“No,” Tess said, shaking her head. “He didn’t know what Youssef looked like, so he can’t be the pickup. Besides, you don’t see a lot of black kids hiring themselves out as trade. It’s a weird racial division. White boys from farm country do it, sometimes. They rationalize they’re not gay, just taking advantage of gay men. But the black kids don’t go for that double standard.”
“All the more reason to be covert about it.”
“Uh-uh.” Tess took another bite of pizza. The crust recipe was said to be secret, which compelled her to analyze it every time she visited. It had a pastry feel, flaky and light. And Matthew Ciccolo had started as a baker. A little sugar, perhaps more lard? “Remember, he knew the name, not the face. He’d clearly never seen the guy in his life. But Lloyd knows something. And he’s not the kind of kid who’s going to speak voluntarily to the cops-not without a charge hanging over him, which would force him to make some deals fast.”
“You’ve got the auto-theft thing.”
“I’m not sure that’s enough of a threat to get Lloyd to talk to the cops. You know what the antisnitching culture is like in Baltimore.” The city had been abuzz for weeks about a homemade DVD, Stop Snitching, that showed an NBA player hanging with drug dealers, making ominous threats about what happened to those who cooperated with the police. “But it might be enough leverage to get him to talk to a reporter. Which would sort of make up for the fact that I embarrassed Feeney by telling his boss to go fuck himself. The thing is, we have to find Lloyd.”
“I’m in,” Whitney said, eyes gleaming. It was what made her such a satisfactory friend. She was always up for whatever Tess was planning, even when she didn’t have a clue what it was.
“We’ll need your mother’s car. And”-Tess looked up, catching the waitress’s eye-“an order of curly fries.”
“Are the curly fries the bait?”
“No, my dear. You are.”
“Here?” Crow asked.
“Almost. A little higher. A little to the right-and yes. Yes.”
Kitty Monaghan stood in the center of her ever-expanding bookstore, Women and Children First. It was a family enterprise, twice over. Tess’s aunt, her father’s only sister, had acquired the old pharmacy from Tess’s maternal grandfather, who had presided over the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall of Weinstein’s Drugs.
Kitty was having far more luck at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare streets, although it had required endless ingenuity on her part. Over the years the bookstore had enlarged its original mission, adding annexes known as Dead White Men and Live! Males! Live! But instead of the ubiquitous coffee bar, Kitty had put the old soda fountain back into service, providing an array of ice cream drinks and baked goods. She let people drift in with coffee from the Daily Grind and Jimmy’s and perch at the counter for hours, buying nothing more than a newspaper and a cookie. Somehow she made a profit.
Now she was creating a gallery space within the store, and Crow was helping her install the first show, a grouping of tin-men sculptures-a firefighter, a policeman, a dog walker, an astronaut-all with the same conical tops, yet somehow distinctive, too. Most of the pieces stood no more than three feet high, but there was one life-size one, and Kitty had decided she wanted it suspended from the ceiling so it appeared to be flying. It was an angel, after all, its face at once goofy and benevolent. An angel with the best of intentions, one that would try to take care of you and probably would succeed in the end, but not without a few bumps along the way.
Kitty agreed with Crow’s assessment of the angel’s character.
“Like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life,” she said, offering Crow a glass of real seltzer. Not the store-bought variety but the stuff that had to be delivered by a New York deliveryman. Kitty’s life was full of people who fell over themselves to do her favors. Crow had come under her spell almost five years ago, when he took a job as a part-time clerk here-and then he met Tess. Crow studied the angel again. Now the smile seemed more mocking than kind.
“I used to think I was going to be an artist, remember? An artist, a musician…all I’ve ever really been is a dilettante.”
“You’ll always be an artist, Crow. No matter how much you throw yourself into business, you’re not going to be able to snuff out that part of yourself. Tess fell in love with you when you were a bookstore clerk, remember?”
“And fell out love with me. Remember?”
“Her faith faltered once or twice along the way. Her faith in herself, not you. Besides, you’re the one who bails, leaving when things don’t go exactly the way you want. You first bolted when she admitted she was attracted to someone else. You did the same thing when she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married. Not that she didn’t love you or didn’t want to be with you. Just that she was unsure of marriage-and of your motives for proposing when you did.”
“I love her. That’s not a motive.”
Kitty may have carried the name and looks of an Irishwoman, but she had the soul of a Jewish mother. Throughout the conversation she had been working behind the counter, heating a cheese tart, slicing fruit, then placing it all before Crow on a large Fiestaware platter. He hadn’t even realized he was hungry, but he fell on the food happily.
“Of course you love her. But you asked her to marry you because you felt guilty about what she went through when she was almost killed. Which, by the way, was entirely her fault. Not yours.”
“She was targeted by a psycho. That’s not exactly something she brought on herself.”
“Fair enough. But the way she chose to handle it-that was her decision, before and after. No one could have protected her. How do you think her parents felt? Or me? Or Tyner? We were all horrified, after the fact.”
“Okay, but why doesn’t she want to get married? Her parents are happy enough-”
“Now. They were a little feistier when Tess was young, always bickering. They found it fun and even erotic, I think, but try to explain that to a five-year-old. The main thing is, I don’t think Tess wants to have children, not yet. And what’s the point of getting married if you’re not going to have children?”
Crow thought he had her at last. “Kitty, you got married for the first time in your forties. Are you planning to have children?”
“I’m not playing by anyone else’s rules,” she said, smiling.
Crow was too distracted to notice how neatly Kitty had sidestepped his question. The physical activity of setting up the exhibit had provided only a temporary reprieve from the thoughts that had been troubling him all day. He had always known it was risky keeping secrets from Tess, no matter how benign. She despised looking foolish under any circumstances. As much as she fibbed and lied her way through her professional life, she was scrupulously honest in her personal one and expected the same from others.
But really, there had never been any point in full disclosure and, more important, never an appropriate time. He’d been waiting for all the stars to align, for Tess’s business to pick back up, so she wouldn’t feel pitied or patronized. Perhaps he should volunteer the information now, to soothe her fears over what the insurance companies might do to her. But she would be angry, and he hated to invoke her wrath, especially when things between them were so smooth, almost honeymoon-like.
Or had been, before he brought home a joyriding thief who tried to burglarize them.
9
By sundown it was clear that Lloyd’s only choices for the night were the streets or one of the mission shelters, which he despised, with their enforced God shit, not to mention all the other rules. Might as well live with Murray ’s bullshit, in that case. And some of the hard-core men smelled so, a nasty funk of wet clothes and body odor and cheap wine. He had been trying to panhandle enough to get into the motel over on North Avenue, which wasn’t fussy about ID and age as long as you had cash, but he hadn’t come close to scraping up the almost forty dollars he needed. As a panhandler Lloyd lacked the natural advantages-no gimp, no limp-and while kindhearted women sometimes gave him a few dollars for food, he could never pull off those big scores, the ones that involved a lot of talking, a complicated story about a broke-down car or a bus, the one where you took the person’s name and swore to Jesus that you would repay them soon. No, all he had was fifteen dollars and some change, and the only thing that was good for was getting stolen.