In A Strange City

Chapter 4

Tess was the first to see the delicious irony in the fact that John P. Kennedy had given her a phony name, address, and phone number. Really, it was a great joke, hilarious. She was torn between wanting to laugh hysterically and bang her head on the desk.

She tried the latter. Desk and head were both harder than she realized, and the noise woke the greyhound, who glanced at her reproachfully, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

She sat up, rubbing her forehead. As usual, the Greeks had a word for it: hubris. She had sat in this same spot, just seventy-two hours ago, and smirked inwardly at “Kennedy’s” lame excuses about false names and identities. She would never be caught in such a predicament, she had thought at the time. Fooled once by a client, when she was starting out, she was much more careful now. She knew the things to watch out for.

Or so she thought.

Of course, Kennedy hadn’t become a client, so Tess hadn’t taken his vitals or demanded payment, which was the point where she had learned to ask for an ID. Consoled by this, she stepped over the piles of phone books at her feet and headed for the small kitchen at the rear of her office, to make a cup of cocoa. She felt as if her body temperature had dropped by several degrees during the vigil for the Visitor. She held her hands over the spout of the teapot, trying to warm them. The last time she had gotten this cold was in college, at the aptly named Frostbite Regatta in Philadelphia. Her four had rowed well, but her hands had been curved like claws for the rest of the weekend, as if the memory of the oar was frozen into them.

She had been right about the media onslaught. She could take some comfort in that. The story was too perfectly macabre: a murder at Poe’s gravesite, two cloaked figures, a beloved Baltimore ritual colliding with the more modern Baltimore pastime of homicide. Before the sun was up on the morning of Poe’s birthday, the local media trucks were jockeying for parking spots on Fayette. The national reporters soon followed, then international ones-Poe being a big draw overseas-until the sidewalk around Westminster was a media encampment.

An enterprising Norwegian radio reporter had even tracked her down this morning. Tess suspected Rainer was playing a joke on her, giving her name to this terribly earnest, humorless man who seemed to be under the impression that she was a rabid Poe fan. He had demanded to know her hourly rate and then tried to convert it into guilders or herrings or whatever the Norwegian currency was. He had even asked to see her gun.

“I understand all American women must carry guns,” he had said. “Have you been violated many times?”

“I guess you could call it that,” Tess had replied, excusing herself, saying she had much work to do. She wished.

Her cocoa done, she poured it into a Maryland is for crabs mug, a joke gift from someone who found Tess’s allergy to shellfish hilarious, and carried it out to her desk, where Esskay waited. The dog didn’t wag her tail so much as swish it, with a metronomelike precision. The barbershop clock on the wall might say Time for a Haircut, but Esskay knew it was always time for a snack at Keyes Private Investigations, Inc. The name belonged to an ex-cop to whom Tess was technically apprenticed. He signed the incorporation papers, she sent a small check every month, and they never spoke.

It was everything she had ever dreamed of in a mentor.

Tess tossed Esskay one of the homemade biscuits, while she made do with a pumpkin chocolate-chip muffin from the Daily Grind and settled in with the morning newspaper she had neglected to read.

Competing with the national press always made the Beacon-Light nervous; its coverage of the Poe murder was at once exhaustive and exhausting. The story jumped to two inside pages, with numerous sidebars, and the metro columnist had weighed in on What It All Meant. Nothing good, as it turned out, although Tess couldn’t quite follow how this isolated homicide could be used to argue against zero tolerance policing.

For all the column inches the Blight had spewed forth, information on the victim was still sketchy. Tess inferred this meant Rainer had not yet notified next of kin, because the dead man was identified only as a twenty-eight-year-old man who had worked in “the restaurant industry.” Aka, a waiter or a cook.

The features department warmed up the oldest chestnut of all, the rundown of Poe death theories. There were now twenty-plus and counting. Tess had thought the rabies theory, advanced by a Baltimore cardiologist who had studied the medical records of a so-called Patient X, had been pretty firm, but apparently not. The theories that the cardiologist was said to have discredited-Poe’s death through alcohol or drug overdose-still held sway in the public imagination.

It’s as if we want him dying in the gutter, shivering from delirium tremens, Tess marveled. She hadn’t known Freud had theorized that early childhood trauma had killed Poe, or that impotence had been cited by yet another medical expert. How did impotence kill? She supposed a man might die of embarrassment, but only figuratively. She smiled smugly, a thirty-one-year-old in love with a twenty-five-year-old, unaware that she was once again flirting with hubris.

But her subconscious must have made the connection, for she was suddenly glum, pondering the case of the disappearing John P. Kennedy. She glanced at the phone books stacked at her feet, at the bookmarked “people finders” on her computer, at the CD-Roms that supposedly had everyone, even unlisted numbers. There were Kennedys, of course, many of them, in Maryland and Washington and northern Virginia and Delaware: John P. Kennedys, and J. P. Kennedys, and even one Pendleton Kennedy. But the ages were wrong, or the voices were wrong, or, in the case of Pendleton Kennedy, the gender was wrong. All were most convincing in their assertions that they had never met her. “Please remove me from your call list,” more than one person had snapped, mistaking her for a telephone solicitor.

Trust me, Tess felt like saying, I wish I were trying to sell you long-distance service or credit-card insurance. It would be more fun.

She studied the business card he had left. John P. Kennedy, dealer in fine porcelain. Appraisals, estate sales. If you want it, I can find it. The number listed didn’t even exist in Maryland, nor had it ever, given the prefix. She felt guilty, then stupid for her guilt. Should she really be expected to know every prefix in the state of Maryland by heart? The card looked professional, but anyone with a computer could make a business card these days. She had her own little stock of them, identifying her as various people in various jobs. Baltimore Gas amp; Electric “safety coordinator” was the best. Who wouldn’t let you into their homes if you said you were checking reports of an odorless gas leak?

The Porcine One had not seemed nervy enough to pull off such a stunt, but that had only guaranteed his success. What did it matter how smart you were, as Nora Ephron had once written, if others proved how easily you were fooled?

Tess flipped through the Yellow Pages, noting the many pages of antiques dealers. Surely, it would be more efficient to work by phone, calling up those who advertised large inventories of china and asking if they had any dealings with a pinkish, piggy man with short limbs. She glanced toward the windows of her office, which were barred and always shaded. The glare of a bright winter’s day peeked around the edges of the old-fashioned venetian blinds. The cold snap had snapped, leaving behind a brisk, tolerable day with a chance for snow.

Perhaps it was inefficient, but she’d rather be out there, going door to door. She could try the shops in Fells Point, her old neighborhood. People there knew her face, if not her name, from all the years she had lived there. They had seen her hanging out at Jimmy’s restaurant and her aunt’s bookstore, eating celebratory dinners at Ze Mean Bean and the Black Olive, running them off the next day along Thames Street.

Now she ran in a wooded vale, loved it, then worried about loving it. Pleasure was a double-edged sword for Tess. She was scared she was being lulled into happiness, only so someone could snatch it away from her again, like a dollar bill on a string. She liked a few more lumps in her mashed potatoes.

So bless John P. Kennedy then, or whoever he was, for keeping her life from being too smooth.

Esskay accompanied her on her rounds. The dog appeared to recognize their old haunts, although Esskay experienced the world primarily through smell and taste. Allegedly, she was a sight hound, and she occasionally spotted something moving that made her prick up her ears and quiver with instinct. Usually, the object of her desire was a blue plastic grocery bag or an old newspaper. In their new neighborhood, rabbits often crossed their path, but the dog was indifferent to them, possibly because they ran in jagged stops and starts across the grass, rather than moving smoothly along a track rail.

Still, Esskay was a good ambassador, especially in the red plaid sweater she wore when the temperature dropped below freezing. She drew people to Tess, and they answered questions without realizing it, their hands busy with Esskay’s muzzle and ears.

Yet Tess’s repeated descriptions of the Porcine One brought no signs of recognition.

“Fiestaware?” asked one man, a tall, rumpled type who looked as if he were perpetually filmed with dust. His shop was on a quiet block of Aliceanna, and so crowded with towering stacks of china that Tess watched Esskay’s switching tail with great anxiety. “I thought I knew most of the serious dealers around town, but he doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve ever done business with. Did he talk specifics? Did he mention anything he had ever sold or bought?”

“In Fiestaware and porcelain? No-wait, he did say something hypothetically, about a rare teal-colored gravy boat.”

The man shook his head, sad for Tess’s ignorance. “Teal is one of the new colors, you can buy it at Hecht’s.”

She walked up to Fleet, where the Antique Man, as he was known, kept a shop devoted to local items and curiosities. A giant ball of string, purchased for eight thousand dollars from Sotheby’s, had the place of honor in the window. Fashioned from the bits of leftover bakery string used in Haussner’s restaurant, it had gone on the auction block when the famed German eatery had closed a year or two back. The restaurant also had owned a world-class art collection, which had fetched millions. But Tess, like most Baltimoreans, had cared only for the ball of string and was happy when it found a home not far from its Highlandtown origins. Just looking at it made her hungry for Haussner’s specialties, potato pancakes and cherry pie.

But the Antique Man was out, on this snowy day. “We got a tip that the Beacon-Light beacon was found in someone’s garage,” said his helper, drawing out the last word so it rhymed with barrage.

“No way,” Tess said. As someone repeatedly denied employment by the city’s last newspaper, she wouldn’t have minded owning that particular artifact, a Bakelite replica of a beacon that had once sat on a small pedestal above the Beacon-Light’s front doors and then disappeared when the building was remodeled in the 1980s. “How much would something like that go for?”

“Thousands,” the helper said sagely. “If it’s the real thing. We’ve had false alarms before, and this one sounded a little funky. Still, he had to check it out, you know? It’s a civic duty, you know, like the iron pig.”

“The iron pig?”

“From Siemiski’s Meats, the sign that hung over the door. They were going to throw it away, practically, so he bought it. Now people come in here all the time, offer him big money for it, but he won’t sell. Some things belong to the city, not in a private home or museum.”

“Very civic-minded,” Tess said, and meant it.

Back on the street, she saw the flag flying above a rowhouse bookstore, Mystery Loves Company. One of the owners, Paige Rose, knew everything about everybody in the city, and she wasn’t shy about sharing her information. She was especially good on local politics, but she cut a broad swath through Baltimore, and it was plausible she knew or had met the Porcine One.

“Kennedy?” Paige furrowed her brow and stroked the cat perched on her lap. The cat was named Nora, and those customers who couldn’t figure out her brother was named Nick were probably in the wrong store. Paige was on a high stool behind the counter, keeping an eye on an odd-looking man more interested in the store’s warmth than its wares. He appeared to be sleeping on his feet, his nose almost pressed into the spines of new books in the “H” section-Hayter, Haywood, Henderson, Hiaasen, many of Tess’s favorites.

“John P. Kennedy,” she repeated. “Boy, the name sounds familiar, although I couldn’t tell you why. But I don’t remember meeting anyone who looks like the man you’re describing. I’m not much in the market for bracelets once owned by Bonapartes. I can barely afford the jewelry we sell.”

Tess’s eyes drifted upward, to a piece of felt where small brooches and earrings had been pinned. These were decoupage images of Holmes, black cats, and, of course, Poe himself, such an unhappy-looking man. But that might be projection. People hadn’t been so grinny in the nineteenth century; that was not the way they wished to be immortalized. For all she knew, he was the life of the party. It occurred to her that most of what she knew of Poe had been gleaned from the morning paper, and she didn’t trust the Beacon-Light to get even yesterday’s events right.

“Do you have any of his books?”

“I thought you said he was an antiques dealer.”

“Not my mystery man, Poe. I’d like a good biography perhaps, or an omnibus of his work. I don’t think I own anything, although I must have read him in college or high school.”

The store was small and cramped. But some sort of order was at work, for Paige had a way of finding things customers could not. Dumping the cat from her lap, she made her way to the rear of the store, where a small office overflowed with papers and catalogs and the increasingly strange freebies that publishers bestow on booksellers-caps, jackets, posters, even a life-size cutout of a handsome man in a Hawaiian shirt. Paige patted him affectionately on his blue-jeaned hip as she squeezed past.

Five minutes later, Tess staggered out of the store with not only two Poe biographies and an anthology of his poems and stories but several new hardcovers. The publishers were right to woo Paige; she was nothing if not a formidable hand-seller.

Tess would have to shed this load somewhere, if she wanted to continue working, and she knew exactly where to go. She may have been evicted, but the welcome mat was always out for her at the corner of Shakespeare and Bond streets. It was hard to hold a grudge against a former landlord who happened to be your favorite aunt.