In a Strange City Page 2

  "Who owned it? I mean, presumably who owned it?"

  "Betsy Patterson."

  The name meant nothing to Tess, but she surmised it should.

  "You might know her better as Betsy Bonaparte."

  She did, but not by much. "The Baltimore girl who married…"

  "Jerome, Napoleon's brother. The emperor later forced him to come home and marry someone more suitable. Still, if it had been true—" He made a fish mouth, as if to kiss good-bye his dream of an easy score. Something told Tess it was the only kind of kissing he got a chance to do.

  "He cheated you."

  "Yes."

  "But if the letter had been authentic, you would have cheated him. Do you believe in karma, Mr. Kennedy?"

  "I'm an Episcopalian," he squealed.

  Tess pinched the bridge of her nose. She was on the verge of a headache, something she usually experienced only via a hangover. "Please tell me what you think a private detective can do for you."

  "I believe the man who cheated me has a secret—a secret he would go to great lengths to protect. If I knew his secret, he would have to pay me the money he owed me. But it involves following him, and he would recognize me if I attempted that. I need a private detective to prove what I think is true."

  "Mr. Kennedy, you're talking about blackmail, and I can't be a party to it."

  He looked indignant. "How is it any different from tracking insurance cheats and adulterous husbands around town, snapping their pictures and turning them over to lawyers? Isn't that a form of blackmail?"

  She wondered how he had come to be so perceptive about the work that filled most of her hours. For every flashy headline-making case that had put Tess in the public eye for a few days, there were twenty basic no-brainer jobs that fit Mr. Kennedy's thumbnail description. "Perhaps, but it's legal."

  "Well, let's say you verify my hunch and forget I told you why I wanted to know."

  "I can't fake amnesia, Mr. Kennedy." She was becoming interested in spite of herself. "But if you know this person's secret, or think you do, why not bluff him?"

  "I need proof, and I can only get the proof on one day of the year. Which happens to be the day after tomorrow at Greene and Fayette Streets, sometime between midnight and six a.m. January nineteenth."

  "You know the time, you know the place. Why not wait for him there?"

  "As I told you, I'm not very good at being inconspicuous."

  She could see that. In the fedora and camel's-hair coat he had worn to this interview, he resembled a beige bowling ball. And his prancing walk was unforgettable.

  He looked at her slyly. "The date doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

  "January nineteenth? Not offhand."

  "It's the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe. And the night that the Visitor, the so-called Poe Toaster, comes."

  Tess knew this story. Everyone in Baltimore did. For more than fifty years now, someone had visited the old graveyard where Poe was buried, leaving behind three roses and half a bottle of cognac. No one knew the man's identity. It had been suggested that the baton had passed, that a new Visitor came now, perhaps even a third one. Life magazine had photographed him one year, but from a respectful distance. It was one mystery no one wanted to solve. Unless—

  "You think the man who cheated you is the Visitor?"

  "As I said, I have no proof. But if I did…" He held his palms up in the air, but the gesture was not as charming as he had intended.

  "But that's sick. Why don't you just drive around to area malls and tell kids waiting in line there's no Santa Claus? What if you unmask the Visitor and he decides to stop? You'll have ruined a beautiful tradition the entire city loves." Even if few had ever seen it, including Tess. It was awfully cold on a January midnight. But she had read the dutiful accounts in the Beacon-Light every year. The visit was, in some ways, Baltimore's groundhog, a dead-of-winter ritual that held a promise of spring.

  "I wouldn't take the knowledge public. I'd simply use it to ensure he paid me what I'm owed. If I'm right," he added. "I could be wrong, I suppose."

  "Which would only make it worse. The Visitor might be scared away for no reason."

  "It's a childish custom, if you think about it." Mr. Kennedy sniffed. "And it will end one day, for whatever reason. Everything ends. Does that woman still go to Valentino's grave? Does Joe DiMaggio still send flowers to Marilyn Monroe, now that he's dead? Everything peters out. A dramatic ending would be better. It would give people—what's that hideous word?—closure. Might generate a few headlines for you as well, and you've never been averse to publicity."

  The last was untrue, unfair even. Tess loathed the media in the way only a former reporter could. The Beacon-Light had never written about her without getting at least one salient fact wrong, and it had given her four different middle initials over the years. As for free advertising, she had noticed that the bump of interest she received after any press attention, large or small, yielded little in actual work. The sort of people who picked a private investigator because her name had shown up in the morning paper were not people who thought things through with much care.

  "How did you happen to come to me, Mr. Kennedy?"

  He lowered his eyes. "Truthfully?"

  "Please."

  "Truthfully, I've been working my way through the phone book, concentrating on the smaller agencies. No one has agreed to help me, and it's January seventeenth."

  "In other words, you have a little more than twenty-four hours or your window of opportunity closes for a year. Isn't there some other way to find this man and make him pay you what he owes? You've seen him, you know what he looks like, you had a name for him."

  "He's vanished. He might as well be smoke. He gave me a fake name and address."

  "How can you know so little about him and be so sure he's the Visitor?"

  "Um—the person who introduced us alluded to same."

  "Go to him, then. Or her."

  "That person… has moved away. So you see why I need your help."

  "Never." She was tempted to say Nevermore, but she tried not to mock clients to their faces, even the ones she was turning down.

  "But if—"

  "Never."

  Mr. Kennedy stood, tapping his pudgy fingers on the lid of the cookie jar. Esskay was back at full alert, ears pricked in perfect triangles, but he didn't seem to notice. He was abstracted, lost in thought.

  "You weren't my first choice," he said. "I've tried four others, but they were too busy to grant me an appointment."

  "Good." He might have meant to insult her, but Tess was relieved to know the clock was working against him.

  "I'd like to state for the record that I didn't hire you." She admired his phrasing, the way he pretended the decision had been his. "And I'm going to assume our discussion here has been confidential."

  "That's how I do business. I can't vouch for anyone else, however."

  "I don't suppose you'd want to sign something to that effect? I mean, how naïve would a man have to be to count on such a promise, without proof?"

  "I don't know. How naïve—or greedy—would a man have to be to believe that a bracelet offered at a bargain price really belonged to Betsy Patterson Bonaparte?"

  "It's not about greed," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "It never is, not really, although that's what most people think." Unselfconsciously, he lifted the lid of the cookie jar, picked a dark-brown square from the top, and tossed it in his mouth before Esskay could roll from the sofa and demand her portion.

  "Mr. Kennedy—"

  "I'm sorry, I should have asked first. I have such a sweet tooth, it's a sickness with me."

  "No, it's just that… those are homemade dog treats, from a bakery in South Baltimore. They're made of molasses and soy."

  "Oh. Well, that explains why it wasn't sweeter."

  He buttoned his camel's-hair coat to the chin and tapped out into the world. Tess almost—almost—felt sorry for him. But watching him trot away, she found herself th
inking of the ending of Animal Farm, where it was no longer possible to tell the men from the pigs, or the pigs from the men.

  Chapter 2

  Two days out of five, Tess still turned in the wrong direction when she left her office at day's end. She headed south, to her old apartment in Fells Point, instead of north, to the house where she had lived for almost a year. She did it again after the Porcine One's visit and chided herself under her breath.

  To observe she was a creature of habit was to say that Baltimore was the largest city in Maryland—factual, but nothing more. Tess loved ruts, reveled in ruts, hunkered down into her routines like a dog who had dug a hole in the backyard in order to snooze the summer day away. She sometimes worried she was just a few chapters short of becoming an Anne Tyler character, a gentle Baltimore eccentric shopping at the Giant in her bedroom slippers and pajama bottoms.

  Actually, she had gone to the grocery store in her pajama bottoms, but just once, and very early in the morning. Besides, they were plaid, with a drawstring, and indistinguishable from sweatpants. And she had worn real shoes.

  Moving, even if it had not been her idea, had promised a fresh start, a chance to embrace change. Now it was becoming apparent that Tess was capable only of substituting one routine for another. She had swapped her bagel breakfast at Jimmy's for a bagel and coffee at the Daily Grind, switched her allegiance from the Egyptian pizza parlor on Broadway to the Egyptian pizza place on Belvedere. She did go to a new video store, the exquisitely stocked Video Americain. She ended up renting movies she had already seen.

  The new house underscored her oddness. It was a house, a domicile, in only the loosest use of the word— it had four walls, a roof, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Tess had nicknamed this work-in-progress the Dust Bowl, and she was getting accustomed to going through life sprinkled with bits of plaster, wood, and paint. Sometimes, she found the oddest things in her bed: a latch from one of the kitchen cabinets, for example; a screwdriver; even the occasional nail on her pillow, as if a disgruntled carpenter wanted to send a warning.

  She had known it needed much work and known it would take much time. Even as a first-time homeowner, she had been savvy enough to realize the estimates were only a fraction of what they would become, in both labor and material costs. But she had forgotten about God, so-called acts thereof. The weather had been gleefully uncooperative for much of the past year, sending rain whenever outside projects were planned, dropping temperatures when indoor projects involved powerful solvents that needed to be vented, whipping up a little mudslide the day the landscaper arrived.

  Still, they had managed to accomplish quite a bit— and the house was still a wreck. Under her father's watchful eye, Tess had dutifully arranged for what she thought of as the essential-but-dull improvements: roof, heating and cooling system, updated electricity, replacement windows, new plumbing, new siding. The result was a snug, energy-efficient aesthetic nightmare, with odd bits of wallpaper and the hideous taste of the former owners hanging on like ghosts, from the Pepto-Bismol-pink tile of the forties-era bath to the avocado-green appliances in the cramped kitchen.

  But it was home, and it showed a handsome face to the outside, as Tess noted with satisfaction when she pulled into East Lane. Her father had been appalled at her decision to choose cedar shingles over aluminum siding, toting up the cost of maintenance over the years. Tess had been adamantly impractical on this one point. She wanted the optical illusion of a house that faded into the trees. Her boyfriend, Crow, had heightened the effect by painting the door olive green. In summertime, Tess had felt as if she were entering a treehouse when she came home, passing through the green door into a private world hung in the oaks and elms above Stony Run Park.

  But now it was winter, and the house looked even smaller than it was, not unlike a wet cat. Tess loved it still. Her fingertips brushed the mezuzah her mother had foisted off on her, ignoring Tess's protestations that she was bi-agnostic. "Home," she said, more or less to herself. She had a home, be it ever so humble. So what if her fingernails were never really clean again, or if strands of paint appeared to be woven in her brown braid. It was worth it, just to walk through the door and say, "Honey, I'm home!"

  And to hear Honey call back from the kitchen, "How was work today?"

  Crow did not live with her, not officially. They had tried living together when their relationship was too new, and failed miserably. So now he kept his own apartment, although he was here six nights out of seven, coming and going with his own key and using the plural possessive about life on East Lane. It worked somehow. Tess's mother, of all people, had fretted about the money thrown away on Crow's unused apartment. (Her father, for his part, was capable of pretending that his thirty-one-year-old daughter hadn't gotten around to having sex yet.) Tess had countered that $550 a month was a small price to pay for a relationship that worked.

  Esskay made a beeline for Crow's voice, Tess right behind her. Alas, Crow was preparing wood, not dinner, stripping paint from the kitchen cabinets while a boom box provided him with his own private Mardi Gras, courtesy of Professor Longhair's version of "Big Chief." Or maybe it was Dr. John.

  "Why didn't you call?" Tess asked plaintively, leaning against the doorjamb—or where the doorjamb would be, eventually. "I would have brought takeout."

  "Lost track of the time," Crow said abstractedly, examining the one cabinet that was almost done. Her father had wanted to yank out everything in the kitchen and start over, replacing the original cabinets with modular units from Ikea. But Crow had a hunch that maple lurked somewhere beneath the layers of paint, past bile green, past egg-yolk yellow, past mud brown, past no-longer-glossy white. The kitchen cabinets were a veritable history of bad American taste, circa 1930-1975. It was taking forever, but now the wood was in sight. He stroked the exposed patch softly. "It's going to be beautiful."

  "You're beautiful," she said, meaning it as a joke, not quite able to carry it off. His face was streaked with dirt, his hair stood up in strange tufts, he had on elbow-high rubber gloves and protective eyewear. And yet he was beautiful to her. He was growing up so nicely, her six-years-younger man, his face thinning out, his body filling out. He had begun lifting weights with her this past year, just to be companionable, and now all sorts of interesting changes were taking place. Friends who had once teased her about him now wanted one too, as if he were a Fendi baguette or a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes. But Crow was no accessory, and no knock-off version of him would do.

  Esskay sniffed the air and stalked off, angry that she couldn't detect any food smells beneath the paint remover. Crow thumbed through the take-out menus that formed the spine of their diet these days. Tess had intended to start cooking once she had her own house, but it hadn't worked out that way.

  "Thai? Chinese? Pizza?"

  Slumping already, she drooped a little more with each suggestion. No menu ever seemed right for the cold bright days of January, when the mind argued for abstemious balance and the body yearned for the rich treats of the recent holidays.

  "What then?"

  She didn't know what she wanted. The more she had in life, the more complicated this question seemed. She had always thought it would be the other way around. "Honestly?"

  "Always. That's our one rule."

  "Let me run over to Eddie's before they close, pick up cheese, crackers, a box of brownie mix, and a bottle of red wine."

  Crow, usually so agreeable to her whims, frowned. "Can we at least bake the brownies this time, or are you going to eat them out of the bowl raw?" he asked, removing his gloves. "I worry about you and salmonella."

  "We'll bake them, I promise. I just happen to think brownies and wine go well together. But, Crow—"

  "Yes?"

  "Maybe you could keep those glasses on. I mean— for later. They really do something for you."

  A rubber glove hit her head as she ran toward the door.

  Later arrived sooner than usual. Within an hour, they were in bed, bodies spent but glasses not
yet empty, the pan of brownies cooling on the top of the old-fashioned gas stove. Giggling and relaxed, Tess began to tell Crow about the Porcine One, thinking it nothing more than a good story. Her work did yield good conversational fodder at day's end, although not as often as one might think. And the rules of confidentiality made it tricky. She sometimes thought about "hiring" Crow and paying him the princely sum of, say, one dollar a year, so she could tell him everything. Luckily, the Porcine One wasn't a client, so she could gossip about him freely—and meanly.

  But Crow was not as amused as Tess was by the tale of John P. Kennedy.

  "Jesus, Tess, it would be awful if he found someone who was willing to do it. The Visitor might never come back."

  "He won't find anyone. He only has a day left, and he made a point of telling me he couldn't get an appointment with anyone else—everyone else being so much more in demand, apparently."

  "So he said."

  "Why would he lie?" The greyhound had sneaked into the room and draped herself at their feet like a heavy, furry quilt. Tess nudged her with her toes, only to have the greyhound sigh and expand, taking up that much more of the bed. Esskay subscribed to the Manifest Destiny theory of sleeping space, and the headboard was her horizon.

  "Maybe he wants you to feel confident that no one's going to take him up on his nasty little assignment. But I wouldn't be surprised if you're the first detective he visited."

  "You mean, of all the private detective agencies in the world, he just happened to walk into mine?"

  "You been in the paper lately?"

  "Not for a year, thank God. I've been a good little citizen, limiting myself to insurance work as much as possible, a few missing-persons no-brainers. Not even a matrimonial in the past two months."

  Crow rolled from the bed and walked over to the room's French doors. In her old place, Tess had a terrace that afforded a view of the harbor and the city's Domino Sugars sign. In the boom times of the late nineties, it had become an expensive view, and a day had come when she could no longer afford it. Here, the little cottage had porches on three sides, and they could gaze out at the woods and Stony Run Creek. It was much darker, away from the haze of downtown. Tess actually found it a little scarier, full of unexpected sounds and shadows, but she hadn't confessed this to anyone, even Crow.