In a Strange City Read online

  "Well, you're always saying Rainer's incompetent. Maybe he missed it somehow, or maybe Yeager managed to get into Bobby's apartment. Or maybe the Hilliards gave it to Yeager, not knowing any better. I just hope Bobby Hilliard used a brand of ink that can stand up to dog drool."

  Tess stared thoughtfully up at the television, although the face staring back at them now was the famously sweaty visage of Gary Williams, the seethingly intense Maryland coach who perspired more than his players.

  "Okay, you've convinced me. I'm going to take a little trip out I-70 this weekend, see the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside in the dead of winter. But first, I think there's one place I need to check out right here in town."

  Chapter 19

  Bobby Hilliard had lived in a surprisingly characterless apartment building in North Baltimore, the kind of place popular with spoiled Johns Hopkins students and genteel widows who wouldn't dream of being without a hairdresser, deli, dry cleaners, and chiropodist on the premises. Not that they availed themselves of these services, but they liked knowing they were there.

  Tess surveyed the high-rise from a parking place on Charles Street, watching the little old ladies venture out with their inevitably tiny dogs, noting the students with their bouncing knapsacks. She would have thought someone with Hilliard's love of pretty-pretty things would have chosen charm over convenience—a one-bedroom with, say, a marble fireplace and a little galley of a kitchen in Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon.

  Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon—places where two of Hilliard's victims had lived, if one bought Jim Yeager's theory. Tess didn't, not yet. The standards for public discourse had fallen so alarmingly in recent years that anyone could say anything on the airwaves, especially if the target was dead. See Vincent Foster, whose sad suicide had provided no end of conspiracy theories. The prevailing logic, on talk radio and fringe shows like Yeager's, was that you were right until someone proved you wrong. Tess remembered a time when "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" had been a joke in newsrooms, not a governing philosophy.

  Still, she wasn't ready to eliminate Yeager's scenario, not in its entirety. It filled in some gaps, supplied the connection about which police had been so secretive and edgy. Bobby Hilliard was a thief; she knew this fact independently. The question was whether someone could go, in a few short years, from pocketing pillboxes to breaking and entering and, finally, a furious assault. And if he did, and you knew he did, why kill him? Why not go to the police? Yeager had conveniently glossed over this last piece of the puzzle, claiming Bobby Hilliard's death didn't matter because he was a criminal.

  But the holes in Yeager's logic were bigger than his monstrous head. For one thing, it presumed that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim in the shooting at Poe's grave, and Tess had yet to be persuaded of this. The Visitor was the one person that everyone knew would be there on the morning of January 19. Who had known Hilliard would be present, too?

  She got out her supply of business cards, remembering Gretchen O'Brien's knowing taunts about her methods. For the first time—well, not for the first time, but for the first time in a reflective moment, one not involving a corpse—she felt a real revulsion toward her work. She long had taken comfort in the fact that being a private detective was more honest and less destructive than journalism. Her reports were private, and while what she discovered often caused pain, it brought pain to the people who had paid for it, sought it out. Unlike the newspaper, she did not invite strangers into a family's tragedy over morning coffee and toast in order to sell bras and panties and used cars.

  She tucked her "safety inspector" card into her pocket and walked up to the doorman at Bobby Hilliard's apartment, resigned to who she was and what she did, at least for another day.

  A stone-faced janitor led her to Bobby Hilliard's apartment on the sixth floor but stopped before he inserted his passkey in the lock.

  "Twenty dollars," he said.

  "Twenty dollars?"

  "That's what the other people paid. Twenty dollars to see the apartment where the dead man lived."

  She held her ground. "What dead man? What others?"

  "Other people with phony business cards."

  "Oh." Busted. Might as well ask a few questions before she got her money out. "What others?"

  "One had a notebook and wrote down everything he saw, like an inventory." That would be Herman Peters. "He said he was working for the estate. Uh-huh. Another one walked around, just looking at everything, rubbing his hands together, like a kid in Disneyland."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Getting in was all he wanted, and once he was in he didn't seem to know what to do except walk around, looking. Guy had so much hair he looked like he had a cat on his head."

  Yeager. Bingo. "Anyone else?"

  "A woman. For a moment, I thought you was her again, but she wore her hair loose around her face."

  Tess bristled a little at the suggestion that she and Gretchen O'Brien resembled one another, but handed over her twenty dollars.

  "Did the cops ever stop by?"

  "Oh, sure, right after he died, before his name was in the papers. But I watched them, too. Especially them."

  "Why?"

  He rolled his eyes at her naïveté. "You think cops don't steal? From the dead? They steal all the time. Some, not all. And they got nothing on firemen. You'd be surprised at how many things just vaporize in a house fire, as if they was never there at all."

  The apartment was plain, a perfect rectangle of white walls and parquet floors, the kind of place that rose or fell on the tenant's taste. Here, it rose, thanks to a collection of thrift-shop Victoriana that transformed the vanilla-ordinary rooms into an elegant suite. With the curtains drawn against the view, it could have been the late 1800s here, or so Tess presumed. She didn't know much about antiques. But even she could see the care Bobby Hilliard had lavished on his environment, the attention to detail and color. The old chairs and sofa had been reupholstered with lush velvety fabrics in cherry hues. The breakfront that filled a wall in the dining room had been expertly but not overly refinished, so it wore its age with pride.

  Throughout the apartment, the walls were hung with faux heritage—turn-of-the-century portraits and photographs of people and grand estates that bore little resemblance to the parents who had come to Baltimore to claim their son's body. Oh, well. Bobby Hilliard wasn't the first person who had tried to reinvent himself.

  She opened the kitchen cabinets, checked out the refrigerator. They were not well stocked—a few cans of soup and tuna, a dusty box of Mueller elbow pasta. Did Bobby Hilliard know his lease on life was a short one? She shook her head, smiling at her folly. If kitchen cupboards were reliable barometers of one's expectations, a casual visitor to her home would deduce she had been living on borrowed time for about ten years now. As a waiter, Bobby Hilliard had probably feasted on choice leftovers several nights a week. The absence of groceries did not prove Bobby Hilliard had gone to the graveyard planning to stay.

  Still, something was missing. Tess walked through the rooms again, puzzled, as the janitor grew more visibly impatient, sighing and shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

  "No books," she said, so suddenly and loudly that the janitor jumped.

  "What?"

  "There are no books in this apartment."

  The librarian owned no books. No, not none—there was a small shelf next to the cherrywood four-poster, filled with antiques guides and reference books on furniture. Bobby Hilliard also had a family Bible and a few history books about Maryland. But the latter were trade paperbacks, well-worn, clearly not the volumes he was suspected of stealing from the Pratt. If he had stolen books, where were they? Had he sold them? But Daniel Clary had suggested Bobby stole things to keep, not fence. He liked pretty things.

  "Are you sure no one took anything out of here?"

  The janitor looked insulted. "You see how I am with you. Ain't nobody walk out of here with anything, unless it was his parents. Them I l
eft alone, but that was different."

  "What about the cops? I don't mean stealing, but they might have taken things as evidence."

  "Woulda, coulda, but they didn't. They looked all over here like there was something they wanted, but they walked out empty-handed."

  "What was that noise?" Tess asked. The janitor turned, and she pocketed Bobby Hilliard's miniature alarm clock in one deft movement, just as a test. Oh, yeah, he was really tough to trick.

  Tess pulled up the curtains. Bobby's apartment faced east, looking over the green-shingled roofs of Guilford, and all the way toward the partially demolished Memorial Stadium. Dust motes circled lazily in the shafts of light, the only things that had moved here in some time. The apartment felt like a movie set. But what part had Bobby Hilliard been playing?

  "Is that the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the distance?" she asked the janitor. When he went to look, she slipped the clock out of her pocket and left it in its place. Again, he never noticed.

  Chapter 20

  Tess made Breezewood, the self-billed town of motels, by 10 a.m. Saturday. Halfway between Baltimore and Pittsburgh, this little intersection of gas stations and junk-food restaurants was an inevitable stopping point on any trip through western Pennsylvania. Inevitable because, legend had it, a congressman had used his clout to ensure no cloverleaf would ever be built here. To get from Interstate 70 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and back again, one had to maneuver three congested blocks, crammed with places that would make your arteries as sluggish as Breezewood's traffic. So Tess stopped, although her Toyota could easily make it to Bobby Hilliard's hometown without gassing up. It was only another hour down the road.

  Tess knew this stretch of Pennsylvania from her college days, when she and Whitney and the other Washington College rowers had competed in the Head of the Ohio. She had been curious, even then, about the small towns glimpsed along the way. A line from Auden came back to her, something about the raw places where executives would never tamper. She had always wondered if the topography influenced the culture here. The rolling hills of southwestern Pennsylvania suggested a protected, closed place, isolated from the rest of the world. Her radio faded quickly, so a punch of the "seek" button kept taking her back to the same country station. From this vantage point, it was possible to see Baltimore as part of something called "the East," although Baltimore never felt particularly eastern when Tess was there.

  The Hilliards' farm was not easy to find, even with Vonnie Hilliard's careful directions, which included precise mile markers and such landmarks as an old metal Koontz Dairy sign, which leaned against the barn that signaled the beginning of their property. Mrs. Hilliard had clearly been puzzled by Tess's request to see them, but it did not occur to her to refuse. She was used to doing what people in authority asked. She did not realize Tess had no authority.

  But the Hilliards knew enough not to confuse the visit with a social call. They sat at their kitchen table, hands folded in front of them, making no offer of drinks or food. They had the glum, hopeless look of people in hospital waiting rooms.

  "The police have asked us all these questions," Mr. Hilliard said tonelessly, at one point. "Why would anyone want to kill Bobby? Who were his friends? Did he seem to have more money than he used to have? But we don't know. We didn't know anything about his life down there."

  His grim expression suggested he would have preferred to keep it that way.

  "I don't think he'd hurt anybody," his mother said. "I can't believe what they said on the television."

  "You saw that cable show?" Tess tried to imagine the Hilliards watching Jim Yeager. How alien it must be to them, the notion of a man who made his living by yapping.

  "We have a satellite dish," Mr. Hilliard said, stung. "We get all the movie channels and then some."

  "But, no, we didn't see it," Mrs. Hilliard put in. "Detective Rainer called after, just in case, and said we shouldn't worry, he didn't think it happened the way the television man said. But he did ask us if Bobby had known some people. I don't remember their names…"

  Tess did. "Arnold Pitts, Jerold Ensor, Shawn Hayes."

  "That sounds right."

  "And did he?"

  The Hilliards sighed, almost in unison, two people so in sync after years together that they might as well be one.

  "We don't know," Mrs. Hilliard said sadly. "We just don't know."

  Tess decided to test their professed ignorance. "Do you know why he decided to give up his profession, the one he had trained for, to become a waiter?"

  "More money," his father said. "He paid for college himself, so I guess it was his business if he wanted to wait tables instead of working in a library."

  "No other reason?" she prodded.

  They looked at her as if there could be no better reason, and Tess, glancing around the plain kitchen, felt ashamed. Of course his parents would have accepted this explanation.

  "When was the last time you spoke to him?"

  "Christmas Day," Mrs. Hilliard said, happy for a question she could answer. "He was going to come home, but he had to work the night before and the day after, and it was just too much. He sent us some nice things, though. He was considerate that way."

  "Nice things. What?"

  "Well, cologne for his father. And perfume for me. And a vase, that one there." She indicated a blue-white vase on the kitchen counter. It held three silk roses. Tess wondered if it would hold fresh ones, once spring came. If Bobby Hilliard had lived, he might have instructed his mother, ever so gently, to fill it with nasturtiums or zinnias from her own garden.

  "Could I see his room?"

  "Why?" This was Mr. Hilliard, suspicious.

  "I don't know," Tess confessed. "But I've come all this way, and I'd like to see where he grew up."

  The room where a young Bobby Hilliard had bided his time, plotting his escape from this small town, was an early version of his apartment, filled with yard-sale finds and furniture he had refinished. Only here there were books too, a high shelf filled with boys' adventure stories: Treasure Island, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine. No Poe, not that Tess could see, but there was a stack of Classic Comics, with The Gold Bug on top. This might have been a coincidence, as the others in the pile were illustrated versions of Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Dickens.

  "They're not that old," Mrs. Hilliard said.

  "Dated 1969," Tess said of The Gold Bug.

  "I mean, they're not Bobby's old things. He found them at a yard sale a few years back, when he was visiting. Bought the whole pile for five dollars, and you would have thought he found a diamond ring or something."

  Mrs. Hilliard hugged herself, as if she were cold, and averted her eyes. Tess sensed she didn't like to see her son's things touched, so she put the comic book back and continued to examine the room. Bobby had gone through a deco phase before he discovered the Victorian era, judging by the lamps and the framed Maxfield Parrish prints. The bed's headboard was ornate, the bed itself piled with pillows in fresh white shams, as if the room's owner were expected back sometime soon.

  "It's lovely," Tess said, meaning only to be polite, but Mrs. Hilliard's expression looked wounded.

  "Yes," she agreed reluctantly. Then: "Do you think he was ashamed of us?"

  "What?"

  "Bobby. Do you think he went off to Baltimore because he was embarrassed by this house? And by us, because we're just farmers?"

  "No," Tess said firmly, forgetting she didn't actually know Bobby Hilliard and had no insight into how he thought. "My guess is he moved away because he… because he wanted to pursue a kind of life he couldn't have here."

  "Well, he could have gone to Pittsburgh, which is closer. It's not like they don't have gay men there too."

  Mrs. Hilliard smiled at the surprised look on Tess's face. "We never spoke of it," she said, "but I knew. And his father would have known too, if he wanted to. I'm not saying we understand it, and we were brought up in a church that says it's a sin, but he was our son. We loved him. I was j
ust waiting for a day when Bobby felt comfortable with who he was, because then I thought he might be comfortable with who we are and where he came from. That's all."

  "I love your house." Although Tess was being polite, she also was being truthful. "Old farmhouses are beautiful. So many of them have been ruined by ugly additions. I like the original shape: the peaked roof, the porch along the front. You haven't painted over all the wood, as some people do, or put down carpeting over the wooden floors. You ought to see what allegedly well-intentioned people did to the place I bought."

  "Mmm," Mrs. Hilliard said, not willing to be comforted or distracted. "I knew he stole. I didn't want to say, in front of Webber."

  "From the library, you mean?"

  "All his life. Here and there. Little things, things he couldn't even use. He didn't do it often, and when he did he was like a drunk falling off the wagon. He'd come in looking so tight and guilty, and then he'd ‘fess up, and I'd march him back to the store or the neighbor or the classmate he had stolen from. He always promised it wouldn't happen again, and time would go by and I would begin to believe him. And then he'd do it again."

  "Did he tell you why he had to leave the Pratt?"

  Mrs. Hilliard looked sad. "I guessed. I knew him. I knew his weaknesses. But I loved him."

  "So you believe he did what the police suspect. The burglaries, I mean."

  She sat in a Morris chair. "Uh-uh. Those men down in Baltimore, they say they lost television sets and stereos but nothing else. Bobby wouldn't do that, see?

  That's what I told the police too—Detective Rainer and those two detectives who came up here, looking for things Bobby was said to have stolen. I let them go all over the place, and they saw for themselves there was nothing here. They wouldn't listen."

  Tess detected nothing strange in this speech, but Mrs. Hilliard suddenly swallowed and stared at the floor, twisting the hem of her skirt in her knobby, hard-worked fingers. She swallowed a second time, her neck reddening.

  "But there is something here, isn't there?"