In a Strange City Page 14

  A sulky expression settled on Pitts's face, where it looked too much at home, as if Arnold Pitts spent a lot of time with lower lip extended and pale, bristly brows drawn down over those small, watery eyes.

  He sighed. "How much?"

  "How much?"

  "This is about blackmail, right? I pay you, and you go away. Until you come back again and ask for more."

  "I see. You assume I'm a crook and a liar. Funny, how often crooks and liars make that assumption about others."

  "I'm not a crook," he said swiftly. At least he had the good grace not to deny being a liar.

  "Let's start over. You came to me to find out the identity of the Visitor. Why?"

  "I told you, there was a bracelet—"

  Tess held up a hand. "We're starting over, remember? I'm giving you a blank slate. Use it well."

  "Or?"

  "Or I'll tell the police to look into your whereabouts the night Bobby Hilliard was shot. Did you miss? Was the Visitor really your target? Or did you know Bobby Hilliard?"

  "I have an alibi," he said swiftly. "I was in an all-night diner in Silver Spring with a friend."

  "At three a.m.?"

  "We had been to the theater in Washington."

  "It sounds as if you went to a lot of trouble to establish an alibi. Why? What was Gretchen O'Brien's assignment?"

  But beneath his nervous stammers and eye-rolling histrionics, Pitts had a tough little center, as hard as a peach pit.

  "What does it matter?" he said. "Clearly, she failed at her task, a fact she omitted to mention when she briefed me this weekend—and collected partial payment. I was too quick to accept her explanation that the unexpected developments at the grave site created so much confusion that she couldn't follow her quarry. The news accounts made it easy for her to cover up her failure. It never occurred to me she wasn't there. Or that you were."

  "I never said I was there."

  He smiled at the way she pounced on this detail. "No, but the homicide detective did, when he told me to watch out for you. When he said a private detective might visit me, I was within my rights to ask why you were so interested in the case. He said you were a glory hog. Frankly, I thought it took you a little while to follow such an obvious trail."

  "It's been less than twenty-four hours since I was faxed the burglary reports," she said defensively. Besides, hadn't Pitts seemed surprised when she caught up with him outside the 7-Eleven?

  "And you still don't know why they're grouped together, do you? Two burglaries, an assault, and a homicide. You have no idea what the link is. Neither do the police, if that's any comfort to you—neither do I."

  The last statement seemed hasty tacked on.

  "If you'll tell me what this is all about, I won't go to the police about your visit to me and how you hired Gretchen O'Brien to do what I wouldn't do. She won't have privilege, if you didn't go through a lawyer. She'll have to talk to them."

  He took a moment, as if considering her offer, then shook his head. "I think not. You'll tell them everything, eventually. You're such a good citizen." She had never before heard so much disdain for that simple word. "But if you do tell them about me—why, if you do, I will have to inform them that you visited me in order to extort me. I think the homicide detective would be so hungry for a complaint like that, he might be willing to suspend his usual professional skepticism."

  "But that's a lie. You were the one who brought up the idea of blackmail. I'd never be party to such a thing."

  "What's the old saying? A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on? True, it won't hold up, it's all he-said, she-said, but it will do a little damage while it's out there. So you think carefully about what you do next and where you carry your tales. Your reputation is all you have. And, as I understand it, there are members of your family who have shown they are all too capable of a certain moral relativism."

  "That's ancient history," she said, even as she realized she didn't know if he was referring to her father, her grandfather, or two of her uncles. The Monaghans and Weinsteins had taken a somewhat ad hoc approach to upward mobility, but that was all in the past. Assuming Uncle Spike was behaving in Boca, which was a pretty large assumption. "And it has nothing to do with me."

  "Oh, yes, you've been portrayed in press accounts as squeaky clean, but as I understand the traditional media arc, it's about time for you to get some negative publicity. They build you up so they can tear you down. Read more about Mr. Poe's posthumous life if you want to see a case study in the vagaries of public opinion. The Beacon-Light might not bite, but the local television stations would love a piece on sleazy private eyes. You and Gretchen O'Brien. They say it takes three to make a trend, but maybe they can throw in the historic example of Allan Pinkerton, the original Baltimore PI, whose inability to track the Army of the Confederacy probably extended the Civil War by several years."

  The long rapid speech had left Pitts breathlessly delighted with his own moxie. Tess felt a little breathless, too, at how he had turned the tables on her. The only knowledge she had gained here was that the fat man was shrewder than he appeared. He had chosen her because he knew her family history left her vulnerable to being manipulated in just this fashion. He had gone shopping for a private investigator he could control. She wondered what he had on Gretchen. It didn't matter. He had just been handed a nifty piece of blackmail: Gretchen had defrauded him by collecting money for work she never did. She, too, was now hopelessly compromised, vulnerable to Arnold Pitts's dictates.

  "I think," Pitts said, when she declined to say anything, "this is what they call a Mexican standoff. You're not telling me anything; I'm not telling you anything."

  "But I know where you live now," Tess said. "I know who you are. I might come back."

  "Good night," he said. "Good-bye." It was an order.

  She looked around the low-ceilinged room. The floors that peeked out from the edges of Pitts's green carpets were wide-planked pine. The ceiling had exposed beams, and the walls were a rough plaster that probably fought every nail. It was a little gem of a house, built better than it needed to be, and crying out for simple furnishings. Pitts's re-creations verged on vandalism.

  "Why would you buy a house like this and fill it with fifties kitsch?" Tess asked. "What's the point?"

  "Kitsch? Kitsch? These are my memories. This is my life." Pitts, so cool and calm when he was threatening her, became completely rattled when his taste in furnishings was questioned.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest it isn't… breathtaking in its attention to detail. But why here? Why not in a nice little split-level out in Lutherville? Don't you want to create the full effect?"

  "But I have," he said with genuine bewilderment. "Besides, Mother still lives in the house in Cockeysville. And she's done horrible things to it. Why, she actually got one of those refrigerators with an icemaker in the door." He shuddered. "The old refrigerators are so beautiful, with their rounded tops and those huge handles, as if what you were opening was something important. One day, when she dies—"

  Tess left it—and him—there. It was reassuring to know Mother Pitts was in the suburb of Cockeysville, not stuffed in a nearby crawl space.

  Then again, she recalled when she was back in her car, Norman Bates also had insisted his mother was alive.

  Chapter 16

  Crow had a yen for French toast the next morning, so they ended up at the Paper Moon Diner, a twenty-four-hour oasis near the Baltimore Museum of Art. It had once been a dreary coffee shop, the Open House, a place so bad that Tess kept returning to see if it could possibly be as awful as she remembered. It was. The Open House had been a place where the jelly on your English muffin turned out to be mostly mold and whatever white substance they provided for the coffee was invariably curdled. If anyone dared to complain, the help glared, put out to find customers there.

  But with a little purple paint and a heavy dose of whimsy, the Paper Moon had vanquished the ptomaine ghosts of the previous r
egime. The place now radiated good cheer, with its collection of Pez containers and old-fashioned toys. Christmas lights shone from the exposed rafters year-round, and naked department store mannequins lurked in the shrubbery out front. The service was also divine, thanks to what Crow referred to as the only successful model for socialism in the new millennium: All tips were shared, so everyone on the staff had a vested interest in getting the food to the table and keeping drinks refilled. The menu needed an entire page to explain this system, and the explanation verged on manifesto, but the Paper Moon always made Tess feel as if she were John Reed in the Soviet Union: She had seen the future of restaurant service, and it worked.

  "I'm sorry I got you into this," Crow said, yawning over his coffee. They had stayed up late the night before, until almost 3 a.m. It had been worth it.

  "I like the Paper Moon."

  "No, I mean this Poe thing. It's all my fault."

  "How do you figure?"

  "If I hadn't insisted we go to Westminster and "protect‘ the Visitor, you wouldn't have felt obligated to start looking for this man. Now that you've found him…"

  "Now that I've found him," Tess sang, "I can let him go." The Paper Moon's whimsy was infectious. Besides, she didn't want to talk about Arnold Pitts. She wanted to prolong the warm, happy mood in which she had awakened. Later, stomach full, she would contemplate Pitts's nasty threat, try to figure out if he had left her any room in which to maneuver. Could she launch a preemptive strike, go to Rainer and tell him to expect Pitts's false accusations?

  But Pitts was shrewd in his judgments: Rainer disliked her so much, he'd want to believe the worst of her. She was stuck. She studied the menu, wondering if it was too early in the day to order the hummus, which was billed, perhaps inevitably in this self-referential city, as "Hummuside: Life on the Pita."

  Puns ruined her appetite. Perhaps an omelet instead.

  "You know, one day—not at breakfast, but if we come here for lunch or dinner—I'm going to order a beer milkshake. If any place on the planet would make you one, it would be the Paper Moon."

  "Wasn't there a character in a book who had a beer milkshake?"

  "Doc, in Cannery Row," Tess replied, glad to know a piece of literary trivia. She was still embarrassed at being the butt of Arnold Pitts's literary joke. The twentieth, now that was her century If someone had come into her office claiming to be Edmund "Bunny" Wilson or Harold Bloom, she'd have been in on the joke from the jump.

  Two women walked into the dining room and took seats beneath a mobile of flying Barbies. Tess couldn't help noticing the dark and light heads bent over the menus. Both women had short razor-cut hair, which exposed willowy necks. If it weren't for their coloring—the one so dark, the other a rose-petal blonde— they might have been mistaken for sisters. There was a sameness in the way they dressed, in their posture. Tess was so caught up in trying to figure out how they could look so different and yet seem so related, that it took a second for the dark-haired woman's familiar profile to register.

  "Cecilia Cesnik," she said, for the second time in three days.

  And for the second time in three days, Cecilia turned and gave Tess a wary smile.

  "Now I remember why the City Paper suggested Tiny Town as a nickname for Baltimore," Cecilia said. "Sometimes it seems as if there are only a couple dozen people living here."

  The blonde's blue-green eyes had a frosty glaze that would have done a doughnut proud. Tess realized she must be Cecilia's girlfriend, and she was trying to assess the nature of the relationship between Cecilia and this strange woman.

  "I'm Tess Monaghan," she said, "and this is my boyfriend, Crow Ransome."

  That was all it took to melt the frost. "Charlotte Menaker," she said. "How do you and Cecilia know each other?"

  The answer was complicated—and involved so many events better left forgotten, so much violence and waste—that Tess and Cecilia, after exchanging a look, shrugged and laughed.

  "Another Baltimore story," Tess said. "We were… thrown together once, by circumstances. Then Cecilia clerked one summer for the lawyer I work with, Tyner Gray."

  "The handsome man in the wheelchair?"

  "I suppose," Tess said, knowing she would never carry the compliment back to Tyner. Bad enough that heterosexual women thought he was attractive. If he heard a pretty young lesbian had called him handsome, his conceit would be unbearable.

  Crow, who had met Cecilia about the same time Tess did, suddenly got up and enveloped her in a bear hug. Cecilia looked faintly alarmed, then relaxed in his grip.

  "You look great," he told her. "I saw you on the news, and I was so proud of you."

  "Oh, yeah, the news," Tess said. "So how goes the crusade? Has Rainer unbent, told you anything more about his investigation?"

  Cecilia appeared torn. Clearly her instinct was to spin the story to her advantage, but Tess was a friend, more or less, not a gullible newscaster.

  "The mainstream media gave us cursory mentions, sort of the obligatory crackpot-theories rubric," she admitted. "But I have a television appearance tomorrow on an hour-long news show, Face Time. We're going to talk about hate crimes and whether legislation can make a difference."

  "Face Time? That show with Jim Yeager?" Tess asked, nonchalant in the extreme.

  "Yes. I know he's not exactly a friend to our cause, but he does provide a forum for free and open debate."

  Tess wondered if Cecilia had ever seen the show in question, or if she was simply buying into Yeager's version of what he offered the viewing public.

  "I wouldn't trust him, if I were you," she said, deciding not to reveal she had turned down a chance to be on the same show.

  Cecilia could not bear instructions, no matter how mild or well intended. "I don't recall asking your advice. Besides, I have a great visual. We just came from the SPCA, where I bailed out Shawn Hayes's Doberman. The family doesn't know what to do with her, so they're boarding her there. I'm going to take her on the show with me. People may not respond to the plight of a gay man, almost beaten to death, but a little doggie mourning for her master gets them every time."

  She pointed to Twenty-ninth Street, where a blue RAV-4 was parked. Tess saw the long snout of a Doberman poking through the window, which had been lowered about an inch to let fresh air circulate in the car.

  She hated to anthropomorphize, especially from this distance, but the dog did appear depressed.

  "How does a Doberman not come to her master's aid when he's being beaten?" she wondered.

  "Good question," Cecilia said. "The police want to think it's because Shawn Hayes's attacker was someone he knew. But that would only explain why the dog didn't bark when the person entered the house. You told me you have a dog. Would it sit idly by while someone was hurting you?"

  Tess thought about this. "No, she'd lie idly by, at least if you gave her something to eat first. In fact, if you were feeding her bacon, you could set me on fire and Esskay wouldn't notice. But she's no Doberman."

  "The Hound of the Baskervilles," Crow mused. "Why didn't the Doberman bark?"

  "Ah, but this is a story of Poe, not Conan Doyle," Tess reminded him.

  "It's not a story about Poe at all." Cecilia's voice was edged with irritation. "That's the very problem I'm having with the press. One man is dead, another is near death, and all anyone wants to do is make weak puns about "The Telltale Heart‘ and Baskerville hounds, whatever they are."

  They all looked across the street at the dog in question. A suspicious-looking man appeared to be sneaking up on the RAV-4, but he jumped back when he saw what was inside. The Doberman didn't move, didn't react at all. Maybe she was capable of sitting out an attack on her master.

  "That's a big dog," Crow said. "She's going to need a lot of exercise. Do you have a yard?"

  "We not only don't have a yard, we have a cat," Charlotte put in, with the tone of the frequently put upon. Get used to it, honey, Tess longed to advise her. Welcome to life with Cecilia. "So I'm not sure how this is going
to work. She's a sweetie, though. Her name is Miata."

  "Miata?"

  "Hayes told his friends she was his version of a midlife crisis," Cecilia said. "Look, why don't you bring your food over here and join us, instead of shouting across the tables like this?"

  She could not have been more offhand, but Tess was moved by the offer. Perhaps Cecilia had room in her life for those who were not allies and comrades, just friends.

  "You know, we could keep the dog for you," Crow said, after they had reconfigured.

  Tess choked a little on her orange juice.

  "Well, we could," he said. "Just temporarily. The backyard is fenced, and Esskay could use the company."

  "Esskay doesn't even know she's a dog."

  "True," Crow said, "but she's very tolerant. If she saw us being kind to some strange new creature, she'd do the same."

  "It wouldn't have to be forever," Cecilia said, seizing the opening Crow had given her. "Just temporarily, until Hayes's family makes arrangements for her."

  "She's incredibly well behaved," Charlotte put in. "Except for the sofa incident."

  Cecilia gave Charlotte a sharp look even as Tess asked, "The sofa incident?"

  "The SPCA said she ate a sofa while she was with one of Hayes's relatives," Charlotte confessed. "That's why she was put there in the first place."

  "Not all of it," Cecilia said quickly. "Just part of a cushion. She was making a nest."

  "Don't worry, Esskay won't let that happen," Crow said. "She doesn't let anyone sit on the sofa."

  It's strange, how being allowed to do a favor for someone can feel like a gift. Tess was touched that Cecilia would admit to needing anything, much less allow Tess and Crow to fill that need. Sitting here, a happy foursome, they felt like friends.

  And friends shouldn't have secrets from one another. She owed it to Cecilia to tell her what she had learned about the Bobby Hilliard case.

  "You know, the cops have widened the investigation, beyond the homicide and the assault," she said. "They're looking into two burglaries, too. I'm not sure what's involved, but they're definitely not hate crimes, just ordinary break-ins."