In a Strange City Read online

  She took her gun out of her knapsack and eased off the safety. But the intruder would have the better view, with Tess backlit by her computer screen. She crouched behind the desk and waited.

  It seemed to take forever, but at last the door swung open and feet crossed the threshold. Tess heard the door close—softly, carefully, much too deliberately for a random visitor looking for a quick buck. Tess shifted her weight, her gun in both hands, her knees tight to her chest, almost as if she were holding a yoga pose, and waited for the intruder to move toward the computer's bright screen. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, but the newcomer was moving slowly, unsure of where things were in the room. Footsteps stopped and started, stopped and started until, at last, she saw a pair of khaki'ed legs come around the desk.

  "What the—"

  Tess, coiled like the snake in a gag can of peanuts, let loose with both her feet and caught the intruder squarely in the stomach, hard enough to knock him off his feet. She had been aiming for the groin, but she wasn't going to argue with the results. She scrambled on top of her would-be burglar, her gun aimed at the collarbone.

  "Who are you? What do you want?" she roared, with as much volume as she could muster. Tull had told her one time that yelling could not be overrated as a tool in such situations. Plus, it helped release some of the adrenaline Tess had stored while curled in a ball.

  Her visitor wore a belted trench coat and a soft, shapeless hat that fell off, revealing a mass of long brown hair. The light-colored eyes showed fear, but the mouth was mean and defiant.

  "If you had answered my knock, I wouldn't have broken in," the woman said, her tone self-righteous.

  Tess pointed the gun toward the ceiling, but kept her thighs pressed on either side of her intruder's hip bones. The thing was, she didn't know what to do next. Search for a weapon? There appeared to be something bulky under the coat, but it might have been all flesh. Should she keep her weapon trained on the woman and then call 911? How would she do that exactly?

  Discretion is not always the better part of valor. As Tess considered her options, the woman head-butted her in the chest. Even in her pain, Tess thought, Jesus, only a woman would dare do that to another woman. She fell back, still holding on to her gun, not quite clear of the woman's body but perched on the ankles. Her mind detached, trying to discern the woman's intent. Was this an assault or an attempt at flight?

  Flight. The woman bent her knees and shook herself free of Tess, climbed awkwardly to her feet, and began running toward the door. But this was almost too easy.

  With her gun in her left hand, Tess pulled on the heel of the woman's Chuck Taylor high-top. She fell forward and Tess climbed onto her back, straddling her higher this time, so the woman's arms were pinned, and grabbed a fistful of her hair for good measure.

  "Who are you?"

  The woman's only response was a series of short, hard breaths. Tess surrendered her grip on the hair and patted her captive, somewhat inexpertly. She determined there was a gun stuck in the woman's waistband, but couldn't figure out how to reach under the coat without relinquishing her position. There was a billfold in the trench-coat pocket, which she could reach. She pulled it out and squinted at it in the dim light.

  "Gretchen O'Brien," she said out loud, looking at the driver's license. There were other cards, other squares of plastic, and in a moment of inspiration Tess turned the billfold upside down and let them scatter, then threw the billfold into a corner of the room. It was harder to run when your identity was strewn across the floor.

  "That your name?" she asked the back of the woman's head as she yanked up her coat and grabbed her gun, which she tucked under her armpit. "Gretchen O'Brien?"

  "You think I carry a forged Maryland driver's license?"

  "You break into people's offices. How should I know where you draw the line?"

  "Like you never broke into some place." The woman's voice was sneering, uncowed. Tess had to admire her attitude.

  "I've never picked a lock," Tess said virtuously. She preferred her glass cutter.

  "Never trespassed? Never misrepresented yourself? Never used a fake business card? Never lied?"

  The questions were disconcertingly knowing, as if Tess were arguing with her own conscience. She glanced at the cards strewn around her captive's body. A Blockbuster Video card, a Visa, a Discover, a Super-Fresh savings card, all with Gretchen O'Brien's name on them, some business cards. Soon enough, she glimpsed a less common typeface, a card identifying Gretchen O'Brien as a licensed private detective in the state of Maryland.

  Tess rose and walked to the door, where she turned the key in the deadlock and pocketed it. Gretchen O'Brien would have to resign herself to being her guest for just a little longer. She turned on the light and settled in her desk chair, where she removed the cartridge from Gretchen's 9 mm. She then picked up her .38, motioning at Gretchen to—well, do what exactly? Gretchen pulled herself up to hands and knees, then arranged herself in a half-lotus position and glared at Tess.

  "The only thing you had going for you," Gretchen O'Brien said, "was the element of surprise. You did everything wrong."

  "Everything?"

  "I mean, you're obviously not trained. There's a reason"—Gretchen's breath was still a little ragged, but not so ragged as to disguise the contempt in her voice—"there's a reason the state requires people who haven't been cops to go through a lengthy apprenticeship. Not that people like you don't get around the law all the time. You think anyone really believes Al Keyes has anything to do with your operation here? Everyone knows he lives down the ocean in a trailer since he retired from the force, spends his days fishing."

  What could Tess say to that? It was true. "So you were a cop?"

  "Yeah. I was a cop. But I figured out the free market would pay me more for my skills than the city ever would, and it's a helluva lot safer. I've been doing this for almost five years now. Doing it better than you, too, judging by your setup here."

  "Is that why you broke in? To compare furnishings, exchange information about earnings?"

  Gretchen O'Brien was smoothing her hair, pulling it back into a loose ponytail. She appeared to be a little older than Tess, or else her life had left more marks. Her skin tone was uneven and splotchy, her blue-green eyes had dark bags beneath them, and a sharp line on the inside of her right eyebrow seemed to have been burned in by her semipermanent scowl. But she was tall and well-proportioned, and Tess knew from patting her that her muscle tone was better than average. She probably looked pretty good when she hadn't been on the losing side of a fight.

  "So, you going to call the cops?" Gretchen asked.

  "I'm going to have to, if you don't tell me why you're here."

  "Fine. They'll charge me with burglary. I'll say it was an honest mistake, that a client had told me this was a vacant property where he thought his soon-to-be-ex was warehousing some property."

  "Not a very good story," judged Tess, who was vain about her ability to lie quickly and creatively.

  "Good enough. Anyway, then I'll charge you with assault, and by the time they get it all straightened out, we'll both be out a couple of thousand in lawyer fees, but you still won't have any answers."

  Tess got up and walked around the floor, toeing the flotsam and jetsam of Gretchen's wallet. "Well, here's one answer," she said, bending down to pick up one of the scattered business cards, which identified one John P. Kennedy as a dealer in fine porcelain. "So "John Pendleton Kennedy‘ paid you a visit, too. Were you sleazy enough to take the case? And did you get his real name?"

  Gretchen sat mum as a surly child.

  "I mean John Pendleton Kennedy, of course, not the Poe Toaster. I was at the grave site that morning and didn't see you anywhere. So I guess you didn't take the case."

  "Or maybe I'm better at surveillance than some self-taught amateur."

  "So you did take the case."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Actually, you sort of did. Where were you?"

 
A glare was her only answer. Tess imagined the dark street in her mind, saw the various clumps of spectators converge on the grave site. Yes, Rainer had said there were some witnesses who cut out, unwilling to give statements. She had a hunch that Gretchen wasn't one of them.

  "You took the job, but you weren't there. What did you do—fall asleep, forget to set your alarm?"

  "I went earlier in the day to check out the scene, figure out where the exits and entrances were. It's a fairly common practice—not that I would expect you to know such things."

  "So you weren't late, you were merely too early. Why didn't you come back?"

  Gretchen stared at the rubber toes of her Chuck Taylors. Tess wore Jack Purcells, which she considered vastly superior, an old Baltimore prejudice she had absorbed without questioning.

  "It was the monument," Gretchen said at last, with the air of someone who needed to confess, or at least justify herself. "The one out front, the place where they moved his body. It threw me off."

  "You were watching the wrong spot in the graveyard?"

  "No. It said the wrong day. His own monument says he was born January 20. I figured—" Her mouth had started to form a sound, some soft and open vowel, but she caught herself. "I figured the client made a mistake. I mean, it was literally carved in stone, you know? I thought I was supposed to be there the night of the nineteenth, and he would come early in the morning of the twentieth. How was I supposed to know it was wrong? I'm a Pigtown girl. I was lucky to get through the general course at Southwestern High School and a few semesters at Catonsville Community College."

  Tess smiled at Gretchen's clumsy attempt to play the class card with her. Her own father had gone to work for the city straight out of Patterson Park High School, and her mother had dropped out of College Park in order to marry him.

  "Does your client—I'm sorry, what was his name again?"

  Gretchen allowed herself a short snort of a laugh. "Does that work for you? I wouldn't be surprised if it worked on you."

  "No harm in trying. You almost said his name but caught yourself. Anyway, does our fat friend know you screwed up? Did you break in hoping to find out what I know, because I was there, and to use my work to cover up the deficiencies in yours? Or is there something your client fears I have and wants to retrieve?"

  Gretchen O'Brien turned her rather broad ass toward Tess and began crawling across the floor, gathering up her credit cards.

  "I don't have anything else to say to you. You wanna call the cops?"

  "I don't know," Tess said.

  "Can I have my gun?"

  She pushed it across the desk but kept the ammunition.

  "Well, you've got my particulars. They can always put out a warrant on me, if you like. I don't care. But I'm not hanging around here."

  Gretchen stood up and grabbed her gun. She looked around the room she had come to search and found it wanting. "It was a long shot, anyway. You don't know anything."

  "What would I know? Or have? What are we looking for, Gretchen? Tell me that much. It's not much of a treasure hunt if not all the players know what they're looking for. Is this really about a bracelet? Or maybe a Maltese falcon? What's the rumpus? as Hammett would say."

  "He a cop?"

  "A detective writer. People associate him with San Francisco, but he was born in St. Mary's County and worked as a Pinkerton agent right here in Baltimore. I always heard The Maltese Falcon was inspired by the details on a building downtown."

  Gretchen smiled at her. "So that's where you learned to do what you do. In books, and made-up books at that. Figures."

  She walked toward the door, moving a little stiffly, which Tess decided to count as a small victory. She turned back at the last minute, but only because she needed the key. Tess tossed it to her, and Gretchen caught it in her right fist, then let herself out. She hoped Gretchen hurt like hell in the morning, that she felt all sorts of unsuspected aches in unfamiliar places. Then again, Tess probably would too. The body never seemed to realize when it had been on the winning end of a fight.

  The sheaf of faxes had fallen to the floor while she and Gretchen tusseled. Tess stooped to gather them. They were police reports, not only the assault on Shawn Hayes but two burglaries—and pretty humdrum burglaries to judge by the inventories of what was taken. Herman Peters must have sent them by mistake.

  Told you so, he had scrawled on the cover sheet. When you look into these—assuming you've got nothing better to do—you'll see why your friend is off-base.

  Her friend. For a moment she thought he meant Yeager; then she realized he was referring to Cecilia, the perpetual activist. As she scanned the reports, she wondered idly how Cecilia would feel about that characterization of their relationship. Was she still Cecilia's friend or merely a tool who had long ago ceased to be relevant to Cecilia's various missions?

  The report on Shawn Hayes noted he had been beaten quite badly, with a bat or something else made from wood, but the weapon had never been found. The burglaries seemed to have nothing in common with the attack or with each other. One was in Bolton Hill, the home of Jerold Ensor, who sounded vaguely like someone she should know about, one of those names that crop up on donor lists and the society pages.

  The other was a name of no resonance, Arnold Pitts, at an address that didn't register: Field Street. She had seen that street sign at some point, somewhere, but she couldn't quite place it. The reports made the two incidents sound like penny-ante break-ins, with just the usual mix of fenceable gear taken—televisions, DVD players, a camcorder.

  When you look into these, you'll see why the cops think your friend is off-base. That assumed she was going to look into them. She wanted to whine to that unseen mother who seemed to hover above her at such moments, so much more powerful than any deity, Aw, do I have to? She really needed to find some paying work and leave all this behind.

  But if these reports were Gretchen O'Brien's quarry all along? With a sigh, Tess reached for her crisscross and phone book.

  Chapter 13

  Tess decided to spend the next day doing some-thing truly novel—trying to earn a buck or two. After all, she had the day free. She couldn't call on the two men who had been burglarized until the evening, given that she didn't know where they worked.

  Besides, she needed to make some money. And she had learned that getting people to pay what they owe was often the hardest part of her job.

  She began with a visit to her biggest deadbeat, a fish-market owner who called himself Fuzzy, Fuzzy Iglehart. Tess preferred Mr. Iglehart, despite his repeated invitations to use his nickname. He didn't call Tess anything, except for the occasional "girlie" or the Baltimore-generic "hon." That was before he had stopped returning her calls two months ago. When he saw her coming down the aisle at Cross Street Market a little after 11 a.m., he looked around to see if there was an exit handy. There was, but the narrow side aisle was blocked by two elderly shoppers, so he sighed and stood his ground.

  "How you been?" he asked Tess, as if they were old friends.

  She countered with a more relevant question. "How's business?"

  "Awful," he said. "Just awful. It's where they got me, in this dark little corner, away from all the other fish guys. I don't know who I pissed off, but someone has it in for me. Someone at the city, or in the management here."

  Fuzzy Iglehart began almost every conversation this way, telling her his troubles, proclaiming the city, the state, the world, and all their bureaucracies to be in league against him. When he had come to Tess's office last summer, he appeared to have a point. A rubbery-limbed man had staged a spectacular slip-and-fall in front of Fuzzy's Fish and tried to sue the city, only to find its liability was capped. So he had gone after the next pocket, Fuzzy's insurance company, but the agent wiggled off the hook by pointing out the puddle was caused by a faulty refrigeration unit. Ah, but the manufacturer of the refrigeration unit noted Fuzzy had not installed it properly, thus voiding its warranty.

  As in the old children's game, t
he Farmer in the Dell, the cheese stood alone. Terrified of the legal fees that even a successful case might cost him, Fuzzy had a rare moment of clarity: He decided to confirm that the injured party was, in fact, an injured party. Within forty-eight hours of being hired, Tess had videotaped Mr. Slip-and-Fall building a brick patio in his backyard. She sent the would-be plaintiff a cassette, along with a short note explaining the penalties for criminal fraud in Maryland, and the case abruptly vanished from the docket.

  That had been Labor Day and Fuzzy Iglehart had been her best friend, promising her free fish and a fix-up with his son, Fuzzy Jr., both of which she politely declined. Still, Fuzzy Iglehart had continued to proclaim he would do anything for Tess, absolutely anything.

  Except, it seemed, pay her.

  "January's bad," he said, launching into his usual litany of woe, his eyes fixed on some spot beyond her left shoulder. "It's always bad, but it's worse than ever this year."

  "You said last month that all you needed to do was get through Christmas and you'd be able to pay me."

  "Christmas was terrible this year. So cold."

  "It was one of the warmest Decembers on record."

  "See, that's what I mean. Too warm. Who wants to eat oyster stuffing when it's so warm out? Look, how about I give you a credit for what I owe you, give it to you in goods?"

  "Because, as I told you last month and the month before that, I hate fish and I'm allergic to shellfish."

  "And you from Baltimore. Okay, how about I give you one of those old oyster tins? They're very decorative. I got another one around here. They're worth a lot. I seen it on eBay."

  "You gave me one of those in November and told me you'd make good after Thanksgiving."

  "But you like that kind of stuff, right? Old Baltimore stuff, I mean. You got that weird clock in your office, I remember. Fuzzy has a good memory." He tapped his fuzzless forehead, retreated into a small storage area behind his stall, and returned with a row of stadium or auditorium chairs, four in all and extremely used.