Charm City (19 page)

"Sure." She was inclined
to agree with anything Tucci said, as long as he had a hold on her. But
why was it so important to him that she agree? Why did it sound as if
he were rehearsing a story he might want to tell again?

"Good. Now-why-don't-
you-tell-me- what-you-were- doing-hanging-around-
Lea-and-Linda?"

With each word, he bounced for emphasis.
Tess was thankful she had no breakfast to throw up.

"You've really packed on
the pounds since your lacrosse days," she said.
"How much weight have you gained? Twenty pounds? Thirty? And
all in the butt and the gut, from what it feels like."

Tucci stood up, sucking in his belly as he
smoothed down his shirt front and confronted his profile in the
mirrored wall. "Nothing a few sit-ups wouldn't
cure," he said, which gave Tess the opportunity she needed to
free her legs, roll over, and take aim. Was it the right knee the
doctors had just replaced? It was. Tucci screamed and fell to the
floor, writhing in pain.

"You fucking
cunt
,"
he gasped out. "I'm probably going to be back on a
cane because of you."

Tess didn't wait to hear the rest
of Tucci's self-diagnosis. She ran down the stairs and into
the street, where she found Durban's attendant smoking a
cigarette. At least he had the decency to look furtive and embarrassed
when he saw her.

"He said he just wanted to talk to
you, private-like," the attendant said sheepishly, knowing
this was no excuse, not at Durban's, where Spike's
niece was to be shielded against all male interest. "He gave
me twenty bucks to take a long smoke break. I didn't see the
harm in it."

"Well, maybe he'll slip
you another twenty to call a doctor. He blew out his knee,
he's in a lot of pain."

"How'd he do
that?"

"Um, I forgot to spot him on the
hamstring machine."

"You don't spot on
hamstrings," the attendant pointed out.

"Maybe that was the
problem."

It took him a second. "Jesus,
Tess, what do you think you're doing? Your Uncle Spike hung
out with some rough people, but even
he
had the good sense not to fuck with the Tuccis. Do you have any idea
what you're doing?"

"Not really."

R
osita
Ruiz.

The name glared at Tess form the top of
buff-colored paper—heavy-weight, expensive stuff. It was in
24-point type, maybe 36, as black and intense as Rosita's
eyes. Tess stared back, still trying to figure out what her mystery
guest wanted her to find in a collection of clips, mostly sports
stories, and this skimpy work history. Rosita's professional
life to date could be summed up by grade school in Roxbury, college at
Boston University (history major, cum laude), one summer internship at
a small Massachusetts paper, another internship at the
San
Antonio Eagle
, and one award, a second-place in
the Society of South Texas Journalists. How had this slender
résumé landed Rosita a job at one of the
country's top twenty newspapers? Tess had had five years when
the
Star
had folded, and
she hadn't made the first cut at the
Blight
.

Well, Ruiz
,
Tess thought ungenerously. And a female covering sports, to boot. A
two-fer in the wonderful world of newspaper affirmative action hires.
Not that equally unqualified white guys didn't get jobs all
the time. For every underqualified minority or woman, there were at
least three white men who were equally inept: that was the true legacy
of affirmative action, lowering the standards for everyone. Besides,
Rosita's academic credentials were
impeccable—assuming they were true.

The registrar at Boston University confirmed
Rosita's graduation date and major—once Tess
claimed to be a
Blight
employee fact-checking a résumé. Well, she was,
wasn't she?

"One small thing," the
woman in the registrar's office said. "She actually
was
magna
cum laude. We
don't usually see students make that kind of mistake, but
possibly ‘magna' was inadvertently dropped from her
résumé."

"Possibly," echoed Tess,
unconvinced. It didn't seem in character for Rosita to
underreport her accomplishments.

She spread the contents of the envelope
across her desk, so she could see everything at once. Perhaps the
pieces formed a whole. Was there anything of value here, was there a
pattern to what she had been given? No, it appeared someone had grabbed
whatever was available, shoved it in this envelope, and stuck it under
the windshield wiper on her car. It was up to her to figure out where
to go from here. Was she being challenged by someone who, like Whitney
and Tyner, was trying to push her forward? That would suggest Jack
Sterling. Or was the envelope from someone lazy and desperate, who
hoped Tess could find something where they could not? Any of the other
editors might fit that description.

She read Rosita's clips for the
second time. One mystery was solved: here was the breathless hyperbole,
the creaky clichés that had invaded Feeney's work
once the two were paired. Funny, she had been paired in San Antonio,
too, and had included one of those clippings. By Rosita Ruiz and Alann
J. Shepard. It was the only Page One clipping in the batch, one of
those blow-by-blow Sunday stories that told you more than you ever
wanted to know about a recent controversy, but didn't really
tell you anything new. A pro baseball player who had gone straight from
the San Antonio barrio to the Texas Rangers had propositioned an
under-cover policewoman posing as a prostitute on one of his trips
home. "How about a little half-and-half?" he had
asked her. If only he had stopped there, he could have argued
persuasively he really was looking for cream in his coffee. Alas, the
police wire tap had preserved his next statement as well.
"I'll pay you forty bucks." Not even
convenience stores charged that much for half-and-half.

Still, it was a petty offense, the kind of
rap a popular athlete or actor routinely survived after the ritual
round of media mea culpas. But the officer was white and the baseball
player Latino, and that had changed the dynamic. The department had
been accused of a racist conspiracy against the ball player, of trying
to entrap him specifically in order to tear him down. Yet the baseball
player's own mother seemed to believe the cops'
version of events. "Men!" she had told the
reporters in Spanish. "What do you expect? They
can't keep it in their pants. He plays better when
he's happy, that's a fact."

An interview in Spanish? Rosita had probably
conducted it. On a hunch, Tess dialed the
San
Antonio Eagle
again, and was transferred only
twice before she reached Rosita's erstwhile partner.

"A.J. here."

"As in Alann Shepard?"

"No astronaut jokes, okay?
I've heard them all in my time."

"I'm Tess Monaghan at
the Baltimore
Beacon-Light
and I'm doing a background check on Rosita Ruiz."

If his face matched his voice, it must have
the world's largest smirk on it. "What has she
stepped into now?"

The Lone Star version of Feeney. Tess found
herself warming to him, then remembered she was on less than wonderful
terms with the real thing.

"Nothing that I know of. This is
purely routine. I'm curious about your experience working
with her."

"A ‘purely
routine' background check six months after she arrives at the
paper and less than two weeks after she has her first big story?
I'll buy that. If history repeats itself, she'll
use that story to jump to yet another paper, and leave the
Beacon-Light
to clean up behind her. Let's hope the
Boston
Globe
or the
Washington
Post
is smart enough to ask these questions
before she signs on the dotted line."

"I talked to Ed Saldivar, but he
wouldn't do anything other than confirm her dates of
employment."

"Boy, you guys up there really are
resourceful. You get a no comment and you stop digging. To think I was
envious when Rosita moved on."

"I'm talking to you
now," Tess said pointedly. "Obviously I
haven't stopped digging. And you obviously have something
you're longing to tell me, so why not get to it?"

There was a long pause. When he spoke again,
the smarmy tone was gone and his voice was quieter, sadder.

"There's a lot I want to
tell you. I want to tell you about invasion-of-privacy lawsuits, which
can be as troublesome as libel suits any day. I want to tell you about
big-eyed little girls who go up to barely literate Mexican women and
say, ‘Oh, I know you're not talking to reporters,
but may I come in for a glass of iced tea? It's such a hot
day.' I want to tell you the way gossip works in the
newspaper world—no one in Texas will touch Rosita, but some
Eastern newspapers don't have any contacts here, so they
don't know the whole story. I want to tell you that when a
newspaper pays someone off for the crimes that appear under a double
byline, the blameless partner never gets exonerated. I want to tell you
all these things, but the out-of-court settlement came with a gag
order, and I could lose my job for what I've already
not
said."

"Can't you tell me
anything more? A few details, or some names?"

"Look, re-report the stories
she's done for you. Talk to the people she interviewed, look
at any document she used, trace her steps. My hunch is you'll
find so much up in Baltimore, you won't need to worry about
what happened here." A slight pause.
"It's old news, anyway."

Tess heard a voice screaming at him in the
background. "Hey, Earth to A.J. You got another call, can you
take it, or should I have him orbit until you re-enter?"

"I'm getting
off," A.J. said wearily.

"May I call you back?"
Tess asked.

"Call me back? Lady,
I've never heard of you."

Re-report Rosita's story. Without
intending to, Tess had been doing that all along. She had spoken to the
two Mrs. Winks, quizzed Feeney on what Rosita had contributed to the
original story. She had studied the case files on the Wynkowski
divorce, looked for police records that would confirm the domestic
violence. In her bragging, Rosita had even provided a handy checklist
of everything she had done, and Feeney had backed her up.
Feeney
got the financial stuff, but I got the stuff about his marriage and his
gambling problem. If you listen to what people are talking about around
town, it's my part of the story
.

Tess drew a line down the center of a legal
pad and created two categories—matrimony and betting. Lea had
sworn Wink wasn't a gambler, but wives didn't know
everything. She then called up the archived electronic copy of that
notorious first story, preparing to jot down the names of
Rosita's sources and call them back.

No wonder Jack and Lionel had been troubled:
there wasn't a single person speaking for attribution in the
entire piece, unless the information was so innocuous as to be
meaningless. ("‘Everybody loves Wink,'
said longtime friend Paul "Tooch" Tucci.
‘Even when they lose to him, they love
him.'") At least Feeney had a trail of court papers
to buttress his claim Wink wasn't liquid; Rosita had
a
friend close to Wink, or someone close to the couple
.
It would be impossible to double-check any of this. Which was probably
the point. Rosita had learned at least one thing since leaving San
Antonio: how to cover her tracks.

She read the story again, hoping for a lead
to follow, anything. Here was the detail about Wink and
Linda's bungalow in Violetville, the neighborhood that Jack
Sterling had found such an incongruous place for a tough guy.
"The wood-frame bungalow on MacTavish looked like the
archetypal honeymooners' cottage from the outside, with its
new plantings and fresh paint. But a source close to the couple said
the honeymoon was over from almost the day the two crossed the
threshold, as Wynkowski repeatedly battered his new bride."

The
Blight
had thoughtfully provided Tess with a city crisscross. Finally, a
break. Half the residents on MacTavish, barely two blocks in length,
had lived there when Wink and Linda were keeping house, according to
the listings. The neighbors probably knew as much about the
couple's marriage as anyone, Tess figured. Wood-frame
bungalows, with their thin walls, were notoriously bad at keeping
secrets.

H
ad
violet ever bloomed in Violetville? It was hard to imagine now. The
neighborhood was in the city's industrial southwest corner,
barely within the city limits, an important distinction, for Baltimore
is the rare municipality that lies within no county. It stood alone
when it was rich, and now it stood alone in its poverty, a civic
pariah. Violetville was one of those strange islands one found along
the edges.

Still, it was holding on to middle-class
status by the skin of its teeth. Streets with names like MacTavish,
Sharon-Leigh, Benson, Clarenell, Haverhill—names with no
connection Tess could discern—looked like John Waters, circa
Pink
Flamingos
. Modest houses, green corrugated
awnings, metal porch chairs, kitschy yard art that didn't
know it was kitschy. Even the lighting was the same as
Waters' early work—washed out, harsh, wintry. The
old Wynkowski house—the "honeymooners'
cottage"—was the seediest on MacTavish, as if Wink
and Linda had left all their bad karma behind when they'd
moved on.

Tess canvassed the block, working a loop
that took her north, then across the street and south along the brick
rowhouses, then north again, until she had arrived at the
Wynkowskis' neighbor. Along her circular path, a few
residents had remembered the telltale signs of a tempestuous marriage:
bursts of noise, especially in the summer, when windows were open and
voices carried. But nothing more. Everyone was happy to talk to
her—Tess had the sense she was the most exciting thing to
happen on MacTavish in quite some time—but their memories
were blurred, or vague, and they had nothing but praise for Rosita.
"
Such a polite young woman
."
By the time Tess reached the last house, she was bored and anxious to
move on. She almost hoped no one would answer.

A wizened figure in a faded blue bathrobe
answered the door while her knock still echoed. Tess stared down at a
pink scalp and wispy white hair, which contrasted nicely with the baby
blue robe and matching slippers. From this perspective, it was
impossible to tell if the person staring at her sternum was male or
female. The hair, while thin, was longish and untidy. A man overdue for
a haircut? Or a woman who no longer took pains with her appearance?

"What can I do you?"
Even the voice did not give away the gender. It was a
smoker's rasp, neither high nor low.

"I'm a fact-checker at
the
Beacon-Light
."
This was one of several stories Tess had told as she had gone door to
door, varying it in order to keep herself interested.
"It's part of our new ‘Aim for Accuracy
Always' program. The Triple A. We want the community to know
we're committed to getting things right."

The gnome squinted up at Tess's
face. The gender was still a toss-up. The hair had a mannish style
about it, but there were a few chin hairs, which seemed more
appropriate to an elderly woman with bad eyesight.

"It's a bit backwards,
innit, checking the facts
after
you print' em?"

"Oh, we check beforehand, too.
This is the double-check, I guess you could say, in case something
erroneous slipped through despite our best efforts.
Mi-mi—I'm sorry, I didn't catch your
name."

"Athol. Bertie Athol."
Great. Even the name was asexual.

Bearded Bertie led Tess into a dark living
room, which did not appear to have been dusted since the Iran hostage
crisis.
A man
, Tess
thought.
Only a man could be such a careless
housekeeper
.

Or a near-sighted woman
,
she amended, as Bertie bumped into the water-stained oak table next to
his/her chair, a stuffed chair whose faded gold damask bore the faint
outline of Bertie's lumpy body, like a watermark.

"So what do you want to ask me
about? I tell you, I hate them new stock tables. Print's too
small, I can't follow my mutuals. Box scores, too.
Everything's too small. You skimpin' on paper down
there?"

"Actually, I'm not here
to talk about the stocks or the scores, although I will make a note of
your concerns. We're interested today in your impression of
the stories about Wink Wynkowski."

"The Wynkowski boy? Why, he used
to live right next door. Has he been up to something again?"

"Um, he's
dead."

"You don't
say." Bertie began to laugh, a dry cackle.
"I'm just having fun with you. Of course I knowed
what happen to Wink. I talked to that little girl when she was here. We
spent quite a bit of time together."

"Did she use anything you told
her?"

"Why, I'm the source
close to the family! You know, where it says—" and
Bertie paused, taking the time to gather up the right words from
memory. "Where it says, ‘But a source close to the
couple said the honeymoon was over from almost the day the two crossed
the threshold, as Wynkowski repeatedly battered his new
bride.' Very ellygant, the way she put it. I'da
never thought to say it so good."

Tess stared at the old man/woman
skeptically. "You're the source? Were you really
close to Wink and Linda?"

Bertie jerked his/her chin in the direction
of the Wynkowski's onetime home. "I don't
know how you could be closer. Not even ten feet from my kitchen winder
to their bedroom winder. In the summers, when I was warshing the dishes
in the zinc, I could hear 'em going at it many a
night."

Warshing the dishes in
the zinc
. Bertie could give lessons on
Bawlamerese. Whatever the gender, the speech had all the touchstones.
Probably listened to the Erioles, thought a far was something you
toasted marshmallows over, and went downy eauchin in August, to a
rented condo on the boardwalk.

"Is that what you told Rosita
Ruiz?"

"Yeah, the girl from the paper,
Rosie. I got her card around here somewhere still." Bertie
began patting the bathrobe's pockets, as if the card might
materialize, but only a few used tissues turned up.

"Did you know for a fact that
there was violence involved, Bertie? A lot of people get
loud."

"Yeah, but they don't
start throwing furniture at one another. And they don't call
amb'lances."

This was new. "An
ambulance?"

"Uh-huh. At night. It's
easy to see an amb'lance at night. And, of course, Mr. Athol
was alive then, and I remember we talked about it, how sad it was for a
young couple to be so unhappy all the time."

At least she had solved the mystery of
Bertie's gender. "Yes. Yes it is. Can you remember
anything else about those fights? When the amb'lance
came—" Jesus, Bertie's inflections were
catching. "When the
ambulance
came, did they have to take Mrs. Wynkowski out on a stretcher, or did
she walk out on her own? Could you tell how badly she was hurt? Was it
the kind of injury that might have happened accidentally?"

Bertie closed her eyes and leaned back as if
reliving a particularly vivid dream. It was very dramatic, but not
particularly effective.

"I don't
recall," she said, after several seconds. "All I
remember is the lights. It's not like I stood there all
night, peeking through the curtains."

I bet you stayed until
the show was over, though
. "Thank you,
Mrs. Athol. We're glad to know we got your part of the story
right. You were very helpful."

"So how much money do I
get?"

Tess was confused. "Newspapers
don't pay for information, Mrs. Athol. It's
unethical."

"The other girl did. You see, at
first I just remembered it being the one time the amb'lance
came. She asked me if I could be wrong, if maybe it came three times
instead of the oncet, or at least twice, if there was a pattern. That
was the word she used, pattern. She gave me fifty dollars, and I
remembered it was more like three times."

Tess felt a strange flip in her stomach, at
once hopeful and unhappy. A.J. Shepard had told her this would be easy,
but she couldn't believe Rosita would be this stupid.
"Are you sure?"

"Course I'm sure. You
think someone hands me fifty dollars, I'm gonna forget? Now,
today, today is more of a twenny-dollar interview, doncha
think?"

"You want money?"

"Only twenny dollars,"
Bertie wheedled.

"I'm not authorized to
do that."

"How about a discount on my
subscription?"

"No, Bertie. Not even the
reporters get a discount."

Bertie pushed her lower lip out in a pout, a
mannerism that was probably downright adorable as recently as thirty
years ago. Now, with jowls hanging loosely and her neck as wrinkled as
the corrugated awnings along MacTavish Avenue, she looked more like a
bulldog.

"Why do the reporters need a
discount? They already know what's in the paper."

An only child, Tess had had relatively
little experience with the lurid charms of tattling. Should she tell
Sterling what she knew about the pay-off to Bertie Athol? Should she
keep going, see if there was more damning information to be uncovered
about Rosita's reporting methods? At least the leopard had
changed her spots. Now she paid people up front and didn't
use their names.

Sterling would want to know, she was sure of
it. Checkbook journalism was so low that some of the tabloid television
shows had forsaken it. But Tess was uncomfortably aware she longed to
speak to Sterling for other, less self-righteous reasons. She wanted
his approval, wanted him to smile at her and say, "Great
work!" A crush. She was in the throes of a damn schoolgirl
crush.

Well, at least Violetville was convenient to
St. Agnes. She might as well check in on Spike, give her mind and
hormones a chance to cool.

She was glad to see one of
Durban's boxers waiting unobtrusively in the hall. At least
something was going as planned. When Tess walked in, Tommy was already
there, a chair pulled up by Spike's bed. It was true, only
family was allowed to see Spike, but the hospital, apparently under the
misapprehension that Tommy was Spike's life partner, as
opposed to his business partner, had thoughtfully included him in this
group. He held the box out chocolates on his lap, a strange get-well
gift for a man in a coma. Tommy had probably selected it because he
knew he would be free to plunder his own offering. He held the box out
grudgingly to Tess, but he had picked out all the nutty ones, so she
passed.

"Hi, Uncle Spike." He
was so still. What had she expected—someone sleeping like a
man in a cartoon, or like one of the Three Stooges, his chest rising
and falling with an exaggerated movement, a faint whistling noise
escaping around the various tubes. Tess thought she saw his eyelids
flicker, his mouth twitch. Wishful thinking.

"What's the doctor
say?"

"Nothin' to
me," Tommy said sullenly, his bad mood erasing the usual
question marks. It would be a while before he forgave Tess their last
meeting. Had it really been just yesterday morning?

"My folks been here?"

He snorted, then trilled. "
It's
not that we don't love him as much as you do, Tommy.
It's just that we have jobs
."

Tess laughed. His imitation of Judith was
uncanny.

"I miss him," he added
in his own voice.

"We all do."

"No, you don't, not the
way I do," he said, his voice so fierce and loud that
Durban's bodyguard poked his head in to make sure everything
was all right.

Tommy dropped the volume, but his body
quivered with emotion. "If he died, you'd be sad,
but you wouldn't miss him every day, every minute, like I do.
You'd miss him when you wanted to stop off at The Point with
your friends, giggling at how ugly it is. Or you'd miss him
at fambly gatherings. But you wouldn't miss him every day,
any more than you miss the City Fair."

"Tommy, there hasn't
been a City Fair for years."

"Exactly. And when was the last
time you thought about it?" He stood, putting the candy box
on his chair, and stalked from the room.

Tess couldn't decide if Tommy was
right, or merely annoying. Or annoying
because
he was right. She walked to the window, with its view of the parking
lot and the driveway in front of the emergency room. Her parents had
roared up that drive so many times in her youth, Tess bleeding in the
backseat from yet another accident. A dropped jar of fireflies, one
shard of glass ricocheting up and carving out a sliver of
Tess's calf. A broken ankle when she had jumped out of her
bedroom window, playing Goldilocks. A long, thin cut, hidden now in the
curve of her eyebrow, where a neighbor boy's lacrosse stick
had knighted her. And then there was the bloodless night in high school
when Ipecac had done its job too well. She had vomited and vomited
until she was dangerously dehydrated, her body still intent on emptying
itself long after it had purged the sixteen-inch pizza and half-gallon
of mint chocolate chip. Her parents, frightened out of their senses,
bought the story that she had taken the Ipecac by mistake, thinking it
was a cold remedy. Back then, they didn't know she binged, so
how could they suspect she purged?

She had never needed an ambulance, though,
just a washcloth to press against the mess of the day as her father did
his best Mario Andretti down Wilkens Avenue. The ambulances carried
people with graver injuries, people who needed oxygen or CPR. Tess had
never lost consciousness, not after vomiting all night, not even when
she had fallen on a broken bottle in some underbrush and emerged with a
most unexpected view of the inside of her knee, straight to the bone,
like some illustration in a textbook.