Baltimore Blues Read online

  A preposterous claim. No psychiatrist, no matter how highly regarded, could get charges dropped down at the police station. But Tess counted on Rock’s lack of experience with police officers or bail hearings.

  Still, he was uncomfortable. She knew Rock would have trouble doing nothing. This was the riskiest part of her plan—trying to keep Rock from confronting Ava until tomorrow night.

  She took his left hand in both of hers. The palm thick with calluses. A rower’s hand. It was like holding a huge Brillo pad.

  “Trust me,” she said, knowing she no longer deserved his trust. “Give it a week. If she hasn’t come to you by then and told you everything, we’ll go to Plan B.”

  “Plan B?”

  “An intervention, like they do for addicts. But give it a week. Promise?”

  “Well, if Dr. Hauer thinks this is the right thing…. I won’t say anything to her, not for a week. You have my word.”

  And his word, Tess knew, was actually worth something. It was as good as the check he pressed in her hand, made out for $1,080. Her first one-act play had gone off without a hitch. Now all she had to do was mount and produce the second one. Sequels were always tricky.

  Tess hadn’t been to The Point for months, a fact Spike lost no time reminding her of.

  “Hey, Tesser, you finally come to see your old Uncle Spike? You still like mozzarella sticks? I tell you what. For you I’ll have Tommy change the oil. And a Rolling Rock, right? In a bottle, no glass. See, I remember, even if you don’t come see me so often.”

  “You’ve got a great memory, Uncle Spike. Who do you get that from?”

  “I got nothing from nobody, Tesser. You know that.” He turned up the sound on the Orioles game, then disappeared into the kitchen to personally supervise her mozzarella sticks.

  Spike was a relative, but no one was sure whose, for neither side of the family would claim him. Tess’s father always insisted he was a cousin from some weak branch of the Weinstein family tree. Her mother maintained she had never met him until marrying into the Monaghan clan. Spike himself was closemouthed about the connection, though his looks favored Momma Weinstein’s springer spaniels. Pale, with an astonishing array of liver spots, Spike was notable primarily for his bald head, which came to a point. Hence the name of his tavern, decorated throughout with silhouettes of his bald head, cut from black construction paper by the dishwasher.

  Tess adored him and his bar. When she was fifteen he had given her an open invitation to The Point, telling her it was important to learn to drink among people one could trust.

  “You miscalculate here, the worst that happens maybe you wake up on my sofa, some crumbs on you,” Spike said. “You drink too much out there—” He pointed with his chin to the world beyond Franklintown Road and didn’t bother to explain what could happen to a drunk teenager out there. Accidents, vehicular and sexual.

  Spike’s plan, while unorthodox, worked well. By the time Tess went off to Washington College, she knew exactly how much she could drink. It was a prodigious amount. Her dates were far more likely to pass out than she. On occasion a few did. A lady, she never took advantage of them.

  Tonight she had chosen Spike’s Place because she hoped it would throw Ava off balance. She was ready for a second Rolling Rock before Ava arrived, ten minutes late and unapologetically so. She stalked in, wearing a white unitard, a turquoise thong, suede boots, and a leather jacket. Her black hair was pinned up on top of her head in a geyserlike ponytail. It was quite unlike anything ever seen at The Point. One of the older men fell off his bar stool as Ava walked by.

  “Don’t get too full of yourself,” Tess told her, looking at George on the floor. “He does that all the time.”

  “I know you,” Ava said, but her look told Tess she couldn’t place her. They had met only a few times. Rock’s life was neatly compartmentalized, and Ava had shown little interest in rowing, which only happened to be his reason for existence.

  “Maybe you think you know me because I’ve been watching you for so long. You’ve probably seen me several times, yet it never registered until now. I’ve noticed you don’t really pay much attention to the world around you.”

  Ava slid into the booth, arranging herself so only a tiny strip of her tiny behind made contact with the smeared and cracked vinyl. She glanced at a menu, shuddered slightly, then put it aside. Tess had planned to recommend the veal chop, eager to watch her try to cut the rubbery meat. She also hoped she would order a Chardonnay. The white wine at The Point tasted like vinegar, bad vinegar at that.

  But Ava had an innate sense for the right thing, even in the wrong place. She ordered—never had the word seemed quite so apt to Tess—a Black Label draft, helped herself to one of the mozzarella sticks on Tess’s plate, then sat back and raised an eyebrow. Your move, the eyebrow said.

  Fine, Tess thought, I don’t have time for this either.

  “I have information you’re having an affair with Michael Abramowitz.”

  Ava looked puzzled, but only for a second. Then she gave Tess one of her full-force smiles. “Information? Possibly. But do you have proof?”

  “Of course.”

  “Really? I’d love to see it, or hear it. I hope I came out nicely in the photographs.” She took a dainty sip of beer.

  “My proof is for my client. I am interested, however, in any explanation you might want to offer.”

  Ava ate another mozzarella stick, very slowly. She appeared to be considering something, and she didn’t speak again until she had swallowed the last bite of fried cheese, then patted her lips dry with a paper napkin.

  “You know, I thought I knew who you were working for when you called, but the person I was thinking of would have hired someone good, someone who knew how to do things—assuming there was anything to do. So who are you working for?”

  “Whom. Whom am I working for.”

  “Whatever. Whomever.”

  “Why don’t you tell me who you thought my client was, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  “I’m not convinced you work for anyone. You’re probably just a grubby little blackmailer, out for yourself.”

  “I work for Darryl Paxton. Your fiancé, I believe. Or thinks he is.”

  “Well, I like that,” Ava said. “I thought engaged people were supposed to trust each other.” She seemed offended but also a little relieved. Who was her original suspect? Tess wondered. Abramowitz, famous for his monastic devotion to his career, had been single all his life. He had no wife to check on him.

  “Does a woman deserve her fiancé’s trust if she’s having an affair?”

  “Do I deserve to endure this conversation when you don’t have any proof?”

  “I said I did. I’ve been following you. I saw you in the Renaissance Harborplace with him. I saw you at the Gallery. Do you steal the underwear to wear for your boss? Or is that an unrelated hobby?”

  This was more unnerving, Tess could tell. Cheating on your fiancé was one thing, but it didn’t keep one from being admitted to the bar. When Ava looked up, her eyes were filled with tears and her lips trembled. Save it for your next speeding ticket, Tess thought.

  “Are you going to tell Darryl?” Her voice actually quavered.

  “That’s my job. He hired me to find out why you were acting so weird. I think I have an answer.”

  “But Michael has nothing to—” she started, then stopped abruptly, her face shifting back into its normal, haughty expression. The tone of her voice also changed, suddenly amused and airy.

  “Of course you have to tell him,” she agreed. “But I need to talk to him first.” Tess smiled, a playwright watching happily as the curtain line approached. But she had never anticipated the actress might ad-lib.

  “Yes, I’ll call him and tell him how my boss has been making me sleep with him so I can keep my job. I’ll tell him it’s Anita Hill all over again and it freaked me out, which is why I started to shoplift. Darryl will believe me and Darryl will forgive me. It won’t matter wh
at you tell him.”

  “You’re a lawyer. I assume if you were a victim of sexual harassment, you’d know how to handle it a little better than that.”

  “Did you hear about that case in Philadelphia? A woman lawyer sued this big-shot partner, and the jury found in her favor, then gave her nothing in damages. What good is that? A victim deserves compensation, don’t you think?”

  “Are you a victim?”

  “At this point it’s a matter of opinion, and I think I am,” Ava said. She stood up, pulling her purse close to her body, making no move to put money down for her beer. “A court may not agree with me, but I’m sure Darryl will. That’s the only jury I need to persuade.”

  Tess was flustered, incapable of a response. She had assumed Ava would rush to tell Rock her version, burying herself by revealing too much. She had counted on Ava being more concerned about her affair than her tendency to steal underwear. But in her version the sex, unwanted, was making her shoplift. What if Rock believed her? What if she was telling the truth?

  George fell off his bar stool again as Ava walked by, knocking her down with him. The tangle of arms gave Tess some pleasure, but Ava, even trapped beneath the 300-pound frame of a sometimes incontinent alcoholic, kept her Princess Grace cool. As she stood up, brushing off her now not-so-white unitard, she looked smug, untouchable.

  “On your mark, get set, go,” she called back. By the time Tess figured out what she meant, and ran to the door of the tavern, Ava was already in her silver Miata, dialing her car phone as she made an illegal left turn out of the parking lot.

  Chapter 7

  Tess dawdled the next morning, reluctant to show up at the boat house. When she finally arrived Rock apparently was already on the water, as she had hoped. She rowed her usual route. If he wants to find me, she told herself, he will. If he doesn’t he’ll stay out of sight, hiding on that little branch that heads south. It was a tricky route—shallow in spots, with bridges forcing one to duck, pull in oars, and skim beneath them—but Rock preferred it when he felt sulky. Tess rowed to Fort McHenry and back, then out to the fort again. She saw eights and fours and two-man crews, but no other single.

  It was a glorious morning, a day to savor. Brilliant blue sky, light wind, crisp air. Indian autumn, Tess called it—a fake fall to be replaced by another wave of muggy weather any day now. Tess felt she could row the length of the Chesapeake, find her way to the Atlantic, and make England by lunchtime. She settled for a power piece back to the dock. Bursting with endorphins, she waited in the practice room, pretending to stretch until 8 A.M., when she finally gave up on Rock. He was off licking his wounds somewhere. He’d come around eventually.

  She skipped Jimmy’s and ate breakfast at her aunt’s kitchen table, feasting on leftover cornbread that Officer Friendly had prepared the night before, and reading the papers her aunt had left behind in a tidy pile. Tess worked from back to front, a childhood habit reinforced by her days as a reporter. When she had worked at a paper, she already knew the local news, so she saved it for last, reading features and sports, then the Washington Post and The New York Times. She read the Beacon-Light last—or the Blight, as most readers called it—so it was 9:30 A.M. before she saw the story below the fold: Prominent Lawyer Dead; Biologist Held.

  Michael Abramowitz, a lawyer whose amateurish but unforgettable advertisements made him an unlikely local celebrity, was strangled last night in his Inner Harbor office at the staid law firm of O’Neal, O’Connor and O’Neill, according to police.

  A suspect was arrested within an hour of the slaying, which police described as unusually brutal. Darryl Paxton, a thirty-three-year-old researcher at Johns Hopkins medical school, was to be held overnight in the central district lockup, then taken before a commissioner for bail review this morning.

  According to sources close to the investigation, Mr. Abramowitz was beaten and squeezed in a pythonlike grip, then beaten viciously. He also had bruises on his face, presumably from a fight with Mr. Paxton, who visited him at the office just after 10 P.M., according to a security guard’s log. The body was discovered by a custodian…

  Shirley Temple. Tess felt her stomach clutch and saw the child movie star’s dimpled face swimming before her, a ghostly apparition in pale blue. When she was a child—well, fourteen—she had broken her mother’s Shirley Temple cereal bowl and blamed it on a neighbor’s child. No one had ever discovered her lie. Twenty years later, guilt always evoked the same reaction—Shirley’s face, followed by nausea and fear. She had never been good, but she had always been good at not being caught.

  She picked up the paper again. There was nothing new beyond that third paragraph, only boilerplate on Abramowitz and his career. Certainly, nothing was new to Tess. Even the style and the reporting were as familiar to Tess as a lover’s kiss. In a sense, it was her lover’s kiss. The article was the handiwork of Jonathan Ross, her sometime bedmate and a consistent star in the Blight’s galaxy. In her shock at the headline, she had skipped over the byline. All his trademarks were there—unnamed sources, a memorable description of the death at hand, over-the-top prose, a damning detail. “The staid law firm.” Was there another kind? Still, she felt genuine admiration at the guard’s log; she bet no one else in town had that.

  “But I know more,” she said out loud. What Jonathan wouldn’t give to know what she knew—the woman at the center of this triangle, the trysts at the Renaissance Harborplace, Rock’s suspicions. She was the one person who could put it all together. With that thought she threw the paper down and called for Kitty, her voice thin and shrill.

  “Tesser?” Kitty came on a run, dressed in an Edwardian frock of white lawn, a white ribbon in her curls and white canvas Jack Purcells on her size five feet. The effect was a little bit flapper, a little 1920s Wimbledon, a little 1970s Baltimore, when anyone who wore shoes other than Jacks was ridiculed for appearing in “fish heads.”

  Tess thrust the paper at her: “Remember my detective job? It was quite a success. I caught Rock’s fiancée with her boss. Now the boss is dead and Rock’s in jail.”

  Kitty skimmed the article.

  “Did you tell Rock what you found out?”

  “No, I goaded Ava into telling him last night. She says it was sexual harassment. She had to sleep with Abramowitz to keep her job. The last time I saw her, she was on her car phone, telling Rock her story.”

  Kitty was a quick study. “You need to disappear for a while,” she announced decisively. “Take a little trip and don’t tell me where. Given my relationship with Thaddeus, I’d prefer not to know too much so I won’t have to lie if anyone comes looking for you.”

  “I’ll have to talk to them eventually.”

  “Yes, you will,” Kitty agreed. “But it wouldn’t hurt to be unavailable for a few days while you figure out how you want to handle this. Take any money you need out of the cash register and leave me a check. I won’t cash it unless I have to. Find a cheap motel or a friend’s house, then call me collect from pay phones. In a few days we’ll know where this is headed, and you can come home.”

  Tess took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and began throwing clothes into a battered leather knapsack. Her friend Whitney’s family had a house on the shore near Oxford, with a small guest house on the property’s edge. She and Whitney had used it during college when they had wanted to get away. Rich friends had their charms. She would have to assume she was still welcome there, as calling Whitney would only further complicate things. Whitney worked for the Beacon-Light, too, and although she would be under no legal requirement to talk, Tess didn’t want to find out what would happen if Whitney had to choose between her friend and some tantalizing details in what promised to be a big story. Asking Whitney not to act out of self-interest was akin to asking a cat not to chase a bird. Better not to test her.

  The telephone rang as Tess was gathering her toothbrush and shampoo from the bathroom. She let the machine pick it up. A hoarse, familiar voice filled her small apartment with such force th
at the glass doors in her kitchen cabinets rattled: Tyner Gray, a rowing coach whose years of working with young novices had turned his voice into a perpetual shout.

  “Tess, it’s Tyner; call me at my law office as soon as you get a chance.

  “It’s not about rowing,” he added, as if he knew she was standing there and could read her mind as well. “It is about a rower we both know well.”

  The volume of his voice dropped to a husky whisper, still impossibly loud and piercing. “He asked me to call you, Tess. For some reason he thinks you can help him. Although, from what I know, it would appear you’ve done quite enough.” His voice roared back to its usual volume, as if he were shouting a drill to her across an expanse of water. “Call my office, Tess. ASAP.”

  Tess sat on the floor, a pair of underwear still balled up in her hand. If Rock needed her she couldn’t run away. She wondered whether Rock was the best judge of what he needed. Or whom he needed. First he hired a fellow sculler to be his private detective. And see how that had turned out. Now he had a rowing coach as his lawyer. What did he think he was going to get for his jury—a men’s eight and a women’s four?

  At sixty-four, Tyner Gray still had the lean, sinewy upper body of a lightweight rower. On warm days, when he was on the dock and took off his T-shirt, the college girls stole looks at his chest and arms. No one ever glanced at his legs, withered and lifeless in his sweatpants, almost flat. As far as Tess knew, no one had seen them since his accident almost forty years ago, a year after his Olympic victory. He had been hit by a drunk driver outside Memorial Stadium.

  “Did you get a workout in this morning?” Rock asked when Tess was shown into Tyner’s office by his secretary, Alison, a ravishing blonde whose pearls were as big and round as the blue eyes she fastened adoringly on Tyner. “I hated missing practice.”

  Arrested and charged at eleven, bailed out nine hours later, Rock looked good. Jail, or the lack of caffeine, had helped him get some rest for the first time in weeks. In fact he seemed almost serene to Tess. Whatever had happened, he still had Ava.