The Sugar House

chapter 15

WITHIN A DAY, DENTAL RECORDS OBTAINED FROM A Silver Spring orthodontist made it official. The Dead Girl Formerly Known as Jane Doe was Gwen Schiller. Martin Tull was impressed, and generous enough not to hide it.

“I can’t believe how much you did with so little,” he kept saying to Tess. They were sitting in a sub shop near police headquarters. Tess was never really comfortable inside the stale air and unrepentantly macho culture of the city police department. Cops made her nervous. She couldn’t help thinking they knew her every misdeed-every red light run, every mile over the speed limit.

“I started with a lucky break and Whitney turned it into something concrete. She was the one who picked up on the significance of the decayed back teeth.”

“Beginner’s luck. You were the one who parlayed it into establishing the girl’s identity. How did you track down the friend?”

“I think this is one of those things that falls under our don’t ask-don’t tell policy.”

“Misdemeanor or felony?”

Tess was toying with a turkey sub, her usual-lettuce, tomato, extra hots, no mayo. So virtuous it practically qualified as health food. She didn’t have much of an appetite as of late.

“I’m not sure I broke any laws per se. But you’d still feel obligated to lecture me, so let’s leave it alone. How are her parents doing?”

“About how you’d expect. We had to call her father to ask for the name of their daughter’s dentist. He can’t help knowing what that means. The thing that gets me is the father insists there’s a missing person report, but I sure never saw one. I think I’d remember a billionaire’s daughter from Potomac. Talk about a red ball.”

“A paper billionaire,” Tess said, remembering Devon Whittaker’s dismissive tone. “You’ll tell them face to face, right? Not over the phone?”

“Yeah.” Tull pinched the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, which meant he had a headache. “I’d like you to be there.”

“No way. My ghoul days are over, I don’t have to confront grieving next of kin anymore.”

“Yeah, it sucks. But it’s a cinch they’ll ask me something I don’t know, Tess, and I’ll look stupid. We already look stupid. And when the father finds out his daughter’s killer is dead, his rage isn’t going to have any place to go. He’s going to blame the police.”

“Not Baltimore PD,” Tess said. “Montgomery County, or some Eastern Shore county, maybe even the State Police, wherever he filed the report. All she did was die in Baltimore.”

This failed to cheer Tull. He switched hands, pinching the flesh on the right one as he trained his brown, sorrowful eyes on Tess. They had met over a corpse, and it had occurred to Tess more than once that if someone had to show up on your doorstep with news that was going to destroy your world, Martin Tull was the man for the job.

But just because someone was good at something didn’t mean he liked it. Besides, he wasn’t asking her to do it in his stead, merely to watch, back him up. It wasn’t much of a favor, given all the favors he had done her.

She reached for his hand to shake it.

“Thanks, Tess,” he said, then pulled his hand back and resumed his headache cure.

“You know,” she said, “if you didn’t drink so much coffee, aspirin wouldn’t hit your stomach so hard, and you wouldn’t have to rely on pinching your pressure points to get rid of these headaches.”

“If I stopped drinking coffee, the withdrawal headaches would be so bad that no amount of aspirin could touch it. My one vice, Tess. Isn’t everyone entitled to at least one?”

“I couldn’t be friends with someone who didn’t have at least one vice.”

Tull’s pager went off. She offered her cell phone, but he waved it off as if it were a bribe and went to the pay phone on the wall. His voice rose so quickly, in anger and surprise, that she could hear it across the room.

“What? What? Where did you hear that? No, no comment. No comment means no comment. Later. You’ll be glad you waited, I promise. No. No.” He hung up. “Shit.”

“What was that about?”

“Herman Peters, the police reporter at the Blight, is already sniffing around. Someone told him we have an ID on Jane Doe, and he wants to go with it. No name, just the fact we ID’d her. I tried to tell him it will be a better story if he’ll wait until I notify next of kin, but he’s not buying it. I sure wish I knew who leaked it.”

“Could be your own communications department, trying to grab a little good press.” And shaft me in the process. If there was going to be a story, Tess should be part of it. She had earned a little free publicity.

Then she thought of Gwen Schiller, dead forever, and felt a twinge of guilt.

“Naw, those guys don’t know anything unless they’re told. Could be the medical examiner, could be the orthodontist for all we know. Anyway, you ready to take a little ride in my deluxe city vehicle? The sooner we get this done, the less I have to worry about her parents reading it in the paper, or seeing it on television.”

“Where are we going?”

“I told you, I set up a meeting with the Schillers, all the way down in Potomac.”

“I thought they were coming up here.”

“These are rich folks. We go to them.”

Tess thought of Potomac as an old money enclave, full of Kennedys and horsey types. There was even a saddlery shop at the main business intersection, which locals, predictably, referred to as the village.

But new money had taken up residence here, fortunes so vast that they couldn’t be housed in the older mansions, with their laughably small bathrooms and lack of central air conditioning. Some of these were large and garish, the epitome of nouveau riche. But the most expensive of the new homes had been designed to look old. The Schillers lived in one of these.

The father was younger than Tess had expected, barely in his forties, with a boyish face and an asymmetrical white patch in his dark hair that made him look as if he had been slapped with a paintbrush. The stepmother was older than Tess expected, in her late thirties. Given what Devon had said, Tess had expected a trophy wife, but Patsy Schiller was more like a prize given out at a boardwalk shooting gallery. Blond and blue-eyed, she wore a pink suit and white blouse that were too ugly not to be expensive. Unfortunately Patsy’s figure, all breast from collarbone to waist, wasn’t quite right for the lines of couture clothing.

“Nice house,” Tull said, as the couple welcomed them inside. The foyer was the size of the average Baltimore billiard hall.

“We haven’t finished decorating,” Patsy said. She had the supercilious air sometimes mistaken for a grand manner. Tess knew instinctively how she had come to be Mrs. Schiller, saw the transformation as clearly as a trailer in a movie theater. She must have been Dick Schiller’s secretary or administrative assistant, indispensable and sweetly officious. She had brought him homemade cookies on occasion, brushed up against him while handing him his phone messages.

And widower Dick Schiller, who made Bill Gates look as if he had a really good haircut, probably couldn’t figure out what to do with those breasts except marry them.

“We finished decorating, once,” he was saying now, his voice glum and weary. He understood this polite chatter could last only so long, that Tull didn’t want to break the bad news while they were standing in the foyer. “Then we started over, when we returned from our trip.”

“I thought it would cheer you up, getting rid of all that furniture Gwen’s mother had picked out,” Patsy said, patting his arm. “Besides, our decorator said those old things would never have worked in this house.”

Gwen’s mother, Tess noted. Not a name, not “your first wife,” which would have emphasized her connection to Dick. Just Gwen’s mother. Tull caught her eye, noting the same verbal tic.

They sat in the living room. For all the Schillers’ money, it looked like one of the high-end display rooms at Ethan Allen to Tess. The furniture was oversized, and so shiny it appeared to be coated with oil. But maybe there were subtleties in the surroundings that were lost on a little prole like her.

Now that they were seated, Tull spoke swiftly, giving the news the way a skillful doctor would administer a shot to a frightened child.

“We asked you for Gwen’s dental records because new information indicated your daughter might be the victim of a homicide, a victim we could never identify. I’m sorry to tell you the dental records establish she was, in fact, our unidentified victim.”

“Homicide?” her father said. Patsy furrowed her brow. Her surprise was genuine, but she didn’t have any other emotion to put behind it. “Murdered, my daughter was murdered?”

“Yes, sir,” Tull agreed, not bothering to make the kind of distinctions that judges did. Murder was a legal term. Henry Dembrow had been found guilty of manslaughter. “She was killed by a man who found her living on the street in Locust Point, and promised to help her out. This would have been about six weeks after she left the clinic.”

“Will you ever catch the person who did it?”

It was a logical question, one Tess and Tull had expected.

“We know who killed your daughter,” the detective said. “We arrested him, he confessed. But he couldn’t tell us anything about his victim, not even her name. We sent him to prison this year.”

Where he died, Tess thought. But she knew why Tull didn’t tell that part, not just yet. He wanted to give Dick Schiller the fleeting comfort of having an enemy.

“Who is this man?”

“Just a stupid punk kid. A huffer.”

“Huffer?” Dick Schiller echoed.

“A glue sniffer, someone who inhales paint and gasoline fumes.”

“People do that? On a regular basis?” Schiller looked amazed, but Patsy was nodding, almost unconsciously. Oh yeah, Tess thought, definitely a secretary who married the boss. She could almost pick out the zip code in Prince George’s County, one of the little working-class enclaves where the girls dream big, inspired by local heroine Kathie Lee Gifford. You can take the girl out of Bowie, but you can’t take the Bowie out of the girl.

“Yeah, I’m afraid they do.”

“I don’t know Locust Point,” Patsy put in. “Is it near Canton? We have some friends who live in the Anchorage. They have the prettiest view.”

“Other side of the water, ma’am.”

Dick Schiller, to his credit, did not wish to discuss Baltimore real estate. “The man who killed my Gwen, how long will he be in prison?”

Tess liked him for the use of the possessive.

“He’s dead,” Tull said. “He was stabbed to death.”

The room was silent, a silence that not even Patsy was foolish enough to fill. In less than five minutes, Dick Schiller had found out his daughter was dead, his daughter had been murdered, his daughter’s killer had been caught, her killer was dead. Most people complain justice is slow, but it had moved much too swiftly for Dick Schiller.

“Was Gwen using drugs, too?”

“No.”

The question had been Patsy’s; the emphatic denial came from Tess. She couldn’t help feeling fiercely protective of Gwen.

“I was just asking,” the stepmother said. “After all, she had…other issues.”

Tess studied the second Mrs. Schiller. She was so curvy, so pink and white, the colors of her outfit repeated in her fair, ripe flesh and carefully made-up face. She reminded Tess of the old-fashioned refrigerator cookie still found in some Baltimore bakeries, a round disc with pink swirls running through the vanilla dough.

It was a kind of cookie that looked better than it tasted.

“Mr. Schiller, how did Gwen’s mother die?”

“Ovarian cancer,” he said. “She went very fast. At least, that was her doctor’s frame of reference. It may have been fast in medical terms, but it was agonizingly slow for us.”

“Was she very thin, toward the end?”

“Yes.” He looked at Tess curiously, trying to figure out where she was going. “Yes, quite thin.”

Tess didn’t push it. It was just a hunch, an inexcusable, pseudo-psychiatric leap of faith. But it didn’t surprise her that a teenage girl who had seen her mother waste away, then watched her father bring home this strawberry sundae of a woman, had a complicated relationship with food.

“Do you have a photo of Gwen? In all the time I was looking for her, I’ve never known what she truly looked like. All I had was an artist’s sketch.” And a photocopy of a Polaroid of a corpse.

Schiller gave Tull a questioning look, as if he had already forgotten why she was here. “Tess is a private investigator. She’s the one who identified your daughter after the police department had given up. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for her efforts.”

He left the room and returned with a framed studio portrait, the eight-by-ten from a standard school package, with blue skies in the background. It was an old photo. Gwen had braces, the gawkiness of a middle schooler. The part in her hair was crooked, as was her smile, and her eyes were half-closed.

She was also one of the most beautiful girls Tess had ever seen. Like a painting, Sukey had said, or someone famous. Tess understood now. Gwen’s hair was glossy, as Devon had noted, her eyes dark and bright, her features perfect and yet not. Tess could stare at this photograph all day, dissect it a thousand ways, and never be able to explain why Gwen Schiller was so arresting. The dark hair, the fair skin, the lush red mouth. She could pass for Snow White.

And everyone knows what Snow White’s stepmother did when she found out she had competition in the fairest-of-the-land department. Tess would have bet all Schiller’s paper billions that Patsy had been the one who pushed for Gwen to be hospitalized, while she and her husband went on their extended honeymoon.

“She was lovely,” Tess said, handing the photograph back.

“She is, isn’t she?” Schiller said, still not ready to speak of his daughter in the past tense. “Her mother and I never knew how we produced such a specimen. Andrea was pretty, but in a more earthbound way. And me-well, you see what I bring to the table, genetically. I used to tease Andrea, ask her if she had been having sex with a swan behind my back.”

“A swan?” Patsy looked mystified. “That’s sick.”

“It’s how Helen of Troy of was conceived,” Tess said. “Zeus disguised himself as a swan and impregnated a woman named Leda.”

“Oh, yeah. Helen of Troy. The one with the face that launched a thousand ships, and the Trojan Horse, and all that.”

Tess thought it was as concise a summary of Homer as she had ever heard. Maybe Dick Schiller could make his next billion by starting an Internet company that sold Patsy’s interactive Cliff Notes over the Web.

Schiller was staring off into space. He hadn’t cried, not yet. Days might go by before he did. But Tess suspected that once he allowed himself to grieve for his daughter, he might never stop. A dead wife, a dead daughter. Patsy would be a comfort to him, Tess had to give her her due. Whatever her limitations, Patsy Schiller wasn’t the kind of woman who died young. She was pragmatic, she looked both ways before crossing streets, or marrying billionaires. She would take good care of her husband, if only because it served her own strong instinct for self-preservation.

“You know, I’m in the information business,” Dick Schiller said at last. “I can’t help thinking how ironic it is that my daughter could go unidentified for nine months, just because a missing persons report was filed in one jurisdiction and she died in another.”

“We’re not exactly at the cutting edge of technology-” Tull began, but Tess interrupted him.

“What do you mean, nine months? Gwen was missing for more than a year.”

“Gwen walked out of the clinic on her birthday, January thirty-first. I think I know my own daughter’s birthday. She had turned eighteen, and they couldn’t hold her legally against her will. The clinic staff tried to notify us before she left, but we were en route to-I’m not sure where we were in January. Chile?”

“Wherever we were right before Brazil,” Patsy said, adding for Tull and Tess’s edification: “We were in Rio for Carnival.”

“Gwen didn’t check herself out, that’s the point,” Tess said. “She ran away in October of the previous year, well before her birthday. Devon Whittaker told me she heard about the escape from someone else who was still at the clinic.”

“Impossible,” Dick Schiller said. “We continued to receive e-mail from her through January. Not much, I grant you-she was very angry at me for putting her in Persephone’s-but she stayed in touch.”

“Through e-mail,” Tess said.

“Right.”

“And you knew she was the one writing the e-mail because…”

Schiller put his head in his hands. “Because it came from her e-mail address at the clinic. How stupid can I be to think that means anything? Anyone who had her laptop could have used it to send me those notes. No wonder they sounded so stiff and impersonal. But Jesus Christ, why would the school wait so long to report her missing?”

“Because they didn’t want to appear negligent,” Tess said, working it out for herself as she spoke. “Gwen ran away, probably to punish you for putting her there. Maybe she thought you’d go crazy, offer a huge reward, or at least come home from your honeymoon. But the clinic decided to risk not notifying you, to stall until her eighteenth birthday. Then, at least, they could say she left legally, instead of having to admit she had run away. I imagine Persephone’s long waiting list might have been somewhat diminished if the news had gotten out about her escape.”

“All this subterfuge, to disguise the fact that a girl had run away?” Dick Schiller shook his head. “It seems excessive.”

It did, Tess thought. The clinic was hiding something else, something bigger. But what?

“Where is this place?” Tull asked her, his mind following the same trail.

“On the Eastern Shore, near Easton,” Patsy said. “It’s really quite nice. I thought Gwen would be happier in some place that didn’t look so much like a hospital.”

Maybe, Tess thought. Or maybe you thought you’d be happier if she were tucked away in some place far away from Potomac, even while you were trotting around the globe.

“We need to get out there,” Tess said. “We need to get there with a warrant before Herman Peters extracts Gwen’s name from someone, which will give the clinic a heads-up that we know she was dead three months before she was reported missing.”

Tull stood up. “We could drive straight there, radio the state police and county officials to meet us there. If Herman is pushing too hard, the department might make the information public, and it will be all over WBAL and the television stations. They’ve got no reason to hold it back. They knew I was meeting with Gwen’s next of kin this afternoon. But it would still take us two hours to get over there.”

“Three hours, once you factor in afternoon traffic on the Capital Beltway,” Schiller said. “However, my company has a helicopter on call. My old company, I should say, but I think they’d let me use it under such extraordinary circumstances. Would that help?”

“Sure.” It was Tess who answered, not Tull. He gave her a look as if to say, Why do you think you’re coming along for the ride? She knew, in the end, he would let her go with him. It was only fair, after she had accompanied him here, and Tull was always fair. She couldn’t wait to step out of a helicopter on the clinic’s grounds, to let them see who had brought the police to their door. One if by land, two if by sea, three if by air.

It was their fault. They should have let her in the first time she asked.