The Sugar House

chapter 4

IT WAS A BUSY MONDAY MORNING AT THE MORGUE ON Penn Street, the corridors overflowing with the weekend catch from throughout Maryland. Nothing like the combination of hunting season and Christmas cheer to up the number of bodies who needed their passports stamped before they could continue on their journey. Tess, trying to act nonchalant in the extreme, waited among the gridlocked gurneys for the assistant medical examiner who had autopsied Jane Doe a little more than a year ago.

She had been here before, the first time as a rookie night cops reporter, learning the ropes. An older reporter tried to test her mettle, but it had been Tess’s good fortune to arrive on a day when death, if not exactly on holiday, was definitely slacking. Only one body was out in plain view, an overweight young man who had died of a heart attack while interviewing for a job at JCPenney’s.

In the eight years since then, Tess had seen many more bodies-unexpected bodies, fresher bodies, riper bodies, in less contained circumstances. But a girl never forgets her first corpse. He had been blue, the pale blue used in raspberry-flavored Ice Pops. Tess had felt, well, mortified on his behalf. Whatever his life plans, they hadn’t included being a blue, naked prop in the ritual hazing of some cub reporter. He had looked unreal, and Tess found it hard to imagine he had ever been flesh-colored, much less alive.

She had been only twenty-two.

“Miss Monaghan?” Dr. Olive Horvath, the assistant M.E., motioned for her to follow her into a small conference room. Harried, bristling with impatience before Tess had spoken a single word, she made it clear that Tess was at the bottom of the list of things she had to do today, and she was eager to draw a line through her.

“Here,” she said, brandishing a folder.

“Where?”

“Here.”

Tess had expected an attendant to lead her to a drawer somewhere and slide out the preserved remains of Henry Dembrow’s victim. She had steeled herself for this, in fact. But Jane Doe’s body was long gone. No room at the inn, not with the city homicide rate still in the top five nationwide.

“Buried in a pauper’s grave down at Crownsville,” Dr. Horvath explained. Pink-cheeked, with sky-blue eyes and thick, honey-colored hair, she was not so much pretty as in vivid good health, which was jarring in this setting. “We have her DNA, prints, and blood work on file, but we don’t have the room for that kind of storage, not for a closed case. It’s standard practice with the Jane and John Does, or anyone whose body isn’t claimed.”

“Do you know that name has an origin?” Tess asked, thinking to delight the woman with her scrap of knowledge. “John Doe, I mean. My boyfriend explained-”

“Nope, never really thought about it.” It was clear that the living, and their customs, held little interest for Dr. Horvath. “Look, do you want a copy of my report? It’s fifty cents a page.”

Tess was familiar with this racket: City, state and federal agencies charged ten times the going rate for photocopies, if only to keep the nuisance factor down. Normally, she wouldn’t have thought twice about taking this out of her expenses, but Ruthie Dembrow’s finances were limited. As was her father’s patience, if he found out she was featherbedding a client he had referred to her.

“Is there a break room, where I could read it and take notes? I’ll let you hold my driver’s license for collateral.”

“No need for that,” Dr. Horvath said. “I’ll find a spot for you, and you can drop the report off at the front desk when you’re done. Tell them if you need any copies, and they’ll help you out. I’ve got work to do.” She led Tess to a small room with a coffeemaker and an old-fashioned vending machine that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. Tess wasn’t sure if they even made Zagnut bars anymore.

“Our old smoking lounge,” the assistant medical examiner said, her voice wistful. “Now we have to go stand in front of the building, like addicts on some drug corner.”

“You smoke?”

“When you spend your day looking at healthy young men, with pristine organs and beautiful arteries-young men who just happen to have bullets in their brains-you become a little more fatalistic, I guess. Death has its own timetable.”

Her eyes lingered briefly on Tess as if she could see through her, as if she could gauge every slice of pepperoni pizza devoured, every drink consumed, every joint smoked. Tess felt like the transparency in the old World Book Encyclopedia, the one she had studied to master the rudiments of male anatomy. She couldn’t help wondering how her arteries would rate with Dr. Horvath.

Suddenly, a Zagnut bar seemed like a very good idea.

The autopsy report was slow going for someone whose last science class had been the required chemistry lab for Western High School sophomores. Where the science was clear, the English was murky. The bureaucrat’s motto: Why say it once, if you could say it three times, in three increasingly clunkier sentences? Tess read carefully, taking notes as she went, backtracking over and over again. At the end of the hour, she had only a page of notes.

Jane Doe, estimated age 15-25. Caucasian. Cause of death: head injury, consistent with a fall. Length of rubber tubing tied at neck post-mortem. 5-7, 118 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes. Black tattoo, on left ankle a straight line, two inches long, appears to be quite recent, still some blood and scabbing around it. Enamel on teeth badly decayed. Fingerprints taken, no matches found. Has never given birth. No scars.

A photograph was stapled inside the file. Tess avoided it for as long as she could, but she finally confronted Jane Doe’s death mask. Death by a massive head injury, combined with living on the streets, didn’t bring out the best in a person. Jane Doe’s eyes were closed, her face bruised, at once lumpy and hollow. The tip of her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth, her farewell to the world that had treated her so badly. The rubber tubing around her neck, fashioned into a bow, was particularly obscene somehow, an ugly posthumous joke. Henry must have lingered over the body, Tess thought, needing to defile it for some reason. Why?

Still, the vestiges of a pretty face remained. Jane Doe had a sensual mouth; a straight, neat nose; and the loveliest brows, thick and natural looking. Working-class Baltimore women tended to overpluck and tweeze, laboring over their eyebrows the way some worked their tiny rowhouse gardens. Ruthie Dembrow, for one, had that overarched, perpetually surprised look. She’d be better off if she misplaced her tweezers for a few months. Not Jane Doe.

Tess handed the report back to the front desk clerk. “I’d like one page copied, if I could. Well, not a page, really-but this photo. Could you do that?”

“It won’t come out very well,” the clerk warned her.

“I know,” Tess said, pushing two quarters toward her. “But I want it anyway.”

Funny, the Polaroid photo reproduced almost too well. Jane Doe’s face was so pale, her features so dark, the rubber tubing at her neck darker still. Tess folded the paper into fourths and hid it between the pages of her datebook.

After the medical examiner’s office, Tess stopped at the police department to pick up the transcript of Henry Dembrow’s confession. No fifty cents a copy here, not as long as Homicide Detective Martin Tull was on the force.

“You want to go over this with me?” he asked, and Tess knew he wanted to go over it with her. Tull did favors in exchange for full disclosure. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, quite the opposite. Tull had learned the hard way not to ignore Tess’s instincts.

“We can walk over to that place on Guilford,” he said, his girl-pretty features wistful. “The one with Peet’s Coffee and all those bars.”

“Bars?”

“You know, the salad bar, the soup bar, the sandwich bar, the cookie bar, the juice bar…”

Tess made a face. The morgue hadn’t dented her appetite, but she had other ideas for lunch. “I’d rather falafel.”

“You mean you’d rather have a falafel, don’t you?”

“No, I use falafel as a verb. Let’s go to Cypriana, I’ll falafel, then we can have coffee, after. My sandwich card is filled up, and I’m entitled to a free one.”

“Falafel, it is. Hey, can you gyro, too? Or souvlaki?”

“Don’t be silly,” Tess said. “Obviously, those don’t work as verbs at all.”

Cypriana’s was housed in the old lobby of one of Baltimore ’s many defunct newspapers, the American. Tess had worked down the block at the old Star, now an Inner Harbor parking lot. She wondered if the city’s sole surviving paper, the Beacon-Light, might one day fold, too, if its lobby would become a series of small shops, or an avant-garde art gallery. A world without newspapers seemed increasingly possible to her-and perhaps not that tragic. She had survived the transition. Others would as well.

She ordered the “ultimate,” chicken, falafel, and feta cheese wrapped in a pita, drenched in a sauce whose ingredients were zealously protected. Garlic, however, was clearly part of the mix. Tull opted for a small salad, dry. They found a table next to one of the large windows overlooking Guilford. Tull cast a longing glance across the street, where his Peet’s coffee waited for him. The homicide detective was one of those odd people who didn’t care about food, who considered it nothing more than fuel. He probably wouldn’t bother to eat at all, but his stomach needed some lining for the ten-plus cups of coffee he drank every day.

“So, Henry Dembrow,” he began.

“Henry Dembrow’s victim,” Tess amended. “His sister thinks her brother was killed in prison for a reason.”

“Which lies in the identity of Jane Doe.” Tull chewed on a forkful of greens. “She’s wrong, of course.”

“Agreed, but I can’t see how it would hurt anyone, trying to find out who the girl was.”

“No, it’s a good exercise for you, in fact. The question is, how do you, without access to all the tools and databases we have at the department-”

“Without official access,” Tess said, smiling at him. Unattached, she had never allowed herself to flirt with Tull. Now that she was back with Crow, it seemed perfectly safe to flutter her lashes a little. Tull was fine-boned, an inch or two shorter than she was, with even, perfect features thrown into sharp relief by his acne scars. It was those little scars that made him so attractive, not that Tull ever seemed to notice. “I was married once,” he liked to say, in a tone suggesting it was a childhood communicable disease, like measles or chicken pox. Once you had it, you had it.

“Without access,” he repeated now, in a firm tone. “So, what can you do that we didn’t do?”

“Not give up.”

“Don’t be rude, Tess.”

“I’m not, but it’s true, isn’t it? With Henry’s confession in hand, it had to be less urgent to identify Jane Doe than it was to close your other cases. You’re supposed to catch the killers, not identify their victims.”

“You’d be surprised how a case like this eats at a detective. I was the secondary. The primary on the case, David Canty, took it very much to heart. He did everything possible, even planted a few stories in the Blight, hoping to stir up some leads.”

Tess couldn’t help smiling at this. Newspaper reporters liked to think they used people. They hated to acknowledge how they were used and manipulated. But it was a two-way street, this avenue paved with rationalizations about the public’s right to know and the public good.

“I noticed she had a tattoo, a fresh one, a line at the ankle-” Tess began.

“We checked,” Tull said. “I personally called every goddamn tattoo parlor in the city and the county, to see if anyone remembered a girl like her coming in just before she was killed. No one did. Although if she had a tattoo, she was at least eighteen, or had a fake ID. It’s not legal to tattoo a minor.”

“Could have been a do-it-yourself job.”

Tull shook his head. “Too professional looking.”

“I assume you tried to match her with missing persons reports, too?”

“Yeah. That’s the worst. Families coming in, looking at a dead body to see if it’s their dead body. They’re relieved when it’s not, but they’re also frustrated, because it means all they can do is go home and wait.”

Tess’s sandwich was long gone, but Tull was still picking at his salad. From here, she could see the corner of Baltimore Street, the Block-the Tick-Tock club, the sad little sex shops and peep shows. Once, all runaway girls had ended up here. Now there was so much competition.

“Someone, somewhere must miss her,” Tess said. “Every death has to alter the world in some way, don’t you think?”

Tull gave her a fond smile, the kind Tess hated. “Most people get tougher, the more death they see. But you, you’re still all squishy and sentimental. Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’ve found religion, and you’ll start lugging your little piano down to the Block, playing for the passersby. Sister Tess Monaghan, in her black orthopedic shoes, running her own mission of mercy.”

The image made Tess laugh. She knew those women; she had tossed coins in their cups on Friday afternoon, glad someone wanted to save a few souls. “If I find religion, I’ll have to embrace the Muslim faith so both parents can be furious with me.”

Tull surprised her by leaning forward and wiping a piece of feta from her cheek. His touch was a father’s touch-well-meaning, but too gentle to get the job done. Mothers knew how hard to rub a stained cheek. “You know, if you plan on any more human contact today, you might consider a breath mint.”

Tess took over, cleaning her own cheek. “I think I’m just going to go back to my office, read these files, and canoodle with Esskay, whose breath is always much worse than mine.”

“And someone pays you for this? Man, I want a gig like that someday. You need a partner?”

“Everyone wants to be my partner these days.” Tess thought about Whitney’s similarly facetious offer just the other night. At least, she hoped it was facetious. “Why is that? Does my life really look so cushy from where you sit?”

“Actually, it looks…happy. You look happy, ever since you got back from Texas. And back with Crow.”

“I guess I am,” Tess said, then looked around nervously. Too late-there wasn’t even a splinter of wood to knock in this room of formica tables and plastic chairs. She rapped her knuckles on her forehead, figuring it was hard enough to count.