Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

A man in a boxy leather jacket walked through the office, head down as if distracted by his own thoughts. Still, he managed to give Tess the quick once-over some men automatically throw toward any remotely female form. Tess had even seen them do it at mannequins in department stores.

This man blushed when he got to the face. “Tess,” he said. “Little Tess. How long has it been?”

She recognized the man as one of her father’s longtime colleagues. Not a friend-her father always said he wanted to be respected, not liked. But he thought well of this guy, she remembered that much, if only because he was one of the few old-timers left, and this gave them a bond. She groped for the name. George Foreman, Georgie Porgie, Gene-Gene Fulton.

“It’s been quite some time if you still think of me as ‘little’ Tess. I hit five-nine in the eighth grade.” She didn’t use his name, because she couldn’t decide if he was still Mr. Fulton to her, or now an equal named Gene.

He apparently suffered no such confusion, given the way his heavy-lidded eyes continued to track up and down, up and down. Big Tess was fair game in a way that Little Tess had never been.

“When you going to settle down and give your old man some grandbabies?” Gene asked, as if he couldn’t sleep nights for wondering if Pat Monaghan was ever going to dandle a baby on his knee. Tess knew he was fishing, trying to find out where she was on the dating-engaged-married-divorcing continuum.

“Between us”-Tess leaned forward, a finger on her lips, knowing her words would get back to Pat before the day was out-“sooner than he might think.”

“You engaged then?” That was Marley. Tess had suddenly dropped off Gene Fulton’s radar. Some men live to poach. Others figure it’s too much trouble. Fulton was a lazy bastard, bless his heart.

“Practically,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a jeweler’s box beneath my tree this Christmas.”

Which was the truth, because she was sure Jackie would, in fact, find the perfect pair of earrings.

“Huh,” Fulton said. “Well, don’t be a stranger. I’ve got my beeper, Marley, anyone needs me.”

Tess was left with the files. The temptation was to plunge in, but she had learned to be systematic in such things. One by one, bird by bird, she’d go through each report, looking for the syllable Dom , the word sugar or an owner’s name that correlated. On a computer, she could have done this in seconds, but Tess preferred paper files. She was no Luddite, but she knew the trade-offs in using computers. A search could be too targeted, too easy. On the Internet, plugged into a search engine, one traded serendipity for straight-up dippiness, for page after page of worthless hits, while the thing one wanted might be tantalizingly out of reach, a single keystroke off. Getting lost had always been part of the journey for her.

Within an hour, she had three viable candidates-Hummers Café, whose owner was listed as Harold Sugarman; Bo’s Tavern, which had started life as Dom’s Tavern; and Domenick’s, owned by Lawrence Purdy. Although the last seemed the most promising, it had the skimpiest file of the three, with none of the usual neighborhood complaints about noise and after-hours operation.

“Why’s the file so thin? Others are inches thick.”

Marley had a smug, knowing look. “They’re either very well-behaved, or”-she glanced around, saw no one, decided to lower her voice anyway-“very connected.”

“I thought the bribery and fraud trial against the old boss and Billy Madonna would have slowed down any such activity.”

“You can chase a few bears away from a honey pot, but as long as it’s there, the bears are going to keep coming back. A lot of bar owners are willing to pay for special favors. An inspector would have to be almost inhumane to be tempted.”

The secretary’s little malaprop might have afforded Tess some pleasure, if it weren’t for the implication. “You’re not saying my dad-”

“Pat Monaghan? Oh no, Tess, I didn’t mean anything like that. Honest as the day is long. But he’s one of the old guys, been here almost thirty years now. He made a career here. It’s the ones who come and go who are trouble.”

Tess checked her watch. “Ten-thirty. I guess it’s too early to start visiting bars.”

“Not necessarily. Under law, you can open as early as six A.M.”

“You know, I’ve never actually needed to know the legal time to start .” The thought was oddly cheering. Obviously, she wasn’t anywhere near as decadent as she sometimes feared.

Hummer’s Café, out on Arabia Avenue, was closed and the dusty windows indicated it had been a long time since anyone had worked in the small frame house. Tess had slightly better luck at Bo’s, once known as Dom’s, which appeared to have taken its original name from the Latin dominatus -to rule, to exert control, to charge people ridiculous amounts of money for drinks, simply because they were served by men and women in rubber suits.

Yet Bo’s, which happened to be in one of East Baltimore ’s old synagogues, seemed strangely tepid to Tess, sort of the TGIFridays version of an S-M club. Of course, it was only noon when she arrived there, not exactly the hour at which such clubs thrive, and she did not have much experience in these matters. Like most well-brought-up women of her generation, Tess had practiced her masochism privately, within the confines of relationships.

But she was pretty sure that S-and-M shouldn’t be so…clean, so desultory, so absent of shock value. Baltimore just didn’t do debauchery well, but it kept trying.

The manager was not happy to have a private investigator on the premises, but he eventually stopped running his long, twitchy fingers through his dyed blond hair and got down to cases.

“I’ve been here two years,” said the man, who had identified himself only as Hurst. “Not Horst,” he had made a point of saying, “ Hurst.” He was extremely tall, perhaps six-foot-six, rail-thin, and tricked out with so many nervous mannerisms that he seemed to be one gigantic tic of a man. “The turnover is constant, but no different from any other bar or restaurant in the city. In fact, I think we keep our people a bit longer. Our customers tip terrifically, which really doesn’t make sense. If you were going to stiff someone, wouldn’t it be in a place where you were supposed to be, um, in command?”

“Would you have noticed if a girl just disappeared one day and never came back?”

“It happens. It happens all the time. It’s not the kind of job where people give two weeks notice and ask for references, you know what I mean? Do you have a photo?”

Tess didn’t want to show him the photo of Jane Doe’s corpse. It wasn’t only that it seemed less than helpful-she couldn’t imagine anyone making an ID from the battered, bulging face. But the photo seemed pornographic to her, degrading.

She showed him the police sketch instead, although she doubted it was a good likeness. The drawing was a little flat, but it had the particulars-the shape of the face, the high cheekbones, the large eyes beneath the winged brows, the archer’s bow of a mouth, with its plump lower lip.

“Pretty,” Hurst said. “But it doesn’t ring any bells.”

Tess noticed his pupils were pinpricks set in amber, that his hands kept returning to his lank blond locks. A man with his own problems. Bo’s clientele probably came for the speed and stayed for the decor. She wondered how long Hurst had been helping himself to the house wares.

“I never knew this place existed before I checked the liquor licenses this morning, but I know there are bars that try to draw as little scrutiny as possible, for their clientele’s sake. Does Bo’s have a nickname? A kind of code name used by the people who come here, or work here?”