Baltimore Blues Page 12

  Once on the terrace, there was only one place to sit, a cheap director’s chair with a torn orange seat. Ava took the chair and let Tess have the concrete floor. There was a crystal wine cooler by the chair, a nice one, possibly from Tiffany. But when Ava pulled the bottle out to top off her glass, Tess recognized the label, a Romanian Chardonnay available for less than six dollars, even at package stores, which gouged you. Tess had tried it. Once.

  “What do you want now?” Ava said. She sat with her back to the harbor, indifferent to the view. Or perhaps she considered the sunset, a brilliant red orange heightened by the smog, something of a rival. Its warm hues did little for her pale, cool beauty.

  “I’m working for Rock’s—for Darryl’s—lawyer. It’s pretty routine stuff, just gathering as many facts as we can about the night of the murder.”

  Unlike Joey the security guard, lawyer Ava did not remind her that murder was a legal term. She simply continued to stare at Tess, waiting. Some people, smart people, learn early the power of saying nothing. It forces the other person to gush and stutter. Ava had mastered this. Tess had not. Her mouth, as always, rushed into the breach.

  “You were asleep when he left that night, so you can’t help us much there. But do you remember what time you got over there and what time you feel asleep?”

  “I got there about nine. I was pretty upset, thanks to you. He made me some tea, he held my hand, and I fell asleep. It could have been fifteen minutes later, or forty-five minutes, or an hour. I lost track of time.”

  “Good.” Tess ignored the little barb directed at her. “Now, did you wake up when he came back? Did you notice what time it was? Or did you not wake up until the police came?”

  “I can’t see why that matters.”

  “It sets parameters. The earlier he gets home, the easier it is to prove there was time for someone else to kill Abramowitz.”

  Ava smiled, showing dimples but no teeth. “You can’t possibly believe that, can you?”

  “It’s my job to believe it. What do you believe?”

  She leaned forward, as if taking Tess into her confidence. “Just between us—who else could have done it? Mind you, I don’t care. I think it’s terribly romantic and, with a good defense, he has an excellent chance of being acquitted. But what are the odds that someone happened to kill Michael the same night Darryl confronted him? It’s terribly unlikely, isn’t it?”

  “Rock told me he’s innocent, and that’s all I need to know,” Tess said, uneasy to hear Ava ask the question she had asked just six days ago. “I would expect at least as much from his fiancée.”

  “He hasn’t told me he’s innocent,” Ava said.

  “He’s been instructed not to speak to you at all, for the time being. What about when the cops came and dragged him out of bed? Didn’t you talk then?”

  Ava’s eyes slid away from hers, and she took a large gulp of wine. “Well, there wouldn’t have been time for confidences then. Right?”

  Her tone gave her away. She was testing a theory, seeing if Tess would buy it. If she didn’t, presumably another would be offered.

  “Not right, Ava. Not even close. You left before he came home, didn’t you? You faked falling asleep, then sneaked out as soon as he had gone to do your dirty work for you.”

  Ava said nothing.

  “Taking the fifth?”

  She clenched her jaw muscles so hard they twitched, making a second set of dimples, but she still didn’t speak.

  “Maybe you killed Abramowitz,” Tess suggested, not because she believed it, but because she wanted to goad Ava into saying something, anything. “You followed Rock to the office, worried Abramowitz’s version of your relationship might not agree with yours. You hid in your own little office, then came out and finished what Rock had started. Or maybe you did it in front of Rock, and he’s covering for you.”

  “Right. I strangled and beat a man about twice my size.” Ava laughed, a high-pitched girl’s laugh learned in grade school and sharpened by years of ridiculing others. “But, please—go with that theory. I’m sure Darryl would love a defense based on implicating his fiancée.”

  “Then tell me why you left his apartment. Were you worried what he might have done? Did you think he might come back and tell you all, making you an accessory? Or did he go down there because you asked him to, because the only way you can prove your sexual harassment story is if Abramowitz isn’t alive to give his side?”

  Ava started to speak, then sipped her wine again, cooling herself down. “If I didn’t know better I would assume you were a failed novelist, not a failed journalist. You were a journalist, right? I mean, when you still had a job.”

  “I may have left the newspaper business, but at least it wasn’t because I kept failing some test. You know, Abramowitz told Rock you were sleeping with him because you kept failing the bar. He also said he couldn’t do a damn thing for you, but he slept with you anyway. Now that he’s dead, are you going to start sleeping with another partner, hoping for a reprieve from the firm’s ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ rule?”

  Ava’s jaw muscles flickered like neon and her eyes narrowed. If she had been a dog, her ears would have flattened back, too. Tess could tell she longed to bite her, or at least throw her wineglass. Instead she took a sip of wine, then another. When she spoke her voice was calm, but only through great effort.

  “If Abramowitz said that, he’s lying. At any rate I can’t believe Rock wants a defense based on humiliating me in court, but I’ll mention it to him when he calls. He calls me all the time, you know. I just don’t pick up the phone. That’s why we haven’t talked, not because of any instructions he received. But I may pick up the next time he calls. And perhaps I’ll offer my services to his lawyer. I’m sure I could do better than an unlicensed amateur.”

  “Well, you’re definitely not an amateur. The services you provided Abramowitz lifted you out of that category. I won’t pretend to compete with you there.”

  She did throw her wineglass, then, but her aim was poor. The glass sailed past Tess’s shoulder, flying out to the sidewalk. There was a tiny crash, and a woman, probably a tourist, cried out: “Harry, did you see that?”

  “Sorry you couldn’t help me with Rock’s alibi, Ava,” Tess said. “Maybe you better work on your own.”

  She felt pleased with herself, a little cocky, but the mood quickly vanished when she left Ava’s apartment. For outside Eden’s Landing, she saw Rock on his bicycle, riding up and down President Street like the nerdiest kid in school cruising past the head cheerleader’s house, lovesick and forlorn.

  “You’re not supposed to be doing this,” Tess admonished him. “Tyner told you to stay away and not to talk to her.”

  “I don’t remember him telling you to talk to her, either,” Rock said. “How did she look? How’s she holding up?”

  “OK, I guess.” Tess thought of Ava in her empty apartment. “Tell me something, Rock. Where does her money go?”

  “Well, she has a big mortgage and loans from law school. Maintenance is high, and she can’t even deduct it from her taxes. But she had to have it. She figured it wouldn’t be so bad once we got married and were splitting the monthly payments.”

  “Were you going to live there together?”

  “She thought so.” Rock looked embarrassed. “I let her think so. But it is so small and so expensive. I was going to wait until we got married, then try to talk her into a little house down in Anne Arundel County, on the Severn. A place with a dock.”

  “That wouldn’t come cheap, either.”

  “No, but I have some money put aside. And it would have been worth it to have a place on a river where I could practice. Now it looks like I’ll be using my savings for attorney’s fees.”

  “Did Ava know you had a lot squirreled away?”

  “Sure. She couldn’t understand why I lived the way I did—driving my car only when I had to, living in such a cheap apartment. So I booted up my computer one day and showed her my invest
ments. She was pretty impressed.”

  I bet—impressed enough to accept an engagement ring.

  “Look, Rock, I’m not going to tell you what to do, because you never listen to anyone. But try not to do anything really stupid, OK? Stay away from Ava. Trust Tyner and trust me. We have your best interests at heart.”

  “Are you saying Ava doesn’t?”

  “I’m sure she does, too—as long as they don’t conflict with hers.”

  Rock stared wistfully up at Eden’s Landing one more time, then pedaled away, waving good-bye to Tess over his shoulder.

  Although worried about Rock and effectively shut out by Ava, Tess still felt upbeat and lighthearted. She had made a start, and she had so many other leads to follow. That support group. Tracking down the mystery man with the Louisville Slugger. She had earned a reward, she decided. French fries, perhaps, or a hot dog from the Nice N Easy.

  She walked over to the convenience store on Broadway and asked for a kosher dog.

  “It’ll take a minute,” the sullen girl behind the counter told her.

  “Luckily I’ve got a minute. Hand me that paper, will you?”

  The Beacon-Light she shoved at Tess was not the Saturday paper, but the early Sunday edition, the bulldog. Filled with fake news and feature stories, the paper was of little use, except to those who wanted a jump on real estate ads or the Super Deals at the Giant. Tess, lacking the space to store toilet paper purchased in bulk and the funds to buy property, usually had little interest in the bulldog. Then she saw Jonathan Ross’s byline on page one, under a catchy headline:

  THE LAWYER, THE ROWER, THE LADY: UNLIKELY TRIANGLE LEADS TO TRAGEDY

  Friends called Darryl Paxton “Rock.” The nickname was a testament to his discipline as a sculler, a demanding sport that requires an almost absolute fanaticism if one is to be successful.

  But “Rock” also referred to his daunting physique, the heavily muscled arms, back, and legs that had carried him to so many victories, time and time again.

  Sunday night, police say, Paxton used that strength to crush his latest opponent—famed lawyer Michael Abramowitz, believed to be a rival for Paxton’s fiancée, Ava Hill, a young associate who had been working with Abramowitz. Four days later Paxton went before a judge: not to show remorse, or enter a plea, but to request that his murder trial not interfere with his sculling schedule.

  In an exclusive interview the woman at the center of this unlikely triangle told the Beacon-Light that Paxton was insanely jealous of anyone close to her. His mind poisoned by misinformation, Ms. Hill said, he had even come to believe that Abramowitz was sexually harassing her.

  “I tried to tell him he had it all wrong,” said a tearful Hill, recounting the night of the murder. “But once Darryl had an idea in his head, nothing could dissuade him.”

  Paxton appears calm and cool to those who know him best, but he is no stranger to violence. In college in Pittsburgh, he once beat a man in a local bar, injuring him so badly he required medical attention. The man, however, declined to press charges. Contacted today, ten years after the incident, he says he still fears Paxton too much to go on the record against him.

  Meanwhile, childhood friends of Paxton describe cold, uncaring parents, interested only in his rowing accomplishments. His father, in particular, is described as a brutal taskmaster who would berate a young Paxton whenever he failed—whether at rowing or his studies. His father wanted him to be a doctor, according to one family friend, but Paxton preferred the less stressful life of a researcher.

  Neighbors in Baltimore described Paxton as a quiet man who kept to himself. “He always seems a little preoccupied when I see him down at the mailbox,” said Tillie Van Horne, who lives in his building. “Polite, but not real interested in other people. When his girlfriend was with him, he couldn’t see anyone else in the world.”

  It was all there. Rock, faithful to at least one of Tyner’s instructions, had not spoken to Jonathan, so Ava’s account was allowed to float out over Baltimore, unchallenged and untested. In spite of herself Tess was impressed by Ava’s ability to weave lie within lie. Caught in a compromising position, she had made up the story of sexual harassment to defang Tess. When it had backfired she claimed the story was a figment of Rock’s overheated imagination. Abramowitz was dead, so no one could corroborate Rock’s hearsay account that Ava had initiated the affair.

  By the end of the overblown piece, which Tess read still standing in the Nice N Easy, her hot dog growing cold, the average reader would be convinced of two things: Rock’s guilt and Ava’s innocence. Every detail of their lives had been offered up to serve that purpose. Rock emerged as the brooding, obsessive Heathcliff of the Patapsco. Jonathan even called him a “loner,” newspaper code for deranged. Ava was a golden girl, the straight-A student from Pikesville High School whose only false step was her involvement with this lunatic. Oddly Abramowitz hardly figured into his own murder story. A single man with no living relatives, he had no one to speak for him and no life to re-create outside the law. Old associates at the public defender’s office recalled him only as a prickly workaholic. His current partners had declined to be interviewed for the story, saying the tragedy was too fresh.

  But Tess didn’t care about Abramowitz. And she wasn’t particularly concerned about the article’s effect on the case. Ava could lie to a newspaper reporter. She could even lie to Rock, convince him she was quoted out of context, or that she granted the interview only to help his case. In court she’d have to tell the truth, or at least settle on one, noncontradictory version of the truth.

  No, Tess saw the article as a gauntlet, flung down by Jonathan to prove he could always get what he wanted, even without her cooperation. He had ferreted out details of Rock’s life not even Tess knew—she had always assumed his parents were dead—and gotten the interview with Ava before it occurred to Tess to talk to her. Jonathan was a far more vicious opponent than Rock, who ultimately rowed against himself and his own records.

  Jonathan couldn’t win unless someone else lost.

  Tess read the story again. Abramowitz was barely a person, just a MacGuffin, setting the story into play. What did anyone really know about him? Tess thought again about the little man with the baseball bat who had chased Abramowitz around and around the desk. She remembered the bitter woman, the one who had joined a support group just to forget her experience against him in court. Certainly they could help flesh out what was known about Abramowitz.

  Of course, if Jonathan had read the Beacon-Light’s files, he knew about these people, too. But he hadn’t tracked them down. He had gone for the easy story, the one visible from the surface. Let him have the lady and the rower. She was going in search of the lawyer.

  Chapter 14

  Tess rehearsed her cover story on her way to meet the women of VOMA. She had concocted an elaborate tale of date rape, in which she was defiled by a star football player who had taken her out for coffee after studying for a test on the 19th-century novel. As Tess climbed the broad stone steps of the old school administration building, she was wondering if she could summon up tears on cue.

  The gray stone building, an elegant Victorian, had been defiled during a 1960s stab at modernization. Egg yolk yellow, Sunkist orange, shiny contact paper in a floral pattern—inside it was mod with a vengeance. Time had not dulled the yellow linoleum, and the heavy wooden doors were still imprisoned in layers of shiny orange paint, chipped in places and coated with a thin film of grime.

  The city school district owned the old school, but it was not foolish enough to use it, preferring to spend millions to renovate a nearby high school for its own headquarters. The old administration building now functioned as a kind of community center, although there was no community to speak of in the blighted area. And if nature did not abhor a vacuum, then support groups must. More than a dozen had rushed in to fill the cavernous space, and each classroom that night was filled with people at various stages along the twelve steps.

  Tess walked
past hand-lettered signs for AA, NA, Adult Survivors of Incest, Al-Anon, Shoppers Anonymous, and, cryptically, Bings of Baltimore, which she thought might be for people who couldn’t stop watching White Christmas. Then she saw the women inside, hands wrapped tightly around cups of black coffee, hushed voices speaking rhapsodically about the merits of various doughnut shops.

  “Oh, no, honey,” one emaciated woman said, leaning forward to touch the bony knee of another. “Those krispy kremes at the Super Fresh aren’t made there. You have to eat them hot, right out of the oil, to have the real krispy kreme experience. The nearest store is down in Virginia, in Fairfax County.”

  Oh, Bingers of Baltimore. Maybe someone ate the other letters.

  VOMA was in the last classroom on the left. After glimpses at the sullen or tearful faces in the other classrooms, Tess had expected VOMA to be even more downbeat, if possible. Instead a party was in full swing. A portable stereo played bluesy music, and a couple of women were dancing, moving with a loose and sexy grace. Others gathered around a card table with bowls of M&M’s, a plate of brownies, a tin of frosted cupcakes, and a cut glass bowl of bright red punch. Only one woman, a tall redhead, stood apart disapprovingly, her arms crossed and her mouth severe. Tess had a strong sense of déjà vu. Third grade, the class Valentine’s Day party. But instead of candy hearts with Hep Cat and U Drive Me Crazy, there was a bourbon bottle on the table.

  The women seemed embarrassed when they finally noticed her in the doorway. Someone snapped off the stereo and the others fled to their metal folding chairs as if Tess were an inspector from the national office of VOMA. They folded their hands in their laps and looked down, taking the posture Tess had expected to find. Only the redhead, an Amazon who had a good three inches over Tess, remained standing. Unused to looking up into a woman’s face, Tess disliked her instantly. She reminded her of every class secretary she had ever voted against. Confident, with a hint of head nurse about her, always ready to give one an enema.