Baltimore Blues (6 page)

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 what 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.

T
ess 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
.

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 that 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.

Tyner sighed. “Rock, I know your perspective on this is you’re an innocent man and some horrible mistake has been made. It doesn’t work that way. I’m not sure you’ll be allowed to leave the state for the Head of the Ohio, much less the Head of the Charles. You were lucky you had enough cash on hand to pay a bail bondsman.”

Rock looked stunned. Miss the Head of the Charles? Tyner now had his full attention.

“Our biggest problem is that the police are satisfied they have the right suspect,” Tyner said. “This is the kind of high-profile case they’re pressured to solve quickly, and they’re already congratulating themselves on what a no-brainer it was—and that’s
before
talking to Ava. We can only hope their investigation will founder on a lack of evidence, or that someone else might be implicated. In the meantime we can begin gathering information to help us get the charges dropped or, if it comes to that, dissuade a jury. This is where Tess comes in.”

“Back up. I thought we all agreed I
caused
this mess. Why involve me?”

“Because you now work for me. You’re going to turn over your notes from your ‘investigation’ and, if anyone asks to see them, I’m going to argue they’re privileged. Same thing if the police try to talk to you, or the state’s attorney. I will show them our employment contract, dated September first—the day you contracted with Rock.”

“Am I really working for you, or is this just a scam?”

“You’re going to work your ass off,” Tyner promised, grinning. “You are going to do things I hate to do. You are going to photocopy and fetch my lunch. You are going to take my jackets to the tailor if I tell you to. And you are going to conduct preliminary interviews with key witnesses, gathering the information I need to play what I call ‘tick-tock’—a little game designed to open windows for other murderers while narrowing Rock’s opportunity.”

Tick-tock, Tyner explained, was Salvador Dalí’s timepiece, liquid and flexible. Did Rock really go upstairs at 10
P.M
., as the guard told police? Could it have been 10:05? Or 9:45? If the guard was lax about procedures such as calling up, might he have been similarly lax about timekeeping? Who else went in and out? Tess’s job was to interview the security guard, the custodian, and anyone else, and—politely, sweetly, deferentially—create as much confusion in their minds as possible.

“Tick-tock,” Tyner said. “Open windows, find new doors and exits. ‘Did you happen to check your watch? A digital
watch? Did you notice exactly what time it was? Of course you didn’t, I guess; no one notices the exact time. Ten o’clock is an estimate, right, your best guess?’

“‘Does everyone sign in, sir? Everyone? Does anyone ever sneak in? Never? Did you go to the door to smoke a cigarette or breathe the night air? Are you sure?’ That’s how you play. And our first player is Rock. Except I want him to be specific and very clear about what he did, and when. Tess, you used to be a reporter. Take notes.” He threw a legal pad and a pen at her.

Rock looked at Tyner’s worn rug as he spoke. The beginning of his story was familiar, at least to Tess. Ava had called him about 8:30
P.M
. That could be established with a log of calls from Ava’s car phone; even Tess knew that. Ava hadn’t told Rock anything on the phone, only asked him to wait at his apartment until she arrived.

“Take your phone off the hook, sweetie,” she had urged him. “Don’t talk to anyone until I get there.”
Nice block
, Tess thought.
She kept me from getting to him first
.

She had arrived by 9:00. Ava told Rock how Abramowitz had forced her to sleep with him, claiming she would never find another lawyer’s job in Baltimore if she refused. She figured anyone who had defended rapists and murderers could defend himself against something as ephemeral as sexual harassment, so she gave in. In return he promised her a brilliant future. Although the arrangement had put her on the verge of a nervous collapse, she had been handling everything just fine, until “this woman” had tried to blackmail her.

“Totally untrue,” Tess protested.

“I didn’t believe that part,” Rock assured her. “I figured Ava didn’t understand what our arrangement was and misinterpreted your conversation.” Still giving Ava the benefit of the doubt, Tess noted. It had not yet occurred to Rock that Ava might be an accomplished liar.

“I stroked her hair until she fell asleep,” he continued. “I would look down and see my hand on her hair, and I would think that Abramowitz had touched her, too. It made
me sick. And after awhile it made sense to get my bike and go down there, to the firm.”

“How did you know he would be there?” Tyner asked.

“I didn’t. Ava had told me he was always there, always working. I figured last night wouldn’t be any different. And he was there, but he was watching the O’s game. His office is like his own private sky box—it looks right into Camden Yards. If you turn on WBAL it’s better than being there. He even had a beer and a hot dog. I think that made me even angrier, the idea that he was sitting up in his office, watching a ball game, while Ava was practically hysterical. So I told him—I told him what I thought of him, and how we could go to the EEOC and the state bar, maybe even the newspapers. He just laughed.”