Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

The last was untrue, unfair even. Tess loathed the media in the way only a former reporter could. The Beacon-Light had never written about her without getting at least one salient fact wrong, and it had given her four different middle initials over the years. As for free advertising, she had noticed that the bump of interest she received after any press attention, large or small, yielded little in actual work. The sort of people who picked a private investigator because her name had shown up in the morning paper were not people who thought things through with much care.

“How did you happen to come to me, Mr. Kennedy?”

He lowered his eyes. “Truthfully?”

“Please.”

“Truthfully, I’ve been working my way through the phone book, concentrating on the smaller agencies. No one has agreed to help me, and it’s January seventeenth.”

“In other words, you have a little more than twenty-four hours or your window of opportunity closes for a year. Isn’t there some other way to find this man and make him pay you what he owes? You’ve seen him, you know what he looks like, you had a name for him.”

“He’s vanished. He might as well be smoke. He gave me a fake name and address.”

“How can you know so little about him and be so sure he’s the Visitor?”

“Um-the person who introduced us alluded to same.”

“Go to him, then. Or her.”

“That person… has moved away. So you see why I need your help.”

“Never.” She was tempted to say Nevermore, but she tried not to mock clients to their faces, even the ones she was turning down.

“But if-”

“Never.”

Mr. Kennedy stood, tapping his pudgy fingers on the lid of the cookie jar. Esskay was back at full alert, ears pricked in perfect triangles, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was abstracted, lost in thought.

“You weren’t my first choice,” he said. “I’ve tried four others, but they were too busy to grant me an appointment.”

“Good.” He might have meant to insult her, but Tess was relieved to know the clock was working against him.

“I’d like to state for the record that I didn’t hire you.” She admired his phrasing, the way he pretended the decision had been his. “And I’m going to assume our discussion here has been confidential.”

“That’s how I do business. I can’t vouch for anyone else, however.”

“I don’t suppose you’d want to sign something to that effect? I mean, how naïve would a man have to be to count on such a promise, without proof?”

“I don’t know. How naïve-or greedy-would a man have to be to believe that a bracelet offered at a bargain price really belonged to Betsy Patterson Bonaparte?”

“It’s not about greed,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “It never is, not really, although that’s what most people think.” Unselfconsciously, he lifted the lid of the cookie jar, picked a dark-brown square from the top, and tossed it in his mouth before Esskay could roll from the sofa and demand her portion.

“Mr. Kennedy-”

“I’m sorry, I should have asked first. I have such a sweet tooth, it’s a sickness with me.”

“No, it’s just that… those are homemade dog treats, from a bakery in South Baltimore. They’re made of molasses and soy.”

“Oh. Well, that explains why it wasn’t sweeter.”

He buttoned his camel’s-hair coat to the chin and tapped out into the world. Tess almost-almost-felt sorry for him. But watching him trot away, she found herself thinking of the ending of Animal Farm, where it was no longer possible to tell the men from the pigs, or the pigs from the men.

Two days out of five, TeSS still turned in the wrong direction when she left her office at day’s end. She headed south, to her old apartment in Fells Point, instead of north, to the house where she had lived for almost a year. She did it again after the Porcine One’s visit and chided herself under her breath.

To observe she was a creature of habit was to say that Baltimore was the largest city in Maryland -factual, but nothing more. Tess loved ruts, reveled in ruts, hunkered down into her routines like a dog who had dug a hole in the backyard in order to snooze the summer day away. She sometimes worried she was just a few chapters short of becoming an Anne Tyler character, a gentle Baltimore eccentric shopping at the Giant in her bedroom slippers and pajama bottoms.

Actually, she had gone to the grocery store in her pajama bottoms, but just once, and very early in the morning. Besides, they were plaid, with a drawstring, and indistinguishable from sweatpants. And she had worn real shoes.

Moving, even if it had not been her idea, had promised a fresh start, a chance to embrace change. Now it was becoming apparent that Tess was capable only of substituting one routine for another. She had swapped her bagel breakfast at Jimmy’s for a bagel and coffee at the Daily Grind, switched her allegiance from the Egyptian pizza parlor on Broadway to the Egyptian pizza place on Belvedere. She did go to a new video store, the exquisitely stocked Video Americain. She ended up renting movies she had already seen.

The new house underscored her oddness. It was a house, a domicile, in only the loosest use of the word- it had four walls, a roof, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Tess had nicknamed this work-in-progress the Dust Bowl, and she was getting accustomed to going through life sprinkled with bits of plaster, wood, and paint. Sometimes, she found the oddest things in her bed: a latch from one of the kitchen cabinets, for example; a screwdriver; even the occasional nail on her pillow, as if a disgruntled carpenter wanted to send a warning.

She had known it needed much work and known it would take much time. Even as a first-time homeowner, she had been savvy enough to realize the estimates were only a fraction of what they would become, in both labor and material costs. But she had forgotten about God, so-called acts thereof. The weather had been gleefully uncooperative for much of the past year, sending rain whenever outside projects were planned, dropping temperatures when indoor projects involved powerful solvents that needed to be vented, whipping up a little mudslide the day the landscaper arrived.

Still, they had managed to accomplish quite a bit- and the house was still a wreck. Under her father’s watchful eye, Tess had dutifully arranged for what she thought of as the essential-but-dull improvements: roof, heating and cooling system, updated electricity, replacement windows, new plumbing, new siding. The result was a snug, energy-efficient aesthetic nightmare, with odd bits of wallpaper and the hideous taste of the former owners hanging on like ghosts, from the Pepto-Bismol-pink tile of the forties-era bath to the avocado-green appliances in the cramped kitchen.

But it was home, and it showed a handsome face to the outside, as Tess noted with satisfaction when she pulled into East Lane. Her father had been appalled at her decision to choose cedar shingles over aluminum siding, toting up the cost of maintenance over the years. Tess had been adamantly impractical on this one point. She wanted the optical illusion of a house that faded into the trees. Her boyfriend, Crow, had heightened the effect by painting the door olive green. In summertime, Tess had felt as if she were entering a treehouse when she came home, passing through the green door into a private world hung in the oaks and elms above Stony Run Park.

But now it was winter, and the house looked even smaller than it was, not unlike a wet cat. Tess loved it still. Her fingertips brushed the mezuzah her mother had foisted off on her, ignoring Tess’s protestations that she was bi-agnostic. “Home,” she said, more or less to herself. She had a home, be it ever so humble. So what if her fingernails were never really clean again, or if strands of paint appeared to be woven in her brown braid. It was worth it, just to walk through the door and say, “Honey, I’m home!”