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Authors: Laura Lippman

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BOOK: Charm City
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"Let's start with an
obvious question. Where were you Tuesday night?"

"I thought you used to be a
reporter. You should know you don't cut to the chase like
that. You're suppose to lull me into a warm, expansive mood
with a little nonthreatening chitchat."

"This isn't a
profile," Tess said. She couldn't help sounding a
little sharp. "It's report. If you don't
want to talk to me, fine. I'll write that down and pass it on
to your supervisors, who assured me everyone would cooperate. Let them
worry why you don't want to answer the questions I ask in the
order I ask them."

"Fine." Big dramatic
sigh and a double eye-roll. "I was here."

"Alone? From what time
on?"

"I left work at seven-thirty and
stopped at the Giant for a salad, then bought some wine at the liquor
store. I wasn't very happy. Remember, I thought the best
story I had ever written had just been killed." Funny, Feeney
had said almost the same thing—except in his case, it had
been
his
story.

"Did you get any telephone calls?
Did you make any calls or have any friends drop by?"

Rosita pressed her right hand to her
forehead, as if the question required deep thought. "No. No
calls at all. And no visitors."

"Then you don't really
have an alibi. You have a
story
.
I mean, you can't prove you were here. And the electronic
security system at the paper was down, so it's impossible to
prove you weren't there unless you can prove where you were.
As a reporter, you should know one can't prove a
negative."

When surprised, Rosita forgot her poses and
mannerisms. Her eyebrows relaxed and she no longer held her chin so
high it made Tess's neck ache to look at her. For a moment,
she was as pretty as she should have been all the time. The moment
passed.

"In that case, a lot of people
aren't going to have alibis. Are you going to ask
Feeney
to prove where he was?"

"Feeney has a very satisfactory
alibi, or else I wouldn't even be working on this. That would
be totally unethical." Funny, how smoothly a lie could come,
when it really had to. "And, yes, everyone will be held to
the same standard."

"Don't be naive. There
are more sets of standards at the
Beacon-Light
than you'll ever know."

Spare me
,
Tess thought. The last thing she wanted to hear was Rosita's
list of grievances against her bosses. Perhaps she would do well to
follow the reporter's advice after all, steering her into
innocuous territory so she would be less hostile.

"You know, I don't pay
attention to bylines as much as I should, so I'm not really
sure when you started at the
Beacon-Light
,
although I remember admiring your writing on several pieces. What has
it been, a year or so?"

"Fourteen months, but I lost four
months on the sports copy desk. I really wanted to cover
baseball—I covered the minor league team in San Antonio, and
Guy—Guy Whitman, the A.M.E. for sports and
features—keeps promising me I'll have a shot at the
number three slot covering the Orioles. Until then, he has me in the
girl ghetto, features."

"What's wrong with
features?"

"I want to be a
real
reporter. That's why I lobbied to get on the Wynkowski story.
And I've done a good job. Feeney got the financial stuff, but
I got the stuff about his marriage and his gambling problem. If you
listen to what people are talking about around town, it's my
part of the story."

Jesus, Tess thought, all roads led to
Rosita, at least in her mind. The domestic violence was sweetly
salacious, and the gambling could be a huge stumbling block, but that
was nothing but hearsay. The financial angle was the real story.

"Are you from Texas?"

"Texas? Oh, because of San
Antonio. God, no. I spent one year and seven months in that godforsaken
place and it seemed as if the temperature was above ninety for all but
three days. I'm from New England. I like seasons, and I
prefer cool ones to hot ones."

"Baltimore's summers are
pretty wicked."

"Yeah, and the winters are wimpy,
with people going crazy at the sight of the first snowflake.
It's still an improvement, for now. I'll get to the
Globe
yet."

"Just the
Globe
?
Why not the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
?"
Why not the Vatican?

For all her instructions on how to conduct
an interview, Rosita wasn't a very good listener.
"What I really need to do is get back into sportswriting.
It's still something of a novelty act, the woman in the
locker room. Some 22-year-old in overalls won a Pulitzer this year for
an umpire story, for Christ's sake. No, there
aren't many more female sportswriters than there were ten
years ago. The difference is, editors don't feel as
guilt-ridden about it.

"You sound like one of those
people with a five-year plan you update every December
thirty-first."

"I am. Two five-year plans,
actually, one for work and one for my alleged personal life. Work is
proving to be more manageable." Her smile this time
wasn't her usual fake grin. It was tiny and rueful, fading
away quickly, the Cheshire Cat in reverse. She glanced past Tess, who
followed her eyes to the clock in the kitchen gallery. No wonder Tess
had cats on the brain: the clock was one of those insanely grinning
Kit-Kat Klock tchotchkes, sequined tail swinging back and forth in time
with round eyes that cased the room.

"Look, I really don't
have any more time for this," Rosita said abruptly.

"Sorry, you obviously have plans.
Big date?"

"No, no, just dinner with a
friend. You know, the usual unattached single woman's routine
for a Saturday night. Are you married?"

"God, no," Tess said.

"Boyfriend?"

"Sort of. I mean yes, yes I do. In
fact, his band is playing tonight, so I have to go do the band
member's girlfriend thing. Stand in a crowd, stare adoringly
at him."

"In my experience, it
doesn't matter what your boyfriend does. Sooner or later,
you're expected to stand in a crowd and stare at him
adoringly." Rosita almost seemed likable to Tess now. She was
sharp, she had a certain wit. Then she reverted to being merely sharp.
"Of course in Baltimore, there are no available men, not if
you have
standards
.
I'd rather be dateless."

With someone else, it might have been mere
tactlessness. In this case, there was no doubt the remark was
deliberately waspish, an intentional implication that Tess did not have
standards.

"Protect those toenails.
I'll let myself out."

It was dark now along University Parkway and
Tess, a born voyeur, glanced into lighted windows as she walked to her
car. This stretch of buildings was older than Rosita's tower,
with the elegant touches once common to the city's
apartments—dark wood paneling, high ceilings, crown moldings.
Why did people's lives, captured on the sly like this, look
so enticing, like old photographs unearthed in an antique store? Tess
caught glimpses of women her age, yet so much more polished looking in
their real Saturday night date clothes. She saw their men, in jackets
and ties. Grown-ups, headed to restaurants and Center Stage, perhaps
the symphony. And where was she going to be on Saturday night? Lost in
the funhouse of the Floating Opera until the wee small hours of the
morning, keeping company with wee small minds.

"H
ow
much do you weigh?"

The voice, thin and high, interrupted
Tess's reverie. She was keeping herself awake by coming up
with new nicknames for Baltimore neighborhoods. They were in an old
ballroom in SoWeBo, Southwest Baltimore, once home to H.L. Mencken and
Edgar Allan Poe, now home to restaurants like Mencken's
Cultured Pearl and the Telltale Hearth. But how about SoO (South of
Orioles Park at Camden Yard) or SoPoeBo, near where Poe was buried?
So-SoBo, which could encompass the isolated south side neighborhoods.
It was a mark of how tired she was that this seemed incredibly witty.

"What?" she asked
groggily, stealing a look at her watch. Almost 3
A.M.,
up for twenty
hours. She had caught a second wind about 11, over Afghan food followed
by a round of Galliano liqueur. She was reasonably sure the Galliano
was not authentically Afghani, but it had made a nice kicker. The
licorice-like syrup reminded her of prescription cold medicines, the
old-fashioned kind that really made the pain go away for a while. And
it had kept her going through the first three bands, but it was wearing
off now, just when she needed to radiate the kind of mindless devotion
and appreciation expected of a Musician's Girlfriend. Not to
mention a certain proprietary zeal. While her mouth smiled at Crow, her
eyes were suppose to flash "no poaching" signals to
all the females present. It took a lot of energy, this
Musician's Girlfriend gig. But she really did care about
Crow, who was possibly the nicest man she had ever known. And he would
get over being twenty-three. After all, she had.

"I asked how much you
weigh," the chirpy little voice repeated. It was Maisie, one
of her two cohorts in the Poe White Trash Ladies' Auxiliary.
She was sure it was Maisie, because Maisie had the pierced nose.
Actually, the nose stud was a fake, a gold ball she attached to her
nostril with a small magnet. Maisie's boyfriend, the bass
player, had told Crow, who then shared this useful piece of
intelligence with Tess. It allowed her to tell Maisie apart from Lorna,
the one who wore those tight little necklaces that appeared to be
choking her. But that was probably just wishful thinking on
Tess's part.

"I don't know. I
don't own a scale."

"She doesn't own a
scale," Maisie told Lorna, who squealed in delight.

"What about at the
doctor's office?" This was a familiar topic, but a
favorite one, the tyranny of the tiny.
Their
weight barely registered in the three digits. Lorna could be
particularly tiresome, talking about the high-protein shakes she had to
drink because pounds just fell off her.

"I don't look."

"She doesn't
look," Lorna informed Maisie, giggling.

"But, like, what if you had to
tell someone your weight?" Maisie persisted. "What
would you say? Like, if a cop stopped you and wanted to know if you fit
the description of some crazy woman who was killing a bunch of people,
and she was, like, two hundred pounds?"

"I'd tell him to lift me
over his head and make his best guess."

Maisie and Lorna stared at Tess, unsure if
this was a joke. With their curveless bodies and fluffy hair, they
always reminded her of the not-quite-human girls in some Dr. Seuss
stories, Cindy Lou Who carving the roast beast for the Grinch. Tess
reminded
them
of their
parents. Al though she had done the math for them several times, they
refused to believe she was only nine years older. To them, twenty-nine
was Almost Thirty, which was Awfully Close to forty, which meant she
was almost their parents' age, for God's sake.

Luckily, Poe White Trash crashed into its
opening number just then, so Tess could pretend absolute absorption in
the music and ignore Lorna and Maisie. It was not unlike exchanging
nails on a chalkboard for longer nails on a chalkboard. Despite
Crow's sweet, true tenor, or perhaps because of it, Poe White
Trash was determinedly anti-melodic, chaotic, assaultive. They were
loud
.
Maisie and Lorna couldn't quite make Tess feel old, but
putting that adjective in front of music did the trick.

When she'd first started going
with Crow, she had tried hard to pretend an interest in his musical
ambitions, had even trotted out the little intelligence she had gleaned
from the city's almost-progressive radio station, WHFS. Crow
had laughed, convincing her she could never keep up, so she might as
well fall behind. She wished he would sing just one standard, one
ballad, for her. Sid Vicious had sung "My Way." No
one did "So in Love" better than k.d. lang.
Certainly Crow could assay "All the Things You
Are." Or "My Heart Stood Still." Just
once, just for her.

A stray lyric became audible, probably the
result of a malfunctioning sound system, "tongue-kissing the
black dog." Inspired by Esskay? At any rate, it was as close
as she would get to a ballad tonight.

She leaned back against the wall, sending
little flakes of lead paint into the air, and took a long drag on her
drink. No alcohol was allowed at the Floating Opera, only LSD and
various new synthetic potions, so Tess had settled on one of those
ubiquitous iced teas that seemed more religion than beverage. Behind
her closed eyes, she imagined young people running down a beach, hand
in hand, deliriously happy because they had raspberry-flavored iced
tea. The boy looked like Crow. The girl was skinny and short. Unlikely
as it seemed, she dozed off. It was morning when she opened her eyes
again, or some time of day that passed for morning, and
Crow's band was taking a final bow. Time for breakfast.

 

Jimmy's had just opened its doors
by the time they returned to Fells Point. Tess was feeling much older
than the twenty-nine years Lorna and Maisie found so fascinating. For
once, she was glad the waitresses at Jimmy's automatically
served her the same thing, even when she didn't want it.
Today, their presumption saved her from the effort of forming words.
Her bagels were on the griddle the second she crossed the doorstep,
along with toast for Crow's egg-and-hash browns plate. Her
coffee reached the table before they did. Tess thought of asking for
decaf, then decided against it. If she fell asleep now, it would only
screw her body up more. Might as well push on through the day and go to
bed a little early. Say, at 6
P.M.

Crow was quiet in the morning, especially
after a gig. He chewed ice, drank tea with honey, and skimmed the soft
sections of the
Beacon-Light
while Tess pretended to read the
New York Times
.
Well-kept secret of the news business: Sunday papers were comfortingly
soporific, devoid of any real news. The usual words swam before her
groggy eyes, as familiar and sweet as lullabies, so familiar as to be
meaningless.
Bosnia. Pact. GOP. Dow. Future.
Remains to be seen
.

Crow crunched a large piece of ice, inhaled
it by accident, and started choking. "Sweet shit
Jesus," he said, after coughing it out.

Tess, who knew that many things could prompt
such a response in Crow—an interesting fact about
wool-gathering in China, for example—did not react
immediately. The soothing gray of the
Times
had begun to resemble one of those hidden 3-D pictures. The copy swam
in front of her eyes so she couldn't make out the words, only
shapes. She was seeing the paper the way Dorie Starnes and Howard
Nieman did. Computer coding. Black stuff on white stuff. Big boxes and
little boxes.

"Jesus fuckin'
Christ," Crow said, shoving the front page of the
Blight
toward her. Tess had no problem making words from the bold black lines
she saw there.

W
INK
W
YNKOWSKI
F
OUND
D
EAD
, A
PPARENT
S
UICIDE
;
B
EACON
-L
IGHT
H
AD
U
NCOVERED
S
ECRET
P
AST
By Kevin V. Feeney
and Rosita Ruiz
Beacon-Light
staff writers

Gerald "Wink" Wynkowski was found
dead last night, an apparent suicide victim discovered just hours after
he had learned the
Beacon-Light
planned to publish a story about his role in the death of a West Side
shopkeeper almost thirty-one years ago.
     Wynkowski
was discovered in his running '65 Mustang about 10:30 in his
closed and locked garage. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No note
was found, but a Bruce Springsteen song, "Thunder
Road," was playing on the car stereo when police arrived.
     Although
Wynkowski had always acknowledged his time at the Montrose School for
juvenile offenders, he had characterized his crimes as "one
notch up from Andy Hardy—a little vandalism, a little
larceny." Sealed juvenile records had made it impossible to
contradict this account before now.
     But
a former Baltimore man now living in Georgia told the
Beacon-Light
this week that Wynkowski had bragged about causing a man's
death while incarcerated at Montrose. The man—who passed a
polygraph test, but asked that his name not be revealed because his own
delinquency is not widely known among his associates in
Georgia—said Wynkowski claimed to have beaten the man to
death during a hold-up.
     A
source familiar with the state's juvenile justice system
yesterday confirmed that Wynkowski was sent to Montrose on a
manslaughter charge, although the circumstances were slightly
different. Nathaniel Paige, a shopkeeper on Gold Street, was
pistol-whipped during a hold-up there in the summer of 1969, but the
official cause of death was a heart attack. Under Maryland law, Wink,
who had been involved in several minor crimes before this, was charged
with manslaughter.
     Contacted
yesterday for comment, Wynkowski said he wanted to speak to his lawyer
and would have no statement until Sunday morning. He was found dead 12
hours later, and his lawyer, Michael Ellenham, said he had not been in
contact with his client all day.

Tess skimmed through the rest of the story,
but most of its length was devoted to the Georgia interview and a
rehashing of what the paper had already reported. She tried to work out
the timing in her mind. If police had been called at 10:30, Feeney
couldn't have arrived at the scene before 11—just
enough time to call in two paragraphs to the night rewrite, who had
done a pretty good job blending the new information into the existing
story. Under the circumstances, the
Beacon-Light
had been lucky to get the story at all.

"What would you want to be
listening to as you die?" asked Crow, for whom all news
tended to be abstract, impersonal. "I don't think
I'd pick Springsteen. Yet it would be unseemly to die with
Poe White Trash playing. Everyone would assume I did it because I was a
failure at my music. The blues would be too obvious, opera too
pretentious. Hey, maybe that Chet Baker album you're always
playing. ‘It Could Happen to You.'"

"Sounds good," Tess
muttered absently, rereading the story in case she had missed anything.
No suicide note. Blood alcohol 0.1—too drunk to drive, but
not drunk enough to die. Cause of death pending toxicology reports, due
in two weeks, but that was a pro forma check for drugs that the blood
test would have missed. Mrs. Wynkowski and the children were at her
mother's place in New Jersey, where they had been spending
the weekend.

Tess and Crow sat in silence, except for the
occasional cracking sound from his mouthful of ice. So one of the
city's longest winning streaks had come to an end in a
chugging Mustang, with a soundtrack by Bruce Springsteen. Tess knew she
should be thinking deep thoughts about the past and personal
responsibility, about what it was like for a beloved figure to face the
loss of the public adoration he enjoyed.

But all she could wonder was if she still
had a contract with the
Beacon-Light
.

BOOK: Charm City
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