The Sugar House

chapter 27

TESS HAD A LAPTOP THAT HAD SO MUCH RAM COURSING through its system, so much power, according to the Crazy Nathan’s salesman who had talked her into it, that it might arise from her desk one day and start cleaning her apartment, or prepare a Cordon Bleu meal.

But now, when Tess wanted only to use the Internet to check the city real estate database, her laptop was useless. Not because it wasn’t fast, but because the human being on the other end hadn’t updated the file for at least three years. She felt a perverse pride in her fellow Baltimoreans for rendering technology so powerless.

The only thing to do was head down to the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse and look up the records in the dusty old plat books. It wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. She could chat up her friend Kevin Feeney while she was there, find out if there were any juicy rumors about Dahlgren or Adam Moss, the kind of rumors that never made the pages of the Beacon-Light, yet all the reporters traded, like baseball cards.

“Juicy bits?” Feeney’s natural expression was a scowl, so he had to work a little harder to give the impression that he was frowning. His careworn face folded itself into a series of creases and furrows. “You mean, like butt buddies?”

“No. You know, not everything is about sex.”

“Tell me about it.” He sighed at some private memory. “So you’re asking if we’ve ever heard any rumors about Dahlgren we couldn’t find a way to squeeze into the paper, one way or another? Not that I recall. Until this ethics thing came along and he hooked up with Meyer Hammersmith, he was a classic backbencher. As for Adam Moss, I know less than nada. Did you Autotrack him?”

Autotrack was a costly computer search, which reporters took for granted, largely because they didn’t pay for it. Reporters took it so much for granted that they used it to look up ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, or just to update their Christmas card lists, cheerfully racking up hours of charges. It wasn’t something a one-woman private detection agency could afford.

“What a great idea,” Tess said. “Can you Autotrack from here?”

“Nope,” Feeney said emphatically. “They’re not dumb enough to give me access at the courthouse, I have to go into the office. Besides, each of us has his own password. They’d trace it right back to me.”

Tess saw no reason to tell him that Dorie had given her the password of one of the paper’s lazier reporters to do searches on the Blight’s other, less costly databases. “It’s not as if you wouldn’t have a legitimate reason to look into Adam Moss. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Maybe he’d make a good profile.”

Feeney shook his head. “I’m not risking it. Sorry. They’re in a budget crisis this quarter, so they’re nickel-and-diming us to death.”

“Budget crisis? The paper’s so fat with ads I can barely lift it from the doorstep in the morning.”

“Yeah, but the new managing editor went on a hiring binge at some job fair. He woke up the next morning, young Ivy League bodies littered around him.”

“Whitney said they might hire her back.”

Feeney shook his head. “They made her an offer. It’s one of those rare times when the lack of institutional knowledge pays off. The M.E. may not know Spiro Agnew was once Baltimore County Executive, but he also doesn’t know why Whitney left in the first place. I wish she would come back. The new breed-man, it’s total Village of the Damned time down there.”

“Village of the Damned?”

“You know, that movie about those little kids with those big staring eyes? You should be glad you got out of the business when you did.”

“Trust me, I am. About Adam Moss-”

“No. Besides, you know how many Adam Mosses are going to be in Autotrack?”

“We could get his DOB from DMV.” Talking in acronyms, sure sign of bureaucratese. How had she ended up sounding so wonky? “I just want to see if he has a criminal record.”

“So ask your buddy down at the police station. Won’t he run stuff through the NCIC for you?”

Tess had no ready answer. Yes, under certain circumstances, Tull might help her out. But she was trying to keep Tull at arm’s length. She was trying to keep everyone at arm’s length, and it was proving increasingly difficult.

“Want to walk down to the document room with me?”

“Darling, I can think of nothing more I’d like to do, but I have a hearing in five minutes. Give my love to our always cheerful civil servants.”

Walking through the courthouse corridors, Tess had a moment of paranoia. No building was more public than the courthouse, yet it was full of shadowy corners in which to hide and watch someone. All the time she had been following Adam Moss, she had also been trying to ascertain who was following her. Someone had been watching her, paying close attention. She had said at the press conference she had a source in Philadelphia, an unnamed friend who had known Gwen Schiller, but it was only when she ordered the phone logs that Hilde’s killer made the connection. But how had Adam Moss known to ask for the phone logs before she even did it? Was her phone bugged? Her office? Tull’s office?

For all I know, she thought, flipping through the plat book, the hands of Hilde’s killer have held this book recently, have touched the pages I’m touching now. She ran her index finger down the column of listings, feeling the shadow of another finger beneath hers. The finger jumped to her spine, a particularly icy finger with a long pointed nail, and she shuddered.

The owner of the property on 36th Street was listed as a corporation, M.H. Hammersmith Properties. Tess didn’t have to be a cryptologist to figure out that the man behind the company was one Meyer Hammersmith, campaign chairman for Kenneth Dahlgren, boss of Adam Moss. You also could be as ignorant of the city’s history as the Blight’s new managing editor and be aware that Meyer Hammersmith owned dozens, possibly hundreds, of properties throughout the city. It was how he had made his millions. He probably owned properties he didn’t know he owned, including this modest storefront on 36th Street.

And yet.

Meyer Hammersmith was Ken Dahlgren’s finance chairman.

Adam Moss, Dahlgren’s aide, had paid a visit to the gallery owned by Hammersmith.

The woman behind the counter, the woman who didn’t believe in names, had shown real fear when Tess had come by. But she had been comfortable with Adam, she hadn’t been afraid of him.

Tess was on a cul de sac, a big, looping one, but a cul de sac nonetheless, in which every road led back to Ken Dahlgren. Yet there was nothing to connect Dahlgren to Gwen Schiller, or Henry Dembrow, or Devon Whittaker. In fact, there was nothing to connect Dahlgren to anyone. Adam Moss had requested the telephone records. Meyer Hammersmith owned the building. Dahlgren was just the grinning figurehead at the center, the pet that they were grooming to win best of show in a year or two. A former backbencher, as Feeney had said, stunned by his good fortune. He wouldn’t ask any questions, as long as the money kept rolling in, and rolling in.

She and Whitney had worked out a system: Tess could page her via beeper if she needed her urgently. She did this now, punching in her cell phone number, then going outside and waiting on the courthouse steps for Whitney to find an outside line.

The courthouse steps always felt like the wings to a dozen different dramas. Today there was a wedding party, posing for a photograph, the bride so pregnant that it appeared the baby had achieved legitimacy by mere minutes. Newly broken families, divided into sullen, smoldering camps, tried not to make eye contact as they headed into the building. Lawyers in cheap suits raced by with speeded-up walks that only exposed them for the ambulance chasers they were. Some trial was hot enough to bring out the television vans as well, and the reporters were lining up, ready to go live at noon, even if the trial had yet to recess. Given the choice between gathering information and going live, television reporters always chose the latter. After all, you couldn’t have dead air.

Tess’s phone rang, and she pulled it out.

“What’s up?” Whitney sounded breathless, excited.

“Have you worked your way up to opening the mail yet?”

“Have I? I’m covered with paper cuts. So I started using my Swiss army knife, which seems to make the other volunteers ever so nervous.”

Tess had a mental image of Whitney, slicing carelessly through the day’s mail.

“Do you see the checks when they come in? Do you have access to the files where campaign contributions are listed?”

“Sure, but can’t you get them up at the Election Board?”

“Not the current ones. Besides, I’m looking for certain names, certain addresses. I’m especially curious to see if anyone’s bundling-you know, trying to avoid contribution limits by parceling out donations to relatives, or neighbors. I want you to look for donations from Southwest Baltimore, which isn’t in the first, or even in the forty-ninth. And I want you to look for anyone who has the last name DeSanti.”

“I don’t dare take notes,” Whitney said, bless her quick, steeltrap mind. She understood instantly what Tess wanted. “At the very least, they’ll think I’m another candidate’s spy, and they’ll can me.”

“Just remember as much as you can for now. If I’m right, we’ll find a way to come back and get the files.”

“He has a big fund-raiser at Martin’s West in a few days,” Whitney said. “Five hundred dollars a head, and the checks are pouring in. Maybe, if I’m very, very good, I can get them to send me to the bank with the daily deposits. Then I can stop en route and copy down all the names on the checks. Although a lot of it is cash.”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Tess said. “Hey, how well do you know Meyer Hammersmith, anyway?”

“My folks know him. He always seemed like a sweet old man to me, essentially harmless-assuming any real estate billionaire can be essentially harmless. When he comes out to the house, he almost drools, thinking about what he could do with my parent’s property. But they’re not really friends so much as they’re allies, sitting on all these arts boards. My mother was shocked when he signed on with Dahlgren, he’s such a philistine. Look, I better get back. I told them I had to go to the drugstore. And when they asked why, I just lifted an eyebrow in that don’t-ask-female-trouble kind of way, and the guy let me go. But how long can it take to buy tampons, you know?”

“Whitney-” Tess thought of Hilde, dead simply because she happened to stand between Devon Whittaker and her would-be killer, about Gwen Schiller, about the frightened no-name woman in the no-name gallery. “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she assured her airily. “The Swiss army knife isn’t the only thing I’m packing, I can tell you that much.”