Charm City (6 page)

"I think I need a
demonstration."

Whitney threw her shoulders back and shook
her hair away from her face, transforming herself into an eager
acolyte. "Mr. Mabry," she began, a little
breathlessly, her voice higher and sweeter than usual. "Mr.
Mabry, I noticed our circulation numbers for the evening edition have
stabilized. Do you think the redesign, and the attempt to market the
evening paper as a street-driven product, have helped reverse the
years-long trend of dwindling afternoon circulation?"

Bourbon burned when it came out through the
nose. "That's the most fatuous thing I've
ever heard," Tess said, snorting and laughing.
"Does it really work?"

"Well, I got on an elevator three
years ago as a reporter, chatted up the editorial editor about the
wonders of an Ivy League education, and by the time I got off, I was
well on my way to being an editorial writer."

"And to think I thought you were
crazy when you left Washington College for Yale," Tess said,
shaking her head in wonder. It wasn't that she
wouldn't do the same, given the chance. She just
wouldn't do it
as well
.
Perhaps there really were only two kinds of people in the world:
suck-ups and failed suck-ups.

"Then today, right after I saw
you, I ran into the Lion King," Whitney continued boastfully,
as proud of her talent for obsequiousness as if it were a sport she had
mastered. "I said, ‘The Wynkowski
story—it wasn't on the budget at
yesterday's four o'clock, was it, sir?'
The four o'clock is the last news meeting of the day. Some
things break later—"

"I know, I know."

"Right, I sometimes forget
you're a defrocked journalist. Anyway, he said, very tersely,
‘No, it wasn't.' So I said,
‘Well, it's none of my business, but if you want to
get to the bottom of it, and want someone you can trust—a
discreet private investigator with a special knowledge of
newspapers—I happen to know the perfect person.' We
went back to his office and chatted for an hour, mainly about his
impressions of Baltimore and his backhand. It turns out he really wants
to get into the Baltimore Country Club. My uncle is on the membership
committee, you know."

Tess had not been distracted by
Whitney's rambling details. "Back up a little.
Who's this discreet private investigator with the special
knowledge of newspapers?"

Whitney smiled coyly.
"Let's play Botticelli, Tesser. My letter is
‘M.' Ask me a yes-or-no question to figure out who
I am."

"Let's see. Are you a
five-foot-nine Washington College grad whose former college roommate is
apparently out of her fucking mind?"

"You guessed it right off the bat.
I'm Theresa Esther Monaghan, the perfect woman for the job,
don't you think? In fact, you've got a meeting with
the editors at two o'clock tomorrow. Do you have something
decent to wear?"

Tess tipped up the bourbon bottle and took a
swallow, largely for effect. Actually, she was not staggered by the
thought of Whitney, without consulting her, volunteering her for a job.
Whitney was always pushing Tess forward, trying to make her more than
she was. But she had over-looked a few key details here.

"I have a job, remember? I work
for Tyner."

"Who wants you to be more of a
self-starter, by the way. I ran this by him before I called you
tonight, and he's all for it. Said he really
doesn't have enough to keep you busy right now, and this
sounds like a good opportunity."

Great, Tyner and Whitney, president and vice
president of the Let's-Make-Tess-Apply-Herself Club, had been
conspiring behind her back again. Tess was surprised they
hadn't needed her mother, the club's founding
member, for an official quorum.

"My Uncle Spike is in the
hospital. If Tyner doesn't need me. I'd rather
spend my time getting to the bottom of what happened to him."

"Then it couldn't hurt
to have the
Beacon-Light's
files at your disposal. Computerized court documents, the
paper's morgue, Nexis-Lexis—all there at your
fingertips, as long as you're on the payroll."

Tempting, but Tess saw one last, huge flaw
in Whitney's plan.

"Look, you're saying
this was deliberate, right? Hacking, pure and simple?"

"That's the
scenario."

"So they're looking for
someone with a motive?"

"Naturally."

"Well, wouldn't Feeney,
along with this Rosita Taquita, be a prime suspect? I can't
investigate one of my friends. What would I do if I found out he did
it?"

"You're getting ahead of
yourself. The reality is, you probably won't be able to
figure out who did it, but Mabry wants to show the publisher he takes
this sort of thing very seriously. I think Mabry's secretly
delighted the story got in the paper. It's the biggest thing
going, and the
Beacon-Light
had it first. Mabry only held it to begin with because of the unnamed
sources. All he wanted was for Feeney and Rosita to go back and get
people on the record first. Someone just accelerated the schedule,
that's all."

"Still, what if
Feeney—"

"Look, I'll let you in a
secret, but don't let it cloud your judgment: the smart
money's on Rosita. No one thinks Feeney is capable of
something like this. He may bitch and moan more than most, but he
wouldn't risk losing his job over one story. Besides, Feeney
has an ironclad alibi."

"He does?"

Giggling, Whitney punched her in the arm.
Such physicality was a sure sign of drunkenness, better than any
Breathalyzer test. A punch was about 0.08 on the Talbot scale, while
arm-wrestling indicated she was well over the legal limit. It
wouldn't be the first time Tess had made a bed on her couch,
or put Whitney in a cab for the trip home to Worthington Valley, where
she still lived with her parents. If living in a guest house on a
twenty-acre estate could be properly described as living with
one's parents.

"Very funny, Tesser,"
Whitney said, still giggling and jabbing. "Feeney told me
today the two of you were out drinking past midnight. In fact,
it's about all he can remember from last night. Now,
that's not the sort of thing you want to tell the editors,
given the circumstances, but he couldn't have a much better
alibi, could he?"

Tess chewed on the inside of her cheek, a
habit she thought she had outgrown. It hadn't even been eight
o'clock when Feeney had lurched out of the Brass Elephant.
Why had he told Whitney it was midnight?

"Tess?" Whitney tried to
punch her again, but missed, sending her bourbon glass crashing to the
alley below. "So what do you think?"

"I think as alibis go,
that's a pretty good one."

T
ess
had been to the
Beacon Light
on official business once before, for a job interview after the
Star
had folded. She had bought a suit she couldn't afford from
Femme, borrowed Kitty's best pocketbook, and put on pantyhose
that she had managed to avoid running until she got back into her car.
The paper had granted interviews to every one of the
Star's
383 newsroom employees. They offered jobs to fewer than ten. A new
suit, a borrowed pocketbook, and intact pantyhose were not enough to
make Tess one of them.

Luckily, the suit had stayed in style, even
if the store that had sold it had gone out of business. Nothing went
out of style in Baltimore, especially the simple clothes suited to
Tess's unfashionable figure. Almost three years later, her
interview suit was still smart, as her mother would say: navy blue,
with a fitted jacket that didn't require a blouse, and a
straight skirt to the knee. With her hair up and navy high heels, she
was the picture of demure femininity, stretched out over six feet.

"A real lady," Tyner
judged, inspecting her Thursday morning as she turned slowly in front
of the full-length mirror inside his office's closet door.

"The neckline is kind of
plunging," said Whitney, who had ended up spending the night
on Tess's sofa. She had awakened with a headache that she
refused to admit was a hangover, and was now perched on
Tyner's desk, lost inside a sweater and skirt borrowed from
Tess. On Whitney, the too-big clothes looked chic and deliberate.

"Thanks, Whitney. You're
a real pal."

"I'm not being rude. But
if they were making a training film about sexual harassment,
you'd be cast as the doe-eyed secretary. Someone could fall
into your cleavage and never be seen again. It's too sexy.
You lack authority. You need a scarf."

"Of course. I've noticed
the President always wears one during the State of the Union
address."

Ignoring her, Whitney dug through her Dooney
& Burke bag until she produced an Hermès with a
Western motif—lassos, spurs, and horseshoes in shades of
copper and gold, against a navy-and-ivory background.

"Cool," Tess said.
"Now can you make a quarter come out of my ear?"

"I've got better tricks
than that." Whitney arranged the scarf so it filled in the
expanse of flesh without making Tess look as if she were a
cross-dressing Boy Scout. "There, that creates interest
around the face, as they say."

"It does make the
outfit," Tess admitted grudgingly. "But if they
didn't want me as a reporter, why would they want to hire me
as an investigator?

Whitney put her arm around her shoulders,
joining her in the mirror. Cool Snow White and flushed Rose Red stared
back. White bread and rye bread, baked potato and potato hash.

"Half the editors at the
Beacon
Light
today weren't even there when
the
Star
folded," Whitney reminded her. "The other half can
barely remember what their wives look like, much less the hundreds of
supplicants they've turned down over the years.
You'll be a whole new person to them, someone with the power
to turn
them
down. By the
way, I hinted you might not be able to take the job, because
you're so much in demand."

"Wives?" That was Tyner,
who seemed to be enjoying his temporary membership in this
girls' club. Tess expected him to start wielding a lipstick
or mascara brush in her direction any moment. "I never
thought I'd catch you being a sexist, Whitney. You mean
spouses."

"No, I mean
wives
.
Little women. Helpmates. There's only one woman in the upper
ranks at the
Beacon-Light
,
the managing editor, and she's got the biggest balls of all
of them. She had a husband once, maybe two, but I think they went into
the federal witness protection program. Now she makes do with a little
slave boy at home, running around in nothing but a ruffled apron, with
a Scotch and water at the ready when she comes clomping home at ten or
eleven."

"It doesn't sound so bad
to me," Tess said.

"Well, that's what you
have, isn't it?"

The
Beacon-Light
's
founders, the Pfieffer family, had been savvy about many things. Real
estate was not one of them. The family had calculated on the
city's center moving west over time, beyond the great
department stores along the Howard Street corridor. So after World War
II, when the expanding paper needed a new building, Pfieffer III had
built the plant on Saratoga Street, near the ten-story
Hutzler's, the grandest of all the stores. The result was a
marvel of blandness, a building of tan bricks with no discernible
style. Its only charm had been its real beacon, a Bakelite lighthouse
revolving on a small pedestal above the entrance. The lighthouse had
been torn down in the '70s and was now the Holy Grail among
local collectors. The City Life museum was dying to find it, but rumor
had it that a former
Star
columnist had unearthed it at a flea market and kept it on the third
floor of his Bolton Hill townhouse, where he performed quasi-voodoo
rituals intended to make Baltimore the country's first
no-newspaper town.

Tess glanced up at the empty pedestal as she
climbed the low, broad steps, picking her way among windblown
McDonald's wrappers and crumpled newspaper pages. The local
department stores, the few that had survived the '80s, were
long gone from downtown. A drunk was sleeping among the daffodil shoots
in an ill-kept flower bed. Squeegee kids—really, squeegee
adults, a few squeegee senior citizens—had staked out the
intersection. As the Pfieffers had predicted, the city had moved. Only
it was in the other direction, south and east, toward the water. The
Beacon-Light
was a lonely and inconvenient outpost on the edge of an urban
wilderness. Reporters consoled themselves with its proximity to two of
Baltimore's best dining experiences, the open stalls of
Lexington Market, and the white tablecloths of Marconi's. The
Beacon-Light
also was
convenient to St. Jude's shrine. According to newsroom lore,
reporters made pilgrimages there after deadline, always uttering the
same heartfelt prayer to the patron saint of lost causes:
"Please, St. Jude, don't let the editors fuck up my
story."

Feeney had told Tess about this ritual. And
now she was facing the prospect that Feeney was the one who had fucked
up. It seemed unlikely—certainly he had been too drunk to
sneak into the building, perform a little computer hackery, and leave
without a trace. But if the trail did lead back to him, Tess was
determined to be there to protect him, even if she hadn't
figured out how.

On the sixth floor, the
publisher's secretary, one of those strangely proprietary
women always found hovering at the elbows of powerful men, ushered Tess
into an empty conference room adjacent to the publisher's
office. It was a subtly opulent room, a place to wine and
dine—well, coffee and croissant in these leaner, more
abstemious times—the city's powerful. Mahogany
table, Oriental rug, a silver tea set on a mahogany sideboard, the
inevitable watercolors of nineteenth-century Baltimore. What must it be
like for the top editors, the ones who traveled back and forth between
this glossy dining room and the chaotic newsroom below, all the while
trying to reconcile this realm of commerce with all those romantic
ideas about journalism? How did they bridge these two worlds, the
corporate and the cause?

Amnesia, Tess decided. Editors quickly
forgot whatever they knew about reporting. If a man named Smith drove
his truck into a local diner, killing five people, editors
couldn't understand why you didn't call him up and
ask for all the details. "Just look it up in the phone
book," they would say, as if there were only one Smith, as if
he weren't in jail, out of the reach of any phone. And if by
some miracle you did find Smith and get the full story, the editors
would say, "Well, that's what we pay you
for." Or, "We're tight tomorrow, it might
have to hold."

And now Tess had to face three of these
amnesiacs at once, plus the publisher. The executive editor, the
managing editor, and the deputy managing editor.

"Three editors," she
said out loud, staring out the window to the north. "Well,
Hercules slew the Hydra."

"And
it
had
nine
heads."

A man had slipped into the room behind her,
a man with high color in his face and shiny brown hair falling in his
eyes. In blue jeans and a T-shirt, he might have passed for 25. In his
gray wool trousers, red tie, and blue-and-white striped Oxford cloth
shirt, he looked closer to the 45 he probably was. But a cute 45, Tess
decided, checking out his muscular forearms, the wide grin, the boyish
way he kept pushing his hair out of his eyes.

"Jack Sterling," he
said, holding out his hand. "Deputy managing
editor."

"Tess Monaghan." Out of
habit, she grasped his hand hard, the way she had pinched
Rosita's when they'd met. But Jack Sterling just
squeezed back even harder. Flustered, she broke the grip, feeling
something she did not want to put a name to.

He sat on the edge of the gleaming table,
openly appraising her, rotating the wrist of his right hand as he
massaged it with his left.

"Baltimore mick," he
pronounced, talking to himself as if she were on the other side of a
one-way glass. "Something else blended in, though. Something
solid, good peasant stock. About twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Athletic. Doesn't like pantyhose or diet soda. How am I
doing?"

"Midwesterner," she
replied. "Corn-fed Protestant, a onetime
wunderkind
who is still
wunder
, if no
longer
kind
. Probably
plays racquetball—note how he flexes his wrist and rubs his
forearm as he speaks, something an athlete might do. How am I
doing?"

Sterling laughed. Good, he had a sense of
humor about himself. "Close enough. Only my game is squash,
when my back isn't out, and my wrist hurts because twenty-two
years in this business have bestowed on me a chronic case of carpal
tunnel."

He began to massage his wrist again, then
dropped his hand abruptly, suddenly self-conscious about the gesture.
"Midwesterner? Well, I guess Oak Park, Illinois, is about as
Midwestern as it gets. How'd you figure that out? I like to
think I've acquired some East Coast polish over the last few
years."

Tess smiled noncommittally. Whitney had
given her thumbnail sketches of everyone she would meet today, but she
saw no reason to divulge her inside information. "Baltimore
isn't the best place to come if you're looking for
polish. In fact, if you're not careful, your nice, bland
accent will start adding Rs to words like water and wash."

Jack Sterling leaned toward her. His eyes
were even bluer than the stripe in his shirt. "Then what
is
Baltimore the best place for?" Before she could think of a
clever reply, the other editors began filing into the room. A little
guiltily, as if he had been caught consorting with the enemy, Sterling
took his place among them.

They looked more alike than they knew, this
quartet. All white. No one younger than 35, nor older than 60. Two
suits—gray pinstripes on the shortest man, obviously the
publisher, Randall Pfieffer IV, and a flashy turquoise one on the sole
woman, managing editor Colleen Reganhart, who had the kind of dark
hair-fair skin-light eyes combination that the Monaghan side of
Tess's family would call black Irish.

The last man was dressed as Sterling was,
but his blue-striped shirt was just a little better made, his red tie
heavier and silkier.

"Lionel C. Mabry," he
said, offering a limp hand to Tess. The hair, of course. How could she
miss the hair? It was thinner than Tess had imagined, and Whitney had
been uncharacteristically tactful in describing it as blond, but it was
definitely a mane. Mabry's hair was a dull gray-yellow, the
color of diluted piss. Otherwise, he was well preserved, with a vaguely
patrician air. But then, everything about him was vague—the
mumbled greeting, the clouded brown eyes, the limp-wristed handshake.

"Take a seat, Lionel,"
Colleen Reganhart ordered. She gave his name an extra syllable and
feminine lilt.
Li-o-nelle
.
He smiled at her, as if thankful for direction, and slipped into one of
the large leather chairs alongside the table, Colleen to his left and
Jack to his right. That left Tess and the publisher at either end,
creating a strangely lopsided table.

Pfieffer's chair, she noticed, was
hiked up slightly higher than the others, perhaps to give him an
advantage he didn't have on dry land. Behind his back,
Randall Pfieffer IV was known as Five-Four by his employees. The
nickname, while not affectionate, was generous, granting the publisher
two inches above what nature had given him, maybe three. But the
thronelike chair was a miscalculation: his feet swung above the floor,
drawing attention to his diminutive stature. Fortunately, his high,
hoarse voice had no problem filling a room. He had been a cheerleader
at Dartmouth, according to Whitney's dossier. ("If
it comes up, say yell leader.")

He began the meeting. "Miss
Monaghan, we have asked you here today because we have a job that
requires discretion, tact, and a certain sophistication about our
business. We've been assured you have all these
qualities."

Whitney had really laid
it on thick
. "I'd like to
think so, Mr. Pfieffer."