In a Strange City Read online

  "Is that what you think?"

  "I don't have to tell you what I think. Now, were you the first one to reach the body?"

  "My boyfriend, Crow, was a few steps ahead of me." Crow had less experience with the dead than Tess did, and therefore less reticence in such situations. "He found the pulse at the neck—rather, he found there was no pulse. We kept the other people back as they began drifting over, and I called 911 on my cell. Someone inside the church called too, I think."

  "You see anyone else?"

  "The people in the church came out, and someone— the curator, I guess—took the cognac and the roses and put them in the church for safekeeping. And I saw some cars parked, motors running, a few people along the street. I'm not sure how many stayed, once the shot was heard."

  Rainer grimaced. "Almost none. Citizens! People don't even know what that word means anymore. They see a crime, all they can think is what a pain in the ass it is to them. It's just so inconvenient, watching a guy get killed. One family stayed; the kid was going to write a term paper. He sure got more material than he bargained for. But they were parked on Fayette, didn't see much."

  "Have you identified the dead man?" Tess had turned her back on him, unwilling to dwell on his features. Any morbid curiosity she might have had about death was long gone. The victim had looked young, with a thin white face that would not have been out of place in a Poe story. But mainly he had looked much too young to be dead.

  "Tentatively. He had ID on him, but we still need to find someone who can verify it. Family is from western Pennsylvania. I'll call them after the sun's up, let them have the last good night of sleep they'll have in a while."

  An unexpected bit of thoughtfulness on Rainer's part, which made Tess unbend a little. Then she remembered he was a Mets fan, from New Jersey yet, and that he called it "Jersey," which made it worse still.

  "Is he—is there any way of knowing—?"

  "What?"

  "Well, is he the real thing or a wannabe? The real turtle soup or merely the mock, as Cole Porter would say."

  "Huh?" She had made Rainer's jaw unhinge again, affording her a full view of his teeth, which were at once small yet cramped, overlapping each other in all directions, as if he had forty instead of the usual thirty-two. No orthodontia for little Jay Rainer. Somehow, that was probably her fault too.

  "Two visitors came to the grave tonight," she said patiently. "One, presumably, is the real thing, one of the men who's been doing it since the ritual started in 1949. The other was a fake. Since we've never known who the real one is, how can we know which one died?"

  "That's not exactly at the top of my priority list," Rainer said. "I gotta solve a homicide, not figure which Baltimore weirdo is the regular weirdo and which one was the wannabe. I'll tell you this much: The people in the church seem a lot more interested in the guy who got away than the guy who's dead."

  "The victim—was he shot close-up or from a distance?"

  "None of your business."

  It was, although she couldn't tell Rainer why. What if John P. Kennedy had been there tonight, in one of the parked cars or hiding in the catacombs beneath the church? She thought the shot might have come from that direction, but it was a guess on her part. Could the shooting be connected to Kennedy's petty beef over the bracelet?

  "I'm just asking the kind of questions that the Beacon-Light's police reporter is going to be asking you when he comes in this morning," Tess said. "I was a reporter once. I can anticipate what they'll want to know. And it won't end with him. The AP puts a bulletin out about the Visitor every year. It makes news even in some European countries."

  "A chance for you to get your name all over the world, huh?"

  His sourness, which carried the whiff of yet another petty beef, caught her off guard. "I don't know what you mean. I've never sought publicity."

  "Like hell you haven't. You're a showboat, front and center every time, hogging the spotlight—if not for yourself then for your buddy Tull. Or is it just a coincidence that he ends up getting all the good press when you're involved in a case? Don't think the other guys haven't noticed."

  Honestly Tess thought, only a person who had never gotten publicity could want it so badly.

  "No coincidence, and no conspiracy. Martin Tull comes out looking good, because he's a pro." She didn't mind if Rainer caught the implication that she didn't think he was. "If you're referring to that case a year ago—well, given who was involved, it was inevitable there'd be a lot of attention. Neither one of us sought it out."

  "No, it was just an accident that all those national news shows came to town over a missing person and put Tull's pretty little face all over the television, and then the producer gave him money for nothing but doing his job, in case he decided to make a movie."

  Rainer had gotten up and started stalking the room, a disgruntled dog in a too-small run.

  "You know, carrying grudges can damage your vertebrae, Detective."

  "I got no grudges. I'm just trying to tell you that now's the time for you to tell me what you know and then butt out."

  "Glad to."

  For a moment, she thought about telling him about Kennedy. She should, she knew she should. She wanted no part of this. But Rainer couldn't see the forest for the trees. National and international media were going to swarm over the city in the next twenty-four hours, short of a war or a national crisis. The story was tailor-made for a slow January. If she told Rainer about Kennedy, it was only a matter of time before someone wangled the name out of him; the next thing you knew, cameramen would be jumping out of the shrubbery at the guy's home.

  She had no proof he had been there or was connected to the shooting in any way. It would be unconscionable to subject a private citizen to that kind of scrutiny, and Kennedy might end up blurting out the name of the man he suspected was the Visitor. Too bad Tull hadn't caught the case; she would have told him everything and gone home, her conscience clear. But it was almost 5 a.m. and sleep deprivation was hitting her hard; she had to make a decision right now. She told herself she had a fifty-fifty chance of doing the right thing.

  "I told you what I know. We came, we saw, we called 911."

  "Fine. So don't go shooting your mouth off to reporters, pretending to know more than you do."

  "A proper lady only has her name in the paper three times," Tess said primly. "Birth, marriage, and death."

  "No one ever accused you of being a proper lady."

  "Hey, I've been with the same guy for over a year now." It sounded kind of pathetic, spoken out loud, but it was her personal best in the relationship Olympics. Then she realized he was trying to get her angry. He knew she hadn't told him everything and hoped to provoke her into a confidence. It was a crude but effective technique.

  "You done with me?"

  "I hope so. But I still have to talk to your little friend out there."

  "I'm sure you two will hit it off."

  Tess and Rainer walked out into the hall together, where he crooked his finger at Crow as if he were a child waiting outside the principal's office. Crow bounced out of his seat—not happily, for he had seen a dead man, and Crow was too tenderhearted, too empathetic, to remain untouched by such a thing. Still, this was all new to him, and Crow was no enemy of novelty.

  "Have fun, honey," she called to him.

  He turned back to kiss her, which seemed to infuriate Rainer, so Tess prolonged it.

  Once they were gone, she had a bad moment, wondering if Crow would contradict her account, tell Rainer about her would-be client. But Crow was careful with her confidences. He would never reveal to anyone, under any circumstances, that she had discussed her work with him. If anything, Crow would tell Rainer even less than she had, only in many, many more words. He would tell Rainer about growing up in Virginia, and how his real name, Edgar Allan Ran-some, was inspired by the writer. And then he might explain that his nickname was an allusion to a childhood joke he had made about "The Raven." He would tell Rainer about his one-
time band, Poe White Trash, and how he was now booking acts into the little club that Tess's father and aunt ran out on Franklintown Road. He would ask him to come this weekend, to see the zydeco band. He would offer to comp him.

  And he would be so sincere, so genuinely sunny and kind and helpful, that he would drive Rainer out of his mind.

  Smiling to herself, Tess curled up in the chair and stole back what little of the night was left.

  Chapter 4

  Tess was the first to see the delicious irony in the fact that John P. Kennedy had given her a phony name, address, and phone number. Really, it was a great joke, hilarious. She was torn between wanting to laugh hysterically and bang her head on the desk.

  She tried the latter. Desk and head were both harder than she realized, and the noise woke the greyhound, who glanced at her reproachfully, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  She sat up, rubbing her forehead. As usual, the Greeks had a word for it: hubris. She had sat in this same spot, just seventy-two hours ago, and smirked inwardly at "Kennedy's" lame excuses about false names and identities. She would never be caught in such a predicament, she had thought at the time. Fooled once by a client, when she was starting out, she was much more careful now. She knew the things to watch out for.

  Or so she thought.

  Of course, Kennedy hadn't become a client, so Tess hadn't taken his vitals or demanded payment, which was the point where she had learned to ask for an ID. Consoled by this, she stepped over the piles of phone books at her feet and headed for the small kitchen at the rear of her office, to make a cup of cocoa. She felt as if her body temperature had dropped by several degrees during the vigil for the Visitor. She held her hands over the spout of the teapot, trying to warm them. The last time she had gotten this cold was in college, at the aptly named Frostbite Regatta in Philadelphia. Her four had rowed well, but her hands had been curved like claws for the rest of the weekend, as if the memory of the oar was frozen into them.

  She had been right about the media onslaught. She could take some comfort in that. The story was too perfectly macabre: a murder at Poe's gravesite, two cloaked figures, a beloved Baltimore ritual colliding with the more modern Baltimore pastime of homicide. Before the sun was up on the morning of Poe's birthday, the local media trucks were jockeying for parking spots on Fayette. The national reporters soon followed, then international ones—Poe being a big draw overseas—until the sidewalk around Westminster was a media encampment.

  An enterprising Norwegian radio reporter had even tracked her down this morning. Tess suspected Rainer was playing a joke on her, giving her name to this terribly earnest, humorless man who seemed to be under the impression that she was a rabid Poe fan. He had demanded to know her hourly rate and then tried to convert it into guilders or herrings or whatever the Norwegian currency was. He had even asked to see her gun.

  "I understand all American women must carry guns," he had said. "Have you been violated many times?"

  "I guess you could call it that," Tess had replied, excusing herself, saying she had much work to do. She wished.

  Her cocoa done, she poured it into a Maryland is for crabs mug, a joke gift from someone who found Tess's allergy to shellfish hilarious, and carried it out to her desk, where Esskay waited. The dog didn't wag her tail so much as swish it, with a metronomelike precision. The barbershop clock on the wall might say Time for a Haircut, but Esskay knew it was always time for a snack at Keyes Private Investigations, Inc. The name belonged to an ex-cop to whom Tess was technically apprenticed. He signed the incorporation papers, she sent a small check every month, and they never spoke.

  It was everything she had ever dreamed of in a mentor.

  Tess tossed Esskay one of the homemade biscuits, while she made do with a pumpkin chocolate-chip muffin from the Daily Grind and settled in with the morning newspaper she had neglected to read.

  Competing with the national press always made the Beacon-Light nervous; its coverage of the Poe murder was at once exhaustive and exhausting. The story jumped to two inside pages, with numerous sidebars, and the metro columnist had weighed in on What It All Meant. Nothing good, as it turned out, although Tess couldn't quite follow how this isolated homicide could be used to argue against zero tolerance policing.

  For all the column inches the Blight had spewed forth, information on the victim was still sketchy. Tess inferred this meant Rainer had not yet notified next of kin, because the dead man was identified only as a twenty-eight-year-old man who had worked in "the restaurant industry." Aka, a waiter or a cook.

  The features department warmed up the oldest chestnut of all, the rundown of Poe death theories. There were now twenty-plus and counting. Tess had thought the rabies theory, advanced by a Baltimore cardiologist who had studied the medical records of a so-called Patient X, had been pretty firm, but apparently not. The theories that the cardiologist was said to have discredited—Poe's death through alcohol or drug overdose—still held sway in the public imagination.

  It's as if we want him dying in the gutter, shivering from delirium tremens, Tess marveled. She hadn't known Freud had theorized that early childhood trauma had killed Poe, or that impotence had been cited by yet another medical expert. How did impotence kill? She supposed a man might die of embarrassment, but only figuratively. She smiled smugly, a thirty-one-year-old in love with a twenty-five-year-old, unaware that she was once again flirting with hubris.

  But her subconscious must have made the connection, for she was suddenly glum, pondering the case of the disappearing John P. Kennedy. She glanced at the phone books stacked at her feet, at the bookmarked "people finders" on her computer, at the CD-Roms that supposedly had everyone, even unlisted numbers. There were Kennedys, of course, many of them, in Maryland and Washington and northern Virginia and Delaware: John P. Kennedys, and J. P. Kennedys, and even one Pendleton Kennedy. But the ages were wrong, or the voices were wrong, or, in the case of Pendleton Kennedy, the gender was wrong. All were most convincing in their assertions that they had never met her. "Please remove me from your call list," more than one person had snapped, mistaking her for a telephone solicitor.

  Trust me, Tess felt like saying, I wish I were trying to sell you long-distance service or credit-card insurance. It would be more fun.

  She studied the business card he had left. John P. Kennedy, dealer in fine porcelain. Appraisals, estate sales. If you want it, I can find it. The number listed didn't even exist in Maryland, nor had it ever, given the prefix. She felt guilty, then stupid for her guilt. Should she really be expected to know every prefix in the state of Maryland by heart? The card looked professional, but anyone with a computer could make a business card these days. She had her own little stock of them, identifying her as various people in various jobs. Baltimore Gas & Electric "safety coordinator" was the best. Who wouldn't let you into their homes if you said you were checking reports of an odorless gas leak?

  The Porcine One had not seemed nervy enough to pull off such a stunt, but that had only guaranteed his success. What did it matter how smart you were, as Nora Ephron had once written, if others proved how easily you were fooled?

  Tess flipped through the Yellow Pages, noting the many pages of antiques dealers. Surely, it would be more efficient to work by phone, calling up those who advertised large inventories of china and asking if they had any dealings with a pinkish, piggy man with short limbs. She glanced toward the windows of her office, which were barred and always shaded. The glare of a bright winter's day peeked around the edges of the old-fashioned venetian blinds. The cold snap had snapped, leaving behind a brisk, tolerable day with a chance for snow.

  Perhaps it was inefficient, but she'd rather be out there, going door to door. She could try the shops in Fells Point, her old neighborhood. People there knew her face, if not her name, from all the years she had lived there. They had seen her hanging out at Jimmy's restaurant and her aunt's bookstore, eating celebratory dinners at Ze Mean Bean and the Black Olive, running them off the nex
t day along Thames Street.

  Now she ran in a wooded vale, loved it, then worried about loving it. Pleasure was a double-edged sword for Tess. She was scared she was being lulled into happiness, only so someone could snatch it away from her again, like a dollar bill on a string. She liked a few more lumps in her mashed potatoes.

  So bless John P. Kennedy then, or whoever he was, for keeping her life from being too smooth.

  Esskay accompanied her on her rounds. The dog appeared to recognize their old haunts, although Esskay experienced the world primarily through smell and taste. Allegedly, she was a sight hound, and she occasionally spotted something moving that made her prick up her ears and quiver with instinct. Usually, the object of her desire was a blue plastic grocery bag or an old newspaper. In their new neighborhood, rabbits often crossed their path, but the dog was indifferent to them, possibly because they ran in jagged stops and starts across the grass, rather than moving smoothly along a track rail.

  Still, Esskay was a good ambassador, especially in the red plaid sweater she wore when the temperature dropped below freezing. She drew people to Tess, and they answered questions without realizing it, their hands busy with Esskay's muzzle and ears.

  Yet Tess's repeated descriptions of the Porcine One brought no signs of recognition.

  "Fiestaware?" asked one man, a tall, rumpled type who looked as if he were perpetually filmed with dust. His shop was on a quiet block of Aliceanna, and so crowded with towering stacks of china that Tess watched Esskay's switching tail with great anxiety. "I thought I knew most of the serious dealers around town, but he doesn't sound like anyone I've ever done business with. Did he talk specifics? Did he mention anything he had ever sold or bought?"