“The owner?”
“ Lawrence Purdy. I checked your file at the city liquor board.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because this girl, the one I’m looking for, told someone she worked at a place with a name like Domino’s. When I checked the files, I found Domenick’s and thought that might be it.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
“Anyway, Lawrence Purdy-”
“He’s not real active. Bought the place as an investment, I run it. Never shows his face around here. He probably couldn’t pick me out of a lineup.”
“Interesting figure of speech,” Tess said. “You ever been in a lineup?”
The bartender’s eyes met hers, and he grinned. “Nope.”
Her fingers were caked with powdered sugar. She wiped them off on the paper napkin as best she could, then counted out several bills for the check that the bartender had left by her plate. Five dollars total. Not bad for such a nutritionally complete lunch.
As she stood to leave, the waitress skittered out of the kitchen and began clearing her place. She almost made it back to the swinging kitchen door before she dropped the plate on the worn linoleum floor, where it shattered into dozens of white shards.
“Your tip will just about cover that,” the bartender told the girl, and the patrons in the bar laughed, with the exception of the guys at the pinball machine, who didn’t seem to notice anything but their game. The girl flushed, but she did not look particularly embarrassed, or cowed. More puzzled than anything else, Tess thought. It was as if she had awakened from a dream and found herself in this musty little tavern, wearing an apron and waiting tables, but she couldn’t quite believe it. She had the look of a girl who was waiting for her life to begin.
Tess wasn’t going to be the one to break it to her that it already had.
chapter 8
TESS WANTED TO GO IN SEARCH OF LAWRENCE PURDY, Domenick’s owner, that very afternoon, but she had a long-standing date to go Christmas shopping with Whitney.
“I’ve done most of my shopping,” Tess had objected, when Whitney demanded her company. “I did it early so I wouldn’t have to go into a mall this time of year.”
“But I need moral support,” Whitney had said. “Besides, you can use the time to browse, figure out what you want for Christmas. Crow told me he’s asked you a dozen times what you want, and you always say nothing.”
“I tell my parents the same thing,” Tess said. “Can I help it if I’m the girl who has everything?”
She really was having trouble coming up with a list of anything she needed, much less wanted. Having lived close to the bone for a few years-although not quite as close as she now remembered those times-Tess had broken herself of the habit of desiring things. Besides, knowing you could afford what you wanted made these items less urgent. The problem was, she was scared to invest her money; she kept everything in her checking account, so her bank balance was now almost embarrassingly large. Even Whitney was impressed; she whistled when she saw the balance on the ATM slip. Whitney being the sort of friend who would look, unself-conciously, at a friend’s ATM slip, if it were left out in public view. Tess caught her reading it when she came back from the bathroom.
“Sorry,” Whitney said, but she didn’t sound particularly contrite. “Old habits die hard. Reading upside down is one of my talents, I like to keep my hand in.”
Tess sighed and dropped into her chair. The greyhound, fast asleep on the sofa, mimicked the sound exactly.
“Esskay sounds just like you,” Whitney said. “So put upon.”
“I don’t know why.
“Bad day at the office, dear?”
“Futile one. I didn’t have much to begin with. Now I seem to have less. The Sugar House. I thought it seemed too good to be true, and it was.”
Even while Tess was speaking, Whitney continued to snoop, her restless hands poking at various items on the desk. She examined a framed photograph of Crow and Esskay, opened the lid of the old blue Planter’s Peanut jar that Tess used for receipts, looked skeptically at a skeleton in a rowboat, a piece of Mexican folk art that had arrived just yesterday from San Antonio, an early Christmas gift. When Whitney reached for the Dembrow file, Tess stopped her.
“Confidential.”
“But surely that doesn’t extend to
“Especially you. I’ve never known anyone who liked to trade in privileged information the way you do. You’ll be out on the Christmas cocktail party circuit, entertaining your mother’s friends with the sordid details about my Jane Doe.”
“I should be able to read the autopsy,” Whitney wheedled. “It’s a public document, and I’m a taxpayer.”
“It’s not the official autopsy, it’s my summary of the autopsy. No one is entitled to it except me, and my client.” But Tess extracted her typed notes from the folder, placing the rest of the file in her desk drawer, and locking it. Whitney was like a toddler. When she wanted a lollipop, you diverted her with a carrot, and she eventually forgot the lollipop had ever existed.
Once she had permission to look at the report, she quickly lost interest, skimming the page, making a face where the information was particularly graphic, stopping at another point to nod, then moving on. Then her green eyes narrowed, and jumped back to whatever had caught her quicksilver attention the first time.
“You say her teeth were rotted.”
Tess knew where Whitney was going, she had been there herself. “Yes, I asked the assistant medical examiner about that. But you can’t make an ID through dental records unless you know which dental records to check. It’s not as if there’s some computer database and you can plug in the description of the molars and it will kick the match back to you in twenty seconds. Although I suppose it could happen one day. Online teeth identification, DNA testing-”
“That’s not my point,” Whitney said impatiently, jabbing her finger at the line. “The report said the back teeth are eroded, the enamel gone. You know what that means.”
Tess did, or she did now that Whitney had reminded her. How embarrassing to have missed this detail. It was as if an alcoholic had looked at an autopsy in which someone’s liver was clearly diseased, and been too deep in denial to make the connection.
“Eating disorder,” she said, smacking her own cheek, punishment for her own tunnel vision. “Bulimia. A habit of long-standing, if her teeth were showing signs of decay.”
“And?”
“And, what? So she had an eating disorder. What am I going to do with that information? It’s an interesting detail, but it’s not going to help me identify her.”
“It narrows the range of possibilities. Now you know she was from a middle- or upper-middle-class family.”
“That’s a stereotype, Whitney. All classes, all races, experience eating disorders. Even some men have been diagnosed with bulimia and anorexia.”
“Yes, and every now and then some Eastern Europe pituitary case finds a job in the NBA. There’s a difference between stereotypes, based on bigotry, and generalizations, which are extracted from the fact that some groups do dominate in certain areas. Well-to-do white girls rule in the world of eating disorders.”
“Really? Then how come little working-class
“Oh, you were more of a social climber than you’ll ever admit. Going to Washington College, trying out for crew. I used to worry you’d go whole hog, marry some guy named Chip who wore plaid pants and loafers with no socks. Besides, who said I got off scot-free? I had my own brush with it, back in college.”
Tess shook her head, annoyed that her friend’s competitive spirit never seemed to rest. “I don’t think so,
