Baltimore Blues Read online

  To her surprise the ferocious face had smiled. “Now that was a good comic strip. How come the Beacon dropped it? And Mr. Tweedy. I still can’t believe Mr. Tweedy is gone.”

  “Mr. Tweedy? You poor, deprived Beacon readers, living for such paltry things. The Star has all the good comics.”

  So they had gone out to breakfast, sharing the comics pages of Baltimore’s three newspapers. That had been five years and two newspapers ago. Tess, like Mr. Tweedy, had disappeared from the local newspapers. The Beacon, which had subsumed the Light and killed the Star, now had excellent comics pages, three in all, the usual spoils of a newspaper war. But Rock was still her friend, their relationship cemented in one of Tess’s beloved routines—rowing, then breakfast at a diner in her neighborhood. Other rowers skipped practice, overslept, made excuses about the weather. Rock, nationally ranked, and Tess, chronically underemployed, were faithful to the boat house and to each other.

  She studied her friend, who had been on vacation the past two weeks, rowing. He looked gray beneath his summer tan and the circles under his eyes had only deepened.

  “Didn’t you get any rest in New York? I thought that was the point of a vacation.”

  Rock shook his head. “All those crickets. And the more I worked out, the less I slept. But I feel pretty good.”

  “I feel pretty good myself.” It was only a half lie. She was in great shape physically.

  “Well, if you’re in such good shape, wanna race back, all the way to the glass factory? Loser buys breakfast.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’d need a huge head start to make it competitive. Race the cars along Hanover Street Bridge if you want a challenge.”

  “I’ll give you a five-hundred-meter head start.”

  “Not enough at this length. You’ll pass me midway.”

  “One thousand, then.”

  “For breakfast? You always buy me breakfast, anyway.”

  “Well, I won’t buy you breakfast today if you don’t at least try.”

  “Oh.” Poverty ennobled some people. Tess was not one of them. She existed on an intricate system of favors and freeloading, which had made her cheap and a little spoiled. “I guess you’ve got a race, then.”

  “Start as if it were a head race. I won’t come on until I see you disappear under the bridge.”

  Tess positioned her boat and slid forward in her seat. She never raced anymore, except against herself, but the routines were second nature.

  “Start rowing,” Rock called. “Build up to a full stroke in ten.”

  The water had smoothed out, allowing Tess to find her groove quickly. She rowed as she would have in her old women’s eight, following the calls of an imaginary coxswain. Full power for ten, using everything she had, then ten strokes with legs only. She passed under the shadow of the Hanover Street Bridge and into the light again, feeling confident and loose.

  Then she saw Rock coming toward her. She had thought he might lie back a bit, give her a slight edge, but Rock was incapable of giving anything but his best. A peculiar liability, one from which she had never suffered. He crossed the water with amazing speed, his technique so perfect Tess was tempted to stop and watch. But she had to try. She wanted breakfast. Blueberry pancakes, perhaps even a western omelet, were at stake.

  They were even with the boat house when Rock shot past her. In head races, one boat passes another boat a seat at a time, the coxswain hurling insults at the rowers left behind. But Rock seemed to flash past Tess in a single stroke. She caught a glimpse of his face, grim and almost cruel looking, sweat pouring from his forehead.

  Doggedly she kept going. Behind her she could hear the roar of the glass factory, a malevolent-looking place that blew gusts of hot air across the river. There always seemed to be a dozen fires going, no matter what time of day one rowed, yet no human forms were ever seen. Tess rowed toward this wall of heat, full power for the last thirty strokes. Her arms stung from the lactic acid built up in the muscles, and she felt as if each stroke might be her last. Rock had won, of course, but she had to finish. She surged past his waiting boat just as she began to think she could not force another stroke.

  When she looked up, Rock was bent forward, his shoulders heaving. He often pushed himself to the point where he vomited, and Tess was used to seeing her friend with a bit of saliva trailing from his mouth. She felt a little nauseated herself. When she could move again she paddled forward, pleased with herself for pushing him so hard.

  But Rock wasn’t throwing up; he was crying. Hunched forward, his face resting on his huge thighs, his whole body shook from the force of silent sobs. From behind he had looked to Tess like any rower after a tough workout. For some odd reason, it made her think of Moses and the burning bush. It was fascinating and bizarre. She reached across the water and tried to give him a there-there pat. Her hand glanced off his tricep as if she were trying to stroke a tree or, well, a rock.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Tess checked he oarlocks, feeling embarrassed and inept.

  “Ava,” he said succinctly.

  Ava. His fiancée. Tess had met her at last spring’s races. Rock never seemed to do as well when she was there. Perhaps it wasn’t Ava’s fault, but she still was not the woman Tess would have chosen for him. Not the woman his mother would have chosen either, or his coworkers, or anyone with a remote interest in his happiness, Tess was sure. Ava was a lawyer, beautiful, accomplished—and an absolute bitch in a way only other women could fathom. Despite three meetings she never remembered Tess’s name.

  But all Tess said was: “Ava?”

  “I think she’s—” He groped for a word. “In trouble.”

  “What kind?”

  “Some kind she can’t talk about. She’s not at home when I call her late at night, but she’s not at the office, either. She was supposed to come up to the Adirondacks for the second week, but she called at the last minute, said some emergency had come up at work. That boss of hers, Abramowitz, works her to death on these asbestos cases.”

  Tess remembered how proud he had been when Ava had gotten the job at O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill, how proud he was that the flamboyant new partner Michael Abramowitz wanted her for his assistant.

  “That’s plausible, isn’t it? The Triple O is a pretty high-powered law firm, and those asbestos cases just keep coming.”

  “Yeah, especially when one of your biggest clients is Sims-Kever, which would rather pay one hundred million dollars in fees than pay one dollar in damages to a single old guy who can’t breathe.” Rock picked at one of his calluses. “Except Ava wasn’t at work last week. I called and the secretary told me she was on vacation. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, though.”

  “Then why don’t you ask her?”

  “Ava’s funny that way. If I asked her she’d get so offended that—” He shook his head, as if Tess couldn’t imagine what Ava was like when offended, how absolutely frightening and adorable. “She’s very sensitive.”

  They drifted on the light current. Here, in a cove near the marina, the water was still and smooth. Tess tried to think of the right thing to say, the thing to end this conversation and bring her closer to some blueberry pancakes. Ava’s behavior suggested all sorts of theories to her, all unsavory.

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason,” she said finally.

  “But there’s only one way to know.”

  “Ask her? You said you couldn’t talk to her about this.”

  “No, follow her.”

  “Wouldn’t she notice if you followed her?”

  “Of course,” Rock said. “But I’ve been thinking she wouldn’t notice if you did.”

  “How could I follow her? I mean, how could I afford the time to do it? I know I have flexible hours, but I don’t just sit around my apartment all day, watching television.” This was a sore point with Tess. A lot of people seemed to think being unemployed was a lark. She had to work two jobs just to stay afloat.

  “Because I would pay you.
Thirty dollars an hour, what private detectives get. You find someone to take your place at the bookstore for a few days.”

  “I’m not a private detective,” she reminded him.

  “No, but you used to be a reporter. Didn’t you tell me something about following some city official? And you write reports for your uncle. This could be like a report.” He pretended to dictate. “‘At seven-thirty P.M. I saw Ava going into the Hemispheris Clinic at Hopkins. Did not come out for three hours. Receptionist confirmed she is donating platelets for a young cancer victim.’ See?”

  Jesus, she thought, he really can’t come up with a good story. It was more plausible that Ava was going to Hopkins’s sex change clinic and didn’t want to see Rock until she had her new equipment.

  Still, thirty dollars an hour, for even five or six hours, was a frighteningly attractive prospect. Easy money. If Ava was doing nothing, Tess would make a friend happy. If Ava was up to no good, Tess would be paid to save her friend from a disastrous mistake.

  “A computer upgrade,” Rock wheedled. “Car repairs. A nest egg for your own racing shell, so you don’t have to use the shit ones here.”

  Tess was compiling another list: A pair of earrings that didn’t come from a Third World country. Leather boots, including the soles. Student loans. But she turned her mind away from those things, determined to find the flaw in the plan.

  “Why not a real private eye, if you’re willing to pay private eye prices?”

  Rock looked across the river, suddenly fascinated by three young children wading on the northern bank.

  “A real private eye would be sleazy,” he said slowly, as if he was working the answer out for himself. “This is just a favor between friends. I’m offering to pay you because I know your time is valuable. And because I know you’re always strapped for money.”

  As a freelancer Tess billed her time at twenty dollars an hour and often settled for less. As a contractual state employee she made ten dollars an hour. Her aunt gave her kitchen privileges, health insurance, and six dollars an hour for working in the bookstore. Her time had never been considered worth thirty dollars an hour.

  “Where does Ava work?” she asked.

  He smiled. He really did look like Dondi, although not so vacant around the eyes.

  “I’ll fill you in at Jimmy’s.”

  Chapter 2

  Tess did not have blueberry pancakes after all. She wanted them, but as soon as she walked into Jimmy’s in Fells Point, the cook threw two bagels to toast on the griddle and poured fresh orange juice into a red plastic tumbler. Her usual: two plain bagels, toasted, one with cream cheese, one without. She had been eating the same breakfast at Jimmy’s for two years, at least five days a week.

  She had always wanted to walk into a place and have someone ask, “The usual?” Of course, in her original fantasy the place had a long mahogany bar, men wore suits and women wore hats, and she would order a martini, straight up. No olive.

  Rock, after a quick look at the place mat menu, ordered the carbohydrate special, a meal of his own creation: toast, pancakes, orange juice, fruit cup, and cereal with skim milk.

  “No syrup or butter,” he told the waitress. “Just lots of extra jelly.”

  “That all?”

  “Do you have any rice? Or some pinto beans?”

  The waitress stalked off, unamused. Rock was an ardent believer in the idea that diet could boost athletic performance, although the parameters of that diet kept changing. Currently he shunned fat and most meat. Given his workout regime, however, he had to eat enormous amounts and drink protein supplements to maintain his weight. He never ate for pleasure and he never drank alcohol. His one vice was caffeine, which he claimed enhanced his performance. The kitchen in his little apartment in Charles Village was a shrine to coffee. Rock didn’t own a VCR, a CD player, or a microwave, but he had a French press, a cappuccino and espresso maker, and a freezer filled with nothing but ice trays and bags of coffee beans, all labeled and dated. His chronic insomnia surprised only him.

  Breakfast arrived within minutes, and both ate intently, swiftly, as if racing again. For Tess, meals were the high point of her day, which only made her more ravenous. Rock simply wanted to stoke the vast machinery of his body and get it over with. Tess was still working on her second bagel when he wiped the last bit of jelly from his plate with his last pancake.

  “Now,” he began, rummaging in his wallet. He slid an envelope across the table to Tess, who took it happily. A check, she thought. A retainer. But inside she found only a small photograph of Ava and two sheets of paper with phone numbers and addresses. Rock also had included a basic outline of Ava’s day—when she went to work, when she got home—and the places she frequented. That was his word, written on the list. She frequented a gym in Federal Hill, a bar near her office, and an Italian restaurant known primarily for its breathtaking views and inedible food.

  “Funny,” Tess said, examining the envelope’s contents.

  “What?”

  “You had this with you, all ready. Did you assume I’d say yes?”

  Rock blushed. “I know you can always use some extra cash.”

  “Well, it’s not as if I would do anything for money, you know. I have turned down PR jobs.” Being broke had become something of a shtick for Tess.

  He didn’t smile.

  They said good-bye on the cobblestone street in front of Jimmy’s, suddenly awkward with each other. Tess had worked for a lot of relatives, but never a friend. Rock seemed equally uncomfortable with the new relationship. He kept punching her on the shoulder, light taps for him, which left tiny black-and-blue marks. Finally he took his ten-speed out of Tess’s trunk and headed up Broadway, the long gradual hill to Johns Hopkins Hospital and his life as Darryl Paxton.

  Tess crossed the wide plaza on Broadway, cutting over to pretty little Shakespeare Street, where she sneaked glances into unshuttered windows. It was only 8 A.M. and other people, normal people as Tess thought of them, were still gathered at breakfast tables, or venturing out in bathrobes to grab the Beacon-Light. It was the kind of existence she had once imagined for herself, to the extent she had imagined such mundane details at all. A husband, a baby, a dining room table. Sometimes her aunt and her aunt’s latest boyfriend set a place for Tess at their breakfast table, but their attempt at homeyness only exacerbated Tess’s feeling of strangeness. It was odd, sitting down to Cheerios and blueberries with her aunt and her aunt’s man of the month, both usually in bathrobes and flushed.

  Shakespeare ended at Bond, the street on which Tess lived. She stopped and looked at the building she called home, a hulking warehouse of garnet brick with white trim, all buffed up with her aunt’s love. The windows gleamed in the early morning light and the books inside—mellow shades of red, green, and amber—glowed like jewels in a box. Above the door the scarlet letters were so bright and bold they seemed three-dimensional: WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST. And, in smaller letters, for the occasional oaf who thought it was a lifeboat store: A SPECIALTY BOOKS EMPORIUM.

  Not everyone would have seen the potential in a store that sold only women’s and children’s books. Tess’s aunt, Katherine “Kitty” Monaghan, was not like everyone. She was not like anyone. A librarian with the city schools for almost twenty years, she had taken early retirement after a parent complained fairy tales were godless, encouraging belief in Satan and the occult.

  That was the official version. The longer version included the Super Fresh, a cabbage, and a rutabaga. Kitty was fired after she decked a mother who stopped her in the produce section and complained about Jack and the Beanstalk. It encouraged antisocial behavior, the mother complained. It glorified robbery. Kitty blackened her eye. The administration dismissed her: Apparently there was a policy against assaulting parents. She sued for wrongful dismissal. Kitty pointed out that the woman had accosted her in the Super Fresh, where she was clearly going about her business as a private citizen, and hurled a cabbage at her head when Kitty disagreed with her. Th
at was the part Kitty found galling—not the cabbage at her head, but someone daring to talk to her about school while she was at the grocery store, a place she found quite trying under the best of circumstances. She threw a rutabaga back. Her aim was better.

  “It was self-defense, pure and simple,” she liked to say. Luckily the union arbitrator agreed. The Baltimore school system settled for a substantial sum, and Aunt Kitty bought this old drugstore from Tess’s mother’s family, the Weinsteins, after they declared bankruptcy.

  She converted the three-story building into a store and a home, adding an apartment on the top floor for a little extra income. More out of laziness than any sense of design, she left the old soda fountain, which divided the primary business, children’s books, from the secondary one—feminist tracts, erotica, anything written by women and, in some cases, anything about women. It was possible, for example, to buy books by Philip Roth and John Updike at Women and Children First.

  WACF was a cozy place, with armchairs, two working fireplaces, well worn rugs, and the original tin-pressed ceilings. People came to buy, stayed to browse, ended up buying more. The profit margin was slim, yet far more than Kitty had ever dreamed. Entranced by capitalism, she talked constantly of expanding. Perhaps she would serve espresso from the old soda fountain, or afternoon tea. Buy the building next door and open a bed-and-breakfast. Perhaps a bookstore just for men? Like a novice at the track, she was dangerously intoxicated with beginner’s luck. Tess wouldn’t be surprised if she lost all her money as quickly as she had made it.

  “Dead White Males, how’s that for a name, Tesser?” Kitty asked as Tess came through the front door. Kitty was sitting on the old soda fountain, wearing a silky kimono covered with cherry blossoms and sipping a cup of coffee. “We could sell—well, I guess we could sell everything, all the classics. That would be the gimmick. It would be just an ordinary bookstore, but people would think it was special. And between the two stores I’d have most of the territory covered. Eventually everyone dies. Even Norman Mailer.”