Charm City

Chapter 21

Had violet ever bloomed in Violetville? It was hard to imagine now. The neighborhood was in the city's industrial southwest corner, barely within the city limits, an important distinction, for Baltimore is the rare municipality that lies within no county. It stood alone when it was rich, and now it stood alone in its poverty, a civic pariah. Violetville was one of those strange islands one found along the edges.

Still, it was holding on to middle-class status by the skin of its teeth. Streets with names like MacTavish, Sharon-Leigh, Benson, Clarenell, Haverhill-names with no connection Tess could discern-looked like John Waters, circa Pink Flamingos. Modest houses, green corrugated awnings, metal porch chairs, kitschy yard art that didn't know it was kitschy. Even the lighting was the same as Waters' early work-washed out, harsh, wintry. The old Wynkowski house-the "honeymooners' cottage"-was the seediest on MacTavish, as if Wink and Linda had left all their bad karma behind when they'd moved on.

Tess canvassed the block, working a loop that took her north, then across the street and south along the brick rowhouses, then north again, until she had arrived at the Wynkowskis' neighbor. Along her circular path, a few residents had remembered the telltale signs of a tempestuous marriage: bursts of noise, especially in the summer, when windows were open and voices carried. But nothing more. Everyone was happy to talk to her-Tess had the sense she was the most exciting thing to happen on MacTavish in quite some time-but their memories were blurred, or vague, and they had nothing but praise for Rosita. "Such a polite young woman." By the time Tess reached the last house, she was bored and anxious to move on. She almost hoped no one would answer.

A wizened figure in a faded blue bathrobe answered the door while her knock still echoed. Tess stared down at a pink scalp and wispy white hair, which contrasted nicely with the baby blue robe and matching slippers. From this perspective, it was impossible to tell if the person staring at her sternum was male or female. The hair, while thin, was longish and untidy. A man overdue for a haircut? Or a woman who no longer took pains with her appearance?

"What can I do you?" Even the voice did not give away the gender. It was a smoker's rasp, neither high nor low.

"I'm a fact-checker at the Beacon-Light." This was one of several stories Tess had told as she had gone door to door, varying it in order to keep herself interested. "It's part of our new ‘Aim for Accuracy Always' program. The Triple A. We want the community to know we're committed to getting things right."

The gnome squinted up at Tess's face. The gender was still a toss-up. The hair had a mannish style about it, but there were a few chin hairs, which seemed more appropriate to an elderly woman with bad eyesight.

"It's a bit backwards, innit, checking the facts after you print' em?"

"Oh, we check beforehand, too. This is the double-check, I guess you could say, in case something erroneous slipped through despite our best efforts. Mi-mi-I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"Athol. Bertie Athol." Great. Even the name was asexual.

Bearded Bertie led Tess into a dark living room, which did not appear to have been dusted since the Iran hostage crisis. A man, Tess thought. Only a man could be such a careless housekeeper.

Or a near-sighted woman, she amended, as Bertie bumped into the water-stained oak table next to his/her chair, a stuffed chair whose faded gold damask bore the faint outline of Bertie's lumpy body, like a watermark.

"So what do you want to ask me about? I tell you, I hate them new stock tables. Print's too small, I can't follow my mutuals. Box scores, too. Everything's too small. You skimpin' on paper down there?"

"Actually, I'm not here to talk about the stocks or the scores, although I will make a note of your concerns. We're interested today in your impression of the stories about Wink Wynkowski."

"The Wynkowski boy? Why, he used to live right next door. Has he been up to something again?"

"Um, he's dead."

"You don't say." Bertie began to laugh, a dry cackle. "I'm just having fun with you. Of course I knowed what happen to Wink. I talked to that little girl when she was here. We spent quite a bit of time together."

"Did she use anything you told her?"

"Why, I'm the source close to the family! You know, where it says-" and Bertie paused, taking the time to gather up the right words from memory. "Where it says, ‘But a source close to the couple said the honeymoon was over from almost the day the two crossed the threshold, as Wynkowski repeatedly battered his new bride.' Very ellygant, the way she put it. I'da never thought to say it so good."

Tess stared at the old man/woman skeptically. "You're the source? Were you really close to Wink and Linda?"

Bertie jerked his/her chin in the direction of the Wynkowski's onetime home. "I don't know how you could be closer. Not even ten feet from my kitchen winder to their bedroom winder. In the summers, when I was warshing the dishes in the zinc, I could hear 'em going at it many a night."

Warshing the dishes in the zinc. Bertie could give lessons on Bawlamerese. Whatever the gender, the speech had all the touchstones. Probably listened to the Erioles, thought a far was something you toasted marshmallows over, and went downy eauchin in August, to a rented condo on the boardwalk.

"Is that what you told Rosita Ruiz?"

"Yeah, the girl from the paper, Rosie. I got her card around here somewhere still." Bertie began patting the bathrobe's pockets, as if the card might materialize, but only a few used tissues turned up.

"Did you know for a fact that there was violence involved, Bertie? A lot of people get loud."

"Yeah, but they don't start throwing furniture at one another. And they don't call amb'lances."

This was new. "An ambulance?"

"Uh-huh. At night. It's easy to see an amb'lance at night. And, of course, Mr. Athol was alive then, and I remember we talked about it, how sad it was for a young couple to be so unhappy all the time."

At least she had solved the mystery of Bertie's gender. "Yes. Yes it is. Can you remember anything else about those fights? When the amb'lance came-" Jesus, Bertie's inflections were catching. "When the ambulance came, did they have to take Mrs. Wynkowski out on a stretcher, or did she walk out on her own? Could you tell how badly she was hurt? Was it the kind of injury that might have happened accidentally?"

Bertie closed her eyes and leaned back as if reliving a particularly vivid dream. It was very dramatic, but not particularly effective.

"I don't recall," she said, after several seconds. "All I remember is the lights. It's not like I stood there all night, peeking through the curtains."

I bet you stayed until the show was over, though. "Thank you, Mrs. Athol. We're glad to know we got your part of the story right. You were very helpful."

"So how much money do I get?"

Tess was confused. "Newspapers don't pay for information, Mrs. Athol. It's unethical."

"The other girl did. You see, at first I just remembered it being the one time the amb'lance came. She asked me if I could be wrong, if maybe it came three times instead of the oncet, or at least twice, if there was a pattern. That was the word she used, pattern. She gave me fifty dollars, and I remembered it was more like three times."

Tess felt a strange flip in her stomach, at once hopeful and unhappy. A.J. Shepard had told her this would be easy, but she couldn't believe Rosita would be this stupid. "Are you sure?"

"Course I'm sure. You think someone hands me fifty dollars, I'm gonna forget? Now, today, today is more of a twenny-dollar interview, doncha think?"

"You want money?"

"Only twenny dollars," Bertie wheedled.

"I'm not authorized to do that."

"How about a discount on my subscription?"

"No, Bertie. Not even the reporters get a discount."

Bertie pushed her lower lip out in a pout, a mannerism that was probably downright adorable as recently as thirty years ago. Now, with jowls hanging loosely and her neck as wrinkled as the corrugated awnings along MacTavish Avenue, she looked more like a bulldog.

"Why do the reporters need a discount? They already know what's in the paper."

An only child, Tess had had relatively little experience with the lurid charms of tattling. Should she tell Sterling what she knew about the pay-off to Bertie Athol? Should she keep going, see if there was more damning information to be uncovered about Rosita's reporting methods? At least the leopard had changed her spots. Now she paid people up front and didn't use their names.

Sterling would want to know, she was sure of it. Checkbook journalism was so low that some of the tabloid television shows had forsaken it. But Tess was uncomfortably aware she longed to speak to Sterling for other, less self-righteous reasons. She wanted his approval, wanted him to smile at her and say, "Great work!" A crush. She was in the throes of a damn schoolgirl crush.

Well, at least Violetville was convenient to St. Agnes. She might as well check in on Spike, give her mind and hormones a chance to cool.

She was glad to see one of Durban's boxers waiting unobtrusively in the hall. At least something was going as planned. When Tess walked in, Tommy was already there, a chair pulled up by Spike's bed. It was true, only family was allowed to see Spike, but the hospital, apparently under the misapprehension that Tommy was Spike's life partner, as opposed to his business partner, had thoughtfully included him in this group. He held the box out chocolates on his lap, a strange get-well gift for a man in a coma. Tommy had probably selected it because he knew he would be free to plunder his own offering. He held the box out grudgingly to Tess, but he had picked out all the nutty ones, so she passed.

"Hi, Uncle Spike." He was so still. What had she expected-someone sleeping like a man in a cartoon, or like one of the Three Stooges, his chest rising and falling with an exaggerated movement, a faint whistling noise escaping around the various tubes. Tess thought she saw his eyelids flicker, his mouth twitch. Wishful thinking.

"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?