Baltimore Blues (16 page)

I
t was almost noon before Tess could face being vertical. She sat on the floor of the shower and let hot water pound on her, trying to decide if this made her feel better or worse. It was a draw. Finally she slicked her hair back into a tight, damp ponytail—the tension from the elastic band seemed to help her headache—and set out for the courthouse pressroom.

“Feeney’s law,” a sign on the door warned. “The second-worst editor is a failed reporter. The worst editors were all successful reporters.”

She pushed open the door and found the
Beacon-Light
courthouse reporter leaning back in his ergonomic chair, his feet on the antique rolltop he had salvaged with the help of a friendly custodian. He had the phone cradled in his ear, a computer keyboard in his lap, and an entire bag of Utz potato chips in his mouth. Sour cream and onion. She could smell them from across the room.

“I don’t care what you told ’em at the eleven o’clock budget meeting,” he drawled, crunching between words. “You see, unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. The judge just didn’t understand your need for simplicity, for—what do you call it?—a hard, clean narrative line. Maybe by the time you go to the three o’clock budget meeting you can get it right. If not, try for the four o’clock meeting. Hey, but it’s not your fault. You’re an editor. You’re a moron.”

He placed the phone carefully back in its cradle. If Feeney had slammed down phones or raised his voice, he might have been fired long ago for insubordination. That or the death threats he made against editors every other day. But he was so calm, almost jovial in the way he verbally abused his bosses, that they assumed his attitude was a joke. They never guessed, or at least never admitted, that Feeney’s contempt for them was genuine.

Feeney was everything his office sanctuary was not—untidy, with hair forever straggling over his collar and his shirttail always slipping out of baggy khakis. He ate only those foods that could be purchased within fifty yards of the courthouse, a self-imposed restriction guaranteeing a steady diet of hot dogs, which had added a slight paunch to his lanky frame now that he was in his forties. Once a month he shaved, usually on the day he went in to file his expense account. He had been at the newspaper for almost three years, and most of his coworkers were not sure what he looked like. He preferred it that way.

“Darlin’ Tess—what can I do for you? Are you going to run around again with a man’s coat over your head? I didn’t get a chance to see that, but it’s the talk of the courthouse.”

“Next time I’ll tip you off. Today I just want to figure out how to track down an individual asbestos plaintiff.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s an elderly man.”

“You’ve really narrowed it down. Next I guess you’re going to tell me he worked at the shipyards.”

Accustomed to Feeney’s sarcasm, Tess pulled out the clipping and consulted it. “He was awarded $850,000 in one of the last nonconsolidated trials, whatever that means. And Sims-Kever was the only defendant, at least in his case.”

“That’s a start.” The keyboard still in his lap, Feeney tapped in the command for the
Beacon-Light
’s library system. “Luckily I got a hard drive. A lot of the bureaus don’t have the library hookup, but I told ’em I did too much deadline work not to have access.”

“It keeps you out of the building, right?”

“You got it. Now I’m trying to convince them to give me my own Lexis/Nexis account. But they keep bitching about the invoice I put in for a microwave. Damn, the system’s slow today.” He punched the keys viciously and, eventually, a form appeared on the screen, requesting information for a search. Feeney typed: “Sims-Kever” and “asbestos.”

“I’m gonna put in a time line,” he explained to Tess as he jabbed at the keys with two fingers. “They consolidated all the asbestos cases into one big trial a few years back, trying to free up the courts, but before that there were dozens every year. I’m going to tell the computer to search before consolidation.”

He pushed a button.
Ninety-seven items found
, the computer replied.

“Jesus, ninety-seven stories. That’s way too much to go through. We gotta narrow it down. Hand me that clip.” He skimmed it. “Whatta piece of shit. Why’d they give this guy a column, anyway? Wait, here’s another little detail.” He typed in “Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Three items found
, the computer replied.

“That tells me there are three stories in the system in our time frame that mentioned Sims-Kever, asbestos, and $850,000.” Tess looked over his shoulder, enthralled. Electronic data bases were new to her. The ailing
Star
had never been on-line. In fact the morgue at the
Star
was famous primarily for being about five years behind at any given moment. And for filing photos of Mickey Mouse under “Rodents, famous.”

Feeney called up each story, the words rolling so fast beneath his fingers that Tess could barely skim them. “You’ve lucked out. Here are three plaintiffs who got $850,000 from Sims-Kever, two in the same trial, both in the same court, Judge West. If I were you, I’d take these names over to his clerk, see if any ring a bell. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I also could just call ’em up, if they’re still alive.”

“Yeah, but what are you going to say? ‘Hey, are you the old dude who chased that lawyer with the bat?’ Or are you
going to pretend to be doing a telephone survey on baseball bat ownership?”

“Good point. You’re better at this than I am.”

“What exactly is ‘this’? You a private eye now? Or are you planning on law school?”

“I’m not sure, Feeney. But if there’s a story here, I promise to tell you before anyone.”

“Even Jonathan?”

“He’ll be the last to know. Hey—you didn’t tell him that I called the other day, did you?”

Feeney shook his head. “I didn’t know I had anything to tell. Even now that I’ve seen the clip and know where you’re headed, it seems like a long shot, Tess. What are you trying to prove, that some little old man did the lawyer? It’s a big leap from running around with a baseball bat and banging someone’s head to a pulp.”

The phone rang. He let it ring five times, then picked it up as if he had all the time in the world. His voice was sweet and mellow, even if his words were not.

“Feeney here. What? Well, that’s the stupidest fuckin’ idea I ever heard. How’d you get this job anyway? You sleeping with somebody over there?” Tess could hear the editor’s nervous laughter on the other end. She pantomimed good-bye and slipped out. An old political reporter on the
Star
had once given her three rules for success in journalism: Be a star. Be a columnist. Report from a different city than the one in which your newspaper is based. Feeney had found his own city, just six blocks from the
Blight
’s offices.

It was still lunchtime, but she thought she might find Judge West’s clerk at her desk, wolfing down a sack lunch. Courthouse employees didn’t make enough to dine out regularly at any place finer than Taco Bell. Sure enough, a round-faced young woman was hunched over her desk, a can of Coke, a bag of chips, and an egg salad sandwich on a napkin in front of her.

“Hey, I’m Tess Monaghan. I used to work at the
Star
. I think we met a couple of times, Ms…. Collington.” She had never seen the woman before in her life, but the clerk
was considerate enough to have a nameplate on her desk:
D. COLLINGTON
.

“Donna. Donna Collington.” She was a black woman with a reddish undercast to her skin, no more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with a sweet baby face and fingernails long enough to rip someone’s heart out. Plump, she strained the seams of a tight purple dress, but in a way most men would find attractive.

“I work for a local law firm now, and we’ve got this messy criminal case. I mean, it’s crazy.”
So far, all true
. “My boss wants me to find this guy who might be able to testify for our client, but all we know is he was one of two plaintiffs in this court two years ago, in an asbestos case. I have the names, but I can’t figure out which one he is.”

“Why not call both?”

Good question
. “That’s what I thought. But my boss told my specifically not to call them. And when I asked why, he told me it was none of my business, just do it his way.”

Donna Collington laughed as if she understood.

“Been there, done
that
. But I still don’t know how I can help you. Those asbestos cases are all a blur. Just one long line of old men spitting into handkerchiefs and dragging their oxygen tanks around.”

“Well, this gentleman would have been one of the last ones, before consolidation. He also appears to have been rather rambunctious.”

“Rambunctious?”

“Feisty. Bad tempered. Prone to outbursts. Maybe he made threats, or acted up.”

Donna laughed again. “You mean like somebody who might have tipped the judge’s water pitcher on a lawyer’s head?”

“Yes, for example.”

“Not ‘for example.’ For real. He was this little guy, looked like an elf, cute as could be. He didn’t even seem that sick, compared to the others. But he got so upset when some of the others got more money that he grabbed the judge’s pitcher—splash, all over the lawyer’s head. His law
yer. I’d hate to see what he’d have done to the lawyer for the other side if the bailiff hadn’t cuffed him.”

Yes, you would
, thought Tess, who had seen the photographs in the autopsy report. “Do you remember his name?”

“Only his first name. Because his wife was screaming it out over and over, trying to calm him down. ‘
Oh, Abner. Oh, Abner. For the love of God, Abner
.’ I almost wet my pants. And the judge was trying so hard not to laugh, he
split
his. Li’l Abner, we called him.”

Tess checked the printout Feeney had given her. Abner. Abner Macauley. A match.

“Thanks, Donna.”

“No problem. You go make your boss happy, now.” She smiled sweetly, wagging a long red nail at her. “Tyner Gray should be real happy with you today. But next time don’t come in here telling me lies, girlfriend. I knew who you were working for all along. Everybody in the courthouse knows about that long-haired girl who ran the fifty-yard dash through here last week.”

Tess blushed. She had forgotten what a small world the courthouse was, how little was secret here. All along, Donna Collington, with her innocent baby face, had known who she was and what her “messy case” was about. Humbled, she headed back to Fells Point and her shift at the bookstore, for which she was already late.

Kitty gave her a baleful stare when she showed up at the register on a run from the bus stop. She was rearranging the children’s section, setting up for a
House at Pooh Corner
party for the weekend. After reading a magazine article about the increasingly competitive nature of children’s birthday parties, Kitty had decided to go head-to-head with Chuck E. Cheese, luring Baltimore’s more bookish parents into the store for theme parties—Pooh,
Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows
. All the children received five dollar gift certificates to the store. A shrewd investment, as their parents inevitably dropped at least fifty dollars more when they came to pick the kids up.

“Kitty!” Tess said, going on the offensive. “You’re ac
tually wearing clothes! Is officer Friendly out making Baltimore safe for democracy?”

Instead of her usual kimono Kitty wore black linen pedal pushers with tiny bows at the cuffs and a black cotton sweater several sizes too large for her small frame. It kept sliding back and forth, exposing first one shoulder, then the other. Crow, perched on a ladder in the women’s fiction section, was almost dizzy from watching the sweater swoosh back and forth.

“At least I made it to my yoga class this morning,” she said. “I don’t let men disrupt my life. I disrupt theirs.”

So Jonathan’s visit had not gone unnoticed. Kitty didn’t disapprove of casual sex, just of Jonathan. She thought Tess could do better. Tess knew she could do worse.

“Look—some of us aren’t goddesses. We have to settle.”

“Even goddesses don’t always settle.” That was Crow, from his perch. “Athena never wanted a man. The nymph Laurel turned into a tree rather than end up with Apollo. And he
was
a god.”

Tess ignored him, lowering her voice so only Kitty could hear. “Jonathan’s not so bad. When he’s excited about something, about work, he needs someone who understands. His current girlfriend doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t understand that he needs to sleep with someone else? No, I suppose she doesn’t.”

Crow was staring at them so intently that Tess was sure he was going to fall off the library ladder. She whispered, “It’s not really about sex. The sex is secondary, almost…perfunctory.”

“All the more reason not to have it,” Kitty said smugly.

Tired and irritable, Tess was on the verge of saying something wounding to her aunt, something she might regret, when she noticed a wan, tiny figure approaching the register. Head down, the woman moved resolutely, a posture the store’s employees usually identified with someone intent on finding the Kama-sutra or a book with orgasm in the title.

But it was Cecilia, the little Kung Fu-fightin’ bride-to-be from VOMA. Tess wondered what book she wanted. Kitty
had an entire section about rape, including several books about trying to have a normal sex life again.

“Your card didn’t say it was a bookstore,” Cecilia said. Her voice sounded faintly accusing but also confused.

“I guess it didn’t.” Tess groped desperately for whatever persona she had presented the other night. What had she told her? Who had she been?

“We’re partners,” Kitty said, a smooth and accomplished liar. It dated from her early days in the business when she was juggling bills and creditors.

“Oh.” Cecilia rocked on her heels in front of the counter, her eyes on the wide wooden planks beneath her feet. “I called on the phone to get directions, but I’ve never been here before. I guess I wasn’t sure what it was.”