Baltimore Blues
Authors: Laura Lippman
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General, #Hard-Boiled
According to sources close to the investigation, Mr. Abramowitz was squeezed in a python-like grip, then beaten viciously. He had bruises on his face, presumably from a fight with Darryl Paxton, a 33-year-old researcher at Johns Hopkins medical school, who visited the victim at his office just after 10
P.M
., according to a security guard’s log. The body was discovered by a custodian…
There was nothing new beyond that, only boilerplate on Abramowitz and his career. Certainly nothing was new to Tess. The style and reporting were as familiar to her as a lover’s kiss. All the trademarks were there—unnamed sources, a memorable description of the death at hand, over-the-top prose, a damning detail. Still, she felt genuine admiration at the guard’s log; she bet no one else in town had that.
“But I know more,” she said out loud.
BALTIMORE BLUES
For my parents
I am indebted to a special trio—Michele B. Slung; my agent, Vicky Bijur; and my editor, Carrie Feron. Generous colleagues at
The Sun
taught me things I should have already known: Joan Jacobson, Jay Apperson, Arthur Hirsch, Michael James, Jacques Kelly, Joe Mathews, Patrick A. McGuire, Jon Morgan, Michael Ollove, Scott Shane, Melody Simmons. Thanks also to Melinda Henneberger, Jim MacAlister, and Susan Seegar. Finally, thanks to my husband, John Roll, for calling my bluff.
Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
—H.L. Mencken,
A Book of Burlesques
[W]hile I love the dear old City of Baltimore much, and many of her people more, past experience has taught that, in their collective or municipal capacity, they are the most silly, unreflective, procrastinating, impracticable and perverse congregation of bipeds to be found any where under the sun. Wise in their own conceits they are impatient of advice, no matter how thoughtful and well matured, from any one, preferring always their own crude extemporaneous conjectures to the suggestions of sound common sense, which can only be elicited by the patient exercise of judgment, observation and reflection.
—Dr. Thomas Hepburn Buckler of Baltimore, in a letter home from his self-imposed exile in Paris, published in “Baltimore: Its Interests—Past, Present, and Future,” 1873
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heighho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.
—A. E. Housman
“Terence, This is Stupid Stuff”
On the last night of August, Tess Monaghan went to…
Tess did not have blueberry pancakes after all. She wanted…
Ava lived in Eden, in Eden’s Landing, a mid-rise condominium…
For eighteen years Tess’s Uncle Donald had been a moving…
After the easy rewards of her first day, Tess discovered…
That night, Tess ran her hardest route.
Tess dawdled the next morning, reluctant to show up at…
The security guard, Joey Dumbarton, lived in a part of…
Jonathan Ross had seemed shockingly original to Tess once, but…
Whitney—former college roommate, sometime best friend, sometime toughest competitor…
Like most midsize cities at the millennium’s edge, Baltimore had…
Friday night. The Shabbat candles burned brightly on the mantel…
Ava may have sinned, but she had not been forced…
Tess rehearsed her cover story on her way to meet…
The president of the United States came between Tess and…
Tess woke up the next morning with an unfamiliar pleasant…
After dropping Tyner and his van off at his office…
It was almost noon before Tess could face being vertical.
Cecilia’s visit bothered Tess—and not only because there had…
By the time Tess returned to Women and Children First…
Tess asked Crow to drop her on Bond Street outside…
“No one murders reporters.”
Tess had known Jonathan was Jewish. But it was only…
The next evening, when Ava Hill opened her door at…
Tess did not have to dig far through her file…
Tess had been to the state prison just once, under…
Home again, Tess tried to think like a newspaper editor…
Tess wanted nothing more than to sleep. If she could…
Tess left the O’Neals’ and drove to a copy store…
After a tetanus shot and a visit from two homicide…
Tess, Whitney, Crow, and Cecilia stood on the west side…
O
n the last night of August, Tess Monaghan went to the drugstore and bought a composition book—one with a black-and-white marble cover. She had done this every fall since she was six and saw no reason to change, despite the differences wrought by twenty-three years. Never mind that she had a computer with a memory capable of keeping anything she might want to record. Never mind that she had to go to Rite Aid because Weinstein’s Drugs had long ago been run into the ground by her grandfather. Never mind that she was no longer a student, no longer had a job, and summer’s end held little relevance for her. Tess believed in routines and rituals. So she bought a composition book for $1.69, took it home, and opened it to the first page, where she wrote:
- Goals for Autumn:
- 1. Bench press 120 pounds.
- 2. Run a 7-minute mile.
- 3. Read
Don Quixote
. - 4. Find a job, etc.
She sat at her desk and looked at what she had written. The first two items were within reach, although it would take work: She could do up to ten reps at a hundred pounds and
run four miles in thirty minutes.
Don Quixote
had defeated her before, but she felt ready for it this fall.
Number 4 was more problematic. For one thing it would require figuring out what kind of job she wanted, a dilemma that had been perplexing her for two years, ever since Baltimore’s penultimate newspaper, the
Star
, had folded, and its ultimate paper, the
Beacon-Light
, had not hired her.
Tess slapped the notebook closed, filed it on a shelf with twenty-two others—all blank except for the first page—set her alarm, and was asleep in five minutes. It was the eve of the first day of school, time for the city to throw off its August doldrums and move briskly toward fall. Maybe it could carry Tess with it.
The alarm went off seven hours later, at 5:15
A.M
. She dressed quickly and ran to her car, sniffing the breeze to see if fall might be early this year. The air was depressingly thick and syrupy, indifferent to Tess’s expectations. Her eleven-year-old Toyota, the most dependable thing in her life, turned over instantly. “Thank you, precious,” she said, patting the dashboard, then heading off through downtown’s deserted streets.
On the other side of the harbor, the boat house was dark. It often was at 5:30, for the attendant did not find minimum wage incentive enough to leave his bed and arrive in Cherry Hill before first light. The neighborhood, a grim place at any time of day, had long ago been stripped of its fruit trees. And though its gentle slopes offered a sweeping view of Baltimore’s harbor and skyline, no one came to Cherry Hill for the views.
Fortunately Tess had her own boat house key, as did most of the diehard rowers. She let herself in, stashed her key ring in a locker in the ladies’ dressing room, then ran downstairs and grabbed her oars, anxious to be on the water before the college students arrived. She didn’t like being lumped in with what she thought of as the J. Crew crews, callow youths with hoarse chatter of tests they had aced and kegs they had tapped. But she also felt out of place among the Baltimore Rowing Club’s efficient grown-ups, professionals who
rushed from morning practice to jobs, real ones, at hospitals and research labs, law firms and brokerage houses.
“Watch my line, girlie,” a crabber called out, his voice thick in the humid morning air.
“I see it,” she said, balancing an Alden Ocean Shell above her head as she threaded her way down the dock and the crabbers’ gauntlet of string, chicken necks, and bushel baskets. The crabbers, Cherry Hill residents supplementing their government checks with the Patapsco’s bounty, were having a good morning, even if much of their catch was illegal—pregnant females, crabs less than five inches across. Tess wouldn’t tell. She didn’t care. She didn’t eat anything from the local waters.
At least the city-owned Alden was easy to launch. The sun was still lurking just beyond the Francis Scott Key Bridge when Tess pushed off in the choppy water and started for Fort McHenry. Almost reflexively, she hummed “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Oh say can you see?
She would catch herself, stop, then unconsciously start again; after all, she was rowing toward the anthem’s birthplace.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
…
The water was rough this morning, making Tess nervous. It was difficult to tip an Alden, but not impossible, and she didn’t want to be immersed in the Patapsco’s murky middle branch under any circumstances. Once she had gotten a little of the river in a cut on her hand, and the cut hadn’t healed for three months. Better to take it easy, warm up, let her morning-tight muscles relax and expand. On the way back she would push herself, rowing as if in a race.
This was Tess’s routine, her only routine since the
Star
had been shuttered. Six days a week she rowed in the morning and ran in the evening. Three times a week she lifted weights in an old-fashioned boxing gym in East Baltimore. On the seventh day, she rested, soaking her long frame in a hot tub and fantasizing about a man who could rub her feet and neck simultaneously.
In college Tess had been a mediocre sweep rower, re
cruited by a mediocre team because she was strong, with muscular legs and a swimmer’s broad shoulders. Switching to two oars had not enhanced her style. Tess knew, or imagined she knew, how ugly she looked moving across the water.
Like a beetle caught in the toilet bowl, all twitches and spasms
. Even on the easy trip out, she scowled and chewed her tongue, so fierce was her concentration. No, there was nothing natural about Tess’s rowing. She didn’t do it well. She didn’t do it in order to compete. Yet she seldom missed a day. Her friends often said Tess had never met a rut she didn’t like. She took no offense. It was true. And her fondness for routine had helped her weather the jobless months.
But this morning, as she tried to feather her oars in air thick as particleboard, everything suddenly seemed futile. The first day of September should be cool, she thought, or at least cooler. She should be good at this by now, or at least better. Abruptly, she pulling her oars out of the water and let the boat drift. She scanned the skies for rain, hoping for an excuse to quit. A thick haze hung over the skyline, but no clouds. From this vantage point Baltimore simply looked dirty and discouraged.
“Welcome to Charm City,” she said to a seagull that was diving for dead fish. “Welcome to Baltimore, hon.”
Neither Tess nor her hometown were having a good year. She was out of work and out of unemployment benefits. Baltimore was on pace to set an unprecedented murder rate, breaking the once-thought-unbreakable record of 1993, which had broken some previously impossible record. Every day there was a little death, the kind of murder that rated no more than four paragraphs deep inside the
Beacon-Light
. Yet no one seemed to notice or care—except those playing the homicide tally in the Pick 3. the mayor still called it the City That Reads, but others had long ago twisted that civic motto.
“The city that bleeds, hon,” Tess called out to the unimpressed seagull. The city that breeds. the city that grieves, the city that seethes.
The city one leaves
. Only Tess never could, any more than she could have swum from the bottom of Chesapeake Bay with an anchor around her neck.
As she stared off into the distance, another sculler emerged from the shadows under the Hanover Street Bridge, moving easily and swiftly toward her as if the water were greased glass. His technique was perfect, his back broad, his white T-shirt already gray with sweat. His image seemed to pop out, the way things did at a 3-D movie. In seconds he was almost on top of Tess, coming right at her.
“Behind you,” she called, confident such an assured rower would have no problem changing course. Her voice carried across the silent morning, but the rower paid no heed.
“
Behind you
!” Tess called again more insistently, as the boat kept coming right at her. A collision seemed inevitable. She had never watched anyone row from this angle, never realized how fast a boat seemed to move when one was in its path. Flustered, she began making fruitless, tiny movements with her oars, trying to turn the Alden and get out of the oncoming boat’s path. Her only thought was to minimize the damage to the other boat, which looked fragile and, consequently, expensive.
The Alden, an amiable shell designed for beginners, moved beneath Tess with all the alacrity and finesse of a large cow. In her haste, trying to steer the boat through the rough water with rushed, incompetent strokes, she didn’t seem to move at all. Frantic, Tess slid forward in the seat and pulled as hard as she could, using her legs’ full power. Her boat shot across the water, leaving the oncoming boat’s path clear. The other rower then braced his oars against his body, executing a perfect panic stop inches from where she had been.
He had known she was there all along.
“That’s what you get,” a familiar voice called out, “for dogging it.”
“Thanks, Rock,” Tess yelled back. “Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. I thought you were some kamikaze rower, trying to sink me.”
“Nope. Just your personal rowing coach, trying to make sure you give one hundred percent every day. What’s the point of coming out here if you don’t push yourself?”
“What’s the point of coming out here at all? That’s what I was asking myself before you sent me into adrenaline overload.”
But Rock considered rowing his true vocation. On weekdays, from eight to five, Rock was Darryl Paxton, a researcher bent over one of the 20,000 microscopes at Johns Hopkins medical school. Tess wasn’t sure what he was looking for, as Rock was one of those rare people who never talked about his work. Rock worked to row, putting aside as much money as he could to underwrite his singular passion. He also ate to row, slept to row, worked out to row. Until he got engaged last spring, Tess had suspected he performed no nonessential tasks. It would be interesting to see how his fiancée responded to the fall schedule of head races, which kept Rock on the water twice a day through Thanksgiving. If the engagement survived the season, Tess thought, she’d be happy to dance at their wedding next March. Maybe she’d even dance
with
the bride. After all, she was going to be the best man.
Funny to think she had been scared of Rock once. He had what Tess thought of as a serial killer’s physique: short and broad, his skin crammed with more muscles than it could safely contain. Every now and then one got loose and twitched in some unlikely spot. The veins along his arms were thick and blue, like Bic ballpoints under the skin; his short, stocky calves were so overdeveloped it looked as if softballs had been surgically implanted below the backs of his knees. A premed on the Hopkins crew once theorized Rock could not feel pain, claiming it had something to do with his mitochondria. Tess knew he felt things all too deeply. It was evident in his face, a child’s face—clear, guileless, with the round, brown eyes of a cartoon character.
“You look like Dondi!” she had blurted out one morning, five years ago, as he pulled alongside the dock at the end of a hard workout, his blue black hair plastered to his head with sweat. She had known him only by sight, one of a handful of scullers at a boat house dominated by crews of fours and eights.
To her surprise the ferocious face had smiled. “Now
that
was a good comic strip. How come the
Beacon
dropped it? And Mr. Tweedy. I still can’t believe Mr. Tweedy is gone.”
“Mr. Tweedy? You poor, deprived
Beacon
readers, living for such paltry things. The
Star
has all the good comics.”
So they had gone out to breakfast, sharing the comics pages of Baltimore’s three newspapers. That had been five years and two newspapers ago. Tess, like Mr. Tweedy, had disappeared from the local newspapers. The
Beacon
, which had subsumed the
Light
and killed the
Star
, now had excellent comics pages, three in all, the usual spoils of a newspaper war. But Rock was still her friend, their relationship cemented in one of Tess’s beloved routines—rowing, then breakfast at a diner in her neighborhood. Other rowers skipped practice, overslept, made excuses about the weather. Rock, nationally ranked, and Tess, chronically underemployed, were faithful to the boat house and to each other.
She studied her friend, who had been on vacation the past two weeks, rowing. He looked gray beneath his summer tan and the circles under his eyes had only deepened.
“Didn’t you get any rest in New York? I thought that was the point of a vacation.”
Rock shook his head. “All those crickets. And the more I worked out, the less I slept. But I feel pretty good.”
“I feel pretty good myself.” It was only a half lie. She was in great shape physically.
“Well, if you’re in such good shape, wanna race back, all the way to the glass factory? Loser buys breakfast.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’d need a huge head start to make it competitive. Race the cars along Hanover Street Bridge if you want a challenge.”
“I’ll give you a five-hundred-meter head start.”
“Not enough at this length. You’ll pass me midway.”
“One thousand, then.”
“For breakfast? You always buy me breakfast, anyway.”
“Well, I won’t buy you breakfast today if you don’t at least try.”
“Oh.” Poverty ennobled some people. Tess was not one
of them. She existed on an intricate system of favors and freeloading, which had made her cheap and a little spoiled. “I guess you’ve got a race, then.”
“Start as if it were a head race. I won’t come on until I see you disappear under the bridge.”
Tess positioned her boat and slid forward in her seat. She never raced anymore, except against herself, but the routines were second nature.
“Start rowing,” Rock called. “Build up to a full stroke in ten.”
The water had smoothed out, allowing Tess to find her groove quickly. She rowed as she would have in her old women’s eight, following the calls of an imaginary coxswain. Full power for ten, using everything she had, then ten strokes with legs only. She passed under the shadow of the Hanover Street Bridge and into the light again, feeling confident and loose.