Laura Lippman - Baltimore Blues

"So why did you go in that night?"

"The door was open. And I could see something-maybe his leg, I don't know. Something wasn't right."

"And that was what time?"

"I don't have a watch." He flashed a bare wrist at her. "You say the call to 911 was at ten something. I guess I found him no more than a few minutes before then. And I stayed until someone came."

"At ten forty-seven. That's what the EMS log says."

He shrugged. "If that's what the records say. I'll tell you, it seemed longer. It's not much fun, keeping vigil over a dead man."

"How long had you been on the eighteenth floor? Did you see anyone else around?"

"I start at the top and work down. I probably got to their floor about ten-twenty, and I'm pretty sure I had the place to myself. Their office takes up everything, so there's no other place to go."

Shit. The last thing they wanted was to narrow the window of opportunity, making it less likely someone other than Rock had killed Abramowitz. If Miles was right another killer, the real killer, had less than ten minutes to get in and out.

"How can you be so sure?" Tess asked, sliding into a harsh tone despite Tyner's warnings. "You said you don't wear a watch."

"I can't." He smiled sweetly. He probably thought this hilarious, Tess realized. On average there had been a murder a day in the city over the past year, many of them within a five-mile radius of where they sat. Drug dealers may have shot innocent people on this very block. They called them mushrooms, because they seemed to sprout from the pavement. The dealers laughed about it. You can bet people didn't get arrested in those murders in less than an hour's time.

"Want to know something funny?" he asked suddenly. "When I saw him the first thing I thought was, ‘Well, how am I supposed to get all that blood out of my carpet?' It sounds awful now, but at the time it was the most natural thing in the world. All I could do was think about that carpet. Do you think that makes me a bad person?"

He seemed to really care. She thought back to the dead bodies she had seen as a reporter. There had not been many. The first ones had been the two-dimensional bodies of three teenage girls who had tried to beat a train across an unmarked crossing out in the county. The body of a twenty-three-year-old at the morgue, blue as a raspberry-flavored Icee. He had dropped dead of a heart attack during a job interview, a medical examiner told Tess. Yes, she had seen dead bodies, but her job had been to organize their lives into neat, familiar formulas. Age, a pithy description-"popular cheerleader" had summed up the life of one of the train-flattened girls-school affiliations. Hobbies. Mr. Miles's preoccupation seemed healthier. But Tess didn't know how to tell him that.

"And you felt for his pulse, right? At the wrist, or the neck?"

"At his wrist. His neck was so…floppy. I tried to touch it, but it seemed like it might just fall off. I guess that boy must have hated him, to do him like that."

Tess couldn't let that pass. "We're not so sure he did, Mr. Miles. Kill him, I mean. He very well may have hated him, but I don't think Rock-Mr. Paxton-killed him."

He smiled. "That's right , Miss Monaghan. Innocent before proven guilty, that's what they say. I tell you, though, I wouldn't begrudge him a bit. I heard on the news at noon that Mr. Abramowitz may have been bugging that boy's girlfriend. A jury hears that, I wouldn't be surprised if he walked. That's not right, what that man did. He was a bad man."

Great. Television had the Ava angle, if not her name. The police must have leaked a few details this morning, feeling expansive after making a quick arrest. And if TV had that much, the newspaper would want more. Tess knew by the time the morning newspaper came out, Baltimore could know how many silver fillings Ava had in her mouth, and if they tingled when she ate frozen yogurt.

The Hydrox cookies were gone, and even the affable Mr. Miles seemed ready for the visit to end. Tess drove home, thinking about what a wonderful witness he would make for the prosecution and listening to an intriguing noise in her engine. It sounded like a $200 noise. If she was lucky she might break even after all this.

Home. She took the back stairs, ducking Kitty. She'd want a complete rehash of the day. Tess just wanted to transcribe her tapes and written notes for Tyner, then sit on the floor of the shower and let the hot water beat on her.

But she had company-the kind of company who lets himself in with his own key, strips down to his underwear, and crawls beneath the covers. Jonathan Ross had come to call.

Jonathan Ross had seemed shockingly original to Tess once, but she soon learned every newspaper had a Jonathan Ross. Someone who covers cops, and wants to be a cop, too, dressing like the television version of an undercover vice detective-longish hair, a leather thong at the neck with a charm dangling from it, a diamond stud in one ear. Someone who lards his stories with unnamed officials and "sources close to the investigation." Someone who speaks in the latest street slang, and almost pulls it off. Some of these guys were heroes, some jokes. In his time Jonathan had managed to be a little of both, but his star was rising and fewer people were laughing. Tess still laughed, one reason he kept coming around. She knew him when. They had started out together on the Star -her first job, his first big-city gig.

Back then, all of four years ago, they had something called a relationship, complete with dreary late-night arguments that were always about the same thing: What was the point of being together if you knew one day you were going to be apart? They had broken up when the paper folded, a time when a lot of people seemed to be leaving Tess behind, as if her joblessness might be contagious. Then, about a year ago, his latest relationship heading into deeper waters, Jonathan popped up again. Tess became his shield against the new woman. He came, he went, he never called. Tess told herself she didn't care. She preferred it this way, she told others. Jonathan was just another piece of fitness equipment, her home gym. She tried not to think about his girlfriend, and if she did she shrugged and thought: Well, I was there first .

From her bed, Jonathan asked, as he always did: "Still got that body?"

Tess replied, as tradition required: "I don't know. Let me take my clothes off and check." She did.

"That body." Her shape had not changed since she was fifteen, when her mother declared it obscene and began the struggle to keep it from public view. Tess, naturally modest, immediately became an exhibitionist, running around in the tiniest two-piece bathing suits she could find. To her surprise this was a much better way to get boyfriends than hitting home runs over their heads and skimming hard red rubber balls off their backs in dodgeball. She had been a popular teenager.

"What are you working on?" Tess asked not much later, grabbing beers from her refrigerator and carrying them back to bed. "I don't recall seeing your name in the paper for a while." She always pretended to have missed his byline, no matter how prominent.

Jonathan didn't bother to remind her he had been splashed across page one just yesterday, with the story on Abramowitz's death. Disdainful of any story reported and written in less than six weeks, he pitched in on dailies only when his sources gave him something too juicy to waste. Productivity cheapened a man, Jonathan liked to say.

"I've been following some guys on Death Row. Ever since Thanos was put to death, they've started feeling like they might really go. You know, some of them have been there forever, long enough to forget they're supposed to be executed. They don't feel so complacent anymore."