In a Strange City Page 18

  Mrs. Hilliard kept her eyes fixed on the floor.

  "You can tell me, Mrs. Hilliard. I can keep secrets. I keep them for my clients all the time."

  "If we hired you, Webber and I, could you prove that television man told lies about Bobby? I know my son. He couldn't hurt another person. I don't know why someone killed him, but I know that much. He was a gentle boy."

  "I doubt I could help you with that," Tess said. "It's hard to prove a negative. To determine Bobby's innocence, I'd have to figure out who's guilty. Private detectives are expensive, Mrs. Hilliard, and the results aren't guaranteed. You're better off letting the police figure out what happened to Bobby."

  "But they don't care about his reputation. It's almost as if it's better if he was a bad person, because then more people might have wanted to kill him. The detectives who came here, they said terrible things about Bobby, worse than what that television man said. They said he had stole lots and lots of things, but not all his victims had come forward. They told me if I knew anything about what he had done down in Baltimore, I'd better tell them. But I don't. I really, really don't."

  Again, she stared at the floor, and the red from her neck spread to her face, a fire out of control.

  "Mrs. Hilliard, did you hold something back from the police? I might be able to help you make it right, work as a go-between. The longer you go, however, keeping things from them, the worse it will be." Take it from an expert.

  She got up and went to the closet. "There's a piece of wood here that a plumber had to cut, to get to the pipe in the bathroom on the other side of the wall." She spoke over her shoulder, her voice muffled by the clothes hanging on either side of her face. "Bobby always hid things here; he thought I didn't know about it. But I knew. I looked there from time to time to make sure he didn't have anything he shouldn't have. When he sent me my Christmas gift, I put it here, first because I thought it was so valuable and then because… well, because if I didn't show it to anyone, I didn't have to face up to what it might be or how he came to have it."

  "I thought he sent you a vase and some perfume."

  "That was last Christmas."

  She emerged from the closet with a long jewelry box, still in its silver wrapping, a prefab ribbon stuck to the top. Inside was a bracelet, gold, with green stones. Could they really be emeralds? The piece was undeniably delicate and intricate, made with the kind of care and attention to detail that is rare now in all but the most expensive pieces.

  "Bobby could have bought this with his own money," Tess said, as if trying to convince herself. "It's possible, if only because he might have been making money by stealing other things and fencing them."

  "He told me it belonged to a king's wife. No, that's not right. It belonged to someone's sister-in-law. That's right. Bobby said it would be a while before he could buy me something that had belonged to a real queen, but he promised he would someday."

  "Betsy Patterson Bonaparte," Tess suggested, and saw the Pig Man sitting opposite her, swinging his feet, complaining languorously about the man who had cheated him. If he had been fooled by a fake bracelet, did it follow there was a real one? Had there been a germ of truth in all the lies Arnold Pitts had told?

  "That's right. I forgot the name, but I knew it as soon as you said it."

  Tess picked the bracelet up out of its cotton wrapping and held it to the light. She could not imagine killing for it. But then, she didn't think any object was worth homicide. Would Arnold Pitts kill for something like this? No, he didn't do his own dirty work. He tried to trick others into doing it for him.

  "Do you have an account at the local bank?"

  "Of course we do," Mrs. Hilliard said, showing a flash of irritation. "Do you think we barter for goods with chickens and vegetables?"

  "I want you to take this to the bank the minute it opens Monday morning and place it in a safe deposit box. Once you've done that, I'll call the police. I'll tell them I'm working for you and we just found it this weekend, when you thought to check Bobby's old hiding place. That way you can't get in trouble for holding it back when they visited you earlier this week."

  Although I'll get in trouble, Tess thought mournfully to herself, for thrusting myself into this. Rainer will never believe I didn't want to be a part of it all the time.

  Mrs. Hilliard looked confused. "Are you working for us then?"

  "No, just helping you out. It would be wrong for me to take your money when I don't think I can achieve any real results."

  They went back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hilliard offered to fix a cup of coffee. Tess accepted eagerly, then tried not to let her disappointment show when Mrs. Hilliard put water on to boil and pulled a jar of instant from the old-fashioned cabinets. Their sense of shared mission gone, they had nothing left to say to one another. Tess examined the swirled cherry top of the Formica-and-chrome table, drummed her fingers on the surface. She felt obligated to make some kind of chitchat, however desultory.

  "I like this table," she said. "I've seen ones not near as nice, for hundreds and hundreds of dollars."

  "You and that cop," Mrs. Hilliard said, shaking her head. "I do think people from Baltimore are a little queer sometimes. The one police officer couldn't stop talking about that table. He offered me a thousand dollars for it."

  "Really?"

  "He said he had to have it for his kitchen. Said it was the one thing he needed, that it was a dead ringer for the one he had grown up with. He even told me how he had eaten peanut butter and fluffernutter sandwiches at the table, as if that would make me sell it."

  Tess asked yet another question, sure of the answer. "This police officer, what did he look like?"

  "Oh, short and fat. And his partner so thin and tall, with a hangdog face. They made quite a pair. They looked like a number ten marching up the walk. And as much as the little one wanted my kitchen table, the tall one kept asking if he could have the Koontz sign. I thought that was really queer, but I wouldn't sell it, not even for a hundred dollars, because it was something Bobby brought home one day and propped against the barn, so people wouldn't miss the turnoff to our drive. Silly of me, I guess, but I'm sentimental about anything to do with Bobby. Besides, I didn't think they were very professional, those police officers, poking at our things and asking where they came from and how much they cost. Not at all like the ones down in homicide. But I guess you don't have to be as good to work burglary, or whatever they call it."

  "Burglary?" Tess said. Connections were sparking all around her. Two police officers had gone to Bobby's apartment too. That had made sense, and she hadn't bothered to ask the janitor for details. Now she was wondering if this walking number 10 had paid the call there as well. If they had, they had known Bobby Hilliard was dead before he had been identified in the press. They had known who he was all along.

  "Yes, burglary. I remember because that's what it said on the business card." She pulled two cards from the old-fashioned humpbacked Norge refrigerator, where they had been affixed with a magnet from a local market, and handed them to Tess. The cards weren't legit, not even close, but who in Pennsylvania would know that? They said Baltimore city police department and even had a Maryland flag, in color yet. Personal computers and state-of-the-art printers were making life too easy for the criminally inclined.

  And the name on the first card was August Dupuis, a Poe allusion Tess had last heard in the corridors of the Baltimore Police Department. Oh, Arnold Pitts was such a wit. How he must crack himself up, creating these fake identities for himself. And how patronizing he was, choosing his Poe pseudonyms based on his assumptions about how well read his victims were. What name had he given Gretchen? Tess wondered. A. G. Pym? Rod Usher?

  The second card identified his partner as Rufus Griswold. Tess had read enough about Poe's life by now to know this was Poe's perfidious literary executor, who had done so much to damage Poe's reputation after his death.

  "Change of plan, Mrs. Hilliard," Tess announced.

  "What?"


  "Give me a dollar."

  The woman looked confused, but obediently fished four quarters out of a large crockery jar on the kitchen counter and handed them to Tess.

  "You just hired a private detective."

  Chapter 21

  Fat and Skinny ran a race. Fat fell down and broke his face. Skinny won the race.

  Tess woke Sunday morning with that old rhyme in her head. She didn't know how she knew it. From jumping rope? But she had never been a jump-roping girl. She had read books about the kind of girls who jumped rope, wondering why she wasn't more like them. She had been a football-playing, knee-skinning, emergency-rooming kind of girl.

  But if she couldn't remember how she knew the rhyme, she knew why it was echoing in her head. Fat and Skinny—Pitts and Ensor, the Laurel and Hardy of Baltimore. This undynamic duo had searched Bobby Hilliard's apartment and his parents' farm. Yet neither one had mentioned knowing the other. Not to Tess and not, as far as she knew, to the police. Officially, they were simply two burglary victims. Had they met after Bobby's death and decided to join forces for some reason? Or had they been friends all along?

  She didn't know, couldn't know. But she had an image of Pitts's dark house on Field Street, how he had waited that night until he thought she was gone, then come tottering out with his trash. He made it sound as if he had been watching for her for days, but she figured it was more like fifteen minutes, which was about how long it had taken her to get from Ensor's house to his. She wished, in retrospect, that she had searched the garbage can he had carried to the alley. Maybe there was a reason he was in such a hurry to take out the trash.

  Well, now she had the upper hand. She knew the whereabouts of the very item Pitts wanted, an item he had not reported stolen, an item he claimed had been in his possession all along. She could hold that fact over his head. Then again, Pitts had proved to be a most weaselly adversary, not someone to confront head-on. She had lost her first round with him.

  So how to proceed? She puzzled this out while walking with the dogs in Stony Run Park. Esskay was beginning to enjoy the company of her sleek bodyguard, trying to make friends by pointing out the rabbits and squirrels that crossed their paths. Miata, however, took no notice. She continued depressed, unhappy without her master.

  A sleek bodyguard. Tess found herself thinking of Gretchen O'Brien—not exactly sleek, not exactly a bodyguard, but definitely linked to Pitts. She might know if Pitts and Ensor had a relationship that predated their victimhood. Not that Gretchen would give Tess such information voluntarily. She'd have to be tricked into it, or angered into it, perhaps by the revelation that Pitts had chosen her precisely because she had an unsavory reputation.

  Gretchen's name reminded her of yet another stubborn knot in the facts she had been gathering. It was as if she were making her own gigantic ball of string, one piece at a time. If Ensor and Pitts had searched Bobby's apartment once, on their own, why had Pitts sent Gretchen back? Or had she gone without telling him, still trying to cover up her incompetence? The "police" had come quickly, the janitor said, before the newspapers printed the name of the dead man. But if Pitts and Ensor had known who Bobby Hilliard was all along, what was the point of hiring someone to follow him to Poe's grave that night? Was their quarry the real Visitor, as Pitts had claimed? But the Visitor didn't have the bracelet; Bobby Hilliard did. Her head was beginning to hurt.

  The open meadow at the top of Stony Run Park soon turned into a narrow path through dense woods. A synagogue was planned here, but construction had not yet begun and it was an isolated place. Tess was grateful the trees were bare, allowing her to see for some distance. Statistics said she was safer here, in zip code 21210, than she had ever been in 21231. But she didn't always feel that way. If someone approached her now—well, it was fair to say Esskay was not the only one who enjoyed having a Doberman along these days. Miata might feel despondent, but she still looked pretty ferocious. Tess wondered if she should start taking both dogs to the office with her. Certainly, it was healthier for Miata to be away from the renovation fumes.

  Who would kill for a bracelet? It must be worth far more than she realized. Still, she couldn't imagine that the world was waiting breathlessly to see the bracelet worn by an emperor's momentary sister-in-law. You had to be a sick sick puppy to care that passionately about such an obscure piece of Baltimore history.

  It was Sunday, a day of rest. Even the self-employed—especially the self-employed, especially someone who had just taken a case for $1—deserved a day off after working every day for almost two weeks straight. Like Scarlett O'Hara, she would think about all these things tomorrow.

  Crow was patient with all forms of popular culture except television, and he had broken Tess of her habit of relying on it for relaxation. He had many ideas for ways to distract and soothe her, some even vertical.

  But on Sunday nights, she had a standing date with The Simpsons and King of the Hill. She was sure it said something revelatory about her personality that she preferred her entertainment animated. But she was laughing much too hard to care. Tonight was a rerun, one of her favorites: Marge was starring in the musical of Streetcar Named Desire, while Maggie was plotting a Great Escape-type caper from the Ayn Rand Daycare Center. Tess and Crow tried to catch all the film references and failed happily, even though Tess had seen this particular episode five or six times. Then they muted the set and let the light wash over them while they tried to find new territories to colonize on each other. This was one part of their life together where Crow would not tolerate Tess's taste for ruts. He had a point.

  She fell asleep in his arms, starting awake as the ten o'clock news came on, police lights flashing from the screen. Ah, it was the classic top story of the weekend, a homicide. There was the reporter standing outside in the cold, hair blowing; there was the yellow tape; there was the toothless bystander—why did the people willing to speak to television reporters always seem so orthodontically lacking?

  "He was a nice man," Tess prompted, yawning.

  "A quiet man," Crow added.

  "He kept to himself," they chorused.

  She assumed it was the usual mundane murder, a domestic or drug-related slaying in one of the city's sad-sack neighborhoods, the supply of which never seemed to dwindle, no matter how robust the local economy. But when the camera pulled back, the backdrop was one of the city's nicer hotels, not the usual block of dilapidated rowhouses.

  "A fatal downtown? Talk about your red ball." She grabbed the remote and clicked on the volume. "If it's a tourist, the city will go nuts."

  "Police are releasing few details at this time, and hotel officials have declined to be interviewed on camera, but details obtained by Channel Six—"

  "Which is to say, the Channel Six reporter showed up and listened to the police spokesman," Tess muttered.

  "—indicate the victim was returning to the Harbor-South Hotel from dinner at a nearby restaurant when he was accosted by a would-be robber and stabbed after a brief struggle."

  "The Visitors and Convention Bureau is going to love this. Everyone said when they built that hotel it was too far from downtown, that people would never want to walk that far east."

  "But the neighborhood is as safe as any other downtown location," Crow said. "Safer, in some ways. I'd rather walk there than around the Convention Center."

  Tess saw her one friend in the police department, Homicide Detective Martin Tull, in the background, conferring with the uniforms on the scene. Television cameras were unkind to him, highlighting his pitted skin and the narrowness of his face. He was handsome in real life, almost pretty.

  But he wouldn't be the one to comment on camera. That task always fell to one of the public information officers, who knew so little about police work that they were never at risk of saying anything interesting or relevant. Tonight, the PIO on duty was a woman, and Tess had to wonder if she had been so well dressed and beautifully coiffed before the homicide call came in.

  "We know the victim is a fifty-thr
ee-year-old Caucasian male," the PIO droned to the reporter. "A witness has told police the victim was about a block from the hotel when he was accosted by a man. They appeared to exchange a few words, and then the victim fell to the ground. The witness ran to the hotel, shouting for help. When police arrived, the man's personal effects were spread around him, as if his attacker had emptied his pockets after wounding him. His wallet was found a few feet from the body, emptied of all his cash, and he's not wearing a watch, so we think the robber may have taken that as well."

  "What was the weapon?"

  "He was stabbed, but no weapon was recovered from the scene."

  "Can you release his name to the public at this time?"

  The public information officer glanced down at her notes. "Yes. We located his wife at their home in Washington, and she has made a tentative ID. The victim, who was on business here, was"—she stumbled a little over the name—"Jim Yeeger—no, Yeager. His wife says he works in television."

  The reporter continued to blather on, doing the microphone tango with the PIO— your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn—but Tess was having a hard time concentrating on the words. Jim Yeager, stabbed. Jim Yeager, dead—seventy-two hours after his ugly confrontation with Cecilia. Not that Cecilia, or anyone in her ad hoc group of activists, would ever do such a thing. It was unthinkable. And if someone had killed Jim Yeager to make a political point, why disguise it as a street robbery? Unless, of course, the point was to show Jim Yeager that it didn't matter if someone stabbed you for your wallet or your sexuality, dead was dead.

  Crow took the remote from her hand and pointed it at the television, clicking on some nonexistent button. "Sorry," he said sheepishly, as the reporter and the public information officer chattered on, "but I want everything to work like a computer mouse. I keep thinking I can zoom on the television screen, magnify the images I want to see."

  "What caught your eye?"

  "There's something there"— he continued to wield the remote like a pointer, as if he could force it to take on new properties through sheer will—"at the edge of the tape. Tull was kneeling in that spot for a moment. But it's dark. I can't tell exactly what he was looking at."