Laura Lippman (16 page)

“I
NEED YOU
.”

The voice was Crow’s, coming to Tess through the fog of sleep. For once they were in his apartment, because they had drunk too much at dinner, and Crow’s small nest had the virtue of being within stumbling distance of the Brewer’s Art.

Half-awake, Tess rolled into him. Dream and reality merged, enriching the other. They often came together this way and she liked the illicit, phantom quality of these meetings. Not even Crow’s fumbling in his nightstand drawer disturbed the mood.

“I need you,” he repeated.

“I need you, too,” she assured him. At other times of the day or night, they were more apt to say “I love you,” possibly “I want you.” Or, in imitation of a song that Crow particularly liked: “Baby, take it all off.” But in the middle of the night, it was always: I need you.

The only problem was that Crow’s midnight raids
tended to wake Tess up, while he slept more soundly than ever. She lay in his arms, feeling last night’s alcohol buzz shift into this morning’s hangover. Martinis, followed by many glasses of red wine, and a memorable dinner, not that she could remember a bite of it. Veal? Lamb? Something tender and young and decadent. They had been celebrating, but Tess was no longer sure why.

The events of the past two days ran through her mind like a slide show. There was Tull, presiding over a press conference at the state police headquarters, explaining how she had identified Gwen Schiller, and how the clinic how deceived Gwen’s parents. He held back the information about the sexual assault—even in death, Gwen deserved her privacy. It would get out, eventually, as state agencies moved to close down Persephone’s and strip the clinic of its license. But Tull was determined the information wouldn’t come from him.

Next slide. Tess saw Herman Peters, the boy-wonder police reporter who looked so deceptively innocent, scribbling away in his notebook with an excitement that bordered on the sexual. She saw the gleam in his eye when she began telling how she had faked the capsize, remembering to give Whitney full credit for the idea and the execution. Some reporters had laughed, and she hadn’t liked that part.
A girl is dead
, she had wanted to say.
A beautiful girl is dead, and she shouldn’t be, and the only thing I’ve done is make it possible for her father to take her remains from a pauper’s grave at Crownsville
. Tess saw herself, angry and flushed. She mentioned going to Philadelphia, although she didn’t name Devon. Tess’s mother called the next morning and asked why she couldn’t have put on some lipstick, if she was going to be all over the news, maybe comb her hair. Her father said she looked great, but could she smooth things out with
Ruthie, who wasn’t too happy to learn about the break in the case at the same moment the rest of Baltimore did. “Sorry, Dad, we were running against the clock,” Tess said, but she saw his point.

A booth in Frigo’s Bar. Ruthie Dembrow’s mouth was a grim, straight line, no lipstick to brighten it. Tess had done what she had asked her to do, yet she had not found what Ruthie wanted. There was no connection between Henry and Gwen. The people who knew the secret of Gwen’s identity had no idea she was dead, so how could they have sought revenge against Henry?

“But this hospital, this clinic,” Ruthie had said, her overarched brows drawn down in a frown, her eyes locked on Tess’s. “If they knew it was her, wouldn’t they want it to be secret, so they didn’t end up in all this trouble?”

“You mean, did the people at the clinic have Henry killed, in case it turned out he did know who his victim was? I honestly don’t think so, Ruthie.”

“It doesn’t feel right to me,” Ruthie insisted. “He was talking about a new trial, an appeal. Did I tell you that? He said there were mitigating circumstances.”

Didn’t they all
, Tess thought. She thought again about the rubber tube, how Henry had stopped to play a joke on Gwen’s corpse. Ruthie didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. Even with the cops, he had played the stoned huffer for all it was worth. “I know he didn’t mean to kill her, Ruthie. But he did.”

She thought her voice was gentle. Ruthie was beyond being comforted.

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You can’t imagine anyone in your family getting into trouble like this.”

In fact, she couldn’t, but she wanted to be conciliatory.
“You forget my Uncle Donald worked for a senator who was convicted of mail fraud, and we make it a point not to inquire too closely about Uncle Spike’s business dealings. My family’s not so clean.”

“You can say that again.” Ruthie looked at the check on the table. Tess had refunded part of the retainer, which she thought generous—in truth, she had earned every last cent. But she felt guilty that the case, which had brought her glory, had done nothing for Ruthie’s grief, provided her no closure. “So you’re done now.”

The implication being that Ruthie would never be done, that for her, this would never be over.

“Look, you did a good thing, Ruthie. I know you don’t have any feelings for Gwen Schiller, but there’s a father who knows where his daughter is, who can begin to grieve for her, and it’s because of you. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the answer you wanted. Even if it’s not an answer at all. Sometimes, there is no ‘why’ to things.”

“Henry was so scared of going to prison,” Ruthie said. “He thought if things dragged on long enough, he might be able to serve his whole time in city jail. Just his luck, he had to be the one guy in Baltimore to get a speedy trial.”

The city courts were famously clogged and had gone through an embarrassing period in which case after case was thrown out because of unconstitutional delays or lost evidence. Tess had heard of other men awaiting trial who preferred the city jail to the state prison system. But the finer points of incarceration escaped her.

“He confessed,” she reminded Ruthie.

“Who doesn’t when they get a hold of you? In the end, when he saw he was going to go to Hagerstown, he tried to take it back, but the judge wouldn’t hear of it. He had
a crappy lawyer, the guy shoulda done something. You get what you pay for, or so I thought.”

“I gotta go,” Tess told Ruthie. It was past eight, Crow was waiting for her at the Brewer’s Art.

“Yeah, I guess you do,” Ruthie said. “It’s funny about your family, how things always work out for the Monaghans.”

Tess stopped. “What do you mean by that?”

Ruthie tapped a cigarette out of her pack, whacking the pack with great force.

“Nothing, nothing at all. Thank your father for me. He owed me a favor, and you were it. You did your job. I guess if I don’t like the way it turned out, I got no one to blame but myself. And my stupid brother.”

Eight hours ago, Tess had been inclined to agree. Now, awake in the dark, she found herself thinking about Henry’s death. Life was built on coincidences, but this one did have a stink to it. Sure, people died in prison, given the nature of their roomies, but it happened far less often than it did in the world at large. In Henry’s case, a fight had broken out in a different part of the cell block, yet he was the one who had been killed. It had the earmarks of a hit, a planned execution.

Ruthie had come to Tess thinking there was an Old Testament logic to her brother’s death, an eye for an eye. Someone who knew Gwen, but didn’t want to own up to her identity for whatever reason, had sought to avenge her death.

But what if Henry was killed to end a trail, to silence someone who knew more than he was telling? What had happened to Gwen in the weeks she was missing? What kind of life had she led on the streets of Baltimore?

The place where I was it had a name like Domino’s, but I guess you could call it the Sugar House, too
, she had told Sukey. That wasn’t Persephone’s.

Tess dressed quickly in the dark, left a note for Crow on his bedstand, and walked-ran through the deserted streets to the parking garage where she had left the Toyota. The world was dark at four
A.M
., although not as dark as it might have been, given the Christmas lights everywhere. She drove to her office, taking care to lock the door behind her, and pulled her file on Henry Dembrow.

She read his confession again, the transcript from the tape that police had made. It was different, somehow, knowing Jane Doe’s name and background. Small details took on a new poignancy.

I told her about Locust Point, my dad, how Domino’s used to be called the Sugar House. Yeah, yeah, I know that, she said
.

That matched Sukey’s story. Everyone said Sukey was a liar, but so far Tess had caught her in nothing but truths, at least when it came to Gwen.

She scanned through the other papers Tull had given her—the charging documents, the official notices that went back and forth throughout the trial. She had paid only cursory attention to these before. Henry Dembrow’s trip through the legal system hadn’t been about identifying his victim.

But there was a memo, noting that Henry Dembrow was changing representation in the case. Henry had apparently dropped the public defender, someone named Hank Mooney, and switched to a private attorney. Common enough. Baltimore’s P.D.s were good, but a lot of criminals made the mistake of thinking you had to pay for value. Never mind that one of the city’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys had watched as a mentally retarded client went off to serve a life sentence, for a crime it was later proved he didn’t commit. “You get what you
pay for, or so I thought,” Ruthie had complained. Henry went to prison on the private attorney’s watch, not the P.D.’s.

A private attorney named—Tess flipped through the papers—Arnold Vasso.

Arnie Vasso, power lobbyist. Arnie “I don’t practice law, I perfect it” Vasso. Arnie Vasso who had no rep as a criminal attorney, but sometimes did favors for friends, as he had told Tess over their Piccolo Roma lunch. Arnie Vasso, who had engineered the bogus license for a bar called Domenick’s, had represented Henry Dembrow, who had killed a girl who said she once worked at a place that sounded like Domino’s.

The world was full of coincidences. Where would
Reader’s Digest
and movies-of-the-week be without them? But in Arnie Vasso’s world, nothing happened by accident.

Tess checked the “It’s Time for a Haircut” clock that hung on her wall, an artifact from a Woodlawn barbershop where her mother had taken her for buzz cuts. Hence today’s long braid. Tess sometimes wondered if everyone’s life was lived in reaction to those first ten or fifteen years, when one had no control. The clock said 4:30
A.M
., much too early to call anyone.

She didn’t need to call anyway. She knew how the conversation would go.

She’d ask Ruthie if she had hired Arnie Vasso.

Ruthie would say no, Vasso had phoned her up and offered to take the case pro bono, as a favor to a pal at the Stonewall Democratic Club. Something like that.

Tess would ask Ruthie if a good night’s sleep had changed her mind, if Ruthie still believed Henry’s death was connected to Gwen’s death.

Ruthie would say yes, she would always believe this,
she didn’t care about all the reasons Tess had piled up, the neat little sandbags of logic intended to hold back her intution. She knew the two things were related, she would go to her grave believing it.

And that’s when Tess would say: Me too.

T
HE PUBLIC DEFENDER WHO HAD BEEN ASSIGNED TO
Henry Dembrow’s case was a large man. Not fat, but huge, tall, and broad-shouldered, with a frame so big he appeared to have been made from leftover dinosaur bones.

“Hank Mooney,” he said, standing up when she entered the Hasty Tasty, a diner favored by courthouse types. His knee bumped the table, and his coffee sloshed from cup to saucer. “Shit.”

His voice was mild, as if he were used to such accidents, as if his size put him on a constant collision course with life.

“Hey, that’s why they have saucers. Tess Monaghan.”

“Nice to meet you.” His handshake was gentle, restrained. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“From—”

“Feeney, mainly.”

“Then most of what you know is true, and what isn’t
true is at least interesting.” Kevin Feeney, the
Blight’s
courthouse reporter, was an old friend, his devotion to her exceeded only by his devotion to making stories about her more colorful. At least he didn’t put his fiction in the newspaper, unlike some reporters Tess had known.

She asked for coffee and a pair of bagels, having skipped breakfast that morning. She had wanted to avoid meeting Tyner in Kitty’s kitchen. He wouldn’t approve of what she was doing. She wasn’t sure she approved, so she didn’t want to subject herself to anyone else’s doubts. But she needed Hank Mooney’s help if she was going to confront Arnie Vasso with anything other than her hunches.

“I don’t have much time,” Hank said, turning a tree-stump-sized wrist to look at his watch. “Another day, another docket.”

He was smiling, though, energy brimming out of him in much the same way his coffee had run out of his cup. Tess had thought a public defender would be more beaten down, struggling under a staggering caseload, wrestling with the realization that the only thing that really separated him from a criminal attorney was the salary. But Hank Mooney looked as if he couldn’t wait for his workday to begin.

“Do you remember Henry Dembrow?”

“He’d be a hard one to forget, even if the case hadn’t been in the news lately.”

“Because of the Jane Doe angle.”

“Yeah. And because she was a white woman murdered in Locust Point. Most of the people murdered in Baltimore are young black men, killed on the East or West sides. Jane Doe—”

“Gwen Schiller.” Having restored the girl’s name, Tess was determined to make others remember it.

“She was unusual in every way. I shudder to think how
the case would have been handled if they had known who she was at the time. Her father probably would have been breathing down the state’s attorney’s neck, screaming death penalty.”

Tess wasn’t sure if Dick Schiller was capable of screaming for anything. Any rage he could feel now was directed at the clinic. Gwen had been alive for six weeks after running away. Forty-two days, forty-two lost opportunities to change her destiny.

“I understand you moved to have his confession thrown out, on the grounds he was denied counsel.”

“It was worth a try. I was hoping he might be so high when they interrogated him that he was incapable of informed consent. Did you listen to the tape?”

“I read the transcript.”

“He sounds a little spaced out on the tape, but he’s not confused. If anything, I had the impression he thought he was being really crafty.”

“Crafty?”

Their food arrived. Mooney’s breakfast was surprisingly small, a glass of grapefruit juice and a toasted English muffin, which he ate dry. Tess had expected a Paul Bunyan-esque stack of hotcakes, maybe a Western omelet the size of her head. Mooney bit into his English muffin with a sound like someone’s spine cracking, scattering crumbs down his front.

“Yeah, I know—the kid was a hardcore huffer. Yet Henry thought of himself as real smart, an operator. It was like he had some scheme he didn’t want to tell me. Then he got his own attorney, and it wasn’t my problem anymore. Hasta la vista, baby.”

“Arnie Vasso.”

“Really? I guess I must have known that at some point, but with my caseload, I don’t have the luxury of worry
ing about former clients. Funny choice. Vasso doesn’t know shit about criminal law.”

“He knows enough to keep himself out of jail, unlike some other Annapolis lobbyists.”

Mooney liked that. He laughed so hard he almost spilled coffee down his shirt front. “Point taken. Look, all I’m saying is that with my caseload, I don’t ask a lot of questions if a client says he’s got the money to hire a private attorney.”

“Did Henry ever mention a bar called Domenick’s?”

He shook his head vigorously side to side, like a dog shaking himself dry. Hank Mooney was really quite appealing, in his big-boned, shambling kind of way. Tess tried to think of female friends who might appreciate his charms. Jackie was too fastidious—she’d have bailed at the crumbs. And Whitney was secretly as much of a snob as her mother. The only reason she’d ever date a public defender was to torture Mrs. Talbot. Kitty’s taste was famously inclusive, but Kitty was lost to her for now.

“Bars weren’t Henry’s scene. He was essentially a very solitary guy. No friends, no interests. I always thought huffing appealed to him because it’s a real antisocial high. You don’t need a buddy, you don’t have to go to a shooting gallery, or leave the neighborhood to score. He didn’t really care about anyone. Except his sister. He adored her, he kept telling me he was going to make everything up to her some day. Shit.” Another glance at his watch. Luckily, he remembered to put down his juice glass before he flipped his wrist. “I’m going to be late.” He waved frantically at the waitress, sideswiping a water glass, which Tess caught just before it tipped.

“You go. I’ll get this.”

“You sure? I don’t feel like I helped you much.”

“Hey, you’re a public servant. You help the taxpayers every day.”

Mooney smiled a little ruefully. “Yeah, I help you a lot. I try to win freedom for the guys who strip your cars, break into your houses. I get acquittals for the guys who are shooting each other over the drug trade in West and East Baltimore. I’m an Eagle Scout.”

“You ever kept an innocent person from going to prison?”

“An innocent person? I’m not sure there is such a thing. But, yeah, I’ve had clients who didn’t do what the prosecutors said they did, and I’ve gotten them off.”

Tess smiled. “Then I think you’re entitled to at least one free English muffin now and then.”

Tess found Arnie Vasso in the gallery above the Senate floor, watching with great delight as the Maryland Senate tried one of its own. Senator Hertel, as it turned out, had decided not to go quietly. He was forcing his colleagues to cast him out. The proceedings had excited the seasonally deprived media far more than they did the public. The press seats on the Senate floor were full, and cameras lined both sides of the chamber.

But in the gallery, Vasso was one of only a few diehard political junkies drawn to the spectacle. He sat in the back row, arms folded across his chest, eyes bright with a strange hunger, as if he were watching some kind of blood sport.

“Why are you wasting your time here?” Tess asked him.

“It’s history,” he said curtly, not even turning his head toward her.

“More of a tradition, if you ask me. It’s the third time it’s happened in the last three years.”

He glanced at her, but his attention quickly returned to the floor. Senator Ken Dahlgren, the quasi-prosecutor here, was making a speech about his committee’s findings, and how they had reached the recommendation for Senator Hertel’s expulsion. Somehow he managed to reference the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and something about how the Maryland State House was the oldest legislative building in continuous use. Tess thought he looked a little waxy and unreal, like Dan Quayle caught in the headlights. But hers was evidently a minority opinion.

“He’s good,” another spectator whispered.

“The next congressman from the first district,” someone agreed. Vasso cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He obviously considered himself above such low-level political speculation.

“I need to speak to you,” Tess said.

“When they break.”

“It’s about Henry Dembrow.”

Vasso took his eyes from the Senate floor, but only for a moment. “When they break.”

“I need to speak to you now.”

“Your needs don’t interest me much. You want my time, get elected to something.”

“It’s about Henry Dembrow.”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“It’s about Henry Dembrow and a place called Domenick’s and the strange coincidence that the same Annapolis lobbyist stepped in and dusted off his barely used shingle when they needed help.”

Had her voice risen? She could swear Dahlgren had glared up at the gallery, lost a step in his carefully
planned speech, then resumed again. Vasso’s hand closed over her wrist and he all but dragged her into the hallway, as if he had been the urgent one all along.

Once in the corridor, she took her arm back.

“You’re proving to be a real pain in the ass,” Vasso said. “I’m sorry, I guess that wasn’t very PC of me.”

He was trying to act jocular now, as if this were some joke between the two of them. People were passing through the hall, mainly secretary types from the offices on this floor, but Vasso was being careful not to draw too much attention to himself, or to her.

“The girl that Henry Dembrow killed was identified recently.”

“So I heard. Nice bit of publicity for you. Lots of potential. Don’t fritter it away, looking for connections that don’t exist, or weighing yourself down with losers. Yes, I represented Henry Dembrow. As I told you, I do favors for people.”

“Who was that a favor for?”

“I believe I also told you there’s no point in doing favors if I’m indiscreet. Baltimore is a small town, everyone’s only one or two people apart here. I tried to help a kid in a jam. I helped a bar get its liquor license. No connection.”

“
You’re
the connection.”

Adamancy was all she had going for her. Vasso glanced over her head, back at the doors to the Senate chamber.

“You’re spinning your wheels,” he said.

“Is it true that Henry Dembrow was going to file for a new trial, based on inadequate counsel?”

“He wouldn’t be the first man to wake up in prison and start thinking about ways to get out, and pointing fingers.” His voice had lost a little of its rat-a-tat slickness.
“Henry watched too much television, he kept saying it was his understanding that I’d be able to get him out on a technicality because I was so ‘connected.’ I told him the only technicality I could find was that he didn’t want her to die, but if you shove a woman standing at the top of a flight of concrete steps, that’s intent as far as the law’s concerned. He made it personal, tried to threaten me, and I told him I’d do anything to protect my reputation. He backed off.”

“Actually, I made that part up.”

Vasso looked at her blankly.

“The part about Henry asking for a new trial. But thanks for confirming that he was considering it. And that you would do quote-anything-unquote to protect your reputation.”

Vasso brushed the lapels of his suit, as if he had been in a fistfight, and yanked the sleeves down over his wrists. Hand-tailored suits didn’t do as much for a man if he kept gaining weight after the fitting.

“Can I give you some advice?” he asked Tess. “Take a branch off the family tree. Your father understands how things work, when to push, and when to walk away. Your father knows all about favors. Someone wants me to step in, do a little pro bono for some bozo, I’m fine with that. I didn’t do it for Henry, you get me, or his bitch of a sister. The real owner of Domenick’s doesn’t want his name on the license. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t live in the city. Maybe it’s because he has a criminal record. These are just hypotheticals, I hope you understand. But bar owners all over the city find ways of getting around the regs. I helped one out. That doesn’t make me the fucking missing link.”

“Henry Dembrow died for a reason. Maybe Gwen Schiller did, too.”

“Everyone dies for a reason. Everyone dies for the
same
reason—their heart stops.”

“Then you’ll never die, because you’ve got no heart to stop.”

Vasso smiled. Everything was a game to him, Tess saw, and the score was kept in dollars and cents. He didn’t believe in anything—Democrat or Republican, pro-life or pro-choice, right or wrong. Pay him, he was yours. If the American Cancer Society threw more money at him than the cigarette industry, he’d carry their water, fight for their bills. He could lobby for any side of any issue, as long as he was paid to do it. What some people called a devil’s advocate.

“It slows you down,” he said, “caring too much. You’ve got a case tied up neat as a Christmas package. Henry Dembrow confessed to killing that girl. You found out who she was, and now everyone thinks you’re a fucking genius. A fucking genius with a nice rack. You should be out getting corporate accounts, not wasting time on looking for explanations that don’t exist. But I’ll tell you this much: I don’t know anything. I make it a point not to know anything I don’t need to know. Which is what makes me so smart.”

He walked back into the Senate gallery. Tess caught a burst of oratory as the door swung open. Words, words, words, words, words. Everyone was so full of words down here.

Tied up neat as a Christmas package
. She wished Vasso had used a different image. Now she was reminded of Gwen, in the crime scene photo, that piece of rubber tubing tied in a bow at her neck.

Like someone’s present, Tess realized.

Tied to someone’s past.