Charm City

Chapter 4

The Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, like most bureaucracies, ran inefficiently. Unless, of course, one was trying to stay away from work. Then it was suddenly a model of speed and productivity. On Wednesday morning, Tess, desperate for five minutes to herself, didn't even have a chance to take her Beacon-Light out of the plastic yellow wrapper before a cheerful clerk brought out the batch of driving records Tyner had requested. Oh well, there was no law against lingering here on a bright blue bench, drinking scorched take-out coffee and watching the frustrated drivers and driving aspirants. They, unlike her, were in a hurry and therefore must be thwarted at every turn. It was MVA policy.

"I'll pay you ten bucks if you've got a number lower than mine," a harried businessman whispered to Tess. She knew the type, someone who was Much Too Important, who rushed through every chore as if he were the Secretary of State and needed to jump ahead of you at the dry cleaners, or cut you off in traffic, because he was en route to board Air Force One for some summit in the Middle East.

"I don't have a number at all," she said complacently, smiling at the way he edged away from her. Yes, only a real sicko would hang out at the MVA on her recognizance, as Tommy would say. But Tess had been on the run all morning, since the alarm failed to go off, putting her thirty minutes behind. She had lost another thirty minutes when Esskay had decided to throw up on the living room rug. Tyner, to punish her for her tardiness, had sent Tess on his version of a scavenger hunt, with a list of documents that required visiting five government offices in two jurisdictions. Now it was almost eleven, her first chance to sip a cup of coffee instead of dumping it on her lap in the car. It was also the only time she had to call the hospital for an update on Spike.

"Still stable," said a cheerful nurse, whose uncle presumably was not lying in a coma.

"Still stable. Isn't that a redundancy?" Tess snapped, banging the pay phone down. She gulped her coffee, hot and strong enough to provide a stinging pain behind the breastbone, then skimmed the front page. Nothing of interest above the fold. Her eyes worked down to the bottom of the page, the part usually reserved for features and boring-but-necessary stories. Tidal wetlands, budget votes, welfare reform. "Duty fucks," as one of her old editors had put it so elegantly.

But Feeney's byline was anchoring this particular piece of front-page real estate. And there was nothing boring here, except for the headline.

RECORDS, SOURCES INDICATE

WYNKOWSKI HAS PROBLEMS

by Rosita Ruiz and

Kevin V. Feeney,

Beacon Light staff writers

Gerard S. "Wink" Wynkowski, the self-made millionaire who has promised to bring professional basketball back to his hometown, may never realize his dream, given the precarious condition of his financial empire and his own checkered past, which includes domestic violence and a compulsive gambling problem, the Beacon-Light has learned.

"‘Checkered past'?" Tess said out loud, prompting the vibrating businessman to take a seat even farther away. "Oh, Feeney, tell me you didn't write that line."

Otherwise, it was Feeney's story, exactly as he had described it to her. How could he not have known it was to run today? Was he that far gone? No, even drunk, he'd have a sense if his story was going into the paper. Something or someone had changed the editors' minds late last night. Maybe one of the TV stations was close to breaking a piece of it, improbable as that seemed.

Wynkowski's business, Montrose Enterprises, is a veritable house of cards, in which money is moved from one subsidiary to another in an attempt to maintain cash flow and obscure shortages. His creditors literally run the gamut from A to Z-from AAA Ambulance Services to Zippy Printing Services, which printed up the fliers for his Inner Harbor rally.

Wynkowski always manages to pay his biggest suppliers, but small-time creditors often are forced to sue to collect on old debts, a situation that raises doubts about whether Wynkowski has the cash on hand-an estimated $95 million-to bring a team to town.

Even if Wynkowski can put the deal together financially and cover the monthly costs of owning a team, a background check may prove to be his undoing with the NBA, when the league discovers:

Wynkowski is an inveterate gambler, according to friends and associates, who has dropped large sums on sporting events.

He had a tempestuous first marriage, in which police were frequently summoned on complaints of domestic violence, according to sources close to the couple at the time. He pays his first wife generous alimony because the damage inflicted by her years with him makes it impossible for her to hold a job.

Wink's activities as a juvenile delinquent, which he has portrayed as harmless boyhood pranks, included a string of armed robberies while he was still in junior high.

It was then that Wynkowski ended up at the Montrose School, the notorious and now closed juvenile facility whose name he took for his business. A source confirmed he remained at Montrose for almost three years, an unusually long sentence.

Yet it was at Montrose that Wynkowski discovered his talent for basketball. When he returned to the community as an apparently reformed high school youth, his heroics for Southwestern High School in his junior and senior years helped erase memories of his unsavory past. Since becoming a wealthy man, he also has given generously to local charities. (See Basketball, 5A)

"Well, you did it, Feeney." Tess spoke out loud again. "Good job." With a satisfied sigh, she read the rest of what could prove to be the obituary for Baltimore 's dream of a basketball team. Feeney was right, it had everything-crime and money. And wife-beating as a bonus! Feeney and Rosita had hit the allegation trifecta.

Baltimore did not necessarily share Tess's pride in Feeney's work. As she went through the rest of her bureaucratic rounds that morning, she could feel the city humming and whispering about Wink Wynkowski in heated commiseration. Theirs was a unified lament: the basketball team might be lost to the city now, all because of that bad news Blight.

"I don't know why they gotta be so negative all the time," she heard a man grumbling on line at the Never on Sunday sandwich shop, as she waited for a turkey sub with tomato, lettuce, and extra hots. "Be just like the NBA to hold a little bad publicity against a guy."

"They're just looking for a reason to block the deal, those bastards," the counterman agreed. "They hate Baltimore."

Everyone on line agreed to that, even those who had missed the rest of the conversation. They hated Baltimore. The NBA, Washington, DC, the suburbanites who had fled years ago, taking their tax dollars with them. The Eastern Shore, the Western counties, the lawmakers in Annapolis. New York, Hollywood, big business, little business, God, the universe. They were all in a league against poor little Baltimore.

A woman's piercingly clear voice cut through the camaraderie of victimhood.

"Oh, spare me another day on the grassy knoll, folks. I am not in the mood. From there, it's always just a short stroll to the Trilateral Commission and the worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy. Is it too much to ask for a moment of silence while I wait for a grilled cheese with bacon-no tomatoes, please, they're like dead tennis balls this time of year."

The voice was familiar, the attitude more so.

"Whitney Talbot," Tess said, turning to inspect her old friend. "What are you doing this far uptown?"

"Tess! I've been meaning to call you. Ever since you took up with that little boy, you never have any time for your old-maid friend." This piece of information sharpened the crowd's interest in Tess for a moment, but all eyes quickly returned to Whitney. Blushing and windblown, Tess was no match for this fabulous creature who looked like the patron goddess of field hockey.

Whitney Talbot was as tall as Tess, 5'9", but thinner. She wore her thick blond hair in a girl's careless bob and spent $60 every six weeks to keep it even with her jaw, the sharpest bone in a body of long, sharp bones. It was her one flaw, if a Talbot could be said to have flaws. Rich and well bred, they tended toward quirks. Tess knew Whitney's quirks well: they had been college roommates, crew mates, and competitors, vying in the secret way so many female friends do.

Tess worked her way back through the line and threw her arms around her friend. Was she turning into one of those women who dropped friends when a steady man was around? But it had been such a wretched winter, a time for digging in, not going out.

"Crow's okay, but he's just a boy," she said. "No one can replace you, Whitney. Bring your sandwich back to Tyner's office and eat lunch with me. We'll catch up."

Whitney shook her head. "I need to get back to the Beacon-Light. Things are a little crazy over there today."

"Because of Feeney's story? You know, my sources tell me-" strange how good that phrase felt, more than two years out of the business-"his story wasn't suppose to run."

Whitney wasn't impressed. She knew Tess had precisely two sources at the Beacon-Light, and she was the other one. "Did you hear it wasn't going to run today, or that it wasn't going to run at all?"

"You tell me."

"Really, Tess, you know editorial is separate from the news side. I wouldn't know anything about the Wynkowski story except that, as we like to say in my section, ‘This bears watching.'" Whitney was one of the paper's youngest pundits, but she was well suited to the job, a born second-guesser.

"C'mon, Talbot. Don't stonewall me. I've got photographs of you from college in compromising positions with a cigar, a boy, and a fifth of Scotch."

"The old edict about never being caught with a dead girl or a live boy doesn't apply to our gender, dear." Whitney frowned. "Then again, given the double standards at the Beacon-Light, the cigar alone could kill my prospects. Girls aren't suppose to have fun."

"Is this the sound of one head banging on the glass ceiling?"

Whitney didn't smile. "Know where I was this morning? A soup kitchen on Twenty-Fifth Street. They start serving breakfast at seven-thirty A.M. and don't finish until almost eleven most mornings. And today was a slow day, only two hundred people served. By month's end, it'll be three hundred. Some women stop by every morning with their kids, in order to stretch out their food stamps."

"Well, I'm encouraged to hear the Blight is taking an interest. You usually only write about hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa."

"Forgive me, Tess, but I hate doing all this bleeding heart social services crap. I've covered city politics, I'm fluent in Japanese, I had a fellowship in economics down at College Park. But I don't get to write editorials about those things. You know why? It's because I don't stand up when I go to the bathroom!"

Whitney's outburst, while not particularly loud, filled one of those odd silences endemic to hectic public places. The men in line stirred uneasily. They might have wanted to envision Whitney in the bedroom, standing or sitting, but not in the bathroom. Tess had to admit the image didn't do much for her appetite, either.

" Turkey sub, extra hots," the counterman called. Tess took the greasy brown paper bag, plucked a bag of Utz cheese curls off the metal rack, and turned back to Whitney, who was focused on her grilled cheese's progress with bird dog intensity.

"Call me, hon." She had started using the local endearment ironically, only to find it a natural fit over time, Baltimore being an irony-free zone. Even its synthetic nickname, Charm City, had begun to take on a life of its own. "Crow doesn't take up all my time. In fact, he's so busy being a local rock hero, I have plenty of free week-ends and evenings."

Whitney nodded absently. But as Tess began working her way out of the crowded carryout, Whitney reached out and caught the sleeve of her coat.

"Tesser?"

"What?"

"How's your job? The investigator thing? Tyner keeping you busy?"

"In spurts."

"Spurts." Whitney laughed. Even her laugh seemed better than most people's-rarer, richer, deeper. "I thought that was how Crow kept you busy. Are you licensed? Have you bought a gun? You know, if you want to go to a range with me sometimes-"

"I don't have a gun yet. You know how I feel about them." Whitney, who had hunted ducks and doves with her father most of her life, and always kept her rifle handy, had tried to interest Tess in the sport during their Washington College days, to no avail.

"I know, I know. But you should get a license to carry, since you're entitled to one by law. If you had been carrying a gun last fall-"

"I probably would have shot myself in the foot by accident." And everyone who was dead would still be dead, she reminded herself, as she did whenever someone alluded to that malevolent September, to what might have been, and who might still be among the living. The little movie, the one that seemed to have been booked into her dreams for eternity, rolled again in her head, a trailer for that evening's coming nightmares.

"If you say so." Whitney gave her a kiss on the cheek, not one of those fake, airy ones preferred by her class, but an exuberant smacker of a smooch that left a pink smear of lipstick on Tess's cheek. The crowd loved it. Quicksilver Whitney had already turned her attention back to her sandwich.

"It's getting too brown. Turn it, turn it, turn it!" she implored the short, swarthy man at the grill, who grinned goofily, as if her imperious orders were a declaration of undying love. "And would you be so kind as to cut off the crusts?"