Baltimore Blues (9 page)

“Let’s go watch from the front,” Rock said. “I like thunderstorms.”

They left through their respective dressing rooms, meeting in the large hall that ran the length of the building’s north side. Although this room was decorated with plaques, photographs, and etchings of rowers and their shells, real rowers seldom ventured into it. The city rented it out every weekend for wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, and banquets. A plain room, it was in demand only because of its sweeping view of the Patapsco and the city beyond—Camden Yards, the three large gas tanks that rose and fell depending on the city’s natural gas supply, downtown’s ragged skyline. The view was better at night, all white lights and silhouettes.

“Maybe lightning will strike the IBM building,” Tess
said, referring to a white skyscraper usually listed among the city’s top ten architectural offenses.

“Or the Maryland National Bank tower,” Rock said. “Excuse me, the NationsBank tower. I still can’t get used to that, this North Carolina company owning Maryland’s biggest bank.”

“Hey, I haven’t gotten used to Friendship Airport becoming Baltimore-Washington International, and that must have happened over twenty-five years ago.”

“Sometimes I think Baltimore is a city that defines itself by what’s gone, what used to be.”

“Well, the
Star
is a parking lot across from Harborplace.”

“The Colts—the Ravens can’t make up for losing Johnny Unitas’s team.”

“Hutzler’s department store is the Department of Human Resources.”

“McCormick moved to the suburbs, so there’s no more cinnamon smell drifting over the harbor.”

“And the flea market at the old Edmondson Drive-In is a Home Depot now.

This was how they spoke: They built lists together, stacks of loosely related facts. Tess did not know if this was a generally masculine way of speaking, or a style specific to Rock. At any rate, she liked it.

He looked over the water, watching the lightning strike. Tess looked at him, remembering Jonathan’s questions.
Where was he from? Does he have a history of assaulting people?
She knew only that he wasn’t born here, although he had been in Baltimore long enough to consider it home. Their friendship was built on the present, and they seldom spoke of the past. Tess had assumed this was how men became friends—through activities, innocuous riffing and banter, sports scores.
How ’bout them O’s?
She liked it. Besides, Baltimore was filled with people who knew her life story. It had been a relief to find a friend who wanted to talk about nothing more than current events, or whether antioxidants boosted performance.

The storm was moving east. Tess could have taken a
crayon and drawn a line straight up the floor-to-ceiling windows. To the right of the line the sky would be black, shot through with lightning; the left was washed-out and clear. An eerie sight, this black and white Baltimore. She slipped her hand into Rock’s. Nothing about Tess was dainty, but her hands were especially large, with ragged nails and a rower’s calluses. Rock’s hand was larger and rougher still. She liked him for that, too. Folding her hand inside his, he squeezed gently. He did know his strength, how to be gentle, how to curb his power. But he had to think about it, Tess realized. He had to try.

W
hitney—former college roommate, sometime best friend, sometime toughest competitor—called at nine that morning, when Tess had finally started to transcribe her tapes and notes. She was grateful for the distraction. She could have written a news story or a press release about her meetings with Dumbarton and Miles, but a report was a foreign form to her. Did one include everything, or edit judiciously? Could she record her own impressions, or did objectivity rule here, too? Hopelessly blocked, she lunged for the phone.

“Word is, you had another Jonathan encounter,” Whitney said by way of greeting.

Tess sighed. “I bet he came into work this morning and sent an electronic message to everyone on the
Beacon-Light
computer system: ‘Tess Monaghan will sleep with you, but she won’t tell you anything.’”

“No, but he did stage one of his special scenes for my benefit, pacing madly around his desk when I walked by, complaining loudly to the city editor about how ‘she’ wouldn’t leak. Lovely imagery.”

“I don’t leak. It’s one of my best qualities.”

“Why don’t you meet me for lunch at the Tate—on the paper, of course. I can always claim I was wooing a recalcitrant source. But I’m leaving if you start to leak. Or even ooze. I’ve had enough dates like that recently. It’s like a
science fiction novel. All they leave behind are little puddles.”

“Talk about lovely imagery. Noon?”

“Twelve-fifteen. If I’m late order me a crab cake and coleslaw. The patty, not the sandwich. Broiled, not fried.” Whitney never meant to sound imperious, but certain tones came naturally to a Talbot.

The last name was pronounced not like the chain of preppy clothing stores but like the Eastern Shore county where Whitney’s family summered. “Tall, but.” Tess had been struck by Whitney’s drawling rendition of her name when they met freshman year in college. “Whitney Tall-but,” she said, squeezing Tess’s hand quite hard, as if to measure her strength. Tess squeezed back, staring skeptically at this fabulous creature—straight blond hair, narrow green eyes, long bones, and a jaw so sharp she could have cut cheese with it.
I can like this woman or hate her
, Tess told herself,
but I’ll never be indifferent to her
. She decided to like her. It was a decision she seldom regretted.

Still, they could never stop competing. Whitney was the best rower, Tess the strongest. Whitney was rich and thin, Tess wild and impulsive. In the classroom they fought for top honors and dreamed of the Sophie Kerr prize, a no-strings endowment granted to the school’s best writer. Whitney took herself out of the running, transferring to Yale to major in Japanese. Tess lost the Kerr prize to a quiet, long-haired young man she had never noticed.

Maybe I chose wrong that day
, Tess thought as she waited for Whitney in the Tate’s fusty dining room.
Maybe I should hate her after all
.

“If I ever pay for lunch, can we go someplace decent?” Tess asked when Whitney finally arrived. “You Wasps have the worst taste buds in the world.”

“This is the perfect comfort food. Iceberg lettuce with bottled thousand island dressing. Macaroni and cheese. Go up the street”—Whitney pointed with her cameo-perfect chin to the nearby Tuscany Grille, currently Baltimore’s trendiest restaurant—“and it’s food miscegenation. Pista
chios and mint jelly. Fajitas with leeks. Goat cheese and peanut butter. Give me a break.”

“Miscegenation,” Tess mused. “That’s not a word you hear much these days.”

“Keep reading the
Beacon-Light
. I think they’re going to ask me to write an editorial against it next week.” She took a sip of iced tea—presweetened, and overly so—and sighed as if it were pure nectar. The old women in the dining room gazed approvingly at the young woman with her blond hair twisted into a soft chignon, her elegant frame encased in a sea green knit dress from Jones & Jones. Whitney’s taste was everywhere but in her mouth, Tess marveled, although she did have a nose for fine whiskey. Even in college she had preferred good Scotch, and she had been almost tiresome in her quest for the Eastern Shore’s best martini.

Without a trace of self-consciousness, Whitney rapped a spoon against the glass, as if calling a meeting to order. After all, she came from a long line of garden club presidents. The North Side Chapter of the Washington College Alumnae Fund was now convened. Any old business? No. Any new business? Yes, ruthless prying.

“So, what’s up with your new career, whatever it is. Private investigator? Paralegal? And working on one of the hottest cases in town. Tell all.”

This was Whitney’s style, straight up the middle, but Tess had eleven years of experience deflecting Whitney’s frontal assaults. “Are you asking me as a friend or as a
Beacon-Light
employee? Either way I can’t tell you much. I’m working for his lawyer. Everything I know is confidential.”

“Fair enough. What about the rumor that you caused it all, telling your friend Rock that his girlfriend was cheating on him?”

Her casually inaccurate version of events stung. Obviously Whitney had done more than just eavesdrop on Jonathan’s conversation with an editor.

“You know, this is the second time in two days a
Beacon-Light
employee has tried to chat me up on this. Don’t you have any other ways of getting information?”

“‘Chat you up.’ That’s an interesting term for Jonathan’s method of information gathering. Did you do a lot of ‘chatting’ last night?”

Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney’s mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil’s advocate? Whitney could have been the devil’s
mentor
.

“Stop
milking
me,” Tess said. “I told you I can’t talk about the case, and I can’t.”

“Oh, Tesser—” Whitney was truly contrite. “I didn’t come here to milk you. In fact I’m going to feed you. I just thought I could have some fun first. When did you get so damn prickly?”

She took a manila folder out of her briefcase and dropped it on the table with a heavy plop. Photocopies and clippings about Michael Abramowitz spilled out. Computer printouts of recent news stories, photographs, a résumé, biographical information. Only the
Beacon-Light
’s library, off-limits to civilians such as Tess, could have provided this treasure trove.

“I glanced at the stuff after one of the librarians pulled all the material for me,” Whitney said. “Nothing jumped out, although he was quite the controversial little public defender before he went into business for himself. Recently he’s been in chin-and-grin mode, trotting around town in a rented tux.”

Tess extracted a glossy black-and-white of Abramowitz from last year’s Black-Eyed Susan Ball. He stared dutifully at the camera, drink in hand, his narrow shoulders lost inside his tuxedo. She didn’t need Whitney’s eye to see it was a rental, and a particularly ill fitting one at that. Thin women in ugly dresses, the kind that cost more than pretty ones, stood on either side of him, faces forward but bodies angled away, as if embarrassed to be seen with the once notorious lawyer.

“Interesting—but I’m not sure what to do with all this. Tyner has defined my role in the case pretty narrowly.”

“Balls.” Whitney’s voice was only a shade below a
hoarse cry. Luckily most of the women who lunched at the Tate were too vain to wear hearing aids, so they continued to steal fond looks at the elegant young woman.
Why can’t our granddaughters be so ladylike?
they asked one another. “OK, I confess: Jonathan told me you were working for Tyner. Interviewing security guards and custodians—
too
boring. You need to start tracking down anyone who’s ever held a grudge against Abramowitz. It shouldn’t be hard. He was a world-class shit who defended scum. Then he was a world-class shit who helped scum sue scum. He ended up defending an asbestos company, scum par excellence. There should be no shortage of people who loathed him.”

“Yes, but Tyner said—”

“
Tyner said
. Since when do you give a fuck what anyone tells you to do? When did you become this cautious little mouse, waiting for permission all the time, terrified to take the initiative on something?”

Direct hit.

“I became a cautious little mouse, to use your perfect phrase, at precisely the same moment I realized my last fling with initiative may have inspired one of my dearest friends to kill someone. You see, the grapevine has it more or less right, Whitney. I got Rock’s fiancée to confess to him she was sleeping with her boss. I thought he would break up with her, not break the guy’s neck.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“He says he didn’t, and he’s not a liar. But if he had been angry enough…” Tess didn’t want to finish her own thought.

“I remember him from some of the races.” Whitney hadn’t kept up with her own rowing, but she still attended the big events. “He struck me as one of those guys so immense and strong he has to be gentle, or else he’d destroy everything in his path.”

“Like Lennie in
Of Mice and Men
.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s only one problem with that comparison, Whit
ney. Lennie had a bad habit of breaking people’s necks by accident.”

Back home, Tess changed into a T-shirt and shorts and turned on her stereo. Although she had a CD player, she owned almost no compact discs—she had signed on to the technology revolution about a month before the
Star
folded. By financial necessity she listened primarily to the albums and tapes of her college days. Alternative stations kept her current with new music, but she found herself more interested in old music: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Rodgers and Hart. All the standards, except Irving Berlin. She had been forced to play the Statue of Liberty in eighth grade and never quite gotten over “Give me your tired…” And one of the immigrants had pinched her ass.

The Abramowitz file was a mix of old and new technologies. Photocopies of old clips, printouts from microfiche, the computerized printouts of a Nexis search, which scanned a national data base of newspapers. The
Beacon-Light
librarian had even found a fawning profile of him in the city magazine, a deservedly defunct rag called
B-more
.

Her desk was too small to hold these riches. She spread the contents of the folder across the floor, separating the clips and photos into three piles representing the distinct phases of his career. Public defender. Plaintiff’s attorney. Corporate.

The first phase of his career seemed the most promising, given that many of the people he defended had already either killed or raped someone. Tess knew a disgruntled defendant was much more likely to track down his own lawyer than a prosecutor or a judge. After all, the prosecution is supposed to put you away, and the judge is just following a rule book, but your lawyer is paid to put up a good fight. Even if it’s not your nickel, as in the case of Abramowitz’s early clients, one expects to get his money’s worth. As a reporter Tess once saw a nineteen-year-old react to a guilty verdict for manslaughter by grabbing his P.D. by the back of the neck and methodically pounding her head against the table until the bailiff intervened.

But Abramowitz’s clients, at least the ones who made the papers, seemed to adore him. The stories about him as a public defender stressed his heroics. He had won three out of the seven death penalty cases he tried, which made his early reputation, but that accomplishment had faded with time. In fact, the state’s attorney’s office seldom went for the death penalty in Baltimore any more.

Cop Killer Goes Free on Technicality
. Tess remembered that case. The “technicality” had been an illegal search and seizure, that pesky fourth amendment thing. Abramowitz had been vilified for his unapologetic defense of Donald Bates, who in all probability
was
a cop killer, but the state failed to prove it when the judge excluded key evidence from the trial. Bates ended up dying two years later, shot to death by a cop answering a call for a domestic dispute. Interestingly there had been no record of the 911 call summoning the cop to the scene, but no one had pressed the issue. Bates would have lived longer, much longer, on Death Row.

Tess jotted down the name of the cop who had killed Bates, and the names of the relatives of the cop who had been killed. It had been twelve years ago, but time passed differently for some people. Again, Tess wrote down the names of the victims’ relatives.

Abramowitz’s losses were more interesting, but men on Death Row seldom had the funds or mobility to pursue vendettas. And, again, none of Abramowitz’s convicted clients seemed to bear him ill will. A photo of one showed him bear hugging the lawyer, while Abramowitz stared down at the floor, seemingly embarrassed by the show of affection and gratitude. Or perhaps he was pissed at losing, Tess thought.

Tucker Fauquier. Tess remembered him. Anyone who had been alive in Maryland that year remembered him. Born in the western Maryland town of Friendsville, he had decided one day to work his way across the state by killing and sexually molesting a boy in each county. He was twenty-two when he began, venturing out to distant counties—Worcester, Cecil, Dorchester—where he would kidnap a boy, kill him, then bury him. At first he was careful, spacing out his visits, and law officials made no connection, not publicly. Baltimore, Prince George’s, Calvert. But after six cautious years, Fauquier became bolder. He kidnapped a boy from his home county of Garrett, then went to Allegany where he procured another boy to witness the first boy’s murder. Then from Allegany to Washington County, where a Hagerstown boy watched him kill the Allegany boy. And so on. He was halfway to his goal—twelve victims out of Maryland’s twenty-four jurisdictions—when an Anne Arundel County boy, the latest witness and soon-to-be victim, leaped from the car as Fauquier slowed to pay the toll on the Bay Bridge.