Charm City (22 page)

Whitman almost bowed as he ran from the
room, grateful for the chance to live another day in abject fear.
Colleen was composed but deathly pale as she stalked out behind him,
while Five-Four tried to give Mabry a manly pat on the shoulder which
ended up closer to the small of his back. Only Sterling was left
behind, still staring at the blank legal pad in front of him.

"I wonder what she'll
do," he said.

"Find a new job, start over. What
else can she do?"

"She could still fight it, if she
was smart. File an EEOC complaint, say she was railroaded out because
she's a minority and a woman."

"I don't think the facts
of Rosita's firing make her an ideal candidate for any kind
of job action."

"But it was so ugly, so
vicious," Sterling said. "I've never seen
anything like it, not in all my years in the business. I tried to
prepare her for it, but I don't think she understood the
severity of her circumstances. She thought I could save her, but I
couldn't, I really couldn't."

"No one could. Besides, it was
Lionel's decision in the end, not yours."

"I was part of it, though. We were
all part of it. If Rosita is a monster, we're Dr.
Frankenstein."

Tess wanted desperately to comfort him, to
remind him he was a good person, albeit one in a rotten business. She
tried to put her arm around his shoulders, but it was awkward, reaching
around the padded leather chair, and she ended up pressing her cheek
next to his. She couldn't believe how hot his face was, how
hard the pulse beat in his temple.

Sterling was the one who pulled away.
"So you're free of us now."

"I guess I am. Won't
take a security guard, or even a box to clean out my desk. I never
settled in."

"It will probably be weeks and
weeks before you get paid. We're not very timely in sending
checks out to our independent contractors."

So that's what she was to him. An
independent contractor.

"No problem." She
grabbed the straps of her knapsack, ready to flee. She didn't
have a reason to see him anymore, she realized. That also was part of
the bargain she had struck.

Sterling's voice stopped her
before she reached the door. "Tess—what's
Tess short for, anyway?"

"Theresa."

"Whitney refers to you as Tesser,
sometimes."

"Do you and Whitney talk about
me?" She didn't know whether to be flattered or
troubled.

"Before you were hired, she
briefed me on you. Remember my little instant thumbnail description of
you? Whitney fed me most of my information."

"She was a double-agent, then. She
did the same for me. Anyway, Tesser is the way I said my full name,
Theresa Esther, when I was a kid."

He had seemed to be cheering up, but his low
spirits suddenly overtook him again. "Everybody was a kid
once, pure and hopeful. You. Rosita. Wink. No one plans to fuck up, do
they?"

"I don't plan on it, but
I
do
count on
it."

Good, she had made him laugh, and his bad
mood lifted for good this time. Strange, his ambivalence over Rosita
only made him more attractive to her. He was the only person here
today—Rosita included—who seemed to understand that
there would probably be no second chances for Rosita, no hope of
starting over. She was damaged goods at twenty-four. Well, she could go
to law school, or find some other profession where a situational
approach to the truth was less of a detriment. But she'd
probably never work as a reporter again.

Sterling stood up to leave.
"Good-bye, Tess. Good luck. Everything I've seen
suggests you're going to be a hell of an investigator. I bet
you were a pretty good reporter, too."

"Thanks. I'd say
it's been fun, but—"

"I know. It
hasn't." He jingled the change in his pocket,
suddenly self-conscious. "Look, I don't want you to
think I'm another Whitman—for one thing, I
don't have a wife and five kids at home—but would
you like to have dinner sometime?"

"Sure." She waited to
see if he was going to make the invitation concrete, or if he was
merely being polite.

"Saturday night?"

"I'm free."

And having said that, she had to make it
true.

Tess found a lot of reasons not to go home
that afternoon. She puttered around Tyner's office, then went
to Durban's, where she set out to run five miles on the
treadmill, then found herself doing seven. Finally, there was no place
else to go.

When she arrived at the apartment, Crow was
puttering on the terrace, almost ridiculous in his perfection: the
postmodern boyfriend, potting pansies and singing softly to
man's best friend. Esskay was under his elbow, nosing through
the mulch and topsoil and demanding attention even as he worked. It was
staying light longer now and the purple dusk picked up the new violet
strands in his hair.
He looks like a little boy
playing with mud pies
, Tess thought,
or
Martha Stewart as a punk rocker. I'm surprised you
can't order him from the Smith & Hawken catalog
.
The truth was, he looked like what he was, what he had always
been—a kind, considerate man-child. The kind of guy she had
longed for when she was in college. He was only seven years too late.

"It's too early, even
for pansies," she said, a little too harshly. "It
snowed this morning, remember? We'll probably have two or
three more freezes into April."

"I'm going to bring them
in and keep them next to the French doors. They'll get good
light there. I was thinking, this would be a great spot to grow
tomatoes this summer, with all the sun. I also want to put in a little
herb garden. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme." He sang the
last. "And basil, so we can have
linguine
alla cecca
all summer long. That's
pasta with chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, olive oil, and cayenne
pepper. It's the best thing you'll ever
eat."

Tess grunted noncommittally. She
didn't want to plan her summer menus in March. She
didn't want to plan anything with Crow right now. Lost in his
dreams of Early Girls and Beefmasters, he sprinkled a handful of mulch
across the topsoil, then patted it tenderly in place. Everything he
touched, he touched with this indiscriminate love and care. For a
moment, Tess tried to frame an objection to him on this basis, but not
even she could be that contrary. Crow loved her, he was good to her, he
was a good person. The sad fact was, none of those things obligated her
to love him back.

"Do you know the significance of
April?" he asked.

"Opening Day? The cruelest month?
The Mary Sue Easter egg jingle on the radio twenty-four hours a day,
driving one slowly insane?"

"Our six-month anniversary comes
in April. April twenty-third. Know where I'd like to go to
celebrate?"

"Lourdes?"

He was too happily absorbed in his plans to
really hear her. "The community health clinic for HIV tests.
Then, when we get our results, we could make a commitment to one
another." He put down his shovel and came over to hug her,
smelling of dirt and mulch. "Nothing official. It would be
just a way of formalizing what we're already doing."

"I want to say yes,"
Tess muttered into his collarbone. "I want to
want
to say yes."

Crow pulled away from her. "What
are you saying, Tess?"

"It's what I'm
not
saying, Crow.
I'm not saying yes. I'm not saying I'm
ready for a committed relationship. Sometimes I think we jumped into
this a little too quickly. So much was going on last fall. So much is
going on now. And when you talk about summer and tomatoes and linguine
and AIDS tests—Crow, I'm going to be thirty this
summer."

"What does your age have to do
with anything?"

"Everything—when you
throw in your age as well."

"As time goes by, the difference
in our ages will seem smaller and smaller."

"Maybe. But I have a feeling
it's going to get larger before it gets smaller."

Crow gave her a long, puzzled look, then
went into the apartment. She heard drawers opening, the sound of
plastic CD boxes smacking together as he sorted through their
commingled music. Heavy footsteps on the stairs, three trips in all, as
he carried things to his car. Esskay watched anxiously from the French
doors, confused as always by anything remotely out of the ordinary.
Crow gave the dog a long, lingering pat as he came back out on the
terrace. His expression was as troubled and perplexed as the
greyhound's.

"I'll probably end up
giving Kitty my notice. I was planning to, anyway, things are heating
up with the band."

"That's okay.
She's used to people coming and going."

"And you? Are you used to it,
Tess?"

She had no answer for that.

"I loved you." Not a
question, not an attempt to change her mind, just a statement of the
facts. Again, Tess had no reply, other than "I
know"—and that would be too cruel.

"You're a good
person," she said at last. "You're one of
the nicest people I've ever known."

"There are steamed vegetables for
Esskay's dinner." And he was gone.

It was dark now, and getting cold on the
terrace, just as Tess had prophesied. She dragged the heavy planters of
pansies into the apartment, found Esskay's length of
chain—Crow still hadn't gotten around to buying her
a proper leash,
there
,
that was something he had screwed up—and took her out,
largely for something to do. They walked to the pier at the foot of
Broadway, so Tess could watch the water and Esskay could lunge at
pigeons and seagulls.

She thought she would feel
exhilarated—break-ups were usually enormously liberating if
one initiated them. And if the other person broke things off, well,
that was usually good for taking off a quick ten pounds. Tonight, she
still had her appetite, but was she happy, was she free? As
Feeney's friend Auden had said, the question was absurd. She
was depressed, hungry, and strangely sad.

Esskay rested her head on Tess's
knee, gazing into her eyes in the soulful way that meant "Pet
me," unless there was food handy, in which case it translated
to "Feed me." Tess scratched beneath her chin and
along her nose, picking a few flecks of mulch from the dog's
long snout. The slightly acrid, tangy smell made her think longingly of
the daffodils and tulips that would soon appear throughout the city.
And her mother's flower beds, with their red, white, and blue
flowers in perfect rectangles along the house. She smiled at the image
of Uncle Spike, showing up with her mother's winter mulch,
ten whole bags of it, just as spring was beginning. Judith
didn't use that much mulch in a decade. What had Spike been
thinking?

What had
she
been thinking? No, the problem was, she hadn't been thinking
at all. Neither had her mother, nor her father. The reason for
Spike's beating had been with them all along.

T
ess
was too anxious to take the time necessary to wrestle Esskay up three
flights of stairs and settle her down with water, supper, and a
post-walk treat. Friday was grocery shopping night in the Monaghan
household, a time-consuming ritual in which Judith and Patrick worked
the aisles at the Giant side by side, picking fights over virtually
every item.
Creamed corn, pro or con? Was there
really a difference between name brand toilet paper and the generic
store brand
? But now it was almost eight, which
meant Tess had less than an hour until they returned. It would be
better to find whatever Spike had hidden, take it, and leave, allowing
her parents to remain in blissful ignorance.

She parked on the street and walked up the
driveway, Esskay trotting happily alongside her, just pleased to be in
on this adventure. The garage was padlocked, but the side entrance,
where her mother kept her potting bench and gardening tools, was always
open.

Inside, the naked sixty-watt bulb
wasn't a match for anything past dusk, and the corners of the
shed were lost in gray shadows that made every shape sinister and
suspect. Ten plastic garbage bags sat in the back like huge
toad-stools, fat and poisonous. She opened one, sniffing. The fragrance
was sharper than whatever Crow had been using, but this was definitely
mulch. Now what?

She plunged her arm into the elbow, then to
the shoulder, fingers wiggling in search of anything that was not
mulch. It might be hard or soft, as big as a gold brick, as small as a
diamond ring. Again and again, eight times in all, she repeated the
exercise, coming up with nothing more than a sleeve loamy with traces
of tree bark. But on the ninth bag, the mulch was only a soft, shallow
cover for something harder. A handful of little triangles, dried and
stiff, like misshapen tortilla chips.

Curious, she pulled a few out. Esskay
sniffed experimentally, then backed away, whimpering strangely. Tess
held the triangles closer to the light. No, they weren't
chips, and they weren't edible, not unless a dog was a
cannibal. The triangles were made of flesh and hair, and although they
had shrunk when they dried, the tattooed numbers were still visible.

The ears. The
ears
.
That's what Spike had seen, not the years.

Tess dropped them on the floor, recoiling at
the light clattering sound on the concrete floor. Her first instinct
was to run, as if by fleeing she could put some distance between
herself and a world where someone methodically sliced the ears from
greyhound corpses, ensuring they could never be traced, then beaten her
uncle so he couldn't tell what he had seen, or share what he
had found.

But she couldn't just run away.
She had to gather up the evidence, gruesome as it was, and take it to
someone. The police? The Humane Society? She'd figure it out
later. Grabbing her mother's rake, she pushed the scattered
ears into a pile, then dropped to her knees to put them back in their
bed of mulch. Esskay's whimpering escalated into a
high-pitched wail, a dirge for her fallen comrades.
Ru-ru-ru-ru
.

Perhaps it was this plaintive sound that
masked the footsteps in the driveway. At any rate, it was only when the
door creaked behind her that Tess stood and turned, but before she
could make a sound, her face was smothered in a man's leather
jacket—the leather jacket of someone broad-shouldered and at
least 6' 6".

"Finally," a familiar
gravelly voice said from somewhere behind the man, who held the back of
her neck just hard enough to let her know he could crack her spine if
he wanted to.

"Is it just the one
bag?" her captor asked.

"Looks that way, but we better
take 'em all, just in case. Maybe we'll get lucky
and find the other thing, too."

"We could look around. It could be
somewhere else in here."

"No time. But we'll take
her, see if she has any ideas."

Leather Jacket released the pressure on
Tess's neck slightly and shoved a handkerchief into her
mouth. His callused hand smelled of onions and motor oil. She thought
of biting the hand that gagged her, but it seemed futile and most
unsanitary. From behind her, another hand fished through her pockets
for her car keys.

"Let's go,"
Gravel Voice said. The two men linked arms on either side of her, as if
she were Dorothy, ready to gambol down the Yellow Brick Road with Tin
Man and Scare-crow. When she tried to go limp, forcing them to drag her
away, one poked a hard object in her ribs—presumably a gun;
she didn't have the heart to find out for sure by struggling.
Where was the Ten Hills neighborhood watch when
you really needed them? Why wasn't one of her
mother's nosy friends peeking out her window now, taking in
this scene
? Esskay jogged beside them,
determined not to be left out.

"Like the new car?"
Gravel Voice asked, as they pushed her into the backseat of a black
Oldsmobile, a far more discreet car than either of their previous
vehicles. Esskay hopped in beside her. There, yet another man in a
leather jacket forced her head down below the seats, using his armpit
like a vise, a leathery, sweaty vise. "We realized the other
one was a little too recognizable, so we traded up."

Tess's muffled voice almost
managed to sound confident. "My parents are going to come
home soon and when they see my car at the curb, they'll have
the cops out looking for me immediately."

"Why do you think we took your
keys?" Gravel Voice asked from the front seat. "Our
friend's going to follow us in it. There's not
going to be any car at the curb when your parents come home, or any
bags, or any dog. They'll never know you were here, and I
don't think the cops are going to put out an
all-points-bulletin for a bunch of dirt."

"Jesus fuckin'
Christ!" The man who had been holding Tess loosened his grip,
letting her up for air, just in time to smell something even less
appealing than the poorly aged leather of his jacket. Esskay,
overwhelmed by the evening's events, had emptied her bladder
on the floor of the car. The armpit returned, dragging Tess back into
its rancid world.

She muttered into the crook of his elbow:
"If I promise to keep my head down in my own lap, would that
be okay?"

No verbal reply, but the arm released her
and she pressed her face into her thighs. Her black wool trousers
carried a faint whiff of mothballs. Mothballs, and it was almost time
to put them back in storage. It depressed her, yet another sign of
incompetence on her part.

Beneath her, she felt the car make two right
turns and a left, then head down a long straight-away marked by
frequent intersections, judging by the stops every 100 feet or so, and
more frequent potholes. This was probably meaningful information, but
Tess had no idea what to do with it. The Oldsmobile also had bad shocks
and a few empty cans of Miller Lite rolling around on the floor. Esskay
whined at each jolt.

"Look, you've got the
ears," she said. "Once you take them,
there's nothing anyone can do to you. What else are you
looking for? What do you want with my dog?"

Gravel Voice said, "The last thing
we need is another fuckin' dog."

The man next to her shook with suppressed
laughter; Tess felt the vibrations where their hips touched. Then the
car was quiet, rolling to a stop in what appeared to be a long driveway.

It took a few seconds to stand straight
again, once she was out of the car. Tess pretended to be stiffer than
she was, which allowed her to steal a glance at the neighborhood as she
stretched and stamped her feet as if they had fallen asleep. Large
Victorians, set far back from the street, big lawns. Suburban, but not
overly so. A block away, she could see the haze of streetlights along a
fairly busy street. The traffic sound was constant, and they
couldn't have driven more than twenty minutes. Catonsville,
only a few miles due west of her parents' house. Either these
guys didn't care if Tess knew where she was, or they
didn't think she was going to have a chance to tell anyone.

They dragged her into a once-grand house,
seedy after what appeared to be many months of vacancy. In the living
room, with its high ceilings and old-fashioned chandelier, a man sat in
a slightly ramshackle Morris chair, the only furniture in the room,
holding a small dog in his lap. Tess didn't recognize the
man, but she remembered the yapping dog from their encounter on South
Street. Charlton? Carleton? Something like that. The dog had silky
red-gold hair and an ugly rat face. The man had plain brown hair and an
ugly rat face.

"We tried to tell you your uncle
had things that didn't belong to him," the man in
the Morris chair said. "I don't know why you
couldn't help us recover our property sooner."

"I didn't know what you
wanted. I only found the—them—on a
hunch." She didn't want to say out loud what she
had seen, what she had touched.

"But there is something else he
has stolen from our employer, and it is urgent we find that as
well."

"It might help if you told me what
you were looking for. All this time, I thought you wanted my
greyhound."

Morris Chair shook his head. His face was
long and thin, with deep hollows in his cheeks that gave him a wasted
look.

"This dog was part of an earlier
program that proved to be too, uh, labor-intensive. It's of
no interest to us, and frankly, neither are you. But I guess
you're going to be our guest for a while. Perhaps your
uncle's friend, the little dishwasher, will suddenly remember
where our property is, if he has some incentive."

"Tommy doesn't know
anything." Tess felt desperate, thinking of her fate in
Tommy's hands, imagining Tommy opening up a box with, say,
her index finger in it. He'd probably deep-fry it and serve
it during Happy Hour. "You know, when I went out tonight, I
told my aunt to call the police if I didn't return within the
hour."

All the men laughed at that. Tess
wasn't sure if they didn't believe her or were
simply confident it didn't matter. Nonplused, she gave Esskay
a little slack on her leash, hoping the dog might pee on
someone's leg. But the greyhound simply stared with bright
eyes at Morris Chair, her brain's signals almost audible.
Dinner,
dinner, dinner
. Tess would have been hungry,
too, if her stomach wasn't so tight with fear.

"You won't be returning
within the hour," Morris Chair advised her. "You
won't be returning at all until your uncle's friend
cooperates."

His lap dog jumped to the floor and sniffed
her owner's shoes. Shiny slip-ons, sort of like patent
leather bedroom slippers. And he wore a leather blazer, fingertip
length, over a navy blue polyester sports shirt. All the men were
dressed the same, more or less. Leather jackets or blazers, knit
shirts, polyester pants, and shiny, soft loafers. Despite herself, Tess
wondered where they shopped.

"Now, are you sure you
don't have any ideas about where else your uncle might have
hidden something?"

The little dog saw something move near the
fireplace—a roach, a rat, a shadow—and gave chase,
yapping excitedly. Tess felt a strange burning sensation against her
palm as Esskay's metal chain jerked through her fingers
before she could grab it. The greyhound had joined the hunt. But Esskay
didn't want the small dog's prey. She wanted the
small dog, whom she quickly trapped in the corner.

"Charlton!" Morris Chair
screamed, rising from his chair. Too late. Esskay sank her teeth into
the dog's soft belly, shaking it ferociously from side to
side. The race was won! And Esskay had
caught
the rabbit, something no other dog at the track had ever done. She was
almost delirious with joy, prancing around the room like a majorette.

Morris Chair made a horrible keening sound.
The three other men rushed into the fray, then backed away, unsure what
to do. Esskay kept her jaws clamped on the smaller dog, shaking it as
if it were a small dust mop. Tess began edging toward the door, but
stopped when she saw one of the men, the tall one who had first grabbed
her, reach into his jacket and pull out a gun.

"Are you crazy?" she
screamed, pushing past him and seizing Esskay by the snout, forcing her
jaws open easily. After all, this wasn't a pit bull, or a
Rottweiler. There was no strength here, no danger, nothing to fear
except halitosis. The smaller dog writhed on the floor, possibly in
shock, but the only visible damage were two small puncture wounds to
its abdomen.

"Charlton," Morris Chair
whimpered, when she picked up the little dog and handed it to him.

"There's a
twenty-four-hour vet not far from here," Tess offered,
surprised that she could feel some empathy for the man and his hideous
little dog. "Out Route 40." Her three captors just
stared blankly at her, as Morris Chair cradled Charlton in his arms.

"It's probably the road
you brought me here on," she explained. "At least,
I think that's the route, unless we came out Frederick Road.
Route 40 runs off the Beltway, parallel to Frederick, you
can't miss it. The vet is opposite the Toys R Us."

"You stay here with
her," Morris Chair told Leather Jacket number 1, the tall one
who had grabbed Tess in her parents' garage, as he rushed
out, followed by Gravel Voice and Leather Jacket number 2.

"He loves that dog," her
remaining captor said, putting his gun on the mantel, as if to remind
Tess it was still at hand. "Anything happens to it, your
dog's dead. Probably oughta be put down anyway, vicious as it
is."

He spoke without irony, this thug who had
kidnapped her, beaten her her uncle, and tried to shoot Esskay.