Charm City (13 page)

Tess shook her head. "I have no
idea what you're talking about."

"Are you sure?"

One of the homeless men, the nut-brown man,
stepped forward. "She said no. Isn't that good
enough?" There was just enough light to catch the short blade
clenched in his right hand.

The man in the front passenger smiled and
held up a gun.
Paper beats rock, rock beats
scissors, scissors beat paper, gun beats knife
,
Tess thought. But the rear car door slammed shut and the old Buick took
off, accelerating so quickly it bounced off one curb and then the
other. Her bodyguards stayed close to her until the car disappeared,
and Tess was touched, until she remembered she owed them money. She
doled out five dollars to each. The first two said nothing, but the
third one, the one with the knife, was curious.

"You owe them money?"

"I don't, but my uncle
might. He's a bookie."

"That's a bad business.
Stay away from that." With those words of advice the brown
man was gone, melting into the dusk. A taxi pulled up as he vanished,
and Tess, who had already spent fifteen dollars on her trip home,
decided to spend another five dollars to reach her car. Shifting her
weight to avoid the bad springs in the cab's backseat, she
thought of how Spike had always kept the family at arm's
length from what he called "my little sideline."
Until now, she had assumed he was being dramatic, indulging his
proclivity for mystery and secrets. Until now.

P
uzzled,
Tess stared at the computer screen. It was Tuesday, about 11
A.M.
, and she had just
started her day at the
Beacon-Light
,
after checking in with Colleen's secretary, as required.
Funny, she had expected Colleen to have a male secretary, an unctuous
himbo guarding her office, but the secretary was a pleasant moon-faced
matron, who put a little smiley face next to Tess's name,
along with a notation of the time—to the minute.

In her office, Tess had turned on the
computer thinking she might fill her daily sentence of six hours by
exchanging e-mail with Whitney, or reading the wires, only to see this
message pop up. It was phrased as if it were a directive to all users,
yet she knew enough about the system to realize the message was
addressed only to her. Strange. Dorie wanted her to find something, but
didn't want to make it too easy, or appear to be doing her
any special favors.

With a quick glance at the cheat sheet
posted next to the keyboard, Tess typed in the command instructing the
computer to call up all items in "Trash Metro." The
computer obliged, quickly and silently, and Tess soon found herself
sifting through the electronic equivalents of cigarette butts,
half-empty coffee cups, and tissues with lipstick traces. Here were
memos as dull and plodding as any corporation's. Here were
reporters' ill-crafted leads, the false starts they would
have crumpled and tossed across the room in the typewriter era. Here
were notes from telephone interviews. "Sez city mayor No can
do/Constinal ish big. Pres. no agree. Wld req ref. More stdy
requrd." Good fodder for a libel trial, Tess thought. It was
doubtful the writer could reliably decode this Tarzanese. Fortunately,
the notes would soon disappear: whatever was dumped in the trash
expired in twenty-four hours.

Moving from Metro Trash to Features Trash
and Sports Trash, then back to Metro Trash, Tess found daily staffing
reports from each department's executive secretary and a log
of overtime requests. Anyone filing for more than ten hours per week
was flagged and expected to provide an explanation for daring to
request what the contract guaranteed. Rosita, who had filed for twelve
hours of overtime in the last pay period, had written an obsequious
little note to Colleen, with copies to Mabry and Sterling, reminding
them that the Wynkowski story was the reason.

Tess thought she detected a lot of attitude
in that one word, "Now." Feeney had filed for
eighteen hours of overtime without bothering to defend himself in
writing. That, too, was in character.

Why would any reporter, especially a cagey
type like Rosita, allow her craven brown-nosing to be on display? Tess
couldn't be the first pair of "prying
eyes" to pass through these directories. She checked the
history field, the way Dorie had shown her. Of course: reporters
created the files, but the
editors dumped them
.
And the editors weren't concerned about safeguarding
anyone's privacy except their own. Reganhart, in particular,
never erased reporters' notes before trashing them, while
Sterling was erratic. Only Lionel Mabry, who had seemed so vague and
out of it, scrupulously expunged everything he discarded.

Digging deeper into the electronic trash,
Tess found yesterday's news budget, which included ongoing
projects at the bottom. Reporters assigned to the Wink story were to
keep checking with county police, on the off chance the death would be
classified as an accident or homicide when the toxicology reports came
back from the medical examiner. The budget also indicated at least five
other reporters had been deployed in case Wink had even nastier
skeletons in his closet. So far, they had come up empty. Meanwhile,
Feeney was responsible for tracking the basketball deal, which was
expected to unravel unless Paul Tucci could find more backers, but
there had been no developments on that front, either.

In fact, the only Wink-related story in
today's editions was a thin piece on his wake by Rosita. As
published, the piece had been flat and unremarkable. The original, sent
to the trash by Reganhart, was inappropriately vicious, the kind of
piece in which the writer mistook mere bitchery for wit. Tess was
particularly struck by the description of Wink's high school
basketball team members in "green-and-gold letter jackets
that would never button again, not in this lifetime." At
least Reganhart, whatever her weaknesses, understood how disastrous
this would have been. Death demanded reverence not only for the
deceased, but for his mourners.

"So what's moving on the
wires this morning?"

Startled, Tess jumped and banged her right
knee hard on the lap drawer of the old metal desk, which caused her to
swear under her breath. Jack Sterling was leaning against the door
jamb, hands in his pockets, shirt sleeves rolled up. A solid blue shirt
today, which made his eyes almost too blue.

"Not much," she lied
automatically. Even if she wasn't actually hacking, she
didn't want to admit she was digging through the
Blight's
electronic trash. "Spring training stories."

"In March, it's hard to
believe Opening Day will ever come. In August, when you're a
Cubs fan like myself, you sometimes wish it never had."

As Tess casually cleared her screen of any
incriminating files, Sterling came in and sat on a corner of the desk,
inches from her right elbow.

"Do you like baseball,
Tess?"

"I watch the World Series. Want to
know my deepest, darkest secret?"

"I'm a journalist. I
live to know secrets."

"I don't even know where
the Orioles finish, most years."

He laughed, a sound so spontaneous and
generous that Tess wished she could find other secrets to confide in
him.
I didn't report all my income on
my taxes last year. I think you're cute. I've been
known to be something of a round-heels under the right circumstances
.

"Let me ask you something,
Tess."

Yes
.

"Did anything bother you about the
first Wynkowski story? The, um, unofficial one?"

She knew she was suppose to say she had been
bothered, and she hated to disappoint him. But what had been wrong? She
wracked her brain.

"I know there were a lot of
anonymous sources. Then again, you let the guy in Georgia cloak his
identity, too."

"At least I know who he is this
time, and what his motivation is. I don't know anything about
the sources in the first story. I've got a bad feeling in my
gut about this whole thing. What about you? What do your instincts tell
you, Tess?"

It was an uncomfortable question for Tess,
who had once watched as her best instincts had collapsed against the
backdrop of three separate deaths. But it was foolhardy to tell the
unvarnished truth to an employer, and Jack Sterling was still just
that: her employer.

She settled for a partial truth.
"My gut tends to be opinionated, so it's not
infallible."

Her stomach picked this exact moment to
groan with hunger. Tess wanted to crawl under the desk, or find some
graceful way to inform Sterling she did not normally make such noises.

"Running on empty? Let me treat
you to lunch at Marconi's." Tess grinned at him the
same way Esskay the greyhound grinned at any offering of food.

They walked down Saratoga Street to the
restaurant. It was a little cool, but the sun was out and the sky
clear. A few brave crocuses peeked out among the stunted trees planted
along the sidewalks. A horrible tease, Tess knew. Did spring have an
equivalent term for Indian summer, a way to describe these March
flirtations with nice weather?

"We'll probably have
another snowstorm before the month is out," she said. How
lame could she be, falling back on the weather to make conversation?
She should have said something about politics, or today's
front page. But that would have involved actually reading the front
page. She had been having far too much fun wallowing in the electronic
trash heap.

"Baltimore is lovely in the
snow," Sterling said, "even if Baltimoreans
aren't."

"Are you going to go into that
usual out-of-towner rap, about how we can't drive in it, and
we all act like idiots, rushing to the store for supplies?"

"It's the nature of the
supplies I've never understood. Bread, milk, and toilet
paper, hon." Sterling did a decent Baltimore accent for a
newcomer. "The holy trinity of Baltimore life. Can you
explain it, hometown girl?"

"My parents always say it goes
back to the Blizzard of '66, which seemed to come out of
nowhere," Tess said, as they climbed the marble steps outside
Marconi's. "Milk for the kids, bread for
sandwiches. And I think the toilet paper was for women to wrap their
beehives."

Good, she had made him laugh again.
"And now people run to the Giant or the SuperFresh near
Television Hill so they can be sure of making the evening
news."

"Hey, don't knock it.
Being identified as a ‘panicky snow shopper' is how
most locals earn their fifteen minutes of fame."

"Funny, how that phrase has been
perverted over the years," Sterling mused, as they followed
an ancient maître d' to a table in the rear dining
room. "Warhol actually wrote in an exhibition catalog,
‘In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen
minutes.' Now we talk about it as if it were an entitlement,
or part of the Declaration of Independence. The right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of our fifteen minutes of fame. Have you had yours
yet?"

Tess took her seat, thinking about the brief
article the
Blight
had run
last fall, when she had been attacked. If she was going to be famous
for fifteen minutes, she hoped it wouldn't be for that.
"I might have slept through mine."

"Well, then, you can have my
fifteen minutes. Unless I'm on the masthead, the only time I
ever want to appear in any newspaper is when I die."

It was Tess's turn to laugh.
"How Junior League of you. What's the rule? A
proper person's name appears only three times: at birth,
marriage, and death."

"Exactly. So I have two more
opportunities left."

She ducked her head, taking more care than
necessary as she unfolded the linen napkin, hoping Sterling
couldn't see the wide grin spreading across her face at the
realization he had never married.

Marconi's was a dowdy
grande
dame
. The dining room was too bright, the food
too heavily sauced, the wallpaper faded and waterstained. Prices, while
not steep, climbed quickly on the a la carte menu. And although the
owners had finally agreed to a reservation system, the last seating for
dinner was at 8
P.M.
,
ensuring the regulars were at home in time for reruns of
Matlock
and
Murder, She Wrote
. But
Baltimoreans cherished the place. Tess opened the menu with happy
anticipation.

"I'll have the house
salad—it's big, we can split it if you
like—fried pork chops, and potatoes au gratin," she
told the waiter, who was young by Marconi staff standards, not even
sixty. "And please make sure the kitchen doesn't
run out of fudge sauce. I know I'm going to want a sundae for
dessert."

Sterling seemed slightly taken aback by
Tess's appetite, but he tried gamely to keep up with her. His
choices were healthier, however—broiled sole and a plain
baked potato. And while he urged Tess to have a drink, he settled for
club soda and lime. After hearing his abstemious order, Tess wished she
could at least rescind her request for a glass of white wine. Bad
enough to be such a pig, did she have to be a drunkard, too?

"Don't worry, you
won't lose points for drinking in front of me,"
Sterling said, again guessing what she was thinking.
"I'd love a drink myself, but my metabolism went
south when I turned forty. Can't afford those empty
calories."

"I guess I do have a pretty good
metabolism. Of course, I exercise every day." Tess was aware
she sounded boastful, yet she didn't stop. She wanted Jack
Sterling to know how strong she was, how fast, how firm. "On
a typical day, I bet I burn at least a thousand calories from my
workouts—rowing in the warm weather months, running and
weight lifting year round. That's five glasses of wine, or
almost four packs of Peanut M&Ms."

"Well, you look
very…healthy," Sterling said. His naturally pink
cheeks turned a little pinker and a dry cough almost choked him. He
gulped his club soda, spilling some on his shirt front.
"I'm sorry, that was inappropriate."

Tess wanted to ease his embarrassment, the
way he had eased her discomfort earlier. "You don't
know from inappropriate. You should have heard what Wink Wynkowski said
to me when I ran into him at the gym."

"When was this?"

"Friday. The day
before…" she stopped, flustered.

"You can say it, Tess. The day
before he killed himself, thanks to the
Beacon-Light
's
enterprising reporters. Maybe I will have a drink after all."