His voice was mild, as if he were used to such accidents, as if his size put him on a constant collision course with life.
“Hey, that’s why they have saucers. Tess Monaghan.”
“Nice to meet you.” His handshake was gentle, restrained. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“From-”
“Feeney, mainly.”
“Then most of what you know is true, and what isn’t true is at least interesting.” Kevin Feeney, the Blight’s courthouse reporter, was an old friend, his devotion to her exceeded only by his devotion to making stories about her more colorful. At least he didn’t put his fiction in the newspaper, unlike some reporters Tess had known.
She asked for coffee and a pair of bagels, having skipped breakfast that morning. She had wanted to avoid meeting Tyner in Kitty’s kitchen. He wouldn’t approve of what she was doing. She wasn’t sure she approved, so she didn’t want to subject herself to anyone else’s doubts. But she needed Hank Mooney’s help if she was going to confront Arnie Vasso with anything other than her hunches.
“I don’t have much time,” Hank said, turning a tree-stump-sized wrist to look at his watch. “Another day, another docket.”
He was smiling, though, energy brimming out of him in much the same way his coffee had run out of his cup. Tess had thought a public defender would be more beaten down, struggling under a staggering caseload, wrestling with the realization that the only thing that really separated him from a criminal attorney was the salary. But Hank Mooney looked as if he couldn’t wait for his workday to begin.
“Do you remember Henry Dembrow?”
“He’d be a hard one to forget, even if the case hadn’t been in the news lately.”
“Because of the Jane Doe angle.”
“Yeah. And because she was a white woman murdered in Locust Point. Most of the people murdered in Baltimore are young black men, killed on the East or West sides. Jane Doe-”
“Gwen Schiller.” Having restored the girl’s name, Tess was determined to make others remember it.
“She was unusual in every way. I shudder to think how the case would have been handled if they had known who she was at the time. Her father probably would have been breathing down the state’s attorney’s neck, screaming death penalty.”
Tess wasn’t sure if Dick Schiller was capable of screaming for anything. Any rage he could feel now was directed at the clinic. Gwen had been alive for six weeks after running away. Forty-two days, forty-two lost opportunities to change her destiny.
“I understand you moved to have his confession thrown out, on the grounds he was denied counsel.”
“It was worth a try. I was hoping he might be so high when they interrogated him that he was incapable of informed consent. Did you listen to the tape?”
“I read the transcript.”
“He sounds a little spaced out on the tape, but he’s not confused. If anything, I had the impression he thought he was being really crafty.”
“Crafty?”
Their food arrived. Mooney’s breakfast was surprisingly small, a glass of grapefruit juice and a toasted English muffin, which he ate dry. Tess had expected a Paul Bunyan-esque stack of hotcakes, maybe a Western omelet the size of her head. Mooney bit into his English muffin with a sound like someone’s spine cracking, scattering crumbs down his front.
“Yeah, I know-the kid was a hardcore huffer. Yet Henry thought of himself as real smart, an operator. It was like he had some scheme he didn’t want to tell me. Then he got his own attorney, and it wasn’t my problem anymore. Hasta la vista, baby.”
“Arnie Vasso.”
“Really? I guess I must have known that at some point, but with my caseload, I don’t have the luxury of worrying about former clients. Funny choice. Vasso doesn’t know shit about criminal law.”
“He knows enough to keep himself out of jail, unlike some other Annapolis lobbyists.”
Mooney liked that. He laughed so hard he almost spilled coffee down his shirt front. “Point taken. Look, all I’m saying is that with my caseload, I don’t ask a lot of questions if a client says he’s got the money to hire a private attorney.”
“Did Henry ever mention a bar called Domenick’s?”
He shook his head vigorously side to side, like a dog shaking himself dry. Hank Mooney was really quite appealing, in his big-boned, shambling kind of way. Tess tried to think of female friends who might appreciate his charms. Jackie was too fastidious-she’d have bailed at the crumbs. And Whitney was secretly as much of a snob as her mother. The only reason she’d ever date a public defender was to torture Mrs. Talbot. Kitty’s taste was famously inclusive, but Kitty was lost to her for now.
“Bars weren’t Henry’s scene. He was essentially a very solitary guy. No friends, no interests. I always thought huffing appealed to him because it’s a real antisocial high. You don’t need a buddy, you don’t have to go to a shooting gallery, or leave the neighborhood to score. He didn’t really care about anyone. Except his sister. He adored her, he kept telling me he was going to make everything up to her some day. Shit.” Another glance at his watch. Luckily, he remembered to put down his juice glass before he flipped his wrist. “I’m going to be late.” He waved frantically at the waitress, sideswiping a water glass, which Tess caught just before it tipped.
“You go. I’ll get this.”
“You sure? I don’t feel like I helped you much.”
“Hey, you’re a public servant. You help the taxpayers every day.”
Mooney smiled a little ruefully. “Yeah, I help you a lot. I try to win freedom for the guys who strip your cars, break into your houses. I get acquittals for the guys who are shooting each other over the drug trade in West and East Baltimore. I’m an Eagle Scout.”
“You ever kept an innocent person from going to prison?”
“An innocent person? I’m not sure there is such a thing. But, yeah, I’ve had clients who didn’t do what the prosecutors said they did, and I’ve gotten them off.”
Tess smiled. “Then I think you’re entitled to at least one free English muffin now and then.”
Tess found Arnie Vasso in the gallery above the Senate floor, watching with great delight as the Maryland Senate tried one of its own. Senator Hertel, as it turned out, had decided not to go quietly. He was forcing his colleagues to cast him out. The proceedings had excited the seasonally deprived media far more than they did the public. The press seats on the Senate floor were full, and cameras lined both sides of the chamber.
But in the gallery, Vasso was one of only a few diehard political junkies drawn to the spectacle. He sat in the back row, arms folded across his chest, eyes bright with a strange hunger, as if he were watching some kind of blood sport.
“Why are you wasting your time here?” Tess asked him.
“It’s history,” he said curtly, not even turning his head toward her.
“More of a tradition, if you ask me. It’s the third time it’s happened in the last three years.”
He glanced at her, but his attention quickly returned to the floor. Senator Ken Dahlgren, the quasi-prosecutor here, was making a speech about his committee’s findings, and how they had reached the recommendation for Senator Hertel’s expulsion. Somehow he managed to reference the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and something about how the Maryland State House was the oldest legislative building in continuous use. Tess thought he looked a little waxy and unreal, like Dan Quayle caught in the headlights. But hers was evidently a minority opinion.
“He’s good,” another spectator whispered.
“The next congressman from the first district,” someone agreed. Vasso cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He obviously considered himself above such low-level political speculation.