Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Tyner had a different strategy, one that didn’t include tact. “She needs a lawyer because you’re a vindictive asshole.”

“Don’t feel you have to sugar-coat it,” Rainer said, helping himself to a bagel. He peered into the bag to see if Tess had brought any cream cheese. She had, but it was ordinary cream cheese-no chives, no vegetables, and definitely none of those sweet sacrilegious flavors. Tess had observed that cops took bagels and tried to transform them into doughnuts, slathering them with blueberry cream cheese or strawberry jam or something even worse. Faced with plain white cream cheese, Rainer decided to eat his bagel dry.

“So,” he said, his too-many, too-small teeth working the poppy seeds like a threshing machine. “What did she know? And, more important, when did she know it?”

“Why is that important?” Tyner ‘s question, not hers.

“Well, for one thing a guy was killed this weekend. Maybe if she”- there was that third person again; sip and bite, sip and bite, sip and bite, don’t rise to the bait-“had been more forthcoming from the beginning, I wouldn’t have two red balls.”

“You the primary on both?” Tyner’s question was civil but shrewd. It served to remind Rainer that they weren’t gullible civilians who would believe one super-cop worked every homicide. Rainer had caught Poe in the early a.m., Yeager had fallen on a Sunday evening. There was no way the same shift was working both cases, much less the same cop.

“Well, no, but I gotta cooperate now. Next thing you know, we’ll have a fucking task force.”

“Are the two killings connected?” Tyner was still doing all the talking.

“I have my suppositions, but I guess it depends on what she’s going to tell me.”

“What Tess tells you will be contingent on what kind of agreement we reach beforehand.”

“What, you talking plea already? I thought she had an airtight alibi for the second one.”

Tyner and Tess, recognizing that Rainer thought of this as high wit, managed wan smiles.

“You made some noise when I called you yesterday to set up this meeting,” Tyner said. “I distinctly remember the phrase ”obstruction of justice‘ being thrown around. But Tess had sound reasons for not coming forward earlier. I’ll assume you were angry and speaking impulsively. But I need to be assured that any such charge is off the table, now and forever.“

“I can’t make promises about the future,” Rainer said. “I mean, what if she continues to interfere with police business? You want, like, carte blanche for things she hasn’t even done yet?”

Carte blanche? In Rainer’s mouth it sounded like one of those freestanding stalls in a shopping mall, run by a woman named Blanche. Oh, Carte Blanche. A blank check, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Yes, that was exactly what Tess wanted.

“No,” Tyner said, low and patient. Funny, he was much more intimidating when he made the effort to keep his voice soft. Tyner keeping himself in check was sort of like a guy walking a pit bull on a piece of frayed rope. If you were smart, you still crossed to the other side of the street. “I’m asking for an agreement. Tess gets immunity. It’s true, she was not completely forthcoming the first time you spoke. But it was only subsequent to your interview that Tess realized she had information you could use, information she developed precisely because she ignored your instructions. And by then she had legitimate reasons not to come forward.”

“Legitimate reasons? Tell that to Bobby Hilliard’s family. And maybe Yeager’s widow.”

“No,” Tess said.

Both men turned to look at her, as if they had forgotten she was in the room. That was the problem with all this she-ing. A girl disappeared.

“I know what it is to have something weigh on my conscience,” Tess said, lifting her eyes from her bagel for the first time. “But I’m not shouldering this one. Bobby Hilliard’s course was set before Arnold Pitts came into my office. And Jim Yeager was snooping around Bobby Hilliard’s apartment in the days after his murder. He put himself in play, a fact that several other people might know-Arnold Pitts, Jerold Ensor, Gretchen O’Brien-”

“Gretchen O’Brien? That sleaze is involved in this case?”

“She works for Arnold Pitts, or did. He’s probably fired her by now. Why is she sleazy?” It was a tangent, but Tess was curious.

“She was forced to resign after she was caught stealing.”

“That’s not unheard of,” Tess said, remembering the custodian’s cynical talk about cops who helped themselves to souvenirs from murder scenes, but also remembering Gretchen’s take on her history, which was markedly different.

“Yeah, but she was taking stuff from her fellow officers. Out of their lockers and shit. She’s virtually a klepto.”

“Well, as I said, she was in Bobby Hilliard’s apartment. Probably Pitts and Ensor, too, pretending to be cops before they took their act on the road and tried it on the Hilliards. Anyone who spoke to the custodian, as I did on Friday, would have recognized his description of Yeager.”

“SoyouwereinHilliard’sapartment.”Rainer chewed the inside of his cheek with a few quick, rapid strokes. “Well, then, I could definitely charge you with… something. If I put my mind to it.”

The simple phrase gave Tess pause. If I put my mind to it. The image it conjured up was of a tiny pea trying to move a large boulder. Rainer didn’t frighten her. The person she feared was lurking at the periphery of her life, unseen and unknown. He had called her on the phone, knowing she would be there, waiting for him. Someone had been watching her all this time, someone secretive at best. And at worst? She couldn’t bear to think of it.

“Look, I’ll cop to my real mistakes,” Tess said. “When we first spoke, the only thing I didn’t tell you was that a man had come to me, intent on unmasking the Poe Toaster. That’s why I was at the grave that night. I feared someone else had taken the job, and I didn’t want to see the Visitor revealed. I honestly believed it was a petty dispute.”

“But when it turned out to be a homicide, it didn’t seem so important to you to mention this fact to me?”

She had anticipated just this question, knowing the truth would not set her free. She could not afford to tell Rainer she had questioned his very competence, his ability to protect a citizen from the media hounds.

“I behaved unprofessionally,” she said. “I was sleep deprived and feeling contrary, I suppose. Also-the man who called himself John Pendleton Kennedy simply isn’t the kind of person you associate with murder. My plan was to find him, ask him a few questions, and decide for myself if he could have been involved. When I found out he had given me a phony name, I got caught up in the chase. And when the flowers appeared-”

The flowers. They looked at the items spread out on the table. For, along with her provisions, she had brought everything: the now-wilted flowers, the half-full bottle of Martell’s, the increasingly elliptical notes, even the rose petals she had found in the bottom of her mailbox. Strangely, it gave her a pang to release these things to Rainer, even as it made her skin crawl to think about the person who had left them for her. Not the Visitor, not even a visitor, not some benign soul leading her toward a solution, but quite possibly a killer. “They’re worth killing for,” he had told her. “You know that now.”

“The flowers…” Rainer shuffled his notes. “Yeah, I got the chronology on that stuff. Tyner told me on the phone. But it’s been a week since you found out that the guy who visited you was Arnold Pitts and that we were looking into his burglary as a connection to this case. Why didn’t you think that was important enough to come tell us? Does it take two deaths for you to take something seriously?”