In a Strange City Page 22

  Whitney wasn't done. "What about Cecilia? Have you asked her why she went to see Yeager?"

  "She hasn't returned my calls," Tess said sadly. "I guess I've become a "them.""

  "A them?" Daniel asked, puzzled.

  "Just one of the many in the vast conspiracy against her and her causes. She seems to have forgotten that I warned her not to go on Yeager's show. But Charlotte talked to Crow, when she called to check on Miata. She said Cecilia's pretty shaken up. Which is good. She should be. She saw someone killed."

  Daniel's eyes were wide, as if he couldn't believe the fast company he was keeping. Crow continued to stare at the old photograph of Jerry Lewis, absolutely mesmerized. Whitney had a momentary lapse and only managed nine pins on her next try.

  "I think that ball is pitted," she said.

  Tess stood at the line, trying the therapist's trick yet again. But there was no joy in letting go of the duckpin, no release when it smacked the head pin and sent all nine others reeling, her first strike of the evening. Until she knew who her enemies were, she could take no delight in knocking them down.

  Baltimore was so pretty in the snow, perhaps because everyone went inside. And this storm, which had tricked the local weather forecasters, felt like an unexpected gift, because it was so much more harmless than predicted. The system had crept up the coast and then stayed over the city, as if it liked what it saw there. But the snowfall was languid, slow to accumulate.

  They said good night to Whitney, who liked to drive her Suburban in the snow just to show she could, sometimes rescuing addled Baltimoreans who had driven off the road in panic. Daniel followed Tess and Crow to midtown, where they tucked their cars into the University of Baltimore parking garage, indifferent to the fact that they would be held hostage overnight. At least they wouldn't have to dig them out in the morning, after the plows had gone through. They strolled around midtown, looking for an open restaurant, and finally found a few hardy souls at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere Hotel. The kitchen wasn't exactly open, nor was it closed. They ordered a bottle of red wine and ate blue-cheese potato chips, followed by steak-and-mushroom sandwiches on whole wheat toast.

  "F. Scott Fitzgerald used to come here," Daniel commented, offhand. Crow's face brightened, and he took a second look around the high-ceilinged room, with its dark paneling, stained-glass windows, and carved owls behind the bar. Owls were also depicted in a triptych of stained glass.

  "I knew he worked on Tender Is the Night in Bolton Hill, right around the corner from my apartment, but I never thought about him in the Owl Bar," Crow said. "Do you think he brought his pages here, that he might have written while having a drink, or two, or twelve? He could have sat at this very table."

  Tess was dubious—the sturdy table was probably younger than Crow—but she allowed the fanciful assertion to stand, as did Daniel. After all, Fitzgerald had been in this space, had stared up at the stained-glass owls. It always appeared one was missing from the set, for the legend beneath the winking owls was clearly an incomplete quatrain:

  A wise old owl sat on an oak, The more he saw, the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard…

  No one, not even Daniel, knew what the last line was, although they all had guesses.

  Listening, or the lack thereof, turned her thoughts toward Cecilia. Tess hoped she was avoiding her because she was humiliated, not guilty. She wished Cecilia would reach out to her now. It was unsettling to see a man die. Tess was one of the few people Cecilia knew who had any experience with such things. The word hubris went off in her head, a neon sign that flickered and then came on at full strength.

  "What are you smiling at?" Crow asked.

  "Myself. I just caught myself in a full-blown act of idiocy. I was thinking that I was one of the few people Cecilia knew who had watched a man die. But as an activist in the gay community, she's seen many more people die than I ever will—slower deaths, expected deaths, but deaths all the same. No one owns death. Ready to go? It's a long walk, especially on these slippery streets."

  ""Walkin‘ in a winter wonderland,"" Crow sang. "What's the next part? Something about building a snowman and naming him Reverend Brown—"

  "Parson Brown. He'll ask if we're married, and we'll say, No, man, but we're shacking up and having great sex, and if you don't melt you can watch the next time you're in town," Tess sang back. Daniel blushed, hustled into his coat, said good-bye, and headed east, in search of a cab, while they walked west.

  Even without ecclesiastical snowmen, the walk back to Bolton Hill felt not unlike what Tess would have considered a sappy falling-in-love montage in a movie. But what was sappy in art could be delightful in life, and she enjoyed every slipping sliding minute. They were a half block from Crow's apartment, laughing in the hysterical, jagged way that feeds on itself, when he decided they needed provisions for the next day. He stopped outside a corner grocery that appeared to be open and peered in the windows to see if it had been picked clean by neurotic Baltimoreans.

  "They probably won't have any milk or bread, but we should be able to get half-and-half for your coffee in the morning," Crow said. "And I'll grab some Entenmann's, too. That okay with you?"

  "Sure."

  "Aren't you coming?"

  "I'm safer out here than I am in there. That store's been hit three times in the past six months."

  He gave her a stern look, but Crow had no talent for this. He backed into the store, trying to keep an eye on her as he went about his errand.

  Tess stood in the circle of light cast by a streetlamp, turned her face to the sky and caught a few snowflakes on her tongue, giggling. The city was so peaceful tonight, people sitting out the storm at home, resigned to their inability to cope with any snowfall greater than two inches. It would be gone by tomorrow, and people would return to their normal lives, sheepish about how they folded in the face of such a small threat. But tonight it was as if time had stopped. She had forgotten her own troubles. All she wanted was to go home, kick the dogs off the bed, and get warm.

  Entenmann's was good; they made a decent coffee cake. But if you were going to eat coffee cake for breakfast, why not cake? And if you could eat cake, then it followed that you could have cookies. If cookies for breakfast, then they should be Pepperidge Farm, preferably Lido, although she would settle for a Mint Milano. Any port in a storm. Any Pepperidge in a storm. Laughing at herself, she turned to go into the store after Crow, only to find herself suddenly on her knees, a searing pain in her neck, where a hand—she thought it was a hand, she hoped it was a hand—had slapped her with enough force to cause whiplash.

  "You bitch."

  The voice was behind her or above her. Maybe both. She could not orient herself. She wasn't wearing gloves—when had she taken them off? had she ever had them on?—so her palms curled reflexively as she clawed through the snow and her feet seemed to run in place as she tried to stand. A foot—yes, a foot, definitely a foot this time, heavy in the rubber and leather of a laced duck boot; there was a strange relief in being able to identify it—landed in the small of her back, flattening her.

  The voice continued to rail, as harsh as the chains spinning on auto tires on Mount Royal, which seemed so far away. She needed to get there or into the store. She needed to get to where there were people.

  "Why did you bring my name into this?" a voice harangued her. "Haven't you done enough? I already lost money because of you, you bitch, and now the cops are at my door, threatening me. I… don't… need… this."

  Each word of the last sentence was accompanied by a stomp, starting on the back of her thigh and working up toward the tailbone. But on this, the foot's aim was off, and the blow landed to the right of its presumptive target. Tess waited, assuming the next one would find its mark, wondering if one's back could be broken this way. She felt strangely resigned, her inertia a byproduct of wine and pain.

  But the blow didn't come, only shouts, deeper than the first voice. She saw a carton of half-and-half skitter by her and then bur
st, wasting its white in the snow, and soon she had a companion on the sidewalk, a long sturdy body flattened by running tackles from Crow and the smocked convenience-store clerk.

  "You all right?" Crow asked anxiously, rubbing her hands between his, trying to warm her. She might have been seven again, coming into the basement after a day of sledding on Suicide Hill; everyone's sledding site was called Suicide Hill. She had forgotten how the skin felt as if it were on fire, after you were exposed to cold and snow, how the flesh burned.

  "Sure," she said, but only because she wanted to be agreeable. Strange, she almost felt sorry for the other one, the person no one was tending to, even if it was her attacker. The clerk sat perched on the broad back, looking absurdly small, an elfin broncobuster who could be thrown at any moment. But the body beneath him offered no resistance, just pushed the hair back from its face and sighed, defeated.

  "Hey, Gretchen," Tess said, still feeling companionable, "how you doing?"

  "Fuck you."

  Tess assumed this meant she was okay.

  Chapter 25

  ''I knew I wasn't going to accomplish anything. But it felt good, hitting you. I owed you."

  Most assault victims do not invite their attackers into their homes for tea and brandy much less share the Entenmann's coffee cake that was to be the next day's breakfast. But Tess, despite the ringing in her ears and the disorientation brought on by Gretchen's sneak attack, had been able to think quickly enough to offer a deal: Talk now, and there would be no charges later.

  "I haven't done anything to you," Tess said, handing Gretchen a mug of tea, which she put down on the floor, uninterested, and a snifter of brandy, which she bolted in one gulp.

  "You almost cost me my license, twice." Gretchen appealed to Crow, as if he were the chief justice on a neutral panel comprising him, Esskay and Miata. The three perched solemnly on the foldout sofa, while Gretchen had the one comfortable chair in the room.

  Tess sat cross-legged on the floor in front of an electric heater, warming her back and massaging the tender muscles in her neck.

  "How did Tess do that?" Crow asked.

  "First she rats me out to Pitts, telling him I didn't see the visitation because I got screwed up about the date. And then, the minute she gets called in by the cops, she has to throw my name around. Baltimore PD and I are not exactly on the best terms. It's better for me when they forget I'm out here."

  "Why is that?" Tess was curious to hear if the answer matched with what Rainer had told her.

  "We have some… history." In someone else's mouth, this might have sounded like a euphemism. But there was something raw and unfiltered about Gretchen O'Brien tonight. She seemed to be speaking carefully, groping toward the truth as best she could.

  "I'll be honest, if you'll be honest," Tess said. "The first time, with Pitts, getting you in trouble wasn't my goal, but I didn't lose any sleep over it. You broke into my office, told me I was a piece of shit, and wouldn't tell me why you were there. So, yeah, it felt a little good, letting Pitts know you had screwed up. It didn't occur to me you had lied to him about it, tried to take money under false circumstances."

  Gretchen looked into the bowl of the brandy snifter the way Esskay sometimes stared at her supper dish, as if her powers of concentration could summon the food back. Crow walked over and tipped the bottle into her glass.

  "I was playing catch-up. That's why I came to your office and talked my way into Bobby Hilliard's apartment. I figured no one knew much anyway, and I wouldn't have been able to follow the guy even if I'd been there, because of the shooting. If I had been there, I would have run, because Pitts sure as hell didn't want me talking to the cops."

  "I imagine Pitts saw it differently."

  "Yeah, he had me where he wanted me. He said if I told anyone about him, he'd complain to the state licensing division, tell them I took his money under false pretenses. I thought he'd make me do some more work for free, but no, he just wanted to make sure I knew he could screw me if I so much as said his name out loud."

  "He approached me for the same reason, if that's any consolation. He did his research; we have to give him that. He knew we were vulnerable."

  "How do you figure?" Gretchen was perplexed. "He couldn't know ahead of time that I was going to screw up."

  "But he could know the real story behind why you left the department."

  Tess put the tiniest of spins on the word real, so Gretchen wouldn't miss it going by. She didn't, and her face darkened with a quick intimidating anger that made the muscles in Tess's neck twitch.

  "Rainer told me," she added. "I wasn't trying to get you in trouble when I talked to him, I was just running down the list of everyone known to be in Bobby Hilliard's apartment after his death. Rainer jumped on your name like a cat pouncing on a mouse."

  "Rainer," Gretchen said, her voice flat. "That cock-sucker."

  "Yeah."

  Crow piped up, "That's funny, if you think about it."

  "What?" Gretchen and Tess chorused.

  "Cocksucker as an insult. I mean, so what? You are or you aren't, but it's not a pejorative unless, of course, you're desperately homophobic. Which I guess Rainer is, but why would either one of you think that's an appropriate insult? And asshole—everyone has one, so what does it mean to call someone that? Sure, it's rude, but it's not worth a fight. Then there's motherfucker, which I get, but it's never used in cases where it might be true. Do you think anyone ever called Oedipus that?"

  Gretchen looked at Tess. "Is he on drugs?"

  "No, but his serotonin levels are off the chart. Look, I agree with you. Rainer's a prick"—she gave Crow a warning look, uninterested in hearing this particular profanity deconstructed—"but he said you were a thief. Did you steal from other officers? Were you forced to resign?"

  "I was a scapegoat." Gretchen held herself very still, as if she had to have every muscle under control to tell this story. "Stuff was disappearing so someone had to disappear too, and it couldn't be the real culprit. You see, there was a sergeant—good guy, popular guy, long history with the department. And a long history of problems, related to his drinking. His wife had put him on an allowance; he had to account for every penny. So he began to steal in order to have money to drink. They come to him, because he's such a good guy and all, and he says, "Well, I don't know anything for sure, but I've seen O'Brien going through other people's stuff." I get fired, he sobers up for a little while, and the thefts stop. He felt bad, but not bad enough to tell the truth."

  "I have a hard time believing no one else knew about this," Tess said. By which she meant: Bullshit.

  "Oh, the top brass figured it out. After, when he got caught shoplifting at a liquor store in his neighborhood, they put it together. But, see, I had negotiated a settlement, agreeing to leave if I could get part of my pension and never sue the department. I signed some paper, so it wasn't like I could do anything. I can't complain too much. I used the pension money to set myself up in business, and I make three times what I made in the department, even without the overtime."

  The story was almost plausible and absolutely uncheckable—no names, no real specifics. Tess didn't want to put Gretchen on the defensive, not about this.

  "So did it make you feel good," Tess asked, "sneaking up on me and hitting me from behind? I happen to be living here because I'm worried about some crazed psychopath who may or may not want to kill me. For a moment tonight, I thought my number was up."

  She knew she was being overly melodramatic, but Gretchen seemed shocked and that's what she wanted to see—Gretchen's reaction.

  "You thought I was trying to kill you? I never thought about that. I just… I just wanted to confront you."

  "Confront me from behind?"

  "I'd been waiting here for hours, sitting in my car, planning on talking to you. Nothing more. But when he left you alone on the street"—she indicated Crow with a flick of her head—"knocking you down was kind of a last-minute inspiration. I was mad after Rainer came to see m
e yesterday. I followed you home last night, to see where you lived, and made a note of this address." Gretchen paused. "You should have picked up the tail. Especially if you're so worried about your safety right now. I mean, I'm a pro, but so are you. Allegedly."

  She was right, and now Tess was the defensive one.

  "So you've been following me, huh? Do you leave me roses and cognac? Write me poetry?"

  Gretchen's slack-jawed expression was a more convincing expression of denial than any impassioned speech she might have made in her defense. She clearly had no idea what Tess was talking about. Trying to steady her suddenly shaky hands, Tess took a sip of her brandy which Crow must have had lying around since some student party in his art school days. It was at once too sweet and too harsh, making her long for the Martell's she had turned over to Rainer. She wondered if she'd ever get it back. Well, she'd probably get the bottle back.

  Gretchen said, "You know, we always seem to be having this conversation, but—are you going to press charges?"

  "Maybe this wouldn't come up if you didn't break into my office and try to beat the crap out of me. But no, I promised I wouldn't, and I won't."

  "People break promises," Gretchen said. "Pitts promised me I'd be famous if I pulled off this job."

  "Infamous, perhaps. People would not have been kindly inclined toward anyone who unmasked the Visitor."

  "I get that now. But he was persuasive—and willing to pay triple my usual rate."

  Tess could not fault Gretchen for her greed. On the right day, at the wrong moment, the right amount of money could recalibrate one's moral compass. With her house leeching every cent out of her bank account—the house from which she was now exiled, with no return date in sight—she could have taken on an unsavory job. Not this one but another one, one that Gretchen might have found unconscionable, for whatever reason. She shouldn't sit in judgment, not on this. The Poe visit was precious to her, but that didn't mean it had to be important to Gretchen.

  "What did Pitts want, exactly? I mean, beyond witnessing the visitation?"