The Sugar House

chapter 8

TESS WANTED TO GO IN SEARCH OF LAWRENCE PURDY, Domenick’s owner, that very afternoon, but she had a long-standing date to go Christmas shopping with Whitney.

“I’ve done most of my shopping,” Tess had objected, when Whitney demanded her company. “I did it early so I wouldn’t have to go into a mall this time of year.”

“But I need moral support,” Whitney had said. “Besides, you can use the time to browse, figure out what you want for Christmas. Crow told me he’s asked you a dozen times what you want, and you always say nothing.”

“I tell my parents the same thing,” Tess said. “Can I help it if I’m the girl who has everything?”

She really was having trouble coming up with a list of anything she needed, much less wanted. Having lived close to the bone for a few years-although not quite as close as she now remembered those times-Tess had broken herself of the habit of desiring things. Besides, knowing you could afford what you wanted made these items less urgent. The problem was, she was scared to invest her money; she kept everything in her checking account, so her bank balance was now almost embarrassingly large. Even Whitney was impressed; she whistled when she saw the balance on the ATM slip. Whitney being the sort of friend who would look, unself-conciously, at a friend’s ATM slip, if it were left out in public view. Tess caught her reading it when she came back from the bathroom.

“Sorry,” Whitney said, but she didn’t sound particularly contrite. “Old habits die hard. Reading upside down is one of my talents, I like to keep my hand in.”

Tess sighed and dropped into her chair. The greyhound, fast asleep on the sofa, mimicked the sound exactly.

“Esskay sounds just like you,” Whitney said. “So put upon.”

“I don’t know why. Her friends respect her privacy.”

“Bad day at the office, dear?”

“Futile one. I didn’t have much to begin with. Now I seem to have less. The Sugar House. I thought it seemed too good to be true, and it was.”

Even while Tess was speaking, Whitney continued to snoop, her restless hands poking at various items on the desk. She examined a framed photograph of Crow and Esskay, opened the lid of the old blue Planter’s Peanut jar that Tess used for receipts, looked skeptically at a skeleton in a rowboat, a piece of Mexican folk art that had arrived just yesterday from San Antonio, an early Christmas gift. When Whitney reached for the Dembrow file, Tess stopped her.

“Confidential.”

“But surely that doesn’t extend to me.”

“Especially you. I’ve never known anyone who liked to trade in privileged information the way you do. You’ll be out on the Christmas cocktail party circuit, entertaining your mother’s friends with the sordid details about my Jane Doe.”

“I should be able to read the autopsy,” Whitney wheedled. “It’s a public document, and I’m a taxpayer.”

“It’s not the official autopsy, it’s my summary of the autopsy. No one is entitled to it except me, and my client.” But Tess extracted her typed notes from the folder, placing the rest of the file in her desk drawer, and locking it. Whitney was like a toddler. When she wanted a lollipop, you diverted her with a carrot, and she eventually forgot the lollipop had ever existed.

Once she had permission to look at the report, she quickly lost interest, skimming the page, making a face where the information was particularly graphic, stopping at another point to nod, then moving on. Then her green eyes narrowed, and jumped back to whatever had caught her quicksilver attention the first time.

“You say her teeth were rotted.”

Tess knew where Whitney was going, she had been there herself. “Yes, I asked the assistant medical examiner about that. But you can’t make an ID through dental records unless you know which dental records to check. It’s not as if there’s some computer database and you can plug in the description of the molars and it will kick the match back to you in twenty seconds. Although I suppose it could happen one day. Online teeth identification, DNA testing-”

“That’s not my point,” Whitney said impatiently, jabbing her finger at the line. “The report said the back teeth are eroded, the enamel gone. You know what that means.”

Tess did, or she did now that Whitney had reminded her. How embarrassing to have missed this detail. It was as if an alcoholic had looked at an autopsy in which someone’s liver was clearly diseased, and been too deep in denial to make the connection.

“Eating disorder,” she said, smacking her own cheek, punishment for her own tunnel vision. “Bulimia. A habit of long-standing, if her teeth were showing signs of decay.”

“And?”

“And, what? So she had an eating disorder. What am I going to do with that information? It’s an interesting detail, but it’s not going to help me identify her.”

“It narrows the range of possibilities. Now you know she was from a middle- or upper-middle-class family.”

“That’s a stereotype, Whitney. All classes, all races, experience eating disorders. Even some men have been diagnosed with bulimia and anorexia.”

“Yes, and every now and then some Eastern Europe pituitary case finds a job in the NBA. There’s a difference between stereotypes, based on bigotry, and generalizations, which are extracted from the fact that some groups do dominate in certain areas. Well-to-do white girls rule in the world of eating disorders.”

“Really? Then how come little working-class moi flirted with bulimia in high school, while you never had a problem?”

“Oh, you were more of a social climber than you’ll ever admit. Going to Washington College, trying out for crew. I used to worry you’d go whole hog, marry some guy named Chip who wore plaid pants and loafers with no socks. Besides, who said I got off scot-free? I had my own brush with it, back in college.”

Tess shook her head, annoyed that her friend’s competitive spirit never seemed to rest. “I don’t think so, Whitney. I was your roommate, remember? You couldn’t have hidden it from me. I can spot compulsive overeaters in the grocery store, just by the way they load their carts.”

“Not at Washington College, at Yale.” Whitney had transferred after their sophomore year, correctly deducing that, in a world gone label mad, a brand-name college was essential. Back then, her ambitions had been aimed, laserlike, at the New York Times and a foreign assignment. “I missed an entire semester. Didn’t you ever wonder why I graduated six months after you did?”

“I assumed you lost some credits in the transfer.”

“What I lost was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for almost three months. I had to be hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance.”

Tess’s mind wanted to reject this information. Whitney had never had a weight problem. Then again, eating disorders weren’t about weight. They were about everything but weight. The scale’s daily verdict was simply a way to measure one’s entire self, and you always came up wanting. It was just a number, they kept telling you. But this was a world where numbers mattered more than anything, a place of ceaseless top 10 lists, top 100 lists, the Forbes 500 and the Fortune whatever. Homeless men knew how high the Dow closed yesterday, and everyone wanted to be number one. All Tess had wanted was to weigh 120 pounds.

Twelve years ago, after waking up in the hospital, her stomach pumped of the Ipecac she had used to purge, she had made a deal with her body: Tell me what you want, really want, and I’ll give it to you. A brownie when you want a brownie, a piece of fruit when you want a piece of fruit. It wasn’t always easy to hear her body over the roar of the other voices in her head, the ones that swore a bowl of raw cookie dough would solve all her ills, but she could usually zero in on the right signal. She hadn’t weighed herself for ten years, and she closed her eyes when she climbed on a doctor’s scale.

“How did it happen to you, Whitney?”

“Rowing was a lot more competitive at Yale. My only shot was the women’s lightweight four. But I’m tall as you, and leaner. I didn’t have much fat to lose. But I tried. God knows I tried.” Whitney’s thin mouth curled at the memory. “Only problem was that, once I got my weight down, I kept passing out. Hard to win a race when a rower loses consciousness.”

Tess had a guilty desire to know more. She and Whitney had traveled in the same dark country, they spoke a language only a few knew. It was so tempting to delve into the details-laxatives or self-induced vomiting? What was the biggest binge you ever went on? Did you ever wrap yourself in plastic while doing sit-ups? Run seven miles after eating a half gallon of chocolate chip ice cream?

Tempting, but probably not healthy.

“Okay, say you’re right. Jane Doe had an eating disorder, and she took it a lot further than we ever did. Which, you think, means she’s not some street kid, but a nice little middle-class girl. So why hasn’t her family come forward? Why isn’t there a missing persons report on file?”

“I can’t do all your work for you, Tesser. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they don’t know she’s gone. Maybe both. The autopsy said she could be in her twenties. There are people who are estranged from their parents, you know.”

“Really? How does one manage that?”

Whitney stood up and stretched, gave her friend a knowing smile. “As if you could survive without your parents. You’d die if you didn’t have them meddling in your life. Speaking of parents-I have a very precise list from my mother, telling me the exact brand of suede gloves I am to give my father for Christmas this year, and where to find the linen handkerchiefs for Marmee-”

“God, I’d forgotten you call your grandmother Marmee. How Louisa May Alcott. Is she as much of a sanctimonious prig as the real Marmee, making you give away your Christmas gifts to the less fortunate?”

“-and, of course, mother has ordered my Christmas cards for me, from Down’s Stationers, and given me a list of people I might have overlooked for my gift list. In fact, she’s put everyone on the list but herself, claiming she doesn’t want anything. What she really means is there’s not a thing I could give her she wouldn’t return, so why bother? I think I’ll find something especially hideous, something monogrammed that can’t be exchanged.”

“How do we reward ourselves at the end of this ordeal?” Tess asked. She disliked shopping under most circumstances; the mere thought of a mall in high season made her feel claustrophobic. There would be crowds and Christmas music and, she knew with a sudden and certain dread, robotic figures standing in mounds of white cotton, waggling their heads to and fro.

“We could head back to Belvedere Square, go to Café Zen or Al Pacino’s.”

“Pizza would be perfect. Maybe I’ll even be virtuous and get one of their low-fat pizzas, the kind they make with soy cheese, or whatever it’s called.”

“You start eating shit like that, and I’ll disown you as a friend.” Whitney’s face was uncharacteristically grave. “You shouldn’t joke about our old bad habits. Do you know how lucky we are that we’re relatively normal, that we didn’t do lasting damage to ourselves?”

“Relatively lucky, relatively normal, relatively happy, and driven mad by our relatives.”

Like a dog with a bone, Tess worried the little bit she had, growling over it, turning it around in her mouth, trying to make it new. Jane Doe had said she worked at a place with a name like Domino’s. Tess had found three such places, but the girl wasn’t connected to any of them. Still, it was all she had. That, and Whitney’s insight, which told Tess more about herself than it did about the dead girl. How could she have missed the eroded back teeth? One couldn’t say she was in denial, exactly, more a state of amnesia. Had she forgotten how sick she had been? Was that a sign of health?

She was driving out Frederick Road, near her parents’ house, to the address given in the liquor board file for Lawrence Purdy, owner of Domenick’s. True, the bartender had said Purdy was an absentee owner, sitting at home and collecting checks, but he might know something about his own operation.

He lived modestly, this Lawrence Purdy, in a plain brick rowhouse on West Gate, near Tess’s former middle school. The house was neat, but the porch steps creaked ominously beneath her feet and the trim needed painting.

A small, white-haired woman answered the door. That is, she opened the door, the chain still on, and peered at Tess through the locked storm door.

“Yes?”

“Is Lawrence Purdy here, ma’am?”

“I am Mrs. Lawrence Purdy, yes.”

Distinction noted. “Is your husband home, ma’am?”

“My husband has been dead for almost a year.” She said this proudly, as some other women might announce their husbands’ lodge affiliations, or military service.

To Tess, whose family was intertwined with bureaucracies at every level of government, it was not surprising that a bar license could be out of date. “So you now own the bar on Hollins Street, in your husband’s place?”

“Mr. Purdy never owned a bar. He didn’t even take spirits.”

They had conducted this entire conversation through the storm door. And, although the December day was bright and sunny, the wind was kicking up, blowing right through Tess’s all-weather coat. “Do you think we could continue this conversation inside, ma’am?” She had her billfold at the ready, and she flipped it open to her ID, anticipating Mrs. Purdy’s next question. “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for a young woman who I think might have some connection to the bar. Your husband’s name was on the license as the owner.”

Mrs. Lawrence Purdy shut the main door-didn’t slam it, just shut it. At first, Tess thought their conversation must be over, but then she heard a scrabbling sound on the other side of the door and realized that the woman was fumbling at the chain, her hands slowed and stiffened by age. At last, the door opened, and Tess watched as Mrs. Purdy worked the latch on the storm door.

“It was not like Mr. Purdy to have secrets from me,” the woman said at last, as she led Tess into the dim living room. The house was dark, even for a rowhouse that was not an end-of-group. It was dark even for an older woman’s house, with heavy draperies over pull-down shades. A slight dent showed where Mrs. Purdy had been sitting in an easy chair when Tess had knocked, but not what had she been doing. There was no book or newspaper nearby, no bag of knitting or sewing kit. Tess passed her hand over the old-fashioned television set. Cold to the touch.

Mrs. Purdy misinterpreted the gesture. “I don’t see as well as I used to,” she said. “Dust builds up.”

She resumed her spot in the dent, while Tess sat carefully on the edge of an old-fashioned chair with a needlepoint seat. It looked fragile, barely equal to the task of supporting a real human’s weight.

“It’s possible,” Tess said, “that the bar belonged to another Lawrence Purdy. Or that your husband owned it at one point, then sold it before he died.”

“Was there money?”

“Money?”

“From the sale. If there was a sale, wouldn’t there be money?”

“I was just…hypothesizing. I don’t know what’s true. I only know his name was listed on a license.”

“Oh.” The story no longer seemed of much interest to the woman. She was nicely dressed, Tess noticed, for sitting quietly in her own home, doing nothing. She had on a knit pant-suit, a style which Baltimore women of a certain generation still favored. And why not? The old-fashioned polyester was durable, washable, and the colors stayed bright. Very bright, in the case of Mrs. Lawrence Purdy, tropical orange, with a striped jersey beneath the boxy jacket. The fact is, someone could buy this outfit at one of the city’s retro stores and, with the addition of the right shoes, look incredibly stylish. Not Tess, because she wasn’t built to wear clothes that required irony. But someone thin, someone like Whitney, could pull it off. The thought of Whitney running around in bright orange double knit made Tess’s lips twitch.

“Something funny?” Mrs. Purdy asked.

“No. I admit I’m puzzled, though. You say your husband died a year ago.”

“Of cancer.” This, too, was said with pride, as if it were a singular achievement. “Before he went on disability, he worked for the state.”

“In what capacity?”

The question confused Mrs. Purdy. “I don’t know if he had a capacity,” she said. “He just had a job.”

“And, to your knowledge, he never owned a bar on Hollins?”

Mrs. Purdy shook her head. “He was sick a long time before he died. Longer than the doctors thought. I took care of him here at home, me and a nursing service that our health insurance paid for. It was hard.”

Mrs. Purdy had a classic Baltimore accent, a slippery sound of such distinction that it had defeated some of the world’s finest actors. “Hard” was “hahrd” in her prim mouth, while “home” was “hoooooohme.” Tess tried not to smile.

“Is this his signature?” She handed Mrs. Purdy a copy of the license application.

“Yeah, but who’s this?” Her stubby finger pointed at another name on the paperwork. Arnold Vasso.

“Just his lawyer.”

“Not our lawyer. Our lawyer is Sonny Cohen. Mr. Purdy always said you had to have a Jew for a lawyer.”

Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan could not let that go by. “What about for your doctor and accountant?”

“Oh, well, with these medical plans today, who gets to pick your own doctor? Anyway, I don’t know this guy. Never heard of him.”

But Tess had, she realized. The name, Arnold Vasso, had slid past her because the lawyer hadn’t seemed important. Such documents always had lawyers’ signatures, but they were just hired guns. Tunnel vision again. But this lawyer was better known as one of the state’s top lobbyists. It made no sense for him to be involved in such a low-rent transaction. Arnold Vasso was so out and out sleazy he had achieved a kind of purity: He did everything for a payoff. Not money necessarily, he got that from the clients who paid him $400 an hour to represent them in Annapolis, where he was one of the top earners. Still, Arnold Vasso never scratched someone’s back without getting his own scratched twice.

“Did your husband ever mention Vasso?”

“I told you, I never heard of him. But I guess no one ever tells anyone everything.”

“Let’s hope not,” Tess said absently. In her mind, she was already en route to Annapolis, where Arnold Vasso could be found any time the General Assembly was in session. Even a closed committee meeting, convened for no reason other than to railroad one of its own, would draw Vasso.

After all, vultures don’t discriminate when it comes to carrion.