Charm City

Chapter 17

You couldn't call Tommy tough, but he had a stubborn streak, and that could be almost as good under the right circumstances. For most of the morning, he sat sullenly and silently in Kitty's kitchen. Tess sensed his dignity had been offended by her ploy, which had been predicated on Tommy not being a serious physical threat. To make him feel better, she tied him to his chair with a pair of Kitty's silk scarves, although she doubted he would try to run and knew she could catch him if he did. His zippered ankle boots would slow him down on the cobblestones of Fells Point.

"Would you like something to eat?" Crow, although fortified on doughnuts, had prepared a large breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, hopeful the smell of food would entice Tommy into talking. But food had never interested Tommy. He ate only enough to balance his beer intake.

"No, thank you, I'm maintaining just fine," he said, giving Tess a wounded look. Laurence Olivier couldn't have delivered the line with more gravitas.

"A coma's a serious thing," Crow told Tommy, pushing the plate of eggs a little closer.

"Uh-huh. Serious as a heart attack," said an unmoved Tommy.

"And what if Spike never comes to?" Crow asked. "These guys may not go away. They may hurt Tess, or her parents. They seem to be pretty dangerous guys."

"The dredges of society," Tommy agreed.

Tess leaned over and whispered in Crow's ear, "This is hopeless. We're going to have to pull out our big gun."

Crow left the room and Kitty returned in his place, red curls bouncing, bright red high heels dancing across the wooden floors. Just looking at her, Tommy flushed a shade even darker than her shoes. He had never actually spoken with Kitty-he had always been too tongue-tied to dare. But Tess knew he had noticed her. All men did.

"Good morning, Tommy," Kitty said, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be tied to a chair in her kitchen. "I hear you've been doing a great job running The Point in Spike's absence."

Tommy nodded curtly. Even with his pillow hair and baggy baby blue sweats, he had an odd dignity.

"He'll be so proud of you when he hears." Kitty leaned over Tommy, her mouth deliriously close to his ear, her long skirt brushing against his ankles like a friendly cat. "I really do think he'll wake up, that he'll be with us again. People do come out of comas, you know, sometimes with remarkably few ill effects. There's still so much we don't know about the brain."

"I have read that myself," Tommy said, his thoughtful tone suggesting he gleaned his medical news from the New England Journal of Medicine, instead of the Weekly World News.

"What worries me is how Spike is going to feel if he finds out you refused to tell Tess what she needs to know," Kitty said. "I'm sure you think you're protecting him by not sharing his secrets with Tess, but I can't imagine Spike wanted Tess endangered."

Tommy looked confused and troubled. Suddenly, this conversation was headed somewhere he didn't want it to go.

"But she kidnapped me!" he protested. "She used brute force!"

"Only because you wouldn't talk to her when she visited you at The Point that last time. And now these guys are following her, because they think she has whatever it is they want. Maybe because you told them that." Kitty was at eye level with him now, her mouth so close to his it must have hurt a little. "What if they hurt her as badly as they hurt Spike? Do you want to be the one to explain that to him? Do you want to be the one to tell me something has happened to my niece?"

Tommy looked at Kitty and licked his lips, helplessly enthralled. "Okay," he said at last. "But I'm gonna tell Spike how Tess tricked me. He wouldn'ta liked the way she squashed me like a bug. I almost smothercated."

Kitty kissed him on his sweaty forehead, then went back to the store, as Tess untied the scarves at his wrists and ankles. Tommy made a big show of rubbing his wrists and forearms, as if his bonds had been tight ropes instead of loose, silken scarves.

"So where did Esskay come from?" Tess asked.

"I swear on my mother, I don't know the answer to that. Two weeks back, Spike showed up with this dog, looking like Monday's meatloaf on Friday."

"Come again?"

"You know. He was all gray and lumpy looking. Said he had met with this guy he knows, and the guy wanted him to have the dog?"

"What guy?"

"Jimmy Parlez. It's a French name? As in parlez the English, you know?"

"Why did Monsieur Parlez give him a greyhound?"

Tommy shook his head. "Spike wouldn't tell me nothin'. He said ignorance was piss."

"Bliss. Ignorance is bliss."

"You sure?" Tommy wrinkled his forehead as he thought about this. "Anyways, the only thing he did tell me 'bout was the numbers."

"Numbers? I knew this had to do with book-making."

Tommy shook his head. "Uh-uh. Spike don't run no street numbers no more. Can't compete, what with the state doing Pick 3, Pick 4, and all those gimmicky instant win games. He's down to a sports book now, a little action on Pimlico."

"And on dog races?"

"Tess, there are guys who come into The Point and put money down on how much a bushel of crabs is gonna cost on July fourth, but nobody around here is gonna bet some greyhound race in Florida or New Hampshire when ya got stakes races right down the road. Now, tell that dog to come to me."

He waggled his fingers, but Esskay ignored him until Tess placed a piece of the dog's namesake bacon in Tommy's hand. Gingerly, he held the crunchy bite out to the dog, who snatched it with such alacrity Tommy almost lost part of a finger. He clambered on top of the chair, but Esskay only became more agitated, leaping around him wildly until Tess gave her another piece of bacon.

"I'm a little scared of dogs?" Tommy confessed unnecessarily.

"Don't worry, she's harmless unless she thinks you're a piece of food," Tess assured him.

He climbed down from his chair and tentatively began scratching behind Esskay's ears. As the dog relaxed under his touch, he pulled the left ear back and turned it inside out, exposing the ghostly pale interior, the way one might turn a little leather glove.

"All racing dogs have tattoos here, like ID numbers. That way, the tracks can keep track of 'em. But the numbers also mean you can trace 'em back to their trainers."

"Why would you want to do that?" Tess asked.

"'Cuz a few bad trainers can't be bothered to do the right thing when the dogs can't race no more. They'd just as soon kill 'em and dump 'em. The ear tattoos make that hard to do."

"So who was Esskay's trainer? How do we track her number?"

"You can't. That's what I'm tellin' ya." Tommy ran his finger over the smooth skin inside the dog's left ear. "Someone put a new tattoo on this dog, a home-made job like you see in prison. See? Where this dog once had numbers, all she has now is these red Xs. It's like filing down the serial number on a car or a TV set. Untraceable."

Tess looked at the crude markings inside both ears. Although a vivid red, they would be easy to miss unless you knew to look for them, or spent a lot of time playing with a dog's ears, something Tess was not inclined to do. Esskay's breath had kept even Crow from going nose to nose with the dog. The marks still looked a little raw, and there were tiny scabs. It must have been painful, being on the receiving end of a tattoo gouged with penknife and filled in with ballpoint. No wonder Esskay had been so fearful at first.

"Okay, so you cover up the dog's tattoo and no one knows who it belongs to. Seems like a lot of work to dump some racing dog. And this dog is still alive. So what does it all mean?"

"That," Tommy sighed, "is what Spike and only Spike knows. Look where it got him. You know what? He did say ignorance is piss. Ignorance is piss, and knowledge ain't shit, that's exactly what he said the last time I talked to him."

Armed with Tommy's tissue-thin leads, Tess headed to the Beacon-Light, figuring its computer databases could help narrow her search. But Tommy's scraps led nowhere fast. In the Beacon-Light's Nexis account, Tess searched for "greyhound" and "ears" in various combinations, but found only a few stories from the country's major newspapers, most of which recounted successful rescue efforts. There was no Jim Parlez at all in the court files, no matter how she spelled it, and no possible explanation for why someone would go to so much trouble to change a greyhound's tattoo.

As for the MVA, its records claimed there were no salmon Buicks in all of Maryland, and there were too many brown ones to count. That didn't surprise her: the car had probably been stolen, then hastily painted so it was as untraceable as the greyhound its occupants sought. The only thing left to do was to go to the courthouse and feed Parlez's name through the computers there, just in case he had a record that predated the Blight's system, which only went back to the late '80s. Spike's associates usually had had at least one brush with the city's criminal system, although Spike himself had never been caught doing anything illegal.

Baltimore 's Clarence Mitchell courthouse is an unspeakably sad place, a limestone-and-marble reminder of how innocent the city had once been. Imagine the folly of a public building with entrances on four sides, as if people could be trusted to come and go at will, without passing through metal detectors and opening purses and briefcases in front of armed guards.

Tess surrendered her Swiss Army knife to the security guard. Now her only problem was to figure out where to go. Normally, she would have relied on Feeney to walk her through the circuit court computer files. But some newbie she didn't know was filling in for Feeney while he continued to chase basketballs and millionaires. Tess was on her own.

She fed Parlez into the criminal system. No dice. She then tried the civil system, but still came up snake eyes. Tommy had probably mangled the name beyond recognition. For all she knew, she was really looking for Hervé, St. Tropez, or Parsley.

"Ma'am? Ma'am?"

Unaccustomed to being ma'amed, Tess didn't respond to the earnest young voice until she felt a tentative tap on her shoulder. She turned to face a nervous young man with an amazing mane of bushy brown hair falling to his waist. Despite temperatures in the forties, he wore only a denim jacket over a faded black T-shirt.

"I don't work here," Tess snapped. Why did people always assume a woman was a clerk, ready to serve?

"Oh." He looked forlornly at the computer next to her. "I just thought you might be able to tell me if you can find divorces here. I'm looking up my wife."

"Shouldn't you know if your wife has gotten a divorce?"

"Yeah, sure-if it was from me. I need to find out if she ever got one from her first husband. I'm her second husband. She's Mrs. Roger Hehnke now." He thumped his chest with his index finger. "I'm Mr. Roger Hehnke."

Disarmed by his pride in acquiring a wife, Tess showed Mr. Roger Hehnke how to look for the file. She was glad she did. It was gratifying to hear his relieved giggle when he found his wife had remembered to end the first union before starting a second-at least, in the legal sense.

"See, her first marriage ended on April second last year, and we got married on April fifth. Our baby wasn't born until May, so we're totally cool."

"Congratulations." Mr. Roger Hehnke didn't look old enough to drive, but you didn't need a driver's license or a high school diploma to be a father in Maryland. Unless you planned to marry, which required one be at least eighteen or sixteen with parental consent. By local standards, Mr. Roger Hehnke was quaintly old-fashioned.

"Thanks. Hey, you know how the first anniversary is paper? Would tickets count? I thought if Hammerjacks had a band that night, we could go there."

"That's good, but I think you should take her to dinner, too."

"Oh, of course. We're going to Chi-Chi's. And we're gonna have the gold margaritas, the ones they make with the good tequila. They cost five dollars!" Mr. Roger Hehnke held up his palm and Tess high-fived him, thinking: I hope it lasts forever. But I give you three years at the outside.

Who would she have married at age eighteen? Joel. Joel Goodwin. A neighborhood boy she had chosen precisely because he seemed so safe and pliable, someone with whom to practice sex and love before she left for college. Today, she probably wouldn't recognize him if he passed her on the street.

How long had Wink and his first wife lasted? It was of no concern to her; she had kept her bargain with Sterling and didn't have to worry about Wink any more. Still, Tess found herself tapping out Wynkowski's full name, if only because she longed to have something to show for her field trip to the courthouse. At least she knew Wink's name wouldn't disappoint.

Sure enough, dozens of files came up, most of them the civil suits Feeney had documented. Wink had sued and been sued, in that never-ending shell game some sleazy businessmen played. Tess had to go back almost fifteen years to find the case she wanted, Wynkowski v. Wynkowski. She wrote down the number, then asked the clerk for the complete file.

The file was thick with papers, but in the end it shed little light on the marriage or its dissolution. Linda had petitioned for the divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences and mental cruelty, but made no mention of Wink's physical cruelty. Well, alimony was more common at the time; maybe Linda didn't need to drag Wink through the dirt to get the financial settlement she wanted. Although the two had no children, she was to receive $500 a month, as long as she lived. That wasn't so much. What had Lea been complaining about?

Tess paged through the file. There was a revised order from five years ago, upping the alimony order to $20,000 a month. And the revised order included a rider that stipulated that in the event of Wink's death, his estate would continue to support Linda through an irrevocable trust, an annuity independent of any life insurance policy. So the first Mrs. Wink was better off than the second, since Wink had killed himself.

She looked at the date again. Right around the time Wink had remarried. Was Wink afraid his first wife would scuttle his marriage to Lea if he didn't give her what she wanted? Had the first Mrs. Wink used his abuse to blackmail him into higher payments? And once the abuse became public knowledge, did Wink no longer have a reason to honor this commitment?

Tess checked Wink's name in the criminal system. He had no record for assault, but that wasn't a surprise. Prosecutors had only recently started pursuing cases where wives wouldn't testify against abusive husbands. The city police department hadn't even kept separate statistics on domestic violence until 1994. During Wink's first marriage, it was likely that the cops who'd answered calls to the house hadn't considered domestic violence a crime. They had probably taken Mrs. Wink's statement, then taken a beer from Wink, laughing with him. Dames, Broads. Bet she was on her period.

What had really happened between Wink and his first wife? Kitty, who had been married for exactly six weeks in her twenties and seldom spoke of it unless she had too much to drink, liked to say there were only two people who knew the truth about any marriage.

In Wink's case, there was now only one.