Charm City (14 page)

The salad arrived, a welcome distraction.
Tess watched the waiter as if she had never seen someone toss and cut
greens before, then forked up several mouthfuls in a row to avoid
saying anything. It seemed tactless to speak of Wink's death
to Sterling, although she wasn't sure why.

But Sterling wouldn't let her off
the hook.

"Did we do it, Tess? Did the
paper, in its zeal for a story, kill a man?"

"Of course not. You
didn't know—you couldn't have known what
he would do when the story ran. It's no different than what
happened with
Newsweek
and
Admiral Boorda. Wink made himself out to be such a tough guy. Who knew
it was all an act?"

"Who knows anything about anyone?
I'm burning out on this business, and on the glib
explanations we offer up for everything, as if we could ever really
know a man's soul. I'm no longer so confident I
know what's right and what's wrong. I'm
not even sure Wink's crimes are relevant. Wink Wynkowski left
behind a wife and three children under the age of five. How do I weigh
their pain against the readers' ‘right to
know'?"

The entrees and side dishes arrived, along
with a bourbon and water for Sterling. Although she knew form past
experience how hot the potatoes were, Tess plucked a cube from the
yellow-orange cheese sauce, which had tiny grease bubbles on the
surface. Sure enough, it burned the roof of her mouth.

Sterling stared glumly at his food.
"I think about his widow a lot. I wonder if she spoke to him
Saturday, if he told her what he was going to do. I wonder if she knew
about the story before it was in the paper. Had Wink ever confided in
her? Had he ever confided in anyone about his past?"

"Are Feeney and Rosita working on
a Sunday story about how it…happened?"

"No—not if I have
anything to say about it. I'm not worried about answering
these questions for the
Beacon-Light
.
I want to know for myself, for my conscience. But Mrs.
Wynkowski's not talking to anyone. I'll never know
how she feels or what she's thinking."

Tess sliced off a piece of pork, chasing it
with another potato cube. Still hot, but no longer lethal.
"What if someone intervened, asked her a few questions?
Questions you wanted asked."

"Who would do that?"

"I would, if it counted toward my
six hours daily of indentured servitude. I can't take being
on such a tight leash, Jack. I'm probably in trouble right
now for not checking out with Colleen's secretary before I
went to lunch. Maybe if you told Colleen I was talking to Mrs.
Wynkowski on your behalf…"

"Why would Lea Wynkowski talk to
you?"

"Because I'm not a
reporter. Which means I can misrepresent myself, becoming someone she
might like, someone she would want to confide in."

When Sterling smiled, really smiled, his
grin split his face like the crack in a cheap watermelon. "I
think I know now why Whitney is so devoted to you. I couldn't
see it at first. The two of you seem so different, but you both have a
devious side."

Tess probed the roof of her burned mouth
with her tongue. Comparisons to Whitney seared in a way no potato
could. "Are you saying you're surprised
we're friends because she's gorgeous, rich, and
successful, and I'm a plain, poor failure?"

"Don't beg for
compliments," Sterling said, wagging his fork at her, still
smiling broadly. The color in his cheeks was even higher than usual,
perhaps because of his drink, and his hair was falling in his eyes
again. Tess had a sudden desire to push it back.
"You're both good-looking women, and I suspect you
know that. Which is the main reason I find your friendship intriguing.
Most attractive women pick plain friends."

"
Smart
women prefer beautiful friends: you meet more men that way, especially
if you complement one another. I've met a lot of my
boyfriends through Whitney."

"Including Jonathan
Ross?"

The name, the too-casual way Sterling used
it, made something catch in Tess's throat. Before his death,
Jonathan Ross had been one of the
Blight
's
star reporters. Obviously, Sterling would know that. He also had once
been Tess's boyfriend, and she wondered if Sterling had
learned this as well. She saw Jonathan again, the way she saw him in
her nightmares, in clumsy flight over Bond Street. He had saved her
life, losing his in the process.
Not my fault
,
she reminded herself.
Not my fault
.

"Jonathan and I worked together at
the
Star
years ago, then
he moved to the
Beacon-Light
.
We were friends, Whitney, Jonathan, and I. Friends. Men and women can
be, you know."

"Sometimes I think Whitney would
like to be a man."

"Whitney would like all the
opportunities open to men. There's a difference."

Sterling didn't pick up on her
dig. "Whitney reminds me of a man in one of those English
hunting prints. I always expect her to stride into my office one day, a
riding crop in one hand and a dead fox in the other. I've
never really liked those blueblood types. Something androgynous there.
You're actually more feminine, even if you do spend a lot of
time trying to hide it." He turned pink again.
"Sorry. There I go again, being inappropriate."

"More bizarre than inappropriate.
Whitney's not mannish at all."

"I've been known to hold
minority opinions before. I didn't get where I am by
embracing the conventional wisdom."

"Obviously. The conventional
wisdom is that you should let the widow Wink alone."

"I know." He shook his
head. "I know. But I have to find out how she's
doing, Tess. Won't you talk to her for me? I'll get
the okay from Lionel, so you don't have to worry about Cory
any more. Whitney told me you're trying to figure out what
happened to your uncle. Do this for me, and you have carte blanche to
come and go as you please for the next two weeks."

Tess raised her glass. "To
unconventional wisdom."

I
t
was almost 2 o'clock when Tess finished scraping the last bit
of hot fudge from her ice cream bowl. Sterling, who had faded during
the main course, watched with a slightly stunned look that might pass
for admiration. Together they walked back to the paper, where her car
was now safely parked in the visitors' lot behind the
building.

"The shit-and-salmon
gang," she said out loud, remembering the brown
Buick's original color, outlandish enough so it might be
possible to track the model and make through MVA. How many
salmon-colored Buicks could there be in Maryland? Then again,
they'd probably have a new car the next time she saw them.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just a stray thought. My
brain sometimes doesn't process a piece of information for
days, but it never lets go of anything."

She felt a little giddy, as if returning
from an unusually good first date, and had to remind herself not to
seize Sterling's arm or touch him in any way. Wine at midday,
even one glass, made the world a dangerously warm and tender place.

They had agreed, somewhere over her dessert
course, that she should start the new assignment immediately, going to
call on the widow Wink this afternoon.

"Their house is in that new
development out Reisters-town Road," Sterling told her when
they reached the
Blight
.
"The Cotswolds, I think. Or Tudor Village.
Something
English. He lives on Tea Rose Lane. I always remember that detail from
the stories, because I thought it was funny, a tough guy who grew up in
Violetville, then ended up on Tea Rose Lane. But I don't have
the number. Come upstairs and I'll get it for you."

"No, I don't want to run
the risk of entering Colleen's field of vision.
She's like one of those big dinosaurs, the kind who
can't attack unless she sees you moving. I've got a
map in my car which should get me to Tea Rose. Then all I have to do is
look for the place with a lawn trampled by all those camera crews. I
may make one stop en route, pick up a little something I might have to
put on my expense account. Is that okay?"

"Whatever you need,"
Sterling assured her.

Whatever
?

The Costwolds seemed to feature every kind
of architecture except for the modest cottages found in the part of
England from which it took its name. The lots were deep but narrow.
Huge houses crowded up against one another, almost as close as the city
rowhouses the residents had fled. After a few wrong turns, Tess found
Tea Rose, a looping cul de sac off the main road, Cotswold Circle. Her
joke about the camera crews had been prescient. Although all the lawns
here were still winter-brown, the yard at number seven had a
particularly hopeless look to it.

After several seconds of scrutiny through a
fisheye in the huge oak door, Lea Wynkowski opened the door.

"Yes?" she asked, eyes
and voice dull.

"Mrs. Wynkowski? I'm
Sylvia Weinstein, from Weinstein's Jewelers in
Pikesville." The lie almost made her lips pucker, as tight
and unapproving as the lips of the real Sylvia Weinstein, widely
believed to have been born with a lemon wedge in her mouth. Tess could
think of few people she'd less like to be than her aunt. But
she did exist, and she worked alongside Uncle Jules in his Pikesville
store when the mood struck her, or when she wasn't in Boca
Raton. Her story would check out, if anyone thought to check it out.

"Honestly, I don't have
as much money as everyone thinks I do," Lea said.
"Even if I did, I'm not exactly in the market for
jewelry right now."

"But I'm here to bring
you something, Mrs. Wynkowski, something Wink had been planning to give
you. He stopped in the store last week and said he would pick it up
after the weekend. It's paid in full, it's only
right you have it."

She pulled out a box and showed Lea the
simple gold bracelet inside. More than $100, even at cost, but she had
told Uncle Jules to bill it directly to the
Blight
.
She'd like to see Colleen Reganhart's face when
that expense came through for authorization.

"Kinda plain, for Wink's
taste," Lea said dubiously. "Did he say why he was
buying it?"

"Just because—just
because he loved you."

To Tess's horror, Lea burst into
tears and embraced her.

"I'm sorry,
it's only that it's exactly what I would have
picked out for myself," Lea said, wiping her nose on the
sleeve of a butter-yellow sweater, then grabbing Tess again.
"I guess Wink finally noticed I didn't wear that
fancy stuff he was always giving me. Good thing. I'll
probably have to hock most of them now."

Money was certainly on her mind, Tess
noticed. "Are you having, uh, financial
difficulties?"

"We're having financial
catastrophes. Wink had a five-million-dollar insurance policy, but it
doesn't pay off in the event of suicide. By the time you
figure closing costs on this place, I'll lose what little
equity we have in it. I could sell the business. But the business
isn't worth anything without the basketball team, and
there's no guarantee there will be a basketball team, or
I'll get a piece of it if there is."

"Shit."

"You can say that again. Hey, you
want a cup of coffee or something?" Lea asked. "My
mom took the kids out for the afternoon so I could be alone for a
little while. Although it helps a little, being so busy with the kids.
Between cookies and diaper changes, I don't have much time to
feel sorry for myself."

"How many children do you
have?" Tess asked, as she followed Lea to the rear of the
house.

"Three. Three kids in four years.
What was I thinking? What was Wink thinking?"

A family room as large as a hotel lobby ran
across the back of the house. Tess suppressed a smirk at the
needle-point pillows along the sofa, adorned with Springsteen titles:
"Born to Run," "Hungry Heart,"
and "She's the One."

Tess could see how Lea Wynkowski might
inspire that last sentiment. Young and fresh looking, she had the kind
of beauty that stood up to crying jags and insomnia. Large brown eyes,
brown hair a shade lighter, with the shine and bounce of hair in a
shampoo commercial. She wore blue jeans, a yellow cotton sweater over a
white T-shirt, yellow socks, and no shoes, and she looked better than
most women would in couture clothes. Tess had thought men who traded in
their first wives went for high-maintenance types the second time
around. Lea looked like a first wife, or someone's high
school sweetheart. She could be the girl in an early Bruce Springsteen
song, lured onto a motorcycle and out of town, knocked up and
abandoned. Instead, she was living out the lyrics to "Hungry
Heart"—the part about the wife and kids back in
Baltimore, left by the guy who went out for a ride and never came back.
In his own way, Wink had done just that.

"How are you holding
up?" Tess asked. Her sympathy wasn't
fake—if anything, the wretched success of her bracelet trick
made her feel she owed Lea Wynkowski true compassion.

"I'm not," Lea
said. She opened a wooden-and-copper box on the low, distressed pine
table in front of her and took out a cigarette. She didn't
light the cigarette but held it in her right hand, twirling it like a
miniature baton. "I'm in a million little
pieces—one for every dollar Wink didn't leave
us."

"Your doctor could write a
prescription for a sedative."

"I don't want to be
sedated. I want to feel what I'm feeling."

"What are you feeling?"

"Pissed." Lea smiled at
Tess's surprise. "I know it doesn't sound
very elegant, and it's not in any of those grief books my
mother keeps bringing me, but it's what I am. I'm
pissed
.
Furious with Wink for what he did to us."

She sniffed the cigarette she was holding,
then placed it back in the box. "I gave up smoking the first
time I got pregnant, but I never stopped missing it."

"Me, either," Tess said,
willing to say anything to find common ground with this strange young
woman. Lea's grief was sincere enough, but it was shot
through with something darker, something disturbing.

"You have kids?"

"Uh, no, but I gave up
cigarettes." Not even this was true. It was one of the few
vices Tess had skipped along the way.

"Then you can't know how
weird it is. Killing yourself, I mean, when you've got three
kids. He loved our girls. He would have killed anyone who hurt them,
but now he's hurt them more than anybody else could. I wish I
could ask him why."

"Where did you two meet?"

"In Atlantic City.
Tooch—Paul Tucci, his best friend—introduced us.
Tucci's the one who really likes to gamble, not Wink. But I
was a blackjack dealer, so he played blackjack. Won a date with me on a
bet. We got married six months later. We would have gotten married even
sooner, but—"

"But?"

"But we
didn't," she said flatly.

"When was the last time you talked
to him?"

"Friday, in the afternoon. He
called me at my mom's house in Jersey. Whenever I went away,
he called me every day. He was devoted to me."

Yes, a devoted husband,
checking in by phone when he wasn't making passes at other
women
.

"When did you hear about what was
in the paper on Sunday?"

"Not until Sunday night, after I
got back. I don't know why Wink killed himself over it. That
guy who died—I mean, so he had a bad heart. He could have
died if some kid jumped out of a closet and said
‘Boo.' It wasn't Wink's
fault."

Tess picked her words carefully as possible.
"According to the account in the paper, Wink stood over the
guy and pistol-whipped him, then bragged about it."

"That's not true. Wink
couldn't have done something like that.
He's—he was—a pussycat. A sweetie. Anyone
who ever knew him loved him."

She stood up and walked over to a large pine
armoire, which Tess knew would store the requisite electronic toys.
Sure enough, the doors opened to reveal a large TV, stereo, VCR, laser
disc player, and two shelves of videotapes. Lea reached behind the
videos on the lowest shelf and pulled out a slim book bound in bright
blue. Tess read the white lettering on the spine:
The
Happy Wanderer
.

"This is Wink's yearbook
from junior high. Before he…went away," Lea said.
"He never knew I had it. I found it in his stuff, and I liked
to look at it sometimes. Sometimes I wish we were the same age, that we
had started going together in sixth grade and been together forever. I
would have been good for him."

She handed Tess the book, and its well-worn
spine opened automatically to a photograph of Wink, taken with the
basketball team. He had been even scrawnier then, but his hair had been
close-cropped, so you couldn't tell how curly it was. What an
unfashionable hairdo, among the bushy locks and sideburns of the early
'70s. Most of the boys looked like they were werewolves,
caught in mid-transformation.

"And look here," Lea
said, leaning over Tess and turning to the frontspiece. "Look
at the things the kids wrote, boys and girls. They all loved
him." She traced her fingers over the faded ink. "
Right
back here and out of sight/I sign my name just for spite
."
"
Make no friends/But keep the old/One is
silver/but the other's gold. You're golden, Wink.
RGJH 4-ever
." "That means
Rock Glen Junior High forever." "
Love,
Lynette
." Someone else, presumably a
boy, had signed nearby, "
Silver and
gold. Gag me. Ray-ray
."

Tess started to flip through the rest of the
pages. Lea tried to snatch the book away from her. But Lea was timid,
scared of damaging the precious memento. Curiosity sparking, Tess held
it out of arm's length and scanned the pages. It took only a
moment to find what Lea didn't want her to see: a
classmate's photo had been crossed out with an emphatic black
X, the legend "Cunt" written beneath it. Despite
these additions, the name was still legible.

"Linda Stolley," Tess
read out loud. "If I remember the
Beacon-Light
's
first story, she was Wink's first wife. I guess the divorce
wasn't too amicable, if he had to go back and deface her
junior high school yearbook picture."

Lea looked scared, but she didn't
back down. "She was a…well, I don't like
to say that word, but it's what she was. Wink left her years
ago, but he never got divorced from her officially. So when he decided
to marry me and finally wanted to get a divorce, she held him up for a
fortune. Her alimony cost more than the mortgage on this place, but it
was the one bill Wink never skipped, I can tell you. Oh no, Miss Linda
always had to be paid first no matter what."

"You make it sound as if he had a
habit of paying other bills late." Unwittingly, Lea was
confirming the
Blight's
story, line by line. The violence, the rage against his ex-wife, the
financial problems.

"I'm
not—" Lea snatched the book back. "I
wanted to show you how loved Wink was. I thought you were on
our
side."

Tess had forgotten her role.
"Look, I've upset you. That was the last thing I
wanted to do. Please, wear your bracelet in good health. And if you do
have to sell anything, call Jules Weinstein first. I'll make
sure he does the appraisal for free. It's the least I can
do."

Lea looked at her skeptically.
"Was that the whole reason you came over here, to get dibs on
my jewelry? Maybe you made up the whole story about this gold bracelet.
Maybe you've never even met Wink."