In a Strange City Page 3
"The sky is awfully clear tonight," he observed. "Didn't the weather forecast call for snow?"
"No, apparently the chance for snow wasn't pronounced enough for the television weatherheads to justify throwing themselves into a frenzy and panicking the entire city. Just cold and clear."
"You ever been? I mean, you have lived here all your life."
"Where?" she asked, a beat behind. "No. I mean— January at midnight, the corner of Greene and Fayette? I love the idea, but I've never been able to drag my body out of bed."
"I'll get you up. I'm still a night owl at heart."
"Why?" she asked, deciding to skip the argument, which she had already lost, and proceed straight to the heart of the matter.
"Because life's so short, and then you die. Molière said that, or something close. It's pathetic, really, how people have to hand you reasons to do things you should be doing. Easy things, right-in-front-of-you things. It's like waiting for guests to visit before you go see any of the things that are special in your hometown. Your would-be client has bluffed us into doing something we should have done already. You have to do it once, at least, so why not tomorrow night?"
"It seems to me you made the same argument last Halloween, when that local theater group was performing "The Masque of the Red Death‘ on Rollerblades."
"And weren't you glad you went?"
"Only because I dined out on the story for weeks. I'll go a long way for an anecdote."
"Then why not go to the graveyard tomorrow night?"
"I'd already said I'd go. Hey—aren't you cold?"
He got back into bed, and it wasn't long before the greyhound fled for the living room sofa, playing the part of the offended grande dame. Tess and Crow knew each other so well, or were beginning to. The gurus of modern relationships say couples are to speak honestly, eschew codes, always state directly and plainly what they want. But there are codes, and there are languages. Tess and Crow had their own language. Tess was never going to be an "I want" kind of person, no matter how much Crow encouraged her. So he did his best to read between the lines of her epigrams, translating at will. "Are you cold?" could have meant many things, from "Please get the brownies as long as you're up" to "I'm cold, come warm me up." Actually, it had meant both things, but Tess was happy to settle for the latter. It was a small price to pay for being obscure. She could have a brownie after.
Now Crow, on the other hand, knew what he wanted, said what it was, and almost always got it as a result. What a concept, Tess thought. And then she stopped thinking for a while, which was Crow's great gift to her. He was the only person who could make her mind shut down.
The old church and its graveyard stood on the western edge of downtown Baltimore, in a neighborhood overtaken by the University of Maryland's various graduate schools. In fact, the university now owned Westminster Chapel, which had been turned into a performance hall, and a new law school was under construction behind the graveyard. This had been undeniably good for a once-blighted area, and it was probably safer than it had been in years, but it was still pretty darn lonely at midnight.
Not to mention cold. Two cars were parked on Fayette Street, engines running, and Tess envied them. How cozy it would be, waiting in the car with the heater on, listening to the tape player or the radio. She saw a few other people at the front gate, standing close together to generate warmth yet clearly not connected to each other. She found this creepy. She wasn't sure she wanted to know the story of someone who came, alone, to watch the Visitor make his January nineteenth pilgrimage.
Besides, not one of them resembled the Porcine One. He had a silhouette not soon forgotten.
"Don't you think it's better if we wait in the car?" she asked Crow. "I mean, suppose we have to chase someone down?"
They were on the side street, Greene, but standing on the opposite side from the graveyard gates, near the bright lights of University Hospital. Crow had come earlier in the day and walked around, noting all the graveyard's entrances and exits. Tess had assumed the Visitor just strolled through the front gates, the crowd parting to make way. But Crow thought he might take advantage of the construction and scale the low wall behind Westminster Hall.
"The Visitor arrives on foot, not in a Nissan," Crow said. "Besides, being outside seems to be part of the experience, don't you think?"
"The Poe folks stay inside," she said, pointing with her chin toward the old church where the regulars, the curator of the Poe museum and his invited guests, kept vigil every year. He was the gatekeeper, allowing only those he trusted inside the church. He would never permit anyone to interfere with the visit.
"Well, if you start coming every year, you could stay inside too."
"Fat chance. You know, Life magazine photographed this one year. But it was understood they would never unmask him."
"Imagine, a journalist with ethics," he said mildly. Crow, who liked almost everyone, was willing to make an exception for those in her former profession.
It was 3 a.m., and they had been out for three hours. Tess had brought a thermos of coffee, but she took only tiny sips on infrequent breaks inside Crow's Volvo, worried that her bladder wouldn't make it through the night. According to Crow, the Visitor sometimes arrived as late as 6 a.m., which was still dark on January nineteenth. They had played Password, they had played Botticelli, they had played Geography, but their efforts to make time pass only made them more aware how slowly it was moving.
A blast of wind shot down Greene Street, and then the night fell still, as if it knew its part in this drama. A figure had come around the corner and was approaching the Greene Street gate. It was a man—well, maybe not, come to think of it—but definitely a person, wrapped in a cloak, an old fedora pulled down to his eyebrows, hands held up as if to shield the lower part of his face. From their vantage point, Tess and Crow had a clear view, but the spectators on Fayette Street were blocked and oblivious. She thought she saw a white flash in one of the church windows, a face appearing and reappearing, but it happened too quickly for her to be sure. The sounds of the city seemed to fade into the distance, and although she was aware of traffic on the nearby streets, it might as well have been a hundred miles—or a hundred years—away.
The figure entered the graveyard. Tess felt a strange excitement almost in spite of herself. She knew it was just a man, going through a ritual someone else had started, but it still felt magical. The past was suddenly accessible; she felt linked to a time she had never known, to a person who had never been particularly important to her. Through this one odd figure, she could travel to the past and back again. Her mind scrambled for the fragments of facts she had accumulated about Poe over her lifetime. He invented the detective story. He married his young cousin. He had been found, wandering in a state of confusion, on Election Day, wearing strange clothes. He had died in a hospital in East Baltimore within a few days—Church Home Hospital, she thought, although it may have had a different name then. Crow would know; she would have to ask him later.
She reached for Crow's hand and they ran across Greene Street on tiptoe, finding a shadowy place where they could watch the man approach the grave. The night was bright: the moon almost full, the streetlamps on, the blue glow of Baltimore's Bromo-Seltzer tower adding a suitably surreal cast to what they could see.
"Tess—"
"Shhhh." She didn't want to talk, not now.
Crow pulled at her elbow, turning her so she was looking toward another spot in the graveyard. Another man stood there, near the entrance to the catacombs that ran beneath the church. Taller, swathed in a grander cloak, carrying the same tribute of roses and cognac. Two visitors? How could that be? Too tall, she told herself, and too slender to be John P. Kennedy, her porcine pal.
The first figure was already at the grave—not at the Poe monument, which dominated the front of the graveyard, but the plain tombstone in the back, where he was originally buried. Tess wanted to run after them, to see what happened when they met, but she couldn't move. She to
ld herself it was out of respect, but she was frightened in a way that only a nonbeliever can be when facing something that cannot be explained. Certainly, one of those figures could not be human. Poe had come back to meet his most constant friend.
The first man backed away from the grave as the second man put down his tribute. Was it Tess's imagination, or was one trying to keep his distance from the other? The first man made a strange high-stepping movement—there must be a low fence around the grave itself—and stumbled. The other man caught him by the arm, then embraced him. The first man submitted to it, arms at his sides, his body cringing as if expecting a blow.
They parted, moving in different directions. The wind kicked up with a sudden burst, lifting the capes of both men. The taller one, heading east, seemed to be moving quickly, while the other moved at the same stately, measured pace he had used to approach. As he reached the southern wall of the cemetery, he turned back as if to take one last look at his doppelgänger. Tess was no longer sure who was who, which man had come through the gate and which man had come from the catacombs.
And then there was one.
A gunshot is startling any time, any place. It's a sound people assume they know, and then they hear one and realize they never knew it at all. No diet of movies and television can prepare one for the way a gun cuts the air, the way it leaves all who hear it breathless with dread. Some run, others freeze in place. Whatever choice is made, the other always seems wiser.
Tess knew the sound well, too well, which only made it more terrifying when it shattered this strange tableau. As the spectators at the front gate screamed, she experienced a sickeningly familiar sensation—a sense that the world stopped for a second and then speeded up to get back on schedule. Her mind and body lurched forward, and without realizing what she was doing, she found herself following Crow to the spot in the graveyard where a man was now dead, the voluminous folds of his cape billowing around him like a makeshift shroud.
Chapter 3
"Next time," Tess told Crow, her fatigue so pronounced it made her entire body ache, "remind me to run in the other direction when I hear a gunshot."
"But it's professional ethics, right?" he asked, even as he tried to figure out a way to place his long frame across the hard plastic bench and put his head in Tess's lap. "You felt obligated to see what happened and then try to control things until police arrived. Besides, the guy might have been alive."
"Okay, next time shoot me when I hear a gunshot. I could go the rest of my life without seeing the inside of this police department and be quite happy."
The homicide cop who had caught the Poe murder was named Rainer, Jay Rainer. Tess knew him just well enough to dislike him. He had been a traffic cop when their paths first crossed a few years back. In a different era, he never would have made the homicide squad, but the city police department was still reeling from the destructive free-for-all management style of the penultimate police commissioner. The cops had liked to say he was more coroner than cop; he had treated everyone working for him like a body. Homicide cops had gone to robbery vice cops were on patrol, and traffic cops like Rainer were now in homicide.
"It's no wonder," Tess said on a yawn, "that the clearance rates for homicide are at an all-time low. I hear if there's not a two-ton Chevy with blood on the bumper, Rainer doesn't have a clue what to do."
"I'm a big fan of yours too, Miss Monaghan."
Rainer was standing in the corridor with one of the last witnesses from the church, who were presumed to have had the best view of the shooting. It was a presumption that Tess was happy to let stand, although it meant she had been waiting for hours to give her statement. Trust the city police department to have coffee so overcooked it was almost sour, and powdered creamer that came only in flavors—amaretto and crème de men-the. Wimps, Tess thought, frowning into her Styrofoam cup and feeling the twisted shame of the exposed gossip. She had only been expressing the opinion of another homicide cop, Martin Tull. Her only friend in the department, Tull respected her and trusted her instincts. It was their standing joke that he might leave the department and come work for her, although she barely made enough money to keep Esskay in dog food.
But inside the department, Tull was a go-along, get-along kind of guy. If Rainer figured out she had lifted the bumper line from Tull, it would be bad for him. So she swallowed it, she owned it.
"Good morning, Detective."
"You know, I think I've had a few nightmares like this," Rainer said.
"Being immersed in Poe has made you melodramatic, Detective," Tess replied, trying to stifle a yawn. "We don't know each other well enough to figure in each other's dreams, good or bad."
"And even if you did"—this was Crow, his usual laid-back demeanor pricked by the thought of Tess appearing in another man's dream—"you ought to consider whether a Freudian or Jungian interpretation is more appropriate. My guess is that Tess represents your lost animus, the feminine side of your personality."
Rainer had to think about this, which required his mouth to drop open. After a few seconds, the rusty hinge on his jaw clamped shut and he motioned Tess to follow him to the interrogation room.
"He's not exactly Monsieur Dupuis," the previous witness whispered to Tess as they passed in the hallway, and Tess nodded absently. The woman was a poetry teacher from Hood College who had lobbied hard for one of the coveted church spots and driven sixty miles for the privilege of watching a homicide. Context kicked in, and Tess realized the Poe aficionado must be referring to the detective in Poe's stories, the one who had solved the murders in the Rue Morgue.
Funny, but she had never been in an interview room before, not in her hometown of Baltimore. She had been questioned at crime scenes, volunteered information at her aunt's kitchen table—in fact, that was where she and Rainer had first met, when he was a lazy traffic investigator determined to believe a dead man in the alley was the careless work of an after-hours drunk instead of the premeditated homicide it really was. She had waited in the hallways here while police officers solidified leads she had brought them. But she had never sat in the famed "box."
I am not a suspect, she told herself again. I am not a troublemaker. I am a witness.
"What are you thinking?" Rainer asked her.
"How much it is like that show, right down to the amber tile walls and the desk with the handcuffs attached." The lie was reflexive, a knee-jerk reaction to authority. "I thought television always got it wrong."
"Aw, Homicide was a piece of shit. I was glad when they took it off the air." It was a heretical statement for a Baltimorean to make, but then Rainer clearly wasn't a Baltimorean. Tess couldn't place the accent. It was rough and crude, a northeastern caw without the round, full o sounds and errant r‘s that make the local patois difficult even for gifted mimics. Tess's mother had somehow kept Tess from acquiring one, and Tess supposed she was grateful. But it would be nice to put one on, from time to time.
"It's not off the air. It's in reruns on cable," Tess said. She wasn't sure if this was true, but it was too much fun, yanking Rainer's chain. Also too easy. If she hadn't been so tired, she wouldn't have bothered.
"Yeah, well, I'll call you next time I need to know what I want to watch on TV. You're a walking channel guide. But right now we got other things to talk about. Why were you down at Westminster Hall tonight?"
If Tess's first lie to Rainer had been automatic, the second was thoughtful and measured. Yes, she knew something, but she wasn't sure what it was, and she didn't want to entrust information to Rainer under those circumstances.
"Just witnessing a Baltimore ritual. I've lived here all my life and never visited Poe's grave, much less seen the Visitor. That's akin to never going to Fort McHenry or watching the Orioles play."
"Bunch of bums." Rainer frowned. "I hate the American League."
"Where did you grow up, Detective?"
"Jersey. I'm a Mets fan. Remember 1969?"
"You've got my DOB in front of you, you do the math."
"So anyway, you decide, being Miss Charm City personified, that it's your duty to go and watch whoever this weirdo is who goes to the grave every year?" charm city personified—that had been the headline on an item about her in a lighter-than-air puff piece in the Beacon-Light eons ago. Not a good sign, Rainer knowing this. He had been keeping tabs on her. To what purpose?
"More or less."
"And then what happens?"
"Two cloaked figures converged on the grave." Even if she was willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she'd never dream of letting Rainer know she had—briefly—imagined she was witnessing Poe's ghost. "I heard a shot. One fell; one ran."
"Which way did he run?"
She replayed the moment in her mind, then tried to square it with the grid of the city at large. North and south came easily but she always needed a minute to orient herself to east and west. Rainer assumed she was stalling.
"Don't tell me you're going to be like the gang in the church. One of those guys has watched this thing almost every year for twenty-five years, and he suddenly gets all vague, like he's not sure what direction the guy came from or how he got into the graveyard. Six people, and not one of ‘em sees anything. You tell me that's a coincidence. They're protecting this guy, which is sick. What if he's the killer?"