Laura Lippman: The Last Place

“It’s not enough,” Whitney said. “We have to teach this guy a lesson, really throw a scare into him. He had those pills on him. If he hasn’t raped someone, it’s only a matter of time.”

Steve-no, Mickey-sighed in his drug-induced sleep. His middle shirt button had come undone as they dragged him about, exposing a furry expanse of fish-white belly.

Whitney leaned over the man, prodding his chest with the toe of her loafer. “Hairy little devil, isn’t he? I hate hairy men.”

“Hairy body,” Tess corrected. “Head’s not going to be hairy for long. He’ll be bald in three years, tops. So then maybe he won’t be able to hit on teenagers anymore. All we have to do is let nature take its course.”

Whitney gave her a who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding look, then announced, “I have an idea.”

She went over to the old-fashioned planter’s desk, one of the cast-off family heirlooms that her mother stored here. Digging through the drawers, she soon unearthed a plastic stencil sheet.

“What, we’re going to make posters for the homecoming dance?” Tess asked.

“Wait, just wait.” Whitney disappeared in the small bathroom off the hall and came back with a can of Nair so ancient that it was rusted at the bottom. “Truth in labeling. Let’s tell the world what this guy really is.”

She flipped him on his stomach and removed his shirt, grimacing when she saw the thicker mat of hair on his back. “Perfect.” Carefully, she laid the stencil over his back, and filled one of the letters with foam. First a B, then an A, then a B again-

“Whitney, what are you doing?” Tess demanded.

“Spelling out Baby Raper on his back.”

“That’s ridiculous. After all, who’s going to see his back? It’s barely April.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s April Fool’s Day and we have caught ourselves the number one fool.” But when Whitney tried to change her design, the lines overlapped and she ended up taking all the hair from his back.

“Great,” Tess said. “A salon would have charged him thirty bucks for that.” She took the can from Whitney and applied it to the thinning hair on his scalp. No need for stencils here, she wanted to take all of it. She and Whitney rolled him on his back and did the front of his chest for good measure, using the stencil to spell out LOSER.

“The letters don’t really stand out,” Whitney said.

“We should have used a razor,” Tess conceded.

“Or Nads. I really want to try Nads, every time I see that infomercial.”

Tess unbuckled his pants and pulled them down to his ankles, applying what was left of the Nair to his thighs and calves. The aerosol had begun to rattle, close to empty. Here, the hair was paler and finer, more like a boy’s. He wore black nylon briefs, unflatteringly tight.

“He thought he was going to get some tonight,” Whitney said.

“That’s pretty much guaranteed when you drug your dates,” Tess said. “The problem is, they’re usually not conscious by the time you unveil your lingerie.”

It was after midnight when they left him, more or less denuded, in the parking lot of the restaurant, propped up against a blue Honda Accord. The restaurant was dark, having closed an hour ago. The Honda was the only car in the parking lot besides Tess’s Toyota, and his key fit the lock. Mickey Pechter still had on his briefs and socks, but Tess had thrown the rest of his clothes in a Dumpster behind a liquor store on York Road. She arranged his wallet, keys, and pager in a pile next to his head and draped his jacket over him.

At the last minute, she decided to keep the roofies, not wanting to return his weapon to him. She was unsure how difficult they were to procure, but why make anything easy for this predator?

“He looks awfully pink,” she said.

“We’re all pink,” Whitney said. “White is a misnomer if you think about it. Just like black.”

“But he’s red-pink,” Tess said. “He looks like he’s been dipped in crab boil. Or like Humpty-Dumpty, after his fall.”

Yes, that was it: Humpty-Dumpty. Tess wouldn’t describe him as broken, but he was pathetic, curled up in his slumber, his pale body exposed to the night air, prickly with gooseflesh. She felt a wave of sympathy for him, belated, to be sure.

And then she remembered his plans for the evening and revulsion twisted her stomach, where a cheeseburger and onion rings sat on a few sips of strawberry margarita.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, standing. Then, without really understanding what she was doing, or why, she turned back and gave him a sudden swift kick in the ribs.

If she had been wearing boots, he might have wakened at the impact, but the flat ballet-soft shoe she had worn to minimize her height didn’t pack much of a punch. Still, it was hard enough to bruise his rib, to give him one last souvenir of their evening together.

Or so the Baltimore County cops told her the next day, when they took her into custody.

Baltimore County surrounds Baltimore City like a moat. Or a vise, depending on one’s vantage point. The two broke up more than 150 years ago, heading their separate ways, and they’re still fighting about who got the raw end of the deal. The city is broke, crime-ridden, and incapable of expanding. But the county is one of those no-there-there places. To city-born Tess, it might as well have been a foreign country.

Her trip through its legal system did little to change that perception.

“Hey, that’s a thought,” she said, sitting in the hallway of the county courthouse three weeks to the day after her date with Mickey Pechter. “Is it too late to petition for extradition?”

“I’m glad you can joke about this,” said her lawyer and sometime employer, Tyner Gray. “I kept thinking at some point in the process- when they arrested you and kept you in county lockup overnight, when they fingerprinted you, when they charged you with felony assault-that you might start taking it seriously. But no, here you are, about to be sentenced, and you’re still acting like it’s one big hoot.”

“It’s not as if there’s much suspense,” Tess pointed out. “It’s not even a sentence, really.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Probation before judgment simply means you won’t have a record once you complete the terms of your probation.”

“Now that’s an interesting philosophical question: If a PBJ falls down in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“Not funny, Tess.”

“There are times in this life,” she said, “when you can laugh or you can cry. I choose to laugh.”

Tess had cried a little bit over the past three weeks, but always in secret. She never would have revealed such weakness to crusty old Tyner, or to anyone else for that matter. She had maintained a tough facade even in front of her boyfriend, Crow-not that he was fooled. Her lackluster appetite had betrayed her.

But now it was almost over, another bad memory to be condensed into one simple sentence for future biographers: “When I was thirty-one, I got into a little trouble with the law, but it was all a misunderstanding.” The very term used for her plea, probation before judgment, PBJ, sounded innocuous, as if they were discussing peanut butter and jelly.

Tyner’s mind must have been following a similar food track, for he suddenly said, “Time to make the doughnuts,” did a neat three-point turn in his wheelchair, and rolled into the appointed courtroom.

Mickey Pechter sat in the first row, behind the prosecutor. It was the first time Tess had seen her “victim,” as the legal system would have it, since that night in the parking lot. The hair on his head had grown back, duller but thicker. Perhaps she had found a cure for baldness. His skin looked normal to her, and she wondered if he had really suffered the severe allergic reaction he had claimed. Then again, he had wound up in the emergency room. She caught his eye and watched the emotions that played on his face: a reflexive fear, like a dog cowering before someone who had hurt him, a wisp of a smile, and, finally, a narrowed gaze of pure hatred.