Laura Lippman - Charm City

"Every personal injury shark in town has sent someone to Lea's door, although the rest weren't as clever as you. They think there's gotta be some deep pocket to sue. A psychiatrist who didn't realize Wink was suicidal? Wink didn't have a psychiatrist. Malfunctioning garage door opener? It's not like he tried to open it at the last minute and it failed. He didn't want it to open. Booze and drugs? Hey, it says right on the label not to mix them. And not to operate heavy machinery, which takes us back to the car. What are you going to do, sue Ford Motor Company because the '67 Mustang didn't have an automatic shut-off to stop someone intent on killing himself?"

"How do you know he had drugs in his system?" Tess asked. Tucci had loosened his grip slightly, but she could still feel the blood pounding in her ear. "The tox screens aren't back yet and there hasn't been anything in the papers about the cops finding drugs at the scene. All they tested for that night was alcohol."

Tucci grabbed her braid with two hands, pulling her head back the way Esskay had the night before, only not as playfully. "i know Wink. He wouldn't have been able to go through with it unless he was knocked out. He would have lost his nerve, bailed at the last minute. He was kind of a wuss, when you get down to it. The cops told Lea he broke open a new bottle of Jack Daniels that night, had two, three glasses at the most. His blood alcohol wasn't even.10, he was legal to drive. That was in the paper. So I figure he took some over-the-counter shit to speed things up. Makes sense, doesn't it?"

"Sure." She was inclined to agree with anything Tucci said, as long as he had a hold on her. But why was it so important to him that she agree? Why did it sound as if he were rehearsing a story he might want to tell again?

"Good. Now-why-don't- you-tell-me- what-you-were- doing-hanging-around- Lea-and-Linda?"

With each word, he bounced for emphasis. Tess was thankful she had no breakfast to throw up.

"You've really packed on the pounds since your lacrosse days," she said. "How much weight have you gained? Twenty pounds? Thirty? And all in the butt and the gut, from what it feels like."

Tucci stood up, sucking in his belly as he smoothed down his shirt front and confronted his profile in the mirrored wall. "Nothing a few sit-ups wouldn't cure," he said, which gave Tess the opportunity she needed to free her legs, roll over, and take aim. Was it the right knee the doctors had just replaced? It was. Tucci screamed and fell to the floor, writhing in pain.

"You fucking cunt ," he gasped out. "I'm probably going to be back on a cane because of you."

Tess didn't wait to hear the rest of Tucci's self-diagnosis. She ran down the stairs and into the street, where she found Durban's attendant smoking a cigarette. At least he had the decency to look furtive and embarrassed when he saw her.

"He said he just wanted to talk to you, private-like," the attendant said sheepishly, knowing this was no excuse, not at Durban's, where Spike's niece was to be shielded against all male interest. "He gave me twenty bucks to take a long smoke break. I didn't see the harm in it."

"Well, maybe he'll slip you another twenty to call a doctor. He blew out his knee, he's in a lot of pain."

"How'd he do that?"

"Um, I forgot to spot him on the hamstring machine."

"You don't spot on hamstrings," the attendant pointed out.

"Maybe that was the problem."

It took him a second. "Jesus, Tess, what do you think you're doing? Your Uncle Spike hung out with some rough people, but even he had the good sense not to fuck with the Tuccis. Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

"Not really."

Rosita Ruiz.

The name glared at Tess form the top of buff-colored paper-heavy-weight, expensive stuff. It was in 24-point type, maybe 36, as black and intense as Rosita's eyes. Tess stared back, still trying to figure out what her mystery guest wanted her to find in a collection of clips, mostly sports stories, and this skimpy work history. Rosita's professional life to date could be summed up by grade school in Roxbury, college at Boston University (history major, cum laude), one summer internship at a small Massachusetts paper, another internship at the San Antonio Eagle , and one award, a second-place in the Society of South Texas Journalists. How had this slender résumé landed Rosita a job at one of the country's top twenty newspapers? Tess had had five years when the Star had folded, and she hadn't made the first cut at the Blight .

Well, Ruiz , Tess thought ungenerously. And a female covering sports, to boot. A two-fer in the wonderful world of newspaper affirmative action hires. Not that equally unqualified white guys didn't get jobs all the time. For every underqualified minority or woman, there were at least three white men who were equally inept: that was the true legacy of affirmative action, lowering the standards for everyone. Besides, Rosita's academic credentials were impeccable-assuming they were true.

The registrar at Boston University confirmed Rosita's graduation date and major-once Tess claimed to be a Blight employee fact-checking a résumé. Well, she was, wasn't she?

"One small thing," the woman in the registrar's office said. "She actually was magna cum laude. We don't usually see students make that kind of mistake, but possibly ‘magna' was inadvertently dropped from her résumé."

"Possibly," echoed Tess, unconvinced. It didn't seem in character for Rosita to underreport her accomplishments.

She spread the contents of the envelope across her desk, so she could see everything at once. Perhaps the pieces formed a whole. Was there anything of value here, was there a pattern to what she had been given? No, it appeared someone had grabbed whatever was available, shoved it in this envelope, and stuck it under the windshield wiper on her car. It was up to her to figure out where to go from here. Was she being challenged by someone who, like Whitney and Tyner, was trying to push her forward? That would suggest Jack Sterling. Or was the envelope from someone lazy and desperate, who hoped Tess could find something where they could not? Any of the other editors might fit that description.

She read Rosita's clips for the second time. One mystery was solved: here was the breathless hyperbole, the creaky clichés that had invaded Feeney's work once the two were paired. Funny, she had been paired in San Antonio, too, and had included one of those clippings. By Rosita Ruiz and Alann J. Shepard. It was the only Page One clipping in the batch, one of those blow-by-blow Sunday stories that told you more than you ever wanted to know about a recent controversy, but didn't really tell you anything new. A pro baseball player who had gone straight from the San Antonio barrio to the Texas Rangers had propositioned an under-cover policewoman posing as a prostitute on one of his trips home. "How about a little half-and-half?" he had asked her. If only he had stopped there, he could have argued persuasively he really was looking for cream in his coffee. Alas, the police wire tap had preserved his next statement as well. "I'll pay you forty bucks." Not even convenience stores charged that much for half-and-half.

Still, it was a petty offense, the kind of rap a popular athlete or actor routinely survived after the ritual round of media mea culpas. But the officer was white and the baseball player Latino, and that had changed the dynamic. The department had been accused of a racist conspiracy against the ball player, of trying to entrap him specifically in order to tear him down. Yet the baseball player's own mother seemed to believe the cops' version of events. "Men!" she had told the reporters in Spanish. "What do you expect? They can't keep it in their pants. He plays better when he's happy, that's a fact."