Laura Lippman - In A Strange City

Some fancy old-fashioned font. Shit, shit, shit. Tess didn’t have her Visitor’s notes any more, not even the copies. She caught Daniel’s eye, and he nodded. He had picked up on this detail, too.

“How did it arrive?” She was trying not to lead Cecilia, not to plant anything in her mind.

“By carrier pigeon,” Cecilia said impatiently. “Jesus, Tess, what do you mean, how did it arrive? He slipped it under the door. We had a meeting Sunday afternoon, the way we always do. It was there when I arrived to open the office at four.”

And Yeager was a man of regular habits, Tess was remembering, not unlike herself. He ate at the same Inner Harbor restaurant every night-McCormick and Schmick’s, because God forbid he should go to one of the local places when a high-end chain was available- walking back to the hotel as if this would balance out his indulgences.

“I was curious about the stationery, whether it came in a certain kind of envelope.”

“I don’t recall, but I think it was just a plain piece of paper folded in quarters. The door is pretty low to the ground, and there’s a carpet. Something thicker wouldn’t have fit.”

“Did Rainer know about the note? Did you show it to him?”

“I talked to the other detective, Tull, more than I talked to Rainer. Remember, the one working on the Yeager case? I guess I told Tull, but Rainer was pretty cursory with me. He might have assumed it was a phone call, I don’t know. What’s the big deal?”

Rainer assumed, the ass. How in character. He didn’t even read Tull’s notes, because he didn’t care if anyone else’s homicide was cleared.

“The big deal, Cecilia, is I don’t think Yeager wrote the note. If you hadn’t been avoiding me, you’d know I was getting notes, in an old-fashioned computer font, like clues in some mysterious scavenger hunt. I think Yeager’s killer wanted you there. He wanted a witness.”

“But why?” Daniel asked. “Why would someone invite an eyewitness to a murder?”

Tess was thinking about Gretchen’s remark, that En-sor might have faked his getaway, how inferences can be sparked by simple facts we choose to interpret.

“The killer wanted Cecilia to see a tall man in a cloak, a man with roses and cognac, because it fits the pattern of what happened at Poe’s grave. But what if Cecilia didn’t see what she thought she saw? You know, I think you ought to go to a hypnotist, see if someone could shake out more details of what you might remember but have suppressed out of shock or fear.”

“A hypnotist? Oh, Tess, please. You’re getting weird on me.”

“Maybe I am.” But she was only growing more convinced of her own theory. Perhaps she could draw Cecilia’s memories out of her, under the guise of concern and friendship. “You want to stay for pizza? Daniel here brought enough for ten people.”

“I have a big appetite,” he said, blushing. “I guess I overestimate how much others need.”

Charlotte and Cecilia shook their heads at the offer, almost in unison.

“I’ve done what I came to do, Tess,” Cecilia said, her voice shaking with some unidentified emotion. “I said I couldn’t say I was sorry, but I am sorry for one thing. I wish I had realized I didn’t have to fight you so hard.”

She broke down and began to cry. Tess would have embraced Cecilia then, but Charlotte had already taken her into her arms, so she settled for patting her arm awkwardly.

“Cecilia, it’s not that bad. You didn’t kill anyone.”

“I thought… I thought I did,” she said, in the broken voice that comes on the heels of a hard cry. “That’s why I’ve been avoiding you. All this time, I believed Yeager’s death was my fault, because I must have stirred someone up somehow. Maybe that is what happened. Maybe someone summoned me to that corner to see the consequences of my rhetoric. Good Lord, maybe someone thought it was what I wanted. If it turns out Yeager was killed by one of us…” She broke down again.

“You didn’t stir anyone up, Cecilia,” Tess told her, in her most soothing voice. “Yeager did. That datebook he wagged on the air? It was a prop. If anything got him killed, it was his own stupidity. Jerold Ensor probably thought his name was in that book. Or Arnold Pitts. If they set you up to witness the killing, it was only to implicate the Visitor. Who’s a better murder suspect than the man no one knows by name? Maybe they thought turning the Visitor into a homicide suspect would force police to do everything they could to identify him, which would lead them to whatever it was Bobby Hilliard gave him that night.”

Cecilia’s shoulders continued to shake as she suppressed another wave of sobs. Daniel, embarrassed by all this emotion, escaped to the kitchen with a beer, in search of Crow.

And Tess realized that her words, intended to do no more than comfort, may have stumbled into the vicinity of the truth.

Yeager’s killer wanted the Visitor, any way he could get him. Enough to pretend to be him, in order to get the police to flush out the real one. Yeager’s killer believed Bobby had passed to the Visitor that still-mysterious “they,” the things worth killing for. The plan had failed, which could mean the Poe Toaster’s life was in danger. But how can you protect someone, or even warn him, if you don’t know who he is?

Are you sure?“ the mystified classified clerk at the City Paper had asked. She had already read the ad back three times and hadn’t gotten it right once. ”I mean, it’s a lot of words, and it’s not like most of the things we run in our “Misconnected‘ section. Usually, they’re a little more direct, you know?”

Tess had felt perversely flattered that the clerk even cared. This youngish-sounding woman had been a bored automaton when their conversation had started. Now the mask of boredom had slipped, and she was no longer in such a rush to take Tess’s ad and money and get her off the phone.

“More direct? You mean something like: ”You: Black cloak, roses, cognac. Me: Braid, vintage tweed coat, Smith amp; Wesson. Glimpsed at Westminster Hall on Jan. 19 and then-nevermore.“”

“That’s a little better,” the clerk had conceded. “But you could get the word count down. You don’t really need the ”nevermore‘ part because, like, he knows, right? After all, if you’d seen the guy since then, you wouldn’t be placing an ad. Also, my advice? Lose the poetry.“

Tess had looked at the lines she had penned on a legal pad at her kitchen table. It read:

From the same source I have not taken My sorrow I could not awaken, My heart to joy at the same tone, And all I loved, I loved alone.

These were the four lines dropped from the poem “Alone,” the last written missive from her Visitor, whoever he was.

After much pencil-chewing, literal and figurative, Tess had added her own quatrain:

Just because a man’s a stranger Doesn’t mean he can avoid all danger Meet me tomorrow at 6, the usual place, I know your secret-you know my face.

“I’ll stick to my version,” she told the clerk firmly.

“It’s way too vague, I’m telling you. You need to be specific to get results.”

“Well, there’s always next week, isn’t there, and another chance to get it right.”

She hung up, but Tess wasn’t done. She had index cards printed with the same doggerel and she set out with Esskay and Miata, posting them in her usual haunts. If someone had been following her all those weeks, he had been to these places, too. She walked down to the Daily Grind, where Travis agreed to tape the card to the cash register, sharing a conspiratorial wink with her. She crossed the street to Video Americain, where another card joined the jumble of ads for music lessons and apartment shares and yard sales. By the end of the day, her exercise in verse had gone up in the two supermarkets she frequented, Kitty’s bookstore, the boxing gym where she lifted weights, and the “Andy Hardy” liquor store, a neighborhood joint that had earned that nickname because the owners were peppy enthusiastic kids who didn’t look old enough to be drinking wine, much less selling it.