In A Strange City

Chapter 29

Fifteen minutes later TeSS yanked open the curtain that surrounded Pitts’s bed in the emergency room-and almost ran smack into Dr. R. Massinger, who was hovering around the periphery. Tess hoped she hadn’t been eavesdropping. If she had, what would she make of Pitts’s sobbing confession, the strange little tale that had just tumbled out of the man?

“I have to take Gretchen to… get her prescription filled,” she told the young doctor, who appeared to be board certified in soulful, empathetic looks. “Please don’t let my uncle leave, whatever happens.”

“If he wants to sign himself out, it’s hospital policy-”

“Look-” Tess caught herself and slowed down, remembering to play the part expected of her, loving niece. “You have to understand, Uncle Arnold is a proud old cuss. He thinks he can take care of himself, but clearly he can’t. I’m going to get Gretchen whatever she needs and then the two of us are going to take him to my house. But he’ll freak if you tell him he’s not going back to his place tonight. I’ve told him that a friend of his is going to be here soon, Horatio Lyman.” Trust Pitts to have a lawyer with a name straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. “If he asks, tell him Lyman’s en route. We won’t be long.”

“But what if he wants-”

“You’re a dear,” Tess said, rushing off. It had taken all her self-control not to shout over her shoulder, Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. When would she get the chance to say that again?

Gretchen, holding an ice pack to her swollen jaw, asked fewer questions when Tess grabbed her and took her to the car, but only because speech was still difficult.

“You know what you’re doing?”

“Not really,” Tess said. “But I know what we’re looking for. Two pieces of jewelry: a gold bug, with sapphire eyes, and a locket. Arnold Pitts says Poe had them on his person when he traveled from Richmond to Baltimore in the last days of his life. But he didn’t have them when he was found and taken to Washington Medical College, where he died, and there was no written record of their existence.”

She filled Gretchen in on everything Pitts had said. “Pitts said he had to find the Visitor because Bobby claimed to have given him these two items, after stealing them from Shawn Hayes’s home.”

“When? The night Bobby was killed or earlier? It would have to be earlier, to justify hiring me, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Tess said. “Pitts thinks Bobby lied to cover himself and decided later to make the lie come true. Think about it: He has this contraband, this incredibly valuable stuff that can’t even be reported missing and will link him to the attack on Shawn. He can keep it, but Pitts and Ensor are on to him. So he gives it to someone who everyone knows-and yet no one knows. He does it in front of eyewitnesses. If he hadn’t been killed, he would have gotten away with it.”

“But how can a gold pin and a locket be worth killing someone for?”

“Because it’s not just any old locket. It’s a memento mori.”

“A what?”

“I didn’t know the term either, except as the title of a Muriel Spark novel,” Tess said. “It’s a piece of jewelry that commemorates someone who’s dead and often uses the deceased’s hair in the design. If Pitts is telling the truth, this one had the hair of Poe’s wife, Virginia, worked into it. It would be incredibly valuable-if Pitts is telling the truth.”

“Big if,” Gretchen muttered.

And so it was. “Which is why we’re going to the Poe Museum right now. The Beacon-Light ran a list of the theories about Poe’s death the week that Bobby was killed, but there was nothing about gold bugs or lockets, and I haven’t read anything like that in the biographies. I called my uncle Donald, who has contacts all over the state, and asked him to arrange for someone to meet us there. Somehow he pulled it off.”

“Uncle Donald? Is he one of the black-sheep family members that Pitts used to threaten you with?”

“More of a pale gray one,” Tess said. “He likes to say his tombstone will say never indicted.”

Given its bucolic name, Amity Street should have been in the middle of the country, overlooking fields and copses of trees. In Poe’s time there, it had been. The city had overtaken the block long ago, however, and it was now in one of West Baltimore ’s most blighted areas, surrounded by public housing. These low-rises were called the Poe Homes, a cruel and ironic tribute. The city had to keep a patrol car on the block during regular visiting hours, to protect the adventuresome tourists who dared to find their way here.

But there, in the middle of Amity Street, stood the tiny brick house where Poe had lived with Marie Clemm and Virginia Clemm in the 1830s. It looked forlorn and a little tired, as if it might just collapse under its own weight one day.

Jeff Jerome, who ran the Poe Society, had a young child at home and had begged off from giving this private tour, sending a docent in his place. Tess had not felt particularly guilty about the deception that had brought them here until the wooden door swung open and she saw the docent had arrived in full Poe regalia. Gretchen, usually so fearless, jumped back at the sight of the man in the white collar, string tie, and coarse black wig.

“Welcome to my home,” he intoned.

Tess sighed inwardly. This reminded her of a trip to Appomattox, back in high school. The Civil War site had actors, representing various Civil War archetypes-the Union soldier, the Confederate scout-who trailed vistors through the park and attempted to “interact” in didactic fashion. Lee wasn’t the only one who was ready to surrender there.

“I’m Tess Monaghan,” she said, “and this is my associate, Gretchen O’Brien.”

Gretchen frowned at the word “associate,” and Tess knew she thought it meant her rank was lesser. “We’re partners,” she added, hoping this would appease her.

“Partners who represent the Talbot Foundation, as I understand it?” Poe inquired hopefully. Tess wondered if the deep somnolent voice was based on some historical account of Poe’s speaking voice. To her, it brought to mind the host on those late-night horror movie marathons, the local dweeb who dressed as a vampire or phantom and bayed at the moon at every commercial break.

Then Tess remembered that the man in the bad wig was a person, a person who was doing her an enormous favor, opening the museum a few minutes before midnight. While she-she was a fraud, dangling money that wasn’t hers to give, in front of a museum that wasn’t going to get it.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet us on such short notice. The Talbots are famously impulsive.”

“And famously generous,” Poe said, and Tess felt another wave of guilt. “Now, do you want the full treatment, or do you prefer to discover the place on your own?”

“Let us walk through on our own,” Tess said, because it seemed cruel to all concerned to force the man through his act. “We just want to see what you have here and ask a few questions when we’re through.”

Gretchen shot her a look behind the docent’s back, and Tess shrugged. She felt she owed him-and Poe- the courtesy of at least pretending to look at what was here. It couldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Although it occupied three floors, the Poe House was tiny, with less square footage than Mary Yerkes’s Mu-sheum. It included some items and mementos from Poe’s life. Much of what was there was authentic to the time in general but not to the writer’s life in particular. Tess and Gretchen took it all in as quickly as possible, noting the portrait of the young Virginia, the information about a medallion stolen from the Poe monument and then recovered. But no, there were no lockets, no gold bugs.

On the third floor, in a literal garret where her head almost brushed the ceiling, Tess stopped at the desk that had been set up in front of the window. Again, not Poe’s desk and not Poe’s view, which would have been considerably more serene than a trashed vacant field and the backs of several dilapidated rowhouses. He had written “Berenice” here, according to the plaque on the wall, a horror story so shocking that he had ended up censoring parts of it so as not to offend the sensibilities of his time. It had been about a woman buried alive, a very real fear in the nineteenth century. What would Poe have written if he could have seen this Baltimore? Tess wondered. Was the city merely catching up to his vision or had it overtaken it long ago? Somewhere in the night, a clock began to chime the hour. It was midnight. How fitting.

And Tess finally felt what she had failed to feel in so many other places, a sense of communion with this writer who had meant so little to her before Arnold Pitts walked into her office. Poe had been a musty relic, someone she was forced to read in high school, nothing more than “nevermore.” She understood now what Crow had felt, sitting in the Owl Bar and dreaming of Fitzgerald, why Mary Yerkes yearned for Toots Barger’s bowling trophy. It didn’t matter that the furniture here was not Poe’s, that the view had been corrupted, that she could hear a radio from the street, loud and raucous. After all, the nineteenth century had not been a decorous time, it had been loud and unruly in its own right, stinking of horse manure and coal fires and open privies. But this feeling-this was the reason people fought to save buildings and why things, mere things, sometimes mattered. It was not because of the old Santayana cliché, the one about being condemned to repeat the past if you failed to remember it. Remembering one’s mistakes was no talisman; Tess had repeated her own over and over again in full knowledge. The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

“Hey, come see this,” Gretchen called out, and Tess had to shake herself, as if coming out of a dream.

“This” was the only known photograph of the Poe Toaster, taken by Life magazine in the early 1990s. The magazine had shot him from a distance, intent on protecting his identity. And so they had. He was just a blurry shape.

“It could be anyone,” Tess said.

“Yeah,” Gretchen agreed.

They returned to the second floor, where chairs had been set up in front of a television with a looped video. Gretchen pressed the button to start, and what followed was, Tess hated to admit, vintage Baltimore schlock-a pastiche of video feed from news programs, local and national; a five-year-old travelogue for some cable channel; and, yes, a series of public service announcements about the life of Poe that had run during Channel 54’s Vincent Price Weekend.

But the climax, for want of a better word, was a locally produced video in which Poe appeared before a boy touring the museum with his school chums. The actor playing Poe was fine, but his young co-star was not what is called a natural. He stood rooted to the spot, hurling his lines across an imaginary home plate as if some coach were clocking the speed with a radar gun.

“People-say-you-were-crazy-were-you?”

Poe gave the boy a kindly smile and assured him he was not.

The information conveyed was actually quite solid, a more nuanced view of Poe than most short treatments allowed. In the end, as Poe began to disappear, courtesy of some pretty cheesy special effects, the now forlorn little boy called out to his new friend, “Where can I find you?”

“In the books, Michael. In the books.”

Gretchen was giggling so hard she was on the verge of a coughing fit, and even Tess had to allow, “Well, it’s not Hamlet, nor was it meant to be. It’s pretty accurate, though.”

But neither it nor anything else in the museum made any mention of a gold bug or a memento mori of the beloved Virginia.

They trooped downstairs, where they found the Poe docent on a cell phone, a Daily Racing Form open in front of him on one of the glass display cases. “And in the fifth tomorrow-” His normal speaking voice was considerably higher than his Poe voice, and a little nasal. “Wait, I’ll have to call you back.” He straightened up, tucked the cell phone in his breast pocket, and was Poe again.

“Did you find everything to your satisfaction, ladies?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tess said. “Look, I specifically had asked my uncle to ask Jeff Jerome if there was any research that suggested Poe owned a locket which included a strand of Virginia Clemm’s hair. He said he was going to check with someone else, who was better on the Poe artifacts than he was.”

“Yes, Jeff Savoye. I talked to him on my way over here, and he said he’s never heard of anything like it. He was quite dubious. He keeps a master list of Poe artifacts on the museum’s Web site, noting where they can be found. And in some cases, noting where they were last housed, before they ”disappeared.“”

“And the idea of a gold bug, a small stickpin of a bug with jeweled eyes, given to Poe to commemorate his story by the same name-”

“He was even more dubious. If Poe had been given such a precious bauble, he surely would have been forced to sell it at some point. He lived hand-to-mouth.”

“Even if it were of sentimental value?”

“Poe was a writer. He couldn’t afford sentiment.”

“But if such things were found, if they could be authenticated-”

“They would be of great interest to us, or the museum in Richmond, or the one in Philadelphia -”

“Jesus,” Gretchen asked. “How many museums does one poet need, anyway?”

The docent eyed her warily. “In the case of Edgar Allan Poe, I think three is barely adequate.”

Gretchen rolled her eyes, and Tess pinched her.

“How could such things be authenticated? Assuming they existed.”

The docent ran his finger around his collar as if it itched. “That’s not really my field, but I suppose you’d need some sort of document-correspondence from Poe or someone close to him-alluding to the items. Even then, you could never really know. Proving historical facts in dispute is tricky. Take Poe’s death, for example. It is possible to eliminate certain theories or to poke holes in them. But the actual cause will never be established.”

“Why don’t they dig him up and use modern science to examine his remains?” Tess asked.

“And get the monument right while they’re at it,” Gretchen muttered, still bearing a grudge against some long-dead carver.

“To what end? It’s not like there’s blood and tissue samples left after all these years. Some things are meant to remain mysteries.”

But Tess could not agree with this last bit, not in this case.

She and Gretchen walked out into the bitter-cold night, looking around carefully before getting back into their rental car. Tess thought she caught a wisp of a smile on Gretchen’s lopsided face.

“What?” she asked. “What?”

“People-say-you-were-crazy-were-you?” Gretchen shouted, in perfect imitation of “Michael.”

“Yes,” Tess said. “Yes, I clearly am. So look for me in the books, Michael. In the booooooooooooooks!”

They began laughing, almost hysterically, the kind of joy jag that was dangerously close to tears. Because Tess knew, and suspected Gretchen knew as well, that Arnold Pitts would not be waiting for them back at the hospital. Doped up on Percoset, his left leg in a cast, he had still managed to send them on a wild-goose chase while he hobbled off into the night, enjoying one last laugh at their expense.