Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

“Not just yet,” Mrs. Hilliard said, then looked anxiously at her husband, as if she had spoken out of turn. Her voice was soft, a mountain accent, more West Virginia than Western Pennsylvania to Tess’s ears. “We haven’t really had time to make the… arrangements.”

An awkward silence fell. When it appeared that the Hilliards were going to volunteer nothing more, a blond anchorwoman waved at them as if hailing a taxi, confident of being recognized. After all, she and her station cohorts beamed down at Baltimoreans from billboards throughout the city, asserting themselves as friends and family, trusted advisers and neighbors. They made no claim to journalistic integrity, but by God, they were nice!

Smiling and nodding, the blonde engaged the couple in laser-sharp eye contact.

“This really must be upsetting to you,” she said, with a graveness suggesting she considered this a profound insight. “How are you doing?”

Out-of-towners, the Hilliards felt no special kinship toward the blond anchor. But they were polite people by nature, so they gave it their best shot.

“Not so good,” said Mr. Hilliard, who wore a shirt buttoned to the throat beneath a stiff-looking sports jacket that was short in the sleeves. His wrists were large and knobby, his hands larger still, red and chafed from hard work.

The blond anchor continued to smile and nod, smile and nod, so Mr. Hilliard struggled to find something else to say. “Not good at all.”

Vonnie Hilliard held her hands to her mouth, and Tess had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The Visitor, the one who got away, had held his hands to his face in a similar manner. But Mrs. Hilliard’s concern seemed to be her teeth, which were crooked and discolored.

“We feel pretty bad,” she offered, around her fingers.

Tess was hunkered down in the back, screened by the risers that had been set up for the television crews and their equipment. Rainer, his forehead sweating despite the fact that the temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing, was too preoccupied to pay any attention to her now.

“Did your son have a special affinity for Poe?” A print reporter this time, armed with nothing but a pad and a self-important air. Either from the New York Times or an aspirant.

The Hilliards glanced pleadingly at the detective, but he appeared as baffled as they were by the question. Finally, Mrs. Hilliard tried to answer.

“You mean, like going on forever?”

The reporter proved to be kind; Tess awarded him a few mental points for the gentle tone of his follow-up question. “Did he like the work of Edgar Allan Poe? Did he read a lot of his poems or stories when he was growing up?”

The Hilliards looked at each other as if this were a game show and they were desperately afraid of getting the answer wrong, lest they not be allowed to go on to the next level.

“He read some,” Mrs. Hilliard said at last. “He read a lot. But he did other things, too.”

“Such as?” An eager young woman with a tape recorder, she had Washington Post written all over her.

“He watched television,” Mr. Hilliard said, prompting a nervous laugh among the reporters, then silence. “Well, he did.”

“Bobby liked…” Mrs. Hilliard paused, and the reporters leaned toward her, various recording devices in hand. “He liked nice things. He liked to dress just so, and he liked antiques. He’d go out to the yard sales on the weekends, bring home what looked like junk to me. But he’d shine it up, or refinish it, and his room was so nice. I was surprised he left all those pretty things at home when he came down here, but he didn’t take a stick of it.”

She stopped, surprised by all the words that had come out of her mouth, and held her hand to her face again, as if to hold back anything else that might spill out.

“Can we see his apartment here?”

“No,” Rainer said.

“Why not? It’s not a crime scene.” This was Herman Peters, the Beacon-Light’s police reporter. Rainer had stepped in it now, Tess thought. Peters would charm the landlord with his sweet little rosy-cheeked face, if only because Rainer had declared the apartment off limits. Peters specialized in getting that which was deemed ungettable.

“It’s a private residence that may yield important information in an ongoing investigation. We can’t have reporters trooping through it to get little details, like what he read and what brand of shampoo he used.”

Tess was impressed in spite of herself. Rainer did know something of how journalism was practiced these days, how reporters gathered random bits and tried to construct shoddy wholes out of them.

“Where is the apartment?”

Rainer shook his head, but Mrs. Hilliard volunteered, “Near that big school, the one where they’re always playing lacrosse so you can hardly park.” North Baltimore, Tess deduced, near Johns Hopkins University. There were a lot of apartment buildings in that neighborhood.

“Are police sure that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim?” This was Herman Peters again, and he sounded irritable. Sob stories didn’t interest him. Tess thought she had seen a lot of death, but, after just two years on the police beat, Peters was at five hundred bodies and counting.

“No comment.”

“I have to ask because conflicting information has been coming out. Some say the shot was fired at a distance, from the law school construction site, but I’ve also heard it might have been from the catacombs.”

“There’s no conflicting information because there’s no information coming out of this department,” Rainer said testily. “If you got that, it’s not official, and you shouldn’t print it.”

“Okay, okay. But if the other guy was standing between Bobby and his killer-assuming the other guy wasn’t the killer-is it possible the shooter missed, hit the wrong one? You’ve ascertained that Bobby probably wasn’t the regular Visitor. But was he the intended victim?”

“That’s not something I’m prepared to comment on just yet.”

“I can’t imagine,” Mrs. Hilliard put in, “that anyone would want to kill Bobby. He was a nice boy. He never bothered anyone.”

“He was a nice boy?” parroted a television reporter, a handsome African-American man, one of the second-teamers used on the weekend crews.

“He was a nice boy,” she repeated firmly, sure of something at last.

“Did he ever speak of his plans for the future?” This was from WBAL’s radio reporter, a young woman. Tess thought she saw her Norwegian buddy in the cluster of radio reporters, but she couldn’t be sure. It was funny, how reporters were drawn to their own kind. The print reporters stood with the print reporters, while the television folks clustered down front and the radio people set up camp on the edge.

The Hilliards looked puzzled.

“I mean”-the WBAL reporter looked embarrassed-“no one plans to be a waiter forever.”

“They don’t?” Mrs. Hilliard asked. “He loved his job. And sometimes he got to take food home. When he visited, he’d bring us leftovers from the restaurant, and you know what? The aluminum foil would be in the shape of a swan.”

Tess could tell Rainer’s appetite for center stage was waning rapidly. He had probably put this together just to get the press off his back, figuring it would be easier for the Hilliards to run this gauntlet once and get it over with. Tess hoped he had plotted an escape route for them, because everyone here was going to clamor for one-on-one interviews as well. Reporters were unruly houseguests, taking each kindness for granted and whining for yet more liberties-the jackals who came to dinner.

“Have you considered the possibility that your son was the victim of a hate crime?”