Laura Lippman: Charm City

No, it was more likely that Feeney was writing about the main event, about Wink and this basketball deal. But what did any of this have to do with the courthouse? And why assign a feature writer to help?

"Let's have a drink, soon," Tess said, lowering her voice so Rosita wouldn't think the invitation was being extended to her as well. "It's been too long."

He laughed. "You just want to pump me for details."

"Fair enough. But what's it to you if I interrogate you over a round of drinks at the Brass Elephant? You'll get a free drink out of it, and probably won't answer my questions anyway. Tomorrow night? Seven-thirty?"

"Make it eight. Who knows-it may be time to celebrate by then."

"Okay. 'Til then." She squeezed his hand, then lied to Rosita. "Nice meeting you."

The young woman smiled, a tight-lipped little V that dropped the temperature ten degrees. Okay, I wasn't exactly warm, either . But Tess figured she had only been responding to the little reporter's bitchiness, smashing it back the way one returned a tough first serve in tennis. Rosita wore her ambition the way oldtime reporters wore trench coats. On her young frame, it wasn't particularly becoming.

Tess grabbed another free hot dog and tried to make it last for the rest of the walk home. Out of eighteen blocks, she ended up only sixteen short. Still, she was happy and full when she arrived at her apartment. She decided to stop in her aunt's bookstore on the ground level and rehash the rally for her. Kitty had a fine appreciation of the absurd, as evidenced by her store's name, Women and Children First.

"Oh, Tesser, where have you been?" Kitty cried out, before she could even begin to act out the governor's spastic dribbling, the mayor's pseudo-cool manuvers, Tucci's gimpy plays. "Tommy's been calling and calling. He just missed you at your office, and he's been phoning here every five minutes since then-"

"Tommy, Spike's hysterical busboy? What, did someone steal the lifts from his shoes? Take an extra handful of pretzels, or walk a seven-dollar check? Trust me, Kitty, Tommy's calls are never the emergencies he thinks they are."

Kitty's blue eyes were bright with tears. "It's your Uncle Spike, Tess. He's at St. Agnes Hospital. Someone tried to rob The Point and the crazy old goat tried to stop them-and he almost did."

"Only almost?"

"Only almost."

"The years, I saw the years," Spike muttered, his brown eyes glazed and unfocused, incapable of seeing anything. "Years."

"I know, Uncle Spike, I know," Tess said, patting his hand. But she didn't know. The years must be his life, fifty-some years in all, passing before his eyes. The cliché was a good sign, she decided. Surely, if death were near, one could be allowed a little originality.

"The years."

Spike's face was mottled and crisscrossed with tiny cuts, the liver spots that gave him a slight resemblance to a springer spaniel overwhelmed by vivid purple-red bruises. Only his pointy bald head, rising above the fringe of brown hair, was still white and unblemished.

"Years," he muttered.

"I found him?" said Tommy, the dishwasher from Spike's bar, who framed almost every thought as if it were a question. This wishy-washy tendency, combined with his thick Baltimore accent and talent for malaprops, made him virtually incomprehensible to anyone but Spike. "About two hours ago? I came by to get ready for the Monday night crowd? I was going to peel some hard-berled eggs because the new cook didn't show up, being so lacks-a-daisy as he is?"

"A robbery?" Tess had not meant this as a question, but Tommy's inflections were contagious.

"Yeah, a robbery, but we don't have much money on Mondays, not once pro football is over? That's why they got their dandruff up? They beat him to a pulp?"

Tommy was right: Uncle Spike looked like a plum gone bad, or a skinned, mashed tomato. Who did this to an old man? But Tess knew. Amateurs. Kids. Idiots, the kind of crooks who were giving crime a bad name. They didn't know from hold-up etiquette, which said you didn't kill a guy in a tavern robbery, and you certainly didn't try to beat him to death. You didn't rob taverns at all, in fact, for the owner usually had a sawed-off shotgun under the bar, especially if he had a flourishing side business as a bookie. Spike had the side business, Spike had the shotgun. Why hadn't he been able to get to it in time?

"Numbers," he cried weakly, as if he, too, were thinking of his bets, which produced far more income than the bar. And then he said nothing, eyes fluttering closed.

They remained frozen in this tableau-Tess holding Spike's hand, Tommy on the other side of the bed, rocking nervously, arms wrapped around his body-until a young doctor came in and asked them to leave.

Tommy, all ninety-five pounds of him, insisted on walking Tess to her car for her protection. There were frozen puddles in the lot and the promise Tess had sensed earlier in the evening was gone. March, with its morning rains and wintry nights, suddenly seemed as bitter as baking chocolate.

"He has something for you?" Tommy began, tentative even by his standards. "Back at the bar? Before the paramedics took him, he said to make sure to get it to you?"

"He doesn't expect me to run the bar, does he?"

Tommy cackled and cackled, bent over double at the thought of Tess running The Point, Spike's bar. Between sputtering laughs, he even managed a whole string of declarative sentences.

"No, not the bar. But it's at the bar. C'mon now, and I'll give it to you. But follow me, okay? I got a special shortcut?"

They left St. Agnes Hospital and drove through Southwest Baltimore to her uncle's place, using back streets. Highways were seldom the fastest way to get anywhere in Baltimore, at least not east to west, but Tommy's shortcut seemed to be an unusually circuitous route, approaching The Point through the winding roads of Leakin Park.

The Point was dark, shuttered for the night, shuttered forever, perhaps. Tommy took Tess in the back way, through the kitchen-the kitchen where she had eaten her first french fry, her first onion ring, her first mozzarella stick, even her first stuffed jalapeño. Those had been the base of Spike's food pyramid, and who was Tess to disagree?

Tommy unlocked a storeroom and stood on the threshold, peering into the darkness.

"There," he said finally, pointing to what appeared to be a black bag.

"What?" Tess said. Alarmingly, the bag began to move, rising on four sticks and walking toward her, into the light. "What the hell is it?"

It was a dog, a bony, ugly dog with dull black fur and raw patches on its hindquarters. The brown eyes were as vague and glazed as Spike's, the shoulders hunched in an uncanny impersonation of Richard M. Nixon.

"It's a greyhound? Spike just got it this weekend?"

"But it's black ."

"Most greyhounds ain't gray, and you call 'em blue when they are." Tommy spoke confidently, sure of himself on this particular subject. "Some are kinda beige, and some are spotted, and some are black. They say gray ones don't run so good, but that's just a super-supposition."

"Was Spike going to race this dog?"

"No, this dog is retired . And she wasn't ever much good? Spike got her from some guy?"

"What guy?"

"The guy he knows from the place he goes sometimes?"

The dog looked up at Tess and her droopy tail moved ever so slightly, as if she had some vague memory of wagging it a long time ago. Tess looked back. She was not a dog person. She was not a cat person, fish person, or horse person. On bad days, she was barely a people person. She ate meat, wore leather, and secretly coveted her mother's old mink. Fur was warm and Baltimore 's winters seemed to be getting worse, global warming be damned.