“More or less.”
“And then what happens?”
“Two cloaked figures converged on the grave.” Even if she was willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she’d never dream of letting Rainer know she had-briefly-imagined she was witnessing Poe’s ghost. “I heard a shot. One fell; one ran.”
“Which way did he run?”
She replayed the moment in her mind, then tried to square it with the grid of the city at large. North and south came easily but she always needed a minute to orient herself to east and west. Rainer assumed she was stalling.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to be like the gang in the church. One of those guys has watched this thing almost every year for twenty-five years, and he suddenly gets all vague, like he’s not sure what direction the guy came from or how he got into the graveyard. Six people, and not one of ‘em sees anything. You tell me that’s a coincidence. They’re protecting this guy, which is sick. What if he’s the killer?”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t have to tell you what I think. Now, were you the first one to reach the body?”
“My boyfriend, Crow, was a few steps ahead of me.” Crow had less experience with the dead than Tess did, and therefore less reticence in such situations. “He found the pulse at the neck-rather, he found there was no pulse. We kept the other people back as they began drifting over, and I called 911 on my cell. Someone inside the church called too, I think.”
“You see anyone else?”
“The people in the church came out, and someone- the curator, I guess-took the cognac and the roses and put them in the church for safekeeping. And I saw some cars parked, motors running, a few people along the street. I’m not sure how many stayed, once the shot was heard.”
Rainer grimaced. “Almost none. Citizens! People don’t even know what that word means anymore. They see a crime, all they can think is what a pain in the ass it is to them. It’s just so inconvenient, watching a guy get killed. One family stayed; the kid was going to write a term paper. He sure got more material than he bargained for. But they were parked on Fayette, didn’t see much.”
“Have you identified the dead man?” Tess had turned her back on him, unwilling to dwell on his features. Any morbid curiosity she might have had about death was long gone. The victim had looked young, with a thin white face that would not have been out of place in a Poe story. But mainly he had looked much too young to be dead.
“Tentatively. He had ID on him, but we still need to find someone who can verify it. Family is from western Pennsylvania. I’ll call them after the sun’s up, let them have the last good night of sleep they’ll have in a while.”
An unexpected bit of thoughtfulness on Rainer’s part, which made Tess unbend a little. Then she remembered he was a Mets fan, from New Jersey yet, and that he called it “ Jersey,” which made it worse still.
“Is he-is there any way of knowing-?”
“What?”
“Well, is he the real thing or a wannabe? The real turtle soup or merely the mock, as Cole Porter would say.”
“Huh?” She had made Rainer’s jaw unhinge again, affording her a full view of his teeth, which were at once small yet cramped, overlapping each other in all directions, as if he had forty instead of the usual thirty-two. No orthodontia for little Jay Rainer. Somehow, that was probably her fault too.
“Two visitors came to the grave tonight,” she said patiently. “One, presumably, is the real thing, one of the men who’s been doing it since the ritual started in 1949. The other was a fake. Since we’ve never known who the real one is, how can we know which one died?”
“That’s not exactly at the top of my priority list,” Rainer said. “I gotta solve a homicide, not figure which Baltimore weirdo is the regular weirdo and which one was the wannabe. I’ll tell you this much: The people in the church seem a lot more interested in the guy who got away than the guy who’s dead.”
“The victim-was he shot close-up or from a distance?”
“None of your business.”
It was, although she couldn’t tell Rainer why. What if John P. Kennedy had been there tonight, in one of the parked cars or hiding in the catacombs beneath the church? She thought the shot might have come from that direction, but it was a guess on her part. Could the shooting be connected to Kennedy’s petty beef over the bracelet?
“I’m just asking the kind of questions that the Beacon-Light’s police reporter is going to be asking you when he comes in this morning,” Tess said. “I was a reporter once. I can anticipate what they’ll want to know. And it won’t end with him. The AP puts a bulletin out about the Visitor every year. It makes news even in some European countries.”
“A chance for you to get your name all over the world, huh?”
His sourness, which carried the whiff of yet another petty beef, caught her off guard. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve never sought publicity.”
“Like hell you haven’t. You’re a showboat, front and center every time, hogging the spotlight-if not for yourself then for your buddy Tull. Or is it just a coincidence that he ends up getting all the good press when you’re involved in a case? Don’t think the other guys haven’t noticed.”
Honestly Tess thought, only a person who had never gotten publicity could want it so badly.
“No coincidence, and no conspiracy. Martin Tull comes out looking good, because he’s a pro.” She didn’t mind if Rainer caught the implication that she didn’t think he was. “If you’re referring to that case a year ago-well, given who was involved, it was inevitable there’d be a lot of attention. Neither one of us sought it out.”
“No, it was just an accident that all those national news shows came to town over a missing person and put Tull’s pretty little face all over the television, and then the producer gave him money for nothing but doing his job, in case he decided to make a movie.”
Rainer had gotten up and started stalking the room, a disgruntled dog in a too-small run.
“You know, carrying grudges can damage your vertebrae, Detective.”
“I got no grudges. I’m just trying to tell you that now’s the time for you to tell me what you know and then butt out.”
“Glad to.”
For a moment, she thought about telling him about Kennedy. She should, she knew she should. She wanted no part of this. But Rainer couldn’t see the forest for the trees. National and international media were going to swarm over the city in the next twenty-four hours, short of a war or a national crisis. The story was tailor-made for a slow January. If she told Rainer about Kennedy, it was only a matter of time before someone wangled the name out of him; the next thing you knew, cameramen would be jumping out of the shrubbery at the guy’s home.
She had no proof he had been there or was connected to the shooting in any way. It would be unconscionable to subject a private citizen to that kind of scrutiny, and Kennedy might end up blurting out the name of the man he suspected was the Visitor. Too bad Tull hadn’t caught the case; she would have told him everything and gone home, her conscience clear. But it was almost 5 a.m. and sleep deprivation was hitting her hard; she had to make a decision right now. She told herself she had a fifty-fifty chance of doing the right thing.
“I told you what I know. We came, we saw, we called 911.”
“Fine. So don’t go shooting your mouth off to reporters, pretending to know more than you do.”
“A proper lady only has her name in the paper three times,” Tess said primly. “Birth, marriage, and death.”