“A bracelet exists. We know that much.” Tess could not hide her disappointment. She had nursed the hope the antiques dealer who had tempted Mary Yerkes might be Arnold Pitts. Or perhaps Bobby Hilliard, peddling things he had stolen from the library, had called her. It was one possible explanation for why the things he stole were not in his possession. But if he had gotten money for them, where had the money gone? Not into his apartment of thrift-shop luxuries, or to his parents.
“The dealer who tried to sell you the trophy-did you ever get a sense of who his buyer was?”
“No, only that he must be extremely rich.”
Rich was a relative term. Tess had a feeling that she and someone with a million-dollar endowment might use the word differently. “Millionaire rich? Billionaire rich?”
“Let’s put it this way: This was a person who was willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a trophy whose parts are worth no more than a couple of dollars. Now, it’s theoretically possible he lives off saltines and canned tuna to afford such indulgences, but somehow I doubt it. To collect, one needs to be able to protect as welclass="underline" climate-controlled rooms, security, the proper storage for whatever it is, whether books or old fabrics. I know people who give up much for their objects, but collecting requires upkeep. It is not a static activity for casual people with limited funds. You have to be fierce.”
“Would you kill for your things?” Crow asked.
“Crow!” Whitney scolded, giving an uncanny and unconscious imitation of her very proper mother. Daniel, who had turned back to listen to their conversation, also looked appalled. But Mary Yerkes cocked her head, intrigued by the question.
“Kill?” she said at last. “No, I couldn’t kill to protect my things. But I might put myself in harm’s way. If I arrived here one afternoon and saw smoke coming from the windows, I could be prone to do something… ill advised. Rush in and try to grab things before firefighters arrived, save whatever is most precious to me.”
“What would you take?” Crow pressed her. “What are your favorites?”
Mary Yerkes held a finger to her lips and cast a conspiratorial glance around the room. “Please,” she whispered. “They can hear you.”
Chapter 24
When in doubt,“ Crow said, ”go duckpin bowling.“
Left with only a sliver of an afternoon-not enough for Tess or Whitney to go back to work but too early to eat dinner or go to a bar-they had retreated to the Southway Lanes, inspired by Mary Yerkes’s talk of Toots Barger. The much-anticipated snow had finally started, a soft languid snowfall that didn’t seem in a rush to get out of town, and they had the place to themselves.
Tess had forgotten that duckpin bowling is to regular bowling what Baltimore is to New York -smaller, perversely provincial, and more complicated than it first appears. You got three turns in a frame of duck-pins, but the hand-sized holeless balls required a different kind of skill. Brute force did not yield results in duckpins. You could hit the tenpin in the sweet spot and leave five standing.
Unless you were Whitney, who had bowled 130 in the first game and had two strikes and a spare going into the sixth frame of the second. She swore it was only her third time at duckpins, but Tess was beginning to suspect the Talbot homestead contained a secret alley or two, where Whitney had honed her skills for years with an eye toward this opportunity to humiliate her. Between turns, Whitney drank beer, flattish Budweiser, and amused herself by studying the team names of the various local leagues.
“The ”Who Cares,“” she called out. “ ”I Don’t Give a Shit.“ ”Sparrows Pointless.“ It’s as if Sartre and Camus were reincarnated in South Baltimore and decided to bowl instead of write.”
Daniel laughed appreciatively, but Tess had already abandoned her matchmaking plan. Whitney and Daniel hadn’t sparked at all. Crow and Daniel, however-they were a perfect pair, with their love of arcane trivia and that same earnest, sincere quality.
Deciding her problem was the ball, Tess put down the reddish one that reminded her of the planet Mars in favor of a mottled brown one, an egg from some ungainly bird. She lined up her aim slightly to the right, trying to compensate for her tendency to go left, and hurled it down the alley. It was perfect-leaving the 1 and the 5 pins standing.
“No lofting,” scolded the owner, an older woman in a faded pink sweater who was watching them anxiously from behind the bar. The weather was making her nervous; she wanted to close up and go home. “We just fixed them floors.”
Tess shrugged apologetically-she hadn’t meant to loft; the ball had kind of slipped-and sent her second ball down the left gutter, her third down the right.
“I knew a therapist once who recommended bowling as a way to confront untapped rage,” she said, sliding into the molded plastic chair next to Whitney. “It doesn’t work as well with duckpins. Maybe this is for people for whom you hold small grudges.”
A petty beef, as Arnold Pitts might say. Those were the words he had used when he first visited her. But how petty could a beef be if someone ended up dead? Tess heard the voice on the phone again-they’re worth killing for-and suppressed a shudder.
“Who would you be picturing right now if you were playing for catharsis?” Whitney asked. “Although, given your score tonight, I think you’d leave here even sicker.”
“Bitch,” Tess said sunnily.
She did love Whitney and would rather spend a lifetime exchanging insults with her than have one of those gooey, faux-sisterhood friendships that were all backstabbing, boyfriend-stealing, Nair-on-the mascara-wanding.
“The problem is, I don’t know who I’m angry at. Someone has stolen my life-forced me out of my house and put me in the position of looking over my shoulder every three seconds-and I don’t know who it is. That’s my head pin. Rainer, Arnold Pitts, Jerold Ensor-they’re in there too, but hitting them won’t give me as much satisfaction.”
“Has Rainer questioned them?”
“Yeah, this morning. But they showed up with lawyers and deflected virtually every question. The fact is, he doesn’t have a thing on them, other than impersonating police officers. Which is pretty serious, but it’s not a murder charge.”
Crow finished his turn, then Daniel put together an eight the hard way. He tapped Whitney on the shoulder. She got up and threw a strike, as if her only concern was to return to the conversation as quickly as possible.
“What did they say they were doing when they searched Bobby’s apartment and the Hilliards’ farm?”
“Looking for their stuff, which is a pretty good excuse.” Tess went to the rack and hefted several balls, judging them the way a housewife might rate a head of cabbage. Maybe back to the red ball, Tess thought, then remembered it was slang for a high-profile homicide. She chose a pea-green one instead. Four pins. The ragged, broken line of white looked like a South Baltimore mouth.
“But Rainer asked Pitts about the bracelet, right?”
“Yep, and he was ready for him. Pitts said Bobby used to talk about this bracelet all the time, so he appropriated it as a cover story. It was never his, and he didn’t care about it. He offered to open up his files and show he had never purchased such an item or sold one.”
Dividing her concentration between talking and bowling seemed to work. She picked up the spare against the odds and took Crow’s seat, stealing a glance at their scores. Whitney was out of reach, but she, Crow, and Daniel were almost dead even. The guys didn’t care, but Tess did, secretly. Whatever she did, Tess liked to win. Whereas Whitney assumed she would be victorious at every undertaking, a significant distinction. Daniel didn’t seem to have a competitive bone in his body, while bowling took a backseat to Crow’s unfettered delight in the Southway itself. He was enamored with the details. Such as the score sheet, which featured advertisements for neighborhood businesses that liked to brag they had “nationally advertised” brands, and a photograph of Jerry Lewis, circa 1972, demanding help in the battle against muscular dystrophy.