The Sugar House Read online

  She left the bar. No one said goodbye. Instead of walking back to her car, she went around the block and headed down the alley behind Domenick’s. There was a large green dumpster there, and she crouched behind it, watching the back of the bar. Something was wrong, something was missing. It was the smell of food. Granted, no one was in Domenick’s eating just now, but taverns always smelled of the fried foods they served. And her hiding place, the dumpster, should have been a stew of ripe, rotting smells. She glanced inside—bottles, cans, broken-down cases. Go figure, the owners of Domenick’s didn’t recycle. Still, whatever brought people to Domenick’s wasn’t the food. She had probably been the first person to eat there in ages.

  She wedged herself behind the dumpster, lying flat on the ground, and continued to watch the back door. She didn’t know what she expected to see, but her gut told her that if a girl in an ivory dress disappeared, she eventually had to reappear. Fifteen minutes passed—a short time, yet much longer when one was lying on a cold, rough patch of cement. A car pulled up in the alley. From her place on the pavement, all Tess could see were tires, a strip of shiny maroon paint on some kind of sedan. Gray trousered legs went from the car to the back door, disappearing inside. Soon the same legs appeared, accompanied by a pair of girl’s calves. Tess couldn’t help noticing that the girl’s legs were stubby and thick-ankled.

  “I thought they were going to pick me up,” the girl was saying.

  “Here? No, not here. I told you. You’re going to Harbor Court for tea.”

  “Iced tea in winter? That’s all I get? Jesus, I thought this guy had money.”

  “Hot tea, with little sandwiches. You’ll like it. Just don’t eat too many. This is a look-see, remember. You might not get it.”

  “And it’s a good thing to get?”

  “Honey, it’s the best gig in town. If you get it. Most don’t. For every ten that go, maybe one gets picked.”

  They climbed into the man’s car. Tess was able to catch sight of the license plate, the make of the car. A Mercury Marquis, fairly new. She waited until it turned out of the alley and then stood up, unkinking her knees, brushing herself off. She wondered if she could pass muster at the Harbor Court’s high tea. She’d have to. She walked slowly through the alley, and the five blocks back to her car. Running, rushing, attracted attention, and it didn’t gain that much time in the end. She’d make it to Harbor Court before tea was over.

  Or so she thought, until she rounded the corner and saw the blond duo from Domenick’s, sitting on the trunk of her car.

  chapter 20

  “WHERE YOU BEEN?” ASKED ONE, HAILING HER AS if they were old friends.

  “Yeah, where you been?” echoed the other. “We’ve been waiting for you. You been talking to Gee-gee all this time?”

  “Gee-gee?”

  “It’s what we call my grandmother,” the first one said, scowling, daring her to make something of it.

  My grandmother, not our, she noted. Then they weren’t brothers, although they could have passed. Could have passed for twins, in fact. Two Baltimore punks with the unhealthy pinkish pallor that always reminded her of the inside of a white rabbit’s ears. In the dim light of the bar, they had looked stringy and small. Now she saw they were taller than she was by several inches, with taut neck cords and sinewy forearms.

  “I was walking around the neighborhood. I decided while I was here, I’d take a tour of Mencken’s house.”

  She was counting on them not knowing it was closed, because she was counting on them not knowing who Mencken was.

  “The Mexican restaurant?” the other one asked. “That’s long-gone.”

  “Not Mencken’s Cultured Pearl, the writer’s house. The Mexican restaurant was named for him.”

  “Bullshit,” the first one said. “Ain’t no writer famous enough to have his house be a museum, much less a Mexican restaurant.”

  “Not many,” Tess agreed.

  “Yeah, where is this place?”

  “Over on Hollins, across from the park. I’ll show you, if you want to walk up there with me.” She was screwed if they took her up on her offer. The Mencken House had been closed since the City Life Museum had gone belly-up and parceled out its holdings.

  Then again, she might be able to outrun them in the park. Maybe.

  “I hate fucking museums,” the second one said, leaning back against the rear windshield, his hands behind his neck, as if to catch a little sun. “When we was in school, they were always dragging us to those fuckin’ places. They’d take us to the B&O, right here in our fuckin’ neighborhood. Like I give a shit about trains. I liked the FBI, though. That was cool.”

  The taller one got up and walked around the car, leaning against the Toyota’s driver-side door. Tess would have to push him away to get her key in the lock. That’s what he wanted, she realized with a sinking feeling. He wanted her to make the first move, and then he would make the second.

  “You like Domenick’s?” he asked. “You keep coming around.”

  “I’ve been to friendlier places.”

  “Well, it’s a neighborhood joint, and this isn’t your neighborhood, is it?”

  The one sitting on her trunk sat up and began to bounce, so her car moved beneath him, jouncing on its worn shocks. Tess took out her keys and tried to reach around the other one in order to open her door. He grabbed her wrist, hard. What was it with men and her wrists today?

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “What?”

  She wished she knew. “Tell your friend to stop rocking my car.”

  “He’s not my friend, he’s my nephew.”

  “That’s a fact,” the other one said, still bouncing with an almost autistic rhythm. Close up, she could see their eyes were bloodshot, their pupils dilated. Mean and high, a great combination.

  “I got a sister sixteen years older ’n me. She and my mom had us the same weekend. We’re closer than some brothers I know. Gee-gee is my grandma, his great-grandma. She calls us Pete and Repete. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “It’s practically ‘The Brady Bunch,’ right here in Sowebo.”

  He squeezed her wrist harder, bringing her hand up to his face as if it were a small animal he had caught by the scruff of the neck. Tess tried to figure out if she could use the keys clutched in her fist to scratch him, or gouge his eyes. But that would address only half her problem.

  Repete got off her car, came and stood behind her. She was now pressed between these two not-quite-men, no-longer-boys. They could have been anywhere between seventeen and twenty-two. Tess hoped they were on the older side. The younger they were, the more dangerous they would be. Their clothes were slightly rank, as if they had been worn a few days running. But their skin gave off a sweet, sticky smell, suggesting a teenager’s diet. Mountain Dew, rubbery sweet tubes of strawberry licorice, pink Hostess snowballs.

  “He’s older, by a day,” the nephew, Repete, said in her ear. “But I’m bigger.”

  He ground his crotch into her backside. Not much happening there, not as much as he seemed to think. Tess tried to tell herself they wouldn’t dare to do anything, not here. It was light out, she was on a busy street, cars were going by. All she had to do was scream, run into the traffic, find a way to grab her cell phone from her knapsack and punch in 911.

  She saw a woman walking her dog and their eyes met. Tess let the woman see her fear, tried to put the shared history of their gender into that one look. She said nothing, yet it was the loudest plea she had ever made in her life.

  The woman crossed to the other side of the street and turned her back to her.

  “I don’t think you should come back here,” Pete said.

  Her mouth was dry. “I agree.”

  “If you come back here, you’re ours. You know what I mean?” He pressed a thumbnail into the side of her throat. “Gee-gee said we could.”

  The nephew held her by the hipbones and the uncle humped her leg the way a dog might. Tess felt something at her back, something much t
oo hard to be part of anyone’s anatomy. A knife.

  The uncle released her hand, and the two stepped away from her so quickly she almost fell. She wished her hand wasn’t shaking as she unlocked her door, but her fear made them happy, so perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing.

  Uncle Pete blocked her car door with his body, placed his grubby hand on the side of her neck, as if to caress her. “I usually let him do the girls,” he said, jerking his head toward Repete. “He likes it better. But I’m willing to make an exception in your case.”

  Tess nodded, past caring. Pete stepped back and she turned the key, but nothing happened. She didn’t have her foot on the clutch. She tried again, the car started and she began to drive, mindlessly following the one-way streets, until she realized she was on Frederick Road, headed away from the city, toward her parents’ house in Ten Hills. She turned around, but lost her way, caught by the neighborhood’s triangles and diagonals. Funny, she knew Southwest Baltimore well, or thought she did. She got her bearings by pointing her car toward the ballpark and the purple accents of Ravens Stadium. Harbor Court, she reminded herself, I have to go to Harbor Court. Her legs were shaking so hard that she had trouble with the play on her clutch, and the car kept stalling out.

  Once downtown, she pulled into the first parking garage she saw, although she was several blocks shy of the hotel. She ran across Pratt Street and through Harbor-place, where children waited in line at Santa’s candy cane house. The child on Santa’s lap was crying, of course. The child on Santa’s lap always cried. Only the nonbelievers got through the meeting with any nonchalance, using the tradition to manipulate parents toward the right purchases. Santa Claus and clowns—why couldn’t adults remember their own terror at these suspicious characters, why did they allow these red-nosed men to thrust their faces at children, who grew up and repeated the mistake? Repeated all the same mistakes, straight down the line, generation after generation.

  Tess was shaking so hard now that she had to sit down, if only for a minute. She’d still make Harbor Court, she told herself. Tea was not a rushed affair, they’d still be there. She sat on a bench facing the water, hugged her knees, and began sobbing so recklessly and unself-consciously that the children in Santa’s line turned to watch with something akin to admiration.

  chapter 21

  HER FACE WAS STILL RED AND BLOTCHY WHEN TESS banged through the front doors of Women and Children First almost an hour later, but she could blame the December wind if anyone noticed. Luckily, the store was thronged with customers, so Kitty and Crow could barely afford to call out a greeting, much less indulge in a prolonged interrogation about how she had spent her day.

  But observant Crow did say, even as he worked the cash register with his deceptively laid-back efficiency: “You okay? Your eyes look kind of swollen, and your face is puffy.”

  “Really? Must be something in the Chinese carryout I had for lunch. Is Tyner coming for dinner tonight?” Her question was for Kitty, who was ringing up a set of out-of-print Oz books. Not the truly rare ones, just the white cover editions of the 1960s. But Kitty had found out that self-referential boomers would pay astronomical prices to reclaim the artifacts of their childhoods, even if the books weren’t rare by strict collectible standards. Her only problem was staying ahead of eBay and other online auction sites, which were cannibalizing so much of the children’s books market.

  “He’s already here,” Kitty said, nodding toward the rear of the store. “We’re so swamped he volunteered to assemble gift packages.”

  “Tyner is putting together your Christmas gift baskets? This I gotta see.” Tess pushed through the swinging doors, into the small storeroom that separated Kitty’s living quarters from her business.

  Tyner was seated at the round oak table in the kitchen’s center, mangling sheets of red and green cellophane in his hands. A stack of empty wicker baskets sat next to his wheelchair, while the table held the piles of books and tchotchkes Kitty used for her largely Charm City-centric themes. Tess recognized the basket in front of Tyner as a “sampler” of Kitty’s favorite living fiction writers—Anne Tyler, Stephen Dixon, Ralph Pickle, Dan Ellenham, Sue Roland—as well as a small box of Konstant Kandy peanut brittle and a snow globe with an Inner Harbor scene inside. The paperbacks had been tied together with gold string, and arrayed in shredded green-and-red confetti. Theoretically, all Tyner had to do was bring the cellophane to a point at the top, tying it off with a gold ribbon, then place the finished basket in one of the preassembled cardboard boxes, surrounded by bubble wrap.

  But the cellophane was too slippery for him, slithering to the floor. In the process of reclaiming it, Tyner rolled back and forth, leaving a few tire tracks. All in all, he looked about as helpless as Tess had ever seen him.

  She loved it.

  “Let me,” she said at last, taking the basket from him.

  “Damn cellophane,” he said. “How can anyone work with this stuff?”

  “You’re welcome. Why would you offer to do something for which you’re so ill-equipped?”

  “It wasn’t my idea exactly,” Tyner said. “I wanted to work out front, but Kitty said she needed me here.”

  “Tactful of her. She probably just thought it was bad business to send the customers rushing out of the store in tears. You never did master the concept that the customer is always right. Unless you’re the customer, of course.”

  Tess consulted the list in front of Tyner. The next order was for a “Crabtown Special”—a set of H. L. Mencken’s Days books, a tin of Old Bay seasoning and two crab mallets. Tess’s hands fell naturally into the rhythm of assembling the items. Last Christmas season, she had still been filling in at the store, even as she began working toward getting her private investigator’s license. In hindsight, it seemed a most desirable job. The hours were regular; Kitty had made sure her staff had medical benefits.

  Besides, no one ever backed bookstore clerks against their cars, threatening to rape them if they showed their faces in a neighborhood again. And sleazy lobbyists didn’t play the dozens with you, insulting your father just for the hell of it.

  Tyner watched intently as Tess assembled the next three or four baskets, then started on the next, a Birdland special, which was built around the histories of the Orioles and the Ravens. He was never going to be as fast as Tess, and his ribbons left much to be desired, but he was catching on. They worked in a companionable silence, making steady progress.

  “Something you want to talk about?” he asked after a while.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “It is to me.”

  She told him of the day’s events, hoping she wouldn’t become emotional. She hated betraying any weakness in front of Tyner. Funny, the conversation with Vasso troubled her more in the retelling than the encounter with Pete and Repete. At least they hadn’t been so damn oblique, or dragged her family into it.

  “You get the license plate on the car you saw in the alley?”

  Tess nodded. “But it’s blocked. The MVA lets citizens safeguard their information now. As a licensed PI, I think I can still get it, but it means a trip to Glen Burnie tomorrow.”

  “Did you go to Harbor Court Hotel?”

  “Of course. I didn’t see the girl, though, and all I know of the man with her is that he wore gray trousers and drove a maroon car. She was probably in a private room.”

  “A prostitution ring.”

  That was the nice thing about Tyner. His mind worked quickly, and he always saw where she was going, even if he didn’t necessarily agree it was the right direction.

  “What else? I’ve never heard of Nicola DeSanti, but Baltimore has so many low-level criminal bosses that no one can know all of them. The bar is clearly a front for something. I’m betting her husband’s name isn’t on the license because he was a convicted felon. When she took over, she saw no reason to bring the paperwork up to date.”

  “You going to ask Tull to run a background check on her or the late Mr. DeSanti?”

 
Tess shook her head. “No. I thought about it. I even considered filing charges against those two guys. But I don’t think the police department is going to be as inclined to help me out when I’m trying to pry open a case they consider closed twice over.”

  “Tesser—” Kitty’s influence had softened Tyner, made him a little nicer. He was not as quick to tell Tess that she was wrong, or thinking poorly. He resorted to tact. This should have been an improvement, but it was more like having a Band-Aid lifted very slowly.

  “Just say it, Tyner. No Zig Ziglar homilies, please.”

  “You could be right. Gwen Schiller may have worked at this bar. She may even have been a prostitute there. But do you really think they’d kill her for that?”

  “Maybe there was something else. Maybe she saw something, or heard something. They could be running numbers through there, or drugs.”

  “So Nicola DeSanti hires Henry Dembrow, an addled spray paint addict, to kill her? Pretty far-fetched.”

  So it was. Tess was going on her gut, and what did her gut know about anything? Pete and Repete weren’t likely to take a shine to any stranger who showed up at Domenick’s. They hadn’t threatened her because she had asked about Gwen, but because she came back, asking questions.

  She tied a ribbon on the last basket, a Decadence Deluxe: John Waters’s essays, Tender Is the Night, which Fitzgerald had worked on while Zelda had been in and out of the local mental hospitals, a box of Rheb’s chocolate, and a bottle of Boordy, a Maryland wine.

  “Sometimes,” Tyner said, “things really are what they appear to be. A stupid kid knocks down a girl, she cracks open her head. He runs. She dies. End of story.”

  “Sometimes,” Tess said, agreeing, yet not. She was staring at the bow on the package. Why had Henry marked Gwen’s body, as if to send a message to someone? “And sometimes you just have to go back to the beginning, and start all over again.”