Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Tess detected nothing strange in this speech, but Mrs. Hilliard suddenly swallowed and stared at the floor, twisting the hem of her skirt in her knobby, hard-worked fingers. She swallowed a second time, her neck reddening.

“But there is something here, isn’t there?”

Mrs. Hilliard kept her eyes fixed on the floor.

“You can tell me, Mrs. Hilliard. I can keep secrets. I keep them for my clients all the time.”

“If we hired you, Webber and I, could you prove that television man told lies about Bobby? I know my son. He couldn’t hurt another person. I don’t know why someone killed him, but I know that much. He was a gentle boy.”

“I doubt I could help you with that,” Tess said. “It’s hard to prove a negative. To determine Bobby’s innocence, I’d have to figure out who’s guilty. Private detectives are expensive, Mrs. Hilliard, and the results aren’t guaranteed. You’re better off letting the police figure out what happened to Bobby.”

“But they don’t care about his reputation. It’s almost as if it’s better if he was a bad person, because then more people might have wanted to kill him. The detectives who came here, they said terrible things about Bobby, worse than what that television man said. They said he had stole lots and lots of things, but not all his victims had come forward. They told me if I knew anything about what he had done down in Baltimore, I’d better tell them. But I don’t. I really, really don’t.”

Again, she stared at the floor, and the red from her neck spread to her face, a fire out of control.

“Mrs. Hilliard, did you hold something back from the police? I might be able to help you make it right, work as a go-between. The longer you go, however, keeping things from them, the worse it will be.” Take it from an expert.

She got up and went to the closet. “There’s a piece of wood here that a plumber had to cut, to get to the pipe in the bathroom on the other side of the wall.” She spoke over her shoulder, her voice muffled by the clothes hanging on either side of her face. “Bobby always hid things here; he thought I didn’t know about it. But I knew. I looked there from time to time to make sure he didn’t have anything he shouldn’t have. When he sent me my Christmas gift, I put it here, first because I thought it was so valuable and then because… well, because if I didn’t show it to anyone, I didn’t have to face up to what it might be or how he came to have it.”

“I thought he sent you a vase and some perfume.”

“That was last Christmas.”

She emerged from the closet with a long jewelry box, still in its silver wrapping, a prefab ribbon stuck to the top. Inside was a bracelet, gold, with green stones. Could they really be emeralds? The piece was undeniably delicate and intricate, made with the kind of care and attention to detail that is rare now in all but the most expensive pieces.

“Bobby could have bought this with his own money,” Tess said, as if trying to convince herself. “It’s possible, if only because he might have been making money by stealing other things and fencing them.”

“He told me it belonged to a king’s wife. No, that’s not right. It belonged to someone’s sister-in-law. That’s right. Bobby said it would be a while before he could buy me something that had belonged to a real queen, but he promised he would someday.”

“Betsy Patterson Bonaparte,” Tess suggested, and saw the Pig Man sitting opposite her, swinging his feet, complaining languorously about the man who had cheated him. If he had been fooled by a fake bracelet, did it follow there was a real one? Had there been a germ of truth in all the lies Arnold Pitts had told?

“That’s right. I forgot the name, but I knew it as soon as you said it.”

Tess picked the bracelet up out of its cotton wrapping and held it to the light. She could not imagine killing for it. But then, she didn’t think any object was worth homicide. Would Arnold Pitts kill for something like this? No, he didn’t do his own dirty work. He tried to trick others into doing it for him.

“Do you have an account at the local bank?”

“Of course we do,” Mrs. Hilliard said, showing a flash of irritation. “Do you think we barter for goods with chickens and vegetables?”

“I want you to take this to the bank the minute it opens Monday morning and place it in a safe deposit box. Once you’ve done that, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them I’m working for you and we just found it this weekend, when you thought to check Bobby’s old hiding place. That way you can’t get in trouble for holding it back when they visited you earlier this week.”

Although I’ll get in trouble, Tess thought mournfully to herself, for thrusting myself into this. Rainer will never believe I didn’t want to be a part of it all the time.

Mrs. Hilliard looked confused. “Are you working for us then?”

“No, just helping you out. It would be wrong for me to take your money when I don’t think I can achieve any real results.”

They went back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hilliard offered to fix a cup of coffee. Tess accepted eagerly, then tried not to let her disappointment show when Mrs. Hilliard put water on to boil and pulled a jar of instant from the old-fashioned cabinets. Their sense of shared mission gone, they had nothing left to say to one another. Tess examined the swirled cherry top of the Formica-and-chrome table, drummed her fingers on the surface. She felt obligated to make some kind of chitchat, however desultory.

“I like this table,” she said. “I’ve seen ones not near as nice, for hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”

“You and that cop,” Mrs. Hilliard said, shaking her head. “I do think people from Baltimore are a little queer sometimes. The one police officer couldn’t stop talking about that table. He offered me a thousand dollars for it.”

“Really?”

“He said he had to have it for his kitchen. Said it was the one thing he needed, that it was a dead ringer for the one he had grown up with. He even told me how he had eaten peanut butter and fluffernutter sandwiches at the table, as if that would make me sell it.”

Tess asked yet another question, sure of the answer. “This police officer, what did he look like?”

“Oh, short and fat. And his partner so thin and tall, with a hangdog face. They made quite a pair. They looked like a number ten marching up the walk. And as much as the little one wanted my kitchen table, the tall one kept asking if he could have the Koontz sign. I thought that was really queer, but I wouldn’t sell it, not even for a hundred dollars, because it was something Bobby brought home one day and propped against the barn, so people wouldn’t miss the turnoff to our drive. Silly of me, I guess, but I’m sentimental about anything to do with Bobby. Besides, I didn’t think they were very professional, those police officers, poking at our things and asking where they came from and how much they cost. Not at all like the ones down in homicide. But I guess you don’t have to be as good to work burglary, or whatever they call it.”

“Burglary?” Tess said. Connections were sparking all around her. Two police officers had gone to Bobby’s apartment too. That had made sense, and she hadn’t bothered to ask the janitor for details. Now she was wondering if this walking number 10 had paid the call there as well. If they had, they had known Bobby Hilliard was dead before he had been identified in the press. They had known who he was all along.

“Yes, burglary. I remember because that’s what it said on the business card.” She pulled two cards from the old-fashioned humpbacked Norge refrigerator, where they had been affixed with a magnet from a local market, and handed them to Tess. The cards weren’t legit, not even close, but who in Pennsylvania would know that? They said Baltimore city police department and even had a Maryland flag, in color yet. Personal computers and state-of-the-art printers were making life too easy for the criminally inclined.