Charm City (3 page)

Today's menu was French toast,
courtesy of Steve the bartender. He had a tight, hard look that Tess
despised. Small men who spent so much time developing their muscles
tended to neglect other vital parts. Then again, she hadn't
liked any of her aunt's boyfriends since Thaddeus Freudenberg
had left to attend the FBI academy down at Quantico. That had been in
January—two months by the regular calendar, four boyfriends
ago on the Kitty calendar.

"So, did Tommy provide any more
details about what happened last night?" Kitty asked, as Tess
helped herself to coffee. "And how's Spike
doing?"

"Not so good. He lost
consciousness while we were there. Someone—several
someones—really worked him over. Probably got all of thirty
dollars for their trouble."

Steve, uninterested in such mundane family
matters as the robbery and near-death of a relative, yanked the
conversation back to a subject he could dominate.

"So, did you get your dog from one
of the local rescue groups?" he asked, serving Tess two
slices of French toast, then sprinkling powdered sugar on top. Tess
would have preferred something a little less sticky on a Tuesday
morning, a bagel or a bowl of cereal, but she wasn't about to
complain.

"I got her from my Uncle
Spike."

"Well, he must've just
got her, if she didn't know how to do steps. Those raw
patches on her butt, that's kennel burn."

Esskay whimpered, as if aware of being the
center of a less-than-flattering discussion. Kitty broke off a piece of
toast and offered it to the dog, who wolfed it down with amazing speed.

"You should call one of those
rescue groups, get the drill," Steve continued.
"There are all sorts of things you need to know."

"Like what?" Kitty
wouldn't be able to put up with this one for long, Tess
decided, no matter what talents he possessed in the kitchen and
boudoir. She liked quiet breakfasts.

"Diet. Exercise," he
said vaguely, waving his fork in the air. Something in the gesture told
Tess he had exhausted his little storehouse of greyhound facts.

As Steve held his fork aloft, a chunk of
French toast still on its tines, Esskay leaped up and snatched the
syrupy bite. The dog's eyes were bright for the first time
and she no longer hung her head in that
"don't-hurt-me" droop. Esskay looked
ready for a fight to the death over the rest of the French toast, and
Tess thought she had a chance of taking Steve. Esskay was hungrier.

"I've got an
idea," she said, cutting the rest of her toast into small
pieces. "Kitty, come out into the hall for a
second."

At the foot of the stairs, Tess handed Kitty
the plate and sent her halfway up the first flight. She then positioned
herself behind the dog, arms braced on the dog's hind legs.

"Hold out one of the toast
chunks," she told her aunt. Kitty proffered one of the
smaller pieces between forefinger and thumb, as Tess moved the
dog's legs up the steps. Foreleg, foreleg, hind leg, hind
leg. Right, left, right, left. She could feel the tension in the poor
beast as she craned her neck forward, trying to get closer to the
morsel of French toast only inches from her mouth.

"Back up a few steps."
Kitty retreated. Foreleg, foreleg, hind leg, hind leg. Again, the dog
was almost in reach of the toast.

"Okay, let her have that bite,
then go up to the landing and hold out one of the larger
pieces."

The small taste, drenched with syrup and
powdered sugar, almost drove the dog wild. Whimpering now, Esskay
strained toward Kitty, out of reach on the landing. Tess crouched
behind the dog, feeling like a mother who was about to let go of her
kid's two-wheeler. A slight nudge and Esskay surged forward,
taking the rest of the steps in one bound. Kitty fed her another French
toast chunk, then pranced up four more steps. The dog followed on her
own, Tess crawling behind her. Within seconds, they were at the top of
the stairs outside Tess's apartment and the plate looked
dishwasher clean.

Steve, who had watched this impromptu lesson
from the bottom of the stairs, was not impressed.

"You better call that greyhound
rescue group," he yelled upstairs. "I doubt French
toast is going to agree with her stomach. You'll be lucky if
she doesn't have diarrhea all over your apartment."

Kitty scratched the dog behind the ears. The
dog looked up lovingly. It was more than toast. As Crow had once told
Tess, falling in love with Kitty was a rite of passage for anyone who
spent time at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare streets. He should
know: a clerk at Women and Children First, Crow had nursed his own
impossible crush on Kitty before suddenly, unpredictably switching his
affections to Tess five months ago.

"Even dogs," Tess
marveled. "Is there anyone immune to your charms?"

"Thousands. I just don't
waste time on those lost causes, the way most women do."
Kitty called downstairs. "Steve, you can go ahead and wash up
now. I'm going to change and get ready to open the
store."

Steve turned back to the kitchen, whistling
as if it were a privilege to clean up after the meal he had prepared.
Kitty floated to the landing and slipped inside her second-floor
bedroom suite. Tess had to hold onto Esskay's collar to keep
the dog from trotting after her.

Familiar with athletes and their needs, Tess
poured the dog a huge bowl of water, placing it on a copy of the
Beacon-Light
.
She then found an old blanket and arranged it into a bed on the floor
of her bedroom. Puzzled, Esskay stood over it, staring at the blue
plaid wool as if waiting for it to do something. When Tess came out of
the shower, the dog was still standing over the blanket, growling
faintly in the back of her throat.

Once dressed and ready for work, Tess stood
in the bedroom's doorway and looked at the dog awkwardly.
What was expected in a person-pet relationship? She had never
understood people who talked to animals and babied them, but it seemed
odd to walk away from a warm-blooded creature without some
acknowledgment. Besides, this dog meant something to Spike, so she had
to treat her well. Esskay was not unlike Tommy—not exactly
human, but a part of Spike's life, and therefore deserving of
common courtesy.

"I'm going out
tonight," Tess said at last, "so I won't
be home until late. I'll tell Kitty to check on
you."

Esskay looked up briefly, then went back to
staring at the blanket.
Great
,
Tess thought.
I'm talking to a dog, and
it's not even paying attention
. And
she ran down the stairs, late for work. That was the one drawback of
the office being only ten minutes away. You couldn't make up
lost time on the commute.

T
yner
Gray's law office was in an old town house on Mount Vernon
Square, a pretty neighborhood clustered at the feet of George
Washington, who kept watch from the top of a modest monument.
"But it's older than the one in DC," some
local was always quick to point out. Tess didn't care much
about the monument, but she liked the pretty park outside her office
window, the strains of classical music that drifted over from Peabody
Conservatory, and the good restaurants in the neighborhood. Last fall,
fate and circumstances had brought her here, in what was to be a
temporary job. Tess had ended up staying on, although Tyner reminded
her every day that her goal should be to obtain a private
investigator's license and open her own office.

As she came through the heavy front door at
9:15, she could hear the whine of the old-fashioned elevator only Tyner
used. Tess darted up the broad marble steps between the first and
second floors, then took the narrower staircase to the third floor,
confident she could beat the wheezing lift. They had timed it once with
Tyner's stopwatch, the one he used when putting novice rowers
through drills. It took exactly one minute and thirty-two seconds for
the elevator to make the trip from first to third. By the time Tyner
arrived, she was at her desk in the front room, which she shared with
Alison the receptionist, making notes on an interview she had conducted
last week, some woman who hoped to sue her neighbor in a boundary
dispute.

"I'm not fooled, you
know," Tyner said, rolling past her in his wheelchair.

"Really, Mr. Gray, she's
been here all along," volunteered Alison. A preppy beauty, as
overbred as a golden retriever, Alison was a good egg. She
couldn't lie to save her life, though.

"I heard you on the
stairs," he called back to Tess. "You have a very
heavy tread. I never remember—do you pronate or
supinate?"

"Pronate," she said,
following him into his office, a spare, uncluttered room. In a
wheelchair for almost forty years, Tyner hadn't waited for
anyone to make the world accessible to him. Although his office was in
a nineteenth-century town house better suited to antiques, he had
chosen sleek, modern furnishings, which took up less floor space. His
desk was a large, flat table, custom made so he could roll right up to
it. The chairs facing it were tall and slender, expensive maple pieces
with narrow strips of leather for seats. They also were wretchedly
uncomfortable, and, not incidentally, reminiscent of the sliding seats
in a racing shell. Rowing was Tyner's true passion, even if
his years as a rower had ended up being only a fraction of his life.

"My uncle got robbed last
night," Tess told him, perching on one of the chairs.
"Someone worked him over pretty bad."

"Jesus. Which one? Which
side?" Unavoidable questions, and difficult ones, for Tess
had nine other uncles—her father's five younger
brothers, her mother's four older ones. Spike was actually a
cousin, and to complicate things further, no one had ever agreed to
which side of the family he belonged. His last name was Orrick.
Changed
from O'Rourke
, Tess's mother
always said.
Could be one of those Eastern
European Jew names
, her father inevitably
countered,
screwed up the immigration officials
.

"The one who owns The Point, that
bar on Franklintown Road. It was a robbery, and they were pissed
because he didn't have anything."

"This city is becoming
unlivable."

"You say that every other day.
You're just looking for a reason to buy that house in
Ruxton." This green, sheltered suburb, no more than five
miles outside the city limits, was a kind of code between them,
symbolizing the ultimate surrender.

Tyner smiled ruefully. "The city
doesn't make it easy for a taxpayer to stay here, Tess.
Especially after this winter. My street wasn't plowed or
salted even once. Every time it snowed, I was stranded."

"You don't have to tell
me. Remember, I was the one who drove out there five times, using
cross-country skis to get up your street. You always acted as if it
were a terrible imposition, having me show up with groceries."

"I wanted brandy, not food.
You'll never make it as a St. Bernard, Tess."

St. Bernard
.
Tess's mind jumped from the past to the present,
free-associating. Dog. She should call that greyhound rescue group
Steve had been blathering about.

Leaving Tyner to his usual grumpy funk, she
went back to her desk and flipped through the phone book until she
found a listing for Greyhound Pets of Maryland.

"Greyhound Pets." The
breathless person on the other end was a woman with a sweet, throaty
voice. Dogs barked frantically in the background. Tess had an instant
image of someone in blue jeans, covered in dog hair.
Yech
.

"Hi. I seem to have inherited a
greyhound from my uncle and I'm trying to find out what I
need to do for it. Food, exercise, routine, that stuff."

"How long has your uncle had the
dog? I mean, is he a recent adoptee, or has he had him some time?
How's he doing?"

Tess became confused, thinking
"he" must be her uncle. Then she realized the woman
was referring to the dog. "Um, pretty recent, I guess. She
didn't know how to go up stairs."

"Is he from here?"

"The dog? I don't
know."

"Your uncle. What's his
name?"

"Spike Orrick."

"That name doesn't ring
a bell, and we do most of the placements in the Baltimore
area." The woman's voice suddenly sounded much less
pleasant. "Are you sure he adopted this dog through proper
channels? Has he gotten her fixed? You have to get them spayed or
neutered, you know. It's part of the agreement. Is the dog
with you now? We do have an identification system, and if
you'll just…"

Tess placed the receiver back in its cradle.
Who was she kidding? Spike had never gone through proper channels for
anything. If only Esskay could talk. If only
Spike
could talk.

But a call to St. Agnes dashed those hopes:
Spike was in a coma now, prognosis uncertain.

"What is so rare as a day in
spring? What is so rare as a Baltimore day in March when the sun
actually shines?" Tess muttered to herself, climbing the
stairs to the Brass Elephant bar that evening, her mood a strange
muddle of anxiety and anticipation—worry over Spike, delight
at spending time in her favorite bar, with one of her favorite drinking
companions.

The Brass Elephant bar was a well-kept
secret and the regulars conspired to keep it that way. An inexpensive
hide-away above an expensive restaurant, it had been an essential place
to Tess when she was unemployed, a refuge where she could feel
civilized, pampered, and well fed for as little as fifteen dollars. The
lights were low, as was the volume on the stereo, with Chet Baker,
Johnny Hartman, and Antonio Carlos Jobim murmuring their songs of love
so quietly that one caught only an occasional rhyming whisper of
love/above, art/heart, or sky/thigh. There had been an ugly scare a few
years back, when a new bartender had begun playing a jazz version of
the hit ballad from the latest Disney cartoon musical, but someone had
quickly set her straight. The Brass Elephant survived good and bad
fortune, from Maryland's peripatetic economy to those
best-of-Baltimore ratings that stumbled on its martinis, creating a
brief flurry of interest among people who didn't necessarily
like martinis, but liked to say they had tried the best.

Good, her favorite bartender was here. So
was Feeney, settled deep in the corner banquette, fingers pinching the
stem of his martini glass, a telltale mound of toothpick-skewered
olives on the white tablecloth in front of him. Tess pointed to
Feeney's glass, signaling she wanted the same, and slipped
into the chair across the table from Feeney's slumped body.
But he didn't acknowledge her, unless one considered a few
muttered lines of Auden a suitable greeting.

"
I sit in one
of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the
clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade
."

Tess sighed. Richard Burton
couldn't have done it much better, or much drunker. Auden was
a particularly ominous sign, reserved for all-time lows. Only Yeats or
Housman was worse.

"You're on Charles
Street and the Brass Elephant is hardly a dive, although I
won't debate you on the merits of this particular
decade."

"All I have is a voice,"
Feeney countered, his voice slipping into a singsong cadence as he
notched up the volume. "
To undo the
folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual
man-in-the-street
…"

"Is that what they did to you
today? A man in the streets?" A minor complaint, one Feeney
could be jollied out of. Tess knew the real folded lie was the
media's never-flagging belief that ordinary people knew
anything about current events. Whenever anything big happened far away,
the editors sent reporters into the street to sample the common sense
of the common man.

The bartender appeared at the table with her
drink. The ritual was part of the pleasure—his wrist action
with the shaker, the way he poured the martini with a nice bit of
showmanship. Tess took a sip and immediately felt better, stronger,
smarter, ready for Feeney
in extremis
.

"So what was today's
question? Something about NATO? NATO is always good for a
man-in-the-street. I remember back in my
Star
days, when someone in Pigtown thought NATO was an indoor swimming pool
the mayor wanted to build in Patterson Park."

"You disappoint me,
Tess," Feeney said balefully, gnawing on one of the
toothpicks from the pile in front of him. "You're
as literal minded as my dumb-fuck editors."

Tess took a second, more generous sip from
her glass, relishing its chill and the tiny tongue of heat behind it.
Truly a lovely drink.

"It's nice to see you,
too, Feeney."

"Nice to see me? You
can't even bear to look at me."

Lost in his own private pity party, Feeney
had spoken an unwitting truth. Tess was avoiding his eyes, squinted
tight from bitterness, and his turned-down smirk. Feeney had always
been gray—gray-blue eyes, gray-blond hair, even a
grayish-pink pallor, only a few shades lighter than the undercooked hot
dogs he bought from the sidewalk vendors outside the courthouse. But
tonight, everything looked a little ashier than usual, as if he
wasn't getting enough oxygen. Against his drained face, the
broken blood vessels on his cheeks were stark blue road maps leading
nowhere. Gin blossoms, the one flower you could count on finding
year-round in sodden Baltimore.

"What's wrong,
Feeney?"

"My career is over."

"You make that announcement once a
month."

"Yeah, but usually it's
only free-floating paranoia. Tonight, I got the word officially. I
don't belong. Not a team player." The last sentence
came out so slurry it sounded more like "Knotty
template."

"They couldn't have
fired
you." The
Beacon-Light
was a union paper, which made it difficult for them to dismiss
employees, although far from impossible. But Feeney was good, a pro.
They'd have a hard time building a case against him. Unless
he had done it for them, by ignoring an editor's orders.
Insubordination was grounds for immediate termination.

"Suppose you had written the story
of your life, Tess?" he asked, leaning toward her, his face
so close to hers that she could smell the gin on his breath, along with
the undertones of tobacco. Strange—Feeney had given up
smoking years ago. "The best story you could ever imagine.
Suppose it had everything you could ask for in a story, and everything
had at least two sources? And suppose those goddamn rat bastard
cowardly pointy-head incompetents wouldn't publish
it?"

"This has something to do with
that basketball rally, doesn't it? The story you
wouldn't tell me about last night."

Feeney picked up his fork and began stabbing
the happy hour ravioli, until little spurts of tomato sauce and cheese
freckled the tablecloth. "Well, I can tell you now. In fact,
the only way anyone is ever going to hear this story is if I tell it to
'em. Maybe I could stand on a street corner with a sign,
offering to read it at a buck a pop."

"How good is it? How
big?"

He slipped back into his singsong poetry
voice. "Wink Wynkowski, Baltimore's best hope for
luring a basketball team back to Baltimore, has many things in his past
he prefers no one know about, especially the NBA. His business is a
house of cards, perhaps on the brink of bankruptcy, beset by lawsuits,
from ambulances to zippers. He may be able to get up the scratch for a
team, but he isn't liquid enough to keep it going."

"Then why buy it if it's
going to make him broke?"

"Good question. Two answers.
He's a fool—doubtful. Or he plans to unload the
team pretty quickly, as soon as the city builds him that brand-new
arena, which will double the team's value
overnight."

"That seems a little
far-fetched."

"Hey, remember Eli Jacobs? He
bought the Orioles for $70 million in the 1980s. When his business
collapsed in the recession, he sold them for almost $175 million and it
was Camden Yards, paid for by the state, that made the team so
valuable. If Wink can keep all his spinning plates aloft for a couple
of years and sell the team before his creditors come calling, he stands
to see a huge profit."

"Is there more?" Feeney
scowled. "Not that there has to be," she added
hastily. "You connected the dots, and I can see the
picture."