Charm City (12 page)

W
hitney
was waiting in Tess's bare bones office when she returned
from the ladies' room. Sitting in Tess's chair,
scrolling through files in Tess's computer. Tess had nothing
to hide, but
still
.

"So did Reganheartless try to shut
you down?" Whitney asked, without lifting her eyes from the
computer screen.

"She
did
shut me down. I'm still getting paid, but she's
arranged it so I won't be able to talk to anyone on staff.
Yet if I don't put in my hours, she'll say
I've breached the contract and stop payment. I'm
fucked. I have to come in here every day and sit at this desk doing
nothing."

Whitney tapped a few keys and Tess heard a
modem's rasping beeps and gurgles. She hadn't known
the
Blight's
computer was equipped with one.

"Didn't Dorie tell you
about the on-line capabilities built into the system here?"

"You mean the electronic library?
I tried to use it over the weekend, but it's a fussy little
program. Make one mistake and you have to start all over. The court
files aren't much easier to use."

"Yeah, well, Marvin Hailey had a
hand in designing our computer network, so that's to be
expected. It's as jumpy as he is. But there are other things
on the computer, too. Nexis, MVA records, Autotrack."

"I know about the first two.
What's the last one?"

"A little program that allows you
to find all sorts of stuff. Social Security numbers, past addresses,
mortgage histories, current and former neighbors. Might be interesting
to put Rosita through it."

"And Feeney."

"You know where Feeney has been
the last twenty years of his life. And you know where he was that
night." It was hard, to hear one friend's lie in
another friend's mouth, as casual and uncontested as a
passing comment on the weather. Why had Feeney told Whitney he and Tess
were together that night? Now it was Tess's lie, too, and it
was too late to disown it. "Rosita's the mystery
woman."

"Not so mysterious. I talked to
her over the weekend. Pretty routine
résumé—last job was in San Antonio,
she's from Boston, wants to move back there. No husband, no
boyfriend."

Whitney picked up the receiver and held it
out toward Tess. "You don't need
Colleen's permission to dial long-distance. Just an access
code and I'll give you that: five-four. Sheer coincidence, I
assure you, nothing to do with our beloved publisher. What's
the paper in San Antonio, the
Eagle
?
No harm in checking out Rosita's reputation down
there."

Tess took the phone and placed it back in
its cradle. "You got me the job, Whitney. Now let me do it.
My way."

Unlike most blunt people, who tend to be
extremely tender about their own feelings, Whitney was nearly
uninsultable "Okay. Just trying to be helpful. I'd
ask you to lunch, but I have a squash date with Sterling, assuming it
hasn't been overtaken by recent events."

Perhaps Colleen
Reganhart wasn't so paranoid after all
.
Tess was surprised to feel a little stab of jealousy on her own behalf.
"Lobbying for Japan? Or something bigger?"

"Japan
is
big enough. For now. And yes, I'm working all the angles.
Luckily, Sterling is a better player than I am, when he isn't
having problems with his back, or his carpal tunnel. It's
hard to throw games without being too obvious about it."

Tess waited about five seconds after Whitney
left, then pulled out the phone book and looked up the area code for
San Antonio.

Newspaper bureaucracies are as byzantine and
hierarchical as any government office. It took Tess almost an hour to
find a San Antonio editor who would talk to her about Rosita Ruiz.
Rosita's supervisor, the sports editor, seemed the obvious
choice, but he referred her to the managing editor's office,
where she learned the assistant managing editor for administration
handled all such queries. It turned out this editor had an assistant
who oversaw the two-year intern program, in which Rosita had been
employed, and only he could serve as her reference.

"Edward Saldivar." His
was a soft, young-sounding voice with a slight accent, one Saldivar
seemed to try and minimize, anglicizing his first name as much as
possible. Quite the opposite of Rosita, hitting her consonants with
hurricane force.

"My name is Tess Monaghan and
I'm checking Rosita Ruiz's references. She listed
you as the contact there."

"Ah." When stalling for
time, Saldivar made a singing sound, as if he were warming up his vocal
cords for a chorale performance. "Our policy is to confirm
the position an individual held here, and verify dates of employment,
no more, no less."

"That's not exactly a
reference."

"Ah." A little higher
this time. "I see your point. But recent litigation by, uh,
disgruntled workers, suggests companies should adopt uniform policies,
lest they be accused of slander. Unfortunate, but that's the
way everything is going today. Besides, Rosita left here more than six
months ago, for a job at the paper up in Baltimore. Why don't
you call them?"

"I'm calling
for
them, from their offices. Did you provide a reference then?"

"I don't recall being
asked, and I don't know if someone else was contacted. But
whoever was called would have given only the dates of employment.
That's our—"

"Your policy. Yes, I understand,
Mr. Saldivar. But Rosita has the job and she
knows
I'm calling you." A harmless lie. "Surely
you should be able to speak freely about her work at the
Eagle
.
She covered minor league baseball, right?"

"She worked here for nineteen
months, leaving last October to join the Baltimore
Beacon-Light
."

"I thought she had a two-year
internship. Why did it end in nineteen months?"

"It's not unusual for
our two-year interns to leave for permanent positions at other papers
before their terms are up. Rosita Ruiz resigned on October first after
securing a job at the
Beacon-Light
,
a larger paper that could afford to pay her much more. We were very
happy for her. Good day, Miss Monaghan." Saldivar was not the
type who would slam a phone down to end a conversation. No, he slipped
the receiver back into place, almost as if he regretted breaking the
connection. That was something she could learn from Saldivar, Tess
decided, without the benefit of a two-year internship: Good manners are
a great way to be rude.

It was almost 7 when Tess left the
Blight
,
a lonely time in that forsaken neighborhood, especially on a rainy
March night. Her shoulders ached, as did her neck, and she had a
splitting headache. Doing nothing was hard work, and she had done
little more than play solitaire with the computer after running into
the dead-end known as Ed Saldivar. Out of sheer perversity, Tess had
stayed even later than Colleen Reganhart had specified, forgetting she
would have to walk back to Tyner's to get her car. On top of
everything else, the
Blight
had forgotten to provide her a parking place, and the Nazi who
supervised the lot had told her the visitor spaces couldn't
be used by an employee, even one as tenuous as she.

Head down against the wet wind, Tess
shuffled along the sad, deserted blocks of Lexington, bricked in during
the 1970s, when downtown "malls" were thought to be
the secret to urban renewal. There were still stores here, discount
chains and cheap clothing boutiques, but they closed along with the
state offices at 5
P.M.
Even the Nut House was shuttered, much to Tess's
disappointment. A handful of pistachios would have made a big
difference in the quality of her life just then.

She was crossing Park Avenue when she
noticed a long, brown-colored car with bits of salmon paint peeking
through. It made a sudden U-turn on the one-way street, fishtailed to a
stop with a great squealing of brakes, then made another U and headed
back in the right direction. Downtown Baltimore, with its warren of
one-way streets, often had that effect on out-of-town drivers.

Two blocks later, as Tess turned north on
St. Paul, the same car passed her again, heading south. Again the
brakes whined and the car almost spun out on the slick road. But even
at this hour, one-way St. Paul was too busy for the car to dare going
the wrong way. She watched it turn left at the next side street,
suddenly overtaken by a sinking sensation that these might be her
hospital-bound buddies, in another untraceable vehicle.

"As long as I'm walking
against the traffic, I should be okay," she told herself,
speaking out loud from nervousness. She started up St. Paul, and
although she walked quickly, she hadn't covered an entire
block before the same car—an old Buick, she saw
now—passed her again. She looked for a license plate, but
there wasn't one, not on the front, and the back plate was
thick with mud.

Tess stopped for a moment to think.
She'd never make it to her car, not along these increasingly
desolate blocks north of downtown. She could disappear into the Tremont
Hotel just ahead, or turn around and go south, vanishing into the shops
at the Gallery or Harborplace. Even on a Monday night, the restaurants
would be busy enough to offer her some protection while she waited for
Crow, or a taxi. But she had to be sure it was the same men. There had
to be a way to confront them without putting herself at risk.

To the east, City Hall's gold dome
shone in the misty dusk, all the inspiration she needed. She checked
her wallet. Forty dollars in small bills. Should be enough. She
sprinted for South Street, but not so quickly that her friends in the
brown-and-salmon-mobile couldn't see her.

Because of the parking problem in downtown
Baltimore, an underground economy of de facto valets had taken hold in
the more congested areas near City Hall and the district court
building. Homeless men earned money by feeding parking meters for
people who "tipped" them. Even if one
didn't plan to stay beyond the meter's time limits,
it was smart to offer a dollar or two, if only to protect
one's car against the men offering protection. Tess, who had
patronized these attendants while on various errands for Tyner, knew
they scorned the local shelters, preferring to sleep near their place
of business. They should be settling down for the evening just about
now, having scored some sandwiches from the nearby missions. The trick
was getting them to emerge from the cubbyholes and doorways where they
slept.

"Anybody want to make a few
bucks?" she called. "Easiest five dollars
you'll ever make in your life!" She heard a
rustling noise, then three men appeared out of the shadows. Three
large
men, she noted happily. She pulled out her wallet, showed them the
cash, then slipped the wallet back into her knapsack.

"All you have to do is stand
around me and look mean. Think you can do that?" The three
nodded, unfazed by the strange request. They huddled close to her and
Tess caught the bitter scent of sweat dried on old wool, the too-sweet
grape of bad wine.

"You do something
wrong?" asked one man, a white man who was brown all
over—brown hair, brown clothes, brown eyes, skin the color of
a pecan from what must be years of living outdoors.

"Not that I'm aware
of."

Within a few minutes, the brown-over-salmon
car turned onto South Street, stopping short of where Tess stood. Even
without a valid license plate, it would be an easy car to recognize.
The windows were one-way mirrors, the job done so cheaply that strips
of the reflective material were already peeling away. The paint job was
new but cheap, a flat shade of dung-brown. The fenders were pitted with
dents and scrapes, one headlight was cracked, and the muffler appeared
to be loose. But these guys had a habit of changing
cars—first a bright blue AMC Hornet, now this Buick. Or was
the Hornet the first car, after all? She suddenly remembered the high
beams of a car behind her on Franklintown Road, the car she had lost by
running a red light the night she had acquired Esskay. The night Spike
had been beaten.

The front passenger window rolled down
slowly and a familiar pair of oversize sunglasses studied Tess. The
concerned friend of Joe Johnson, the one who had wanted to give her a
lift the other day. Then the rear passenger door opened, creaking
horribly.

"Miss Monaghan?" The
voice, thin and reedy, came from the backseat. Tess did not reply.

"It is Miss Monaghan,
isn't it? Spike Orrick's niece? He has always
spoken so highly of you. We saw him just the other day."

"Did you go see him when you
visited your pal Joe?"

"For various reasons, we
didn't have a chance to stop in and visit. But we did see
Spike before he went into the hospital." A low, rusty
chuckle. "
Just
before."

Her paid protectors drew closer, as if they
understood the threat implicit in this exchange. Or perhaps they wanted
to be sure to grab her knapsack if someone bolted from the car and
dragged her away. In the space between the door and the car, Tess could
see a leg, a beefy one in tight black denim. A brown leather jacket,
styled like a blazer, hung over the jeans. But she couldn't
see any faces. Somewhere deep inside the car, a small dog yapped.

"Hush, Charlton," the
reedy voice admonished indulgently. The voice was colder, steelier,
when it addressed her again. "Miss Monaghan, your uncle has
something that belongs to a friend of ours. It has no real monetary
value, but it is his, and he wants it back. Do you know where we could
find this…item?"