Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“You come here often?” Tess called out when they were about halfway up the stairs.

The girl screamed, and the boy dropped the six-pack, which bounced down the steps and broke free of the plastic rings, rolling across the wooden floor. Surprised and overwhelmed, they couldn’t begin to figure out what to do. The girl tried to run down the stairs as the boy ran up, only to block each other.

“Don’t choose a career in any kind of crisis or emergency work,” Tess said, picking up a beer. She was tempted to open it for the sheer insouciance of it, but it would only spray everywhere, making a mess. Besides, she wasn’t in the mood for a Natural Light. She was never in the mood for a Natural Light.

“Who are you?” the boy asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Let’s just say I have a right to be here,” she bluffed, “which is probably not your situation. Breaking and entering, drinking alcohol when you’re under twenty-one, getting ready to have sex with a minor-”

“I’m a minor,” the boy protested, even as the girl said: “We were not!”

“The law doesn’t care about the boy’s age,” Tess said, having no idea if this were true. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll forget about everything I saw and everything you’ve done, if you’ll just tell me some things I need to know about the man who lived here. You did know him, right?”

“Mr. Grace?” the boy said. “Yeah.”

“What was he like?”

“Weird.”

That was more than she had hoped for, actually. She was counting on getting the usual “Nice man, quiet man” rap, the default of incurious neighbors everywhere. Translated: I never paid attention to him.

“How so?”

“He’d invite the neighborhood kids over to watch movies.”

Well, Crow did that with Lloyd.

“And that was okay, he would give us sodas and stuff, screen us these old movies, then ask us what we thought.”

Again, not so different from what happened in her home.

“And he even wanted to make movies with some of us.”

Shit .

“Not like that,” the young man added hastily. Perhaps he had told the story before and always gotten the same reaction. “Movies with stories, that he had written out. Short. They weren’t exactly the Matrix, but they were kind of good. Only he stopped doing that, like, a year ago or so.”

“Did he keep the movies?”

“Shit, I don’t know. His equipment was old school, some big clunky camcorder, VHS tapes. Who still has that shit?”

Tess glanced around the room. There was a large armoire in one corner of the living room. Using a pinpoint flashlight on her key ring, she opened it and found a television and a cable box, but no DVD player, and no VCR. Below the television was a shelf with films in both formats, mostly classics, but there were no homemade movies among them.

“You steal this stuff?” she said.

“What stuff?”

“You said he watched movies, he had to have something to watch them on.”

“No,” the boy said, adamant, even a little offended. “I wouldn’t do nothing like that. I come over here to – you know, have fun. I’m not a thief.”

The girl spoke up, outraged. “This is the first time I’ve ever been here.”

The boy smiled sheepishly at Tess, as if expecting her to take his side, to understand that a super-suave Herring Run stud such as himself – hadn’t he sprung for an entire six-pack of Natural Light – couldn’t be expected to be tied down to just one girl.

“But there was equipment,” Tess insisted, examining the armoire. In the back, several small holes had been bored into the wood so cords could be passed through.

“Like I said, I hadn’t come over to see Mr. Grace for a couple of years. He liked the younger kids, mainly.” Again, he seemed to know what Tess was thinking. “Not like that. When you’re little, it’s not embarrassing, doing that shit, running around and pretending to be other people. But you outgrow it, you know?”

Tess studied the living room, best as she could see it in the dim light. Nothing else seemed missing, or off. The television was light enough and, although not a flat-screen, new enough to fetch a decent sum at a pawnshop. If there had been a burglary, why not take that as well?

“What’s upstairs?”

“Bedrooms,” said the playboy of Northeast Baltimore, leering, and Tess froze him with a look. “Not trashed or anything,” he added. “I been coming and going from here since he died, and I ain’t noticed anything missing. He didn’t really have any friends. Just the little kids.”

“You left the window unlatched?”

He shrugged, almost proudly. He wasn’t altogether dim-witted. Tess stared him down.

“The first time, I came through the cellar,” he admitted. “He has them Wizard of Oz doors.”

It took her a second to get that reference, but it made her smile. Some old Baltimore houses did have storm cellar doors, although tornadoes were rare.

“Once I pried them open, I bolted ’em shut from the inside. I just leave the one window unlocked, on the back porch.”

“Very considerate,” Tess conceded. “How about I give you guys a ride home? It’s getting late, and it’s a school night.”

“Well, we don’t live far…” he began, then realized it hadn’t really been a question.

“And I’ll take the beer,” Tess said. “For your own good.”

“Like you never drank when you was my age.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I didn’t get caught.” She regarded the beer with little affection. Crow could always use it for crab boil, she guessed. “By the way, drink what you want, but when it comes to birth control, don’t do that on the cheap, okay? That’ll cost you.”

Martin Tull was, as Tess had assured Flip, good police. Smart, methodical, with a kind of confidence that can’t be faked and a work ethic that few could equal. While some detectives welcomed homicides because they started the overtime clock, Tull was inclined to work eighteen-hour days no matter the circumstances. Going on nine-thirty, it was a toss-up whether he would be free, but Tess decided to try to lure him out anyway.

“A man has to eat,” she said persuasively. “And drink.”

He agreed to meet her at Burke’s, a reliable all-night refuge, the kind of place that made its living off cops, emergency room personnel, reporters, and insomniacs. Tess decided to have mozzarella sticks and a beer. Tull, as was his habit, ordered coffee, black. Tess wasn’t sure she had ever seen him drink anything else. Come to think of it, in all the years she had known Tull, she wasn’t sure she had ever seen him eat .

“A shot of whiskey would be healthier,” she said. “It reduces stress. And who knows how long that coffeepot has been sitting on the burner?”

“I love the coffee here,” he said. “It’s boiled down to the essence. It’s like… caffeine syrup.”

“Are you trying to get a second wind, or just maintaining for the drive home?”

“Home, I guess. We can’t find the boyfriend. Which, of course, makes me happy in the long run – just convinces me that he’s the one we want – but I wouldn’t have minded finding him today.”

“So, a dunker?”

“I think so, yeah. Based on how his family’s acting. Alternating between ‘ Oh, JJ just disappears sometimes, goes fishing up at Deep Creek Lake when the weather is like this ,’ then, in the next breath, mentioning what a bitch the dead girl is, how badly she behaved, and then ‘Not that we’d wish any harm on her.’”

“Behaved badly how?”

“JJ was convinced there was another guy – his mother let that slip, and tried to backpedal. From what I gather, the two were high school sweethearts, years ago, got back together in the past year, but the mother never thought the girl’s heart was in it.”