Baltimore Blues Page 30
And then there was Frank Miles, another person out to create his own justice. A patient man, unlike O’Neal, willing to bide his time. He had waited for his opportunity to kill Michael Abramowitz. And he had tried to send Tess down blind alleys, hoping he wouldn’t have to kill her. Poor man. In the end he was the one person in this whole mess who had believed in her.
Lovely muck, as Feeney’s poem would have it. The world, it was the old world yet. I was I, my things were wet.
Whitney and Rock had gone off in search of more food, with or without potassium. Cecilia, her shyness overcome, was arguing animatedly with Tyner about something she had learned in law school. The sudden appearance of a bagpipe band, wheezing through “Maryland, My Maryland,” drowned them both out.
Was it Carroll’s sacred trust and Howard’s warlike thrust, or vice versa? No one ever remembered, and few sang along. The state song finished, the skirted band began the national anthem, accompanied this time by the quavering voices of the dutiful crowd. Baltimoreans seldom complained about the song, given its local origins, but they sang it as poorly as anyone.
“You sing it wrong, you know.” That was Crow, at Tess’s elbow.
“I never sing it at all.”
“People, I mean. Marylanders. Everybody. We sing the first verse, which is all questions. Francis Scott Key was asking if the flag still waved, if the United States had been victorious over the British. We should sing the last verse, when he knows they’ve won and is exultant.”
“I never knew that.” Nor particularly cared.
“I’ll tell you something else you don’t know. Cecilia doesn’t really have a fiancé. That was just another of Pru’s lies, when you crashed the VOMA tribute to Abramowitz’s death. Whitney says I ought to ask her out.”
“Will you?” She found herself caring about the answer more than she wanted to.
“Naw, because Whitney missed a salient detail: Cecilia’s gay. Besides, I like tall women. Muscular women.” He squeezed her bicep.
Tess looked away but didn’t take his hand off her arm. “Crow, you don’t know what you want. A few weeks ago you were delirious over Kitty, and she’s not exactly tall.”
“Everyone falls in love with Kitty. It’s a rite of passage. Then you move on. I like you, Tess. I really like you.”
If he had said he loved her, or couldn’t live without her, she would have been unmoved. If he had quoted poetry or put his arms around her, she would have pushed him away. Crow’s understated declaration was harder to ignore. He liked her.
“Do you have a fiancée? Or a wife?”
In reply Crow kissed her—a simple, outdoors kiss, a kiss promising much, but not too much. He wasn’t saying forever. He wasn’t even saying next week. Just now, this afternoon. She kissed him back, then pulled away, aware they were in a crowd. People were watching.
The Patapsco looked almost blue today, shiny in spots. Oil, Tess thought, shuddering a little. Toxins. Lovely muck. She turned her back on the river and faced the boat house. A handsome building, she decided, a perfectly innocuous place. A place couldn’t hurt you.
On the veranda, along the second level, officials and VIPs crowded the rail, where they paid more attention to one another than to the races below. Light skipped and bounced along shiny surfaces—tiny prisms created by diamond rings, gold earrings, silver flasks. Tess saw a rainbow trapped in a crystal glass half filled with amber liquid, a large hand holding tight to the glass. The hand belonged to Seamon O’Neal, laughing, even redder than usual, Ava on one side, Luisa on the other. Tess had never noticed the similarities between the two women—the dark hair, the heart-shaped faces, the good bones. Only, Ava looked like a cheaper version, the fine lines blurred in translation, like a knockoff of a designer dress.
Tess stared at the trio steadily. Neither Seamon nor Ava looked down, but Luisa’s wounded eyes caught hers, held them for a moment, then closed as she raised her glass to her mouth.
You see my side of things, Miss Monaghan. Justice was done…. You’re no one, and no one will ever believe you.
She had not told—not Tyner, not Kitty, not Whitney—especially not Whitney, whose loyalties would have been sharply tested. Her mother substituted in Luisa’s tennis foursome.
Tess turned back to Crow. “Do you really like James Cain?”
“Jesus, Tess.” He rolled his eyes. “I have better things to do with my time than study up on your literary preferences, hoping to impress you. I counted on my charm to win you over. James Cain was a lucky accident.”
“Last line of Mildred Pierce. What does Mildred say to Bert?”
“Bert says it to Mildred first: ‘Let’s get stinko.’”
“Let’s get stinko, Crow. And then—then I’m going to tell you a story.”
The bagpipe band, terrifyingly hearty, swung into the anthem’s final lines. It had started as a poem, and a bad poem at that. Tess didn’t need Crow to tell her that much. She also knew it was set to a drinking song, ugly and clumsy, from Great Britain. But the anthem belonged to Baltimore.
About the Author
LAURA LIPPMAN was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for fifteen years. Her Tess Monaghan novels—Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House, and The Last Place—have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony and Nero Wolfe awards, and her novel, In a Strange City, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest standalone crime novel, Every Secret Thing, was published by William Morrow in September 2003. You can visit her website at www.lauralippman.com.
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Books by
Laura Lippman
BALTIMORE BLUES
CHARM CITY
BUTCHERS HILL
IN BIG TROUBLE
THE LAST PLACE
THE SUGAR HOUSE
IN A STRANGE CITY
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BALTIMORE BLUES. Copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader June 2006 ISBN 0-06-119360-7
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