“Yell out the address,” she shouted to Devon. “Scream as loud as you can.” A second round of shots, and although Tess did not dare look up, she knew they were coming from Devon’s apartment. Luckily, whoever was waiting there had assumed they’d be doing their work at much closer range. They didn’t have the guns, or the target skills, for this distance, although Tess heard a few shots ringing into the BMW. The cheesesteak vendor abandoned ship, running down the block. The first wave of sirens started, not too far in the distance. The shots stopped as suddenly as they had begun.
“Is there a back entrance to your building?” Tess asked Devon.
She nodded, looking a little dazed. “And a fire escape. Do you want me to show you?”
“No, I just need to tell the police when they get here. My guess is whoever was in your apartment will leave that way. But we stay here until the cops arrive.”
Slowly, Tess was returning to her own body. She became aware of the cold air, the rough sidewalk beneath her cheek, the fact that her left arm was around Devon’s narrow waist. People had begun to move in the street again, but no one would come close to them, although a teenage boy kicked Tess’s cell phone so it skittered back to her. Maybe it was the gun in Tess’s right hand. Maybe it was because no one saw any percentage in cozying up to the targets.
“The cheese and onions are making me sick,” Devon said. “The smell, I mean.”
“There are worse smells,” Tess said.
chapter 23
HILDE WAS DEAD. THE PHILADELPHIA COPS, OVER Tess’s objections, made Devon come inside the apartment and identify her keeper’s sturdy body. Tess, who knew more about murder scenes than she wanted to, could see that Hilde had been shot as she came through the door, then dragged to the kitchen. The homicide detectives seemed to find this curious, and spent a long time pacing the path of dried blood she had left, looking for pieces of evidence to bag. Why had the body been moved, they kept asking one another, when the answer seemed obvious to Tess. Hilde’s killer wanted Devon to be inside the apartment before she knew anything was amiss. A corpse by the front door would have ruined the element of surprise.
She kept her thoughts to herself. Baltimore cops had never been particularly enamored of her ideas, and there she was a taxpayer. Here, she was an out-of-state PI. An out-of-state PI who hadn’t bothered to check if her license to carry transferred across the Mason-Dixon line. Oops.
Devon handled herself well. She was tougher than Tess had thought. Oh, she cried, and looked as if she might become sick, yet she seemed remarkably composed. Did she understand she was the intended victim, that Hilde had been nothing but an unexpected obstacle? Probably not, and Tess didn’t see any reason to tell her. The realization would come soon enough and, along with it, the electric guilt of surviving when someone close to you is dead. That was the hard part. The secret euphoria you felt at still being alive.
The cops kept Tess and Devon apart as much as possible, taking them to the police station in separate vehicles and sequestering them in different interview rooms. It did not strike Tess that they feared the two women were collaborators, who would conspire to tell one version of events. No, they were from different caste systems. The cops were deferential to Devon-the hometown girl, the Main Line deb, with a Philadelphia lawyer waiting for her at the station, along with her parents. Tess was the scruffy outsider and although they knew she was not to blame for what had happened, they couldn’t seem to shake the idea she was a troublemaker. She didn’t help matters by refusing to divulge details about the case that had brought her to the City of Brotherly Love.
“Privileged,” she said, keeping her voice as polite and cool as possible.
“Privilege is for lawyers, priests, and doctors,” one of the homicide cops said.
“I work for one.”
“Which one?”
“A lawyer, for Christ’s sake. Do you think I had my gun drawn because I was attempting to convert Devon Whittaker to Catholicism?”
The Philadelphia cops enjoyed her sense of humor about as much as the Baltimore cops did. But given that they had one, maybe two less homicides to solve because of Tess, they grudgingly relaxed their hard-ass routine. So she unbent, too, telling them enough to seem almost co-operative.
“I came to see Devon Whittaker because phone logs indicated she had been one of the last people to speak to a woman connected to a case.” All true, and straightforward. Trying to explain Gwen Schiller, the Jane Doe murder, Henry Dembrow’s sudden demise, and her whole family history wouldn’t have shed any more light on the matter.
They seemed somewhat mollified, but they didn’t let her go. Left alone with her own thoughts-always a dangerous combination-Tess puzzled over the day’s events. Had she been followed? No, she would have noticed a two-hour tail, she was sure of that. From eavesdropping on the cops, she knew Hilde had been dead for a while by the time they entered the apartment. At least, she thought that was what was meant by lividity. Maybe she just couldn’t bear to believe that Hilde had been shot even as she sat outside, waiting for Devon to come home from her classes.
Tess had been sitting with her left leg curled beneath her, and it had gone to sleep, all pins and needles. She stood up and stomped Frankenstein-style around the room, not caring if this made for a comic show for the cops on the other side of the one-way glass. She wondered if she was going to have to tell them more before they let her go. She had called Tyner, and he was sending a friend, a local attorney. They had agreed this would be quicker than waiting for him to head up I- 95 in his van. Besides, Tyner and Kitty had tickets to the opera that night. Tosca.
“I find Puccini the most sensual of all the composers,” he had told Tess. “As I told Kitty in bed last night-”
Tess had told Tyner she really didn’t need to know where he and Kitty had their conversations, or if they were vertical or horizontial at the time. Really, Tyner was such an adolescent. He wanted the whole world to know that he was in love and, better yet, having sex. To Tess, this fell into the same category as the President’s sex life, Bob Dole’s Viagara habit, and Larry King’s insistence on procreating well into Methuselah-hood. It was beyond too much information, it was instant Ipecac.
But she couldn’t help noticing that Tyner’s friend, when she finally arrived, was a striking woman in her fifties, with dark hair slicked back in what Tess thought of as a Mexican movie star bun. Very Delores del Rio, even if her name was decidedly unexotic: Ellen Cade.
“I work for one of the big boy firms here,” she told Tess, offering a soft, cool hand.
“Criminal law?” Tess asked her.
“Constitutional. But I know enough to get by. Besides, it was my impression that you’re not going to be charged with a crime. You just want to know how much you have to tell these guys, if you can claim privilege as a contractual employee of an attorney.”
“Something like that.”
“Let me play devil’s advocate: Why not tell them everything?”
Tess thought about this. She was, by nature, a wary person, stingy with what she knew and suspicious of anyone in authority. It didn’t help that she wasn’t sure what she knew, and if it had any bearing on what had happened today. But a woman had been killed, and Tess was not inclined to solve the crime herself, so perhaps she should cooperate a little.
“I’m investigating…I’m not sure what I’m investigating. A girl was murdered in Baltimore a year ago. Her killer died in prison. There are some loose ends around the case, and I’m looking into those for the killer’s sister. The dead girl called Devon Whittaker the day before she died-a fact that Devon hid from me when I talked to her earlier this month. I came back today to find out why.”