across Mulberry to the block of town houses on the other side. Daniel followed—at the corner, once the light had changed.

  "How could I have forgotten about this place?" Tess asked, berating her own Swiss-cheese memory. And not just hers but Paige Rose's and Kitty's. The name had been so tantalizingly close to them all along. It was probably in the index of the biography she had bought, but Tess had been too busy reading about Poe's death to focus on his life.

  Daniel was completely lost. "The youth hostel where the European students stay?"

  "No, this town house, which I've only walked by about eight million times, and whose historic marker I've read at least five million times. Your mention of the Saturday Visiter must have jogged my memory. This is why the name John Pendleton Kennedy seems so familiar to everyone. It's been sitting on this building for all the world to see."

  She pointed to the small faded rectangle, affixed to the building decades ago, in one of the city's periodic fits of civic pride during the brief reign of Mayor Clarence "Du" Burns. In this town house, in 1833, three men had judged submissions to a local literary contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The winner, by acclaim, was a young writer named Edgar Allan Poe, for a story called "MS in a Bottle."

  And one of the three judges was John Pendleton Kennedy. If her would-be client had used one of the other judges' names—Latrobe, with its deeper, better-known Baltimore resonance—Tess would have been suspicious at the jump. If he had taken the name of Dr. James H. Miller, she probably never would have made any connection at all. But John P. Kennedy raised different, more modern associations, and the Poe allusion had slid right past her.

  Slid past her like a greased pig.

  "I guess this was the Pig Man's idea of a joke."

  "The pig man? Who's he? What does he have to do with John Pendleton Kennedy or Poe?"

  "I think that's what I'm supposed to be trying to find out."

  Chapter 12

  Tess went back to her office before going home. It was out of the way, but she told herself it was admirably efficient to file the receipt from her dinner at Sotto Sopra and to write down her discoveries about Bobby Hilliard while they were still fresh in her mind. She hadn't taken notes at dinner, because Daniel Clary had struck her as the nervous type, someone who would speak less freely if he saw his words being converted to her not-quite-shorthand, that self-taught mix of abbreviations that most journalists use. The wonder wasn't that people were misquoted, Tess knew, but that they were ever quoted correctly.

  But as she pulled up to her office, she couldn't quite admit, not even to herself, that she was curious to see if another note, or at least a trio of roses, waited for her. She had done his bidding—assuming he was a he— and found the secret of John Pendleton Kennedy's significance only steps away from the library. Certainly, that must have been her correspondent's in
tent. Did he know? Did he approve? Did he have another clue for her?

  Then again—did she want him to know of her progress, did she want someone watching her that closely? She was still unsettled by his having found her home. She wondered if there was a way to tell her anonymous tipster to direct all future correspondence to her office.

  But her office's front door turned a blank silent face on the street. That was the problem with anonymous tipsters. They were so unavailable, so undependable, coming and going as they pleased. It was rather like dating.

  Inside, the only thing waiting for her were several pages of police reports, faxed by Herman Peters. It took her a minute to remember what she had requested. Oh, yes, the police report on Shawn Hayes. In the wake of what she had discovered about Bobby Hilliard and the Pig Man's sly joke on her, it seemed much less urgent.

  She switched on her computer but didn't bother with the lights. The monitor was bright enough for her purposes. Besides, the gloom felt good. She wanted to cultivate her inner Poe.

  She got out a sketchbook and began using an old outlining technique she remembered from her newspaper days—not a straightforward list but a series of connected circles, shooting across the page like meteors, all jumping out from the center of—well, from the center of what? The center could hold, Yeats be damned, if she only knew where or what the center was. Was it Bobby Hilliard? The deadly meeting at Poe's grave site? The Visitor? The fake John Pendleton Kennedy? What if her fat little friend was the one who was shadowing her now? Why?

  Tess was so caught up in her diagram that she jumped at the sound of a soft knock on her door, banging her knee on the keyboard tray. She glanced at the door to make sure she had thrown the lock when she came in. The deadbolt was off, but the regular lock was secure. She waited to see if anyone would knock again. It was not uncommon, in this neighborhood, for lost winos and hard-up junkies to pay after-hours visits. Seconds passed and, hearing nothing, she went back to her diagram. Then came a new sound, a sneakier sound, metal on metal. Someone was picking her lock. Slowly and clumsily, but undeniably picking her lock. This was no wino.