Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

“Of course,” Tess murmured. On the far wall of the kitchen, custom-made shelves groaned under the weight of what appeared to be fifty, maybe a hundred, cookie jars. Many were commercial containers, made to advertise or commemorate a certain brand of sweet-Oreos, Fig Newtons, Mallomars-while others were old-fashioned receptacles in various shapes: fat women, contented cats, cars, houses, a caboose with a smiling face. She noticed a hopelessly non-PC Aunt Jemima figure, but it was tucked into a corner on the lowest shelf, as if even Pitts knew it wasn’t a nice thing to have on display.

He led her into a combined living room-dining room, which gave Tess an odd feeling of déjà vu. Over the river and through the woods-why, it was her grandmother’s house, right down to the nesting end tables and the porcelain cigarette lighter on the coffee table.

“Let me guess. This is a replica of your parents’ living room.”

“I wish.” He sniffed. “This is the living room I wanted growing up. I even took my mother down to Levenson and Klein, to show her what we should get. Instead, she picked out a plaid sofa.”

He had taken a seat in the dining area, an alcove that was too small for the sturdy mahogany pieces Pitts had crammed into the space. A huge curio cabinet loomed over them, filled with-Tess needed to look closer.

“What are those?” she said.

“Don’t touch!” he squeaked reflexively, as if her extended finger might poke through the glass doors. “They’re salt cellars. Mother collected them.”

Tess hoped “Mother” wasn’t sitting in a rocking chair in the basement, a withered corpse waiting for Vera Miles’s hand to tap her on the shoulder, à la Psycho. She reminded herself the Pig Man’s name was Arnold Pitts, not Norman Bates, and this was an old mill house in a crowded neighborhood, not the isolated Bates Motel and homestead.

Actually, a few pieces of taxidermy might have been a nice addition to the decor here.

“So, Mr. Pitts. It is Pitts, right? Arnold Pitts of Field Street. As opposed to John Pendleton Kennedy of no known address.”

He smothered a pleased-with-himself giggle in his hand. “I guess you know even less about the life of Poe than you do about Fiestaware.”

“But I’m learning,” Tess said. “And if I had taken your job, I wouldn’t have been confused by the monument, gone on the wrong date, and missed everything.”

Pitts’s merry mood vanished. “What do you mean?”

Tess sat in one of the dining room chairs, stretched out her legs, and folded her arms across her chest, in no hurry to speak. She was trying to figure out if Pitts was surprised that she knew about Gretchen O’Brien or startled to learn his private detective had fallen down on the job.

“I’ll satisfy your curiosity when mine is satisfied. So, do the cops know?” she asked.

“Know what?” His voiced scaled up on the last syllable.

“There was a burglary here last summer. For reasons I can’t fathom, the police believe that incident is connected to the shooting at Poe’s grave. But it might help the police out if someone told Detective Rainer how you were scurrying around town before the murder, trying to find someone to stake out the visit and identify the Visitor. I imagine you’d prefer that information didn’t get back to him.”

A sulky expression settled on Pitts’s face, where it looked too much at home, as if Arnold Pitts spent a lot of time with lower lip extended and pale, bristly brows drawn down over those small, watery eyes.

He sighed. “How much?”

“How much?”

“This is about blackmail, right? I pay you, and you go away. Until you come back again and ask for more.”

“I see. You assume I’m a crook and a liar. Funny, how often crooks and liars make that assumption about others.”

“I’m not a crook,” he said swiftly. At least he had the good grace not to deny being a liar.

“Let’s start over. You came to me to find out the identity of the Visitor. Why?”

“I told you, there was a bracelet-”

Tess held up a hand. “We’re starting over, remember? I’m giving you a blank slate. Use it well.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll tell the police to look into your whereabouts the night Bobby Hilliard was shot. Did you miss? Was the Visitor really your target? Or did you know Bobby Hilliard?”

“I have an alibi,” he said swiftly. “I was in an all-night diner in Silver Spring with a friend.”

“At three a.m.?”

“We had been to the theater in Washington.”

“It sounds as if you went to a lot of trouble to establish an alibi. Why? What was Gretchen O’Brien’s assignment?”

But beneath his nervous stammers and eye-rolling histrionics, Pitts had a tough little center, as hard as a peach pit.

“What does it matter?” he said. “Clearly, she failed at her task, a fact she omitted to mention when she briefed me this weekend-and collected partial payment. I was too quick to accept her explanation that the unexpected developments at the grave site created so much confusion that she couldn’t follow her quarry. The news accounts made it easy for her to cover up her failure. It never occurred to me she wasn’t there. Or that you were.”

“I never said I was there.”

He smiled at the way she pounced on this detail. “No, but the homicide detective did, when he told me to watch out for you. When he said a private detective might visit me, I was within my rights to ask why you were so interested in the case. He said you were a glory hog. Frankly, I thought it took you a little while to follow such an obvious trail.”

“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I was faxed the burglary reports,” she said defensively. Besides, hadn’t Pitts seemed surprised when she caught up with him outside the 7-Eleven?

“And you still don’t know why they’re grouped together, do you? Two burglaries, an assault, and a homicide. You have no idea what the link is. Neither do the police, if that’s any comfort to you-neither do I.”

The last statement seemed hasty tacked on.

“If you’ll tell me what this is all about, I won’t go to the police about your visit to me and how you hired Gretchen O’Brien to do what I wouldn’t do. She won’t have privilege, if you didn’t go through a lawyer. She’ll have to talk to them.”

He took a moment, as if considering her offer, then shook his head. “I think not. You’ll tell them everything, eventually. You’re such a good citizen.” She had never before heard so much disdain for that simple word. “But if you do tell them about me-why, if you do, I will have to inform them that you visited me in order to extort me. I think the homicide detective would be so hungry for a complaint like that, he might be willing to suspend his usual professional skepticism.”

“But that’s a lie. You were the one who brought up the idea of blackmail. I’d never be party to such a thing.”

“What’s the old saying? A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on? True, it won’t hold up, it’s all he-said, she-said, but it will do a little damage while it’s out there. So you think carefully about what you do next and where you carry your tales. Your reputation is all you have. And, as I understand it, there are members of your family who have shown they are all too capable of a certain moral relativism.”

“That’s ancient history,” she said, even as she realized she didn’t know if he was referring to her father, her grandfather, or two of her uncles. The Monaghans and Weinsteins had taken a somewhat ad hoc approach to upward mobility, but that was all in the past. Assuming Uncle Spike was behaving in Boca, which was a pretty large assumption. “And it has nothing to do with me.”