“Do you have an account at the local bank?”
“Of course we do,” Mrs. Hilliard said, showing a flash of irritation. “Do you think we barter for goods with chickens and vegetables?”
“I want you to take this to the bank the minute it opens Monday morning and place it in a safe deposit box. Once you’ve done that, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them I’m working for you and we just found it this weekend, when you thought to check Bobby’s old hiding place. That way you can’t get in trouble for holding it back when they visited you earlier this week.”
Although I’ll get in trouble, Tess thought mournfully to herself, for thrusting myself into this. Rainer will never believe I didn’t want to be a part of it all the time.
Mrs. Hilliard looked confused. “Are you working for us then?”
“No, just helping you out. It would be wrong for me to take your money when I don’t think I can achieve any real results.”
They went back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hilliard offered to fix a cup of coffee. Tess accepted eagerly, then tried not to let her disappointment show when Mrs. Hilliard put water on to boil and pulled a jar of instant from the old-fashioned cabinets. Their sense of shared mission gone, they had nothing left to say to one another. Tess examined the swirled cherry top of the Formica-and-chrome table, drummed her fingers on the surface. She felt obligated to make some kind of chitchat, however desultory.
“I like this table,” she said. “I’ve seen ones not near as nice, for hundreds and hundreds of dollars.”
“You and that cop,” Mrs. Hilliard said, shaking her head. “I do think people from Baltimore are a little queer sometimes. The one police officer couldn’t stop talking about that table. He offered me a thousand dollars for it.”
“Really?”
“He said he had to have it for his kitchen. Said it was the one thing he needed, that it was a dead ringer for the one he had grown up with. He even told me how he had eaten peanut butter and fluffernutter sandwiches at the table, as if that would make me sell it.”
Tess asked yet another question, sure of the answer. “This police officer, what did he look like?”
“Oh, short and fat. And his partner so thin and tall, with a hangdog face. They made quite a pair. They looked like a number ten marching up the walk. And as much as the little one wanted my kitchen table, the tall one kept asking if he could have the Koontz sign. I thought that was really queer, but I wouldn’t sell it, not even for a hundred dollars, because it was something Bobby brought home one day and propped against the barn, so people wouldn’t miss the turnoff to our drive. Silly of me, I guess, but I’m sentimental about anything to do with Bobby. Besides, I didn’t think they were very professional, those police officers, poking at our things and asking where they came from and how much they cost. Not at all like the ones down in homicide. But I guess you don’t have to be as good to work burglary, or whatever they call it.”
“Burglary?” Tess said. Connections were sparking all around her. Two police officers had gone to Bobby’s apartment too. That had made sense, and she hadn’t bothered to ask the janitor for details. Now she was wondering if this walking number 10 had paid the call there as well. If they had, they had known Bobby Hilliard was dead before he had been identified in the press. They had known who he was all along.
“Yes, burglary. I remember because that’s what it said on the business card.” She pulled two cards from the old-fashioned humpbacked Norge refrigerator, where they had been affixed with a magnet from a local market, and handed them to Tess. The cards weren’t legit, not even close, but who in Pennsylvania would know that? They said Baltimore city police department and even had a Maryland flag, in color yet. Personal computers and state-of-the-art printers were making life too easy for the criminally inclined.
And the name on the first card was August Dupuis, a Poe allusion Tess had last heard in the corridors of the Baltimore Police Department. Oh, Arnold Pitts was such a wit. How he must crack himself up, creating these fake identities for himself. And how patronizing he was, choosing his Poe pseudonyms based on his assumptions about how well read his victims were. What name had he given Gretchen? Tess wondered. A. G. Pym? Rod Usher?
The second card identified his partner as Rufus Griswold. Tess had read enough about Poe’s life by now to know this was Poe’s perfidious literary executor, who had done so much to damage Poe’s reputation after his death.
“Change of plan, Mrs. Hilliard,” Tess announced.
“What?”
“Give me a dollar.”
The woman looked confused, but obediently fished four quarters out of a large crockery jar on the kitchen counter and handed them to Tess.
“You just hired a private detective.”
Chapter 21
Fat and Skinny ran a race. Fat fell down and broke his face. Skinny won the race.
Tess woke Sunday morning with that old rhyme in her head. She didn’t know how she knew it. From jumping rope? But she had never been a jump-roping girl. She had read books about the kind of girls who jumped rope, wondering why she wasn’t more like them. She had been a football-playing, knee-skinning, emergency-rooming kind of girl.
But if she couldn’t remember how she knew the rhyme, she knew why it was echoing in her head. Fat and Skinny-Pitts and Ensor, the Laurel and Hardy of Baltimore. This undynamic duo had searched Bobby Hilliard’s apartment and his parents’ farm. Yet neither one had mentioned knowing the other. Not to Tess and not, as far as she knew, to the police. Officially, they were simply two burglary victims. Had they met after Bobby’s death and decided to join forces for some reason? Or had they been friends all along?
She didn’t know, couldn’t know. But she had an image of Pitts’s dark house on Field Street, how he had waited that night until he thought she was gone, then come tottering out with his trash. He made it sound as if he had been watching for her for days, but she figured it was more like fifteen minutes, which was about how long it had taken her to get from Ensor’s house to his. She wished, in retrospect, that she had searched the garbage can he had carried to the alley. Maybe there was a reason he was in such a hurry to take out the trash.
Well, now she had the upper hand. She knew the whereabouts of the very item Pitts wanted, an item he had not reported stolen, an item he claimed had been in his possession all along. She could hold that fact over his head. Then again, Pitts had proved to be a most weaselly adversary, not someone to confront head-on. She had lost her first round with him.
So how to proceed? She puzzled this out while walking with the dogs in Stony Run Park. Esskay was beginning to enjoy the company of her sleek bodyguard, trying to make friends by pointing out the rabbits and squirrels that crossed their paths. Miata, however, took no notice. She continued depressed, unhappy without her master.
A sleek bodyguard. Tess found herself thinking of Gretchen O’Brien-not exactly sleek, not exactly a bodyguard, but definitely linked to Pitts. She might know if Pitts and Ensor had a relationship that predated their victimhood. Not that Gretchen would give Tess such information voluntarily. She’d have to be tricked into it, or angered into it, perhaps by the revelation that Pitts had chosen her precisely because she had an unsavory reputation.
Gretchen’s name reminded her of yet another stubborn knot in the facts she had been gathering. It was as if she were making her own gigantic ball of string, one piece at a time. If Ensor and Pitts had searched Bobby’s apartment once, on their own, why had Pitts sent Gretchen back? Or had she gone without telling him, still trying to cover up her incompetence? The “police” had come quickly, the janitor said, before the newspapers printed the name of the dead man. But if Pitts and Ensor had known who Bobby Hilliard was all along, what was the point of hiring someone to follow him to Poe’s grave that night? Was their quarry the real Visitor, as Pitts had claimed? But the Visitor didn’t have the bracelet; Bobby Hilliard did. Her head was beginning to hurt.