“A proper lady only has her name in the paper three times,” Tess said primly. “Birth, marriage, and death.”
“No one ever accused you of being a proper lady.”
“Hey, I’ve been with the same guy for over a year now.” It sounded kind of pathetic, spoken out loud, but it was her personal best in the relationship Olympics. Then she realized he was trying to get her angry. He knew she hadn’t told him everything and hoped to provoke her into a confidence. It was a crude but effective technique.
“You done with me?”
“I hope so. But I still have to talk to your little friend out there.”
“I’m sure you two will hit it off.”
Tess and Rainer walked out into the hall together, where he crooked his finger at Crow as if he were a child waiting outside the principal’s office. Crow bounced out of his seat-not happily, for he had seen a dead man, and Crow was too tenderhearted, too empathetic, to remain untouched by such a thing. Still, this was all new to him, and Crow was no enemy of novelty.
“Have fun, honey,” she called to him.
He turned back to kiss her, which seemed to infuriate Rainer, so Tess prolonged it.
Once they were gone, she had a bad moment, wondering if Crow would contradict her account, tell Rainer about her would-be client. But Crow was careful with her confidences. He would never reveal to anyone, under any circumstances, that she had discussed her work with him. If anything, Crow would tell Rainer even less than she had, only in many, many more words. He would tell Rainer about growing up in Virginia, and how his real name, Edgar Allan Ran-some, was inspired by the writer. And then he might explain that his nickname was an allusion to a childhood joke he had made about “The Raven.” He would tell Rainer about his one-time band, Poe White Trash, and how he was now booking acts into the little club that Tess’s father and aunt ran out on Franklintown Road. He would ask him to come this weekend, to see the zydeco band. He would offer to comp him.
And he would be so sincere, so genuinely sunny and kind and helpful, that he would drive Rainer out of his mind.
Smiling to herself, Tess curled up in the chair and stole back what little of the night was left.
Chapter 4
Tess was the first to see the delicious irony in the fact that John P. Kennedy had given her a phony name, address, and phone number. Really, it was a great joke, hilarious. She was torn between wanting to laugh hysterically and bang her head on the desk.
She tried the latter. Desk and head were both harder than she realized, and the noise woke the greyhound, who glanced at her reproachfully, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
She sat up, rubbing her forehead. As usual, the Greeks had a word for it: hubris. She had sat in this same spot, just seventy-two hours ago, and smirked inwardly at “Kennedy’s” lame excuses about false names and identities. She would never be caught in such a predicament, she had thought at the time. Fooled once by a client, when she was starting out, she was much more careful now. She knew the things to watch out for.
Or so she thought.
Of course, Kennedy hadn’t become a client, so Tess hadn’t taken his vitals or demanded payment, which was the point where she had learned to ask for an ID. Consoled by this, she stepped over the piles of phone books at her feet and headed for the small kitchen at the rear of her office, to make a cup of cocoa. She felt as if her body temperature had dropped by several degrees during the vigil for the Visitor. She held her hands over the spout of the teapot, trying to warm them. The last time she had gotten this cold was in college, at the aptly named Frostbite Regatta in Philadelphia. Her four had rowed well, but her hands had been curved like claws for the rest of the weekend, as if the memory of the oar was frozen into them.
She had been right about the media onslaught. She could take some comfort in that. The story was too perfectly macabre: a murder at Poe’s gravesite, two cloaked figures, a beloved Baltimore ritual colliding with the more modern Baltimore pastime of homicide. Before the sun was up on the morning of Poe’s birthday, the local media trucks were jockeying for parking spots on Fayette. The national reporters soon followed, then international ones-Poe being a big draw overseas-until the sidewalk around Westminster was a media encampment.
An enterprising Norwegian radio reporter had even tracked her down this morning. Tess suspected Rainer was playing a joke on her, giving her name to this terribly earnest, humorless man who seemed to be under the impression that she was a rabid Poe fan. He had demanded to know her hourly rate and then tried to convert it into guilders or herrings or whatever the Norwegian currency was. He had even asked to see her gun.
“I understand all American women must carry guns,” he had said. “Have you been violated many times?”
“I guess you could call it that,” Tess had replied, excusing herself, saying she had much work to do. She wished.
Her cocoa done, she poured it into a Maryland is for crabs mug, a joke gift from someone who found Tess’s allergy to shellfish hilarious, and carried it out to her desk, where Esskay waited. The dog didn’t wag her tail so much as swish it, with a metronomelike precision. The barbershop clock on the wall might say Time for a Haircut, but Esskay knew it was always time for a snack at Keyes Private Investigations, Inc. The name belonged to an ex-cop to whom Tess was technically apprenticed. He signed the incorporation papers, she sent a small check every month, and they never spoke.
It was everything she had ever dreamed of in a mentor.
Tess tossed Esskay one of the homemade biscuits, while she made do with a pumpkin chocolate-chip muffin from the Daily Grind and settled in with the morning newspaper she had neglected to read.
Competing with the national press always made the Beacon-Light nervous; its coverage of the Poe murder was at once exhaustive and exhausting. The story jumped to two inside pages, with numerous sidebars, and the metro columnist had weighed in on What It All Meant. Nothing good, as it turned out, although Tess couldn’t quite follow how this isolated homicide could be used to argue against zero tolerance policing.
For all the column inches the Blight had spewed forth, information on the victim was still sketchy. Tess inferred this meant Rainer had not yet notified next of kin, because the dead man was identified only as a twenty-eight-year-old man who had worked in “the restaurant industry.” Aka, a waiter or a cook.
The features department warmed up the oldest chestnut of all, the rundown of Poe death theories. There were now twenty-plus and counting. Tess had thought the rabies theory, advanced by a Baltimore cardiologist who had studied the medical records of a so-called Patient X, had been pretty firm, but apparently not. The theories that the cardiologist was said to have discredited-Poe’s death through alcohol or drug overdose-still held sway in the public imagination.
It’s as if we want him dying in the gutter, shivering from delirium tremens, Tess marveled. She hadn’t known Freud had theorized that early childhood trauma had killed Poe, or that impotence had been cited by yet another medical expert. How did impotence kill? She supposed a man might die of embarrassment, but only figuratively. She smiled smugly, a thirty-one-year-old in love with a twenty-five-year-old, unaware that she was once again flirting with hubris.
But her subconscious must have made the connection, for she was suddenly glum, pondering the case of the disappearing John P. Kennedy. She glanced at the phone books stacked at her feet, at the bookmarked “people finders” on her computer, at the CD-Roms that supposedly had everyone, even unlisted numbers. There were Kennedys, of course, many of them, in Maryland and Washington and northern Virginia and Delaware: John P. Kennedys, and J. P. Kennedys, and even one Pendleton Kennedy. But the ages were wrong, or the voices were wrong, or, in the case of Pendleton Kennedy, the gender was wrong. All were most convincing in their assertions that they had never met her. “Please remove me from your call list,” more than one person had snapped, mistaking her for a telephone solicitor.