“I can’t do all your work for you, Tesser. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they don’t know she’s gone. Maybe both. The autopsy said she could be in her twenties. There are people who are estranged from their parents, you know.”
“Really? How does one manage that?”
Whitney stood up and stretched, gave her friend a knowing smile. “As if you could survive without your parents. You’d die if you didn’t have them meddling in your life. Speaking of parents-I have a very precise list from my mother, telling me the exact brand of suede gloves I am to give my father for Christmas this year, and where to find the linen handkerchiefs for Marmee-”
“God, I’d forgotten you call your grandmother Marmee. How Louisa May Alcott. Is she as much of a sanctimonious prig as the real Marmee, making you give away your Christmas gifts to the less fortunate?”
“-and, of course, mother has ordered my Christmas cards for me, from Down’s Stationers, and given me a list of people I might have overlooked for my gift list. In fact, she’s put everyone on the list but herself, claiming she doesn’t want anything. What she really means is there’s not a thing I could give her she wouldn’t return, so why bother? I think I’ll find something especially hideous, something monogrammed that can’t be exchanged.”
“How do we reward ourselves at the end of this ordeal?” Tess asked. She disliked shopping under most circumstances; the mere thought of a mall in high season made her feel claustrophobic. There would be crowds and Christmas music and, she knew with a sudden and certain dread, robotic figures standing in mounds of white cotton, waggling their heads to and fro.
“We could head back to Belvedere Square, go to Café Zen or Al Pacino’s.”
“Pizza would be perfect. Maybe I’ll even be virtuous and get one of their low-fat pizzas, the kind they make with soy cheese, or whatever it’s called.”
“You start eating shit like that, and I’ll disown you as a friend.” Whitney’s face was uncharacteristically grave. “You shouldn’t joke about our old bad habits. Do you know how lucky we are that we’re relatively normal, that we didn’t do lasting damage to ourselves?”
“Relatively lucky, relatively normal, relatively happy, and driven mad by our relatives.”
Like a dog with a bone, Tess worried the little bit she had, growling over it, turning it around in her mouth, trying to make it new. Jane Doe had said she worked at a place with a name like Domino’s. Tess had found three such places, but the girl wasn’t connected to any of them. Still, it was all she had. That, and Whitney’s insight, which told Tess more about herself than it did about the dead girl. How could she have missed the eroded back teeth? One couldn’t say she was in denial, exactly, more a state of amnesia. Had she forgotten how sick she had been? Was that a sign of health?
She was driving out Frederick Road, near her parents’ house, to the address given in the liquor board file for Lawrence Purdy, owner of Domenick’s. True, the bartender had said Purdy was an absentee owner, sitting at home and collecting checks, but he might know something about his own operation.
He lived modestly, this Lawrence Purdy, in a plain brick rowhouse on West Gate, near Tess’s former middle school. The house was neat, but the porch steps creaked ominously beneath her feet and the trim needed painting.
A small, white-haired woman answered the door. That is, she opened the door, the chain still on, and peered at Tess through the locked storm door.
“Yes?”
“Is Lawrence Purdy here, ma’am?”
“I am Mrs. Lawrence Purdy, yes.”
Distinction noted. “Is your husband home, ma’am?”
“My husband has been dead for almost a year.” She said this proudly, as some other women might announce their husbands’ lodge affiliations, or military service.
To Tess, whose family was intertwined with bureaucracies at every level of government, it was not surprising that a bar license could be out of date. “So you now own the bar on Hollins Street, in your husband’s place?”
“Mr. Purdy never owned a bar. He didn’t even take spirits.”
They had conducted this entire conversation through the storm door. And, although the December day was bright and sunny, the wind was kicking up, blowing right through Tess’s all-weather coat. “Do you think we could continue this conversation inside, ma’am?” She had her billfold at the ready, and she flipped it open to her ID, anticipating Mrs. Purdy’s next question. “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for a young woman who I think might have some connection to the bar. Your husband’s name was on the license as the owner.”
Mrs. Lawrence Purdy shut the main door-didn’t slam it, just shut it. At first, Tess thought their conversation must be over, but then she heard a scrabbling sound on the other side of the door and realized that the woman was fumbling at the chain, her hands slowed and stiffened by age. At last, the door opened, and Tess watched as Mrs. Purdy worked the latch on the storm door.
“It was not like Mr. Purdy to have secrets from me,” the woman said at last, as she led Tess into the dim living room. The house was dark, even for a rowhouse that was not an end-of-group. It was dark even for an older woman’s house, with heavy draperies over pull-down shades. A slight dent showed where Mrs. Purdy had been sitting in an easy chair when Tess had knocked, but not what had she been doing. There was no book or newspaper nearby, no bag of knitting or sewing kit. Tess passed her hand over the old-fashioned television set. Cold to the touch.
Mrs. Purdy misinterpreted the gesture. “I don’t see as well as I used to,” she said. “Dust builds up.”
She resumed her spot in the dent, while Tess sat carefully on the edge of an old-fashioned chair with a needlepoint seat. It looked fragile, barely equal to the task of supporting a real human’s weight.
“It’s possible,” Tess said, “that the bar belonged to another Lawrence Purdy. Or that your husband owned it at one point, then sold it before he died.”
“Was there money?”
“Money?”
“From the sale. If there was a sale, wouldn’t there be money?”
“I was just…hypothesizing. I don’t know what’s true. I only know his name was listed on a license.”
“Oh.” The story no longer seemed of much interest to the woman. She was nicely dressed, Tess noticed, for sitting quietly in her own home, doing nothing. She had on a knit pant-suit, a style which Baltimore women of a certain generation still favored. And why not? The old-fashioned polyester was durable, washable, and the colors stayed bright. Very bright, in the case of Mrs. Lawrence Purdy, tropical orange, with a striped jersey beneath the boxy jacket. The fact is, someone could buy this outfit at one of the city’s retro stores and, with the addition of the right shoes, look incredibly stylish. Not Tess, because she wasn’t built to wear clothes that required irony. But someone thin, someone like Whitney, could pull it off. The thought of Whitney running around in bright orange double knit made Tess’s lips twitch.
“Something funny?” Mrs. Purdy asked.
“No. I admit I’m puzzled, though. You say your husband died a year ago.”
“Of cancer.” This, too, was said with pride, as if it were a singular achievement. “Before he went on disability, he worked for the state.”
“In what capacity?”
The question confused Mrs. Purdy. “I don’t know if he had a capacity,” she said. “He just had a job.”
“And, to your knowledge, he never owned a bar on Hollins?”
Mrs. Purdy shook her head. “He was sick a long time before he died. Longer than the doctors thought. I took care of him here at home, me and a nursing service that our health insurance paid for. It was hard.”
Mrs. Purdy had a classic Baltimore accent, a slippery sound of such distinction that it had defeated some of the world’s finest actors. “Hard” was “hahrd” in her prim mouth, while “home” was “hoooooohme.” Tess tried not to smile.