Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Laughing, she hung up on him, happy to be going home to flesh-and-blood Crow and sorry for any woman who had to tolerate the attentions of Jerold En-sor, the walking corpse.

The map book placed Field in the heart of lower Hampden, which mystified Tess. She was no snob, but this was an area where burglars were more likely to live than to plunder. She happened to know a high-placed lieutenant in a local crime ring had once lived along this stretch of Keswick, until his conscience had gotten the better of him and he turned his best friend in for murder. He had been able to leave his door unlocked, Tess remembered, and no one had ever dared to bother him.

She found the sign for Field Street, but it was a stretch of pavement shorter than most driveways, dead-ending into a vacant lot. After a quick look back at the map, Tess backtracked on Keswick, turning onto Bay Street, which appeared to go through.

Making a right-hand turn had never so transformed the world before. One minute, Tess was in the narrow dark ravine of Keswick, banked with row houses. But here the landscape was open, and the houses were small stone duplexes set back on large lots. Field Street was literally a field, she realized; that’s why it didn’t run through. She knew little about architecture, but she could tell such housing had to be a hundred, a hundred and fifty years old. The neighborhood had a rustic Brigadoon-like charm. It was the kind of place she would have wanted to live in if she had not found her cottage in the trees.

She parked outside Arnold Pitts’s house, dark and seemingly empty. Trouble beckoned, but she was determined to resist it. There was no gain, she told herself, in trying to get into that house. Then she would be Gretchen O’Brien, breaking and entering, and Rainer would finally have a reason to come down on her like a ton of bricks.

The strange thing was, she could almost see Rainer’s point of view as she sat here in the early dark, mulling her options. Why was she here? She had no client, no leads, only her own curiosity. She had begun her investigation for what seemed to be a logical, almost honorable reason: Find the mystery client and learn what he really wanted. The roses and the cognac had seemed to signal she was on the right track.

But maybe these tokens were really just handmade signs from Wile E. Coyote, advising the road runner to take the washed-out road up ahead. Sighing, she started her car’s engine and headed back down the block.

Idling at the corner, waiting to make the turn, she glanced back at the dark house in her rearview mirror. To her amazement, someone emerged from the rear, stopped to put a plastic bag in an old-fashioned metal garbage can, and then lugged the container to the curb. He made a comic silhouette, for he was not much taller than the can, and his arms were short pudgy things, barely long enough to reach past his own formidable stomach and hook onto the handles. He moved with tiny mincing steps, the way a woman in high heels walks on ice, although the sidewalks were clear and smooth, the weekend’s snow having melted within hours of falling.

I know that walk, Tess thought. I know that silhouette. She slammed her car into reverse, sliding into someone’s parking pad, and rolled down her window, calling out, “Arnold Pitts?”

At the sound of her voice-or perhaps it was his real name that startled him so-Arnold Pitts, the Pig Man, aka the Porcine One, aka John Pendleton Kennedy, dealer in fine porcelain, made the most fitting little squeal, threw his trash can in the street, and began trotting away as fast as his little legs would carry him.

for a moment, TeSS was so amazed by Pitts the Pig Man’s flight that she couldn’t do anything except watch him trot down the street, his garbage can rolling behind him. Then she wondered if she should even bother to give chase. He’d have to come home eventually, right? And it seemed almost unsporting to run after a man whose legs needed five steps to do what hers could accomplish in two.

This uncharacteristic pang of fairness passed and she took off, catching up with him as he puffed and panted his way up Keswick, where the 7-Eleven and its bank of pay phones appeared to be his goal. When he saw she was behind him, he was almost gracious in defeat, stopping abruptly in the small park across from the convenience store and throwing open his arms, as if he expected Tess to run into them. “How did you find me?” he demanded petulantly.

It was her turn to mislead him. “It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t hard at all.”

This seemed to scare him. Good.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“But not at my house. How about-” He pointed to a bar across Keswick, Ben’s, a place that Tess knew only for the pit-beef stand it ran in the summer and early fall. “How about we go over there?”

“I’d prefer your house. After all, you came to mine.”

“I came to your office,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, which might have qualified him for the scarier rides at local amusement parks.

“Your house,” Tess repeated.

“I don’t like to have people in my home. They touch things.”

Tess began to laugh, only to see Pitts was serious, and aware of no irony in his self-righteousness. “I promise I won’t.”

“They all promise,” he said resignedly. “Then they all break their promises. You will, too, you’ll see. But, what the heck, let’s go.”

Tess drove him back.

“Interesting neighborhood.”

“These were mill houses,” Pitts said, unlocking his back door. “This area is known as Stone Hill.”

“I’ve lived in Baltimore my entire life. I live less than two miles from here”-she immediately wished she had not volunteered that particular piece of information-“and yet I’ve never heard of it.”

“Yes,” her host said. “That’s why I chose it, for privacy. Also, it’s close to the freeway, and I travel a lot for my business.”

“Your porcelain business?”

“I do deal in antiques, actually. I’m a scout, and I specialize in glassware, china, figurines. I find things people want. I find buyers for things people no longer want. Restaurants that are interested in pursuing a certain theme, people who are missing a few bread plates in their old china pattern-they come to me.”

You’re a few bread plates short of a place setting, she thought. “A dealer I consulted said you didn’t know much about Fiestaware.”

“Fiestaware. Ugh-I wouldn’t have those garish things in my house. Not my era, not my taste. But I know enough about it. I have to, in my line of work. I misspoke to gauge your knowledge of the subject. Or lack thereof. And I was not disappointed.”

They had entered the house through the kitchen, which struck Tess as being at odds with the quaint house. At first glance, it appeared to be an older kitchen that had yet to be remodeled. But the harvest-gold appliances were too shiny, the white linoleum with red fleur-de-lis accents was too fresh to have been walked on for fifty years. The Formica-topped yellow table was probably a knockoff too. The real things cost upward of five hundred dollars now. Tess knew, because she had priced one for her own kitchen, while in the throes of a short-lived flirtation with retro.

“This is an exact duplicate of the kitchen in my parents’ house in Cockeysville,” Pitts said proudly, mistaking her confused silence for awe. “It wasn’t easy, finding working versions of the appliances. The old dishwasher, which is the kind you have to roll out and attach to the sink, was really hard to get, and I don’t know what I will do if the hose breaks. But this is what our kitchen looked like, down to the terry-cloth curtains over the window, although my mother’s table was red. Of course, we didn’t have the cookie jars.”