Laura Lippman - Baltimore Blues

"How do you figure?"

"If William had been arrested he never would have been judged competent to stand trial. He would have been committed to some state asylum, at the state's expense, until he was. Instead he is in a nice place in Connecticut, which costs me $80,000 a year-about four times what prison costs in Maryland, by the way. And my family is still here, contributing to the community. If my son's crime had been publicly exposed, we would have left, taking the foundation with us. There's no stipulation the grants be made in Maryland. The city would have lost out, not us."

"I see-it was in the best interest of the taxpayers. What if the taxpayers preferred not to pervert our legal system?"

"Lawyers pervert the system," she replied. "The jurors pervert it. We sidestepped it."

"And Jonathan Ross?"

"The reporter? What about him?"

"He was murdered."

"Really? I read his death was ruled a hit-and-run, an accident."

"He was going to figure this out. He was starting to research foundations. He had talked to Fauquier. He would have put it together as I did, eventually."

Mrs. O'Neal just smiled.

"Am I going to be in a police report, Mrs. O'Neal? Am I going to be an accident?"

"Seamon tends to…panic. You've seen how red he becomes, how his voice starts squeaking. Another sign of the compulsively tidy. But when he has time to think-time to listen to advice-he is quite rational."

"Fauquier will write more letters to other reporters. He wants to tell his story. He wants attention."

"Yes, he does. You visited him yesterday, I understand. Your name was on the sheet. We've been taking note of his visitors since Mr. Abramowitz's death. Today-" She glanced at her watch, the kind of gold simplicity that costs dearly. "It's already happened. Shay held a press conference at one-thirty and announced the firm was going to take over Mr. Fauquier's appeals as a memorial to their slain colleague, Mr. Abramowitz. Larry Chambers, a quite capable young man, will handle the case. And if Mr. Fauquier tries to tell him any stories about fake confessions, Larry's going to assure him it will only hurt his appeal. He's also going to inform prison officials that you are not to visit Mr. Fauquier again, nor will any reporter. You need the lawyer's permission, you know."

"I know."

Now it was Tess who did not want to meet Mrs. O'Neal's eyes. If Luisa saw the past through her window, Tess saw the future. Fauquier's appeals would run out. His lawyer would whisper to him: "Don't say anything about that fake confession yet. We have a plan. We're going to announce it just before they give you the injection. You'll get more publicity than any condemned prisoner in the country." And so Fauquier would go obediently, quietly, sitting in the chamber and waiting for the door to be flung open, waiting for his lawyer to rescue him. The pellets would drop, and Fauquier would die. The last living witness.

"There's only one thing I don't understand, Mrs. O'Neal. Why did you have Abramowitz killed? Was he so miserable that he was going to confess?"

"I'm afraid, dear, you can't blame us for that. We have no idea who killed Abramowitz, although we probably owe whoever it was a debt. It has worked out nicely for us. He was becoming quite a nuisance."

"Aren't you worried I'll tell?"

"No. I think, on some level, you see my side of things, Miss Monaghan. Justice was done. A boy was killed, a man confessed. My son is in a hospital for the rest of his life, which is longer than he would have stayed in jail. What more would you ask?"

"I don't see your side. I could never think the way you do." Tess was almost yelling, frantic in her hope that she was telling the truth.

"Well, then, I'll tell you the second reason I'm not worried. You're no one, and no one will ever believe you. But if you'd like a little money, a reward for being so clever, it could be arranged."

"Actually," Tess said, surprising even herself, "I might."

Tess left the O'Neals' and drove to a copy store out in the suburbs, a bright, lively place with an espresso bar and throngs of people. Despite Mrs. O'Neal's kind assurances that she was too inconsequential to kill, she felt safer in public. She paid for computer time and typed up the story she had told Mrs. O'Neal, fleshed out now with Mrs. O'Neal's details. At the end she listed all her resources, a bibliography of sorts. She smoothed out and photocopied the crumpled, damp faxes, paid for the disk on which she had worked, and put everything in a manila envelope, which she then sent by certified mail to Kitty. She wrote on the back flap, " To be opened only in the event of my death ." Kitty was one of the few people who would unquestioningly follow those instructions. She wouldn't even find it particularly odd. Tyner, while the more logical choice in some ways, would have opened it immediately.

Strangely Tess almost believed Mrs. O'Neal when she said they had not arranged Abramowitz's death. More importantly she believed she couldn't prove it if they had. All this work, all this effort, and she had ended up solving the wrong case-Jonathan's death and the death of a little boy whose name she had not even known two days ago.

That's why I hated being a reporter. You were always getting the wrong answers to your questions .

The thought darted across her mind like a cockroach running from the kitchen light, trying to disappear into a dark crevice. But Tess caught it before it vanished. Hated being a reporter? No, she had loved it. She had worked hard at it. It was the only career she had ever known. She had been a reporter because…because.

Because Whitney wanted to be a reporter, and you could never stop competing with Whitney. Because Jonathan was a great reporter, and you loved him once and wanted him to love you. Because James M. Cain was a reporter who went to Washington College, then had gone on to write wonderful books and have an interesting life. You wanted to be a writer with a regular paycheck. That didn't make you a reporter. Or a writer. It made you a coward and a fake. An imitation .

Her package mailed, she drove home and flopped on her bed. She had not exercised for five days, since Jonathan's death, and she'd eaten little. Her body felt puny and weak, her stomach flat, the kind of flat that comes from the atrophy of muscle. A workout's effects are lost in seventy-two hours , Tess chided herself, then tried to remember the last time she had gone three days without running or rowing. About five years ago, when she had sprained her ankle. Even then she had done bicep curls with cans of Progresso plum tomatoes and tried chin-ups from her door frame.

She stood up, determined to run, but her legs felt too rubbery. Instead she left her apartment and began walking. First north, then east. The neighborhoods through which she walked were the cornerstone of the Baltimore myth, the places enshrined in the travel pieces written by every slumming journalist who had ever swung a crab mallet at Obrycki's. Here were the marble stoops, the celebrated ethnic mix, the vast green spaces of Patterson Park. It looked good, from a distance. But Tess knew teenagers were smoking PCP and crack in the alleys, and that no one walked in Patterson Park because of the crime. She knew fewer and fewer women scrubbed their marble stoops every day. Even the Elvis mural had been defaced, so it had to be painted over. And when Baltimoreans started turning on Elvis, times were bad.

She walked past the old Francis Scott Key Hospital and through Greektown. The air was full of grape leaves, roasted lamb, potato pancakes, and, near the Brazilian restaurant, a scorched pork scent her nose recognized as the "national dish of Brazil." She passed Cesnik's Tavern. It could be Cecilia's father's place. She walked all the way to Dundalk, down Holabird Avenue, to the small hideous rancher owned by Abner Macauley.