Baltimore Blues

Chapter 12

Friday night. The Shabbat candles burned brightly on the mantel, creating a redundant halo effect for the cheap watercolor of Jesus hanging above them. Tess pushed her pot roast around on one of her mother's "meat" plates, hoping to create the illusion of eating. At the end of the table, her father was eating a cold cut sub on a paper plate and drinking a Pabst from the can.

Her mother, a striking woman despite the deep frown lines cut deep along her mouth and forehead, ate daintily from her steaming plate, wiping sweat from her face between bites. She wore a toast-colored dress of polished cotton, flattering to her dark eyes and hair, her tanned face and arms. Although her legs were also deeply tanned, she had sheathed them with panty hose, one shade lighter than her dress. Her suede pumps were also toast colored. Bite, chew, wipe. The weather had turned warm again, but Judith Weinstein Monaghan did not believe in air-conditioning or cold suppers after Labor Day any more than she believed Jesus Christ was the son of God.

"What's the matter?" she asked, not fooled by Tess's childhood habit of pretending to eat. "It's pot roast. You love pot roast."

"Not when it's ninety. I can't believe you cooked on a day like today. Cold cuts for everyone would have been fine."

Her father, whose bright red hair and clear skin made him look fifty instead of sixty, belched.

"Nice," her mother said. Her voice was mean, but the look she gave her husband was sultry. "Very nice."

"A man's home," her father said, belching again, "is his castle."

They all fell to eating and not eating again, and silence filled the room. It had always been a quiet house, a house deprived of the children Patrick Monaghan, the oldest of seven, and Judy Weinstein, the youngest of five, had assumed were their due. Tess, born less than a year after their wedding day, had been an only child. "I wasn't planned," she liked to say, somewhat inaccurately, "but the others were, the ones who were never born."

Her mother had insisted on putting Weinstein on her birth certificate, claiming: "They do it in Mexico."

"Oh, Mother," Tess had said when she was older. "The only thing you know about Mexico is that Uncle Jules got the trots in Cancún from having ice in his gin and tonic."

As a child Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan had called herself Tesser. Her doting aunts and uncles called her that, too. They changed it to Testy when she showed her temper, which, contrary to stereotype, came down from the Weinstein side of the family.

As a teenager Tesser became Tess, who complained endlessly about her name.

"It's a compromise," her mother said.

"A compromise means picking an alternative course, not choosing everything. You and Dad just force your incompatible choices to live side by side, much as you do."

Her parents were united on one subject: the shame of her vocational limbo.

"You found a job yet?" her father asked her now, after coming back from the kitchen with another can of Pabst. Her mother was drinking hot coffee, while Tess had a Coca-Cola in front of her. It had never occurred to her parents to offer her beer, wine, or a good stiff drink.

"Not exactly. I'm doing a little work for a lawyer-"

"As a paralegal?" Her mother's voice was pathetically hopeful. "They make very good money."

"Nothing permanent, nothing like that. A little freelance."

"And how does a little freelance pay these days?" Her mother sawed through her meat, trying for a casual, uninterested tone she had never mastered. Tess could tell she was driving her crazy.

"A little pays a little."

"There's no need to take that tone with me, Theresa Esther." Tess took a bite of her pot roast, hoping the several minutes necessary to chew the meat would give her, and her mother, a chance to cool down.

"Well, why not think about being a paralegal," she wheedled. She had a way of making Tess feel like a ragged cuticle on her perfect hands. "It's a perfectly good job, and it would pay the bills."

"I'm paying my bills."

"With what Kitty and Donald pay you."

"It counts. It's work; they give me money, not Green Stamps."

"Sure, if you don't mind Donald stripping his nest egg bare."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Patrick Monaghan glared at his wife and belched again, perhaps to distract her, or Tess. But Patrick Monaghan had been given to gas all his life, and it had been a long time since a well-timed belch could distract either woman.

"Do you really think Donald has state money to pay an assistant? And if he did, he would be allowed to hire you? Donald pays you out of his own pocket because he feels sorry for you. He even has you fill out those time sheets so it looks legitimate. He never expected it would go on this long. No one did."

Tess replied almost automatically: "Hey, if Uncle Donald wants to give me money, he can just write a check every month. I'm not proud."

Strange, the words were true before she said them, but once out she could hear how false and hollow they were. It was bad enough to be someone who would do anything for money. It was worse to be someone who would do nothing for money. But that was her arrangement with Uncle Donald and, in her heart, she had always suspected it.

"Gotta go," she said, rising, the dutiful daughter, heading toward the kitchen sink with her plate and glass.

"Oh, Tesser," her mother said. "Don't go off in a huff."

"I'm not, I'm not," she assured her. "I just realized I have to be somewhere."

No, it wasn't a huff. More of a funk, as dark as the moonless night.

Her mood did not improve when she finally got to Fells Point, only to find no free parking spaces within eight blocks of Kitty's place. It was almost nine, and Fells Point's nightlife was coming to life. She circled the bookstore several times, then crawled up Broadway, looking for a spot. No luck. She ended up parking in the pay lot at the foot of Bond. She had only recently spent the better part of a day at city hall getting a permit so the two-hour restrictions throughout the neighborhood didn't apply to her. The permit was a hollow badge of honor when there were no places to be had.

On this particular night the crowd at the bookstore ran heavily to embroidered dresses and fiesta skirts. Oh shit, Tess remembered. Frida Kahlo night. Kitty was offering a twenty dollar gift certificate to the couple who most resembled the Mexican artist and her husband, Diego Rivera. The more serious contestants had penciled in heavy mustaches and forced their dates to stuff their shirt fronts, the better to resemble Diego's girth. But the winner had really stacked the deck: She not only had a rotund Diego, but another man dressed as Trotsky, who was believed to be Frida's lover.

"Todos vuelven," Ruben Blades sang seductively from the stereo system. Kitty had translated the song for her once. Everyone returns. But first you had to go somewhere.

The contest over, most of the couples were now drinking sangria and snatching up books. Kitty held court in one of those slit-skirt Mandarin dresses requiring a perfect body. She didn't let the dress down. Officer Friendly was at her side, wearing a poncho and looking vaguely lost without his gun and bicycle but absolutely devoted.

"These theme nights seem to be working out," Kitty said to Tess. "What should I do next? A ‘George' night, with Eliot and Sand? Rita Mae Brown? Or suppressed Catholic girls night, with McCarthy's memoirs? We could put little girl mannequins in the windows, in Catholic girl uniforms and those shiny shoes."

"Do people still read McCarthy?"

"Good point," Kitty turned to her Zapata-ed beau. "Thaddeus, do you know who McCarthy is?"

Officer Friendly looked panicky, and Tess found herself rooting for him. This obviously had not been on the civil service exam.

"Normally I would say the witch hunt guy from the fifties," he said. "But I guess you're talking about some woman writer I never heard of."

Good answer. Thaddeus was a tad brighter than he seemed, smart enough not to bullshit, a rare quality in a man. Kitty almost cooed with pleasure at her protégé.

"There's nothing wrong in saying you don't know something, Tad. We'll read some McCarthy together later tonight."

She gave him a large, wet kiss on his left ear. Tess looked at them and all the happy couples around her-boy-girl, boy-boy, and girl-girl alike-and had an overwhelming need to be alone. No one was stopping her. She went to Kitty's kitchen, hijacked a bottle of Riesling, and climbed the stairs to her apartment.

The piles she had made of Abramowitz's life just two nights earlier still sat on the floor. She had a sudden desire to kick them into the air, or shred them into confetti and toss them from the roof. Instead she sat down and reviewed what she had written so far. Lists and lists of names. Rock's chronology of the night of Abramowitz's murder, side by side with Joey Dumbarton's account, and Mr. Miles's. Something was missing. Someone was missing.

Ava. Rock had never mentioned if Ava was at his apartment when he returned. Where had she been when the police arrived and arrested him? If she had still been sleeping there, they would have taken her in, too, for questioning. But the police didn't find Ava until later, which is why Jonathan had known so little about her when he came by two nights after the murder.

"I guess I do have a job to do," Tess said aloud. Really two jobs-her official chores for Tyner and these unofficial chores she kept assigning herself. If she had not earned Rock's money before, as Tyner had suggested, perhaps she could now.