Charm City (20 page)

She watched a young man help a woman out of
a battered old Dodge. He could have been the same man she had met at
the courthouse, the one who was so pathetically proud of his legitimate
marriage and his almost legitimate child. This woman held her arm
awkwardly in front of her, as if it were an interesting piece of
driftwood she had found on the beach. The man—really more of
a boy-man—circled her shoulders with his arms as if she were
made of porcelain.
So why did you break her
,
Tess wanted to ask, for she had no doubt he was the one who had brought
her here in every sense of the word. Of course, she had domestic
violence on her mind just now.

Only two people know
the truth of a marriage
, Kitty's voice
chided her again. No one really knew what had happened in Violetville.
Wink was dead and Linda wasn't talking. But Bertie had seen
the ambulance, even if she had seen it only once. It was wrong of
Rosita to pay for that information, and the money had probably
encouraged Bertie to exaggerate, but Tess didn't doubt it was
basically true. Hit your wife once, you're a wife beater. And
almost no man ever hit just once. If he got help, perhaps, saw a
therapist—but it was impossible to imagine Wink seeking help
to control his violent temper, the same temper that had made him beat
the old shopkeeper so badly. Montrose had only taught him how to hide
his temper, how to pick better victims. Wink was too busy building an
empire—from A to Z, as Feeney had said—to worry
about his karma. Rosita might have gotten the facts wrong, but she had
nailed down the truth.

No, if Tess was going to retrace
Rosita's reporting, she probably should concentrate on the
gambling angle. Alas, her best source for that line of inquiry was
right here, but he wasn't going to be able to help her
anytime soon. If he ever did regain consciousness, she had more
pressing questions.
Why would someone try to kill
you for a greyhound, even one with altered tattoos
?
She studied his dear, pointy head, wishing she could climb inside and
wander through his memory. As that was impossible, she left.

An ambulance almost wiped her out as she
crossed the driveway. That would make an interesting lawsuit. Her own
memory came to life, like a pinball machine with all the lights
flashing. It wasn't Wink's empire that ran the
gamut from A to Z. It was the
lawsuits
,
the bills he never paid, from ambulances to zippers.
"Amb'lances," as Bertie would say. Word
of the day. Call it whatever you like, but if you called an ambulance
and didn't pay for its services, there would be paperwork,
which might detail what had happened to whom. And if
someone's had that paperwork, they could hold it over
someone's head, unsavory proof of what a less-than-nice guy
he was. Why hadn't Feeney thought of that? Why
hadn't Rosita, flinging fifties along the length of MacTavish
Avenue, taken time to track down proof far stronger than some
geezerette's faulty memory?

Tess glanced at her watch and tried to
remember the shopping itinerary chanted by the doorman at Linda Stolley
Wynkowski's apartment building. If memory served, Thursday
was Jones & Jones day. Or was it Ruth Shaw?

L
inda
Wynkowski stood in front of a full-length mirror, arrayed in a royal
blue dress with an organza skirt, its hem so haphazard and ragged it
couldn't cost less than $500. Seen from a distance, through
the windows of Jones & Jones, she was lovely, the blue dress
setting off her white body and blue eyes, while playing down the fact
the former was too soft, the latter too hard. Tess would have liked to
remain at a distance, but this was not an option.

"You again," Linda
sighed.

"I just came from MacTavish
Avenue."

"Lovely, isn't
it?"

Tess wasn't sure if she meant
MacTavish or the dress. "It's not so
bad," she said, feeling the answer was appropriate to both.

"No, unless you expected more.
Unless you'd been led to expect more. Wink talked so big, I
thought we were going to be living in a nice new house out in Owings
Mills. You know, like the one he and his second wife have. But that
kind of money didn't come in until after we had separated. We
fought about money all the time back then. If I spent fifteen dollars
on a dress at Hoschild's, he'd go crazy."

"Is that how the arguments began?
Over money?"

Linda rose on her tiptoes and did a full
turn in her gown, looking at her own reflection. "I told you,
Wink and I had an agreement not to talk about our marriage. Whatever
happened between us is private."

"Wink dead. Unless you promised to
take his secrets to
your
grave, you don't owe him anything."

"Do you have any earrings to go
with this, Tara?" Linda called over her shoulder to the
salesgirl, a pretty young coed who had cultivated a chic European look
not many Baltimoreans could pull off. Tara rushed forward with crystal
balls strung on sterling silver strings of varying lengths, chunky
flies caught in a spider's fine web.

"Those aren't right at
all," Linda said, throwing them back at the girl.
"This dress needs something bigger—you know, more
dramatic." Tara scurried away.

"I talked to your neighbor on
MacTavish," Tess said. "Bertie Athol."

"Bertie the busybody."

Tess lowered her voice, aware Tara was
probably eavesdropping keenly from her post behind the display case,
where she and an older saleswoman had fallen conspicuously silent.
"Bertie told me she heard the fights, and that she saw an
ambulance in the night. She's the only one who really knows,
isn't she, even if she doesn't know anything?
Bertie, the doctors. And you."

Linda Wynkowski gathered her blond hair in
her hands and piled it on top of her head. It did look better up, but
what was the point of fiddling with hairstyles and accessories for a
dress she would never wear, for a dress that would never go anywhere
but her walk-in closet? She was ruined, and $20,000 a month suddenly
didn't seem a lot to pay for turning someone into a doll,
scared to leave her dollhouse village.

"You know, he always
cried." Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if describing her
former husband's preference for string beans.
"After, I mean. He cried and said he still loved me. When we
separated, he was the one who never wanted to make it official, because
he loved me so much he didn't want to get a divorce. At
least, he loved me until he met her, and then he didn't care
about me anymore."

"But you had something on him,
something concrete," Tess prompted. "Ambulance
bills he didn't pay, or insurance papers detailing exactly
what had happened. You kept them, and when he decided he wanted to
remarry, you used them to get the support order increased."

"Yes. Yes I did." Linda
almost seemed to be in a trance before the mirror, eyes locked on her
own reflection.

"May I see them? Could I see what
you used to"—she didn't want to use the
term blackmail—"to convince Wink?"

"So Bertie knew all along, huh?
She tell anybody else?"

"With Wink dead, I don't
think anyone will be coming around to ask her."

Linda gathered up the long, shaggy skirt of
her ballgown and swept out of Jones & Jones in her stocking
feet. Tara the salesgirl, wiser than Marianna at Octavia, simply
watched her leave, allowing a tiny whistle of a sigh to escape.

"If she doesn't come
back in twenty minutes," the older saleswoman said,
"we'll wrap up what she left and send it to the
apartment, along with a bill for the dress. It won't be the
first time."

Tess followed Linda out of the store,
assuming she was headed for her apartment, just straight ahead, not
even 100 yards away. Instead, she turned right and led Tess to the
branch bank in the shopping center.

"I keep all my important papers in
a safe deposit box at the bank here in Cross Keys." Linda was
strangely manic, as if she had wanted to tell someone this story long
ago but had never dared—first because she was scared, then
because she was paid. "That's the wonderful thing
about Cross Keys, everything is right here. It's so
convenient."

Linda pushed through the bank's
double set of glass doors. No one raised an eyebrow at her ballgown and
stocking feet; the bank employees must know her as well as the
salesgirls. Soon, she was unlocking her safe deposit box on the counter
just beyond the security gate, Tess at her side.

"You know, for a long time, it
didn't even occur to me I had anything to tell,"
she said, as Tess's hands closed greedily on the photocopies,
folded into careful fourths so long ago that the creases had turned
gray. "Then, when that stupid story came out, I hated
everyone thinking—but $20,000 a month. Well, it makes up for
a lot."

Tess skimmed the hospital forms, with their
coded comments on the various injuries treated. A broken collarbone.
Lacerations. A concussion. A broken nose. Oh, Jesus, this must have
been the night the ambulance was called. First-degree burns from hot
grease, and the spleen so badly injured the doctors had almost removed
it. And yet the hospital didn't even have the decency to
grant Linda her own name on the forms. They just listed her as Gerard
S. Wynkowski. His property. His chattel. His to do with as he pleased.
Gerard
S. Wynkowski
. Not even a
"Mrs." You would think Wink had been the patient.

"I can't believe they
kept getting the name wrong, as many times as you went in
there."

"Hell, no one can spell Wynkowski.
Took me years." Linda looked over Tess's shoulder.
"No, no, that's right. Gerard S. Wynkowski. The S
is for Stanislaus. He hated it, how the hospital would call him Gerard
instead of Wink, and use his middle name. He said that was the worst
part of going, hearing them call out his full name in the emergency
room."

"Call out his name? Why would they
call out
his
name?"

"When the doctor was ready to see
him. Haven't you ever been in an emergency room?"

"But they call out the
patient's name—" And finally Tess
understood.

"But you said you knew,"
whined Linda Stolley Wynkowski, pushing Tess against the bank of metal
boxes. It was a child's petulant, impetuous shove, the
opening salvo in a full-fledged tantrum. But unlike a child's
shove, it was really hard: Tess's shoulders smacked the wall
with enough force to leave a bruise, and she remembered the frightened
salesgirl at Octavia, how Linda had ground her heel into her foot.
"You said Bertie told. Bertie
told
!"

Tess sat in the parking lot of
Eddie's on Charles Street, eating her way through a
half-pound of Eddie's peanut clusters, her lunch for the day.
She had been yearning for chocolate-covered nuts since Tommy had held
his picked-over box of candy out to her, and she was a great believer
in yielding to temptation. To her way of thinking, the one part of her
body that actually knew what it wanted deserved to get it.

After leaving Linda Wynkowski, she had
driven straight to the gourmet grocery store, her car homing in on the
nearest source of peanut clusters as if it had a microchip designed
just for that purpose. Eight ounces gave you about a dozen pieces.
Between bites, she took huge draughts from a twenty-ounce Coca-Cola.
But all the sweetness she forced down her throat couldn't
wash away the sour taste of the story Linda Wynkowski had told when her
fury had passed. It had passed pretty quickly, too, for Tess had done
the one thing Wink apparently had never dared—slapped Linda
square across the face and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her until she
calmed down.

The first time, we had
been married about six weeks and he went out drinking with his buddies,
that greaseball Paul Tucci. And he didn't get home until four
A.M.
,
and he didn't call, and I was
hysterical, asking where had he been, why hadn't he called. I
was scared to go out by myself, and I was scared to be there alone. He
just shrugged, you know, the way men do when they're saying
you're just some little bug they can't be troubled
listening to, so I picked up this ashtray—we smoked then,
both of us—and threw it at him. My aim wasn't very
good, but it caught part of his cheek and left a good bruise
.

Put it to music and it could have been a
country song. Substitute Wil E. Coyote and the Road Runner for Wink and
Linda, you had a Warner Brothers cartoon. Rig up a puppet show and it
was Punch 'n' Judy time.

Wink just
wouldn't hit back. I don't know why. Maybe because
I was a woman, maybe because he couldn't ever forget what had
happened to that old guy. He wouldn't even run away, just go
limp. It made me so mad, the way he wouldn't fight;
I'd go wild, I'd hurt him more and more, trying to
get some reaction out of him, but I never could. Finally, he said we
had to live apart, he thought I might kill him the next time. He paid
me support and I really couldn't complain. But then he got
rich and he wanted to marry again. So I told him: you give me what I
want financially, or I'll tell everybody Wink Wynkowski, Mr.
Tough Guy, is a little wimp who let his wife beat up on him. He gave me
what I wanted then, and I moved here. Nothing goes wrong here
.

How surreal it had been, standing in the
alcove of safe deposit boxes with prom queen Linda as she'd
told her story. A story, not incidentally, that happened to be the
complete opposite of what the
Beacon-Light
had reported.
When did you stop beating your
wife, Mr. Wynkowski? Actually, she beat me. Oh sure, Mr. Wynkowski
.
Even the bit about Linda's agoraphobia had been made up. The
only reason she never left Cross Keys was because she was a lazy
eccentric without any friends.

As a dead man, Wink couldn't be
libeled, not in this state. Yet he hadn't been dead when the
story had first run. Maybe the widow Wynkowski had a wrongful death
suit on those grounds. Unfortunately, Tess did not work for the widow
Wynkowski, she worked for the
Beacon-Light
,
and all her information belonged to them, even information that had
nothing to do with how a certain story got into the paper, and
everything to do with how screwed up it was once it got there.

Rosita's use of checkbook
journalism had been a toss-up, slimy but not illegal. Paying and
getting the story ass-backwards—Tess couldn't keep
this to herself. Gee, if only Bertie had known the real story, she
could have made so much more. Not as much as $20,000 a month, perhaps,
but definitely more than fifty bucks. But Bertie, peering through the
curtains in the darkness, had seen what she'd expected to
see, and Rosita had found what she'd expected to find.

She finished off the dregs of her Coke, then
put her car in gear. Despite having consumed almost 100 grams of simple
sugars, she felt sluggish and still had a brackish taste at the back of
her throat that the Coke couldn't wash away. Strange, she had
thought victory was suppose to taste sweet.

Tess found Jack Sterling in the
Blight's
basement level canteen. The room's vending machines, the only
source of sustenance in-house, gave new meaning to the phrase
"strictly from hunger." Olive loaf sandwiches, tins
of stew, lots of pork rinds, rock-hard Gummi Bears. And according to
the lights on the soda machine, the only drink selections were
practically fluorescent—orange, grape, and diet lime.

Sterling stared longingly at some of the
dusty chocolate bars in the candy machine's metal coils,
sighed, and resignedly settled on a bag of honey-mustard pretzels. Ever
the gentleman, he offered the bag to Tess first, but she shook her head.

"I just had lunch," she
said.

"I hope it was something elegant
and fattening. A metabolism like yours is a terrible thing to
waste."

"Well, it was from
Eddie's," she said. "Look, remember when
you asked me to talk to Wynkowski's wife?"

"Of course I do, Tess. I told you
how much I appreciated that, what a relief it was to know she
didn't think we were culpable. Perhaps I didn't
stress my gratitude enough—"

"No, no, I'm not digging
for a compliment. It's just—well, I
didn't stop there. Some things she said made me curious, and
I decided to look at Wink's divorce papers. And I noticed
something odd in the file, so I went to talk to the first Mrs.
Wynkowski." She decided to skip over the detail about
Rosita's personnel file ending up on her windshield. That
would only confuse things. "The next thing I knew, I was
canvassing MacTavish Avenue in Violetville, trying to figure out who
could have told Rosita about the domestic abuse, because it sure
wasn't the first Mrs. Wynkowski."

Sterling tried to keep his voice even and
calm, but Tess could tell he was annoyed. "I arranged for you
to be able to come and go as you pleased so you could look into your
uncle's beating, not so you could meddle in a story that the
Beacon-Light
is still pursuing. What in hell were you thinking? You could have
compromised our coverage, or worse yet, inadvertently let it slip that
the first story was published by accident."