By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel (11 page)

T
ess stopped off at the Hampden Post Office before her late-breakfast meeting with Nancy Porter, sending three certified letters to the Mail Boxes Etc. store that Lana had visited. Each one contained a card with a typed message, one for Lana and two for Natalie, addressed to both Rubin and Peters:
I know what you’re doing. Call me.
She used her second cell-phone number, the one that couldn’t be traced to her. But just getting either of the Natalie letters accepted at the address would be a key piece of information.

The morning was bright and breezy, and Nancy Porter had taken one of the two porch tables at the Golden West, a restaurant carved out of a row house on Thirty-sixth Street, aka the Avenue. Long the main business artery in the working-class neighborhood of Hampden, the Avenue had become hip in spite of itself, bringing in the usual mix of cafés, galleries, and shops. Tess’s personal favorite was Ma Petite Shoe, an establishment that sold only chocolate and shoes. That pretty much met all her needs, although most of the shoes tended to be on the girly side.

“I’m glad you were okay with meeting here,” Nancy said, rising to shake Tess’s hand. “I’m on a low-carb diet, and they have the best huevos rancheros, which almost make up for the fact that I can’t have the tortillas.”

Tess sized up the detective. She appeared a year or two younger than Tess and only a few pounds heavier, although those pounds were packed on a shorter, finer-boned frame. Men probably didn’t mind Nancy’s weight as much as she did. She had an all-American-girl cuteness, and the wedding band on her left hand would seem to indicate she didn’t lack for companionship.

“Well, we’re the perfect dining companions, then,” Tess said.

“You’re doing low carb, too?”

“No, but I love huevos rancheros, and I’ll happily eat your tortillas along with mine.”

Nancy favored her with a crooked grin. “I hate women like you. You can probably eat anything you want and not worry about it.”

“Oh, I could worry about it, but what’s the point? I accept my height and shoe size, my eye color and my hair color. I might as well live in the body I was born with, too.”

“You can change your hair and your eyes, though.”

“Would you?” Tess challenged the blue-eyed blonde.

Nancy laughed, shaking her head. “Gretchen said you were funny. Said you’d talk my ear off about nonessential stuff, too, but she swears you’re a good investigator when you aren’t being all philosophical.”

“You talked to Gretchen?”

The blue eyes in that baby face had a knowing spark. “Oh, yeah, as soon as I hung with you. Woke her up, too. Sorry, but there was no way I was going to take your word for anything. I’ve gotten burned a time or two, talking to people I shouldn’t. For all I knew, you were a reporter. In fact, Gretchen said you used to be.”

“I’ve been a private investigator almost as long as I worked as a reporter.” Tess paused, surprised by her own stat. She double-checked her arithmetic. Three years at the
Star
before it folded, now going on three years as a licensed PI. “And I wasn’t much of a reporter. I was so far down the fourth-estate food chain that I was plankton.”

“If you say so. Anyway, Gretchen vouched for you, and she’s as tough on people as I am. So here I am. What can I tell you?”

“Did you work the Rubin case?”

“There is no Rubin case, as far as the department is concerned. And I hope he’s not trying to say there is. Family Crimes checked it very thoroughly. His wife walked out, taking their kids. No sign of foul play. And until he gets a custody order, which he says he doesn’t want to do, no laws broken.”

“That’s pretty much how he tells it. But I was curious about the fact that her credit cards have been dormant since she left. Isn’t that suggestive of foul play? How can she be on the run without any money?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

Another knowing smile. Nancy might be younger than Tess, but she had more experience listening to people’s lies.

“Mark Rubin kept his wife on a short, tight leash when it came to money. She had credit cards for everything she needed, and an ATM-Visa card, but he didn’t let her have more than a hundred dollars in cash. Plus, he made her account for her cash day by day. Withdrawals, too. At the end of the month, he went over everything again, item by item.”

“I don’t get it. That would make her more likely to use the credit cards, right?”

“Not if she doesn’t want him to know where she is. So she figured out a way to get around his system, get enough cash to hit the road.”

“How?”

“Oh, she’s shrewd. Rubin withdrew his cash for the week every Monday, and he seldom went to the machine again before the week was out. So she figured she had five days before he would notice that the balances were off. All she had to do was lie to him, not show him the slips at night. Starting the Monday before she left, she went to the ATM every day and withdrew five hundred dollars. That gave her twenty-five hundred.”

“Decent seed money, but it won’t take you far, not with three kids.”

“She wasn’t done. She bought some high-end electronics on one of the credit cards, stuff that Rubin can’t find in his house. Probably sold it for twenty cents on the dollar through a friend, or a fence. We figure she got at least another thousand pulling that scam. And then, the day before she left, she deposited a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to cover what she had taken. I guess she was worried he could come after her for theft, even though it was a joint account.”

“Where’d she get the check?”

“It was a personal check signed by Lana Wishnia.”

“She’s a manicurist. Where does a manicurist get twenty-five hundred bucks to lend?”

Nancy nodded approvingly. “You are good. Rubin didn’t know about her at all, and he thinks Natalie was just her client, but I think different. Lana told detectives the check was to repay some loans Natalie gave her over the years. My hunch is that Lana Wishnia was the fence, but it’s legal, right? No law against buying electronics and selling them cheap.”

“Why didn’t Natalie just write herself a big check on the joint account, wipe out the whole thing?”

Nancy cocked an eyebrow, a trick that Tess had never mastered. “Because the bank had instructions to call Mr. Rubin if Natalie wrote a check for cash for any amount over five hundred dollars.”

“Did anyone ask Rubin about his, um, strict household bookkeeping?”

“Absolutely. You see behavior that controlling, and you have to wonder — how else is this guy controlling his wife? Detectives checked 911 logs to see if the Rubin residence was known for calling in domestics. It came up clean, but in that community that’s not unusual.”

“What do you mean, ‘that community’?” Tess’s tone was sharp, her Irish roots forgotten. She was suddenly 100 percent Weinstein, and the girl on the other side of the table was just another bigoted shiksa. Never mind that Tess herself had basically asked Rubin when he stopped beating his wife. That was different.

“Look, I was posted to Northwest in the city before I came to the county. I know that the Orthodox like to take care of their problems when possible, whether it’s the elderly or drugs or domestic abuse.”

“All communities should do as good a job of caring for their own,” Tess said, still feeling self-righteous.

“No question. But the downside to keeping problems all in the family is that there’s no paper trail when a situation gets out of hand. If you don’t get the batterers in the system when they start, then sometimes you can’t clamp down on them when their behavior becomes truly life-threatening.”

“I don’t see Mark Rubin as an abuser.”

“Neither do I. But I can be definite on this point because we looked into it. We also checked to see if there had been any accusations of sex abuse, if the school had noticed anything in the oldest kid’s behavior. Look, we even had to consider if Mark Rubin was some criminal mastermind who’d murdered his whole family, then played the part of the grieving husband. The fact that he hired you is only further proof that he’s in the clear.”

“Or an expensive bluff.”

Tess was thinking of the pregnant woman who had become a national sensation a while back. Her husband hadn’t been the most persuasive grieving spouse in the world, though, given that he was an adulterer who put their house on the market and sold the family car within a month of her disappearance. Rubin was much more convincing in his agony.

“You said you know the detective in Family Crimes who worked this. What’s her take on it?”

“Maria says if Mark Rubin had anything to do with this, he’s the biggest, two-faced Bluebeard ever. No one has a bad word to say about the guy. Employees, people in his congregation, neighbors. Even ex-employees, and you know what they’re like. Everyone agrees he’s a great guy. Although they say it as if it were a little bit of a surprise.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the older ladies at his synagogue, the ones who had known him since he was kid, kept telling Maria he was such a nice man, ‘considering everything.’ And when Maria asked, ‘Considering what?’ they’d just smile or pat her hand. Again, it’s a close-knit community. They’re not going to tell us all the gossip.”

“What about Natalie?”

“Maria says no one knows her — and no one seems to want to know her. In fact, she’s probably the ‘everything’ that all those women find so objectionable.” Tess, knowing Natalie’s background and youth, saw Nancy’s point. “And then there’s Lana Wishnia, but she’s not saying anything.”

“She stonewalled me, too, but I like to think that Baltimore County Police can be a little more persuasive.”

“We can — if we have a charge on you.” Again Nancy raised a single eyebrow. “But you have to remember, no law has been broken, and Mark Rubin didn’t want to pursue custody through the system, so…sayonara. Not our case, not our stat. The major only expended as much energy as he did because he thought the community might get up in arms, bring all this pressure to bear if we didn’t make every effort to establish there was no crime. The last thing he wanted was to turn on the news and see some little old ladies marching around the Public Safety Building, picketing the department.”

Tess was transformed back into Teresa Esther, defender of the faith. “Are you saying Jews are pushy when they want something?”

“I’m saying
people
are pushy. But some communities are better organized than others, always have been.”

“What are you, anyway? You look WASP, you have a WASP name, but you sure don’t have the attitude.”
Or the bone structure.
Nancy Porter’s round face was pleasant, but she would never pass as one of Baltimore’s moneyed bluebloods.

“Porter is my married name. I was born Potrcurzski. We’re pretty burned out, us Poles, just as left behind as your people, Monaghan. We’re never going to run this city or state again.”

“Baltimore has an Irish mayor now. He even plays in his own Irish band.”

“You know, that’s one of the few things makes me glad I’m working in the county these days. My sergeant says we live in an era where the politicians want to be rock stars and the rock stars want to be politicians — but only one of those jobs actually takes talent.”

Tess laughed. “I have a feeling I’d like your sergeant. Is there anything else I should know about Rubin?”

“His business is sound, and there’s no life insurance on his wife or the children. Just on him, which is what you’d expect. Oh, and he’s pretty well fixed. Not so much from the business, but from an inheritance. His dad died a few years ago, left him everything, and everything was quite a pile.”

“So why did she leave? Why run away from a rich man who adores you and gives you everything you want, if not all the cash you can carry?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not the kind of thing we do at my shop,” Nancy said. “We do more concrete stuff. Dead body, who did it, let’s lock ’em up. Motives are a luxury I can’t afford.”

“Still, you must trip over them from time to time. You can’t be a cop without learning a lot about human nature.”

“Yeah.” The single syllable carried a world of memory and meaning. “But when I do find out why someone did something — I usually wish I hadn’t.”

L
ike an old lady who didn’t trust banks, Baltimore sometimes hid its money in odd places. Robbins & Sons, a white stucco building that resembled a bunker, was tucked away on Smith Avenue, a quiet street just northwest of the city limits. Yet its nearest neighbor, a shoe store, sold high heels that even Tess’s inexpert eye put at three hundred dollars and beyond, while a dress store in the same strip center was advertising a trunk show for a designer who was surely famous among those who paid attention to such things. These one-named stores — Evelyn’s, Soigné — had been built in a different era, when shoppers still expected to brave the elements to go door to door and had to enter stores to get a sense of their wares. The small, narrow displays offered only one or two items for a window-shopper to contemplate.

The stores also provided an interesting contrast to the men strolling along the street here in northwest Baltimore, strictly observant Jews in beards and brimmed hats. It struck Tess for the first time how funny it was that one of the major streets through the heart of this middle-class Jewish neighborhood was named Smith. Did even streets assimilate?

Robbins & Sons had no windows at all, just glass double doors and a sign so discreet that it was unlikely anyone ever stumbled on the furrier by accident. Was that intentional? Tess assumed that furriers were besieged these days, quivering inside their stores while picketers circled with cans of red paint. A few years back, her mother had stopped wearing the raccoon coat that Tess’s father had given her on their twentieth anniversary, proclaiming herself much too nervous. She then bought a faux fur, but it was such a convincing fake that she was scared to wear it. Instead she wore a good cloth coat. “Like Pat Nixon,” joked Tess’s Uncle Donald, which angered his sister. Any comparison to any Nixon was considered harsh rhetoric in the Monaghan-Weinstein families.