In A Strange City

Chapter 19

Bobby Hilliard had lived in a surprisingly characterless apartment building in North Baltimore, the kind of place popular with spoiled Johns Hopkins students and genteel widows who wouldn’t dream of being without a hairdresser, deli, dry cleaners, and chiropodist on the premises. Not that they availed themselves of these services, but they liked knowing they were there.

Tess surveyed the high-rise from a parking place on Charles Street, watching the little old ladies venture out with their inevitably tiny dogs, noting the students with their bouncing knapsacks. She would have thought someone with Hilliard’s love of pretty-pretty things would have chosen charm over convenience-a one-bedroom with, say, a marble fireplace and a little galley of a kitchen in Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon.

Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon -places where two of Hilliard’s victims had lived, if one bought Jim Yeager’s theory. Tess didn’t, not yet. The standards for public discourse had fallen so alarmingly in recent years that anyone could say anything on the airwaves, especially if the target was dead. See Vincent Foster, whose sad suicide had provided no end of conspiracy theories. The prevailing logic, on talk radio and fringe shows like Yeager’s, was that you were right until someone proved you wrong. Tess remembered a time when “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” had been a joke in newsrooms, not a governing philosophy.

Still, she wasn’t ready to eliminate Yeager’s scenario, not in its entirety. It filled in some gaps, supplied the connection about which police had been so secretive and edgy. Bobby Hilliard was a thief; she knew this fact independently. The question was whether someone could go, in a few short years, from pocketing pillboxes to breaking and entering and, finally, a furious assault. And if he did, and you knew he did, why kill him? Why not go to the police? Yeager had conveniently glossed over this last piece of the puzzle, claiming Bobby Hilliard’s death didn’t matter because he was a criminal.

But the holes in Yeager’s logic were bigger than his monstrous head. For one thing, it presumed that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim in the shooting at Poe’s grave, and Tess had yet to be persuaded of this. The Visitor was the one person that everyone knew would be there on the morning of January 19. Who had known Hilliard would be present, too?

She got out her supply of business cards, remembering Gretchen O’Brien’s knowing taunts about her methods. For the first time-well, not for the first time, but for the first time in a reflective moment, one not involving a corpse-she felt a real revulsion toward her work. She long had taken comfort in the fact that being a private detective was more honest and less destructive than journalism. Her reports were private, and while what she discovered often caused pain, it brought pain to the people who had paid for it, sought it out. Unlike the newspaper, she did not invite strangers into a family’s tragedy over morning coffee and toast in order to sell bras and panties and used cars.

She tucked her “safety inspector” card into her pocket and walked up to the doorman at Bobby Hilliard’s apartment, resigned to who she was and what she did, at least for another day.

A stone-faced janitor led her to Bobby Hilliard’s apartment on the sixth floor but stopped before he inserted his passkey in the lock.

“Twenty dollars,” he said.

“Twenty dollars?”

“That’s what the other people paid. Twenty dollars to see the apartment where the dead man lived.”

She held her ground. “What dead man? What others?”

“Other people with phony business cards.”

“Oh.” Busted. Might as well ask a few questions before she got her money out. “What others?”

“One had a notebook and wrote down everything he saw, like an inventory.” That would be Herman Peters. “He said he was working for the estate. Uh-huh. Another one walked around, just looking at everything, rubbing his hands together, like a kid in Disneyland.”

“What do you mean?”

“Getting in was all he wanted, and once he was in he didn’t seem to know what to do except walk around, looking. Guy had so much hair he looked like he had a cat on his head.”

Yeager. Bingo. “Anyone else?”

“A woman. For a moment, I thought you was her again, but she wore her hair loose around her face.”

Tess bristled a little at the suggestion that she and Gretchen O’Brien resembled one another, but handed over her twenty dollars.

“Did the cops ever stop by?”

“Oh, sure, right after he died, before his name was in the papers. But I watched them, too. Especially them.”

“Why?”

He rolled his eyes at her naïveté. “You think cops don’t steal? From the dead? They steal all the time. Some, not all. And they got nothing on firemen. You’d be surprised at how many things just vaporize in a house fire, as if they was never there at all.”

The apartment was plain, a perfect rectangle of white walls and parquet floors, the kind of place that rose or fell on the tenant’s taste. Here, it rose, thanks to a collection of thrift-shop Victoriana that transformed the vanilla-ordinary rooms into an elegant suite. With the curtains drawn against the view, it could have been the late 1800s here, or so Tess presumed. She didn’t know much about antiques. But even she could see the care Bobby Hilliard had lavished on his environment, the attention to detail and color. The old chairs and sofa had been reupholstered with lush velvety fabrics in cherry hues. The breakfront that filled a wall in the dining room had been expertly but not overly refinished, so it wore its age with pride.

Throughout the apartment, the walls were hung with faux heritage-turn-of-the-century portraits and photographs of people and grand estates that bore little resemblance to the parents who had come to Baltimore to claim their son’s body. Oh, well. Bobby Hilliard wasn’t the first person who had tried to reinvent himself.

She opened the kitchen cabinets, checked out the refrigerator. They were not well stocked-a few cans of soup and tuna, a dusty box of Mueller elbow pasta. Did Bobby Hilliard know his lease on life was a short one? She shook her head, smiling at her folly. If kitchen cupboards were reliable barometers of one’s expectations, a casual visitor to her home would deduce she had been living on borrowed time for about ten years now. As a waiter, Bobby Hilliard had probably feasted on choice leftovers several nights a week. The absence of groceries did not prove Bobby Hilliard had gone to the graveyard planning to stay.

Still, something was missing. Tess walked through the rooms again, puzzled, as the janitor grew more visibly impatient, sighing and shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“No books,” she said, so suddenly and loudly that the janitor jumped.

“What?”

“There are no books in this apartment.”

The librarian owned no books. No, not none-there was a small shelf next to the cherrywood four-poster, filled with antiques guides and reference books on furniture. Bobby Hilliard also had a family Bible and a few history books about Maryland. But the latter were trade paperbacks, well-worn, clearly not the volumes he was suspected of stealing from the Pratt. If he had stolen books, where were they? Had he sold them? But Daniel Clary had suggested Bobby stole things to keep, not fence. He liked pretty things.

“Are you sure no one took anything out of here?”

The janitor looked insulted. “You see how I am with you. Ain’t nobody walk out of here with anything, unless it was his parents. Them I left alone, but that was different.”

“What about the cops? I don’t mean stealing, but they might have taken things as evidence.”

“Woulda, coulda, but they didn’t. They looked all over here like there was something they wanted, but they walked out empty-handed.”

“What was that noise?” Tess asked. The janitor turned, and she pocketed Bobby Hilliard’s miniature alarm clock in one deft movement, just as a test. Oh, yeah, he was really tough to trick.

Tess pulled up the curtains. Bobby’s apartment faced east, looking over the green-shingled roofs of Guilford, and all the way toward the partially demolished Memorial Stadium. Dust motes circled lazily in the shafts of light, the only things that had moved here in some time. The apartment felt like a movie set. But what part had Bobby Hilliard been playing?

“Is that the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the distance?” she asked the janitor. When he went to look, she slipped the clock out of her pocket and left it in its place. Again, he never noticed.