"They don't, you know they don't. The agency was the only lead we have."
"Then you need a private investigator who knows more about this kind of work than I do. The truth is, the other case I'm working on is going to take more and more time. There might be criminal charges, and I'm in pretty deep. You'd be better off working with someone else, someone who can give you first priority."
"No. I want you to help me."
They had saved two of the Kingfishers, planning to drink them in a triumphant toast. Tess opened both now and began to pour one in Jackie's glass, but Jackie took the bottle from her and drank straight from it, just as Tess always did.
"Look, it's great that you wanted to give a break to a new businesswoman. But there's got to be some other female private investigator starting out on her own. Go to her."
Jackie had already downed more than a third of her beer. She stared into the bottle as if her daughter might be at the bottom. Tess was remembering how adamant Jackie had been that first day, how sure of herself. Why did you choose Keyes Investigations? You were in the paper, weren't you? Something about shooting someone or someone shooting you? Yes, she had been in the paper quite a bit, but not for being a private detective. The announcement of the agency's opening, a paragraph in the Baltimore Business Journal, had been a brief item, using the more formal version of her name, Theresa Esther Monaghan. You had to be paying close attention to link the two articles, to know that Tess the near-shooting victim was now the near-entrepreneur.
And you had to be paying really close attention to know of Tess's fondness for chocolate malts, a detail Jackie had known before Tess mentioned it. How can you know what kind of dark smear a kid has on her face in a black-and-white photo? You can know it's chocolate, perhaps, but you can't know it's malt. Yet Jackie had always known.
"It wasn't just a woman you wanted, was it? It's me. It had to be me. Why Jackie?"
Jackie Weir raised her eyes from the bottle and looked at Tess helplessly, as if she could no longer speak. Then she shifted her gaze to the wall, to that photo. The crying girl on the flying rabbit.
"I knew you," she said at last. "When we were younger."
"Were we at Western together?" Jackie could have been a senior when she was a freshman.
"No, at the drugstore," she said, pointing her beer bottle at the photo. "Not that one, the big one, the one on Bond Street."
"The Weinstein flagship on Bond and Shakespeare? That's my Aunt Kitty's bookstore."
"It wasn't then. Not when I was eighteen. Not when you were fifteen. Not when you used to come in after school and drink chocolate malteds, and talk to your grandfather about your day. Your hair was usually in a long, shiny plait down your back and you were so thin, then, almost scrawny. That must have been when you were running all the time."
"It was. But I don't-" She stopped, embarrassed.
"Don't remember me? There's no reason you would. I was just the girl in the back, flipping burgers. I wore an apron, and a hairnet, and those big glasses. But I could hear you. You told your grandfather about the good grades you were getting and the parties you were going to and what this boy or that boy had said to you. It was like watching a rerun of those old Patty Duke shows, listening to your life."
"Funny, my adolescence seemed more like a sitcom based on Kafka to me."
Jackie heard her, but she wasn't having any of it, any more than she had let Tess see herself as some poor frail female about to plunge through the tattered safety net. "Then last March, I read about you in the paper. Your picture was there, with that dog. Like I said, you look just the same. Later, when I saw you had opened up a private detective agency, I knew I had to hire you. I knew when it became difficult, or rough, you couldn't drop me, like the first detective did, or spend my money without getting results, like the second one did. You had to help me. You had to."
"Just because you once worked for my grandfather, because I was out front sipping sodas while you were in the back, making burgers?"
Jackie looked frightened, as if the words she were about to utter were so forbidden, so long unspoken, that she wasn't quite sure what they might do once let loose in the world.
"You have to help me because Samuel Weinstein was my baby's father."
Chapter 19
As many times as she had been there, Tess always needed the marker of the wheelchair ramp to find Tyner's house in Tuxedo Park. It was so dark in his neighborhood on a summer night-darkness being the perogative of truly safe places as well as the really dangerous ones-and the shingled houses were virtually indistinguishable. Hard enough to find the street, St. John's, much less the house itself. Once she did, she waited on his front porch, drinking from the international six-pack she had assembled at Alonso's Tavern, where they allowed you to mix-and-match the beers. A Red Stripe, a Bohemia, a Royal Oak, a Tsing-Tao, a Molson, and an Anchor Steam. Around the World in eighty beers.
It was past eleven. The velvety voices of television anchors drifted from open windows, filling the night with authoritative sounds. So emphatic, so sure. You didn't even have to hear the words to know how a story was supposed to make you feel. The pitch told you everything you needed to know. Bad thing had happened. Important thing had happened. Funny thing had happened. Weather had happened.
Shit happened. Where was Tyner, anyway? Tess drained the Red Stripe. She was halfway through Mexico by the time his van pulled up out front. She called to him as he came up the ramp, so he wouldn't be startled to find her on his shadowy front porch. But nothing ever really surprised Tyner. Lucky him.
"Not a very good training regimen," he observed, looking at the glass bottles at her feet.
"Depends on what you're training for. Where have you been, burning the midnight oil on Luther Beale's case?" She couldn't help sounding a little petulant, as if Tyner should know she would be waiting on his front porch.
"Luther Beale is safe at home, where I expect him to stay unless the police come up with something significantly more substantial than the circumstantial bullshit they threw at us all day. I had a date."
"A date?" She had known women found Tyner attractive, but she hadn't known he actually did anything about it. "Who is she?"
"Another lawyer. No one you know."
"How old is she? Or should I ask, how young is she? Young enough to be your daughter? Young enough to be your granddaughter?"
"What an odd thing to say."
"Not so very odd."
And she told him everything. She began with her conversation with Jackie, veering off into wild digressions about Willa Mott and Adoption Rights and the leather seats in Jackie's Lexus. Somewhere in the middle of her rambling story, Tyner reached for the Anchor Steam and the bottle opener, but he never spoke. By the time Tess's voice wore down, the street was silent, the televisions long turned off, all the windows dark.
"So I'm looking for my aunt, I figured out," she said. "What's that stupid West Virginia joke, the one about the song. ‘I'm My Own Grandpa?' I'm looking for my thirteen-year-old aunt."
"Lots of people have aunts and uncles younger than they are. Given the imperatives of biology, it's not that unusual."
"Jesus, Tyner, there was a fifty-year age difference."
"So?"
"So that's sick."
"It was legal, though. She was of age to give consent."