Charm City

Chapter 5

Never a cheery place, The Point was particularly bleak at twilight. Even the dusk's faint light illuminated too much, accentuating the bar's distinct charmlessness. Tess could see dust on the tables, the smeared glass in the jukebox, an odd assortment of stains on the floor. She couldn't blame this on Spike's absence. The truth was, the place looked marginally better under Tommy's care.

"So, Tommy," Tess tried again, fixing herself a watery Coke from the bar nozzle. "How did Spike end up with a greyhound?"

"That blond girl sure is pretty," he said, eyes fixed on the early news, on the television set bolted above the bar. "But I don't like the black guy. How come it's always a blond girl and a black guy? How come it's never a blond guy and a black girl? You ever think about that? And who do you think makes the more exuberant salary, the girl or the guy?"

"Exorbitant salary, Tommy. And I'm more interested in greyhounds right now. What was Spike's interest in dog racing?"

"We don't have no dog races in Maryland?" he protested.

"We don't have world champion prizefights, either, but Spike has been known to take a few bets on those. Look, did he buy an interest in Esskay? Is he a partner with some out-of-state trainer? Or is he mixed up in betting on greyhounds?"

"He didn't want nothing to do with greyhounds," Tommy insisted. "He said they were spooky looking? It bothered him to look at them?"

"Look at them where? Where he got Esskay?"

Tommy turned back to the television. Reporters were camped out in front of Wink Wynkowski's mansion, a new house built in a pseudo-Tudor style out of place in a treeless subdivision. Apparently, Wink had not emerged all day, nor had he provided any response to the Beacon-Light's allegations. The TV reporters' only hope to advance the story was to get a reaction. They couldn't duplicate the kind of reporting Feeney had done over the last several weeks. Besides, why look at some boring old court documents or chat up sources when you can chase someone across his own front lawn, screaming, "How do you feel?"

"Be too bad to lose the basketball team because of the newspaper," Tommy said to the TV screen. "Woulda helped our business?"

"You seem awfully proprietary about things around here, Tommy. Someone might think you didn't care if Spike never woke up."

Tommy plucked nervously at his lower lip. "You're treading on thin ground, Tess. I don't see where you get off, talking to me like that. I'm around more'n the rest of the fambly. More'n you."

"Where did the dog come from? Why was Spike beaten? How are the two things connected?"

He turned away and began fiddling with the beer tap. The regulars were drifting in, providing Tommy with enough distractions to ignore her for hours. Slowly, with great ceremony, he shook miniature pretzels into wooden bowls along the bar, then slapped down coasters, which no one in the history of The Point had ever used. Behind the bar, Tommy looked as fresh as the coasters, in his bright yellow shirt and black pants. He even looked taller. Tess peeked over the Formica top and saw he was sporting a pair of high-heeled caramel-colored ankle boots with side zippers, circa 1976.

"Spiffy shoes," Tess said.

"Oh, yeah, well, you know I can't wear loafers. Thin ankles."

"Don't those heels hurt after a day on your feet?"

"You know what they say-a hard man's day is never done." Tommy looked bewildered when everyone laughed, but Tess suspected he was playing to the crowd. It wasn't the first time she had heard this particular Tommyism.

Esskay had also put in a hard day, shredding paper towels and toilet paper, gnawing on the pieces, then spitting up clumps behind furniture and in corners. Tess found a particularly large, soggy chunk in the center of her pillow. Her pillow, not the one Crow used, which was actually closer to the door. Did Esskay know which side of the bed Tess preferred? And if so, was this fealty, or a veiled threat?

Later, after a hot bath, she was still plucking bits of paper from odd places when the phone rang.

"Tesser! You told me to call you, so here I am, calling you." Whitney, a little too hale and hearty. The rah-rah team captain persona was usually reserved for strangers, strangers Whitney wished to keep strangers.

"Here you are," Tess echoed, without much enthusiasm.

"Can you come out and play?"

"Now?"

"Why not? It's only eight-thirty, spring is coming, and I haven't been taking enough people out on my expense account. They'll lose respect for me if it's under three figures for the month. Come be my recalcitrant source. I'll make it worth your while."

Tess studied the wad of soggy paper towels in her hand. "I'm in my bathrobe and feeling kind of cranky. Can't you buy some bourbon, bring it over here, and put that on your expense account?"

She was counting on being refused. Tess couldn't give Whitney a receipt or a credit card slip. She couldn't even validate parking.

"Okay, but be ready to throw a coat over your bathrobe. I want to sit out on your terrace, at least as long as we can take it. See you in twenty minutes."

Tess's apartment took up only half of the space of the two floors below. The rest belonged to a flat, unremarkable roof, reached through French doors off her bedroom. A more ambitious tenant might have filled this pseudo-patio with pots of geraniums, or splurged on wrought-iron café chairs and a matching table. Tess left two vinyl lawn chairs out year-round, sponging them off as necessary. The harbor view was so spectacular it seemed unnecessary to do more. Who needed fripperies like tiny white lights in ficus trees with the neon Domino Sugar sign across the water in Locust Point blazing red throughout the night?

Yet when Whitney arrived, she was in no hurry to go outside.

"Do you have any…?" she asked, sniffing delicately. Esskay wandered over to see if Whitney was good for a few pats, or a morsel of food. She stroked the dog's head, never bothering to ask how or why Tess had acquired such an ugly beast. Incurious Whitney. Reporting had never come naturally to her.

"Have any what, Whitney?" Tess knew exactly what she meant, but loved to torture the answer out of her friend, force her to say what she wanted.

"You know." Her voice was now a stage whisper. "The little box under your bed."

"My sweaters? Dust balls?"

"Your pot. Your dope. Weed. Mary Jane. Ganja. The 1970s smokable herb now making a comeback, as they say in the New York Times every time they do one of those ‘Whatever-happened-to-marijuana?' stories. Satisfied?"

"Oh, that. I stopped making purchases when I went to work for Tyner, given it's a crime. A condition of my employment." A half-truth. Tyner disapproved of marijuana only because it hampered the lungs' ability to maximize oxygen intake.

Whitney looked so blue that Tess took pity on her. "I still have a little left, though. I've been hoarding it."

"Well, dig it out. And let's order pizza from BOP or Al Pacino's. Do they deliver?"

"They do to Kitty's address."

Within an hour, Esskay was nosing through two grease-stained boxes in a corner of the terrace, searching out stray bits of pepperoni and Whitney's uneaten crusts. The night was not at all springlike, but Tess and Whitney, warmed by doses of bourbon and pizza, were inured to the temperature as they shared a second post-dinner joint. Time had collapsed. They could have been in Washington College again, smoking on the banks of the Chester River.

The joint almost gone, Whitney improvised a roach clip with a garnet stickpin from the lapel of her blazer. "I like your boy-toy Crow, but I'm not sorry he's away tonight," she said, coughing a little. "I wanted to have you to myself. It makes me feel like I'm nineteen again. That, and this." Another furtive puff.

"I was thinking the same thing. Except the nights were so black on the Eastern Shore and they're so bright here. Have you ever noticed the city looks faintly radioactive from here? It has this smudgy glow, from the anticrime streetlights and all the neon."

"What did we talk about back in college, all those nights we smoked and drank and talked?"

"Our classes, our love lives, our futures. I was going to be a street-smart columnist and you were going to be the New York Times Tokyo correspondent. You're still on track, at least. We also played Botticelli. Remember?"

"You called it Botticelli. My family called it ‘Are You a Wily Austrian Diplomat?' And you picked the most incredibly obscure people.

"Jackie Mason is not obscure, Whitney."

Tess's turn to inhale. It wasn't very good pot. The mild buzz was giving her a mild headache right between the eyebrows. Ever the good hostess, she let her guest have the last toke. Whitney pulled hard on the stub of the joint, then tossed the remains off the roof, to the graveyard of vices in the alley below-broken bottles, limp condoms, Twinkie wrappers.

"So you had drinks with Feeney last night," she said suddenly. "Did he say anything of note?"

"You know Feeney. Sometimes you can't get a word out of him all night."

Whitney snorted. "The only thing you can't get out of Feeney's mouth is his foot." She started to bring her fingers to her lips, then realized the joint was gone and refastened the stickpin to her lapel instead. "He told you about his story, didn't he? That's why you asked me about it today."

"He told me it was on life support and not expected to make it through the week." Spike's face flashed in her mind, and she suddenly felt guilty for her glib metaphor.

"It was."

"What happened?"

"Biggest resurrection this town has seen since Jesus or our last crooked governor, depending on your frame of reference. Spiked in the afternoon, it rose again that night for one edition only, the final. But one edition was enough. The Associated Press overnight guy moved it on the wire, which went to all the broadcast outlets, and there was no turning back. Everyone in town went with it, and everyone attributed it to the Beacon-Light."

"Why only one edition?"

"Good question. One of many being asked around the office today." Whitney's eyes locked on hers, steady and serious. "It wasn't suppose to be there, Tess. Not today. Maybe not ever. Someone decided otherwise."

"So what happened? You should know, you're a lock for a Pulitzer for in-house gossip."

"I'd rather have that Far East fellowship, the one in Hawaii, or one of those Alicia Patterson grants for young journalists," Whitney said, as if "Pulitzer" was the only word she had heard. For a moment she seemed lost in some private reverie, perhaps an image of herself striding through the Orient, literally head and shoulders above the populace. She blinked, returning to Baltimore, Tess, and the roof.

"As it turns out, I do know quite a bit about this. I got it all from the big boss, right after I saw you today. Editor in chief Lionel C. Mabry himself."

"Do I know him?"

"He came to the paper nine months ago, lured out of semiretirement at Northwestern University. Ran the Chicago Democrat in its glory days. Reporters call him the Lion King, because he has this mane of blond hair sweeping back from a high widow's peak. They also call him the Lyin' King, because he has a tendency to tell you nice things to your face, then go to the editors' meeting and stick knives in your back. Long, elegant, quite sharp knives."

"Not your bony back, Whitney. Bosses always love you."

"The old bosses did. But Mabry doesn't know my work as a reporter, and he's going to have a big say in who gets the Tokyo bureau when it opens up this summer. I'm on the short list, but I'm not a lock. Not even close."

Whitney frowned. She looked baffled, much in the same way she had the first time she'd attended a Passover dinner with Tess's mother's family. "That's not horseradish," she had insisted politely, poking the tuberous root with her spoon. "Horseradish comes in a jar." No one had dared contradict her.

Tess poured more bourbon into Whitney's glass. "You'll win him over."

"Or die trying. I even used the elevator technique on him today."

"What's that, some blow job tip from the pages of Cosmo?"

"Well, it's not fellatio, but it is a kind of oral sex." Whitney hoisted herself up on the ledge and sipped her drink, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. "There's a theory that the most important part of your career is the thirty seconds you spend on the elevator with the boss-or in the hallway, or the john, but that last outlet doesn't exactly work for me. It's prime exposure time, and you should prepare for it in advance, the way you prepare for orals in college, or the way you train for a race, so it's all second nature."

"Prepare what?"

"Your tapes. Think of your brain as a mini tape recorder. You need two or three tapes at the ready, to drop in the slot at the first sight of the CEO. Editor in chief, in my case. Each tape features a timeless question or observation, demonstrating you are a motivated, loyal, dedicated, happy worker who's willing to do a hundred and ten percent to make your terrific place of work even more terrific."

"I think I need a demonstration."

Whitney threw her shoulders back and shook her hair away from her face, transforming herself into an eager acolyte. "Mr. Mabry," she began, a little breathlessly, her voice higher and sweeter than usual. "Mr. Mabry, I noticed our circulation numbers for the evening edition have stabilized. Do you think the redesign, and the attempt to market the evening paper as a street-driven product, have helped reverse the years-long trend of dwindling afternoon circulation?"

Bourbon burned when it came out through the nose. "That's the most fatuous thing I've ever heard," Tess said, snorting and laughing. "Does it really work?"

"Well, I got on an elevator three years ago as a reporter, chatted up the editorial editor about the wonders of an Ivy League education, and by the time I got off, I was well on my way to being an editorial writer."

"And to think I thought you were crazy when you left Washington College for Yale," Tess said, shaking her head in wonder. It wasn't that she wouldn't do the same, given the chance. She just wouldn't do it as well. Perhaps there really were only two kinds of people in the world: suck-ups and failed suck-ups.

"Then today, right after I saw you, I ran into the Lion King," Whitney continued boastfully, as proud of her talent for obsequiousness as if it were a sport she had mastered. "I said, ‘The Wynkowski story-it wasn't on the budget at yesterday's four o'clock, was it, sir?' The four o'clock is the last news meeting of the day. Some things break later-"

"I know, I know."

"Right, I sometimes forget you're a defrocked journalist. Anyway, he said, very tersely, ‘No, it wasn't.' So I said, ‘Well, it's none of my business, but if you want to get to the bottom of it, and want someone you can trust-a discreet private investigator with a special knowledge of newspapers-I happen to know the perfect person.' We went back to his office and chatted for an hour, mainly about his impressions of Baltimore and his backhand. It turns out he really wants to get into the Baltimore Country Club. My uncle is on the membership committee, you know."

Tess had not been distracted by Whitney's rambling details. "Back up a little. Who's this discreet private investigator with the special knowledge of newspapers?"

Whitney smiled coyly. "Let's play Botticelli, Tesser. My letter is ‘M.' Ask me a yes-or-no question to figure out who I am."

"Let's see. Are you a five-foot-nine Washington College grad whose former college roommate is apparently out of her fucking mind?"

"You guessed it right off the bat. I'm Theresa Esther Monaghan, the perfect woman for the job, don't you think? In fact, you've got a meeting with the editors at two o'clock tomorrow. Do you have something decent to wear?"

Tess tipped up the bourbon bottle and took a swallow, largely for effect. Actually, she was not staggered by the thought of Whitney, without consulting her, volunteering her for a job. Whitney was always pushing Tess forward, trying to make her more than she was. But she had over-looked a few key details here.

"I have a job, remember? I work for Tyner."

"Who wants you to be more of a self-starter, by the way. I ran this by him before I called you tonight, and he's all for it. Said he really doesn't have enough to keep you busy right now, and this sounds like a good opportunity."

Great, Tyner and Whitney, president and vice president of the Let's-Make-Tess-Apply-Herself Club, had been conspiring behind her back again. Tess was surprised they hadn't needed her mother, the club's founding member, for an official quorum.

"My Uncle Spike is in the hospital. If Tyner doesn't need me. I'd rather spend my time getting to the bottom of what happened to him."

"Then it couldn't hurt to have the Beacon-Light's files at your disposal. Computerized court documents, the paper's morgue, Nexis-Lexis-all there at your fingertips, as long as you're on the payroll."

Tempting, but Tess saw one last, huge flaw in Whitney's plan.

"Look, you're saying this was deliberate, right? Hacking, pure and simple?"

"That's the scenario."

"So they're looking for someone with a motive?"

"Naturally."

"Well, wouldn't Feeney, along with this Rosita Taquita, be a prime suspect? I can't investigate one of my friends. What would I do if I found out he did it?"

"You're getting ahead of yourself. The reality is, you probably won't be able to figure out who did it, but Mabry wants to show the publisher he takes this sort of thing very seriously. I think Mabry's secretly delighted the story got in the paper. It's the biggest thing going, and the Beacon-Light had it first. Mabry only held it to begin with because of the unnamed sources. All he wanted was for Feeney and Rosita to go back and get people on the record first. Someone just accelerated the schedule, that's all."

"Still, what if Feeney-"

"Look, I'll let you in a secret, but don't let it cloud your judgment: the smart money's on Rosita. No one thinks Feeney is capable of something like this. He may bitch and moan more than most, but he wouldn't risk losing his job over one story. Besides, Feeney has an ironclad alibi."

"He does?"

Giggling, Whitney punched her in the arm. Such physicality was a sure sign of drunkenness, better than any Breathalyzer test. A punch was about 0.08 on the Talbot scale, while arm-wrestling indicated she was well over the legal limit. It wouldn't be the first time Tess had made a bed on her couch, or put Whitney in a cab for the trip home to Worthington Valley, where she still lived with her parents. If living in a guest house on a twenty-acre estate could be properly described as living with one's parents.

"Very funny, Tesser," Whitney said, still giggling and jabbing. "Feeney told me today the two of you were out drinking past midnight. In fact, it's about all he can remember from last night. Now, that's not the sort of thing you want to tell the editors, given the circumstances, but he couldn't have a much better alibi, could he?"

Tess chewed on the inside of her cheek, a habit she thought she had outgrown. It hadn't even been eight o'clock when Feeney had lurched out of the Brass Elephant. Why had he told Whitney it was midnight?

"Tess?" Whitney tried to punch her again, but missed, sending her bourbon glass crashing to the alley below. "So what do you think?"

"I think as alibis go, that's a pretty good one."