In A Strange City

Chapter 7

Rainer saw her immediately, as if his eye was trained to spot her braid at a hundred yards, but he was too distracted to do more than glare. Tess tried to fit a world of nonchalant meaning into her responding shrug. Just passing by, saw my buddy Herman Peters, the police reporter, saw the crowd, couldn’t help being curious. It’s public property. Sue me. Even if Rainer understood her body language, he clearly didn’t buy any of it. His scowl told her the bill would come due later.

But for now, Bobby Hilliard’s parents were coming into War Memorial Plaza-the media crowd was so great that the news conference had been forced outside, between the huge Depression-era horses on the plaza opposite City Hall-and Rainer was completely focused on them as they moved toward the podium and the little garden of microphones that had sprouted there. The Hilliards walked stiffly, as if they had been in a car accident.

“Good afternoon,” prompted one of the female reporters, who may or may not have been local. Oh, she was clearly local-she didn’t have the shiny-serious finish that network news babes develop when they make the leap-but she could have been from Baltimore or Washington, Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. They all looked alike to Tess.

The Hilliards nodded a greeting, and stared mutely into the cameras. Tess realized they did not know what was expected. They had not absorbed, as so many citizens had, the media’s protocol for personal tragedy. Television has boiled grief down to the essentials over the years. How do you feel? the reporters ask those who have survived, and the responses are supposed to be Cat-in-the-Hat simple: sad, mad, bad, glad. The grieving tear up on cue, they shake their fists at the camera, they vow revenge, they threaten lawsuits. They know what to do, because they have seen other people do it. And because they do it too, future victims know how to behave when their turn comes.

But Bobby Hilliard’s parents didn’t know this game, much less how to play it. Gazing numbly at the reporters, they might have been the ones under arrest. The reporters stared back, unsure of how to proceed in the face of such quiet dignity. Maybe Rainer did know what he was doing. If the killer was capable of feeling anything, the Hilliards would break his or her heart.

“This is Webber and Yvonne Hilliard,” Ranier said at last, “from Pennsylvania.”

“Vonnie,” whispered Mrs. Hilliard, a thin woman in a navy print dress and an old-fashioned navy wool coat. Her Sunday best, clearly, yet she still might have walked straight out of a Dorothea Lange portrait from the thirties. She had that kind of narrow weatherworn face. “No one ever calls me Yvonne.”

“They have come down to claim their son’s body and take him back for burial in Pennsylvania -”

“Do you know when that will be?” called out a reporter, an out-of-towner. Tess saw the gears clanking in his feverish mind: Funerals were always good for footage, and the two-graves visuals were a surefire winner. She could write his hackneyed copy for him: Bobby Hilliard, who died in one cemetery, was buried in another today.

But this dark-haired questioner was one of the talking heads at the end of the cable dial, a former political consultant who had reinvented himself after a particularly nasty scandal. Jim Yeager, that was his name. Caught with two prostitutes, whose services he had been billing to his clients, he had quickly found Jesus and a book deal, although not necessarily in that order. He had then parlayed his “recovery” into his talk-show gig, where his status as a redeemed sinner made him far more sanctimonious than his neo-con peers, no small feat. The Poe story must be bigger than Tess had thought, or things in Washington were even slower.

“Not just yet,” Mrs. Hilliard said, then looked anxiously at her husband, as if she had spoken out of turn. Her voice was soft, a mountain accent, more West Virginia than Western Pennsylvania to Tess’s ears. “We haven’t really had time to make the… arrangements.”

An awkward silence fell. When it appeared that the Hilliards were going to volunteer nothing more, a blond anchorwoman waved at them as if hailing a taxi, confident of being recognized. After all, she and her station cohorts beamed down at Baltimoreans from billboards throughout the city, asserting themselves as friends and family, trusted advisers and neighbors. They made no claim to journalistic integrity, but by God, they were nice!

Smiling and nodding, the blonde engaged the couple in laser-sharp eye contact.

“This really must be upsetting to you,” she said, with a graveness suggesting she considered this a profound insight. “How are you doing?”

Out-of-towners, the Hilliards felt no special kinship toward the blond anchor. But they were polite people by nature, so they gave it their best shot.

“Not so good,” said Mr. Hilliard, who wore a shirt buttoned to the throat beneath a stiff-looking sports jacket that was short in the sleeves. His wrists were large and knobby, his hands larger still, red and chafed from hard work.

The blond anchor continued to smile and nod, smile and nod, so Mr. Hilliard struggled to find something else to say. “Not good at all.”

Vonnie Hilliard held her hands to her mouth, and Tess had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The Visitor, the one who got away, had held his hands to his face in a similar manner. But Mrs. Hilliard’s concern seemed to be her teeth, which were crooked and discolored.

“We feel pretty bad,” she offered, around her fingers.

Tess was hunkered down in the back, screened by the risers that had been set up for the television crews and their equipment. Rainer, his forehead sweating despite the fact that the temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing, was too preoccupied to pay any attention to her now.

“Did your son have a special affinity for Poe?” A print reporter this time, armed with nothing but a pad and a self-important air. Either from the New York Times or an aspirant.

The Hilliards glanced pleadingly at the detective, but he appeared as baffled as they were by the question. Finally, Mrs. Hilliard tried to answer.

“You mean, like going on forever?”

The reporter proved to be kind; Tess awarded him a few mental points for the gentle tone of his follow-up question. “Did he like the work of Edgar Allan Poe? Did he read a lot of his poems or stories when he was growing up?”

The Hilliards looked at each other as if this were a game show and they were desperately afraid of getting the answer wrong, lest they not be allowed to go on to the next level.

“He read some,” Mrs. Hilliard said at last. “He read a lot. But he did other things, too.”

“Such as?” An eager young woman with a tape recorder, she had Washington Post written all over her.

“He watched television,” Mr. Hilliard said, prompting a nervous laugh among the reporters, then silence. “Well, he did.”

“Bobby liked…” Mrs. Hilliard paused, and the reporters leaned toward her, various recording devices in hand. “He liked nice things. He liked to dress just so, and he liked antiques. He’d go out to the yard sales on the weekends, bring home what looked like junk to me. But he’d shine it up, or refinish it, and his room was so nice. I was surprised he left all those pretty things at home when he came down here, but he didn’t take a stick of it.”

She stopped, surprised by all the words that had come out of her mouth, and held her hand to her face again, as if to hold back anything else that might spill out.

“Can we see his apartment here?”

“No,” Rainer said.

“Why not? It’s not a crime scene.” This was Herman Peters, the Beacon-Light’s police reporter. Rainer had stepped in it now, Tess thought. Peters would charm the landlord with his sweet little rosy-cheeked face, if only because Rainer had declared the apartment off limits. Peters specialized in getting that which was deemed ungettable.

“It’s a private residence that may yield important information in an ongoing investigation. We can’t have reporters trooping through it to get little details, like what he read and what brand of shampoo he used.”

Tess was impressed in spite of herself. Rainer did know something of how journalism was practiced these days, how reporters gathered random bits and tried to construct shoddy wholes out of them.

“Where is the apartment?”

Rainer shook his head, but Mrs. Hilliard volunteered, “Near that big school, the one where they’re always playing lacrosse so you can hardly park.” North Baltimore, Tess deduced, near Johns Hopkins University. There were a lot of apartment buildings in that neighborhood.

“Are police sure that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim?” This was Herman Peters again, and he sounded irritable. Sob stories didn’t interest him. Tess thought she had seen a lot of death, but, after just two years on the police beat, Peters was at five hundred bodies and counting.

“No comment.”

“I have to ask because conflicting information has been coming out. Some say the shot was fired at a distance, from the law school construction site, but I’ve also heard it might have been from the catacombs.”

“There’s no conflicting information because there’s no information coming out of this department,” Rainer said testily. “If you got that, it’s not official, and you shouldn’t print it.”

“Okay, okay. But if the other guy was standing between Bobby and his killer-assuming the other guy wasn’t the killer-is it possible the shooter missed, hit the wrong one? You’ve ascertained that Bobby probably wasn’t the regular Visitor. But was he the intended victim?”

“That’s not something I’m prepared to comment on just yet.”

“I can’t imagine,” Mrs. Hilliard put in, “that anyone would want to kill Bobby. He was a nice boy. He never bothered anyone.”

“He was a nice boy?” parroted a television reporter, a handsome African-American man, one of the second-teamers used on the weekend crews.

“He was a nice boy,” she repeated firmly, sure of something at last.

“Did he ever speak of his plans for the future?” This was from WBAL’s radio reporter, a young woman. Tess thought she saw her Norwegian buddy in the cluster of radio reporters, but she couldn’t be sure. It was funny, how reporters were drawn to their own kind. The print reporters stood with the print reporters, while the television folks clustered down front and the radio people set up camp on the edge.

The Hilliards looked puzzled.

“I mean”-the WBAL reporter looked embarrassed-“no one plans to be a waiter forever.”

“They don’t?” Mrs. Hilliard asked. “He loved his job. And sometimes he got to take food home. When he visited, he’d bring us leftovers from the restaurant, and you know what? The aluminum foil would be in the shape of a swan.”

Tess could tell Rainer’s appetite for center stage was waning rapidly. He had probably put this together just to get the press off his back, figuring it would be easier for the Hilliards to run this gauntlet once and get it over with. Tess hoped he had plotted an escape route for them, because everyone here was going to clamor for one-on-one interviews as well. Reporters were unruly houseguests, taking each kindness for granted and whining for yet more liberties-the jackals who came to dinner.

“Have you considered the possibility that your son was the victim of a hate crime?”

The voice, instantly familiar to Tess, came from somewhere in the middle of the pack. It was a woman’s voice, clear and sweet, with the kind of nonaccent that came from working hard to eradicate a stubborn one. Yet it wasn’t a newscaster’s voice. It had a slight excited quaver, and it was rapid, too rapid for broadcast. Tess craned her neck to see the speaker, but all she caught was a glimpse of short dark hair and a long delicate neck.

Rainer appeared to recognize the woman, however. His face flushed, he wagged a furious finger at his questioner. “This is for press, not agitators. You got no standing, no standing here at all.”

“Fine. Then I’ll let the reporter from the Alternative repeat my question, which you’ve refused to answer despite his repeated requests.”

A husky male voice obligingly shouted out, “Have you been told your son may have been the victim of a hate crime?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Rainer barked at the Hilliards, scaring them so that they backed away from the microphones. “It’s not true, anyway.”

The media types began to buzz and stir, although Herman Peters simply looked impatient. He was ahead of everyone else on this story, Tess realized; he had already investigated-and rejected, or at least tabled- this strange and tantalizing tangent. The Hilliards were more confused than ever, glancing between Rainer and the roomful of reporters they wanted to appease.

“Hate crime,” Mrs. Hilliard said at last. “I’m not so sure what that is. I mean, if someone kills you on purpose, they pretty much hate you, right?”

They don’t know, Tess realized, as an awkward silence fell. Reporters understood the significance because the questioner was from the Alternative, a local paper for the gay community, but Bobby Hilliard’s parents were completely in the dark.

“Good point,” Rainer said, clasping Mrs. Hilliard’s shoulder. “Good point.” He was really only 99.9 percent an asshole. Unfortunately for Tess, she was never going to benefit from that 0.1 percent of niceness. She wondered if he would try to bring her in for questioning, after seeing her here.

The woman’s voice rose up again; Tess was close to placing it, but the speaker’s identity still eluded her. It was familiar, but only as a memory.

“For those members of the media who are interested in the story that’s not being told here, local activists will be available later today on Monument Street at Mount Vernon Square, west of Charles.”

“You got a permit?” Rainer challenged.

“We don’t need a permit to hold a press conference,” the girlish voice replied evenly. “Do you have a permit?”

Undone by her curiosity, past caring if she came into Rainer’s sights again, Tess worked her way through the throng of reporters, finally catching a glimpse of the speaker’s profile.

Yes, she knew the woman who had spoken, although not as well as she once thought she would.