In A Strange City

Chapter 3

Next time,“ Tess told Crow, her fatigue so pronounced it made her entire body ache, ”remind me to run in the other direction when I hear a gunshot.“

“But it’s professional ethics, right?” he asked, even as he tried to figure out a way to place his long frame across the hard plastic bench and put his head in Tess’s lap. “You felt obligated to see what happened and then try to control things until police arrived. Besides, the guy might have been alive.”

“Okay, next time shoot me when I hear a gunshot. I could go the rest of my life without seeing the inside of this police department and be quite happy.”

The homicide cop who had caught the Poe murder was named Rainer, Jay Rainer. Tess knew him just well enough to dislike him. He had been a traffic cop when their paths first crossed a few years back. In a different era, he never would have made the homicide squad, but the city police department was still reeling from the destructive free-for-all management style of the penultimate police commissioner. The cops had liked to say he was more coroner than cop; he had treated everyone working for him like a body. Homicide cops had gone to robbery vice cops were on patrol, and traffic cops like Rainer were now in homicide.

“It’s no wonder,” Tess said on a yawn, “that the clearance rates for homicide are at an all-time low. I hear if there’s not a two-ton Chevy with blood on the bumper, Rainer doesn’t have a clue what to do.”

“I’m a big fan of yours too, Miss Monaghan.”

Rainer was standing in the corridor with one of the last witnesses from the church, who were presumed to have had the best view of the shooting. It was a presumption that Tess was happy to let stand, although it meant she had been waiting for hours to give her statement. Trust the city police department to have coffee so overcooked it was almost sour, and powdered creamer that came only in flavors-amaretto and crème de men-the. Wimps, Tess thought, frowning into her Styrofoam cup and feeling the twisted shame of the exposed gossip. She had only been expressing the opinion of another homicide cop, Martin Tull. Her only friend in the department, Tull respected her and trusted her instincts. It was their standing joke that he might leave the department and come work for her, although she barely made enough money to keep Esskay in dog food.

But inside the department, Tull was a go-along, get-along kind of guy. If Rainer figured out she had lifted the bumper line from Tull, it would be bad for him. So she swallowed it, she owned it.

“Good morning, Detective.”

“You know, I think I’ve had a few nightmares like this,” Rainer said.

“Being immersed in Poe has made you melodramatic, Detective,” Tess replied, trying to stifle a yawn. “We don’t know each other well enough to figure in each other’s dreams, good or bad.”

“And even if you did”-this was Crow, his usual laid-back demeanor pricked by the thought of Tess appearing in another man’s dream-“you ought to consider whether a Freudian or Jungian interpretation is more appropriate. My guess is that Tess represents your lost animus, the feminine side of your personality.”

Rainer had to think about this, which required his mouth to drop open. After a few seconds, the rusty hinge on his jaw clamped shut and he motioned Tess to follow him to the interrogation room.

“He’s not exactly Monsieur Dupuis,” the previous witness whispered to Tess as they passed in the hallway, and Tess nodded absently. The woman was a poetry teacher from Hood College who had lobbied hard for one of the coveted church spots and driven sixty miles for the privilege of watching a homicide. Context kicked in, and Tess realized the Poe aficionado must be referring to the detective in Poe’s stories, the one who had solved the murders in the Rue Morgue.

Funny, but she had never been in an interview room before, not in her hometown of Baltimore. She had been questioned at crime scenes, volunteered information at her aunt’s kitchen table-in fact, that was where she and Rainer had first met, when he was a lazy traffic investigator determined to believe a dead man in the alley was the careless work of an after-hours drunk instead of the premeditated homicide it really was. She had waited in the hallways here while police officers solidified leads she had brought them. But she had never sat in the famed “box.”

I am not a suspect, she told herself again. I am not a troublemaker. I am a witness.

“What are you thinking?” Rainer asked her.

“How much it is like that show, right down to the amber tile walls and the desk with the handcuffs attached.” The lie was reflexive, a knee-jerk reaction to authority. “I thought television always got it wrong.”

“Aw, Homicide was a piece of shit. I was glad when they took it off the air.” It was a heretical statement for a Baltimorean to make, but then Rainer clearly wasn’t a Baltimorean. Tess couldn’t place the accent. It was rough and crude, a northeastern caw without the round, full o sounds and errant r‘s that make the local patois difficult even for gifted mimics. Tess’s mother had somehow kept Tess from acquiring one, and Tess supposed she was grateful. But it would be nice to put one on, from time to time.

“It’s not off the air. It’s in reruns on cable,” Tess said. She wasn’t sure if this was true, but it was too much fun, yanking Rainer’s chain. Also too easy. If she hadn’t been so tired, she wouldn’t have bothered.

“Yeah, well, I’ll call you next time I need to know what I want to watch on TV. You’re a walking channel guide. But right now we got other things to talk about. Why were you down at Westminster Hall tonight?”

If Tess’s first lie to Rainer had been automatic, the second was thoughtful and measured. Yes, she knew something, but she wasn’t sure what it was, and she didn’t want to entrust information to Rainer under those circumstances.

“Just witnessing a Baltimore ritual. I’ve lived here all my life and never visited Poe’s grave, much less seen the Visitor. That’s akin to never going to Fort McHenry or watching the Orioles play.”

“Bunch of bums.” Rainer frowned. “I hate the American League.”

“Where did you grow up, Detective?”

“ Jersey. I’m a Mets fan. Remember 1969?”

“You’ve got my DOB in front of you, you do the math.”

Her voice was nonchalant, but Tess seethed at the question. Her father and his five brothers had schooled her carefully in the key dates of Baltimore sports history: 1958-Colts win the championship; 1966-Orioles sweep the Dodgers; 1972-Frank Robinson traded; 1979-The “We Are Family” series in Pittsburgh; 1984-Colts leave town in the middle of the night in a Mayflower moving van. But 1969?-1969 was Pearl Harbor times three, a nadir in Baltimore sports history imprinted in every native’s genetic code. The Colts’ loss to the Jets, the Bullets’ loss to the Knicks, the Orioles’ loss to the Mets. Tess might not remember the year, but she had relived it at the 20th mark, the 25th, and the 30th, and would probably be around for its 50th. And it would probably still hurt.

“So anyway, you decide, being Miss Charm City personified, that it’s your duty to go and watch whoever this weirdo is who goes to the grave every year?” charm city personified-that had been the headline on an item about her in a lighter-than-air puff piece in the Beacon-Light eons ago. Not a good sign, Rainer knowing this. He had been keeping tabs on her. To what purpose?

“More or less.”

“And then what happens?”

“Two cloaked figures converged on the grave.” Even if she was willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she’d never dream of letting Rainer know she had-briefly-imagined she was witnessing Poe’s ghost. “I heard a shot. One fell; one ran.”

“Which way did he run?”

She replayed the moment in her mind, then tried to square it with the grid of the city at large. North and south came easily but she always needed a minute to orient herself to east and west. Rainer assumed she was stalling.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to be like the gang in the church. One of those guys has watched this thing almost every year for twenty-five years, and he suddenly gets all vague, like he’s not sure what direction the guy came from or how he got into the graveyard. Six people, and not one of ‘em sees anything. You tell me that’s a coincidence. They’re protecting this guy, which is sick. What if he’s the killer?”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t have to tell you what I think. Now, were you the first one to reach the body?”

“My boyfriend, Crow, was a few steps ahead of me.” Crow had less experience with the dead than Tess did, and therefore less reticence in such situations. “He found the pulse at the neck-rather, he found there was no pulse. We kept the other people back as they began drifting over, and I called 911 on my cell. Someone inside the church called too, I think.”

“You see anyone else?”

“The people in the church came out, and someone- the curator, I guess-took the cognac and the roses and put them in the church for safekeeping. And I saw some cars parked, motors running, a few people along the street. I’m not sure how many stayed, once the shot was heard.”

Rainer grimaced. “Almost none. Citizens! People don’t even know what that word means anymore. They see a crime, all they can think is what a pain in the ass it is to them. It’s just so inconvenient, watching a guy get killed. One family stayed; the kid was going to write a term paper. He sure got more material than he bargained for. But they were parked on Fayette, didn’t see much.”

“Have you identified the dead man?” Tess had turned her back on him, unwilling to dwell on his features. Any morbid curiosity she might have had about death was long gone. The victim had looked young, with a thin white face that would not have been out of place in a Poe story. But mainly he had looked much too young to be dead.

“Tentatively. He had ID on him, but we still need to find someone who can verify it. Family is from western Pennsylvania. I’ll call them after the sun’s up, let them have the last good night of sleep they’ll have in a while.”

An unexpected bit of thoughtfulness on Rainer’s part, which made Tess unbend a little. Then she remembered he was a Mets fan, from New Jersey yet, and that he called it “ Jersey,” which made it worse still.

“Is he-is there any way of knowing-?”

“What?”

“Well, is he the real thing or a wannabe? The real turtle soup or merely the mock, as Cole Porter would say.”

“Huh?” She had made Rainer’s jaw unhinge again, affording her a full view of his teeth, which were at once small yet cramped, overlapping each other in all directions, as if he had forty instead of the usual thirty-two. No orthodontia for little Jay Rainer. Somehow, that was probably her fault too.

“Two visitors came to the grave tonight,” she said patiently. “One, presumably, is the real thing, one of the men who’s been doing it since the ritual started in 1949. The other was a fake. Since we’ve never known who the real one is, how can we know which one died?”

“That’s not exactly at the top of my priority list,” Rainer said. “I gotta solve a homicide, not figure which Baltimore weirdo is the regular weirdo and which one was the wannabe. I’ll tell you this much: The people in the church seem a lot more interested in the guy who got away than the guy who’s dead.”

“The victim-was he shot close-up or from a distance?”

“None of your business.”

It was, although she couldn’t tell Rainer why. What if John P. Kennedy had been there tonight, in one of the parked cars or hiding in the catacombs beneath the church? She thought the shot might have come from that direction, but it was a guess on her part. Could the shooting be connected to Kennedy’s petty beef over the bracelet?

“I’m just asking the kind of questions that the Beacon-Light’s police reporter is going to be asking you when he comes in this morning,” Tess said. “I was a reporter once. I can anticipate what they’ll want to know. And it won’t end with him. The AP puts a bulletin out about the Visitor every year. It makes news even in some European countries.”

“A chance for you to get your name all over the world, huh?”

His sourness, which carried the whiff of yet another petty beef, caught her off guard. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve never sought publicity.”

“Like hell you haven’t. You’re a showboat, front and center every time, hogging the spotlight-if not for yourself then for your buddy Tull. Or is it just a coincidence that he ends up getting all the good press when you’re involved in a case? Don’t think the other guys haven’t noticed.”

Honestly Tess thought, only a person who had never gotten publicity could want it so badly.

“No coincidence, and no conspiracy. Martin Tull comes out looking good, because he’s a pro.” She didn’t mind if Rainer caught the implication that she didn’t think he was. “If you’re referring to that case a year ago-well, given who was involved, it was inevitable there’d be a lot of attention. Neither one of us sought it out.”

“No, it was just an accident that all those national news shows came to town over a missing person and put Tull’s pretty little face all over the television, and then the producer gave him money for nothing but doing his job, in case he decided to make a movie.”

Rainer had gotten up and started stalking the room, a disgruntled dog in a too-small run.

“You know, carrying grudges can damage your vertebrae, Detective.”

“I got no grudges. I’m just trying to tell you that now’s the time for you to tell me what you know and then butt out.”

“Glad to.”

For a moment, she thought about telling him about Kennedy. She should, she knew she should. She wanted no part of this. But Rainer couldn’t see the forest for the trees. National and international media were going to swarm over the city in the next twenty-four hours, short of a war or a national crisis. The story was tailor-made for a slow January. If she told Rainer about Kennedy, it was only a matter of time before someone wangled the name out of him; the next thing you knew, cameramen would be jumping out of the shrubbery at the guy’s home.

She had no proof he had been there or was connected to the shooting in any way. It would be unconscionable to subject a private citizen to that kind of scrutiny, and Kennedy might end up blurting out the name of the man he suspected was the Visitor. Too bad Tull hadn’t caught the case; she would have told him everything and gone home, her conscience clear. But it was almost 5 a.m. and sleep deprivation was hitting her hard; she had to make a decision right now. She told herself she had a fifty-fifty chance of doing the right thing.

“I told you what I know. We came, we saw, we called 911.”

“Fine. So don’t go shooting your mouth off to reporters, pretending to know more than you do.”

“A proper lady only has her name in the paper three times,” Tess said primly. “Birth, marriage, and death.”

“No one ever accused you of being a proper lady.”

“Hey, I’ve been with the same guy for over a year now.” It sounded kind of pathetic, spoken out loud, but it was her personal best in the relationship Olympics. Then she realized he was trying to get her angry. He knew she hadn’t told him everything and hoped to provoke her into a confidence. It was a crude but effective technique.

“You done with me?”

“I hope so. But I still have to talk to your little friend out there.”

“I’m sure you two will hit it off.”

Tess and Rainer walked out into the hall together, where he crooked his finger at Crow as if he were a child waiting outside the principal’s office. Crow bounced out of his seat-not happily, for he had seen a dead man, and Crow was too tenderhearted, too empathetic, to remain untouched by such a thing. Still, this was all new to him, and Crow was no enemy of novelty.

“Have fun, honey,” she called to him.

He turned back to kiss her, which seemed to infuriate Rainer, so Tess prolonged it.

Once they were gone, she had a bad moment, wondering if Crow would contradict her account, tell Rainer about her would-be client. But Crow was careful with her confidences. He would never reveal to anyone, under any circumstances, that she had discussed her work with him. If anything, Crow would tell Rainer even less than she had, only in many, many more words. He would tell Rainer about growing up in Virginia, and how his real name, Edgar Allan Ran-some, was inspired by the writer. And then he might explain that his nickname was an allusion to a childhood joke he had made about “The Raven.” He would tell Rainer about his one-time band, Poe White Trash, and how he was now booking acts into the little club that Tess’s father and aunt ran out on Franklintown Road. He would ask him to come this weekend, to see the zydeco band. He would offer to comp him.

And he would be so sincere, so genuinely sunny and kind and helpful, that he would drive Rainer out of his mind.

Smiling to herself, Tess curled up in the chair and stole back what little of the night was left.