In a Strange City Read online

  He clicked to another channel, found another view of the same scene, another reporter with hair ruffling in the wind, waiting his turn for the public information officer, like a dateless man in a stag line. Forced to fill the time, he was chatting with the anchor back in the newsroom, answering the very questions he had probably told the blond newscaster to ask him just before they went on the air.

  "And there are no suspects at this time, Bart?" the anchorwoman chirped.

  "Police have not made an arrest as of yet, but they are looking into details of how the victim spent his last few hours here in Baltimore. They know from his wife that he went out to dinner, and police say they have found a receipt that places him at an Inner Harbor restaurant this evening, although they don't know yet if he was dining alone or with a companion."

  "Why was he staying in Baltimore?"

  "He had been doing his show from here since the Poe murder, which had captured his attention—"

  The channel switched again. "Sorry," Crow said. "An accident." But Tess held his wrist before he could click again. On this station, the photographer had managed some arty shots of the scene before police had pushed the media back, and she had picked up the detail that had caught Crow's eye. Round and red, they looked like blood splatters at first, but these had thorns.

  Three red roses. Three… red… roses. Not one or four, not white or pink, not carnations or daisies. Three red roses. Was there a bottle of Courvoisier in the street, too? A bottle in a Baltimore gutter could be overlooked much too easily. Only the upscale brand would make it stand out.

  Protective Crow instinctively started to click the remote off, but Tess grabbed it from him, grimly determined to hear the rest.

  "And he was coming back from dinner?"

  "Yes, he was coming back from dinner in the Inner Harbor."

  "Jesus," Tess said to the television. "If you don't know anything, just shut up."

  The phone rang, and she allowed Crow to mute the set. She assumed it would be Tyner, but the number on the Caller ID screen wasn't a familiar one.

  "Yeah?" she said absently, waiting to hear the usual pitch for a credit card or long-distance service.

  "They're worth killing for," an unfamiliar voice said. The connection was bad, or the receiver had been covered with something.

  "What?" Even as her mind was scrambling, Tess was digging for a pen and a piece of paper. When she couldn't find the paper, she scrawled the number on her hand.

  "Now you know what I've known all along: They're worth killing for."

  "What? Who?"

  But the call had been terminated with a quiet, dignified click. She dialed the number on her hand, only to hear it ring in the night, over and over again. Finally, on the fifteenth or sixteenth ring, someone picked up.

  "You got the wrong number," a voice told her, a different voice. Or was it? The first one had sounded distant, vague, as if coming from a great distance. This man was cocky, his voice street-hard.

  "How do you know it's the wrong number?" she asked, looking at the seven digits on her hand.

  "Because this is a pay phone at North Avenue and St. Paul. It ain't nobody's right number."

  "Did you see the man who was at this phone not even a minute ago?"

  "Lady, it's not a neighborhood where people stand still for very long, you know? I was coming out of the KFC, and I can't walk past a ringing phone. I just gotta know—you know?"

  She knew.

  Chapter 22

  Tess took a large cup of coffee, a pint of orange juice, a bag of bagels, and Tyner Gray with her when she went to meet Rainer on Tuesday morning.

  "Why does she need a lawyer?" was the detective's first question. It did not escape Tess's notice that she had been demoted to third person. An interesting dynamic. The temptation was to say what her mother used to say in such situations—"She is the cat's mother, my boy"— but Tess took a sip of orange juice instead. A sip here, a bite there, and she'd come through this just fine.

  Tyner had a different strategy, one that didn't include tact. "She needs a lawyer because you're a vindictive asshole."

  "Don't feel you have to sugar-coat it," Rainer said, helping himself to a bagel. He peered into the bag to see if Tess had brought any cream cheese. She had, but it was ordinary cream cheese—no chives, no vegetables, and definitely none of those sweet sacrilegious flavors. Tess had observed that cops took bagels and tried to transform them into doughnuts, slathering them with blueberry cream cheese or strawberry jam or something even worse. Faced with plain white cream cheese, Rainer decided to eat his bagel dry.

  "So," he said, his too-many, too-small teeth working the poppy seeds like a threshing machine. "What did she know? And, more important, when did she know it?"

  "Why is that important?" Tyner ‘s question, not hers.

  "Well, for one thing a guy was killed this weekend. Maybe if she"— there was that third person again; sip and bite, sip and bite, sip and bite, don't rise to the bait—"had been more forthcoming from the beginning, I wouldn't have two red balls."

  "You the primary on both?" Tyner's question was civil but shrewd. It served to remind Rainer that they weren't gullible civilians who would believe one super-cop worked every homicide. Rainer had caught Poe in the early a.m., Yeager had fallen on a Sunday evening. There was no way the same shift was working both cases, much less the same cop.

  "Well, no, but I gotta cooperate now. Next thing you know, we'll have a fucking task force."

  "Are the two killings connected?" Tyner was still doing all the talking.

  "I have my suppositions, but I guess it depends on what she's going to tell me."

  "What Tess tells you will be contingent on what kind of agreement we reach beforehand."

  "What, you talking plea already? I thought she had an airtight alibi for the second one."

  Tyner and Tess, recognizing that Rainer thought of this as high wit, managed wan smiles.

  "You made some noise when I called you yesterday to set up this meeting," Tyner said. "I distinctly remember the phrase "obstruction of justice‘ being thrown around. But Tess had sound reasons for not coming forward earlier. I'll assume you were angry and speaking impulsively. But I need to be assured that any such charge is off the table, now and forever."

  "I can't make promises about the future," Rainer said. "I mean, what if she continues to interfere with police business? You want, like, carte blanche for things she hasn't even done yet?"

  Carte blanche? In Rainer's mouth it sounded like one of those freestanding stalls in a shopping mall, run by a woman named Blanche. Oh, Carte Blanche. A blank check, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Yes, that was exactly what Tess wanted.

  "No," Tyner said, low and patient. Funny, he was much more intimidating when he made the effort to keep his voice soft. Tyner keeping himself in check was sort of like a guy walking a pit bull on a piece of frayed rope. If you were smart, you still crossed to the other side of the street. "I'm asking for an agreement. Tess gets immunity. It's true, she was not completely forthcoming the first time you spoke. But it was only subsequent to your interview that Tess realized she had information you could use, information she developed precisely because she ignored your instructions. And by then she had legitimate reasons not to come forward."

  "Legitimate reasons? Tell that to Bobby Hilliard's family. And maybe Yeager's widow."

  "No," Tess said.

  Both men turned to look at her, as if they had forgotten she was in the room. That was the problem with all this she-ing. A girl disappeared.

  "I know what it is to have something weigh on my conscience," Tess said, lifting her eyes from her bagel for the first time. "But I'm not shouldering this one. Bobby Hilliard's course was set before Arnold Pitts came into my office. And Jim Yeager was snooping around Bobby Hilliard's apartment in the days after his murder. He put himself in play, a fact that several other people might know—Arnold Pitts, Jerold Ensor, Gretchen O'Brien—"

  "Gretchen O'Brien? That sleaze i
s involved in this case?"

  "She works for Arnold Pitts, or did. He's probably fired her by now. Why is she sleazy?" It was a tangent, but Tess was curious.

  "She was forced to resign after she was caught stealing."

  "That's not unheard of," Tess said, remembering the custodian's cynical talk about cops who helped themselves to souvenirs from murder scenes, but also remembering Gretchen's take on her history, which was markedly different.

  "Yeah, but she was taking stuff from her fellow officers. Out of their lockers and shit. She's virtually a klepto."

  "Well, as I said, she was in Bobby Hilliard's apartment. Probably Pitts and Ensor, too, pretending to be cops before they took their act on the road and tried it on the Hilliards. Anyone who spoke to the custodian, as I did on Friday, would have recognized his description of Yeager."

  "SoyouwereinHilliard'sapartment."Rainer chewed the inside of his cheek with a few quick, rapid strokes. "Well, then, I could definitely charge you with… something. If I put my mind to it."

  The simple phrase gave Tess pause. If I put my mind to it. The image it conjured up was of a tiny pea trying to move a large boulder. Rainer didn't frighten her. The person she feared was lurking at the periphery of her life, unseen and unknown. He had called her on the phone, knowing she would be there, waiting for him. Someone had been watching her all this time, someone secretive at best. And at worst? She couldn't bear to think of it.

  "Look, I'll cop to my real mistakes," Tess said. "When we first spoke, the only thing I didn't tell you was that a man had come to me, intent on unmasking the Poe Toaster. That's why I was at the grave that night. I feared someone else had taken the job, and I didn't want to see the Visitor revealed. I honestly believed it was a petty dispute."

  "But when it turned out to be a homicide, it didn't seem so important to you to mention this fact to me?"

  She had anticipated just this question, knowing the truth would not set her free. She could not afford to tell Rainer she had questioned his very competence, his ability to protect a citizen from the media hounds.

  "I behaved unprofessionally," she said. "I was sleep deprived and feeling contrary, I suppose. Also—the man who called himself John Pendleton Kennedy simply isn't the kind of person you associate with murder. My plan was to find him, ask him a few questions, and decide for myself if he could have been involved. When I found out he had given me a phony name, I got caught up in the chase. And when the flowers appeared—"

  The flowers. They looked at the items spread out on the table. For, along with her provisions, she had brought everything: the now-wilted flowers, the half-full bottle of Martell's, the increasingly elliptical notes, even the rose petals she had found in the bottom of her mailbox. Strangely, it gave her a pang to release these things to Rainer, even as it made her skin crawl to think about the person who had left them for her. Not the Visitor, not even a visitor, not some benign soul leading her toward a solution, but quite possibly a killer. "They're worth killing for," he had told her. "You know that now."

  "The flowers…" Rainer shuffled his notes. "Yeah, I got the chronology on that stuff. Tyner told me on the phone. But it's been a week since you found out that the guy who visited you was Arnold Pitts and that we were looking into his burglary as a connection to this case. Why didn't you think that was important enough to come tell us? Does it take two deaths for you to take something seriously?"

  Tess squelched another inappropriate response— No, but it helps—and moved on. "He threatened me. He said he would tell you I had tried to extort him, offered to keep quiet for money, and turned him in only when he wouldn't play."

  "Yeah, so what? He would have been lying, right?"

  Tess counted the sesame seeds on her bagel, unable to think of an appropriate response. There was no point in telling Rainer what he wouldn't admit about himself, that he was small enough to believe lies about people he disliked. She decided to throw him a bone, pretend to be the person he had accused her of being.

  "I honestly didn't believe I could weather a siege of bad publicity right now. Meanwhile, I kept getting these notes, and I thought if I did what the notes suggested… I don't know. I was caught. I made some bad decisions. But I didn't do anything illegal."

  She pulled a Federal Express package from her backpack. This was the only thing that had kept her from coming in on Monday morning first thing, because she had to call Pennsylvania and ask Vonnie Hilliard to change her plans and head for the nearest overnight delivery service instead of the bank. The bracelet had arrived this morning, still in its Christmas wrapping.

  "When Arnold Pitts came to me, he said the Visitor had sold him a bracelet, claiming it was a historic piece that had once belonged to Betsy Patterson Bonaparte." She saw Rainer frown, unwilling to ask questions when he didn't know something. This was a bad quality in a homicide cop. It was a bad quality in anyone.

  "The name didn't mean anything to me either," she assured him. "She was a local belle, married to Napoleon's brother for a while. The way Pitts told the story, he had the bracelet but was angry because it was worthless. Yet Bobby Hilliard had given this bracelet to his mother for Christmas and told her it was the real thing."

  "You think two men are dead because of this," he said, poking it with a pencil, as if it were a snake, and lifting it from the cotton padding. The bracelet resisted, but it eventually surrendered its hold on the cotton. "I mean, I don't care if Queen Elizabeth wore it, this thing wouldn't bring a thousand dollars at a Baltimore pawn shop. How do you fence something like this?"

  "A knowledgeable person might pay dearly for it. I don't know. I have to assume it's what Pitts and Ensor were looking for, at Bobby's apartment and his parents' farm. What else could it be?"

  Rainer was thinking hard. It wasn't a pretty sight. "But Pitts said he had the bracelet."

  "Pitts said a lot of things. The man who called me Sunday night said "they‘ were worth killing for. He could have been talking about people, or principles, or material possessions. He could have been talking about anything. This is an "it," singular. Are "they' Hilliard and Yeager? Pitts and Ensor? I don't know. I've told you everything I know. I think you should tell me what you've found out."

  Rainer's face was glum. It was the purest expression Tess had ever seen on him.

  "None of it makes sense, not a goddamn piece. We get so close, and then it falls apart. The fact is, we got no evidence that the two things are connected, Hilliard and Yeager. The only thing they've got in common is we got damn few leads on either one."

  "So you were just yanking Tess's chain all this time, trying to make her feel guilty for sport?" Tyner was angry on her behalf, but Tess wasn't. Nor was she comforted. She might not accept blame for Yeager's death, but she also wasn't ready to embrace the idea that the timing of her Sunday night call had been a coincidence.

  "Please." Tess didn't feel comfortable touching Rainer in any way, so she tapped the bracelet, which still dangled from Rainer's pencil. "Please tell me whatever you know. I'm clearly at risk. Is it too much to ask that you help me protect myself?"

  "You got yourself into this," Rainer said, ever sanctimonious.

  "Yes and no. I didn't solicit Arnold Pitts's business. I didn't invite some stranger to stalk me and start leaving gifts and notes at my home and office. I'm scared to go home, Rainer. Do you know what that's like? Crow and I moved into his studio apartment yesterday morning, with a greyhound and a Doberman yet. Two humans and two dogs in one room. You may have a triple homicide on your hands soon."

  Rainer got restless easily and needed to move. Now he stood and began making circles around Tess and Tyner, small aimless swoops, like an addled hawk who can't decide if it's spotted prey or merely something shiny in the grass.

  Tyner said, "She has cooperated, and it's reasonable to assume she's in jeopardy. Can't you tell us anything?"

  Rainer was behind them as he began talking and, although he crossed in front of them as he continued to circle and swoop, he never made ey
e contact. It was as if he was speaking to himself, thinking out loud, all the gears whirring and clanking.

  "Bobby Hilliard was a waiter, worked at the big fancy restaurants, changing jobs all the time. Because he wanted to, not because he ever got into any trouble. His co-workers say he was a charmer, a good talker who knew just how much to pour it on, and a certified genius at remembering people's special needs. Regulars would request his station when they made reservations, even follow him to new restaurants.

  "But—he was a thief." He waited, as if he expected Tess to jump in here. He was testing her, she realized. He would know that she had been to the Pratt and learned of Bobby's work history there. She kept still.

  "He stole from the library," Rainer said. "But not from the restaurants, never from the restaurants. He was so honest he would tell another waiter if he saw someone try to pocket a tip, or chase down a customer if he thought he had overtipped by mistake. Then I come to find out the guys in the burglary division questioned him about a couple of break-ins around town."

  "As a suspect?" This was Tyner's question.

  Rainer stopped circling to think about this. "Not officially. In fact, he had alibis for all of ‘em. But the alibis were almost too good, like he was waiting for someone to come around and ask. He was working the night Pitts was hit. And Ensor had a party at his house the night he was burglarized. Anyone could have left the door unlocked. Including Ensor, as he himself pointed out. In fact, according to the uniforms who made the report, he was happy to take the blame and pretty indifferent, all things considered."

  "Was Bobby at the party?" Tess asked.

  Rainer had finally worn himself out. He dropped heavily into his chair. "Not as a guest, as a worker. He worked part-time for a catering firm, making extra money on his nights off. The patrons who knew him from the restaurant ended up hiring him for their private gigs. But here's the thing—his bosses remembered he often went to a lot of trouble to get the nights off to do these parties, even when they were held on Fridays and Saturdays. He couldn't have made as much working those parties as he would putting in his regular shift. So you tell me why he did it."