In Big Trouble Read online

  Great, her litany of fast-food ghosts had made her hungry. And her right leg was cramping up. She eased the driver's seat back, tried to massage her hamstring, but a twelve-year-old Toyota Corolla just didn't afford much room when you were five-foot-nine and most of it was inseam. Damn, she hated surveillance work. She tried to make it a rule not to take such assignments, but principles had to be suspended sometimes in light of certain economic realities. Or, in this case, when a certain friend had promised her services without asking first.

  At least the client was a woman. She was a sexist about this, no other word. But in her experience, cuckolded men tended toward violence against others, and she didn't want that on her conscience. Women were masochists, dangers to themselves. Usually. Tess looked at this it way: Four thousand years after the Greeks, Medea would still be front-page news, while feckless Jason wouldn't even rate a question in Cosmo's Agony column.

  Not that women's cases weren't lose-lose propositions in their own way. If you didn't get the goods on hubby, some women didn't want to pay for the time put in, they didn't get that a job had been done, even if it had yielded no results. These were the kind of women who tipped poorly in restaurants, on the theory that they provided food service all the time without compensation.

  But if you did turn over a discreet set of photographs of hubby leaving, say, a motor court on Route 40, a redhead giantess in tow, the kill-the-messenger syndrome kicked in—literally. One cheated-on wife had aimed her neat little Papagallo pump at Tess's shin. Tess had counted to ten, left the suburban palace that was about to loom large in the divorce case, and discreetly let all the air out of the tires on the woman's Jeep Cherokee.

  So she charged more now. She told would-be clients it was because surveillance work was a bore, which was true, but it was really the aftermath she hated, the moment of truth, which was anything but boring. "Excuse me, ma'am, while you're weeping and thinking about the implications of this information for your twenty-year marriage and your two children, could I trouble you to write me a check?" Tess had started taking much bigger retainers and sending refunds. Easier on everyone.

  Unfortunately, this particular wastrel-husband had eaten through the retainer in the first week, without actually doing anything. A nervous type, he cruised the city's best-known prostitution strips, window-shopping, beginning negotiations, then breaking them off at the last minute. Tess had taken a few photographs of women bent toward his car on long, skinny legs, but such photos paid no premiums in divorce court. He could always claim to be asking for directions.

  Today, however, he had finally settled on a tall redhead with a towering beehive and the knotted calf muscles that come from years of wearing spike heels. A real Amazon, even alongside Tess's Amazonian proportions. He probably thought a hooker with some meat on her bones was less likely to be a junkie. Or maybe he went in for kinkier stuff, which required a woman with those cut biceps and triceps.

  They had gone in about five minutes ago. Because she had followed Mr. Nervous at a particularly careful distance, Tess hadn't been able to take a photo of the happy couple on their way into the honeymoon suite, and she didn't do in flagrante—that was just too gross. But she'd get them on the way out. Which would be—she checked her watch—ten, fifteen minutes at the most? He didn't look like the kind who would set any records for stamina. He had been saving up for this too long to draw it out.

  Still, Tess was unprepared when the door was flung open at what her datebook notes would later establish was the seven-minute mark. As she fumbled for her camera, she saw a flash of red—the hooker's hair—followed by a gray blur, Mr. Nervous, who threw himself on top of the fake hair as if it were a fumbled football in the end zone.

  The hooker stalked out, still fully attired, in a tight red leather-look dress and matching shoes. The real hair was short and wispy, a dark brown color only a shade deeper than Tess's. It wasn't a bad cut, but something about it struck Tess as not quite right. No, it probably just looked funny because it was matted down with sweat.

  "You better give that back to me," the hooker told Mr. Nervous.

  "When you give me my money back, you freak," he said, scrambling to his feet and running toward his car, trying to hold onto the wig even as he dug for his keys.

  The hooker was fast. With a few quick strides, she had crossed the patch of gravel parking lot and leaped on the man's back, teeth sinking into his ear as if it were a pastry. He screamed, falling to the ground, where the two began rolling back and forth like two kids scuffling on the playground. Tess felt as if she had seen this before. She had. It was the great ladies room fight from The Valley of the Dolls, only this time hairless Helen Lawson was kicking Neely O'Hara's big, flabby butt.

  "You'll pay for my wig, too, see if you don't," the hooker said, still perched on his back, frisking the john's pockets as he twisted beneath her. One of her high heels fell off and became an impromptu weapon, perfect for jabbing into the small of his back. Moaning, Mr. Nervous clutched the wig to his chest with both hands and curled up in a tight ball. In his gray suit, rolling back and forth, he reminded Tess of the potato bugs she had tortured in her youth.

  "That wig cost more than the trick," the hooker screamed. She must have been telling the truth, for she seemed reluctant to grab it and end up in a tug-of war with the man. Instead she just kept swinging her red high heel at his back and head.

  "Fuckin' freak," Mr. Nervous rasped out. "Give me back my forty dollars and I'll give you your wig."

  "Hey, I earned that forty dollars," the hooker replied. She had crawled away from him and seemed to be looking for an opportunity to land a quick kick in his crotch but the man stayed curled up in his potato bug position.

  "Don't remind me! Don't remind me!" He was hysterical, his voice a high-pitched scream.

  Just as Tess was beginning to wonder if she was obligated to intervene—she was still a little fuzzy on the ethics of private investigation, if any—the manager of the motor court ran out and threw a small bucket of ice at the two, as if they were dogs in heat. The man gasped and relaxed his grip just long enough for the hooker to grab the wig.

  "This is a respectable place," the manager said. "You got the wrong end of Route 40, you wanna be carrying on like this."

  "I wanted a woman," her client's husband moaned, facedown in the leaves, covering his head, although the blows had stopped. "All I wanted was a woman. Is that so much to ask?"

  The prostitute stood, extending one leg and then the other to check the fishnet stockings for runs, assuming a flamingo posture to slip the literal stiletto heel back on, then pulling the wig over her—no, his—wispy brown hair.

  "In that case, honey, you should've picked someone without an Adam's apple," the rechristened redhead said, pulling up his dress to show off black lace panties, the sleek line disturbed by a kind of asymmetry never seen in a Victoria's Secret catalog.

  Another Kodak moment. Tess clicked away, hoping her body wasn't shaking so hard from suppressed laughter that the photos would end up out of focus. The Valley of the Dolls meets The Crying Game in the parking lot of the Enchanted Castle Motor Court.

  She put her car into gear and headed back into the city, still thinking about blueberry pie. A little farther up Route 40, she considered stopping at the Double-T Diner, but she realized the pie she wanted was somewhere else. Back at the motor court, almost fourteen years in the past, and forever out of reach.

  "No more adultery patrol," she said, sitting across from Tyner Gray, the lawyer who had pushed and prodded her into this line of work, then took credit for every good thing that had happened to her as a result. Time for him to start shouldering a little blame as well. "It's too demeaning. I'd rather go through someone's garbage."

  "Don't be hyperbolic, Tess," Tyner said, writing out a check in his large, fancy script. Technically, all of Tess's clients worked through Tyner, assuring them confidentiality. But this particular wronged spouse had been the daughter of his college roommate, so Tyner was going to bre
ak the news, play show-and-tell with the photos. There was some small comfort in that.

  "You forget I've really gone through garbage, looking for those telltale credit card receipts. I was Dumpster diving just last weekend, on a fraud case. Remember, the pierogi dispute in Highlandtown? A little spoiled food, some coffee grounds, but it's not so bad if you wear good rubber gloves. It's better than watching some stupid john wrestling with a tranvestite hooker."

  Tyner pushed away from his desk and rolled his wheelchair across the office, storing the ledger on a low shelf by the door. Everything was low here—shelves, file cabinets, tables—and so streamlined that it appeared as if Tyner hadn't finished moving in. Visitors mistook the look for minimalism. They didn't stop to think that rugs caught beneath one's wheels or that antique furniture was little more than an obstacle course of sharp, unforgiving corners. Which was the intended effect: Tyner didn't want people to stop to think about his wheelchair. Now in his sixties, he had been a paraplegic for more than two-thirds of his life, struck by a car not long after winning an Olympic medal for rowing.

  "At least you don't have to tell Myra's father that his son-in-law not only tried to cheat on his daughter, but proved to be exceptionally bad at it. All too characteristic. Richard's a fuck-up, even when it comes to fucking up. I was there when Myra brought him home twenty years ago and I never liked him. But you can't give friends advice about love."

  "Really? You butt into my love life all the time."

  Tyner grinned wickedly. "You, my dear, have a sex life. There's a difference. Not that you've had even that as of late. Speaking of which—" He rolled back to his desk. "This came for you yesterday. Postmarked Texas."

  The envelope Tyner held toward her could not have been plainer. White, the kind with a blue-plaid lining that hid its contents. Suitable for sending checks or other things of value.

  Or things you just don't want anyone else to see.

  "Aren't there something like twelve million people in Texas?" she said, hoping she sounded nonchalant, even as she held her hands behind her back, staring warily at the envelope.

  "Closer to nineteen million. You know exactly one of them, however. Right?"

  "That I know of."

  She took the envelope from him. The address had been typed, the stamp was generic, a waving flag. She would have expected something more whimsical. The series with the old bluesmen, or perhaps a cartoon character. She turned it over, held it up to the light. Whatever was inside was feather-light. The postal system suddenly seemed miraculous to her. Imagine moving something so delicate across thousands of miles, for less than the cost of a candy bar.

  "Why did it come here, instead of my office?" she asked, in no hurry to open it, although she wasn't sure why.

  "You've been in Butchers Hill less than six months," Tyner said. "You weren't there before…well, before."

  Before you kicked him in the teeth and kicked him out, only to have him return the favor when you changed your mind.

  "Bo-erne, Texas," she said, looking at the postmark. "Never heard of it."

  "It's pronounced Burn-e," Tyner corrected. "Don't you read newspapers since you stopped working for them? It was all over the papers a few years ago. The Catholic church and the Boerne government went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in a battle over zoning laws. The church claimed that separation of church and state meant it was exempt from zoning."

  "Gee, I don't know how I ever missed a fascinating story like that," Tess said. "You know how I love a good zoning yarn." She still hadn't opened the envelope. It was fun, torturing Tyner. He bossed her so about everything—work, rowing, life. If he was insistent on playing Daddy, he deserved a little teenage petulance in return.

  "I guess you want to read it in private," Tyner said, even as he held his letter opener out to her.

  "No!" The harshness in her voice surprised her. She hadn't thought about Crow for days, weeks, months. She had her share of exes, enough to field a football team if she went all the way back to junior high, and was allowed to resurrect the one dead one in the bunch. It didn't seem a particularly scarlet past to her, not for someone who had just turned thirty. More like coral, or a faded salmon color.

  "I mean, this is no big deal," she added. "For all we know, he's probably just writing about some CD or book he had left in my apartment." But the only thing he had left behind was a ratty sweater the color of sauteed mushrooms. Her greyhound, Esskay, had unearthed it from beneath the bed and used it as part of her nest.

  "Just open it."

  She ignored Tyner's letter opener and unsealed the flap with her index finger, cutting herself on the cheap envelope. Her finger in her mouth, she upended the envelope. A newspaper clipping that had been glued to an index card slid out onto Tyner's desk, and nothing more.

  The clipping was a photograph, or a part of one, with a head-and-shoulders shot cut from a larger photograph, the fragment of a headline still attached over the head, like a halo.

  IN BIG TROUBLE

  The hair was different. Shorter, neater. The face was unmistakably Crow's, although it looked a little different, too. Surely she was imagining that—how much could a face change in six months? There was a gauntness she didn't remember, a sharpness to his cheekbones that made him look a little cruel. And his mouth was tight, lips pressed together as if he had never smiled in his life. Yet when she thought of Crow—which was really almost never, well maybe once a month—he was always smiling. Happy-go-lucky, blithe as a puppy. "The perfect postmodern boyfriend," one of her friends had called him. A compliment, yet also a dig.

  In the end, it was the gap in temperament, not the six-year age difference so much, that had split them up. Or so her current theory held; she had revised their history several times over the past six months. He had been so endearingly boyish. Tess had been in the market for a man. Now here was a man, frowning at her. A man In Big Trouble.

  That was his problem.

  "There's no sign which newspaper it came from," Tyner said, picking up the card and holding it to the light, trying to read the type on the side that had been glued down. "The back looks like a Midas Muffler ad, and that could be anywhere in the country. Didn't Crow head off to Austin last spring?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "So what are you going to do about it?"

  "Do about what?"

  "Crow, and this trouble he's in."

  "I'm not going to do anything. He's a big boy, too big to be playing cut-and-paste. In fact, I bet his mommy lets him use the real scissors now, instead of the little ones with the rounded-off blades."

  Tyner rolled his wheelchair a few feet and grabbed the wastebasket. "So throw it away," he dared her. "Three-pointer."

  Tess tucked the photo and envelope into her notebook-sized datebook, the closest thing she had to a constant companion these days. "My Aunt Kitty will want to see his photo, just for old time's sake, take in the spectacle of Crow without his purple dreadlocks. She was his friend, too, you know."

  Tyner smiled knowingly. But then Tyner always smiled knowingly at Tess. He was one smug, insufferable prick, and proud of it.

  "Sometimes," she said, "I think it's your personality that qualifies you for the Americans with Disabilities Act."

  "Everyone qualifies for the Americans with Disabilities Act," he replied. "But a select few of us have to put it on our license plates. I keep trying to decide what little symbol should be riding on your bumper, but I haven't figured it out yet."

  Tess left Tyner's office, intending to head straight to the bank, then back to her office, where Esskay waited, probably snoozing through the gray October day. She reminded herself that she was a businesswoman, a grown-up, with checks to write, calls to return, and a dog to walk. She didn't have time for little-boy-rock-star-gonnabes and their games.

  As she crossed Charles Street, the open door of the Washington Monument caught her eye. Like many things in Baltimore, it needed a compound modifier to achieve true distinction: first permanent monument to the fir
st President to be built by a city or government jurisidiction. A tiny George was plopped on top, his profile as familiar to Tess as her own. More so, really, for how often do you see your own profile? She saw George almost every day, staring moodily down Charles Street. Soon enough, he'd be dressed up with strings of lights for the Christmas season. Spring would come, and the parks around him would fill with daffodils and tulips. Summer, and he would seem to droop a bit, like all of Baltimore did in the July humidity. Fall, the current season, was Baltimore's best, its one unqualified success. George must have a fine view from where he stood. Yet here Tess was at his feet, a Baltimore native, and she couldn't remember ever climbing his tower and seeing the world as he saw it.

  Suddenly, it seemed urgent to do so. She walked inside, stuffed a dollar into the wooden donations box, and skipping the historical plaques and displays at the base, began to make the climb, counting each step as she went.

  The circular staircase was cooler than the world outside, its air thick with some recently applied disinfectant or cleanser. As Tess began sucking wind about a third of the way up—even someone who exercised as much as she did was ill-prepared to climb so many steps so quickly—she felt a little woozy from the fumes. Still, she climbed, her knapsack and long braid bouncing on her back. Up, up and up—220, 221, 222, 223—until she saw the ceiling flattening out above her head, a sign that she had come to the end, step 228.

  Plexiglass shields and metal gates kept one from venturing out on the tiny parapet that circled Washington's feet, but the view was still extraordinary. Funny, she had never realized what a squat city Baltimore was, how it hugged the ground. The effect was of a low, paranoid place, peering anxiously over one shoulder. She looked east, to where she lived and worked. Then to the north, a scarlet and gold haze of trees at this time of year. Closer in, she could pick out the roof of the Brass Elephant, her home away from home. She turned to the west, to that ruined part of the city between downtown and Ten Hills, the neighborhood where she had grown up, where her parents still lived.