Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

“Because you’re not that good. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You’re good on the thinking end, but you’re not street-smart. You can’t pick up a tail to save your fuckin‘ life, and you hold your gun like it’s a hairbrush.”

And with that Gretchen was gone, their partnership apparently dissolved.

The memory of Gretchen’s words descended on Tess like a cold front when she crossed her threshold later that day siphoning much of the pleasure from her homecoming. A joyful Esskay made a beeline for the sofa, while Miata all but sighed and turned her woeful brown eyes on Tess as if to say, When do I get to go to my home? Crow went immediately to check on the kitchen cabinets, picking up a piece of steel wool and turning on his boom box. It was Mardi Gras on East Lane again.

Tess was left in the center of the living room, taking inventory of her possessions. Everything was here: the dog-flecked velvet sofa, her “Human Hair” sign, the Four Corners tortilla-chip platter she had picked up while trailing Pitts; the oyster tin that Fuzzy Iglehart had used to stave off her demands for payment. There was a restful oil painting of trees, unearthed at a local consignment shop, distinguished by nothing other than her fondness for it. She also had a painted screen, by one of Baltimore ’s best known screen painters, Dee Herget. The half circle showed the prototypical view of swans gliding through a placid pond.

All told, you couldn’t get a thousand bucks for the room’s contents. But Tess liked her stuff too much to put a price on it. In part, she defined herself through the furniture she chose and the things she hung on her wall. She made judgments about other people based on the same criteria. Funny, she knew-and disliked- women who rated men according to the cars they drove. And Whitney had once broken off a promising relationship because the man was, as she put it, “so clueless that he got the Caesar salad from Eddie’s already mixed.”

But Tess was no less silly for her preoccupations. Would it have been fatal, after all, to live in a house with avocado-green kitchen appliances? It had seemed so once, but no longer.

“Knock-knock,” a man’s deep voice called from the other side of the door. She jumped, startled. But when she peeked through the fish-eye, it was only Daniel, his arms full of pizza boxes, a six-pack of Yuengling, and a slender black book balanced on top.

“What are you doing here?”

“I called Crow today, to see if he wanted to go hear this blues band at the Eight by Ten.” Tess’s matchmaking scheme for Whitney may have failed, but Crow and Daniel’s relationship was flourishing. “He told me he didn’t think you should be left alone tonight. So I thought I’d repay your kindnesses to me by bringing dinner and a re-housewarming present. Who’s this?”

He set his armload down on the dining room table to pay attention to the always-demanding Esskay, who believed that all who entered her domain must acknowledge her beauty. The fair-minded Daniel attempted to pet Miata as well, but Esskay kept sticking her snout into his armpit and directing his hands back to her sleek head. Apathetic Miata took no notice.

“She’s one mystery we haven’t solved,” Tess said, nodding at the Doberman.

“What do you mean?”

“The Hound of the Baskervilles. Why didn’t she bark when Shawn Hayes was attacked?”

“Maybe she wasn’t there,” Daniel said.

“Huh?”

“I’ve been thinking about this. I’m a Poe buff, after all. You’ve assumed all of this has been one-on-one. But what if the two men you followed were working together? What if one took the dog out for a walk while the other was burglarizing Shawn Hayes’s home? Hayes walks in, things get out of hand-”

“And what if a gorilla came down the chimney, à la The Murders in the Rue Morgue?” Tess asked. Her voice was gentle, with some effort. She was tired of people treating her work as if it were some double-crostic, a game for everyone to play. “Daniel, you forget. I saw Ensor try to kill Pitts.”

“Because Pitts had double-crossed him. Or maybe they did it for your benefit. Maybe it was all staged.” Esskay drunk on attention, staggered back to her sofa, and Daniel tried to show Miata some affection, scratching beneath her collar. But the Doberman would have none of it. She shrugged off his fingers and walked away, dropping to the floor and assuming as close an approximation of the fetal position as a dog could achieve.

Another knock, a real one this time. Tess opened the door and found Cecilia and Charlotte standing there, holding hands. Cecilia lagged a bit behind Charlotte, a little girl being led to her first day of school or to the doctor’s office for the required immunizations. There were hollows beneath her dark eyes, and her transparent skin had an ashy look.

“I saw on the news that the police think they have a suspect in Bobby Hilliard’s death, that they issued a warrant for someone,” she said, rushing through her words. “You were right, and I was wrong. I’d say I was sorry, but I’m not, not really. If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it much the same way.” Cecilia paused to consider what she had said. “Except go on Yeager’s show.”

“Well-” Tess knew it was wrong to smile, but she couldn’t help herself. Cecilia’s apology was grudging, yet sincere. “That’s something, I guess.”

“I don’t mean because he made a fool of me,” Cecilia said, crossing the threshold. She noticed Daniel, gave him a puzzled look because he wasn’t Crow, and wasted no more time. “But if I hadn’t gone on the show, Yeager wouldn’t have asked me to meet him that night. Then I wouldn’t have seen what happened. I really wish I hadn’t seen… that. I’m still having bad dreams.”

“You’ll have them for a while.”

Maybe forever, maybe not. Tess didn’t know how long the nightmares lasted. It had been two years since she had seen a man run down by a cab, and while the nighttime replays were less frequent, they still came, often when she least expected them, after happy carefree days. But she had cared about the man she saw killed. Cecilia didn’t have that burden.

“Wait a minute. Did you say Yeager asked you to meet him? For some reason, I always thought you were just lurking there, hoping to confront him for what he did to you.”

“No, he summoned me, the neo-con prick.” She put her hand to her mouth, embarrassed. Even Cecilia realized ad hominem attacks should be suspended after a man had been murdered. “He left a note at the office the Alliance uses in the Medical Arts building, demanding to see me. Apparently Jim Yeager doesn’t traffic in anything so crude as technology-phone calls, faxes, E-mails-unless he has no other choice.”

Tess remembered the cell phone that Yeager wouldn’t turn off while drinking coffee at the Daily Grind. He had seemed perfectly comfortable with technology to her.

“Why would you go see him after the way he treated you?”

“He said he wanted to apologize because he knew something that changed everything. I didn’t care about the apology, but I sure wanted to hear what he had learned. I guess it was what you found out, that this was all about someone’s stuff. I waited on that corner for almost twenty minutes. I was about to leave when I saw him approach-”

Her voice faltered, and Tess knew she was seeing the scene in her mind. Charlotte must have realized this too, for she grabbed her hand and steadied her.

“Cecilia-this note,” Tess asked gently. “What did it look like?”

“Oh, it was so typical of him. Computer generated, but with some fancy old-fashioned font, like he was using a quill pen. Jesus, he was such a George Will wannabe. But too bombastic.”