The Sugar House

happened.”

Adam Moss made it a habit of not asking too many questions, Tess realized. No wonder he was so highly regarded in political circles.

“When the replacement bolts, what happens?” She was thinking of the terrified girl in the gallery, Wendy, her shrill insistence that she had fulfilled the contract.

Adam looked as if he might say something, but Hammersmith cut him off. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened. She decided she didn’t want the life I was offering her, and she left. Now that I know she was Dick Schiller’s daughter, it’s all a little clearer to me, I admit. I haven’t had a protege for quite some time.”

He had the gall to sound wistful, as if he had been denied something that was his due.

“But only because the waitress from Domenick’s wasn’t quite right,” Tess said, and she knew she had gotten it right this time. Gene Fulton had brought the girl to Meyer, not to some political rival. “You were the tea at Harbor Court, the job that Fulton described as one of the best gigs in the city. I guess Nicola DeSanti knows your ‘proclivities,’ but can’t quite nail down your taste. Pretty isn’t good enough. They have to be extraordinary.”

“I am interested in young people who want to better themselves, people I can help.”

“Yes. You take them in, and you buy their silence by promising them what they most desire. But Gwen didn’t get anything from you, so she wasn’t bound to keep your secret, was she? You must have been terrified when she ran away. She might have ended up telling someone about your little scout troop.”

“I’m sorry she didn’t like it here,” Meyer said. “But, really, she overreacted. She wasn’t my prisoner, she was free to leave any time. I just needed to ensure her discretion. When I asked Nicola to help me out, I expected a very different resolution. I thought she would put Gene on it, as she usually did. Gene was competent, and levelheaded. The boys are so…unpredictable.”

“The boys?” She wanted to be wrong about this, but knew she wasn’t.

“Her grandsons, I believe. No-her grandson and great-grandson. Have you see them? They look amazingly alike. Very unusual faces. Not handsome, but distinctive. Feral, even.”

Caught up in trying to describe Pete and Repete, Hammersmith had already forgotten the girl he knew as Beth. But Adam Moss was horrified.

“You knew,” he said, stepping around Tess and toward his old mentor. “You knew all this time. They killed Beth, to protect you, and framed the dumb addict. Let me guess what happened next. Gene Fulton carried the tale back to Dahlgren, to get him off his back at the liquor board, and that’s how Dahlgren got you for finance chair. Beth was dead, and all anyone could think of was how to turn it to their personal advantage.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Hammersmith protested. “I didn’t want her dead, and I certainly didn’t want to work for a troglodyte like Ken Dahlgren. But one does what one has to do. Noblesse oblige, Adam. Didn’t I teach you that very concept, over the year I spent transforming you from rough trade to senator’s aide?”

“Noblesse oblige,” Adam Moss repeated, his voice bitter, his beautiful mouth trembling with emotion. “As I recall, you were born in Pigtown and made your first million as a slumlord. You learned to buy fine things, Meyer, but you never truly appreciated them.”

“I bought you,” he said matter-of-factly, reaching out to touch Adam’s face. The younger man backed away so quickly he almost fell over the chaise longue. “I appreciated you.”

Tess pulled her gun from her pocket, and aimed at the center of Meyer Hammersmith’s speckled forehead. She heard Whitney’s voice in her head: Heads are too small, aim for the torso. She could miss, even at this range. But it was so much more satisfactory to point a gun at his face, his unbeautiful face. She squinted her left eye, remembering to adjust for the slight recoil on the Smith amp; Wesson.

“What are you doing, Miss Monaghan?”

“I came here today because I thought you could protect me, that you must be at the top of this conspiracy, because you’re rich and powerful. But you’re as much at Nicola DeSanti’s mercy as I am. You don’t do anything for yourself, whether it’s procuring the beautiful young people you desire, or arranging for their silence when they disappoint you.”

“You don’t understand,” he began, licking his lips.

“I understand as much as I can bear.”

“What do you presume to do, then?”

“With this?” She looked at the gun in her hand, as if surprised to find it there. “Nothing, actually. I just wanted you to know, for a moment, what Gwen Schiller felt when she saw Nicola DeSanti’s progeny coming toward her. Gwen Schiller-not Beth March, or Jane Doe. Gwen Schiller, a seventeen-year-old runaway, whose only crime was wanting one man in the world, her father, to notice her. I wanted you to feel the panic she felt when she saw Pete and Repete. That’s when she twisted away from Henry Dembrow, right? He lured her to his house, probably by promising her she could use the phone. He would have been so easy to buy off, all they had to give him was a can of spray paint. And when Gwen died, it was such a joke to the two men who made it happen that they tied a rubber tube around her neck, just for the hell of it. That was for you, wasn’t it, Meyer? Your gift, your package, courtesy of the DeSanti family.”

“She shouldn’t have run,” he said. “I’d have let her go, I wouldn’t have forced her to stay. I never force anyone, do I, Adam? And I don’t hurt them. Tell her, Adam. Tell her how I saved you, tell her everything I did for you.”

But Adam Moss was out the door, running.

He was waiting for her just outside the iron gates.

“Were you scared?” Tess asked him.

“Scared that you would kill him, and I wouldn’t stop you,” he said. “I can’t believe Dahlgren knew, all this time, that he set me up like that. I’m an accessory, aren’t I?”

They were walking up the hill, toward Tess’s car. The city of Baltimore was spread out before them. The top of Federal Hill was possibly the best vantage point from which to view the city. From here, one could take in downtown, Fells Point, the harbor, and Locust Point. The whirligig at the American Visionary Art Museum twisted in the wind. The Domino Sugars sign blazed red in the night. It was a funny thing about that sign. Wherever you went in Baltimore, it seemed to follow you.

“If the police ever come looking for you, tell them what you know and I think you’ll be okay. But don’t stick your neck out, Adam. Nicola DeSanti is willing to kill to protect her grandson and great-grandson.”

“I guess so,” he said. “But it’s still hard for me to believe. She’s a small-timer, content with prostitution rackets and black market cigarettes. You know she’s death on drugs, fires her girls if they get caught using. She has her own weird moral compass, however skewed. Dahlgren’s the one who scares me. Mr. Law and Order, Mr. Family Man, using a girl’s murder for his political gain. I can just see how it went down, how Fulton carried the story of Gwen’s death and Meyer’s involvement to him, like some dumb, eager bird dog. Love me! Pat me! Don’t fire me! It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for Meyer, getting caught up in that.”

“Then you’re a bigger person than I’ll ever be. I can’t imagine anyone more loathsome than Meyer Hammersmith.”

Adam looked back at Meyer Hammersmith’s house. At night, in the streetlights, the limestone glowed white. Another Sugar House, Tess thought. The world was full of Sugar Houses, places that looked so sweet, and left such a bitter taste.

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “He doesn’t want sex. He wants people to think he’s having sex. He wants to own things of beauty, things that everyone else wants, and can’t have. It was a good deal for me. I didn’t even graduate high school. I was a hustler in New York. Meyer was a step up for me. Wendy’s from some Virginia backwater where you’re lucky to get out without having your cousin’s baby. We thought Beth-Gwen-was one of us. More naive, perhaps, but scrappy. We never would have brought her to him if we hadn’t thought she was strong.”

“She was strong, that was her problem,” Tess said. “She was stronger than you. She’d never consent to be someone’s slave.”

“I wasn’t his slave,” Adam said, his voice sharp. “More like an indentured servant. It’s a contract. You put the time in, you leave set for life. It’s not that different from being in on the ground floor of one of those Internet companies, or some start-up like, well, Dick Schiller’s. I slept with a lot of men and women before I met Meyer, and all I ever got out of it was spending money and some new clothes. He gave me a new life.”