Laura Lippman - Charm City

"I'm Emma Barry," the woman said politely. Tess offered her hand, but Emma ignored it. "We're shutting you down."

"We?"

"The union. The Newspaper Guild. I'm the shop steward for Metro." She folded her arms across her chest, as if delivering a rehearsed speech. "According to long established legal precedents, any procedure that may result in disciplinary action entitles guild members to representation. Since your findings may be used by management in dismissal actions, reprimands, or suspensions, we've notified management of our objections and instructed our members not to meet with you without a union rep. Until management agrees to this, no one under our jurisdiction is available to you."

"As someone who used to belong to the Newspaper Guild, I think you're overreacting. I'll probably do more to clear people than I will to implicate anyone. What's the harm in that?"

"Where do I start? For all we know, the bosses are using the Wynkowski story as an excuse to pry all sorts of personal things out of employees. You asked Brainerd if he went to a bar Tuesday night-are you suggesting he's an alcoholic? If he had said yes, would that information have gone into his personnel file? And you asked Nieman if he would take a buyout, which is something that can be negotiated only by his union."

"It wasn't exactly like that-"

"No more interviews with our members without union representation, and I believe everyone you need to interview is a guild member. See you Monday."

"See you Monday?" Tess muttered to herself, after Emma had gone. "Who said I was taking the weekend off?"

Tess began Saturday by visiting Spike at St. Agnes. Unfortunately, her parents had the same idea. Not that she had anything against her parents, but a little bit went a long way, and she had been over for dinner just three weeks ago. Now here they were, chairs drawn up to the foot of Spike's hospital bed as if it were a television set and he was the host on the old Dialing for Dollars show. The amount is $35 and the count is 4 from the top . They stared at him intently, not speaking. A stranger might have concluded that Patrick and Judith Monaghan were the kind of long-married couple comfortable with silence. Their daughter knew they were merely resting between bouts.

"Hi, Mom. Pop."

"The hair," her mother said.

"It's nice hair," her father said.

"I didn't say it wasn't nice. But she's too old to wear it hanging like that, in a tail."

"It's very neat."

"It's blah. And those pants. Tess, if one's pants have belt loops, one should wear a belt."

"These are blue jeans, Mom, and belts are for people who don't have hips to keep their pants up. Never been one of my problems. Besides, I dress differently when I'm working. Honest."

"How would I know? It's been months since we've seen you." Judith was turned out with her usual monochromatic perfection, in a dark mustard sweater with matching tweed skirt and suede flats. Tess suspected her mother shopped with paint samples from the hardware store, so flawlessly did she match everything. Patrick wore his winter uniform: Sansabelt pants, long-sleeved white shirt, and a plain red tie. Come Memorial Day, he would vary the look by switching to a short-sleeved white shirt and pale blue tie.

"What does the doctor say about Spike?" Tess asked, hoping to divert her mother from such loaded topics as grooming, wardrobe, and lack of attentiveness.

Judith shrugged. "A lot, but all it means is they don't know why he's not doing better. Maybe he'll wake up, maybe he won't. Maybe there'll be permanent damage, maybe there won't."

"Weinsteins are slow to heal," her father observed slyly.

Although everyone agreed Spike was a relative, neither side would claim him. Legend had it that he'd appeared shortly after Tess's birth, working his way through a sesame seed bagel with lox at one of Momma Weinstein's Sunday brunches. But he seemed equally at home at the Monaghans' gatherings, eating Easter ham and neatly side-stepping any question attempting to pinpoint his origins.

Today, however, Tess's mother chose to ignore her husband's invitation to this familiar favorite argument. "You know, we saw him just two days before this happened. It always feels strange, when someone you don't see very often pops up, then the next thing you know, they're… different."

Different. Her mother was given to such euphemisms. Well, a coma sure was different, even for Spike.

"Did he say anything to either of you about a greyhound?"

"Greyhound? No, he brought us two cases of Old Milwaukee-he gets it for your father at cost. And he brought me ten bags of mulch, which I asked him for last fall. Ten bags! Two would have been plenty, I wanted them for the flower beds along the front. But he was being thoughtful, in his own way. I'll be able to use most of it when I put my vegetable garden in this spring." She smiled triumphantly at Patrick. "So maybe he is a Weinstein. The Monaghans are not given to thoughtfulness. I remember when your mother-"

Spike seemed to stir slightly, and everyone turned back to him expectantly. But it was nothing.

"I guess it doesn't do much good for us to sit here and stare at him," Tess said. "I think I'll go downtown and take advantage of the Beacon-Light's database, see if there's been a string of tavern robberies, or anything about greyhounds in the news recently. It's a long shot, but it's all I've got."

"You're going into work dressed like that?" her mother murmured, as Tess bent down to kiss her cheek.

"I like the way she looks," her father insisted. And they started again, like some museum exhibit with a tape-recorded loop.

It was almost 4 before Tess stopped to meet Tyner for a late lunch at Roy Rogers, one of their shared guilty pleasures along with gangster films and fried green pepper rings dipped in powdered sugar. Tyner ordered what he insisted on calling the Trigger special, the quarter-pound cheese-burger with a side of macaroni salad, while Tess settled for the "holster" of french fries. That was their term, not hers.

"Happy trails," Tyner said, as he always did, lifting his twenty-ounce Coca-Cola, another shared vice.

"Same back at you. I'm surprised some do-gooder group hasn't targeted the fries packaging for extinction. Baltimore has always been good at symbols, even if it sucks at doing anything about real problems."

"You're so crabby you remind me of me. You know what you need?"

Tess gave him a dark look. "That is not an issue in my life right now, thank you very much."

"I'm talking about rowing. You need to get back on the water, the sooner the better. You know, you can go out this early if you dress properly. Rock told me-"

"Rock? I heard the Natural Resources police pulled him off the water in February and threatened him with charges if he didn't wait until it was safe." Tess dredged a fry through her own mixture of barbecue sauce, ketchup, and horseradish, another reason she loved Roy 's. "But you're right, I am in a mildly rotten mood. I spent most of the afternoon with the Blight's computer system, to no avail. It's a bitch to learn, and once I finally got it up and running, it wasn't much use."

"Did you find out anything you can link to Spike's beating?"

"I found out there have been several tavern robberies this winter, but no one was beaten in any of those. And the only mention of greyhounds was a two-year-old story on this annual picnic held by local people who had adopted the dogs. Totally goofy. They hold contests for the dog with the longest tail and best costume. Too bad there wasn't a halitosis prize, Esskay could win that in a walk."

Tyner rolled over to the "Fixin's bar" for a plate of free pickles and onions, which he sprinkled with pepper and ate raw. The girl behind the counter gave him a dark look-once one's sandwich was gone, these extras were presumably off-limits-but Tyner was a regular and the staff had learned long ago it was easier to let him do what he wanted. Tess knew she should learn the same lesson, but she couldn't help trying to match him for sheer orneriness.