“Do you have a name?”
“I call myself Jane Doe,” the woman said.
It stung, hearing that name, especially when it was used so casually, so carelessly. Jane Doe was Gwen Schiller; Gwen Schiller was Jane Doe.
“Not very original.”
“That’s the point.”
“No, I mean calling yourself Jane Doe as an artistic statement isn’t original. Didn’t the lead singer of the old punk band X call himself John Doe, way back in the 1980s?”
The woman shrugged ever so slightly. Her thin arms were loaded with bracelets, so the movement made her ring like a wind chime. “Jane Doe is only one of my names. It fit my mood today. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll be someone else.”
Like Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz, Tess thought. Born with a detachable head, the princess changed heads daily, according to her whim. Her heads were numbered, not named, as Tess recalled. Sometimes, Langwidere picked a bad head, and she became unbearably peevish.
“You know, I’m in business for myself. So is my aunt, and one of my best friends. Can I give you some advice? This snotty attitude might work in some other cities, but people in Baltimore are not going to buy art from someone who makes them feel stupid. So thaw, okay? Where are you from, anyway, that you have so much ’tude?”
The last question had been the whole point of Tess’s little monologue, tucked in so it would seem casual, impromptu. It didn’t work.
“Biography doesn’t interest me. People are boring. Including me.”
“That guy who was just in here didn’t look so boring. Boyfriend?”
“Jane Doe” retreated behind the sales counter, a too-precious little desk with spindly legs and a frosted glass top.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice stripped of its snotty veneer. “Who sent you here?”
“I find names boring,” Tess dead-panned.
“I fulfilled my contract,” the woman said. “We’re not supposed to be hassled, after. It’s not my fault, what happened.”
She had pulled a pair of scissors from the desk, but her hand was shaking so hard that Tess felt more pity than fear.
“I’m not anybody. I’m just a Christmas shopper trying to make conversation. Who do you think I am?”
“Please leave,” the woman said. “Once it’s over, it’s over. That’s what they promised.”
“I’m not affiliated with any ‘they,’” Tess said, trying to make her voice as neutral as possible. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know anything about you, or what you’re talking about.”
“Get out, get out, get out, get out.” The woman’s voice rose until it was a feral shriek. Shoppers on the Avenue glanced up, startled. Public brawls were not unknown in Hampden, but they were usually confined to side streets, on hot summer nights, when too much beer had been consumed.
Tess left, making a mental note of the number painted on the transom over the gallery’s door. Sometimes numbers were more important than names.
Sometimes numbers led to names.
chapter 27
TESS HAD A LAPTOP THAT HAD SO MUCH RAM COURSING through its system, so much power, according to the Crazy Nathan’s salesman who had talked her into it, that it might arise from her desk one day and start cleaning her apartment, or prepare a Cordon Bleu meal.
But now, when Tess wanted only to use the Internet to check the city real estate database, her laptop was useless. Not because it wasn’t fast, but because the human being on the other end hadn’t updated the file for at least three years. She felt a perverse pride in her fellow Baltimoreans for rendering technology so powerless.
The only thing to do was head down to the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse and look up the records in the dusty old plat books. It wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. She could chat up her friend Kevin Feeney while she was there, find out if there were any juicy rumors about Dahlgren or Adam Moss, the kind of rumors that never made the pages of the Beacon-Light, yet all the reporters traded, like baseball cards.
“Juicy bits?” Feeney’s natural expression was a scowl, so he had to work a little harder to give the impression that he was frowning. His careworn face folded itself into a series of creases and furrows. “You mean, like butt buddies?”
“No. You know, not everything is about sex.”
“Tell me about it.” He sighed at some private memory. “So you’re asking if we’ve ever heard any rumors about Dahlgren we couldn’t find a way to squeeze into the paper, one way or another? Not that I recall. Until this ethics thing came along and he hooked up with Meyer Hammersmith, he was a classic backbencher. As for Adam Moss, I know less than nada. Did you Autotrack him?”
Autotrack was a costly computer search, which reporters took for granted, largely because they didn’t pay for it. Reporters took it so much for granted that they used it to look up ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, or just to update their Christmas card lists, cheerfully racking up hours of charges. It wasn’t something a one-woman private detection agency could afford.
“What a great idea,” Tess said. “Can you Autotrack from here?”
“Nope,” Feeney said emphatically. “They’re not dumb enough to give me access at the courthouse, I have to go into the office. Besides, each of us has his own password. They’d trace it right back to me.”
Tess saw no reason to tell him that Dorie had given her the password of one of the paper’s lazier reporters to do searches on the Blight’s other, less costly databases. “It’s not as if you wouldn’t have a legitimate reason to look into Adam Moss. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Maybe he’d make a good profile.”
Feeney shook his head. “I’m not risking it. Sorry. They’re in a budget crisis this quarter, so they’re nickel-and-diming us to death.”
“Budget crisis? The paper’s so fat with ads I can barely lift it from the doorstep in the morning.”
“Yeah, but the new managing editor went on a hiring binge at some job fair. He woke up the next morning, young Ivy League bodies littered around him.”
“Whitney said they might hire her back.”
Feeney shook his head. “They made her an offer. It’s one of those rare times when the lack of institutional knowledge pays off. The M.E. may not know Spiro Agnew was once Baltimore County Executive, but he also doesn’t know why Whitney left in the first place. I wish she would come back. The new breed-man, it’s total Village of the Damned time down there.”
“Village of the Damned?”
“You know, that movie about those little kids with those big staring eyes? You should be glad you got out of the business when you did.”
“Trust me, I am. About Adam Moss-”
“No. Besides, you know how many Adam Mosses are going to be in Autotrack?”
“We could get his DOB from DMV.” Talking in acronyms, sure sign of bureaucratese. How had she ended up sounding so wonky? “I just want to see if he has a criminal record.”
“So ask your buddy down at the police station. Won’t he run stuff through the NCIC for you?”
Tess had no ready answer. Yes, under certain circumstances, Tull might help her out. But she was trying to keep Tull at arm’s length. She was trying to keep everyone at arm’s length, and it was proving increasingly difficult.
“Want to walk down to the document room with me?”
“Darling, I can think of nothing more I’d like to do, but I have a hearing in five minutes. Give my love to our always cheerful civil servants.”
Walking through the courthouse corridors, Tess had a moment of paranoia. No building was more public than the courthouse, yet it was full of shadowy corners in which to hide and watch someone. All the time she had been following Adam Moss, she had also been trying to ascertain who was following her. Someone had been watching her, paying close attention. She had said at the press conference she had a source in Philadelphia, an unnamed friend who had known Gwen Schiller, but it was only when she ordered the phone logs that Hilde’s killer made the connection. But how had Adam Moss known to ask for the phone logs before she even did it? Was her phone bugged? Her office? Tull’s office?