In A Strange City

Chapter 31

Are you sure?“ the mystified classified clerk at the City Paper had asked. She had already read the ad back three times and hadn’t gotten it right once. ”I mean, it’s a lot of words, and it’s not like most of the things we run in our “Misconnected‘ section. Usually, they’re a little more direct, you know?”

Tess had felt perversely flattered that the clerk even cared. This youngish-sounding woman had been a bored automaton when their conversation had started. Now the mask of boredom had slipped, and she was no longer in such a rush to take Tess’s ad and money and get her off the phone.

“More direct? You mean something like: ”You: Black cloak, roses, cognac. Me: Braid, vintage tweed coat, Smith amp; Wesson. Glimpsed at Westminster Hall on Jan. 19 and then-nevermore.“”

“That’s a little better,” the clerk had conceded. “But you could get the word count down. You don’t really need the ”nevermore‘ part because, like, he knows, right? After all, if you’d seen the guy since then, you wouldn’t be placing an ad. Also, my advice? Lose the poetry.“

Tess had looked at the lines she had penned on a legal pad at her kitchen table. It read:

From the same source I have not taken My sorrow I could not awaken, My heart to joy at the same tone, And all I loved, I loved alone.

These were the four lines dropped from the poem “Alone,” the last written missive from her Visitor, whoever he was.

After much pencil-chewing, literal and figurative, Tess had added her own quatrain:

Just because a man’s a stranger Doesn’t mean he can avoid all danger Meet me tomorrow at 6, the usual place, I know your secret-you know my face.

“I’ll stick to my version,” she told the clerk firmly.

“It’s way too vague, I’m telling you. You need to be specific to get results.”

“Well, there’s always next week, isn’t there, and another chance to get it right.”

She hung up, but Tess wasn’t done. She had index cards printed with the same doggerel and she set out with Esskay and Miata, posting them in her usual haunts. If someone had been following her all those weeks, he had been to these places, too. She walked down to the Daily Grind, where Travis agreed to tape the card to the cash register, sharing a conspiratorial wink with her. She crossed the street to Video Americain, where another card joined the jumble of ads for music lessons and apartment shares and yard sales. By the end of the day, her exercise in verse had gone up in the two supermarkets she frequented, Kitty’s bookstore, the boxing gym where she lifted weights, and the “Andy Hardy” liquor store, a neighborhood joint that had earned that nickname because the owners were peppy enthusiastic kids who didn’t look old enough to be drinking wine, much less selling it.

The index cards specified the date they were to meet. The City Paper came out on Wednesday, so “tomorrow” should be clearly understood. Not that Tess was optimistic about getting a response. It seemed just as probable that he would use the time to go to her office or her home. So Crow would be in the house on East Lane, listening for approaching footsteps while he worked in the kitchen. And Daniel had volunteered to park across the street from her office in Butchers Hill, watching for the man to show up there.

Finally, Whitney was to shadow her to Westminster, her only backup now that Gretchen had blown her off. Not that Tess feared this man, whoever he was. Clearly, he was the frightened one.

It was out of consideration for him that she had chosen 6 p.m., when the early nightfall provided cover yet the downtown streets were not yet deserted. The traffic, street and foot, would still be heavy-civil servants rushing home to the suburbs, university types heading to their apartments. She hoped he understood this. She cared only for his safety. His safety and his anonymity. But if he held the secret to a murder, he had to come forward.

Now it was Thursday night, and she was alone in the graveyard. The sign said the grounds closed at dusk, but the unlocked gates invited one to ignore this rule. Tess watched the minute hand of the Bromo-Seltzer clock slowly reaching toward 12. She had debated whether she should wait by the memorial, which had so vexed Gretchen with its wrong date, or the original burial place, which is where the Visitor had laid his gifts. She chose the latter, but there was no bench in its immediate vicinity. Feeling it would be sacrilegious to perch on one of the old family crypts nearby, she began to pace. Then she decided she would look threatening if she kept moving back and forth in this way, so she willed herself to stand still, which made it harder to keep warm. The night was unexpectedly bitter, February strutting its stuff, reminding Baltimoreans that it was short but strong.

Six o’clock came and went, then six-fifteen and six-thirty. Thirty minutes made a profound difference in the neighborhood, and Tess was beginning to lose that comforting end-of-workday bustle she had so counted on. At six-forty-five, she was ready to get out her cell phone and tell Whitney to abort when she saw a tall figure coming toward her, up the steps that led from the law school construction site. The man’s head was down, but he held his hands to his mouth in a gesture she remembered. He glanced at her, slowed his stride for a few steps, and then his gait quickened again. He was rushing, trying to get by her without breaking into an out-and-out run.

“Wait,” Tess called out. “Please wait. I must speak to you.”

The man glanced over his shoulder and then began running in earnest, heading for the Greene Street gate. Tess punched the speed dial button for Whitney’s cell phone and yelled “ Greene Street,” even as she took off after the running man.

It was unclear if Whitney, who had been roaming the perimeter, heard the hoarse shout over the phone or cutting through the night air. She appeared at the side gate within seconds. In her long black trench coat, her blond hair blowing in the wind, she could have risen from the pages of a Poe short story. The running man veered off course, heading for the old catacombs. He had to duck so low that he was practically on his hands and knees. Whitney started to follow him, but Tess called out, “Go around, go around! Cut him off on the other side; I’ll go under.”

She had to bend almost double to work her way through the catacombs, and she stumbled a few times, then bumped her head when she tried to right herself. The man had reached the church’s front yard ahead of Whitney, but she beat him to the front gate. His way to Fayette Street blocked, he turned sharply to the right and ran straight toward the spiked iron fence. With one look back at Tess, he jumped on top of an old crypt so he could gain a handhold on the fence’s spires. He was almost over when Tess caught him by the belt and pulled him back to earth. It had not been her plan to let him land on her, knocking the wind out of both of them, but it worked.

After several stunned seconds, he rolled off, covering his head as if he expected blows to rain down on him.

“Don’t hurt me,” he yelled. “Please, please, don’t hurt me.”

“Why’d you come, just to run away from us?” Tess said, her lungs burning from the frigid air.

The man was young, with pitted skin, matted hair, and the pallor of an overworked graduate student. “Jesus,” he said, almost weeping in fear. “I won’t do it anymore, okay? I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but if you’re going to be like this-”

“You’re going to stop coming to the grave? But that’s the last thing I wanted.”

“I only did it because it’s a good shortcut to the parking garage over on Eutaw. I know the cemetery closes at dusk, but I never saw the harm, cutting through here when I was trying to get to my car. Jesus, couldn’t you give a guy a written warning or something? Did you have to go straight to deadly force? The city cops are nicer than you rent-a-goons!”

Tess was still sprawled on the ground, pressing her midsection in various spots to see if the groveling graduate student had done any serious damage when he had fallen on her. Whitney looked appalled, although it was hard to tell if it was because they had assaulted a shortcutting graduate student or because the student had mistaken her for a campus cop.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It was a case of mistaken identity. But you are tall, and you did have your hands up to your face.”

“What does that have to do with anything? I lost my gloves last week,” he said, holding up hands that were almost blue. “I was blowing on them to keep them warm. That’s part of the reason I cut through, so I won’t have to walk so far in the cold.”

Whitney took off her black suede gloves and threw them to the student. “Fleece-lined,” she said. “Probably big enough, too, given how large my hands are, and styled in such a way no one will ever know they’re women’s gloves. But you ought to get a hat. It’s true what they say about the body’s heat escaping through the head.”

The student hesitated for a moment, but then put the gloves on and-with one last, bewildered look at the always-bareheaded Whitney, who was backlit by the pinkish glow from one of the sodium-vapor streetlights-took off through the Fayette Street gate.

“Why did you do that?” Tess asked.

“I figured it would keep him from going to the school or the police and making an official complaint. You did attack him, after all. Besides”-Whitney arched a single eyebrow-“I’d give up a lot more than a pair of suede gloves to watch you yank a two-hundred-pound guy on top of you. Funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks.”

Later, in the Owl Bar, of which Crow was growing inordinately fond, Tess found that almost anything was funny after a few drinks. Whitney had already spun the story into a lengthy monologue, and Tess realized she would be hearing it again and again. Being the butt of a joke didn’t bother her.

The abject failure of her mission was a different matter.

“After all,” Crow said, trying to console her, “the Visitor can’t know for sure that it’s you who’s leaving the note. Even if he saw your index cards or the ad, he was probably too scared to come forward.”

“He has to know the ad was from me. That’s why I restored the missing lines from the poem. Only he and I know about that.”

“He, you, and Rainer,” Daniel corrected. “You turned all that stuff over to the cops, right?”

“Right,” Tess said. “But do you think any Baltimore cop ran out and got a copy of Poe and looked up the missing lines?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Daniel said. “Your Visitor doesn’t trust you. Maybe it was Ensor, after all. I thought this was a good plan, but I’m convinced now that nothing is going to flush this guy out.”

The four stared glumly into their drinks. They were seated along the bar, under the watchful gaze of the carved owls, and Tess felt mocked by their blinking amber gaze. She preferred the stained-glass owls, who were not so superior-looking.

“ ”The less he spoke, the more he heard,“” she murmured. “I wish I knew how that finishes up.”

“”Which is what makes him a wise old bird,“” Daniel said.

Tess looked at him. “You didn’t know the end of the poem the last time we were here.”

“I looked it up,” he said. “What’s the point of being a librarian if you don’t know how to look something up?”

“On the Internet?” Whitney asked.

“No, not on the Internet,” Daniel said, his tone dismissive. “I’m no Luddite, but half the stuff there is urban myth, linked and relinked, until you can’t be sure what the source is. I found this in a database from the Beacon-Light.”

“A newspaper?” Whitney’s hoot was perfect for the Owl Bar. “You don’t trust the Internet, but you think a newspaper gets things right? You are an innocent.”

“Maybe,” Daniel said. “But the newspaper computer databases have the corrections appended. That’s why I rely on them.”

“You’re assuming every error is corrected.” Whitney, never shy under any circumstances, leaned across Crow and wagged a finger in Daniel’s face. “Half the time, people don’t even bother to call, they just take it. Readers are the first to accept this ”first-draft-of-history‘ crap; they figure the first draft always has a few errors.“

“It wasn’t just the newspaper.” Daniel defended himself. “I found a travel guide about Baltimore that verified it.”

“Oh, a book,” Whitney said, sniffing. “That’s only marginally better. What if the book depended on the newspaper article? Books make mistakes, too. Give me primary documents every time.”

“The boooooks,” Tess said, giggling to herself, for the others weren’t in on this private joke. Only Gretchen knew about the video at the Poe House. And only Gretchen could say that word so disdainfully. “Look for me in the boooooks, Michael.”

Her laugh stopped as suddenly as it started, prompting a concerned look from Crow. He probably thought she had been drinking too much. Tess didn’t know how to tell him that her senses had never been sharper, her mind more acute. She should have figured it out long ago. All the answers were in plain sight. All the answers were in the books.