In a Strange City Page 6

  "Do you think your visitor intended tribute?" Whitney's tone was at once arch and concerned. Her voice, the clear, confident tone that only the richest people can afford, was often on the verge of self-parody but Tess knew she was genuinely interested. And genuinely worried.

  "I don't know. It felt creepy but not overtly threatening. Someone knows I was there the other night, that's the creepy part. But—and here's where I'm going to sound as if I'm really off the rails—I don't think it's a threat or a warning. Someone knows what I'm doing and wants me to keep doing it. The question is who."

  "The question is who." Whitney tested the grammar and found it acceptable. "And why?"

  "And why," Tess agreed. "The man who tried to hire me? Maybe this was an elaborate psychological ploy— maybe he wanted me there that night as a witness so he lured me there by letting me think something bad was going to happen—but he didn't strike me as bright enough to play such a complicated game, and I wouldn't have been there if Crow hadn't insisted."

  "Could he be the Visitor? Suppose he had gotten wind of the fact that someone else planned to be there that night and was worried about what might happen. Perhaps he was trying to tantalize you into protecting him."

  Tess had already considered this possibility. "No. No, it's all too sloppy, dependent on too many variables. Besides, the man who got away, while he wasn't as tall as the man who was killed, he wasn't short. And he moved stiffly, while my little pig friend scuttles when he runs, like a crab who's figured out how to go forward. I wonder if my visitor is Rainer, the homicide cop, playing another joke on me, trying to test me. I told you about the Norwegian radio reporter. I think he wanted to see if I would seize the spotlight for myself."

  "Tess—" Whitney had gotten as far as lifting her glass to her mouth, only to put it back on the table and grab Tess's drink for a quick sip. "Hmmm. Their Cosmos are much limier than some. I like it. Anyway, at the risk of sounding bossy—"

  "A risk you'd never take."

  "At the risk of sounding bossy, or as if I'm trying to run your life, what's the point of all this? You tried to find the man who hired you because you didn't want to give him up to an inexperienced cop. But he's MIA, so there's no likelihood of anyone's finding him. Give it up, move on. You're getting a little obsessive. I hate to take Tyner's side in anything, but you do have to earn money. You have a house, a dog, and a boyfriend to support."

  "But the cognac, the roses—"

  Like a child forced to eat a hated food, Whitney grabbed her glass, held her nose, and upended half the contents in her mouth. She made a hideous face, but she swallowed. "I'm sorry. I like martinis. I like blue cheese. But this is wrong. Did I resolve to finish every drink on the list or merely try it?"

  "Just try it. So congratulations, Whitney. You're the only person I know who has successfully lived up to the letter of her New Year's resolutions before the end of January."

  "It's simply a matter of knowing what's realistic," Whitney said, with her perpetually self-satisfied air. "You won't catch me resolving to read some ridiculously difficult book"—Tess had been toting Ulysses around with her for the last year, as Whitney well knew—"or trying to better myself in some dreary, predictable way. Diet, exercise, yoga: how boring."

  "Is it even possible for you to be better?"

  "Well, I can't get any better at being me, that much is certain. And someone has to be me, and it might as well be me, don't you think?"

  "What I think," Tess said, "is that a piece of blue cheese has gone straight to your brain and is blocking the passage of blood to an important artery."

  They ordered dinner, and she pretended to put aside all thoughts of Poe. Whitney had a new job, working at the foundation underwritten by her family's fortune, and she seemed to be enjoying this one more than any of her previous incarnations, which included editorial writer, Tokyo-based financial correspondent, and Tess's unpaid assistant. But even as part of Tess listened to Whitney's sly and knowing gossip about Baltimore's cultural life, she was still thinking about the cognac and those snow-covered roses. Someone was watching her. Someone was expecting something of her. What? It was as if she had a ghost for a client, maybe Poe himself.

  And this meant, she realized, that the likelihood she would be paid for her efforts was very small indeed. Poe had always been broke.

  "It is funny, isn't it?" Whitney said, finishing off a story, waiting expectantly for Tess's reaction.

  "Oh, yes," Tess assured her. "Screamingly."

  Tess had a motto: Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

  It was a rule she had formed while still in the newspaper business, where she had watched other reporters rush out the door without reading clip files or even checking the address in the ADC map book. She called such manic bursts the inherent bias in favor of action, and she had learned to resist it. There was a lot to be said for sitting and thinking.

  So she sat in her office the next morning, Sunday, and thought. She thought, looking at her roses, which she had propped up in a jelly jar, and occasionally uncapping the Martell's for a quick sniff. It was head-clearing, reminiscent of the long-ago nights she had worked elections in the classified section and, in the service of scientific inquiry, opened the glue pot on the clerk's desk between phone calls.

  Mind and nostrils now open, she enumerated all the things she didn't know.

  She did not know who left her the flowers and the cognac. Common sense dictated this was a bad thing, and she should be fearful. Right now, however, with a bright sun working around the edges of the Venetian blinds and church bells ringing in the distance, she simply could not work herself into feeling scared or threatened. In fact, the flowers cheered her enormously. They were good roses, not the cheap kind that would die quickly. The gift felt like a tribute. Then again, so did the Trojan horse at first, didn't it?

  More items for her list: She did not know who the Pig Man was, although she knew he was a liar. She wondered if he had left the flowers and the cognac. She hoped not.

  Meanwhile, there were things she did not know but could learn painlessly, things about Poe. She had made a head start there, dipping in and out of the books she had purchased, learning a little more of his work, about which she was woefully ignorant, and his life, about which she knew even less. Poe himself was the source of much of the misinformation, weaving fanciful tales about his biography while alive and then entrusting his legacy to a man named Rufus Griswold, who proved to be a more unreliable narrator than anyone Poe had ever created. It was, noted the biography by A. H. Quinn, as if Mozart had bequeathed his work to Salieri.

  Finally, Tess was learning much about another dead man, courtesy of the Beacon-Light. The victim had been identified, and the newspaper continued to go whole hog on the story—throwing bodies at it, in the parlance of the newsroom.

  The vic's name was Bobby Hilliard, and he would have been twenty-nine if he had managed to live another two months. He had worked at the kind of restaurants that Tess patronized only in her palmist days, one-name establishments that sounded like places she could barely afford to vacation: Hampton's, Charleston's, Savannah's. His last port of call had been the Prime Rib. Originally from Pennsylvania, he had graduated from the University of Maryland six years earlier with a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in library science. But he had been a waiter for as long as anyone could remember.

  The newspaper had managed to procure a photograph of the dead man. Tess studied this. She knew the routine, knew how reporters talked parents and friends into giving up a cherished photo, how they promised to take good care of it, to send it back by registered mail. She knew how easily they broke such promises, how the photos ended up, bent and creased, wedged in a desk drawer. This photo appeared to be a cheap snapshot, and she could swear Bobby Hilliard looked irritated at being caught on film. His face and eyes were narrow, and he was terribly pale, or the photograph was simply overlit. He had a drink in his hand and wore a white dress shirt, bow
tie askew. He could have been at a wedding, but Tess thought it was more likely he was grabbing a drink after his shift had ended.

  Why does a man with a college degree end up waiting tables? Probably because it paid better than library work, and the patrons who patronized you at least washed first. Still, Bobby Hilliard had seemed peripatetic even by the standards of this nomadic class, changing jobs every three months or so.

  Why had he been at Poe's grave? The Beacon-Light, lacking explanations, offered up Poe-ish quotations about loneliness and solitude and midnights dreary. Former co-workers weighed in with the usual noninformation: "quiet guy," "kept to himself," "dependable." Just once, Tess would like to read a story where someone said, "He was a jerk, and we're not the least bit surprised someone finally offed him." She was beginning to think "quiet guy/kept to himself" was the consequence of an increasingly incurious planet, where no one noticed anyone but themselves. How could it be that the Blight had found a photo but no real friends to mouth platitudes about the dead man? As for Hilliard's parents, en route to Baltimore to claim their son's body, they had managed to avoid the media so far. But, the Beacon-Light teased, Rainer was promising "press availability" at one o'clock today.

  Tess looked up from the newspaper and smelled the roses, then sniffed the cognac. "Not a completely bone-headed move on Rainer's part," she told Esskay On a slow Sunday, such an event stood a good chance of dominating the evening newscasts and the next day's front pages. But what would such a circus yield beside videotape and ink? Rainer wasn't putting the grieving parents in front of the press because he thought reporters' insightful questions would elicit information he had failed to get. Either Rainer believed the killer was vulnerable to contrition or he was one desperate cop, with one of the biggest red balls in years and no clue how to handle it.

  Both things could be true. The only way to know was to go to the press conference.

  Of course, it would be foolhardy for Tess to show up, putting herself squarely in Rainer's sights, confirming his suspicions about her. If she were smart, she'd take the afternoon off, play with her dog and her boyfriend, and catch up on the story the next day, just like the rest of Baltimore.

  But Tess preferred her reality unfiltered, without anyone standing between her and the event, telling her what it all meant. Besides, the presser was a guaranteed mob scene, big as a presidential news conference, with risers for the camera crews and reporters from throughout the country. What were the odds that Rainer would even notice her, lurking in the back? She'd get started on her Sunday soon enough. She was no workaholic.

  Or so she told herself as she uncapped the cognac for another sniff, fingered a rose petal, and tried to imagine where someone had found such perfect blooms in the dead of winter.

  Chapter 7

  Rainer saw her immediately, as if his eye was trained to spot her braid at a hundred yards, but he was too distracted to do more than glare. Tess tried to fit a world of nonchalant meaning into her responding shrug. Just passing by, saw my buddy Herman Peters, the police reporter, saw the crowd, couldn't help being curious. It's public property. Sue me. Even if Rainer understood her body language, he clearly didn't buy any of it. His scowl told her the bill would come due later.

  But for now, Bobby Hilliard's parents were coming into War Memorial Plaza—the media crowd was so great that the news conference had been forced outside, between the huge Depression-era horses on the plaza opposite City Hall—and Rainer was completely focused on them as they moved toward the podium and the little garden of microphones that had sprouted there. The Hilliards walked stiffly, as if they had been in a car accident.

  "Good afternoon," prompted one of the female reporters, who may or may not have been local. Oh, she was clearly local—she didn't have the shiny-serious finish that network news babes develop when they make the leap—but she could have been from Baltimore or Washington, Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. They all looked alike to Tess.

  The Hilliards nodded a greeting, and stared mutely into the cameras. Tess realized they did not know what was expected. They had not absorbed, as so many citizens had, the media's protocol for personal tragedy. Television has boiled grief down to the essentials over the years. How do you feel? the reporters ask those who have survived, and the responses are supposed to be Cat-in-the-Hat simple: sad, mad, bad, glad. The grieving tear up on cue, they shake their fists at the camera, they vow revenge, they threaten lawsuits. They know what to do, because they have seen other people do it. And because they do it too, future victims know how to behave when their turn comes.

  But Bobby Hilliard's parents didn't know this game, much less how to play it. Gazing numbly at the reporters, they might have been the ones under arrest. The reporters stared back, unsure of how to proceed in the face of such quiet dignity. Maybe Rainer did know what he was doing. If the killer was capable of feeling anything, the Hilliards would break his or her heart.

  "This is Webber and Yvonne Hilliard," Ranier said at last, "from Pennsylvania."

  "Vonnie," whispered Mrs. Hilliard, a thin woman in a navy print dress and an old-fashioned navy wool coat. Her Sunday best, clearly, yet she still might have walked straight out of a Dorothea Lange portrait from the thirties. She had that kind of narrow weatherworn face. "No one ever calls me Yvonne."

  "They have come down to claim their son's body and take him back for burial in Pennsylvania—"

  "Do you know when that will be?" called out a reporter, an out-of-towner. Tess saw the gears clanking in his feverish mind: Funerals were always good for footage, and the two-graves visuals were a surefire winner. She could write his hackneyed copy for him: Bobby Hilliard, who died in one cemetery, was buried in another today.

  But this dark-haired questioner was one of the talking heads at the end of the cable dial, a former political consultant who had reinvented himself after a particularly nasty scandal. Jim Yeager, that was his name. Caught with two prostitutes, whose services he had been billing to his clients, he had quickly found Jesus and a book deal, although not necessarily in that order. He had then parlayed his "recovery" into his talk-show gig, where his status as a redeemed sinner made him far more sanctimonious than his neo-con peers, no small feat. The Poe story must be bigger than Tess had thought, or things in Washington were even slower.

  "Not just yet," Mrs. Hilliard said, then looked anxiously at her husband, as if she had spoken out of turn. Her voice was soft, a mountain accent, more West Virginia than Western Pennsylvania to Tess's ears. "We haven't really had time to make the… arrangements."

  An awkward silence fell. When it appeared that the Hilliards were going to volunteer nothing more, a blond anchorwoman waved at them as if hailing a taxi, confident of being recognized. After all, she and her station cohorts beamed down at Baltimoreans from billboards throughout the city, asserting themselves as friends and family, trusted advisers and neighbors. They made no claim to journalistic integrity, but by God, they were nice!

  Smiling and nodding, the blonde engaged the couple in laser-sharp eye contact.

  "This really must be upsetting to you," she said, with a graveness suggesting she considered this a profound insight. "How are you doing?"

  Out-of-towners, the Hilliards felt no special kinship toward the blond anchor. But they were polite people by nature, so they gave it their best shot.

  "Not so good," said Mr. Hilliard, who wore a shirt buttoned to the throat beneath a stiff-looking sports jacket that was short in the sleeves. His wrists were large and knobby, his hands larger still, red and chafed from hard work.

  The blond anchor continued to smile and nod, smile and nod, so Mr. Hilliard struggled to find something else to say. "Not good at all."

  Vonnie Hilliard held her hands to her mouth, and Tess had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The Visitor, the one who got away, had held his hands to his face in a similar manner. But Mrs. Hilliard's concern seemed to be her teeth, which were crooked and discolored.

  "We feel pretty bad," she offered, around her fingers.r />
  Tess was hunkered down in the back, screened by the risers that had been set up for the television crews and their equipment. Rainer, his forehead sweating despite the fact that the temperature couldn't have been much above freezing, was too preoccupied to pay any attention to her now.

  "Did your son have a special affinity for Poe?" A print reporter this time, armed with nothing but a pad and a self-important air. Either from the New York Times or an aspirant.

  The Hilliards glanced pleadingly at the detective, but he appeared as baffled as they were by the question. Finally, Mrs. Hilliard tried to answer.

  "You mean, like going on forever?"

  The reporter proved to be kind; Tess awarded him a few mental points for the gentle tone of his follow-up question. "Did he like the work of Edgar Allan Poe? Did he read a lot of his poems or stories when he was growing up?"

  The Hilliards looked at each other as if this were a game show and they were desperately afraid of getting the answer wrong, lest they not be allowed to go on to the next level.

  "He read some," Mrs. Hilliard said at last. "He read a lot. But he did other things, too."

  "Such as?" An eager young woman with a tape recorder, she had Washington Post written all over her.

  "He watched television," Mr. Hilliard said, prompting a nervous laugh among the reporters, then silence. "Well, he did."

  "Bobby liked…" Mrs. Hilliard paused, and the reporters leaned toward her, various recording devices in hand. "He liked nice things. He liked to dress just so, and he liked antiques. He'd go out to the yard sales on the weekends, bring home what looked like junk to me. But he'd shine it up, or refinish it, and his room was so nice. I was surprised he left all those pretty things at home when he came down here, but he didn't take a stick of it."