Charm City (26 page)

Feeney placed his hand over Tess's
right hand, the one with the toothpick. Without realizing it, she had
started drawing numbers again as she spoke.

"She killed herself, Tess.
It's not your fault, but you'll probably always
think it was."

"I wouldn't say Rosita
was murdered just because I feel guilty."

"Why not? I sure wanted to think
someone killed Wink. I was the one who encouraged Rosita to see if
someone might have knocked him out with booze, then put him in the car.
But how do you convince someone to drink himself into a coma, Tess? And
if someone killed him, why would the murderer then call my pager and
punch in Wink's number?"

"You interviewed all these people
for the story, they all had your pager number. Besides, the tox screens
aren't back yet. If someone slipped him some kind of
drug—I've heard about this tranquilizer from
Mexico, they call it the date-rape drug—the combination could
have made him lose consciousness. Or any strong sedative. He
wasn't a big guy, it wouldn't take much."

Feeney's face was unbearably kind
as he squeezed her hand.

"Tess, I know. I know what
it's like to be an indirect agent in someone's
death. I know what it's like to be the one to find
him—or her. I also know all the conspiracy theories in the
world aren't going to change anything. You're going
to need help with this. Maybe professional help, but help from your
friends as well. Don't make the mistake I did, pushing people
away."

"I don't have many
people to push away right now. I broke up with Crow, and now Whitney
and I are kind of on the outs."

"She told me. She called me today
and made a clean breast of things. Whatever you said to her last night,
it really hit home. But Whitney's not a bad person,
she's just self-centered. She got lost inside her desire for
something and she made a bad mistake, a mistake she's learned
from." Feeney took a piece of bread from the basket on the
table and swiped it through the rich sauce she had left behind.
"Rosemary, that's for remembrance. You know,
she's jealous of you."

Tess meant to give a soft, derisive snort,
but the martinis had robbed her of any modulation, and the noise she
made sounded more like an old man blowing his nose.
"Right."

"You're a free spirit,
while Whitney is weighed down by so many things. Her family's
name, her money, everyone's expectations for her. She
hasn't learned to live her life for herself yet. Maybe now
she will."

The bartender came over and Tess asked for a
coffee. Feeney asked for a beer and helped himself to another piece of
bread. "I don't know if I should tell you this, but
there's a sad little coda to Rosita's story.
She's
not
Rosita
Ruiz."

"Huh?"

"Part of the reason it took so
long for Detective Tull to call back tonight is that the contact number
in Rosita's file was for some family called Rodrigue in New
Bedford, Mass. They kept insisting they had never heard of a Rosita
Ruiz from Boston, although they did have a daughter named Rosemary,
about the same age, working on the copy desk in Baltimore. She
couldn't be a writer, they said, because she never had any
stories to show them. I had to get on the computer to figure it out.
The Social Security numbers matched—the one assigned to
Rosemary Rodrigue had started showing up as Rosita Ruiz's
number about two years ago, right after college graduation. But there
was another Rosita Ruiz from Boston University—different
Social Security number, now in a training program at some New York
bank. Turns out Rosita—Rosemary—changed her name
legally after graduation to match that of a former classmate, a Latina
with stellar grades. Then, when employers checked her college record,
it matched. That explains why she was inconsistent
sometimes—she kept getting her two identities
confused."

A long-forgotten detail managed to come to
the surface in Tess's martini-stewed brain. "Like
putting on her résumé that she was a cum laude,
when the real Rosita—Rosemary—was a
magna?"

"Yeah, that would fit."

"So why do it? I mean, why steal a
life that's essentially a lateral move?"

"Apparently, she wanted a little
of that affirmative-action action. Without a journalism degree and no
real newspaper experience, she thought transforming herself into a
disadvantaged Latina from Roxbury was the only way to kick-start her
career."

"If
Rosita—Rosemary—had been really smart, she would
have had a sex change operation and appropriated the name and
résumé of some Harvard boy. She'd have
gotten ahead even faster as Roger Smith, Rhodes scholar."

"Touché, Tess.
Touché."

Funny, how words echo, then change in their
echoes. Dorie had said the same thing, only hours ago.
Touché-Too-Shay-Tooch-Toooooooooch. Two. The number 2 man on
Wink's ownership team, his constant sidekick. She saw him
limping into the Wynkowskis' home, the apparent possessor of
his own key. She felt his heavy bulk on her back. "I just
figured he took some drug, because he's such a
sissy." Wasn't he, in the end, the one who stood to
gain the most from Wink's death? Linda's lot
hadn't changed a whit, and Lea had lost so much ground she
was almost back in Atlantic City. With three kids to raise, she would
probably fall into the arms of the first man who promised to take care
of her. And there was Paul Tucci, the man who had introduced her to
Wink, the man who had always stood in Wink's shadow, suddenly
at the forefront and in the limelight. The soon-to-be team owner.

"Drive me home?" Tess
asked Feeney. "I'll take the bus back in the
morning and get my car."

"Sure." He studied her
face. "Peace will come, Tess. I don't know
when—I'm still waiting for it myself—but
you'll feel better sooner if you accept what's
really happened."

"I'm feeling better
already," she said truthfully.

T
he
first thing Tess noticed when Lea Wynkowski opened her front door the
next morning was that damn gold bracelet on her wrist—even
though Lea was still in her robe and nightgown at 11
A.M.
, her brown hair
sticking up in tufts all over her head. She apparently had gone from
the insomnia stage of grief to the sleep-all-the-time stage, a
progression of sorts.

"Tooch said I should stop talking
to people, people I don't really know," she said
nervously, fiddling with the bracelet.

I bet he did
.
"This is important, Lea. I think your husband was murdered,
but I need your help to figure out why, and who did it."

Lea twisted the bracelet around her slender
wrist, staring at it as if it were a crystal ball that might reveal the
right answers if you turned it often enough, in just the right way.

"I don't
know," she sighed. "That newspaper reporter was
over here on Saturday and she said the same thing, but I
haven't heard back from her."

So she didn't know
Rosita—Rosemary; Tess would never get use to
Rosita's real, posthumous name—was dead. The
television stations, like the newspaper, didn't report a
private citizen's private suicide.

"What did she tell you
Saturday?"

"Not much. She thought Wink was
killed, but she needed proof. So I gave her what she wanted and Tooch
was so mad when I told him. You see, I thought it was a good thing if
Wink was killed—well, not a good thing, but better, and not
just because we'd get the insurance money then. It would have
meant he didn't leave us, you know, me and his babies. But
Tooch said the reporter was a liar who wanted to make more trouble for
us, which is the only reason she wanted it in the first
place."

"Wanted
what
,
Lea? What did you give Rosita?"

"The yearbook, the one I showed
you." Lea lowered her voice as if there was someone who might
overhear her, although there was no evidence of anyone else in the big
house. "I cut out that one page first, the one you saw. I was
the one who wrote…that word on it. I know I
shouldn't have done it, but I hated her so. She
didn't deserve all that money. But the reporter
might've thought Wink had done it, like you did—so
I cut it out and put it down the garbage disposal."

Check enrollment records
.
Rosita's memo to herself. Schools had closed Friday for
spring break, making that difficult, so she had procured the yearbook
instead, using it as a shortcut to something, or somebody. But the book
hadn't been in Rosita's apartment, Tess was sure of
that.

"Do you know if
Tooch—Mr. Tucci—went to junior high with
Wink?"

"Tooch? No, he went to parochial
school before Loyola—calls it his sixteen-year stint in the
Catholic penitentiary. The brothers at Mount St. Joe actually beat boys
back then." Lea's eyes were wide at this story,
which must have seemed as chronologically distant to her as the
Industrial Revolution. "Can you imagine, someone hitting
little boys?"

Tess could. Worse still, she could imagine
what little boys could do back.

Spike was asleep when Tess arrived at the
hospital for afternoon visiting hours.

"You can sit with him if you
don't pester him," the nurse said. "And
if he comes to, don't pester him with questions. The police
just about wore him out."

"Fine with me," Tess
said. "I don't think he has the answers
I'm looking for, anyway."

She stared outside the window, wishing for a
brainstorm like the one she had the last time she stood there, staring
out over the parking lot and the ambulances. The brainstorm that had
gotten Rosita fired. And now Rosita was dead, because of her own
brainstorm.
Check enrollment records
.
Tess had gone to the Pratt library, but the usually reliable Maryland
Room did not carry junior high year-books. Meanwhile, the school
administration offices on North Avenue had closed for spring break
along with the schools. Tess was sure if she could only locate someone
to ask, she would find that Paul Tucci, despite his proud
proclaimations about parochial school education, had attended Rock Glen
Junior High through eighth grade with Wink, transferring to Catholic
school about the same time Wink had ended up at
Montrose—right after the robbery in which the shopkeeper had
died. Too bad she didn't feel comfortable confronting Linda
Wynkowski so soon after their last meeting. She might know if Tucci
were #2—the second boy in that long-ago assault, but one with
a well-connected father who could keep him from serving the same
sentence meted out to the fatherless Wink.

When Wink's past was revealed, he
must have decided that Tucci should be humiliated as well. Or perhaps
he thought Tucci was the source of the stories, that Tucci had set him
up in order to force him from the ownership group. It would have been
easy enough for Tucci to dose Wink's drink with Percodan, or
whatever he took for his still ailing knee. Even lame, Tucci was big
enough to carry a slight guy like Wink to his car, hoist him into the
convertible, and wait for the carbon monoxide to work.

"There's my
girl." Spike's brown eyes fluttered as he came to.
His speech was slurry and soft, almost as if he had no teeth, but he
was awake, he would live.

Remembering the nurse's
injunction, she didn't try to ask him anything other than
"How do you feel?"

"Been better."

"I found the ears."

He looked troubled. "I
didn't want you to."

"Yeah, well, when I'm
allowed to interrogate you, I want to know more about that."

"I'll tell you
everything I told the police."

"I'm guessing
that's not much."

Spike smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted
back to sleep.

"Good night, Uncle Spike, I gotta
go see a man about a dog. One of the human variety."

"It's not a bad
theory," Sterling said cautiously that evening, as Tess paced
in his office, running through the scenarios she had concocted in
Spike's hospital room. She could hear the skepticism in his
voice, and it hurt. She had counted on him to be the one person who
wouldn't think she was crazy.

"But not a good one,
right?"

Sterling wasn't a great liar.
Although he tried to smile encouragingly, his eyes made it clear he
thought her idea half-baked at best. Tess turned away from him and
looked through the glass windows of his office, toward the newsroom.
Dusk had fallen and snow was in the forecast again, so deadlines had
been moved up, stealing time from the production of the paper in order
to ensure its delivery. Consequently, the reporters and editors on the
city desk were frenzied, gripped in their own snowstorm panic attack.
It didn't help that they were trying to report on something
that hadn't actually happened yet.

"You think I'm spinning
my wheels, trying to prove Rosita was killed so I can absolve myself in
her death," she said flatly. "You think I should
have stayed at the hospital with my Uncle Spike, rather than chasing
down a junior high school yearbook."

"There's just not enough
solid information to go to the police with your theory yet.
You'll have to wait until schools open Monday to check your
hunches. And I'm not sure enrollment records are public
information."

"Oh, I'd get them
somehow. I have an uncle in state government who could always call in a
favor. I could have them by tomorrow if I really pushed."

Sterling played with a paper clip, twisting
it into a straight line, then into a triangle. "There is a
way we could make things move even faster, if you're willing
to be a little devious."

"Always," Tess said.
"What's your plan?"

"You told me Lea cut a page out of
the yearbook before she gave it to Rosita. But if Tucci has the book,
he doesn't necessarily know why the page is
missing."

"So?"

"Think, Tess. What was
Linda's maiden name?"

"What is this, the Socratic
method? Linda's maiden name was Stolley."

"How many kids fell between
Stolley and Tucci in the eighth grade at Rock Glen Junior
High?"

Tess visualized the page. The photos had
been small, in order to accommodate five across and eight down, forty
in all. Linda had been in the middle of the page. Rock Glen was a big
school, there were probably plenty of eighth graders between ST and TU.
Still it was possible—plausible, even.

"So if Tucci thinks that page is
hidden somewhere…"

"He might be interested in getting
it back. And even if we're wrong about his class photo
falling on that page, if we're vague enough, he might think
there's another page cut from the book, which does show his
photograph, in some club or something."

Tess practically held her breath as Sterling
picked up his phone, asked information for the number to the
Tuccis' import-export business, then dialed.

"Paul Tucci, please," he
said, after what must have been eight or nine rings.
"I'm sure he'll want to take this call.
Tell him it's'…someone from the yearbook
committee at his old school. His
real
old school."

Now, this is a man
after my own heart
, Tess thought happily.

"Mr. Tucci, I have the yearbook
page I think you've been looking for. No, I'm sure
you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'd like
to make this available to you, for a price. Why don't we meet
and discuss this, sooner rather than later? At the tennis courts in
Leakin Park, in an hour. Come alone, Mr. Tucci. You may rest assured,
however, that I won't be alone and I won't have the
page with me, not tonight. It's in a safe place."
He paused, let Tucci have his say. "Tonight, Mr. Tucci. No
second chances."

He hung up the phone and Tess could tell he
was pleased with himself.

"I'll have Lionel call
Detective Tull and tell him what we're up to," he
said. "But not until the last possible minute."

"And Feeney," Tess said.
"You should alert him, so he can be in on the story from the
first."

"No, I'm afraid the
police would frown on that. Besides, how would you explain it to Tucci?
Feeney will have plenty of time to follow the story. After all,
I'm sure at least two of the primary sources will cooperate.
Now let me go tell Lionel what we're up to, and give him
Detective Tull's number."

"Sure," Tess said,
studying her wrist the way Lea Wynkowski had, although she had no
golden bracelet to twist. It didn't seem right for Feeney to
miss out on this. As soon as Sterling was out of sight, she sat down at
his computer, signed on, and sent Feeney a message:

The message went through, indicating
Feeney's computer at the courthouse was on, but he
didn't reply. Maybe there was time to page him—

"Hacking again? I hope
you're not sending messages out under my user
name," Sterling said from the door. His voice was sharp, but
he laughed when she jumped.

"N-no, no messages at all. I was
checking the forecast, seeing how bad it's not going to
be."

"Just teasing you. Look, Lionel
thinks our plan is a little unorthodox, but he's going to
back us up. Says he'll call the police at the appointed hour.
Now, are you a McDonald's woman, or a Burger King
loyalist?"

"Roy Rogers, pardner."

Only a few light flakes had started falling
when they pulled into the gravel parking lot off Windsor Mill Road, but
that hadn't kept other drivers from acting as if a fullscale
blizzard was laying siege to the city. Roy Rogers had run out of
buns—plenty of roast beef and ground beef patties, just no
buns to put them on—and Tess had ended up making do with
potato salad, while Sterling had settled for baked beans. It
wasn't a half-bad dinner, but her stomach was doing nervous
flip-flops, wondering how angry Sterling would be when Feeney showed
up.
If
Feeney showed
up—she couldn't be sure he had seen her message.

"Let's have our picnic
in the snow," Tess said, getting out and then climbing up on
the trunk of Sterling's car, a new-looking Honda Accord. She
was conscious of testing him, checking to see if he was fussy about his
car. She considered that a bad sign in a man.

Sterling rummaged through the glove
compartment, then perched next to her on the trunk.

"Something to warm you
up?" he asked, holding out a small bottle of amber-colored
whiskey and a pewter Jefferson cup, the collapsible kind that came in
fancy picnic baskets. She and Whitney had used them and a thermos to
smuggle mint juleps into the Hunt Cup one year.

"You drive around with this in
your car? I'm shocked, Mr. Sterling, shocked."

"You've heard of the old
newspaper editor with a bottle in his desk? Well, I have bottles
secreted
everywhere
. My
nod to tradition."

Tess laughed, reaching for the bottle and
cup, silver in the moonlight.
Make new friends,
but keep the old
. Sterling was rubbing his wrist
the way he did because of his bouts with carpal tunnel. For some
reason, it reminded her of Lea and the way she touched her bracelet, as
if it were an amulet that could protect her from harm.
One
is silver, but the other's gold. You're golden, Wink
.
So Wink had been gold and Tucci was silver. Well, maybe silver plate.
It was a stretch to see him as sterling.

Sterling. He was a good guy. She felt guilty
now about ignoring his instructions. What would he say if Feeney did
show up? "Look, about Feeney—"