In A Strange City

Chapter 33

The last note-and Tess never doubted it would be the last-arrived a month to the day after that night. It was direct and simple, incapable of misinterpretation.

Please meet me at 1 p.m. today in Green Mount Cemetery, behind the obelisk. You’ll know it when you see it.

She wondered if the March date had any significance. Was it yet another Poe allusion destined to fly over her head, or under her radar, or wherever it was that such things flew? She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect.

The day was fair, almost warm. The year’s stepchildren-March, November-had shown signs of surprisingly sweet temperaments lately, while the once-reliable months of May and September had become unruly and bratty. She found a groundskeeper sitting on a bench, eating a sub, and he rolled his eyes at her interruption but pointed the way.

“No dogs allowed,” he called after her.

“She’s a Seeing Eye dog,” Tess said, of the Doberman by her side.

“You don’t look blind.”

“Visually impaired,” she corrected.

“That either,” he said. But he let her go, rather than disturb his lunch.

The grave behind the obelisk turned out to be where John Wilkes Booth was buried. This gave Tess a moment of trepidation-it was an assassin’s grave, after all-and she felt for the comforting shape of the gun in her coat pocket. She had been doing that a lot lately. Her gun was turning into a grown-up version of a child’s “blankie,” one of those tiny scraps of cloth carried far too long. She wondered if her gun would become similarly worn in spots, from all this talismanic touching.

The note had specified 1 p.m., but it did not surprise her when ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. If he were clever-and whoever he was, he was clearly clever-he would make sure she had come alone, check the cemetery for exits and entrances. Green Mount, one of the city’s oldest graveyards, was an expansive ramble of a place, and it would be easy to elude someone here. The trick was staying alive in the depressed neighborhood that surrounded it.

Finally, a tall figure approached. Not in a cape this time, but in the most ordinary trench coat, a belted London Fog. His head was bare in the sun, his hair that shiny, stiff old-man white that made Tess think of dental floss. The silken scarf at his neck was whiter still. He must not have realized how warm it was.

Up close, his face was familiar, but perhaps that was a trick of its very ordinariness. Still-

“We’ve met, haven’t we?” she asked.

He inclined his head in a formal bow. “Several times.”

She studied him, took in the hollows in his cheeks, the bristling eyebrows, the thin lips. But hair could be dyed, especially when it was that snowy white. Voices could change.

“The Norwegian radio reporter.”

“Ja,” he said with a nod. “Would you tell me your hourly rate? May I see your gun?”

“And… the gentleman who came to the jewelry store that day, the self-important one with the monocle and the same silk scarf you’re wearing now.”

He harrumphed, as the man in Gummere Brothers had, all gruff and pompous, and adjusted the scarf at his neck.

“Anywhere else?”

“I sure do like a turkey sammich,” he said, his voice a credible alto, as opposed to the silly falsetto most men affect when trying to imitate a woman. Tess was in Cross Street Market, buying a sub for a homeless woman. A beat, and his voice was now that of a streetwise young man, hanging outside KFC on a winter’s evening, the one who had answered her desperate call. “I just gotta know, you know?”

Then, in what appeared to be his own voice: “I also was in the Paper Moon one morning, when you came in with your boyfriend and ended up quarreling with that other girl. But that was a coincidence, the kind peculiar to Baltimore. I eat there all the time. I like the sweet-potato cottage fries, and I-” He stopped, flustered.

“Yes,” Tess said, letting him off the hook, knowing he had been about to say that he lived near there, which was more than he intended to tell. “Tiny Town.”

An awkward silence fell, an awkwardness peculiar to the voyeur and the viewed. Tess could not help wondering what else he had seen and observed while tracking her. She also felt vaguely foolish. She had not only bought him a sandwich, she had bought the idea that he was a woman. She had given him an interview, watching him struggle comically with his tape recorder, and asking him to repeat his questions because his accent was almost indecipherable. In Gum-mere Brothers, they had looked past each other, intent on their own missions. If he had been self-important- well, so had she, and it hadn’t been an act with her.

“You’re a good actor,” she said.

“Not good enough, I’m afraid,” he said. “The stage was my ambition, but I ended up teaching indifferent students instead.”

“At a city high school?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Tess assumed this meant she was right.

“Why the notes? Why not come forward or just pick up a phone and tell the police what you knew? Why did you have to involve me in this?”

“I did come forward. I came forward that very first night. Well, the next morning. I showed up at the police station and told the homicide detective I had been watching from Fayette when I heard the shooting and that I tried to follow one of the fleeing men. I described my own flight to them, to make sure they knew I couldn’t have done it. But I really didn’t see anything, and I wasn’t ready to tell them about… the other.”

The other. She waited, knowing he would explain. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and unwrapped it. Inside were a simple white-gold chain and the gold bug stickpin. Seen in a store, they would appear interesting, nothing more. But Tess knew their story, knew whose pockets they had lined, as well as the price everyone had paid. How quickly Bobby’s joy at owning them must have turned into fear. After all, he knew what Daniel Clary was capable of, when he really wanted something. The bug’s sapphire eyes caught the pale March sun, seeming to glow off and on, like the amber eyes of the owls in the Owl Bar.

The less you spoke, the more you heard.

Tess picked up the chain and then motioned to Mi-ata to sit. She knelt before her, using a small pair of pliers to remove the locket, then fasten it to the chain where it belonged. The dog had guarded her treasure all this time, but she was ready to give it up. Tess just wasn’t sure if she herself was ready. “They” are worth killing for, he had told her on the phone, the night Yea-ger was found dead. She had held the locket back from the police, waiting for the plural to assert itself. Waiting to see if the Visitor would do the right thing, and reunite the locket with its chain.

So far, so good.

“How did you know to send me to the library? Did you know about Daniel? Or did you want me to find the plaque on Mulberry Street, the one about John Pendleton Kennedy?”

“Neither. I just wanted you to learn something about Poe-and Bobby Hilliard.”

“You knew each other?”

“We met only once, but I didn’t realize it until he was dead. As for Bobby Hilliard, I’m not sure he ever made the connection. But perhaps I inspired him to pass the objects on to my alter ego. I can only hope.”

He walked to a nearby bench and sat, inviting Tess to join him. She hesitated for a moment, then followed. Miata lay at their feet, propping her chin on Tess’s boot.

“Bobby and I met, in fact, at the Paper Moon last December. The lack of all-night eateries in Baltimore does narrow one’s options, doesn’t it? I was feeling melancholy and sorry for myself and had gone there in the middle of the night in a fit of insomnia. A young man was at the counter, and I could tell he was anxious and unhappy. As I said, I taught for many years; I’m attuned to the moods of the young. We were both sitting at the counter, a stool apart, bursting with our secrets. I found myself asking if he knew much about Poe, and he looked at me as if I had just thrown scalding water on him. But he said yes, a little hesitantly, he was interested in Poe, although he cared more about him as a historical figure than he did about his work. He told me he had worked in the Poe Room for a brief time. He asked me what I knew about him, and I’m afraid I launched into the most tiresome little speech. Before I knew it, I was reciting poetry.”

Tess could imagine the scene-the empty diner, an uninterested line cook, and the two men, sitting a stool apart, honoring the unwritten rules of personal space. Two lost souls who had stumbled into one of Baltimore ’s few all-night way stations.

“But he seemed so interested,” the man said, as if he felt the need to defend himself to someone. To her? To himself? “He asked me questions about Poe’s life. He asked me if I had heard the theory that Poe had objects of value on him when he died, that he might have been drugged and beaten as part of a robbery. I was listening, and yet I wasn’t listening. I rambled on, so sure I had finally found someone to whom I could pass the torch. I asked him… I asked him…”

His voice faltered, crippled by embarrassment. Tess waited.

“I asked him to come home with me that night. In my excitement at finding someone I believed to be a kindred spirit, I envisioned showing him my props, asking if he wanted to assume the mantle, if you will. He quite misinterpreted my invitation. He was kind; it was clear he had had some experience in saying no to such invitations, and perhaps saying yes to others. I tried not to be hurt that I warranted such an automatic refusal.”

“Are you-” Tess fished for the right word.

“Gay? No, but still one doesn’t want to be rejected so summarily. At any rate, I didn’t realize whom I had met until he was dead. I never saw him again.”

“Well”-Tess tried to frame the correction as gently as possible-“you saw him at least one more time. He came to the grave site. He told a lie, and it became a plan. He told Arnold Pitts that he had given you the gold bug and the locket. He repeated the same story to Daniel Clary. Then he realized he could do just that. It never occurred to him that Pitts would try to uncover your identity or that Daniel Clary would stake out the grave site. He never meant to harm anyone.”

“Daniel Clary-the librarian, right? I read about him in the newspapers. How is he?”

“Alive, but probably wishing he was dead. He has second-degree burns over his face and hands. The criminal justice system won’t do anything to Daniel Clary that’s anywhere near as bad as what he’s done to himself.”

“Oh, yes, it can; it already has,” he said. “It can take away his things.”

Tess was thinking about Daniel Clary and Shawn Hayes, both caught in the twilight world of intensive care. The children of Shawn Hayes simply could not give up hope, and the legal implications of their decision-that he might die outside the year-and-a-day time frame necessary to charge Daniel Clary with his homicide-meant little to them. Rainer didn’t care. He had his clearances. Hilliard was the only name on the board that mattered to him, and it was now carried in black. As was the Yeager case. Now if only they could do something about the other forty homicides that had already occurred in Baltimore this year.

“Speaking of things-” His voice was tentative.

“Yes?”

“They’re not mine, are they? I don’t get to keep them.”

Tess looked at the objects now on his lap but still spread out in his handkerchief. She touched the locket, marveling at the fact that it could have been in Poe’s hand once, that the fine design might contain a lock of Virginia Poe’s hair. She almost-almost-understood their power. Over Daniel Clary, over Hayes and Pitts and Ensor, over Bobby Hilliard, who so liked pretty things and cared nothing for their pedigree.

“That’s the reason, isn’t it?”

“The reason?”

“For your notes, your elliptical clues. You wanted to do the right thing, but you didn’t want to surrender these items. You hoped Bobby Hilliard’s killer might be caught, and you could keep the chain and the bug. Although the chain isn’t worth anything without the locket, and the bug’s pedigree can never be established. Poe’s admirer, assuming she ever existed, was much too proper a nineteenth-century lady to leave behind any evidence that she had given him this.”

“But it must have been dear to him, or else he would have sold it. He was so poor, it’s touching to think he had such a fantastic bauble on him at the time of his death. Perhaps he died trying to protect these very things.”

“Assuming,” Tess said, “he ever had them. It’s a legend, nothing more. Like many of the theories about Poe’s death, it can never be proven.”

“Still.” He held the bug aloft, turning it in the light. “You’re just trying to make me feel better about giving them back.”

“It’s up to you if you take any solace in doing the right thing. The fact that you asked me to meet you here suggests to me that you know what you must do. Either that, or you thought I would give you permission to walk away with the gold bug in your pocket. But I can’t. They don’t belong to you. They don’t belong to me. They should be someplace where everyone can see them and debate their significance. Think of the joy it will bring to Poe scholars to have something new to argue about.”

She thought of Ensor and Hayes, trying to corner the market on “Baltimore-bilia.” She thought of Pitts, foisting fakes off on his partners. Then along came Daniel Clary, who stole their precious contraband, convinced that only he was worthy of these items. Where would it have ended; when would they have been satisfied? What can break the deadly chain of such acquisitiveness?

He folded the handkerchief and handed it to Tess with a sigh. “I tried to tell myself that I had earned them, in a way. For my service. But the rationalization won’t hold, I know. I had them for two months. I give them to you now, hoping my show of good faith will inspire you to do the right thing.”

“To keep your secret.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know your name, only your face. I can infer you once taught high school and you live in North Baltimore, but that’s about it.”

“That’s more than anyone else knows. Besides, you could follow me when I leave here. Or you could take out your gun and demand my wallet, in order to examine my driver’s license.”

“Do you really think I would do that?”

He smiled. “No. No, I don’t. But now that you know what you know, do you think-could you be tempted…”

It took her a moment to figure out what he was asking. “To take your place? I think not. It’s too much of a commitment, year in and year out.”

“Yes. I wish I had understood that when I started. Well, so it goes. Eventually, I’ll find someone. Now that young man I’ve seen with you, he seems-”

“No!” Tess said. Crow would be all too happy to be recruited into this secret club. She saw an eternity of January nineteenths stretching out before them, saw Westminster Hall as the fixed point in their lives, saw Crow buying roses and cognac until he was as old as the man before her. “No.”

“Well, then, I’ll have to find someone else.” He checked his scarf, patted his pockets as if looking for car keys. “I’m off. I trust you to turn those things in to the proper authorities. I’ll let you be the judge of who they might be. I hope”-his voice was suddenly wistful-“I hope they end up somewhere I might see them again, every now and then.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He made his way down the hill. He had a slight wobble to his walk, an unsteadiness that suggested his age, whatever it was, might be catching up to him. Tess willed herself not to watch him go. She didn’t want to know what kind of car he drove or in which direction he might head. She knew so much more than she wanted to. About Poe. About people and the things of which they were capable. One of Poe’s favorite themes, actually.

She looked at the bug, which was clearly of great value, if only for its gold and sapphires, and tucked it into the breast pocket of her coat. She opened the locket. To touch something Poe might have touched, an item he would have cherished above all others-what did it mean?

It meant nothing. It meant far too much. She wanted to be immune to the sickness that had seized all these men-Clary, Pitts, Ensor, Hayes, even Bobby-but she knew she was susceptible as well. Most of us are. We might not kill for things, but we make other concessions to materialism. We rack up debt, we marry rich, we stay in jobs we hate. “The sickness that is living,” Poe had written, but Tess would change that to “The sickness that is acquiring.” Which was not living at all but a kind of walking death, pharaohs so intent on perfecting their tombs that they never knew life at all.

She would stop by her office, put these items in her wall safe, and figure out what to do with them later.

And then-why, then she was going to go to Nouveau on Charles Street and splurge on those cunning little drawer pulls, the ones shaped like starfish. The maple cabinets in her kitchen were finally finished, and Crow had started regrouting the bathtub just that morning. He thought green tile for the floor, but she preferred the old-fashioned black-and-white pattern, the style used in the house where she had grown up, a house now lost to the ages.

Baltimore (AP)-An anonymous donor has bequeathed two pieces of possible Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia to the Maryland Mu-sheum, a little-known institution even here in its hometown.

The articles in question are a “mourning” locket, or memento mori, believed to contain the hair of Virginia Clemm, Poe’s cousin and child bride, and a one-of-a-kind gold bug stickpin, alleged to be a gift to Poe from a female admirer.

One theory holds that Poe had these items with him when he died in Baltimore on October 19, 1849.

Serious Poe scholars attacked this idea almost immediately pointing out there is no evidence linking the jewelry to Poe. Neither item is mentioned in Poe’s correspondence, nor in the letters of Marie Clemm, Virginia ’s mother. And, although the items are consistent with jewelry design of the early- to mid-nineteenth century even open-minded scholars concede their authenticity will never be established. If Poe had jewelry on him at the time of his death, it was most likely a wedding ring for Elmira Shelton, whom he hoped to marry.

“I don’t care if they can’t be authenticated,” said Mary Yerkes, who runs the Maryland Mu-sheum. “I am delighted to own them and will even abide by the donor’s conditions, although they are not legally binding.”

The anonymous donor not only requested that the items be placed on permanent display-with the exception of loans to other museums-but also stipulated that the Mu-sheum must change its name, according to the computer-generated note that accompanied the items, “to anything else, absolutely anything, as long as it doesn’t have a pun in it.”