In a Strange City Read online

  Or so she thought, until she stepped outside the next morning and began her usual daily hunt for the Beacon-Light. The carrier was mercurial; sometimes he left the papers in a little bunch at the bottom of the hill, other times he just seemed to fling his arms in the air and let the papers fall where they may. Today, Tess found hers—at least she hoped it was hers—in the backyard of the house across the street.

  It was only when she returned to her doorstep that she noticed the white envelope in the wicker basket she used for a mailbox. It was a heavy square, more creamy than white-white, formal enough to be a wedding invitation.

  But Tess didn't think many wedding invitations arrived overnight, before the rest of the mail. And while a wedding invitation might come with red rose petals, shouldn't the petals be inside the envelope, as opposed to strewn across the bottom of her mailbox?

  What had seemed merely interesting at her office was creepy on her threshold. Leaving the rose petals behind, she plucked the envelope from the basket and held it out in front of her, as if it were something lethal or foul-smelling. Arm still extended, she walked inside and sat at the mission table that did double duty as desk and dining room.

  miss monaghan had been hand-lettered on the envelope, written in a compressed old-fashioned hand, where even the looping o and the two a's were more vertical than horizontal. It was good stationery, heavy and substantial. If she was smart, she'd place it in a plastic bag immediately, take it to the police, and let it find a new home with the Evidence Control Unit.

  If she was smart… it was a big if. She sliced the envelope open with a Swiss army knife, noting the fabric backing within—blue stripes on cream, gender neutral—and unfolded the creased page with the tip of the knife. The words inside had been typed, on a computer, but in a fanciful font that mimicked the handwriting on the front.

  Good morning. The Pratt library is a fine place to do research on a cold winter's day. Have you ever visited the Poe room? You may have to ask at the information desk for a tour.

  P.S. It's easier to park on Mulberry than on Cathedral Street proper.

  At the bottom of the page was a quote, presumably from Poe, although it meant nothing to Tess, who knew only of the bells and Annabel Lee and, of course, the nevermore-ing raven:

  There are some qualities—some incorporate things,

  That have a double life, which thus is made

  A type of that twin entity which springs

  From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.

  Retreating to the kitchen, she found a pair of tongs, which she used to slide the letter and envelope into a plastic sandwich bag. This accomplished, she decided to hide the document until she could transfer it to the safe in her office. She had an old oyster tin with a false bottom, and she fitted it here. While she was bending over, making sure everything was securely back in place, someone goosed her from behind with a long cold nose. She jumped and turned and found herself staring into Esskay's accusing eyes. The dog, who had already been walked by Crow this morning, was trying to scam another walk out of Tess.

  "A stranger came skulking around here last night," Tess told the dog, crouching in front of her. "I know you don't bark, but could you at least whimper? Is that too much to ask?"

  She had meant to be rhetorical. But Esskay stuck her nose under Tess's arm and knocked her backward on her ass.

  "I'll take that as a yes," Tess told the dog. She reached for the newspaper from where she sat on the floor and unsheathed it from its yellow plastic bag, skimming quickly to see if the Beacon-Light was paying attention to the Shawn Hayes angle. Cecilia didn't even rate a paragraph in the story which meant the Blight editors had been convinced—by the police department, most likely—that she was a crank, a nut. Or perhaps Shawn Hayes's family, conscious of the discretion he had shown in his life, had prevailed on the paper, arguing that he deserved no less now that he was in a coma. Such deals were still cut for Baltimore's most powerful families.

  Last night, the local television stations, less discriminating, had given Cecilia her Sunday-night sound bite, but they wouldn't know where to go with this piece of the story until the print folks showed them the way.

  Cecilia's problem was that the press, local and out-of-town, had already framed the tale in its collective mind. It was Poe, it was a ghost story, it was "human interest." If Bobby Hilliard had been shot on a corner somewhere, coming home from work, he would have rated a mere paragraph and Cecilia's theories would have excited much more interest, at least locally. But the Poe angle was too delicious. The media couldn't surrender it, not yet.

  Tess glanced back at the oyster tin. She should call Herman Peters at the Blight and ask if he had the police report on Shawn Hayes. If the two cases were connected—and Rainer, for all his bluster, had never denied this—perhaps it would lead her to the Pig Man.

  "Of course, going to the library would just be silly," she remarked to Esskay "This note is probably someone's idea of a joke. For all I know, it's Whitney, pulling my leg."

  Esskay stood over her, pushing out the sour, fishy breaths Tess had come to love because they were an inextricable part of this prima donna disguised as a dog.

  "Then again, the library doesn't even open until ten. So if that's my first stop of the day we could justify going back to bed for another hour."

  At last, something they could agree on.

  Two hours later, as Tess locked her door, she became aware of a sudden motion in the street behind her, the strange little eddy of air created by someone trying to rush without quite running.

  Her reaction was so swift that it outpaced instinct: She turned, keys laced through her fists, and let her right arm extend like a jack-in-the-box.

  Luckily for her visitor, he was taller than she, and the keys grazed his neck instead of his eyes. Luckier still, his neck was well padded with a plaid muffler, so the keys merely sank into the folds of fabric. But he was caught off guard, and he stepped backward down her step, almost twisting his ankle as he fell to one knee.

  Standing over him, Tess recognized the dark hair and prissy mouth of the cable-show talking head from the press conference, even though the mouth was uncharacteristically shut. She stepped around him quickly, heading toward her car.

  He scrambled to his feet and managed to insert himself between her and the Toyota, not unlike a salesman who has learned to stick his foot in a slamming door.

  "Jim Yeager," he said, thrusting out a hand. "I need to talk to you."

  "I have an office," she said. "Do people come to your home on business?"

  He continued to block her path, his hand still out, his hopes of a warm welcome not quite extinguished.

  "Well, no," he said. "But I have an unlisted address. One has to, in my line of work. It's amazing, the things that people project, you know? I'd be afraid of crazy people showing up."

  "Exactly," said Tess, who also had an unlisted address. Which meant that Yeager had found her through someone's tip, probably Rainer's, payback for her appearance at yesterday's press conference. First a Norwegian radio reporter, now this guy. Rainer sure knew where her buttons were located and how to push them.

  "Now, now. Do I look crazy?"

  "What you look like," Tess said, "is a Washington-ian."

  "Is that, a priori, a bad thing?" He liked to use Latin legalisms, it was his shtick, his gimmick, his way of reminding his audience that he had a law school education. "Being a Washingtonian, not just looking like one, I mean."

  "Definitely." Actually, Tess liked Washington for its beautiful buildings and good food. It wasn't Washington's fault that such insufferable people had collected there, like hair in a drain. Come to think of it, maybe it was Maryland's fault. The state had donated the rectangle of land that became the nation's capital.

  "Look, I'm sorry to show up here, but I got a tip that you know something about the Poe case, and I'd like to talk to you about it."

  "If I did know something, it would be information developed from working for
a client, and I couldn't share it with you. If I didn't know anything—and trust me, I don't—then I still would have nothing to say to you."

  "Hear me out." On television, Yeager was a verbal bullyboy, speaking so swiftly and emphatically that his guests seldom got a word in edgewise. But he was soft-pedaling it with Tess, trying to ingratiate himself. He looked like one of those men who had been told— maybe just once, and very long ago—that he was charming. He had curly black hair that made Tess think of the darkest Concord grapes and a heavy coarse-featured face that was too florid for him ever to progress to the more mainstream news shows. Yet he was close to bursting with self-esteem.

  "A mere ten minutes of your time," he wheedled. "Can't we go inside, where I can tell you what I'm proposing?"

  She wouldn't have a stranger in her house, not even on a normal morning, and this morning had veered beyond normal hours ago. She was fussy about her home. It was for friends and family, not business, never business.

  But Yeager was going to be hard to shake, if she didn't go through the motions of giving him what he wanted. What if he kept coming back, now that he knew where she lived?

  "There's a coffee shop at the foot of the hill, on Cold Spring Lane. The Daily Grind. I was going to fuel up down there before heading in to work. I'll give you exactly one cup of coffee to make your pitch, whatever it is."

  "The Daily Grind? Cute name. But is the coffee any good? I have to admit, Starbucks has totally spoiled me. I need my decaf double latte with skim to start the day."

  "I think you'll be able to make do."

  ***

  Tess had lived in her new neighborhood for ten months. This North Side outpost of the Daily Grind had been part of her routine for nine months, three weeks, and six days. She had started going there in the early days of renovating her house because she wanted to eat a dust-free breakfast, and she had just never stopped. It was a one-of-a-kind place, a neighborhood crossroads where students, North Baltimore bohemians, and very proper Roland Park types all converged. Local art hung on the walls, and there was a fake grotto with a waterfall and a gazing globe set on a pedestal. The most recent addition was the "Elvis sofa," a huge white-velour sectional with gold trim, which made Tess feel as if she were on the set of the Merv Griffin show. The orange juice was fresh, the coffee exquisite. Tess's only grudge against the Daily Grind was that it didn't open before 7 a.m. She would have welcomed an early cup of coffee in the warm weather months, when she headed out at 6 a.m. to row.

  "Funky," Jim Yeager said. He never sounded quite sincere, perhaps because of his overweening self-awareness. It was as if he played back every moment of his life on a little monitor in his head, allowing him to assess, instantly, every facial expression and vowel sound. "Not what I expected in Baltimore."

  "Let me guess." Tess handed her battered go-cup to Glenn, the gregarious chef who was one of the Daily Grind's chief draws. No snooty barristas here, just Glenn and his partner, Travis, and a rotating army of pretty girls and handsome boys who maintained the right degree of chipperness, depending on the hour: mellow in the morning, perky in the afternoon, laid-back in the evening. "When you think of Baltimore—which I'm sure you just loooooooove—you think of the Inner Harbor, Camden Yards, steamed crabs, and Little Italy. Oh, and don't forget those white marble steps and dem O's."

  Jim Yeager looked puzzled. "Well, yes. I mean, I do love to go to Oriole games, and we often go to Little Italy or O'Brycki's afterward."

  "How would you feel if we met at a party and I said, "I just looooooooooove Washington, D.C., with all its cool monuments and the cherry blossoms and that wonderful restaurant, Duke Ziebart's, that Larry King is always talking about‘?"

  "Duke Ziebart's is closed and Larry King is an ass."

  "Exactly."

  They took a booth toward the back, near the makeshift bookshelves and the portable CD player, where Blossom Dearie was whispering her way through the morning. The current art on display was from the Baltimore Glassman, a so-called visionary artist—Tess disliked the term, it smacked of patronage—who made whimsical placards from magazines, glitter, and the never-dwindling supply of broken glass found in Baltimore's streets. Crow had given her one of his pieces for Christmas, a stunning Statue of Liberty who lifted her lamp in what would one day be the dining room.

  "Interesting," Yeager said, of the piece that hung over their heads, a smiling man in red pants and turquoise shirt, pouring something into a cup over the legend: hot coffee on a cold day/you don't say.

  "So, here's my proposition," Yeager began, only to be interrupted by a cell phone buzzing somewhere, muffled by material. "You or me?"

  "You. I turn mine off when I'm talking to someone," Tess said pointedly.

  He patted his pockets, found his phone, flipped it open, and looked at the number. "No one I need to talk to right now."

  "If you think about it," Tess said, "how many people do you need to talk to right now? I mean, other than a family emergency, or someone from your work, announcing that you have a chance to sit down with the freak of the week if you'll come to the studio right this minute, how accessible do you need to be? Isn't voice mail adequate to meet most of your needs?"

  He gave her his puzzled look again, a practiced expression that must have been used to ponder imponderables from a whole gamut of people in the news. "But you have a cell phone, too. You just said."

  "I'm often away from phones for long stretches, doing surveillance. But I never speak on it while I'm driving. And I don't interrupt conversations with live people in order to answer it, unless I'm expecting an urgent call, which I almost never am. My rules, developed for me. I don't expect the rest of the world to follow."

  Yeager sipped his latte. She could tell he was surprised by how good it was, but he knew better now than to go all wide-eyed over Baltimore's ability to produce a decent cup of coffee. He was looking thoughtful. Looks can be deceiving.

  "What did you mean when you made that crack about "freak of the week‘? I do a serious news show. I interview politicians and pollsters, informed journalists. I don't trot out trailer trash in search of their fifteen minutes of fame."

  "Well, I don't have cable"—the sad look on Jim Yeager's face was notable for its authenticity and purity— "but I've read about your show in the papers from time to time and caught snippets when someone insists on putting it on in the gym. Didn't you recently have on that husband of the big Hollywood star, the guy who impregnated his daughter-in-law and then fought the divorce, holding his wife up for a big cash settlement?"

  "There were serious legal issues involved in that case. We had some of the country's top legal minds on—"

  "Top legal minds? Oh, you mean the woman who lost the easiest murder trial of the last century while the whole world watched, and that guy who wears the fringe jacket. You know, that's what I want in a lawyer. A guy in a buckskin jacket who's always on television."

  Yeager smiled. "You're a former print reporter, right?"

  He had surprised her. She wouldn't have expected a self-created television "personality" such as Yeager to do any research. She assumed he had a producer who did all the messy digging for facts.

  "A long long time ago. Except for a few painful flashbacks here and there, I barely remember my misspent youth."

  "How did you become a private investigator?"

  "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time." She had meant to be flippant, but the remark opened an old door in her head, a door she tried to keep closed at all times. She was reminded, with a painful acuity, of that autumn when everyone around her seemed to die.

  "What's your connection to the Poe shooting?"

  "None."

  "I have a source." He delivered a lawyerly glare, the lookthatGregoryPeckandRaymondBurrand Spencer Tracy had used as, respectively, Atticus Finch and Perry Mason and Clarence Darrow. "I have a source who tells me you're an eyewitness."

  "Is your source a homicide cop with more teeth than a piano has keys?"

  "I ask
the questions," Yeager said, thumping his chest with an index finger, like a two-year-old who has just discovered the first-person singular.

  "Really? When did we agree on those ground rules? We're not in your studio. I don't see any cameras here."

  He smiled. He was going to go for charming again.

  "You're very photogenic. You could have gone into television, when your print career ended. You've got the look. Pretty enough, but intelligent-looking too."

  Yes, I could have, Tess thought, only I didn't want to shame my family. But she didn't say anything, just drank her coffee from her insulated travel mug with the Daily Grind logo.

  "Here's the deal. I'm doing a show on the murders this Thursday night, which is my highest rating night. Not sure why. I think people want a little intellectual fare before the weekend gets under way."

  Tess let that pass, although it hurt, watching such a fat pitch go by.

  "So I thought I'd have a Poe scholar on—I've found this guy from Duke, who has developed some really radical theories about him and his life—then segue to this modern detective story, as full of twists as anything Poe might have written. Your eyewitness descriptions could add some real spice; you could be, like, the Baltimore explicator. You could fill in how this goes on every year—blah, blah, blah, the ritual, the tradition, blah, blah, blah—and explain Baltimore to the world at large."

  "Hmmmm. Why don't you get Anne Tyler to do that? Or John Waters, or Barry Levinson? They're the big names, the ones everyone associates with Bawlmer."

  "We tried," Yeager admitted, all too happy to let Tess know she wasn't his first choice. "Waters is on the West Coast, doing the sound mix on his latest film project; Levinson is shooting a film out of the country, and Anne Tyler said she doesn't do television. Can you imagine?"

  Tess could.

  "So, what do you think?"

  "Honestly? I think it's about as across-the-board-irresponsible as anything I've ever heard. This is an open homicide investigation. It's a little fresh to be processed, canned, and repackaged for the purposes of feeding the entertainment-industry maw."