The Sugar House

chapter 2

“THANK GOD FOR BARS.” RUTHIE DEMBROW LEANED back in a booth at Frigo’s and, after a quick, guilty glance around the old neighborhood tavern, lit a cigarette. “Smoking is beginning to feel like a criminal act, you know? And when I come here, I always feel like I should be working, even though it’s been years.”

“Come the day, you might not even be able to smoke in bars,” Tess said. “I hear Montgomery County wants to ban it everywhere.”

“Well, that’s D.C.,” Ruthie said, in a tone that suggested a place thousands of miles away, instead of forty-five minutes down the Interstate.

“Smoking isn’t my vice of choice, but I can’t imagine bars without cigarettes.” Tess liked going home with smoke in her hair and clothes, waking up to the smell the next morning. It reminded her that she had had a good time the night before.

“Henry used to give me such a hard time about my Kools.” Ruthie’s lips twitched. “Said it was going to kill me one day. I guess the joke’s on him.”

“Henry?”

“My brother.” Her lower lip continued to tremble, until she finally sucked it beneath her top teeth and bit down hard. She had plump, cushiony lips beneath the coat of coral lipstick she had more or less chewed off. On a richer woman, Tess might have suspected silicon injections. But Baltimore hons started lower when they resorted to plastic surgery.

“My brother was named Henry Dembrow,” Ruthie clarified, in case Tess couldn’t put that together. Her dad must have done quite a sales job on her abilities.

The conversation stalled, as it had stalled several times in the ten mintues they had been sitting in the bar. Ruthie Dembrow didn’t seem to have a clue how to begin her tale of woe, which made her unusual in Tess’s experience. Sure, she had known would-be clients who hemmed and hawed at first, primarily because they disliked telling a stranger about intimate problems. She also was used to people who couldn’t tell a story for anything, who thought the beginning went about as far back as Genesis, and that every tangential thought, every narrative cul de sac, must be explored en route.

But even the worst of the lot-the stammerers, the blushers, the liars, especially the liars-had an opening line or two. They had rehearsed them, standing in front of bathroom mirrors, or talking under their breaths as they drove. They were Hamlet, this was their soliloquy, the first and last time they might hold an audience in their hands.

Not Ruthie, though. Tess was going to have to pull it out of her.

“Why do you need a private detective?”

“Last year…well, almost thirteen months ago.” She took a long swallow on her Miller Lite. Her hands were shaking. “I’m sorry.”

“Take your time.”

“It’s like this, Tess.” Her named sounded strange, coming from those plump, coral-flecked lips, although Tess couldn’t have said why. “My brother Henry killed a girl last year. It was an accident-they were sniffing glue in my backyard. He panicked when she tried to get into our house. He thought she was going to try and take some stuff, I guess. Anyway, she fell, cracking her head open on the pavement. But he admitted it, he took responsibility for what he did. Right from the very beginning, he didn’t try to make any excuses.”

She paused, green eyes wide and solemn, as if waiting for Tess to acknowledge the remarkable moral fiber of her brother, this veritable modern-day George Washington. I cannot tell a lie, I cracked her head open while fighting over some airplane glue.

“Uh-huh,” Tess said, nodding and smiling. As long as you nodded and smiled, she had learned, it didn’t matter what you were saying.

“He went to trial, got ten years, and was sent to Hagerstown this past summer. It wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.”

“No, not at all.” It was, for example, better than having your brains oozing out of your head on some concrete patio in Locust Point.

“It was his last chance to clean up, you see. Prison, I mean. They have a Narcotics Anonymous group there. It was his chance to get clean for once. I hope you don’t think I sound cold, but in some ways it was the happiest day in my life when I saw Henry go off to Hagerstown. Nothing else had worked. No matter what I did, he always went back to huffing.”

“I hear that literally destroys brain cells,” Tess offered, then felt fatuous. Ruthie was probably an unwilling expert on the topic.

“It’s a stupid high,” Ruthie said, inhaling fiercely on her cigarette. “Look, I’m no angel. I like to drink. If I have a gentleman friend, I drink with him. If I’m alone, I might drink a beer or two. When I was working two jobs and going to community college, I took speed to get through exams. But sniffing glue and spray paint, sneaking up on gas pumps-I can’t imagine anything dumber. I kicked Henry out three times in the last two years.”

Tess dropped the smile, which now seemed inappropriate, but continued to nod.

“I also took him back three times. He was my baby brother, I practically raised him after our mother died.”

“Was there a big age difference?”

“Eighteen years. He was a change-of-life baby. Mother died of lung cancer before he was two.” Ruthie sucked on her cigarette as if to taunt whatever gods she believed in. “She was forty-seven. Dad made it to fifty-five before he went. Brain tumor.”

In another city, or another neighborhood, perhaps this double dose of tragedy would have been shocking. But cancer was one area where Maryland stayed competitive, year in and year out, thanks to families like the Dembrows. Bad habits, bad diets, bad workplaces.

Tess realized Ruthie had spoken of her brother in the past tense.

“Henry didn’t make it, did he?”

Ruthie shook her head. “He was stabbed to death his first month in Hagerstown. His first month. There was a fight, and the guards all went running to one part, Henry was left where he was, nobody around. But when it was over, Henry was the one who was dead. I thought Hagerstown was going to save him, but it ended up being the death of him.”

Fairly classic prison shanking scenario, but Tess didn’t think this assessment would comfort Ruthie Dembrow. It was a sad story, too, and one Ruthie carried with not a little guilt. Maybe her eyes, and her mouth and her hair had not always been so hard.

Still, Tess couldn’t see where a private investigator came into play. She wondered if Ruthie was going to try and sue the state, claim the guards were negligent in her brother’s death. If so, she wanted no part of it. Tess was probably Ruthie’s last resort, the only person left after being turned down by every ambulance chaser in the city. There was just no money to be made suing state government. They were careful to write the laws so their mistakes carried no penalties. A guy who had served ten years for a robbery he hadn’t committed, who had lost most of his twenties to the state prison system, had gotten $250,000, parceled out over six years. The credit card commercials said some things were priceless, but Maryland ’s Board of Public Works had come up with a pretty exact figure for a man’s youth.

But that man had been innocent at least. Henry Dembrow had killed a woman. Tess didn’t believe in the death penalty, but she didn’t lose too much sleep over fate getting the job done.

“I’m not a lawyer, Ruthie. I’m an investigator.”

“I know that.”

“So what do you want from me?” She knew she sounded impatient and not a little crass, but she was to meet Crow for dinner in less than forty-five minutes.

“I want to know why my brother was killed.”

“Ask the prison officials.”

“They say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Not very satisfying, but the truth seldom is. Why would they lie?”

“I don’t think they’re lying. I think they don’t care.” Ruthie leaned toward Tess. “But isn’t it awfully coincidental, my brother getting killed after he killed someone?”

Tess managed, with great effort, not to sigh or shrug. “I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Killers serve time alongside other killers. I’ve even heard that some of these guys are not successfully rehabilitated by the system.”

“You know, you remind me of your dad.”

“Really?” Tess almost never heard this. Although her hair had glints of red in it, and she freckled during the summer, her mother’s dark good looks and strong features had crowded most of the Monaghan influence out of her face.

“Yeah, you both think you’re funny, but you’re not.”

“My dad thinks he’s funny?” Tess wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, it just slipped out. She had never noticed Patrick had much of a sense of humor. Then again, maybe this was his idea of a joke. “Look, you said I was going to be intrigued by what you had to tell me. So far, I’m not exactly on the edge of my seat.”

“Maybe it’s time to strap yourself in. Ever heard of a Jane Doe killing?”

Tess finished off her beer and looked for the waitress, hoping to signal for the check. “Sure. They find a body, they can’t identify it at first, maybe not ever. Jane Doe, John Doe. Happens all the time.”

“My brother was convicted for killing a Jane Doe. How often does that happen?”

“It can’t.”

“It does. It did.”

Ruthie smiled triumphantly, aware she had Tess’s full attention. Her mind raced, trying to fit the pieces together. “How could that be? If they know who killed her, they have to know who she was. No victim, no murder.”

“Oh, there was a victim. They had a body. They just didn’t have a name. No ID, and her fingerprints didn’t match up, either. Not in all the country.”

“Missing person?”

“They ran down some leads, but it never came to anything. When the trial was over, she was history. If anyone’s mourning her, they’re doing it privately.” Ruthie leaned forward. “I think they’re getting their revenge privately, too. Henry was killed because of who he killed. What other explanation is there?”

Tess leaned back against the cracked leatherette of the booth, still trying to fathom how anyone could swim through all the identity nets of the modern age, untouched, unknown, untraceable. No fingerprints meant no criminal record. It also meant she hadn’t worked for certain government agencies, or applied to be in the Big Brother/Big Sister program. The lack of a missing persons report indicated no one cared when Jane Doe didn’t come home one night.

“If someone cared enough to kill Henry,” Tess said slowly, “why didn’t the person come forward and claim her body? Why would someone let her continue to be known as Jane Doe?”

Ruthie had an answer at the ready. “There are people who don’t much care for police, or official channels for things. They’re the same kind of people who might kill a man in prison, you know what I mean?”

She knew. “But you’re not asking me to find them, right? Because if such people exist, I don’t want to know them.”

“All I want is a name, an ID. I’ll take it from there.”

A Christmas carol boomed from Frigo’s jukebox, so tinny and speeded up that Tess needed a moment to place the familiar tune. “What Child Is This?” Very appropriate. She was still thinking about Ruthie’s theory, trying to find all the flaws. Like a bridesmaid’s dress made by a neighborhood woman who tippled, it didn’t hang quite right.

“Ruthie, is this your way of making amends, some sort of Christmas mission? If I find the girl’s name, are you going to track down her family, give them a chance to reclaim her bones and lie beneath her own marker, in her hometown cemetery?”

Ruthie’s green eyes were even greener above her tight turtleneck, the same one she had worn at the Sour Beef dinner, to such great effect. “I don’t care what happens to that glue-sniffing skank in the next life, or the life after that. I want to know who my brother killed because I know he died for a reason. I’ll start with a name, if you can find one.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Merry Christmas, you still get your fee. Pat explained that part to me.”

Tess sensed this toughness was an act, but she couldn’t figure out whether it was for her benefit, or Ruthie’s. “Look, I understand. You want a reason for your brother’s death. You want it to matter. Has it occurred to you that Jane Doe has family out there somewhere, family with even more questions than you have?”

“Fuck them. Fuck her. She shouldn’t have tried to get into my house. Then Henry wouldn’t have pushed her, and none of this would have happened. Okay, maybe Henry isn’t dead directly because of her. But the two things are connected. I want to know who she was, how she came to meet my brother that day, why she was in a neighborhood where she didn’t belong. That’s all.”

No, Tess thought, you want someone to blame, someone other than yourself. She hadn’t been able to save her brother, so what? They would have been okay if Jane Doe’s family had been able to save her. It was a head-on collision, and all Ruthie wanted was the comfort of knowing her brother wasn’t the one who crossed the center line.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“You’re a good kid, Tesser.”

If her name had sounded odd enough in Ruthie’s mouth, her family nickname seemed a sacrilege.