The Sugar House

be much harder to track her down outside the gallery, without giving herself away.

Time to become an art lover, her gut told her.

She waited a few minutes, giving Adam time to find his car and leave the neighborhood. She tucked her braid down the back of her coat. Later, if this visit got back to Adam Moss, she could imagine him asking: “Did she wear her hair in a pigtail?” Tess knew people were not naturally observant, because she was still learning how hard it was to get details right. The woman she was about to meet would remember Tess’s hair as being collar length, or short. She also would remember Tess’s tortoiseshell glasses-she had a pair with clear glass that she carried with her, for moments just like this.

Instead of a bell, the gallery door had a rainstick attached, so it made a soft, whooshing sound when Tess pushed her way in and began browsing.

For all Crow’s tutelage, she was still the sort of museum goer given to tiresome pronouncements that she might not know much, but she knew what she liked. The abstract and minimalist work here struck her as worthy of admiration, but it didn’t engage her emotionally. Everything-the paintings, sculptures, the jewelry in a small glass case at the front-was cold and metallic, perfect yet mildly cruel looking.

As was the proprietor, close up. No one that young should look that hard, Tess thought. Her face was like a well-cut diamond, with sharp cheekbones, pointed chin, and eyebrows waxed into stiletto-thin arches. Amber eyes and a full lush mouth gave the face the flashes of yellow and red that diamonds sometimes have, but added no warmth.

“May I help you?” she asked, in a tone suggesting Tess was beyond anyone’s help.

“I’m in this neighborhood all the time, but I never noticed this shop before,” Tess said. “Couldn’t help wanting to check it out.”

“The gallery has been open only a month,” the woman said.

“Are you the owner?”

The question threw her, but only for a moment. “I’m in charge, I make all the selections.”

“I have a friend who owns a gallery in San Antonio. Carries all this wild Day of the Dead stuff. It’s creepy, until you get used to it.”

“Day of the Dead? Oh, you mean folk art.” Her tone was derisive.

“What do you call this place? I didn’t see anything outside.”

“It doesn’t have a name,” the woman said. “Names are essentially phony. I won’t carry artists who insist on naming their work.”

Tess looked around and saw the art was all labeled by numbers. Not sequentially, of course-that would have been too easy. The numbers appeared to have been chosen at random, although Tess supposed the proprietess would insist the #17 canvas could never be, say a #9 or #131.

“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