Laura Lippman - Charm City

"What's the doctor say?"

"Nothin' to me," Tommy said sullenly, his bad mood erasing the usual question marks. It would be a while before he forgave Tess their last meeting. Had it really been just yesterday morning?

"My folks been here?"

He snorted, then trilled. " It's not that we don't love him as much as you do, Tommy. It's just that we have jobs ."

Tess laughed. His imitation of Judith was uncanny.

"I miss him," he added in his own voice.

"We all do."

"No, you don't, not the way I do," he said, his voice so fierce and loud that Durban's bodyguard poked his head in to make sure everything was all right.

Tommy dropped the volume, but his body quivered with emotion. "If he died, you'd be sad, but you wouldn't miss him every day, every minute, like I do. You'd miss him when you wanted to stop off at The Point with your friends, giggling at how ugly it is. Or you'd miss him at fambly gatherings. But you wouldn't miss him every day, any more than you miss the City Fair."

"Tommy, there hasn't been a City Fair for years."

"Exactly. And when was the last time you thought about it?" He stood, putting the candy box on his chair, and stalked from the room.

Tess couldn't decide if Tommy was right, or merely annoying. Or annoying because he was right. She walked to the window, with its view of the parking lot and the driveway in front of the emergency room. Her parents had roared up that drive so many times in her youth, Tess bleeding in the backseat from yet another accident. A dropped jar of fireflies, one shard of glass ricocheting up and carving out a sliver of Tess's calf. A broken ankle when she had jumped out of her bedroom window, playing Goldilocks. A long, thin cut, hidden now in the curve of her eyebrow, where a neighbor boy's lacrosse stick had knighted her. And then there was the bloodless night in high school when Ipecac had done its job too well. She had vomited and vomited until she was dangerously dehydrated, her body still intent on emptying itself long after it had purged the sixteen-inch pizza and half-gallon of mint chocolate chip. Her parents, frightened out of their senses, bought the story that she had taken the Ipecac by mistake, thinking it was a cold remedy. Back then, they didn't know she binged, so how could they suspect she purged?

She had never needed an ambulance, though, just a washcloth to press against the mess of the day as her father did his best Mario Andretti down Wilkens Avenue. The ambulances carried people with graver injuries, people who needed oxygen or CPR. Tess had never lost consciousness, not after vomiting all night, not even when she had fallen on a broken bottle in some underbrush and emerged with a most unexpected view of the inside of her knee, straight to the bone, like some illustration in a textbook.

She watched a young man help a woman out of a battered old Dodge. He could have been the same man she had met at the courthouse, the one who was so pathetically proud of his legitimate marriage and his almost legitimate child. This woman held her arm awkwardly in front of her, as if it were an interesting piece of driftwood she had found on the beach. The man-really more of a boy-man-circled her shoulders with his arms as if she were made of porcelain. So why did you break her , Tess wanted to ask, for she had no doubt he was the one who had brought her here in every sense of the word. Of course, she had domestic violence on her mind just now.

Only two people know the truth of a marriage , Kitty's voice chided her again. No one really knew what had happened in Violetville. Wink was dead and Linda wasn't talking. But Bertie had seen the ambulance, even if she had seen it only once. It was wrong of Rosita to pay for that information, and the money had probably encouraged Bertie to exaggerate, but Tess didn't doubt it was basically true. Hit your wife once, you're a wife beater. And almost no man ever hit just once. If he got help, perhaps, saw a therapist-but it was impossible to imagine Wink seeking help to control his violent temper, the same temper that had made him beat the old shopkeeper so badly. Montrose had only taught him how to hide his temper, how to pick better victims. Wink was too busy building an empire-from A to Z, as Feeney had said-to worry about his karma. Rosita might have gotten the facts wrong, but she had nailed down the truth.

No, if Tess was going to retrace Rosita's reporting, she probably should concentrate on the gambling angle. Alas, her best source for that line of inquiry was right here, but he wasn't going to be able to help her anytime soon. If he ever did regain consciousness, she had more pressing questions. Why would someone try to kill you for a greyhound, even one with altered tattoos ? She studied his dear, pointy head, wishing she could climb inside and wander through his memory. As that was impossible, she left.

An ambulance almost wiped her out as she crossed the driveway. That would make an interesting lawsuit. Her own memory came to life, like a pinball machine with all the lights flashing. It wasn't Wink's empire that ran the gamut from A to Z. It was the lawsuits , the bills he never paid, from ambulances to zippers. "Amb'lances," as Bertie would say. Word of the day. Call it whatever you like, but if you called an ambulance and didn't pay for its services, there would be paperwork, which might detail what had happened to whom. And if someone's had that paperwork, they could hold it over someone's head, unsavory proof of what a less-than-nice guy he was. Why hadn't Feeney thought of that? Why hadn't Rosita, flinging fifties along the length of MacTavish Avenue, taken time to track down proof far stronger than some geezerette's faulty memory?

Tess glanced at her watch and tried to remember the shopping itinerary chanted by the doorman at Linda Stolley Wynkowski's apartment building. If memory served, Thursday was Jones amp; Jones day. Or was it Ruth Shaw?

Linda Wynkowski stood in front of a full-length mirror, arrayed in a royal blue dress with an organza skirt, its hem so haphazard and ragged it couldn't cost less than $500. Seen from a distance, through the windows of Jones amp; Jones, she was lovely, the blue dress setting off her white body and blue eyes, while playing down the fact the former was too soft, the latter too hard. Tess would have liked to remain at a distance, but this was not an option.

"You again," Linda sighed.

"I just came from MacTavish Avenue."

"Lovely, isn't it?"

Tess wasn't sure if she meant MacTavish or the dress. "It's not so bad," she said, feeling the answer was appropriate to both.

"No, unless you expected more. Unless you'd been led to expect more. Wink talked so big, I thought we were going to be living in a nice new house out in Owings Mills. You know, like the one he and his second wife have. But that kind of money didn't come in until after we had separated. We fought about money all the time back then. If I spent fifteen dollars on a dress at Hoschild's, he'd go crazy."

"Is that how the arguments began? Over money?"

Linda rose on her tiptoes and did a full turn in her gown, looking at her own reflection. "I told you, Wink and I had an agreement not to talk about our marriage. Whatever happened between us is private."

"Wink dead. Unless you promised to take his secrets to your grave, you don't owe him anything."

"Do you have any earrings to go with this, Tara?" Linda called over her shoulder to the salesgirl, a pretty young coed who had cultivated a chic European look not many Baltimoreans could pull off. Tara rushed forward with crystal balls strung on sterling silver strings of varying lengths, chunky flies caught in a spider's fine web.

"Those aren't right at all," Linda said, throwing them back at the girl. "This dress needs something bigger-you know, more dramatic." Tara scurried away.