“Here’s Eric,” her father said. “What do you want to ask him?”
The man was young, and earnest looking, with freckles and a cowlick. He wore gray trousers, Tess noticed, but then, so did her father. So did a lot of men in Baltimore.
“Have you picked up on anything at Domenick’s?” she asked him. “Any complaints, any hints that they’re doing something other than serving beer?”
He shook his head. “It’s one of the few places over there no one ever complains about. They close on time, they don’t make noise, they don’t serve underage kids.”
“What about the girls?”
“What girls? I’ve seen a barmaid here and there, but it’s not like they’ve got B-girls at the counter, trying to hustle guys for dollar drafts, or dancing on the tables. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it. It’s a neighborhood joint. Yeah, Nicola DeSanti may be running her rackets through it, but that’s not my problem, you know? I can’t even catch her paying off on video poker. And she’s death on drugs, I can tell you that much. She’s old-fashioned that way.”
“What about the fact that a dead man is listed as the owner?”
The young inspector rolled his eyes. “So, I haul them in, and next thing you know it’ll be her daughter or her cousin. Everyone knows how that works.”
A straight arrow, and not stupid, but uninterested in converting the rest of the world.
“Sorry, Tess,” her father said. “You’re not going to find any answers here. You may have to accept there are no answers, not to the questions you’re asking.”
She left, feeling dejected. It had seemed so promising. Gene Fulton fell into step beside her as she walked down the stairs to the street.
“Looking good, Tess,” he said. “I saw you on the television the other night.”
She was surprised to find him so determinedly chummy. She thought the bit about her imminent engagement would have killed his fleeting interest. Maybe she could show him the photo of herself in her father’s office. That should dampen any man’s ardor.
“Well, you know what they say, Mr. Fulton.” She deliberately avoided using his first name. “The camera adds ten pounds. But it’s good for business.”
“Guess you don’t get to take much time off, being self-employed and all. You working through the end of the year, or you going to give yourself a little holiday, hit the party circuit?”
Oh please, not an invitation. She was not up to the tact required to deflect an unwanted date.
“I thought I was going to be working, but now I’m not so sure. My dad says I’ve got a dog by the tail, and he just might be right.”
“Well-” they were down at the street now, and Gene had his keys out, twirling them in his fingers. “Give yourself a break. Take it easy. You’re young, you should be having fun.”
She braced herself, but there was no followup. He simply waved and crossed South Street to his car, parked illegally in a loading zone. A ticket was on the windshield, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Why should it? It was probably a point of honor with him that he could get his tickets fixed. Lord knows no one in Tess’s family had ever paid a parking ticket. Fulton took the white sheet from the windshield, crumpled it and threw it in the trash. Tess watched the maroon Mercury pull away from the curb and head down South Street.
Maroon. She remembered a car just that color. Granted, she had only seen the bottom six inches of fender, but it had been maroon. She darted across the street and found Fulton’s ticket, crumpled, but at least on top of the trash heap.
She knew before she checked that the license plate would match the one she had glimpsed yesterday in the alley behind Domenick’s, that she wasn’t going to have to drive to the MVA in Glen Burnie after all.
She started back into her father’s office, brandishing the ticket and her notebook. But before she could call upstairs from the lobby, she stopped and retreated to her own car. Loyalty had long ago replaced Roman Catholicism as her father’s religion. Confronted with this scrap of information, he’d make excuses for Gene. Worse, he’d probably ask Gene about it, which would tell the folks at Domenick’s more than she wanted them to know just yet.
She folded the ticket and put it in her pocket, trying to decide where she should go next. So far, there was one person who had been consistently truthful in talking to her about Gwen Schiller, the only person who had been helpful to her in any way.
Wouldn’t you know, it was the one person everyone said was a pathological liar?
chapter 22
SHE FOUND SUKEY IN LATROBE PARK, READING THE latest issue of Teen People.
“Do you think I could ever look like this?” she asked Tess, pointing to a photo of the latest teen sensation, female variety, a toothpick girl with absurdly large breasts on her bony chest. She reminded Tess of the drawing of the boa constrictor in The Little Prince, the one that showed the snake with a pig halfway through its digestive system. Put this girl on her back, and she was more or less the same shape.
“No,” Tess said. “Because no one actually looks like that, not even her. Jesus, those can’t be real.”
“Oh they are,” Sukey assured her. “She says right here that she’s never had plastic surgery.”
“Sukey, do you always tell the truth?”
The girl looked down at her feet, hurt. “Most of the time.”
“Which is what everyone does. So why would you assume she’s telling the truth?”
This seemed to cheer Sukey up. “Hey, can you keep a secret?”
“Sure.”
“I have a boyfriend.”
Uh-oh. “Why does it have to be a secret?”
“Don’t worry, he’s not one of those old guys you warned me about. I mean, he’s older ’n me, he can drive and all. His name is Paul.” Sukey paused. “He’s not a boyfriend-boyfriend. He has a girl. But he likes to talk to me, when she’s being a bitch.”
“Sukey-” Tess didn’t know what to say without sounding as if she were forever contradicting herself. True, she had told Sukey to avoid the boys who wanted girls for their parts. But the talkers could be dangerous, too, in another way. They usually came so much later in one’s life. She had known one in her twenties, a man who dropped by to “talk” late at night, after his fiancée had gone to sleep.
“Go on,” Sukey said.
“What?”
“Tell me he’s using me. Tell me he’s using me to make his girlfriend jealous, that he’ll always go running back to her. That’s what my mother says.”
If Mrs. Brewer had been briefed, then Tess was off the hook, freed of feeling she had to be in loco parentis.
“He does sound a little, well, confused, but I didn’t come here to talk about our love lives.” Sukey beamed at the implication she and Tess were equals, two girlfriends with the same set of problems. “I’m here because we never finished our conversation the other day, the one about the girl I was looking for, Gwen Schiller.”
“I figured you didn’t need me anymore, once you knew who she was.”
There was a sad, lonely note in Sukey’s voice. It wasn’t reproachful, but it was a reminder to Tess that there were infinite ways in which to use people.
“I never would have found her without you. I said your name on television, didn’t you hear?”
“Just my first name,” the girl said sulkily.
“As if everyone in Locust Point didn’t know who Sukey Brewer was. Besides, I thought your mom might not like it, if I used your full name. She certainly wasn’t happy the day she found us talking,” Tess said. “She interrupted us, remember? I thought maybe there was something else you were going to tell me, something more about Gwen.”