Laura Lippman: In Big Trouble

"You forget I've really gone through garbage, looking for those telltale credit card receipts. I was Dumpster diving just last weekend, on a fraud case. Remember, the pierogi dispute in Highlandtown? A little spoiled food, some coffee grounds, but it's not so bad if you wear good rubber gloves. It's better than watching some stupid john wrestling with a tranvestite hooker."

Tyner pushed away from his desk and rolled his wheelchair across the office, storing the ledger on a low shelf by the door. Everything was low here-shelves, file cabinets, tables-and so streamlined that it appeared as if Tyner hadn't finished moving in. Visitors mistook the look for minimalism. They didn't stop to think that rugs caught beneath one's wheels or that antique furniture was little more than an obstacle course of sharp, unforgiving corners. Which was the intended effect: Tyner didn't want people to stop to think about his wheelchair. Now in his sixties, he had been a paraplegic for more than two-thirds of his life, struck by a car not long after winning an Olympic medal for rowing.

"At least you don't have to tell Myra's father that his son-in-law not only tried to cheat on his daughter, but proved to be exceptionally bad at it. All too characteristic. Richard's a fuck-up, even when it comes to fucking up. I was there when Myra brought him home twenty years ago and I never liked him. But you can't give friends advice about love."

"Really? You butt into my love life all the time."

Tyner grinned wickedly. "You, my dear, have a sex life. There's a difference. Not that you've had even that as of late. Speaking of which-" He rolled back to his desk. "This came for you yesterday. Postmarked Texas."

The envelope Tyner held toward her could not have been plainer. White, the kind with a blue-plaid lining that hid its contents. Suitable for sending checks or other things of value.

Or things you just don't want anyone else to see.

"Aren't there something like twelve million people in Texas?" she said, hoping she sounded nonchalant, even as she held her hands behind her back, staring warily at the envelope.

"Closer to nineteen million. You know exactly one of them, however. Right?"

"That I know of."

She took the envelope from him. The address had been typed, the stamp was generic, a waving flag. She would have expected something more whimsical. The series with the old bluesmen, or perhaps a cartoon character. She turned it over, held it up to the light. Whatever was inside was feather-light. The postal system suddenly seemed miraculous to her. Imagine moving something so delicate across thousands of miles, for less than the cost of a candy bar.

"Why did it come here, instead of my office?" she asked, in no hurry to open it, although she wasn't sure why.

"You've been in Butchers Hill less than six months," Tyner said. "You weren't there before…well, before."

Before you kicked him in the teeth and kicked him out, only to have him return the favor when you changed your mind .

"Bo-erne, Texas," she said, looking at the postmark. "Never heard of it."

"It's pronounced Burn-e," Tyner corrected. "Don't you read newspapers since you stopped working for them? It was all over the papers a few years ago. The Catholic church and the Boerne government went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in a battle over zoning laws. The church claimed that separation of church and state meant it was exempt from zoning."

"Gee, I don't know how I ever missed a fascinating story like that," Tess said. "You know how I love a good zoning yarn." She still hadn't opened the envelope. It was fun, torturing Tyner. He bossed her so about everything-work, rowing, life. If he was insistent on playing Daddy, he deserved a little teenage petulance in return.

"I guess you want to read it in private," Tyner said, even as he held his letter opener out to her.

"No!" The harshness in her voice surprised her. She hadn't thought about Crow for days, weeks, months. She had her share of exes, enough to field a football team if she went all the way back to junior high, and was allowed to resurrect the one dead one in the bunch. It didn't seem a particularly scarlet past to her, not for someone who had just turned thirty. More like coral, or a faded salmon color.

"I mean, this is no big deal," she added. "For all we know, he's probably just writing about some CD or book he had left in my apartment." But the only thing he had left behind was a ratty sweater the color of sauteed mushrooms. Her greyhound, Esskay, had unearthed it from beneath the bed and used it as part of her nest.

"Just open it."

She ignored Tyner's letter opener and unsealed the flap with her index finger, cutting herself on the cheap envelope. Her finger in her mouth, she upended the envelope. A newspaper clipping that had been glued to an index card slid out onto Tyner's desk, and nothing more.

The clipping was a photograph, or a part of one, with a head-and-shoulders shot cut from a larger photograph, the fragment of a headline still attached over the head, like a halo.

IN BIG TROUBLE

The hair was different. Shorter, neater. The face was unmistakably Crow's, although it looked a little different, too. Surely she was imagining that-how much could a face change in six months? There was a gauntness she didn't remember, a sharpness to his cheekbones that made him look a little cruel. And his mouth was tight, lips pressed together as if he had never smiled in his life. Yet when she thought of Crow-which was really almost never, well maybe once a month-he was always smiling. Happy-go-lucky, blithe as a puppy. "The perfect postmodern boyfriend," one of her friends had called him. A compliment, yet also a dig.

In the end, it was the gap in temperament, not the six-year age difference so much, that had split them up. Or so her current theory held; she had revised their history several times over the past six months. He had been so endearingly boyish. Tess had been in the market for a man. Now here was a man, frowning at her. A man In Big Trouble.

That was his problem.

"There's no sign which newspaper it came from," Tyner said, picking up the card and holding it to the light, trying to read the type on the side that had been glued down. "The back looks like a Midas Muffler ad, and that could be anywhere in the country. Didn't Crow head off to Austin last spring?"

"Uh-huh."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"Do about what?"

"Crow, and this trouble he's in."

"I'm not going to do anything. He's a big boy, too big to be playing cut-and-paste. In fact, I bet his mommy lets him use the real scissors now, instead of the little ones with the rounded-off blades."

Tyner rolled his wheelchair a few feet and grabbed the wastebasket. "So throw it away," he dared her. "Three-pointer."

Tess tucked the photo and envelope into her notebook-sized datebook, the closest thing she had to a constant companion these days. "My Aunt Kitty will want to see his photo, just for old time's sake, take in the spectacle of Crow without his purple dreadlocks. She was his friend, too, you know."

Tyner smiled knowingly. But then Tyner always smiled knowingly at Tess. He was one smug, insufferable prick, and proud of it.

"Sometimes," she said, "I think it's your personality that qualifies you for the Americans with Disabilities Act."

" Everyone qualifies for the Americans with Disabilities Act," he replied. "But a select few of us have to put it on our license plates. I keep trying to decide what little symbol should be riding on your bumper, but I haven't figured it out yet."

Tess left Tyner's office, intending to head straight to the bank, then back to her office, where Esskay waited, probably snoozing through the gray October day. She reminded herself that she was a businesswoman, a grown-up, with checks to write, calls to return, and a dog to walk. She didn't have time for little-boy-rock-star-gonnabes and their games.