Charm City

Chapter 25

"Did you really hit him with a dog chain?"

"Don't you believe everything you read in your own paper?"

"The story won't be in ‘my' paper until tomorrow. Remember, we didn't find out about your little adventure last night in time for today's editions. It's a good read, too, but I can't help being nervous, dining with a woman known to lash men with dog chains."

For once, it was Tess who blushed, while Sterling smiled at her discomfort.

They were in the Joy America Cafe, the restaurant on the top floor of the American Visionary Art Museum. The food at the Joy America, as visionary and unusual as the museum's world-class collection of outsider art, was a little determinedly creative for Tess's taste. Citrus and pumpkinseed seared antelope with Virginia ham and butternut squash succotash. Food miscegenation, Whitney called such cuisine. Tess thought of appropriating the line as her own, then worried Sterling would be offended. He could be a little on the earnest side.

"Have you noticed people still call this the new Visionary Museum, although it's been open for almost two years?" she asked instead, falling back on the reliable conversational gambit of mocking her hometown.

"There are people here who still think of the Inner Harbor as new, and it was redeveloped almost two decades ago. I'm resigned to being called the new guy for the rest of my career at the Beacon-Light." Sterling took a tentative sip from the soup before him, a deep terra cotta color with a slash of avocado green through it, like the mark of Zorro. "Chili powder and cilantro in mango soup. Not bad, but I detect some cream in here, despite the waiter's assurances."

Tess tried not to make a face. She was eating field greens dressed in raspberry vinaigrette, a prosaic choice by Joy America standards. The waiter had not approved. That was fine, she had not approved of the waiter. While her brain understood this was one of the city's best restaurants, her palate secretly yearned for less determinedly fashionable places. Antelope was a poor substitute for Hausnner's potato pancakes, or a plate of tortellini from the Brass Elephant. But you couldn't veto your host's choice and Joy America did have a spectacular view of the harbor-the National Aquarium and the Columbus Center, the row houses and churches of Little Italy beyond them. She could even see the Fells Point waterfront, lights blazing on a Saturday night.

"If it were daytime, you might be able to see my terrace," she said, waving her fork toward the windows.

"Sounds quite grand."

"Only if you consider living over a store grand. But it's a nice place and Aunt Kitty gives me a break on the rent."

"Kitty?" Sterling looked up from his soup. "Wasn't she in the photograph, the one that's running with your story?"

"Um, yes." Upstaged by her aunt again, whom the Blight photographer had insisted on getting in the shot.

"Tell me-" Here it came. He was going to ask for Kitty's number, try to find out if she was available. "Aren't you worried those guys are going to come back for you?"

She almost laughed in her relief. "Only one got away. The cops picked up the other three while they were still in the vet's waiting room. The fourth one drove my car to the Maryland House rest stop on I-95, helped himself to another car, then dropped that outside Philadelphia. The cops think he'll be more concerned with staying out of the state, now that he's wanted for felony kidnapping."

"Still, it sounds as if these guys were working for someone else. What's to keep them from sending new recruits to find whatever it is they want?"

"I don't know. The man who got away did have the presence of mind to take the ears with him. They won't be able to trace the dogs who were killed."

"Presumably killed." Sterling's correction was automatic, an editor's tic.

"Well, I guess there could be some earless greyhounds running around somewhere, but what would be the point?"

The waiter cleared away their dishes. The mango soup had proved too rich for Sterling, who had abandoned it after only a few spoonfuls.

"At any rate, you've fulfilled Warhol's prophecy. Sorry you won't get better play. I thought the story merited the local section front, but I decided to recuse myself from that decision, as I have a conflict of interest here." He paused. "That is, I hope I'm going to."

Tess felt as if she were right at the edge of the kind of happy normalcy that had eluded her for so many years. Dinner on a Saturday night. A nice man, with a real job instead of a band. Everything was perfect. Then something began ringing in Sterling's jacket pocket.

"Sorry," he said, pulling out a cell phone. "I always have to stay in touch with the desk."

The connection must have been bad, he almost had to shout to be heard, and the other diners stared in pointed disapproval. "Who? What? Where are you?"

"Don't forget when and why," Tess teased, even as Sterling handed her the phone.

"It's Whitney. Says it's some kind of emergency."

Whitney sounded as if she were shouting from inside a wind tunnel, a wind tunnel with loud music and hoarse laughter in the background. "There's a situation here I really need your help with," she said without preamble. "I'm at the Working Man's Bar and Grille."

"Feeney?"

"Close. Colleen Reganhart is here and she's about sixty seconds away from leaving in a cop car, but she says she wants to talk to you before she goes anywhere." Whitney paused. "Look, I know my timing sucks. But there will be other dates, right?"

"How did you know about-" She didn't want to say Sterling's name in front of him, or repeat the word "date," so teen-agerish and vapid. "How did you know where to find me?"

"Newsrooms can't keep secrets, Tess. Don't you know that by now?"

The Working Man's Bar and Grille was the most notorious of Fells Point's megabars, a sprawling warehouse on the waterfront. Its deck, strung with Japanese lanterns, had been part of the pretty lights that made the view from the Joy America so charming. Close up, the charm quickly dissipated. The bar's ersatz Marxist decor-machine parts from its paper-recycling past, the '30s-style posters of brawny working men and the real picket signs from famous Baltimore strikes-was incongruous, almost offensive, alongside five-dollar microbrews and margaritas at seven-fifty. And its college-kid patrons thought working with one's hands déclassé, although urinating in public and walking on top of the parked cars of Fells Point was apparently just another Saturday night.

Whitney was at the rubber-topped bar, designed to look like a conveyor belt. Colleen Reganhart was more or less on the bar, facedown, arms spread in a crucifixion pose, black hair fanning out into the dipping sauce from a half-eaten plate of Buffalo wings.

"She looks pretty docile," Tess said.

"Watch this." Whitney patted her arm. "Colleen, don't you think we ought to be running along now?"

Colleen raised her head a few inches, looked at Whitney with bleary eyes and said, "Fuck you, Talbot. You're the last person I want to see tonight."

"Tess is here. Didn't you say you wanted to talk to her?"

Colleen managed to pull her entire upper body from the bar and turned toward Tess. "Did I? Well, fuck you, too."

The bartender came over. It was Steve, Kitty's most recent dalliance. But Kitty had already dropped him, so he saw no percentage in being helpful to her niece.

"Look, Tess, I cut her off half an hour ago, but she won't leave and our crowd is starting to pick up. I can't have this broad taking up prime real estate and mouthing off at anyone who brushes against her. Blondie here said you'd take care of it."

Whitney raised an eyebrow. She didn't feel a bit guilty, Tess could tell. She might even be relishing the way she had interrupted her dinner with Sterling.

"My car's out front," she said blandly. "I need your help to carry her, then we'll drop her off at her apartment and put her to bed."

"How did you become the chaperone?" Tess said, tucking a hand beneath Colleen's armpit, as Whitney propped her up on the other side. Colleen didn't put up much of a fight, simply muttered a cursory list of curses as they propelled her to the door.

"Another favor for Lionel Mabry. He'd prefer his top people not to get arrested for public intoxication. She called him from a pay phone here an hour ago, threatening to quit one minute, then just threatening him. He convinced her to tell him where she was, then he called me and asked that I take care of it."

"With my assistance."

"I couldn't call anyone from the paper." Whitney glanced at Tess, taking in the good winter coat, the sheer hose and high heels, the upswept hair. "Although Sterling was welcome to come along. How was dinner, by the way? Did you make it to dessert? Did you have that whirligig thing they serve, with chocolate and cinnamon?"

"Let's just get this over with, okay?"

Sometimes Tess wondered if there was a single warehouse left in Baltimore still doing an honest day's work. Colleen lived in Henderson's Wharf, which had started life as a storehouse for the B amp; O Railroad. It sat at the end of Fell Street, a short walk from the Working Man's Bar and Grille, assuming one could still walk. Colleen never would have made it in her heels-the cobblestones on Thames Street would have brought her down in only a few steps. She passed out during the five-minute drive, forcing Whitney and Tess to carry the editor into her building like so much dirty laundry.

"She's on the sixth floor," Whitney said. "Harbor side, naturally."

"Naturally," Tess echoed.

Yet the duplex apartment they entered was simply a richer version of Rosita's spartan apartment, with almost no real furniture and not even one picture hung, although two rectangles wrapped in brown paper leaned against the exposed brick wall. Another woman on the move, Tess thought, so determined to get somewhere she never stopped and looked around at where she was.

"Should we try to put her to bed?"

"I don't want to carry her up the stairs," Whitney said. "Let's leave her on the sofa and help ourselves to her bourbon. I have a feeling that's one thing you can always find in Colleen's kitchen."

Colleen didn't have any bourbon, but she did have good Scotch and an unopened bag of Mint Milanos. Whitney broke the seal on both with great glee, then selected two mismatched glasses from one of the kitchen cabinets.

"We've earned it," she said to Tess, as they sat in the carpeted area where the dining room table might have been, if Colleen had gotten around to buying one.

"I guess you can put it on your expense account. Another favor for Lionel." She turned the phrase over in her mind. It was suddenly rich with meaning. "What was the first favor, anyway?"

Whitney studied Tess. They knew each other so well. Tess could see her mind working, trying to calculate how much Tess had figured out, which would determine how much Whitney had to admit.

"Getting you to come work for him, of course."

"And the second? There was a second favor, too, right?" Whitney didn't say anything.

"I'm guessing the second favor was leaving the envelope on my car, the one with Rosita's personnel file in it. Lionel wanted me to see it, but didn't want anyone to know where it came from. What did he want me to find, whitney?"

"Something. Anything." Whitney went into the kitchen and came back with a steak knife, which she used to slice open a Milano as if she were shucking an oyster. She then licked the chocolate from the inside. "He didn't know you'd do as well as you did, though. He was quite pleased at how quickly you got the goods on her. Lionel always suspected Rosita was trouble." She put the licked-clean cookie aside, then opened another one and began reaming the chocolate out of it. "I told him you would do a good job."

"So this didn't have anything to do with Feeney's story, did it? That was just an excuse, a way to go after Rosita. Mabry wanted to be rid of her, wanted to do an end-run around the union, and he saw this as an opportunity. Nail her for the story, or something else equally egregious, and he could fire her, or scare her out."

"Rosita was trouble, Lionel figured that out early on. He tried to put her back on the copy desk, but she screamed racism and sexism and every other ism she could think of. So he let Colleen pair her with Feeney, figuring she couldn't get in too much trouble working with another reporter. But she managed to. You've heard of rogue cops? Rosita's a rogue reporter. She'd do anything for a Page One story. Lionel had to get her out, and he didn't have time for her dismissal to grind through the union process. It was only a matter of time before the Beacon-Light ended up with a major libel case on its hands. Jesus, it almost did, Tess. If Wink hadn't killed himself, he could have sued the paper over that first story."

"But he wouldn't have. Wink paid his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars never to tell anyone what had happened. He was humiliated."

Whitney shrugged. "He might have been willing to come forward now, because it would have undermined everything else the paper said about him, even the true stuff. I'm surprised he didn't think about that before he killed himself."

"Rosita says he was murdered."

"If Rosita said nice day, I'd check it out. She lies all the time, about little things, just to stay in practice. I swear, I've caught her in the most idiotic inconsistencies. What she majored in, for example. What part of Boston she grew up in. Who lies about stuff like that? She's crazy."

"Crazy," Tess agreed, but she wasn't going to allow Whitney to distract her so easily. "So does being Lionel's favor buddy guarantee you Japan? Was that the deal?"

Whitney lifted her chin, which had a smear of chocolate on it. "It doesn't hurt. Look, I kept you pure in all this by not telling you everything. You did your job beautifully and you made good money doing it. What's your problem?"

"The problem is you told me some lies as well."

"Not really. I just left out a few details here and there."

"What about Feeney's alibi?"

Again, Whitney waited Tess out to see what she knew, or had guessed. She picked up a third Milano, but was rattled enough to eat it as a normal person would.

"Did Feeney really tell you that he was with me that night, or was that your way of ensuring I would take the job, because I'd be so worried about him I'd want to protect him?"

"I did ask Feeney where he was that night, and he did say he had been with you." But Whitney could no longer make eye contact. In fact, she couldn't even face Tess, shifting her body so it was a three-quarters turn away from her. "He didn't remember what time he left you. In fact, he doesn't remember much about that night at all. He more or less blacked out. I knew if you thought he needed you as an alibi, you'd be hooked. You've always had a soft spot for him."

Tess saw Feeney walking north on Eutaw after their last angry conversation. He had been furious with her, absolutely enraged.

"What did you tell him? I mean, you had to make sure that Feeney and I didn't compare notes, right? How did you arrange that?"

Whitney's voice was almost inaudible now. "I told him you were hard-up for cash and he should keep his distance from you, because you had denied knowing him to the bosses. I also told him you said you were keeping an open mind about who had done it, and you wouldn't cut him any slack if you thought he was the one. But he wasn't, so what was the big deal?" She finished off her Scotch. "I think my confession slate is clean now. Am I forgiven? Do you want to assign me some form of penance?"

Tess felt dizzy, the way a child feels after turning in endless circles, staring up at the sky. Bad enough to have been used and manipulated by Lionel. But Whitney had been his willing agent, playing friend against friend in order to get the Tokyo bureau. It was one thing to use the elevator technique, quite another to have taken everyone for a ride.

"Why did you call me tonight? You could have handled this alone."

"Maybe I figured it was my last window of opportunity between boyfriends. Or are you double-dipping now, keeping the little boy at home while you let Sterling take you out on the town?"

"You're jealous."

"Of Sterling? No, losing to him at squash was as far as I was willing to go to advance my career. Not that he ever asked. But don't worry, Tesser, I'm sure you'll have another date with him. You always have another date. Me, I have my job. If I'm lucky, I'm going to have a foreign assignment, then come back to an editing position. Very few women run newspapers. I plan to be one of them."

"Why? So you can end up like Colleen in there, passed out on your sofa on a Saturday night, in an empty apartment, with no friends, no family?"

"Colleen is sui generis. The other editors have families, lives, outside interests."

"The other editors are men. Look around you, Whitney. It's not just Colleen. It's you, it's Rosita. Work is all you have. Jesus, you're still living at your parents' place because you've never taken the time to find an apartment of your own. Most of your relationships last about two weeks, when the guy realizes Friday night is reserved for Washington Week in Review, while Sunday mornings belong to Meet the Press. What are you going to do if you want to have a baby-ask Tim Russert to be the sperm donor?"

Whitney stood up, dusting cookie crumbs from the lap of her tweed trousers. "Look, I have to go. Do you want a ride back to your place, or do you want to walk?"

"I'll walk."

"Any more flaws of mine you want to enumerate, failings you want to catalog? I said I was sorry."

"No, in fact that's the one thing you haven't said this evening."

"Well, I'm saying it now. I'm sorry. Isn't there something you'd like to say in return?"

"Yes, yes, there is." Tess fluttered her fingers. "Sayonara, Whitney."