Charm City

Chapter 19

A dispirited Tess left the Beacon-Light at 4:30, sick of the media, only to arrive home in time for the tail-end of a press conference at Women and Children First. All four local television stations were crowded into Kitty's bookstore, along with the reporter from the East Baltimore Guide, a neighborhood paper, and someone from the city's alternative weekly. The object of their attention was a quivering Esskay, whom Kitty had brushed to a high shine and beautified by intertwining a green velvet ribbon through her collar. It was a toss-up who was going to lose control of her bladder first-Esskay, or Tess, who couldn't believe Kitty was pulling a stunt like this.

"Yes, this dog was an outstanding racer," Kitty was saying, in response to someone's question. "The top earner at her track in Juarez last year. But her owner decided to let her retire at the top of her game and become the official mascot of Women and Children First. Esskay-that's her nickname, her full name is Sylvia Quérida-will also serve as a model for a children's book I plan to write and illustrate about the greyhound rescue movement."

Illustrate a book? News to Tess. Kitty couldn't draw a stick figure with a ruler.

"How's a high-energy dog like that going to get all the exercise it needs when you don't have a real yard?" asked one reporter, a hard-nosed skeptic by television's standards.

"As some of you know, residents near Patterson Park take their dogs on patrol every night, in an attempt to discourage prostitution and drug-related crimes. We'll walk Esskay as part of the patrol at night. As for her morning walks, some old friends of mine have volunteered to take her out."

Kitty waggled her fingers at two muscular men in Spandex leggings and tight T-shirts. "These police officers plan to jog with Esskay as part of their conditioning program. But if this wintry weather doesn't go away, we'll have to get Esskay a sweater-she doesn't have any body fat to protect her. Then again, neither do the officers."

The reporters laughed as the officers blushed a bright, happy red. Kitty then fished a dog biscuit out of a box propped next to the cash register, climbed to the top of the counter, and held the treat straight out from her shoulder, about eight feet above the floor. In one graceful movement, Esskay leaped up and snatched the bone from Kitty's hand.

"Beautiful visual," Tess muttered to herself. "That's going to be on every channel tonight."

So it was. But the stations cut away from the next shot: Esskay, crouched over her treat, looking up to see four television cameras approaching her. The overwhelmed dog made a strange yodeling noise deep in her throat, lost control just as Tess had thought she might and, profoundly humiliated, bolted from the room at top speed.

"That which you cannot hide, proclaim," Kitty expounded to Tess and Crow that night, after a dinner designed to chase away the winter blues while it packed on pounds: corn chowder with sherry, a chicken-and-rice casserole, Crow's home-made rolls, and gingerbread with a heated caramel sauce and fresh-whipped cream. Stuffed and contented, they sat in Kitty's kitchen, listening to the wind whipping around the building as if looking for someone it had a long-standing grudge against. Kitty and Tess sipped coffee with healthy slugs of Kahlua, while Crow settled for straight-up caffeine. He still had to take Esskay out for her first jaunt with the Patterson Park patrol.

"Okay, so we've proclaimed Esskay," Tess said. "But we've also taken out an advertisement for our friends in the shit-and-salmon car. Hey guys! Come and get her. The dog you're looking for is at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare Street."

"They would have found you eventually, if they haven't already," Kitty said. "Now that Esskay is famous, those men who have been dogging you-if you'll pardon the expression-will have to be much more careful. They won't go after two police officers jogging with a dog. And they're not going to wade into that pack of dogs who roam Patterson Park with their civic-minded owners."

"What about the stuff you made up, like her racing record?" Crow asked. "What if the reporters check?"

"Even if they do think to call a dog track in Juarez, I think there's going to be a slight language problem."

Crow laughed, but Tess sighed. "Still, I wish you hadn't brought the cops into it. Remember, we don't know how Spike came to have this dog, or what he has to do with her altered tattoo. The less the cops know, the better."

"I thought of that, too," Kitty said, her voice a smug purr. "The ‘officers' are actually bartender friends of Steve's. The reporters think they're police officers because I told them they were. Perception is more important than reality."

"My, you're just full of aphorisms tonight. When do we get to hear the one about the penny saved? Or how about the early bird, Aunt Kitty? Will you tell us that one, pretty please?"

Kitty bounced a leftover roll off Tess's head, which Esskay caught neatly on the rebound and devoured. "I was thinking more of gift horses and the bodily cavities you're not supposed to inspect, a train of thought that leads me directly to your uncanny impersonation of another part of the horse's anatomy."

"Ladies, ladies." Crow still didn't know what to make of the way Tess and Kitty bickered with one another, even if it was all in good fun. His parents, onetime Bostonians who had fled the winters and settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, were almost painfully civilized in their affection for one another. Esskay, however, liked the mock yelling and rushed to the fray, eager to see if more food bits might fly.

Crow snapped a leash to the excited dog's collar. "I hate to leave this warm kitchen, but we might as well get this over with, girl. Maybe you'll make friends with the other pooches."

"Don't talk to strangers," Tess advised, half-serious.

"We won't. And we won't take any dog biscuits from strangers, either."

Almost an hour later, Tess was stretching on the bedroom floor when she heard Crow and Esskay clattering up the stairs. Her muscles were tight-she hadn't been cooling down after her workouts and the lapse was catching up to her, a sure sign of age. Only twenty-nine, and yet twenty-nine was old in some ways. By twenty-nine, for example, it was too late to improve one's bone density; all you could do was protect what you had with high calcium food, exercise, and daily doses of Tums. By twenty-nine, baby-oil sunbaths from high school had already damaged your skin irreparably. And by twenty-nine, it was too late to have a baby to reduce one's risk of breast cancer. Tess imagined she could feel the engine of her body slowing down, burning fewer calories every day. Eventually, she would have to work out more or eat less. The first option seemed impossible, the second highly undesirable. She calculated quickly: running one extra mile a day burned an additional 100 calories, which could offset a weight gain of ten pounds over a single year. One mile, not even ten minutes. She could probably squeeze it in.

Esskay, fur cold, nose colder, pounced on Tess, ending her aerobic reverie. Tess wrapped herself into a tight ball and the dog took her braid in her mouth as if it were a toy, shaking it with surprising vigor.

"Boy, she's revved up," Tess said, rescuing her hair as Crow flopped on the bed with a groan. "She must have had a good time."

"Too good a time. I never noticed how aggressive she is with other dogs. She tried to pick a fight with a Rottweiler, for God's sake. He snapped at her and she backed down, but I still had to choke up on her leash."

"Did you see any prostitutes working the park?"

"A few brave ones, but they weren't doing any business. I don't think the Pooch Patrol can claim credit, though. You take anything out of your pants tonight and it's going to snap off."

Crow, who didn't own a real winter coat, had dressed in several ratty layers-a leather jacket and wool muffler over three sweaters and a thermal undershirt. Now, as he stripped down to the undershirt, he reached inside the leather jacket and pulled out a long manila envelope from its breast pocket. "I almost forgot. This was on your car when we got back. I thought it was a ticket at first."

"Probably some new advertising gimmick dreamed up by one of the megabars," Tess said, opening it. Photocopies spilled out, along with two pieces of cream-colored stationery, a stark black name emblazoned across the top.

Rosita Ruiz.

"What is it?" Crow asked.

"Rosita's résumé." Tess was bewildered. "And her cover letter, as well as copies of stories she wrote for the San Antonio newspaper, and her evaluation at the Blight. It's her whole personnel file, a highly confidential thing. Crow, did you see who left this on my car, by any chance?"

He shook his head. "All I saw was the envelope beneath your windshield wiper."

Tess turned the envelope inside out and shuffled all the papers. "No note. Well, it's obviously not Colleen, and Sterling would just hand it to me. It must be one of her underlings, Hailey or Whitman. But what's the point? I don't see any smoking gun here."

"Editors as anonymous sources? This job is getting stranger and stranger, Tess."

Tess, still thinking about those extra calories that her thirties would demand, decided she better go back to two-a-days at the gym until it was warm enough to row. She stopped by Durban's the next morning, resigned to a long session with the weight machines.

Weights require unrushed discipline, perfect form, concentration-not Tess's strengths, especially when she worked on her lower body, whose creaky joints protested that running, cycling, and rowing should be quite enough, thank you. Sweating lightly in the overheated room, she lay on her stomach on the Keiser hamstring machine and jerked her heels toward her butt, feet hooked beneath padded bars. Right side, then left side. Up on a two count, release on a four. What could be more boring? At least mornings were quiet at Durban's, a bored attendant the only other person in the room.

She zipped through a second set, then pumped the button for more resistance. As usual, she felt invincible on the first three reps, increasingly mortal on the next five, painfully decrepit by the last two. Rushing the last rep just a little, she sensed more than saw a movement in the room, some-one lumbering toward her. Before she could push her upper body away from the bench, a man's large bulk flattened her into the vinyl. She wrenched her face to the side, assuming she would see one of the men from the shit-and-salmon car.

"So how's the jewelry business?" asked Paul Tucci.

"A little slow right now." Tess tried to raise her head, but Tucci pressed his palm against her ear, pinning her head until she heard the ocean. He was such a dead weight across her back she couldn't even ease her feet from under the pads without wrenching a knee. Weight-training equipment that doubled as a torture device-now that was cross-training. Where was Durban's attendant?

Tucci didn't move his hand, but he shifted his bulk until he rested more comfortably on Tess's fleshier parts.

"It took me awhile to remember exactly where I had seen you," he said. "Once I did, I knew how to find you. What were you doing, sneaking into see Lea with that stupid bracelet story? And you went to see Linda, too. What lie did you tell her?"

"Someone I know was worried about Lea." A truth, more or less. "A lot of people are worried about her. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be worried about a widow with three kids under the age of five. Linda was an…afterthought. She lost someone, too."

"Look, if you're from one of Wink's creditors, you're gonna have to get in line. And if you work for some shyster lawyer, you can forget about it."

"Lawyer?" she asked, in what she hoped was an innocent voice, but there was something about a palm pressing against one's ear that made every utterance come out whiny and defensive.

"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."