In A Strange City

Chapter 15

for a moment, TeSS was so amazed by Pitts the Pig Man’s flight that she couldn’t do anything except watch him trot down the street, his garbage can rolling behind him. Then she wondered if she should even bother to give chase. He’d have to come home eventually, right? And it seemed almost unsporting to run after a man whose legs needed five steps to do what hers could accomplish in two.

This uncharacteristic pang of fairness passed and she took off, catching up with him as he puffed and panted his way up Keswick, where the 7-Eleven and its bank of pay phones appeared to be his goal. When he saw she was behind him, he was almost gracious in defeat, stopping abruptly in the small park across from the convenience store and throwing open his arms, as if he expected Tess to run into them. “How did you find me?” he demanded petulantly.

It was her turn to mislead him. “It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t hard at all.”

This seemed to scare him. Good.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“But not at my house. How about-” He pointed to a bar across Keswick, Ben’s, a place that Tess knew only for the pit-beef stand it ran in the summer and early fall. “How about we go over there?”

“I’d prefer your house. After all, you came to mine.”

“I came to your office,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, which might have qualified him for the scarier rides at local amusement parks.

“Your house,” Tess repeated.

“I don’t like to have people in my home. They touch things.”

Tess began to laugh, only to see Pitts was serious, and aware of no irony in his self-righteousness. “I promise I won’t.”

“They all promise,” he said resignedly. “Then they all break their promises. You will, too, you’ll see. But, what the heck, let’s go.”

Tess drove him back.

“Interesting neighborhood.”

“These were mill houses,” Pitts said, unlocking his back door. “This area is known as Stone Hill.”

“I’ve lived in Baltimore my entire life. I live less than two miles from here”-she immediately wished she had not volunteered that particular piece of information-“and yet I’ve never heard of it.”

“Yes,” her host said. “That’s why I chose it, for privacy. Also, it’s close to the freeway, and I travel a lot for my business.”

“Your porcelain business?”

“I do deal in antiques, actually. I’m a scout, and I specialize in glassware, china, figurines. I find things people want. I find buyers for things people no longer want. Restaurants that are interested in pursuing a certain theme, people who are missing a few bread plates in their old china pattern-they come to me.”

You’re a few bread plates short of a place setting, she thought. “A dealer I consulted said you didn’t know much about Fiestaware.”

“Fiestaware. Ugh-I wouldn’t have those garish things in my house. Not my era, not my taste. But I know enough about it. I have to, in my line of work. I misspoke to gauge your knowledge of the subject. Or lack thereof. And I was not disappointed.”

They had entered the house through the kitchen, which struck Tess as being at odds with the quaint house. At first glance, it appeared to be an older kitchen that had yet to be remodeled. But the harvest-gold appliances were too shiny, the white linoleum with red fleur-de-lis accents was too fresh to have been walked on for fifty years. The Formica-topped yellow table was probably a knockoff too. The real things cost upward of five hundred dollars now. Tess knew, because she had priced one for her own kitchen, while in the throes of a short-lived flirtation with retro.

“This is an exact duplicate of the kitchen in my parents’ house in Cockeysville,” Pitts said proudly, mistaking her confused silence for awe. “It wasn’t easy, finding working versions of the appliances. The old dishwasher, which is the kind you have to roll out and attach to the sink, was really hard to get, and I don’t know what I will do if the hose breaks. But this is what our kitchen looked like, down to the terry-cloth curtains over the window, although my mother’s table was red. Of course, we didn’t have the cookie jars.”

“Of course,” Tess murmured. On the far wall of the kitchen, custom-made shelves groaned under the weight of what appeared to be fifty, maybe a hundred, cookie jars. Many were commercial containers, made to advertise or commemorate a certain brand of sweet-Oreos, Fig Newtons, Mallomars-while others were old-fashioned receptacles in various shapes: fat women, contented cats, cars, houses, a caboose with a smiling face. She noticed a hopelessly non-PC Aunt Jemima figure, but it was tucked into a corner on the lowest shelf, as if even Pitts knew it wasn’t a nice thing to have on display.

He led her into a combined living room-dining room, which gave Tess an odd feeling of déjà vu. Over the river and through the woods-why, it was her grandmother’s house, right down to the nesting end tables and the porcelain cigarette lighter on the coffee table.

“Let me guess. This is a replica of your parents’ living room.”

“I wish.” He sniffed. “This is the living room I wanted growing up. I even took my mother down to Levenson and Klein, to show her what we should get. Instead, she picked out a plaid sofa.”

He had taken a seat in the dining area, an alcove that was too small for the sturdy mahogany pieces Pitts had crammed into the space. A huge curio cabinet loomed over them, filled with-Tess needed to look closer.

“What are those?” she said.

“Don’t touch!” he squeaked reflexively, as if her extended finger might poke through the glass doors. “They’re salt cellars. Mother collected them.”

Tess hoped “Mother” wasn’t sitting in a rocking chair in the basement, a withered corpse waiting for Vera Miles’s hand to tap her on the shoulder, à la Psycho. She reminded herself the Pig Man’s name was Arnold Pitts, not Norman Bates, and this was an old mill house in a crowded neighborhood, not the isolated Bates Motel and homestead.

Actually, a few pieces of taxidermy might have been a nice addition to the decor here.

“So, Mr. Pitts. It is Pitts, right? Arnold Pitts of Field Street. As opposed to John Pendleton Kennedy of no known address.”

He smothered a pleased-with-himself giggle in his hand. “I guess you know even less about the life of Poe than you do about Fiestaware.”

“But I’m learning,” Tess said. “And if I had taken your job, I wouldn’t have been confused by the monument, gone on the wrong date, and missed everything.”

Pitts’s merry mood vanished. “What do you mean?”

Tess sat in one of the dining room chairs, stretched out her legs, and folded her arms across her chest, in no hurry to speak. She was trying to figure out if Pitts was surprised that she knew about Gretchen O’Brien or startled to learn his private detective had fallen down on the job.

“I’ll satisfy your curiosity when mine is satisfied. So, do the cops know?” she asked.

“Know what?” His voiced scaled up on the last syllable.

“There was a burglary here last summer. For reasons I can’t fathom, the police believe that incident is connected to the shooting at Poe’s grave. But it might help the police out if someone told Detective Rainer how you were scurrying around town before the murder, trying to find someone to stake out the visit and identify the Visitor. I imagine you’d prefer that information didn’t get back to him.”

A sulky expression settled on Pitts’s face, where it looked too much at home, as if Arnold Pitts spent a lot of time with lower lip extended and pale, bristly brows drawn down over those small, watery eyes.

He sighed. “How much?”

“How much?”

“This is about blackmail, right? I pay you, and you go away. Until you come back again and ask for more.”

“I see. You assume I’m a crook and a liar. Funny, how often crooks and liars make that assumption about others.”

“I’m not a crook,” he said swiftly. At least he had the good grace not to deny being a liar.

“Let’s start over. You came to me to find out the identity of the Visitor. Why?”

“I told you, there was a bracelet-”

Tess held up a hand. “We’re starting over, remember? I’m giving you a blank slate. Use it well.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll tell the police to look into your whereabouts the night Bobby Hilliard was shot. Did you miss? Was the Visitor really your target? Or did you know Bobby Hilliard?”

“I have an alibi,” he said swiftly. “I was in an all-night diner in Silver Spring with a friend.”

“At three a.m.?”

“We had been to the theater in Washington.”

“It sounds as if you went to a lot of trouble to establish an alibi. Why? What was Gretchen O’Brien’s assignment?”

But beneath his nervous stammers and eye-rolling histrionics, Pitts had a tough little center, as hard as a peach pit.

“What does it matter?” he said. “Clearly, she failed at her task, a fact she omitted to mention when she briefed me this weekend-and collected partial payment. I was too quick to accept her explanation that the unexpected developments at the grave site created so much confusion that she couldn’t follow her quarry. The news accounts made it easy for her to cover up her failure. It never occurred to me she wasn’t there. Or that you were.”

“I never said I was there.”

He smiled at the way she pounced on this detail. “No, but the homicide detective did, when he told me to watch out for you. When he said a private detective might visit me, I was within my rights to ask why you were so interested in the case. He said you were a glory hog. Frankly, I thought it took you a little while to follow such an obvious trail.”

“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I was faxed the burglary reports,” she said defensively. Besides, hadn’t Pitts seemed surprised when she caught up with him outside the 7-Eleven?

“And you still don’t know why they’re grouped together, do you? Two burglaries, an assault, and a homicide. You have no idea what the link is. Neither do the police, if that’s any comfort to you-neither do I.”

The last statement seemed hasty tacked on.

“If you’ll tell me what this is all about, I won’t go to the police about your visit to me and how you hired Gretchen O’Brien to do what I wouldn’t do. She won’t have privilege, if you didn’t go through a lawyer. She’ll have to talk to them.”

He took a moment, as if considering her offer, then shook his head. “I think not. You’ll tell them everything, eventually. You’re such a good citizen.” She had never before heard so much disdain for that simple word. “But if you do tell them about me-why, if you do, I will have to inform them that you visited me in order to extort me. I think the homicide detective would be so hungry for a complaint like that, he might be willing to suspend his usual professional skepticism.”

“But that’s a lie. You were the one who brought up the idea of blackmail. I’d never be party to such a thing.”

“What’s the old saying? A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on? True, it won’t hold up, it’s all he-said, she-said, but it will do a little damage while it’s out there. So you think carefully about what you do next and where you carry your tales. Your reputation is all you have. And, as I understand it, there are members of your family who have shown they are all too capable of a certain moral relativism.”

“That’s ancient history,” she said, even as she realized she didn’t know if he was referring to her father, her grandfather, or two of her uncles. The Monaghans and Weinsteins had taken a somewhat ad hoc approach to upward mobility, but that was all in the past. Assuming Uncle Spike was behaving in Boca, which was a pretty large assumption. “And it has nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, yes, you’ve been portrayed in press accounts as squeaky clean, but as I understand the traditional media arc, it’s about time for you to get some negative publicity. They build you up so they can tear you down. Read more about Mr. Poe’s posthumous life if you want to see a case study in the vagaries of public opinion. The Beacon-Light might not bite, but the local television stations would love a piece on sleazy private eyes. You and Gretchen O’Brien. They say it takes three to make a trend, but maybe they can throw in the historic example of Allan Pinkerton, the original Baltimore PI, whose inability to track the Army of the Confederacy probably extended the Civil War by several years.”

The long rapid speech had left Pitts breathlessly delighted with his own moxie. Tess felt a little breathless, too, at how he had turned the tables on her. The only knowledge she had gained here was that the fat man was shrewder than he appeared. He had chosen her because he knew her family history left her vulnerable to being manipulated in just this fashion. He had gone shopping for a private investigator he could control. She wondered what he had on Gretchen. It didn’t matter. He had just been handed a nifty piece of blackmail: Gretchen had defrauded him by collecting money for work she never did. She, too, was now hopelessly compromised, vulnerable to Arnold Pitts’s dictates.

“I think,” Pitts said, when she declined to say anything, “this is what they call a Mexican standoff. You’re not telling me anything; I’m not telling you anything.”

“But I know where you live now,” Tess said. “I know who you are. I might come back.”

“Good night,” he said. “Good-bye.” It was an order.

She looked around the low-ceilinged room. The floors that peeked out from the edges of Pitts’s green carpets were wide-planked pine. The ceiling had exposed beams, and the walls were a rough plaster that probably fought every nail. It was a little gem of a house, built better than it needed to be, and crying out for simple furnishings. Pitts’s re-creations verged on vandalism.

“Why would you buy a house like this and fill it with fifties kitsch?” Tess asked. “What’s the point?”

“Kitsch? Kitsch? These are my memories. This is my life.” Pitts, so cool and calm when he was threatening her, became completely rattled when his taste in furnishings was questioned.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t… breathtaking in its attention to detail. But why here? Why not in a nice little split-level out in Lutherville? Don’t you want to create the full effect?”

“But I have,” he said with genuine bewilderment. “Besides, Mother still lives in the house in Cockeysville. And she’s done horrible things to it. Why, she actually got one of those refrigerators with an icemaker in the door.” He shuddered. “The old refrigerators are so beautiful, with their rounded tops and those huge handles, as if what you were opening was something important. One day, when she dies-”

Tess left it-and him-there. It was reassuring to know Mother Pitts was in the suburb of Cockeysville, not stuffed in a nearby crawl space.

Then again, she recalled when she was back in her car, Norman Bates also had insisted his mother was alive.