Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

“Made about a year ago?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I signed on last December, although we didn’t announce the fact for several months.”

“You took the appointment just after Gwen Schiller was killed.”

It was a guess, a feint, nothing more. But Tess knew she had closed the circle. She waited, letting the silence in the room grow, determined not to be the next one to speak. She would stand here for hours, if necessary, until one of them told her what she needed to know.

As it happened, she had to wait only a few seconds. But it seemed much longer.

“We knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith said. “Elizabeth March.”

“We?”

“I.”

“We,” Adam Moss corrected. “In fact, I introduced her to Meyer. We were horrified when we realized she must be the girl who was killed in Locust Point, but what could we do? I made an anonymous call, but her name turned out to be fake, as we always suspected.”

“How did you know her?”

Another silence. Again, Tess waited it out.

“She lived here, very briefly,” Hammersmith said carefully. “As did Adam. And Wendy.”

“Wendy? You mean the girl from the gallery.” Tess saw another link, a visual one, spread out on the walls around her. Beautiful faces. Beautiful, beautiful faces of all types, male and female, and no two alike. So art was not the only thing Meyer Hammersmith collected.

“How do you know about Wendy?” Adam asked.

“I followed you one night, then checked the property records for the gallery. So you got a job with a state senator and Wendy got her own business. What was going to be Gwen’s reward?”

“She did not stay long enough for me to help her,” Hammersmith said. Help her? Tess wanted to throw the words back at him, but there was no irony in his voice, no self-awareness.

“You mean she wouldn’t sleep with you.”

“You misunderstand our arrangement.” Meyer Hammersmith actually looked offended. “I’m a mentor. I take in protégés, people who need molding, give them a leg up.”

“Gwen Schiller was a billionaire’s daughter from the Washington suburbs,” Tess said. “She didn’t need your ‘leg up.’” Or your scaly little hand up her skirt .

“I knew her as Beth,” Hammersmith repeated, as if the name made all the difference. “A runaway. If I had known who she was-if Adam or Wendy had known who she was-they never would have brought her to me. They picked her. I knew her as Beth.”

Tess looked questioningly at Adam.

“You have to find your own replacement,” he muttered, looking at the floor. “Wendy didn’t understand Meyer’s tastes as well as I did, she was having trouble finding someone new. We were eating in a bar in South Baltimore one night when Beth came in, looking for work. She didn’t have an ID, or a Social Security number. I knew Meyer would approve of her, once we got her cleaned up.”

“You took her to Domenick’s.”

“I took her to Domenick’s.” Adam seemed relieved, as if he had yearned to tell this story to someone, anyone, over the past year. “The DeSantis aren’t so picky about things like work permits and they know about Meyer’s…proclivities. They’re always happy to help him out. The strange thing was, Beth was actually happy there, living in an apartment above the bar, waiting tables, being left alone. Me and Wendy, we couldn’t wait to get out of there, but Beth-I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to think of her by any other name-didn’t want to go when her time came.”

“You brought her here, to begin her tenure as a ‘protégé,’ and she ran away.”

“I guess so,” Adam looked at Meyer. “I assume so. I’ve never asked too many questions about what happened.”

Adam Moss made it a habit of not asking too many questions, Tess realized. No wonder he was so highly regarded in political circles.

“When the replacement bolts, what happens?” She was thinking of the terrified girl in the gallery, Wendy, her shrill insistence that she had fulfilled the contract.

Adam looked as if he might say something, but Hammersmith cut him off. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened. She decided she didn’t want the life I was offering her, and she left. Now that I know she was Dick Schiller’s daughter, it’s all a little clearer to me, I admit. I haven’t had a protégé for quite some time.”

He had the gall to sound wistful, as if he had been denied something that was his due.

“But only because the waitress from Domenick’s wasn’t quite right,” Tess said, and she knew she had gotten it right this time. Gene Fulton had brought the girl to Meyer, not to some political rival. “You were the tea at Harbor Court, the job that Fulton described as one of the best gigs in the city. I guess Nicola DeSanti knows your ‘proclivities,’ but can’t quite nail down your taste. Pretty isn’t good enough. They have to be extraordinary.”

“I am interested in young people who want to better themselves, people I can help.”

“Yes. You take them in, and you buy their silence by promising them what they most desire. But Gwen didn’t get anything from you, so she wasn’t bound to keep your secret, was she? You must have been terrified when she ran away. She might have ended up telling someone about your little scout troop.”

“I’m sorry she didn’t like it here,” Meyer said. “But, really, she overreacted. She wasn’t my prisoner, she was free to leave any time. I just needed to ensure her discretion. When I asked Nicola to help me out, I expected a very different resolution. I thought she would put Gene on it, as she usually did. Gene was competent, and levelheaded. The boys are so…unpredictable.”

“The boys?” She wanted to be wrong about this, but knew she wasn’t.

“Her grandsons, I believe. No-her grandson and great-grandson. Have you see them? They look amazingly alike. Very unusual faces. Not handsome, but distinctive. Feral, even.”

Caught up in trying to describe Pete and Repete, Hammersmith had already forgotten the girl he knew as Beth. But Adam Moss was horrified.

“You knew,” he said, stepping around Tess and toward his old mentor. “You knew all this time. They killed Beth, to protect you, and framed the dumb addict. Let me guess what happened next. Gene Fulton carried the tale back to Dahlgren, to get him off his back at the liquor board, and that’s how Dahlgren got you for finance chair. Beth was dead, and all anyone could think of was how to turn it to their personal advantage.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Hammersmith protested. “I didn’t want her dead, and I certainly didn’t want to work for a troglodyte like Ken Dahlgren. But one does what one has to do. Noblesse oblige , Adam. Didn’t I teach you that very concept, over the year I spent transforming you from rough trade to senator’s aide?”

“Noblesse oblige,” Adam Moss repeated, his voice bitter, his beautiful mouth trembling with emotion. “As I recall, you were born in Pigtown and made your first million as a slumlord. You learned to buy fine things, Meyer, but you never truly appreciated them.”

“I bought you,” he said matter-of-factly, reaching out to touch Adam’s face. The younger man backed away so quickly he almost fell over the chaise longue. “I appreciated you.”

Tess pulled her gun from her pocket, and aimed at the center of Meyer Hammersmith’s speckled forehead. She heard Whitney’s voice in her head: Heads are too small, aim for the torso . She could miss, even at this range. But it was so much more satisfactory to point a gun at his face, his unbeautiful face. She squinted her left eye, remembering to adjust for the slight recoil on the Smith amp; Wesson.

“What are you doing, Miss Monaghan?”