Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

“Are you saying it doesn’t matter if you’re right about the details, as long as you get your message out?”

Cecilia blushed, unaccustomed to being on the defensive. “No, no-I would never say anything I knew to be false. But even if I’m wrong in the details, I’m calling attention to the bigger picture, if you will.”

At moments like this, Tess realized she could not quite vanquish her reporter persona. She had never confused working for a newspaper with being in the service of the truth, but she had been devoted to facts. Cecilia’s blatant disregard of them was a kind of pollution. The world was stinking with urban myths and Internet-spawned apocrypha. People shouldn’t get in front of television cameras and say things they knew might not have a jot of truth to them, just because they served an allegedly higher purpose.

“Do you even have a police department source?” Tess demanded. “Or are you just making this up as you go along, figuring you’re right until someone proves you wrong?”

But they had both been trained in Tyner’s trenches, and Cecilia was not one to fold in the face of combat. “Look, everyone knows Shawn Hayes was beaten by some homophobe he picked up somewhere.”

“Everyone knows,” Tess repeated scornfully. “No one knows anything, because people manipulate facts for results, the way you’re planning to do. How would you feel if the Christian right held a press conference, putting out rumors to promote its antigay agenda? You’d be livid.”

“Because they’re wrong,” Cecilia said, her face tight with the anger of the self-righteous.

“Which is what they think about you.”

“For your information, Jim Yeager agrees with me. He told me he wants me on because he believes this was a hate crime. And he’s pretty far to the right, so what do you have to say about that?”

“I say Yeager will tell you whatever he needs to, if it means getting a guest for that stupid show of his. He asked me, too, you know. Only his pitch was different, all about Poe and literature. If he’ll lie to get you on the show, imagine what he’ll say once you’re there.”

Crow and Charlotte, the apolitical, conflict-averse partners, stared at the table, like children stuck with quarreling parents. Tess’s omelet was only half eaten, but she began counting out money, hoping she had enough singles to cover the tip, so she could leave and not return.

“About the dog-” Charlotte began.

“We’ll take her,” Crow said quickly. “She’ll be happier with us. Just tell me when you need me to come and pick her up.”

“Why not now?” Charlotte asked.

Fine, Tess thought. The arrangement was between the two of them; it had nothing to do with her and Cecilia. She managed a clenched-jaw good-bye, got one in return from Cecilia. Charlotte accompanied her and Crow outside, where they liberated Miata from the RAV-4. She was a shockingly docile dog, her mournful brown eyes seeming to say, Do with me what you will. Ah, well, Esskay had come into their lives with a similarly defeated attitude, and they had turned her into a narcissistic, hedonistic chowhound in less than a year’s time.

“Cecilia always thinks she’s right,” Tess fumed from the passenger seat of Crow’s Volvo as Miata breathed heavily in her ear, uninterested in the passing landscape. “She’s so principled, so sure of herself, so emphatic in her beliefs. She never entertains any doubt, never stops to think about how her principles might affect living, breathing people. Have you ever known anyone like that?”

Crow smiled. “Oh, I think I have.”

tess had a poetry-loving friend given to fits in which he rearranged Auden’s famous edict about the inherent limits of verse. “For journalism makes nothing happen,” Kevin Feeney would begin to intone, somewhere between martinis three and four. “For government makes nothing happen-thank God. For God makes nothing happen. For nothin‘ makes nothing happen.”

The performance was funny in a bar, after a few drinks. But on a bright cold January morning, when the apparent poet was Poe and the poetry arrived in an intricately folded note, the rhymes were nothing less than sinister. For the implicit threat was that things were going to keep happening until Tess learned to read between the lines.

The day had started innocently enough. She had awakened to find two pairs of mournful brown eyes staring at her over the edge of the bed, and to feel twin puffs of warm doggie breath on her face, stereo smellivision. But while Esskay began romping excitedly the moment Tess blinked, Miata didn’t budge. Tess wondered if the dog was worrying about the comedown in her circumstances. Until recently, she had lived in one of the grandest town houses in Mount Vernon. Now, after a stint in doggie jail, she was in this modest little cottage. No wonder her depression wouldn’t lift.

Eye level with Miata, Tess took note of the dog’s elaborate collar for the first time-leather, with metal studs. Perhaps it was meant to make her look fierce, but the effect was of a society lady trying to punk out at some charity masquerade ball. The collar was too thick and it bunched up in the back, as if it couldn’t quite rest in the thick muscular folds there. Could it be-? Tess unfastened it, turned it over, and found… nothing. Clearly, recent events were making her as giddy and paranoid as any Hardy Boy or Happy Hollister. Looking for clues on dog collars, she thought scornfully. Hiding notes in oyster tins. Really, wasn’t it about time for Crow to sit up in bed and announce breathlessly that he thought he had seen smugglers wading through Stony Run Creek?

With a rueful laugh at her own expense, she got up, threw on her sweats, and leashed both dogs. Esskay was only slightly perturbed to discover they had to share the morning walk with this mournful newcomer. And when Esskay saw how the other dogs in the park fell back at the sight of her muscular companion, she practically pranced in delight. Oh, a bodyguard. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?

Miata’s gloom didn’t dissipate, however, although Tess thought she caught a wisp of a smile on the Doberman’s face when a small ratlike dog made a feint at the duo and Esskay lunged, teeth bared. A ferocious greyhound and a subdued Doberman. They made quite a pair.

“There’s a leash law, you know,” she told the woman who ran forward to grab the ugly little dog-rat, screaming as if Tess were to blame for its aggression.

“Only for those like you, who can’t control their dogs,” the woman said huffily. It was a familiar battle, if a new combatant, and Tess decided to move on. She wasn’t sure if men had Napoleon complexes, but dogs definitely did.

In winter, with the trees bare, the narrow paths through the park were open and one could see at a great distance. Tess found this comforting-no one, woman or beast or both, could sneak up on her here- and she walked farther than she had planned, all the way to the lacrosse museum on the edge of the Hopkins campus.

Cold and hungry by the time she made it back to her neighborhood, she stopped at the Daily Grind for a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin, sharing the latter with both dogs while perched on the curb. Well, she shared it with Esskay. Miata appeared to be like one of those well-reared cloistered children who know nothing of sweet treats, who have been conditioned to clamor for carrots and regard chocolate with suspicion. She sniffed the muffin and turned her head. Esskay valiantly ate Miata’s piece as well.

So she estimated that thirty minutes-no more than forty-five-had passed by the time she arrived home, to find a piece of white paper under one of her Toyota’s windshield wipers. It couldn’t be a flyer, given its almost origamilike folds. Besides, her car was the only one along East Lane that had been so leafleted. Tess plucked the note from its resting space with her gloved hands, wondering why she no longer rated the fancy stationery. Could she have more than one helpful stalker? But rose petals drifted from the letter’s folds when she opened it, and the old-fashioned computer-generated font was the same as on the previous note.