Baltimore Blues Read online

  “Do you think you’ll find anything on the diskette?” Crow asked. “Should we go back to your place and read it now?”

  “I don’t expect to find anything. And, no, I don’t need you to implicate yourself in this crime as well. There’s a chance some privileged stuff might be on there. I did appreciate your help tonight, though.”

  Crow gave her a lovesick smile. His silly all-black garb was oddly flattering. In the dim light of the bar, his green highlights temporarily hidden, he looked halfway normal and almost attractive. He also looked very young.

  Flustered, she took on the pedantic, lecturing tone of teacher to pupil, feeling a need to create some distance between them. She was, after all, at least six years older. Maybe seven.

  “Tell me how you started to read James M. Cain.”

  “I saw Postman—the original one, with Lana Turner and John Garfield. I loved it, but I knew something was missing. It was like watching a movie on TV, knowing they’ve cut out the dirty parts. But, in this case, I figured the dirty parts were in the book. I was right.”

  “Yes. Cain once lamented he had a flaw that made it impossible for him to write something that wasn’t censurable.” She knew her voice sounded obnoxious and prim, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I’m not sure how he would fare today, when anything goes. I think he’d be dismayed by a world in which nothing is censurable.”

  “I don’t know; he lived until 1977,” Crow said. “I bet he kept up. And there are plenty of things still censurable in this world. I don’t care how cynical you are, the world will always find a way to shock and surprise you.”

  Miffed, Tess took a gulp of bourbon, washing the blend of chip flavors out of her mouth. When she was in the throes of a doomed crush, she had the good sense to be agreeable, to nod her head happily, surrendering to every silly thought voiced by the object of her affections. Crow managed to hold on to himself, even when he fell. He was younger than she: Didn’t he understand he was supposed to be more stupid as well, less experienced in all things?

  Chapter 21

  Tess asked Crow to drop her on Bond Street outside the darkened store. He would have preferred walking her to the private side entrance in the alley, but she wanted to avoid any datelike resonance. Fog had rolled in, and even though the air was warm and humid, the night was too romantic for her taste. She was worried Crow might try to kiss her. She was worried she might enjoy it.

  Walking down the alley, she had an uneasy feeling. The fog obliterated the stars and the streetlights, so it seemed darker than usual. There was no moon. Maybe shooing Crow away hadn’t been one of her best ideas. She stopped halfway down, thought about doubling back to the front doors, then thought better of it. The store had closed for the night, and she didn’t want to cut through Kitty’s private quarters, not when she was busy with Officer Friendly.

  I’m being silly, she told herself. All this cloak-and-dagger nonsense at the law offices has gone to my head.

  She started walking again, the soles of her loafers making a loud, flapping sound against the pavement. Her footsteps seemed to echo. Or was there another set of footsteps, shadowing hers?

  Her keys were out, stuck between her fingers in the improvised brass knuckle technique her father had taught her before she went off to college. She had reached the heavy metal door that led to her staircase. But as she put the key in the lock, a man darted out of a recessed doorway on the other side of the alley and grabbed her right wrist.

  Too startled to scream, she turned toward the street, ready to run, but her attacker held her firmly. She lashed out with her left arm and, although her aim was wild, it was a good, solid blow, striking hard against the man’s cheekbone and nose.

  “Goddammit, Tess.” Jonathan Ross dropped her arm, putting his hands up to his face. “When did you get so skittish?”

  “As a crime reporter you should know some of us city residents are a little nervous these days. A murder a day, almost.”

  “I think I’m bleeding.”

  “Don’t be a baby.” She unlocked the door. Her hands were shaking; in fact she was quivering all over as if she had been drinking cappuccino instead of bourbon. She pulled Jonathan inside and examined him under the light at the bottom of her stairs.

  She was impressed by her handiwork. The corner of his right eye was discolored and beginning to swell. Her nails, although short, had scratched two parallel lines from cheekbone to forehead. Blood beaded in the narrow grooves—actual blood.

  “I think I broke your nose,” she said solemnly.

  “My nose? You broke my fuckin’ nose?” Jonathan had a nice straight nose, one that his father, a plastic surgeon in the Washington suburbs, liked to tell patients he had sculpted. In fact it was a gift of nature and one of Jonathan’s greatest vanities.

  “Just kidding. Come on upstairs. I’ll give you a washrag and some brandy. You can use them in whatever way you see fit.”

  In her apartment, as Jonathan examined his face in the bedroom mirror, Tess took off her blazer, slipping the diskette out of the pocket and trying to slide it unobtrusively onto the bedside table.

  “What’s that?”

  “My work for Uncle Donald.”

  “I thought you turned in hard copy. I thought your Mac wasn’t compatible with the state IBM clones.”

  “There’s some program that translates it. The system manager does it.” Typical. Jonathan had never shown the least bit of curiosity about her work for Uncle Donald before this.

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” he persisted. “The state can’t even computerize its own welfare cases, but their system manager can do stuff like that?”

  “Did you come by to scare me to death or quiz me on my part-time employment?” She yanked her shirt out of the waistband of her jeans. She hated clothes that made contact with her body, that pressed in at the waist. Ideally she would have liked to wear a caftan all the time, but she didn’t want to look even larger than she was. Slowly, deliberately, she began unbuttoning her shirt.

  “Still got that body?”

  “Why don’t you come over here and find out?” Tess sat on the edge of the bed and began to take off her jeans.

  His face damp and warm from the washrag he had been pressing against it, Jonathan knelt between her legs and finished the task for her. She placed the back of her left hand on his forehead, as if testing for a fever. Her right index finger traced the lines she had drawn across his face.

  “If you had been a mugger,” she said tenderly, “I would have kicked your ass.”

  “Really?” He pushed her back on the bed, holding her down by the shoulders, squeezing the tight muscles that bunched up there whenever she was under stress. “You row. You run. You lift weights. Me, I play basketball once a week if I’m lucky. Try to get up.”

  She didn’t try, for she knew she would fail, knew how hard it was for a woman to be as strong as a man. Strangely she heard Cecilia’s voice in her head. It must be nice to be so strong. She hated being weak, hated knowing Jonathan could do just that if he wanted to.

  “In the alley I wasn’t on my back.”

  “You might have been if you hadn’t let me inside.”

  The heightened adrenal rush of their earlier encounter, the bourbon buzz from Frigo’s, the memory of Crow’s worshipful stares, the very nature of this politically incorrect conversation—it all combined to make Tess feel wanton and powerful. Jonathan’s equal. In the past year, when he had come back into her life, it had been under his terms. He came when he wanted to, he slept with her, he owed her nothing except an orgasm or a good-faith attempt at one. She had pretended—to others, to herself—this was all she wanted, too. But she had known, and Jonathan had known, it was all she could get. She had been settling.

  He had straddled her. She raised her right leg slowly, her foot caressing his leg until she could press her knee against the underside of his groin.

  “If I wanted to get up, all I would have to do is push this knee up a little more
with all the force I can muster, and your balls would be up around your liver. Luckily for you I don’t want to get up.”

  “Isn’t that convenient?” Yes. It was the way she had always been, pretending what she had was what she wanted.

  She snaked her legs outside his, first the right and then the left, and wrapped them around his waist. He was right. No matter how much she lifted, how fast she ran, how hard she rowed, she could never match him in upper body strength, not without a good dose of steroids or human growth hormones. Below the waist, however, it was a different story. She squeezed her thighs together, thinking about the 200 pounds she pressed when doing her adductor work. Jonathan weighed 175, 180 tops. Unlike a weight machine, he could exert force of his own.

  “I’ve still got you pinned,” he gloated, enjoying her python act.

  Tess, as much to her amazement as his, bit him on the wrist, breaking the skin. Shocked, he pulled his right hand away, which gave her the chance to roll on top of him.

  “Still got that body?” she asked.

  He nodded, liking this new game, the danger in it, the right amount of danger. She pulled his jeans down and lowered herself on him. She was in the position he had held a few minutes before—her legs straddling him, her hands pressing his shoulders into the bed. She held him there, making love to him, interested only in her pleasure. If Kitty was listening that night, she heard Tess’s cries long before Jonathan’s.

  When they finished, Tess sent Jonathan to the kitchen to scavenge for provisions. As soon as he was gone, she hid the diskette in her desk, which locked. She supposed it was a bad sign be so skeptical of someone who had just left her bed. Then again, she knew him awfully well.

  “All I found was white burgundy and Swiss chocolate,” he said upon his return.

  “What more do you want?”

  They munched distractedly, wrapped in private thoughts. Tess was longing to read Abramowitz’s disk and hoped Jonathan would leave after he finished eating. But Jonathan, now that sex was past, seemed gloomy and depressed. She steeled herself for a late night, in which she would be expected to make lots of supportive, murmuring noises. To her surprise she had run out of them.

  He sighed elaborately, her cue to start. “OK, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m having more problems than I thought with that story. I haven’t been able to fit all the pieces together.”

  “What’s it about, anyway? You wouldn’t tell me anything last time—except that it was going to shake Baltimore to its foundations.” She laughed a little cruelly.

  “It wasn’t an exaggeration. This story’s huge. But my source is getting cold feet. He’s a real twisted fucker, Tess.”

  “Nice way to talk about a source.”

  “Hey, it’s not just me. Everyone calls him that. It’s practically his nickname. But he had a great story to tell. Now he wants money for telling it, and the Beacon-Light doesn’t make those kind of deals. He’s threatening to go to the television stations. Of course, they don’t pay either. But the tabloid shows do.”

  “How credible is he?”

  “He’s on Death Row for a crime he admits he committed, so he doesn’t have much to gain. Except a little flurry of attention before he dies. Remember I told you I thought Thanos’s execution changed the dynamic on Death Row? Well, it’s not quite the way I imagined it. A lot of these guys don’t want to play Avis to Thanos’s Hertz. Nobody remembers number two. So this guy comes forward with a story about a crime someone else committed but got away with because he was rich and connected.”

  “Someone local? How rich, how connected?”

  “He won’t tell me. He gave me all these tantalizing hints, but when I went to see him yesterday, he suddenly pops up with this request for $25,000.”

  “What’s a guy on Death Row going to do with $25,000?”

  “I don’t know. Give it to his mom, maybe, except he hates his mom. He just likes playing with people. The money is about leverage.” He sighed again. “He is one twisted fucker.”

  “Death Row, huh? But it doesn’t have anything to do with Abramowitz? I guess that’s possible—only three of the thirteen guys there were his clients.”

  Jonathan grinned. “OK, I misled you a little bit last time. Actually, though, it doesn’t have anything to do with who killed Abramowitz. But this guy got in touch with me because he saw my stories on that case. I’m afraid, Tess, you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact your buddy probably did it.”

  “I think Tyner’s going to have a lot to work with.”

  “Tyner could recover the use of his legs during the trial, tell the jury it’s because the defendant is really Jesus Christ, and it still might not be enough to get Paxton off. The only thing you’ve got going for you is the innate hostility Baltimore juries harbor for the state’s attorney’s office.” He grabbed her wrist, his voice suddenly husky. “Then again, maybe you could slap the jury around a little bit. You’ve got a future as a dominatrix.”

  But Tess, exhausted and drained, just lay back and let Jonathan lead the way. I’m going to stop doing this, she promised herself. She closed her eyes, then opened them again when she realized Crow’s face had slipped into her mind.

  Afterward, as Jonathan started to doze off, Tess whispered in his ear: “You’re not keeping me from the boat house tomorrow. The alarm goes off at five-thirty. You can leave with me or stay here.”

  “Sick, very sick, this compulsion of yours,” he murmured. “But I guess I’ll go with you. Make sure I get up, OK? If I’m home by seven I can make bed check. Daphne likes to call early in the morning.” In seconds he was snoring, as Tess lay awake, realizing she had never heard his girlfriend’s name before.

  In late September, when the city was still under daylight saving time, mornings were quite dark. Traces of last night’s fog lingered as Jonathan and Tess left through the back door and walked down the alley toward Bond Street and their cars.

  The air was heavy and humid, like a wet fur blanket. Jonathan, in a fit of politeness, tried to hold Tess’s hand. But she couldn’t bear to feel someone else’s flesh on such a damp morning, and she shook her hand loose from his grip.

  They were almost to the street when, behind them, a car’s engine came to life, racing madly. Tess turned to look for headlights, but there weren’t any, just the sound of an engine revving. In silhouette it looked like one of those humpbacked old taxis, a Checker or a Marathon, but its motor sounded ferocious and souped-up. For a split second the car seemed to hesitate, like a bull readying its charge, then came straight at them.

  Jonathan and Tess also hesitated. Like deer in the headlights, Tess thought, except there are no headlights. Why are there no headlights? Their reflexes slowed, their depth perception thrown off by the darkness and the early hour, they did not move for several seconds, assuming the car would veer to one side. Even the car, for all its furious noise and speed, seemed slowed by the humidity. But it was still coming straight toward them.

  Jonathan reacted first, bursting into action like someone breaking through the surface of a pool after a long swim underwater. He pushed Tess, hard, to the south side of the alley, stumbling to one knee as he did. His shove sent her a good ten feet, and Tess rolled into the bookstore’s rough brick wall, skinning her knees and bruising her shoulder, scraping flesh from her palms. She flattened herself against the wall, covering her head with her arms as if it were an air raid drill. Then she struggled back to her feet, trying to get her bearings. Where was the car? Where was Jonathan?

  She saw Jonathan first. His jeans were ripped from where he had fallen, but he was up and running. He made it to Bond Street and was a few feet from a row of parked cars when the old taxi hit him. It seemed to rear back and take aim before it struck, catching him at hip level.

  Like most reporters Tess had seen only the aftermath of accidents. In movies, people who get hit by cars fly effortlessly, lightly, like rag dolls. If they’re heroes, they get up again. Jonathan was a more leaden target. Instead
of flying through the air in a graceful arc, he looked like a sack of potatoes being thrown off a truck. He landed hard on the hood of some doctor’s BMW, denting it. Tess waited for him to get up, assumed he would get up. He was a hero, he had saved her life.

  The humpbacked car sped away, heading north on Bond Street. Tess stood in the alley, her back still flat against Kitty’s store, her fingers trying to find a handhold on the brick. Her palms were skinned and bleeding, but she kept digging at the brick. A car alarm wailed, probably the BMW on which Jonathan rested. Lights came on, and people began running outside, pulling bathrobes around their skimpy, hot-weather sleeping outfits. Every house on the block seemed to empty. The car alarm wailed. People kept coming.

  Tess couldn’t understand all the people. A car alarm was a common sound in Fells Point, especially on a Sunday morning, when the last drunks brushed against the parked cars on their way home.

  Then Kitty was there, her silk robe barely covering her, shouting in Tess’s face. It was only when she heard Kitty’s voice that she realized the alarm’s piercing drone had been drowned out by her own voice, shrill and keening. She had never heard herself scream before, so she stopped to listen. Then there was nothing to hear, a fact she found hilarious. Tess began laughing as Kitty held her in her arms and rocked her like a baby.

  “I shut up to hear myself! I stopped screaming so I could hear myself scream!” She laughed at her own idiocy, then cried. Finally she ran out of noises to make, appropriate and otherwise. She listened for ambulance sirens, but the morning was still new. The car alarm had been shut off. Tess saw a man, probably the BMW’s owner, bend over Jonathan and shake his head. Now she knew why there were no sirens, why everyone was moving so slowly, as if there was no reason to rush. There was nothing anyone could do.