Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

And the name on the first card was August Dupuis, a Poe allusion Tess had last heard in the corridors of the Baltimore Police Department. Oh, Arnold Pitts was such a wit. How he must crack himself up, creating these fake identities for himself. And how patronizing he was, choosing his Poe pseudonyms based on his assumptions about how well read his victims were. What name had he given Gretchen? Tess wondered. A. G. Pym? Rod Usher?

The second card identified his partner as Rufus Griswold. Tess had read enough about Poe’s life by now to know this was Poe’s perfidious literary executor, who had done so much to damage Poe’s reputation after his death.

“Change of plan, Mrs. Hilliard,” Tess announced.

“What?”

“Give me a dollar.”

The woman looked confused, but obediently fished four quarters out of a large crockery jar on the kitchen counter and handed them to Tess.

“You just hired a private detective.”

Fat and Skinny ran a race. Fat fell down and broke his face. Skinny won the race.

Tess woke Sunday morning with that old rhyme in her head. She didn’t know how she knew it. From jumping rope? But she had never been a jump-roping girl. She had read books about the kind of girls who jumped rope, wondering why she wasn’t more like them. She had been a football-playing, knee-skinning, emergency-rooming kind of girl.

But if she couldn’t remember how she knew the rhyme, she knew why it was echoing in her head. Fat and Skinny-Pitts and Ensor, the Laurel and Hardy of Baltimore. This undynamic duo had searched Bobby Hilliard’s apartment and his parents’ farm. Yet neither one had mentioned knowing the other. Not to Tess and not, as far as she knew, to the police. Officially, they were simply two burglary victims. Had they met after Bobby’s death and decided to join forces for some reason? Or had they been friends all along?

She didn’t know, couldn’t know. But she had an image of Pitts’s dark house on Field Street, how he had waited that night until he thought she was gone, then come tottering out with his trash. He made it sound as if he had been watching for her for days, but she figured it was more like fifteen minutes, which was about how long it had taken her to get from Ensor’s house to his. She wished, in retrospect, that she had searched the garbage can he had carried to the alley. Maybe there was a reason he was in such a hurry to take out the trash.

Well, now she had the upper hand. She knew the whereabouts of the very item Pitts wanted, an item he had not reported stolen, an item he claimed had been in his possession all along. She could hold that fact over his head. Then again, Pitts had proved to be a most weaselly adversary, not someone to confront head-on. She had lost her first round with him.

So how to proceed? She puzzled this out while walking with the dogs in Stony Run Park. Esskay was beginning to enjoy the company of her sleek bodyguard, trying to make friends by pointing out the rabbits and squirrels that crossed their paths. Miata, however, took no notice. She continued depressed, unhappy without her master.

A sleek bodyguard. Tess found herself thinking of Gretchen O’Brien-not exactly sleek, not exactly a bodyguard, but definitely linked to Pitts. She might know if Pitts and Ensor had a relationship that predated their victimhood. Not that Gretchen would give Tess such information voluntarily. She’d have to be tricked into it, or angered into it, perhaps by the revelation that Pitts had chosen her precisely because she had an unsavory reputation.

Gretchen’s name reminded her of yet another stubborn knot in the facts she had been gathering. It was as if she were making her own gigantic ball of string, one piece at a time. If Ensor and Pitts had searched Bobby’s apartment once, on their own, why had Pitts sent Gretchen back? Or had she gone without telling him, still trying to cover up her incompetence? The “police” had come quickly, the janitor said, before the newspapers printed the name of the dead man. But if Pitts and Ensor had known who Bobby Hilliard was all along, what was the point of hiring someone to follow him to Poe’s grave that night? Was their quarry the real Visitor, as Pitts had claimed? But the Visitor didn’t have the bracelet; Bobby Hilliard did. Her head was beginning to hurt.

The open meadow at the top of Stony Run Park soon turned into a narrow path through dense woods. A synagogue was planned here, but construction had not yet begun and it was an isolated place. Tess was grateful the trees were bare, allowing her to see for some distance. Statistics said she was safer here, in zip code 21210, than she had ever been in 21231. But she didn’t always feel that way. If someone approached her now-well, it was fair to say Esskay was not the only one who enjoyed having a Doberman along these days. Miata might feel despondent, but she still looked pretty ferocious. Tess wondered if she should start taking both dogs to the office with her. Certainly, it was healthier for Miata to be away from the renovation fumes.

Who would kill for a bracelet? It must be worth far more than she realized. Still, she couldn’t imagine that the world was waiting breathlessly to see the bracelet worn by an emperor’s momentary sister-in-law. You had to be a sick sick puppy to care that passionately about such an obscure piece of Baltimore history.

It was Sunday, a day of rest. Even the self-employed-especially the self-employed, especially someone who had just taken a case for $1-deserved a day off after working every day for almost two weeks straight. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she would think about all these things tomorrow.

Crow was patient with all forms of popular culture except television, and he had broken Tess of her habit of relying on it for relaxation. He had many ideas for ways to distract and soothe her, some even vertical.

But on Sunday nights, she had a standing date with The Simpsons and King of the Hill. She was sure it said something revelatory about her personality that she preferred her entertainment animated. But she was laughing much too hard to care. Tonight was a rerun, one of her favorites: Marge was starring in the musical of Streetcar Named Desire, while Maggie was plotting a Great Escape-type caper from the Ayn Rand Daycare Center. Tess and Crow tried to catch all the film references and failed happily, even though Tess had seen this particular episode five or six times. Then they muted the set and let the light wash over them while they tried to find new territories to colonize on each other. This was one part of their life together where Crow would not tolerate Tess’s taste for ruts. He had a point.

She fell asleep in his arms, starting awake as the ten o’clock news came on, police lights flashing from the screen. Ah, it was the classic top story of the weekend, a homicide. There was the reporter standing outside in the cold, hair blowing; there was the yellow tape; there was the toothless bystander-why did the people willing to speak to television reporters always seem so orthodontically lacking?

“He was a nice man,” Tess prompted, yawning.

“A quiet man,” Crow added.

“He kept to himself,” they chorused.

She assumed it was the usual mundane murder, a domestic or drug-related slaying in one of the city’s sad-sack neighborhoods, the supply of which never seemed to dwindle, no matter how robust the local economy. But when the camera pulled back, the backdrop was one of the city’s nicer hotels, not the usual block of dilapidated rowhouses.

“A fatal downtown? Talk about your red ball.” She grabbed the remote and clicked on the volume. “If it’s a tourist, the city will go nuts.”

“Police are releasing few details at this time, and hotel officials have declined to be interviewed on camera, but details obtained by Channel Six-”