Baltimore Blues (28 page)

“Look—” she began as the crabber fumbled in his bushel basket, then took out a revolver.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and took aim.

Tess threw the bar at his head. It caught him in the chest, knocking him down with a hard thump, the handgun flying from his hand. Only fifty pounds, but the bar had done its job. But when she tried to rush past him toward the locker rooms, he grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the floor. Now he was crawling toward the gun and trying to hold on to her ankle at the same time. Tess kicked free, got up, and fled down the circular staircase, sprinting to the storeroom where the boats were kept.

It was dark there, and she could only hope he wouldn’t know the location of the light switches, hidden behind a small closet door at the foot of the stairs. If he stopped to look for them, she might have time to go out the dock doors.
Behind her she heard his heavy tread on the metal stairs. Scared to stand upright, she crawled across the floor, ducking under the rows of hanging boats.
Oh say can you see
…Why was “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing in her head?

The concrete floor was cool on her palms and knees.
By the dawn’s early light
…Of course, she was worried about the dawn. Finding the logical connection almost made her smile. Soon the pale morning sun would start streaming through the oblong windows on the dock doors. But if she raised the doors, she would be backlit, the perfect target.

She pictured the boat house’s layout in her mind. The doors to the dock were about sixty feet away, three of them, one at the end of each long narrow aisle. A gunshot could destroy one of the Baltimore Rowing Club’s beautiful shells. Silly, but she’d hate to have that debt follow her through eternity.

Tess kept crawling until she ran out of room, wedging herself into the southeast corner. Perhaps she could hide until the other rowers started arriving. She glanced at her watch—5:20. No, ten minutes was too long to play this game of hide-and-seek, assuming anyone even showed up that early. Most of the rowers didn’t arrive until six. The light would start coming in, his eyes would adjust to the darkness, he would find her. She could hear one of his rubber boots squeaking as he walked back and forth, sighing patiently. He was keeping sentry along the west wall, waiting for her to rush the stairs.

Would she make the paper? Given the hour, she had a good chance at the front page. The street final of the evening paper was always looking for a cheap, late-breaking crime to create the illusion there was news in the later editions. She tried to write the story in her head.
A twenty-nine-year-old city woman was found dead today
…City Woman was quite famous, almost as famous as City Man. She died, she fell, she was rescued. But what would be the phrase, stuck between two commas, that would summarize Tess’s life for posterity? The appositive, it was called. Baltimore native? Former reporter? Bookstore clerk? Lanky brunette with over
bite? She imagined the rewrite man bent over his keys, happy with the details of her death, the tiny, knowable mystery of it all. Rich, but not too rich, easily captured in 400 words and fifteen minutes. A death dispatched in one edition, then reduced to a brief.

The twenty-nine-year-old native, who police described as an unemployed woman playing at detective
…Yes, that would be it, except it should be whom. Whom police described.

The boot was squeaking, coming closer now. Only one squeaked. Up one aisle, down the next. Dawn was filtering into the boat house, sneaking in around the edges of the heavy metal doors. And now that Tess thought about it, wasn’t “dawn’s early light” redundant? What else could the dawn’s light be? The boot seemed to chirp an off-key accompaniment to the song in her head.
And the rockets’ red glare/The bombs bursting in air
. God, she hated that song.

She tried to shrink into the corner and had to stifle an involuntary cry when a splintery piece of wood pressed into her back. A broken oar. At first she cursed the lazy rower who had left it there. Then she grabbed it, squeezing it tight as she listened to his boots. Otherwise he was silent, unnervingly so. He wasn’t stupid, the kind of person who felt he must explain why he was killing someone. Had he killed Abramowitz? Or Jonathan? Either way, it didn’t matter to him if Tess went to her grave knowing the full details. It was only important she go to her grave.

She heard the squeaking boot again, heading up the final aisle. Her aisle. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Straight toward Tess’s hiding place.
Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

She considered her options. She could stay hidden, assuming she was hidden. She could beg, stalling for time. Both were cowardly, prone to failure, and not entirely out of character for her. She waited, listening to his footsteps, watching his feet approach in the dim light. If she could see his feet, it was only a matter of moments before he could see her. She thought about how a race started, a sprint, the kind of
race decided with the first few strokes. “
Êtes-vous prêt? Partez!” Are you ready? Go!
And then the gun would go off.

No penalties for a false start here. She was so low to the ground, oar in hand, her cheek brushed the cement floor. His rubber boots were about eighteen inches from her nose. A Hail Mary ran through her mind, followed by the one ragged piece of Hebrew she knew from Passover.
Why is this morning different from all others?
Because someone is about to kill you.

She stared at his boots and thought about her unfinished life, wondered if she would get an obituary proper along with a news story. Maybe not. It pissed her off, thinking about how her death would be treated. Another little death, not even good enough to make what the obit writers called the
mort du jour
. She deserved better. But if she wanted better she’d have to live a little longer and die a little differently.

Still low, she took aim and cracked the oar across the man’s shins as hard as she could, just above the rubber boots, then rose with a terrible noise, unlike any sound she had ever made or would ever make again. With her second swing, the flat end of the oar caught him smack in the face, throwing her forward with its motion. Talk about a power piece. Talk about a burst. If she had been able to muster this much adrenaline in a race, Washington College would have had the best women’s eight in the country. She swung again, knocking him backward. This time he held on to the gun with both hands as he fell. Good—he didn’t have a hand free to grab her.

She leapt over him and headed for the door straight ahead, yanking its cord just enough to raise it twelve inches, allowing her to roll under it. Her attacker was broader; if he wanted to follow, he’d have to stop and raise it farther. Now outside, she looked up the hill to Waterview Avenue, empty at this time of day. Her car keys were back in the locker room. The garage door groaned as it opened wider, its cord tugged by rough, impatient hands. How fast could he run? How well could he shoot? How far could a bullet go?

The phrase “between the devil and the deep blue sea”
popped into Tess’s head and she looked toward the not-so-deep, not-so-blue Patapsco. Her worse nightmare, once upon a time. It had just been supplanted. She ran at top speed across the pavement, down the ramp and across the splintery dock, flinging herself into the dreaded water. Mouth shut tight, she swam beneath the surface until her skin was burning and her lungs bursting.

She came up about thirty yards from the dock. Was it far enough? She knew nothing of guns or how they worked. She heard two shots and submerged again, turning west, toward the marina and the glass factory, gliding under the water, then coming up for air every twenty yards. Two more shots sounded, but she was almost to the marina now. She stopped at the first boat, a Boston whaler, and grabbed its side. Peering around it, she looked back to the boat house, coughing up the filthy water.

The man was standing on the pier, looking around him. Behind him the boat house was coming to life. Lights were on in the storage room, cars pulling into the lot. A solitary sculler walked toward the water with his oars. The man looked back to the boat house and out to the water one more time, raised the gun to his head, and fired. Even as he pulled the trigger, the sculler had dropped his oars and was running toward him, shouting as if to stop him.

Tess continued to hold on to the Boston whaler. It had a name painted on the stern, one of those whimsical names so many boat owners prefer.
Paddy’s Wagon
, it proclaimed in merry green letters. She was holding on to the boat and still staring at those letters when someone from the shore finally spotted her and sent out a launch. It was Rock. Without saying a word he pried her fingers from the Boston whaler, lifted her into the small motorboat, and took her back.

He tried to lead her away from the body, but Tess wanted to look. It was a surprisingly neat suicide. There was a small black hole at his right temple and a little blood pooling beneath his head. She could smell burned wool where the powder had made contact with the ski mask. Ignoring Rock,
shaking off his arm as if he were some frail old man, Tess dropped to her knees by the body and pulled the mask up.

The mouth was slightly open, exposing perfect white teeth. The cheeks were cherubically round, the belly full beneath the windbreaker. It was, even in death, even after attempted murder, still an appealing face. The body still had the jolly girth that made one think of a beardless Santa Claus.

“You are conscientious, Miss Monaghan,” Frank Miles had told her more than once. She had thought he meant it as a compliment.

A
fter a tetanus shot and a visit from two homicide cops who wanted to review the morning’s events, Tess took to bed—actually, Kitty’s bed—with a bad case of paranoia. Twice she bolted to Kitty’s turquoise tiled bathroom to vomit up small portions of the Patapsco. Her muscles and joints were stiff and sore, the way they can be with a fever. Exhausted, she tried to sleep. But whenever she started to doze off, she jerked awake, terrified.

Frank Miles was O’Neal’s hit man. She had not told the police that; she had not told them anything but the morning’s barest facts, for fear she would be transported to Spring Grove and wake up in a ward full of poor William O’Neals whose mothers could not afford alternative justice systems. Miles had killed Abramowitz and probably killed Jonathan. Unquestionably he had wanted to kill her. She would bet anything it was Macauley’s gun he was brandishing this morning, stolen from Abramowitz’s office. Perhaps he had originally planned to implicate the old man, then Rock had given him a better opportunity.

No, it didn’t wash, not even in her weary, confused mind. A professional wouldn’t have been lurking in the Lambrecht Building as a custodian, biding his time. He wouldn’t have to steal someone’s gun. And he certainly wouldn’t kill himself when trapped. Of all the deaths and near-deaths, only Jonathan’s had been competently handled. Miles had been
an amateur. Like her. His only link to Seamon O’Neal was his compulsive neatness. A generous man, he had credited her with solving Abramowitz’s murder when she had never been further away. There were probably reams of physical evidence to link him to Abramowitz’s murder, but no one had paid attention. After all, he was the custodian, the man who had found the body, the man who scrubbed the bloodstains from the carpet.

Finally she slept, her body surrendering to sleep as it had surrendered to the river. She didn’t want to go, but she had to. It was almost six when she woke, and the room was dim. Through the filmy curtains that shrouded Kitty’s four-poster, she saw someone waiting for her.

“Kitty?” Her voice came out thick and rusty. She had already taken two showers today, but there were parts of her that would not come clean. The river seemed to coat the insides of her ears, her mouth, and her throat. It clung to her hair, thick and stiff. “Crow?”

Little Cecilia approached the bed, a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, looking impatient as always. She pushed the curtains aside.

“Your aunt said I could wait here for you to wake up, but she’d toss a dictionary at my head if I didn’t let you sleep. I’ve been here almost an hour.”

Tess slid down under the covers, pulling them up to her chin. “I’m sorry, Cecilia, I’m not in the mood to help you investigate anything today. Can’t you come back later?”

“Who said I need your help? Didn’t it ever occur to you I could help you?”

Cecilia unfolded the newspaper. It was the final evening edition, but Tess had not made the front page. In fact she was on the back of the state section, next to the weather map. Maybe if she had died she would have gotten better play.

“A sixty-two-year-old former middle school vice principal shot himself outside the Baltimore Water Resource Center after attacking a woman there,” Cecilia read slowly.

A vice principal? She thought Miles was a custodian with the city schools. But that had been her assumption because
of his current job. Miles had said only: “I used to be with the school system.”

Cecilia continued, picking up speed, a random Baltimore “O” occasionally creeping into her speech. Otherwise her voice was almost accentless, a trick of transformation that had taken far greater effort than cutting her hair and letting it return to its natural color. “Police are now investigating whether Frank Miles may be linked to the recent hit-and-run death of Jonathan Ross, witnessed by the same woman, Theresa Esther Monaghan of Bond Street. Mr. Miles met Ms. Monaghan, who works for lawyer Tyner Gray, when she conducted a routine interview in connection with the Michael Abramowitz murder case.” She tossed the paper on the bed.

“Except for the fact that’s one of the worst-written stories I’ve ever heard, I’m not sure why you decided to come over and read it to me this evening. But thanks for sharing.”

“It’s not the story. It’s the photograph.”

Tess picked up the paper and looked at Frank Miles, smiling his gentle smile in a staff photo that must have been at least fifteen years old. Nice of the school system to provide it to the paper, she thought. Would they have been so cooperative if he was still employed by them?

“Typical head and shoulders shot. Probably every principal and vice principal in the city has one on file. What’s so interesting?”

“Because if it wasn’t for the photo, I wouldn’t have remembered him by name. I know Frank Miles. He tried to join VOMA. Abramowitz had defended two men who raped his daughter.”

“Did he know the group’s real name, or was it just a happy coincidence that a real VOMA happened into VOMA?”

“We’ll never know.” Cecilia sat on the bed. “Pru turned him away, of course, the way she always did. I see now she recruited the original members with an eye to finding women who wouldn’t look too closely at the group’s finances. She wanted weak people, passive people. She didn’t want anyone she couldn’t control.”

“Did he get angry when you turned him away?”

“No. He was very sweet and understanding. He had brought brownies to the meeting, so Pru let him stay, just that once. His daughter was raped back and front by two neighborhood boys, classmates of hers. They said she was a whore who had done everyone in the neighborhood. She killed herself a month after they were acquitted. Pru told Mr. Miles he should find a group for people who had lost children to suicide.”

Tess remembered his shadowy living room, the dusty photographs on the wall. “I don’t have any children,” he had told her. “Just nieces and nephews.” But there had been a beautiful girl in a graduation gown.

“Can you prove this? Will the others remember?”

“I’m a few steps ahead of you—again.” Cecilia smiled. “He filled out a membership form so he could get on our mailing list. Not that Pru ever mailed anything but fund-raising solicitations. I got her to give it to me after I saw the paper this afternoon. She raised a stink, but I reminded her she’s not in a position to call the shots anymore.”

She unfolded the old sheet of paper. Frank Miles’s handwriting was neat and plain. Tess recognized his West Baltimore address.

“Are you going to the cops with this?”

“That’s my next stop. Not because I care about your friend, although I guess no one should do time for a crime he didn’t do. I want people to know a sweet, gentle man was driven crazy by what happened to his daughter. If Abramowitz had driven me to my death, I’d like to think my pop would have killed him, too.”

Tess reached out and put her hand on Cecilia’s arm. “I know you hate Abramowitz, but he did have a conscience. He agonized over the choices he made in his life and he paid for most of them. I read parts of a diary he left. He was very…self-aware. I grew to like him, reading it.”

The corners of Cecilia’s mouth moved in an odd way that, technically, would qualify as a smile. The ends turned up, a shadow of a dimple showed in her right cheek, but it was
the saddest face Tess had ever seen. “Did he ever mention the rape cases in his diary?”

“Well, I didn’t read it all,” Tess said. It sounded weak, even to her. She saw Cecilia’s point. Michael Abramowitz may have been tortured by his capital murder cases, his estrangement from the law, his futile campaign against Seamon O’Neal. But the rape cases weren’t important to him.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. Ever read
Don Quixote
?”

“No, I keep meaning to read it, but—I did see
Man of La Mancha
at Painters Mill when I was a kid.”

“The nuns make you read it in honors. I keep thinking of this one line. ‘What thanks does a knight-errant deserve for going out of his head when he has good cause?’ Frank Miles had good cause, Tess. His family played by the rules and was destroyed by them.”

“He didn’t have good cause, not against Abramowitz. If he wanted to avenge his daughter’s death, he should have killed the rapists.”

Cecilia shrugged. “For all we know, he did. I can do research, too. The two guys who raped his daughter were killed in a drive-by last year. Together, just the two of them. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

With that she walked to the door, then turned back. “I am sorry Frank Miles tried to kill you. I guess that was uncalled for.”

In spite of herself Tess had to laugh. Cecilia had a talent for making her laugh at the oddest things, when she thought nothing in the world would ever seem funny again. She was still giggling when she fell back asleep, a restful sleep this time. When she woke again it was Saturday morning and Kitty was kneeling by the bed, shaking her awake and telling her Tyner was on the phone. The police had agreed to review the physical evidence from the case. Cecilia was not the only new witness who had come forward. Ava Hill, accompanied by lawyer and mentor Seamon O’Neal, suddenly remembered all sorts of suspicious behavior on the part of Frank Miles.

The charges against Darryl “Rock” Paxton were dropped by mid-October, a week before the Charm City Classic.