Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

“You know, Spike, I came here because we know the same people, we have mutual friends who’d like everybody to get along, because it’s better for them if people aren’t feuding,” she said. “Baltimore is a small town. But you don’t run anything, you don’t have any clout. I’m here out of respect to them, not to you.”

“Yeah,” Spike said. “I also know that all you really wanna do is run your business without anyone coming down on you. Gene Fulton’s dead, Nickie, and Kenny Dahlgren’s headed to Congress. Pretty soon, Tess’s father is gonna be the closest thing you got to any grease on the liquor board.”

“Who you kiddin’? He’s out of there, too. All that old shit is going to come up the surface, and there’s not a thing you or I can do about it. I’m gonna ride it out, and get along without Gene, rest his soul.”

Spike nodded, as if to commiserate: Such bad luck to have your politically connected stooge killed while he was trying to burn down an enemy’s house.

“Maybe your boys here should have thought about that before they killed him.”

“Don’t talk shit, Spike. These boys didn’t have nothing to do with that. They weren’t even there that night.”

“Really? Someone was. The investigators found three gasoline canisters. A source tells me they got a print hit this week.”

“No way,” Pete said. “There aren’t any prints on those cans.” Repete nodded. “No prints.”

“How could you be so sure?” Tess asked. “Unless you wore gloves, of course.” The fact was, she and Spike had made up the part about the prints. They weren’t even sure Pete and Repete had fingerprints on file, but it had seemed like a safe bet.

The look-alike uncle and nephew rolled their eyes at Nicola, as if they had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. “He slipped, Gee-gee, honest. We couldn’t save him, so we just got outta there.”

“People are always slipping around you,” Tess said. “You go to fetch Gwen Schiller, to make sure she’s not talking to anybody about Meyer Hammersmith, and she falls and cracks her head open. You go to Philadelphia and you kill the woman you find in the apartment, then try to kill Devon Whittaker.”

“That was Gene,” Pete said quickly. “Gene was running things. We just helped him out sometimes.”

“I checked Gene Fulton’s schedule and he visited five different bars that day, all over Baltimore,” Tess said. “He couldn’t have been in Philadelphia.”

“But-” Pete began.

Nicola leaned across the table and smacked him, then Repete. It was a short, matter-of-fact slap, just hard enough to get her point across.

“Shut up. You’re not supposed to be talking here. I didn’t even know why they wanted you here, but now I guess I do.” She turned back to Spike. “You want I guarantee these two will be good from now on? I can do that. Right, boys? I can make them be good.”

Pete and Repete rubbed their reddening cheeks and nodded ruefully. “No you can’t, Mrs. DeSanti,” Tess said. “They’re out of control. They’re responsible for the deaths of at least three people. Gwen’s death may well have been an accident, but it seems to have given them a taste for it. Hilde, Gene-people keep dying around them. It’s only a matter of time before they do something you won’t be able to cover up.”

Nicola studied Pete and Repete. Tess could see her innate loyalty warring with her instinctive shrewdness. Shrewdness won.

“What do you want?”

“Gwen Schiller’s dead, there’s no bringing her back, and no reason to try them for her death. Make them confess to Gene Fulton’s murder, and the arson. Even if Fulton did fall, the autopsy shows he died from smoke inhalation. When they left him in the house, they were guilty of manslaughter. Gene was a good employee, Mrs. DeSanti, he did whatever you asked him to do, he gave good value for your dollar. He didn’t deserve to die while doing your work.”

“I can’t let my babies go to prison,” she said.

“You should,” Tess said. “I wouldn’t sleep at night, knowing those monsters were coming and going under my roof. One day, they’ll get bored and kill you, too, because they think they know better than you how to run your business. They’re already dealing behind your back. And using. Which makes them big security risks for you. Stupid and on drugs is no way to go through life.”

The boys shook their heads vehemently, almost convincing in their outraged innocence. “We never would do such a thing, Gee-gee,” said Pete, and Repete lived up to his nickname, parroting his uncle’s promises. “We know you don’t want anyone around you to get mixed up in that.”

“No, Nicola prefers clean scams, like prostitution and video poker,” Spike said. “You still do that thing where you let women who are behind on their bills raffle off blow jobs at your bar? I always liked that one.”

Nicola glared at Spike. “Who are you to talk? You’re a two-bit bookie.”

“Never took a bet on a dog race,” Spike said placidly. It was an important distinction to him, for reasons Tess couldn’t fathom.

“We don’t sell drugs, and we don’t do them,” Pete repeated. “Never, never, never,” Repete said.

Tess walked over to the bar, and picked up an envelope of black-and-white photographs. “The quality is a bit off, but I think you’ll recognize the two young men on Forest Park Avenue, not even a half mile from here. I guess they thought if they got out of the neighborhood, you wouldn’t catch them. As consumers, they prefer crack. When they sell, they tend toward amphetamines. They’ve been dealing out of your bar for a while now. My guess is that Gene Fulton found out and told them to stop. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Maybe that’s why he ‘slipped.’”

Nicola studied the top photograph in the stack, which showed her “babies” grabbing a few glass vials of crack. Adam Moss had given Tess this idea when he mentioned Nicola’s antipathy toward drugs, how she fired girls who used. Tess had remembered the crazed stink coming off Pete and Repete, and Crow had been more than happy to verify her hunch, following them for the better part of a day, then chatting up the local Sowebo girls about who hooked them up. But Tess had been deliberate in choosing to show Nicola her babies were consumers as well as dealers. Selling drugs-she might have reconciled herself to that. But not using, not crack.

“It’s what niggers do,” she said, her voice flat. “You’re down on the corner with the niggers, buying their drugs. I didn’t raise you this way.”

“We didn’t-” Pete began.

“We were buying it for a friend,” Repete said.

“You got no friends,” Nicola said. “You never did. Now I know why. Because you’re scum, you can’t be trusted. You did all this, didn’t you, just like this girl said. If you hadn’t fucked up the first time, you realize none of this would have happened? Gene asked you to find a girl, bring her in to talk. Not kill her. Philadelphia, the same. No one asked you to kill anybody. You were just supposed to go up there, see who this girl was that the dead girl tried to call. Bump into her casual like, get her story.”

Nicola pushed the photos back toward Tess. “I didn’t know nothing about the house fire-I told Gene to make you stop nosing around, and he said he had a surefire way. Surefire, get it?”

“Yeah, Gene was the Noel Coward of the city liquor board,” Tess said.

“Well, his death is the one they’ll cop to. Not the dead girl because, like you said, what’s the point? And not Philadelphia, because I don’t want my babies in some Pennsylvania prison, where I can’t take care of them. But they’ll tell the cops they did Gene.”

Tess wasn’t finished, not quite. She had one more question to ask, if only to satisfy her own curiosity-and Ruthie’s. “Did you arrange for Henry Dembrow to be killed in prison?”