“Hey, that’s mine,” Yeager protested from a heap on the floor.
Cecilia was off camera, but her voice was still audible. “Then you take it away from her.”
The confused producer kept calling for different shots, trying to get an angle on Yeager that didn’t reveal his broad backside as he crawled around on the floor, making tentative motions toward the dog, who growled every time he came too close. Finally, Yeager righted his chair and slumped into it, his face the color of a beefsteak tomato.
“This is Face Time with Jim Yeager,” he said. “And we’ll be back after these commercial messages with an update on the trial of the Philadelphia police officers.”
At Tess’s nod, the bartender quickly switched the channel to the Terps game, only to find a small rebellion on his hands.
“Turn it back, turn it back,” one of the regulars shouted in a slurred, furry voice, much to the outrage of the other bar birds. “This is better ‘n pro wrestling.”
“And about as real,” Tess said to Crow. “I find it hard to believe that Jim Yeager could have a piece of evidence as crucial as Bobby Hilliard’s datebook.”
“Well, you’re always saying Rainer’s incompetent. Maybe he missed it somehow, or maybe Yeager managed to get into Bobby’s apartment. Or maybe the Hilliards gave it to Yeager, not knowing any better. I just hope Bobby Hilliard used a brand of ink that can stand up to dog drool.”
Tess stared thoughtfully up at the television, although the face staring back at them now was the famously sweaty visage of Gary Williams, the seethingly intense Maryland coach who perspired more than his players.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to take a little trip out I-70 this weekend, see the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside in the dead of winter. But first, I think there’s one place I need to check out right here in town.”
Chapter 19
Bobby Hilliard had lived in a surprisingly characterless apartment building in North Baltimore, the kind of place popular with spoiled Johns Hopkins students and genteel widows who wouldn’t dream of being without a hairdresser, deli, dry cleaners, and chiropodist on the premises. Not that they availed themselves of these services, but they liked knowing they were there.
Tess surveyed the high-rise from a parking place on Charles Street, watching the little old ladies venture out with their inevitably tiny dogs, noting the students with their bouncing knapsacks. She would have thought someone with Hilliard’s love of pretty-pretty things would have chosen charm over convenience-a one-bedroom with, say, a marble fireplace and a little galley of a kitchen in Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon.
Bolton Hill or Mount Vernon -places where two of Hilliard’s victims had lived, if one bought Jim Yeager’s theory. Tess didn’t, not yet. The standards for public discourse had fallen so alarmingly in recent years that anyone could say anything on the airwaves, especially if the target was dead. See Vincent Foster, whose sad suicide had provided no end of conspiracy theories. The prevailing logic, on talk radio and fringe shows like Yeager’s, was that you were right until someone proved you wrong. Tess remembered a time when “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” had been a joke in newsrooms, not a governing philosophy.
Still, she wasn’t ready to eliminate Yeager’s scenario, not in its entirety. It filled in some gaps, supplied the connection about which police had been so secretive and edgy. Bobby Hilliard was a thief; she knew this fact independently. The question was whether someone could go, in a few short years, from pocketing pillboxes to breaking and entering and, finally, a furious assault. And if he did, and you knew he did, why kill him? Why not go to the police? Yeager had conveniently glossed over this last piece of the puzzle, claiming Bobby Hilliard’s death didn’t matter because he was a criminal.
But the holes in Yeager’s logic were bigger than his monstrous head. For one thing, it presumed that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim in the shooting at Poe’s grave, and Tess had yet to be persuaded of this. The Visitor was the one person that everyone knew would be there on the morning of January 19. Who had known Hilliard would be present, too?
She got out her supply of business cards, remembering Gretchen O’Brien’s knowing taunts about her methods. For the first time-well, not for the first time, but for the first time in a reflective moment, one not involving a corpse-she felt a real revulsion toward her work. She long had taken comfort in the fact that being a private detective was more honest and less destructive than journalism. Her reports were private, and while what she discovered often caused pain, it brought pain to the people who had paid for it, sought it out. Unlike the newspaper, she did not invite strangers into a family’s tragedy over morning coffee and toast in order to sell bras and panties and used cars.
She tucked her “safety inspector” card into her pocket and walked up to the doorman at Bobby Hilliard’s apartment, resigned to who she was and what she did, at least for another day.
A stone-faced janitor led her to Bobby Hilliard’s apartment on the sixth floor but stopped before he inserted his passkey in the lock.
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
“Twenty dollars?”
“That’s what the other people paid. Twenty dollars to see the apartment where the dead man lived.”
She held her ground. “What dead man? What others?”
“Other people with phony business cards.”
“Oh.” Busted. Might as well ask a few questions before she got her money out. “What others?”
“One had a notebook and wrote down everything he saw, like an inventory.” That would be Herman Peters. “He said he was working for the estate. Uh-huh. Another one walked around, just looking at everything, rubbing his hands together, like a kid in Disneyland.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting in was all he wanted, and once he was in he didn’t seem to know what to do except walk around, looking. Guy had so much hair he looked like he had a cat on his head.”
Yeager. Bingo. “Anyone else?”
“A woman. For a moment, I thought you was her again, but she wore her hair loose around her face.”
Tess bristled a little at the suggestion that she and Gretchen O’Brien resembled one another, but handed over her twenty dollars.
“Did the cops ever stop by?”
“Oh, sure, right after he died, before his name was in the papers. But I watched them, too. Especially them.”
“Why?”
He rolled his eyes at her naïveté. “You think cops don’t steal? From the dead? They steal all the time. Some, not all. And they got nothing on firemen. You’d be surprised at how many things just vaporize in a house fire, as if they was never there at all.”
The apartment was plain, a perfect rectangle of white walls and parquet floors, the kind of place that rose or fell on the tenant’s taste. Here, it rose, thanks to a collection of thrift-shop Victoriana that transformed the vanilla-ordinary rooms into an elegant suite. With the curtains drawn against the view, it could have been the late 1800s here, or so Tess presumed. She didn’t know much about antiques. But even she could see the care Bobby Hilliard had lavished on his environment, the attention to detail and color. The old chairs and sofa had been reupholstered with lush velvety fabrics in cherry hues. The breakfront that filled a wall in the dining room had been expertly but not overly refinished, so it wore its age with pride.
Throughout the apartment, the walls were hung with faux heritage-turn-of-the-century portraits and photographs of people and grand estates that bore little resemblance to the parents who had come to Baltimore to claim their son’s body. Oh, well. Bobby Hilliard wasn’t the first person who had tried to reinvent himself.