"No, it's the right place. And I know whose name is on the lease here, and it sure isn't yours," Tess said, her voice louder now. "I'd hate to track down the landlord and tell him you're not the one on the lease."
Her bluff brought results. A marijuana-laden breeze drifted into the hall as a skinny man in baggy plaid shorts opened the door. He had red hair pulled back in a scraggly pony tail and pink, blotchy skin. His hairline was as high as it could be and still be considered a hairline at all.
"You with someone official?" he asked.
"I'm a private detective looking for the man who used to live here. Crow Ransome. You know him?"
"Never heard of any Crow."
"Maybe you knew him as Ed or Edgar."
"Eddie?" Eddie? "Okay, sure, a little. I mean, I met him when I took over the place. I gave him cash up front for the next six months, he pays the landlady. He makes an extra 25 dollars a month on the deal. Everybody's happy, you know?"
"Twenty-five dollars isn't that much. Why didn't he just break the lease and have his mail forwarded to wherever he was living?"
The man was beginning to relax, or maybe he was just too stoned to stay anxious. He yawned, leaned against the doorjamb, scratched the gingery hair under one freckled arm. "I don't know. He had moved in with this chick, and he needed every peso he could get. Maybe he wasn't sure it was going to last. We kind of left it open. I knew if he showed up here before his lease was up, I had to let him have it back. Those are the breaks."
Moved in with some chick. Tess was having a little problem getting past that one piece of information. When she didn't say anything right away, Maury jumped in.
"So when was the last time you saw him?"
He needed to think about this. "September? Anyway, a while ago. He came by, picked up his mail, not that there was much, a letter from Virginia, which he told me to mark ‘Return to sender.' Although he always looked real carefully, as if he thought something else might be in there, too. He told me he was going to be out of pocket for a while, but promised he'd keep paying the rent. I hope so. I'd hate to lose this place."
From what Tess could see through the open door, it wouldn't be much of a loss. The remodeling of the old house had been done as cheaply as possible. The walls looked like painted cardboard, the kitchen wedged into one corner was nothing more than a two-burner stove and a half-sized refrigerator.
"Did you have a number for Crow? For Ed, I mean."
"A number? Oh, you mean like for the phone." He wandered back into the apartment, scratching himself at intervals, until he found a scrap of paper on the floor, near his own phone. "I think this is it."
Tess glanced at it, then checked it against her date book. "This is the number he had here, before it was disconnected."
"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. It was disconnected for a while, but I got it turned back on." He crumpled it into a ball and tossed it on the floor.
"What about the girl, the one he had moved in with?" This was Maury again. Tess would have to tell him later that they were not partners in this enterprise, that he was to stop asking questions. "Did you know her? Do you know where they lived?"
Another yawn, another scratch. "Naw. I saw her once, when Eddie stopped by. She was pretty, like a little doll. Real blond hair, big blue eyes, and cheeks that looked like she had little pink circles painted on them, but natural, you know? I noticed her because she looked like one of the sorority girls around here, except kind of sad-looking, too. Like she was tuned into some frequency only she could hear. He called her lady. At first, I thought it was generic, like ‘my old lady.' But it might have been her name."
"Blond hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, sad-looking. Anything more, uh, specific?"
He shook his head. "Naw. Beautiful girls are everywhere in Austin. You get kind of numb to them after a while. Not numb, exactly, but you stop making those real fine distinctions. It's like eating too much Mexican food. Just burns out your taste buds."
Maury nodded in commiseration. Tess was mystified-she hadn't noticed that Austin was so burdened with pulchritude, although she had observed that bodies here ran to a taut, lean look quite unlike the mesomorphs back home.
"Here's the number where I'm staying, please have him call if he should stop by again." She handed over one of her business cards, skeptical of how it would fare in this apartment's filing system. "One last thing, do you know where he played?"
"Played what?"
"With his band. Where did they perform?"
"I didn't even know he was in a band, but I guess everyone in Austin is. Everyone who's not a movie star or in software," he amended. "Man, what you damn Yankees have wrought."
"Yankee? Crow was from Virginia and I live in Baltimore. Check a map sometime, Maryland lies below the Mason-Dixon line."
"You telling me you're a Southerner?"
It was an astute question, one no Baltimorean could answer. The map said one thing, the city's architecture said something else, its race relations something else again. It was both, it was neither. "Just giving you a little geography lesson."
"What's this about, anyway? Eddie in trouble? He seemed like a good guy, but you never know."
Tess avoided his questions by asking one of her own. "What do you do, anyway?"
"Me? I'm a student."
"You look like you're almost thirty."
"Try thirty-five. But I'll have my master's by the time I'm forty if I don't get distracted again, wander off to Mexico for a while. I worked a couple years down in San Miguel de Allende, but that's almost too American now. I'm thinking Merida, maybe farther down the coast in the Yucatan. Tulum. Or I could just keep going, all the way to Belize. I don't know. Whatever comes next."
"Whatever comes next," she repeated to Maury, once they were back in the car.
"What does come next?" he asked. "Where do you want to go now?"
"I was just quoting Crow's tenant. Seems like an enviable way to live. Except that when I lived that way, I didn't realize how free I was. I just thought I was unemployed."
Maury held his forefinger and thumb out toward her. "You are about this close to singing a Joni Mitchell song and you don't even know it."
"No, what I'm saying is that things are different here. In warm climates, people are more relaxed about being down on their luck, because spending a night outside isn't a matter of life and death."
"So, you don't have any homeless guys up in Baltimore?" he asked.
"Okay, my theory needs a little refining." Still, there was something in the weather here, or the water, that changed one's perceptions of time and possibilities. If Crow had caught this local fever, he could be anywhere.
With anyone.
Chapter 5
They took a break, heading back to Quadling Country to wile away the hours until the clubs started opening. A late-afternoon run along the paths near Town Lake gave Tess a glimpse into Austin 's charms. Here was a city, that worshipped fitness, that accommodated those who exercised. Quite unlike Baltimore, where chain-smoking drivers liked to force runners off the roads for the sheer sport of it. It should have been a perfect fit for her. If only Tess believed in perfect fits. Thanks to Kitty, she had been raised on the real Brothers Grimm, where Cinderella's sisters sliced off their toes and heels to cram their feet into that stupid glass slipper.
A few scullers and sweep rowers were working out, and she found she missed her own unpretentious little Alden. The rowing season was almost over in Baltimore, she would lose some of the best days if she stayed here too long. But she would be home soon, she reminded herself. Things were simpler than she or Crow's parents had realized. He had moved out to be with a woman. She'd probably find him-and her-on Sixth Street tonight. All she had to do was walk him to a pay phone, and she was out of here.
So why had he stopped calling his parents? she asked herself, as she ran along Town Lake. How to explain the postcard? Crow might still be angry enough to play such a prank on her, but why would he want to worry his parents?