Charm City

Chapter 22

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.

"I talked to your neighbor on MacTavish," Tess said. "Bertie Athol."

"Bertie the busybody."

Tess lowered her voice, aware Tara was probably eavesdropping keenly from her post behind the display case, where she and an older saleswoman had fallen conspicuously silent. "Bertie told me she heard the fights, and that she saw an ambulance in the night. She's the only one who really knows, isn't she, even if she doesn't know anything? Bertie, the doctors. And you."

Linda Wynkowski gathered her blond hair in her hands and piled it on top of her head. It did look better up, but what was the point of fiddling with hairstyles and accessories for a dress she would never wear, for a dress that would never go anywhere but her walk-in closet? She was ruined, and $20,000 a month suddenly didn't seem a lot to pay for turning someone into a doll, scared to leave her dollhouse village.

"You know, he always cried." Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if describing her former husband's preference for string beans. "After, I mean. He cried and said he still loved me. When we separated, he was the one who never wanted to make it official, because he loved me so much he didn't want to get a divorce. At least, he loved me until he met her, and then he didn't care about me anymore."

"But you had something on him, something concrete," Tess prompted. "Ambulance bills he didn't pay, or insurance papers detailing exactly what had happened. You kept them, and when he decided he wanted to remarry, you used them to get the support order increased."

"Yes. Yes I did." Linda almost seemed to be in a trance before the mirror, eyes locked on her own reflection.

"May I see them? Could I see what you used to"-she didn't want to use the term blackmail-"to convince Wink?"

"So Bertie knew all along, huh? She tell anybody else?"

"With Wink dead, I don't think anyone will be coming around to ask her."

Linda gathered up the long, shaggy skirt of her ballgown and swept out of Jones amp; Jones in her stocking feet. Tara the salesgirl, wiser than Marianna at Octavia, simply watched her leave, allowing a tiny whistle of a sigh to escape.

"If she doesn't come back in twenty minutes," the older saleswoman said, "we'll wrap up what she left and send it to the apartment, along with a bill for the dress. It won't be the first time."

Tess followed Linda out of the store, assuming she was headed for her apartment, just straight ahead, not even 100 yards away. Instead, she turned right and led Tess to the branch bank in the shopping center.

"I keep all my important papers in a safe deposit box at the bank here in Cross Keys." Linda was strangely manic, as if she had wanted to tell someone this story long ago but had never dared-first because she was scared, then because she was paid. "That's the wonderful thing about Cross Keys, everything is right here. It's so convenient."

Linda pushed through the bank's double set of glass doors. No one raised an eyebrow at her ballgown and stocking feet; the bank employees must know her as well as the salesgirls. Soon, she was unlocking her safe deposit box on the counter just beyond the security gate, Tess at her side.

"You know, for a long time, it didn't even occur to me I had anything to tell," she said, as Tess's hands closed greedily on the photocopies, folded into careful fourths so long ago that the creases had turned gray. "Then, when that stupid story came out, I hated everyone thinking-but $20,000 a month. Well, it makes up for a lot."

Tess skimmed the hospital forms, with their coded comments on the various injuries treated. A broken collarbone. Lacerations. A concussion. A broken nose. Oh, Jesus, this must have been the night the ambulance was called. First-degree burns from hot grease, and the spleen so badly injured the doctors had almost removed it. And yet the hospital didn't even have the decency to grant Linda her own name on the forms. They just listed her as Gerard S. Wynkowski. His property. His chattel. His to do with as he pleased. Gerard S. Wynkowski. Not even a "Mrs." You would think Wink had been the patient.

"I can't believe they kept getting the name wrong, as many times as you went in there."

"Hell, no one can spell Wynkowski. Took me years." Linda looked over Tess's shoulder. "No, no, that's right. Gerard S. Wynkowski. The S is for Stanislaus. He hated it, how the hospital would call him Gerard instead of Wink, and use his middle name. He said that was the worst part of going, hearing them call out his full name in the emergency room."

"Call out his name? Why would they call out his name?"

"When the doctor was ready to see him. Haven't you ever been in an emergency room?"

"But they call out the patient's name-" And finally Tess understood.

"But you said you knew," whined Linda Stolley Wynkowski, pushing Tess against the bank of metal boxes. It was a child's petulant, impetuous shove, the opening salvo in a full-fledged tantrum. But unlike a child's shove, it was really hard: Tess's shoulders smacked the wall with enough force to leave a bruise, and she remembered the frightened salesgirl at Octavia, how Linda had ground her heel into her foot. "You said Bertie told. Bertie told!"

Tess sat in the parking lot of Eddie's on Charles Street, eating her way through a half-pound of Eddie's peanut clusters, her lunch for the day. She had been yearning for chocolate-covered nuts since Tommy had held his picked-over box of candy out to her, and she was a great believer in yielding to temptation. To her way of thinking, the one part of her body that actually knew what it wanted deserved to get it.

After leaving Linda Wynkowski, she had driven straight to the gourmet grocery store, her car homing in on the nearest source of peanut clusters as if it had a microchip designed just for that purpose. Eight ounces gave you about a dozen pieces. Between bites, she took huge draughts from a twenty-ounce Coca-Cola. But all the sweetness she forced down her throat couldn't wash away the sour taste of the story Linda Wynkowski had told when her fury had passed. It had passed pretty quickly, too, for Tess had done the one thing Wink apparently had never dared-slapped Linda square across the face and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her until she calmed down.

The first time, we had been married about six weeks and he went out drinking with his buddies, that greaseball Paul Tucci. And he didn't get home until four A.M., and he didn't call, and I was hysterical, asking where had he been, why hadn't he called. I was scared to go out by myself, and I was scared to be there alone. He just shrugged, you know, the way men do when they're saying you're just some little bug they can't be troubled listening to, so I picked up this ashtray-we smoked then, both of us-and threw it at him. My aim wasn't very good, but it caught part of his cheek and left a good bruise.

Put it to music and it could have been a country song. Substitute Wil E. Coyote and the Road Runner for Wink and Linda, you had a Warner Brothers cartoon. Rig up a puppet show and it was Punch 'n' Judy time.

Wink just wouldn't hit back. I don't know why. Maybe because I was a woman, maybe because he couldn't ever forget what had happened to that old guy. He wouldn't even run away, just go limp. It made me so mad, the way he wouldn't fight; I'd go wild, I'd hurt him more and more, trying to get some reaction out of him, but I never could. Finally, he said we had to live apart, he thought I might kill him the next time. He paid me support and I really couldn't complain. But then he got rich and he wanted to marry again. So I told him: you give me what I want financially, or I'll tell everybody Wink Wynkowski, Mr. Tough Guy, is a little wimp who let his wife beat up on him. He gave me what I wanted then, and I moved here. Nothing goes wrong here.

How surreal it had been, standing in the alcove of safe deposit boxes with prom queen Linda as she'd told her story. A story, not incidentally, that happened to be the complete opposite of what the Beacon-Light had reported. When did you stop beating your wife, Mr. Wynkowski? Actually, she beat me. Oh sure, Mr. Wynkowski. Even the bit about Linda's agoraphobia had been made up. The only reason she never left Cross Keys was because she was a lazy eccentric without any friends.

As a dead man, Wink couldn't be libeled, not in this state. Yet he hadn't been dead when the story had first run. Maybe the widow Wynkowski had a wrongful death suit on those grounds. Unfortunately, Tess did not work for the widow Wynkowski, she worked for the Beacon-Light, and all her information belonged to them, even information that had nothing to do with how a certain story got into the paper, and everything to do with how screwed up it was once it got there.

Rosita's use of checkbook journalism had been a toss-up, slimy but not illegal. Paying and getting the story ass-backwards-Tess couldn't keep this to herself. Gee, if only Bertie had known the real story, she could have made so much more. Not as much as $20,000 a month, perhaps, but definitely more than fifty bucks. But Bertie, peering through the curtains in the darkness, had seen what she'd expected to see, and Rosita had found what she'd expected to find.

She finished off the dregs of her Coke, then put her car in gear. Despite having consumed almost 100 grams of simple sugars, she felt sluggish and still had a brackish taste at the back of her throat that the Coke couldn't wash away. Strange, she had thought victory was suppose to taste sweet.

Tess found Jack Sterling in the Blight's basement level canteen. The room's vending machines, the only source of sustenance in-house, gave new meaning to the phrase "strictly from hunger." Olive loaf sandwiches, tins of stew, lots of pork rinds, rock-hard Gummi Bears. And according to the lights on the soda machine, the only drink selections were practically fluorescent-orange, grape, and diet lime.

Sterling stared longingly at some of the dusty chocolate bars in the candy machine's metal coils, sighed, and resignedly settled on a bag of honey-mustard pretzels. Ever the gentleman, he offered the bag to Tess first, but she shook her head.

"I just had lunch," she said.

"I hope it was something elegant and fattening. A metabolism like yours is a terrible thing to waste."

"Well, it was from Eddie's," she said. "Look, remember when you asked me to talk to Wynkowski's wife?"

"Of course I do, Tess. I told you how much I appreciated that, what a relief it was to know she didn't think we were culpable. Perhaps I didn't stress my gratitude enough-"

"No, no, I'm not digging for a compliment. It's just-well, I didn't stop there. Some things she said made me curious, and I decided to look at Wink's divorce papers. And I noticed something odd in the file, so I went to talk to the first Mrs. Wynkowski." She decided to skip over the detail about Rosita's personnel file ending up on her windshield. That would only confuse things. "The next thing I knew, I was canvassing MacTavish Avenue in Violetville, trying to figure out who could have told Rosita about the domestic abuse, because it sure wasn't the first Mrs. Wynkowski."

Sterling tried to keep his voice even and calm, but Tess could tell he was annoyed. "I arranged for you to be able to come and go as you pleased so you could look into your uncle's beating, not so you could meddle in a story that the Beacon-Light is still pursuing. What in hell were you thinking? You could have compromised our coverage, or worse yet, inadvertently let it slip that the first story was published by accident."

Tess folded her arms across her chest, chastened and defensive. So much for the pat on the head she thought was her due. "Rosita had some problems in San Antonio. Someone down there suggested if I followed in her footsteps, I would find the same pattern here. I did, and I did. Wink never hit his wife, Jack, she hit him. Rosita paid someone for her information, and she didn't begin to try to check it out. I mean, she got a no comment, but she even twisted that to make it sound as if Linda Wynkowski was scared to confirm the story-"

Sterling held up a hand. "Slow down, Tess. Take a deep breath, start over, and tell me everything in straight chronological order, okay?"

And so Tess did-almost. She still held back the detail about the envelope she'd found on her car. Perhaps because it seemed a little sleazy, as if she'd been manipulated by an unknown source whose agenda was still unclear.

"I know I wasn't asked to do any of this," she finished. "But sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me. You were the one who asked me what I thought about that story, on a gut level, and I really didn't have an answer at the time. Now I think it was the combination of solid reporting and sordid gossip that made it seem slightly off. Rosita's work undermined Feeney's at every turn."

"Feeney is a friend of yours, isn't he, Tess?"

Uh-oh. "Baltimore is a small town of 650,000 people. Everyone knows everyone here."

"Do you know him the same way you knew Jonathan Ross?"

"No!" Shit, she was blushing. "I mean, we're friends. We have a drink from time to time, that's all."

"Don't you think it was an ethical breach for you to take this job, given your relationship with him?"

"Well, yes." Something in Sterling's gentle manner tempted her to tell the truth-it would feel so good to get some of those lies off her ledger. Besides, she no longer felt a need to protect Feeney, not after his behavior yesterday. Still, if she veered from the official version, things would get tricky.

"I was told he had an ironclad alibi for the night, so it wasn't an issue."

"You were told. Nice little wiggle phrase, there."

"What does it matter now?" she said, feeling a little desperate under Sterling's questions. She suddenly realized what a good reporter he must have been in his day. "Doesn't what I've learned today make it pretty obvious Rosita slipped the story into the paper? She's ruthless as hell."

Sterling stood up, crumpled his pretzel bag in his hand, and flicked it at the trash can for a clean two-pointer. "Your information doesn't suggest or confirm anything about the original incident. But I want you to come with me now and talk to Lionel about it."

"Why?"

"Because I think Rosita Ruiz's days at the Beacon-Light are coming to an end."