Baltimore Blues

his byline, no matter how prominent.

Jonathan didn't bother to remind her he had been splashed across page one just yesterday, with the story on Abramowitz's death. Disdainful of any story reported and written in less than six weeks, he pitched in on dailies only when his sources gave him something too juicy to waste. Productivity cheapened a man, Jonathan liked to say.

'I've been following some guys on Death Row. Ever since Thanos was put to death, they've started feeling like they might really go. You know, some of them have been there forever, long enough to forget they're supposed to be executed. They don't feel so complacent anymore.'

'I can't see how his case affects these guys, if they're not begging to die. The law hasn't changed.'

'But the appeals have to run out eventually,' Jonathan insisted. 'Thanos will open-'

'The floodgates? Let me guess-your nut graph is already written. Your whole story is already written.' She spoke into her beer bottle as if it were a microphone, putting on the officious voice of a newscaster. 'We begin with three moving paragraphs on one inmate-‘John Smith sits in his cell on Maryland's Death Row, counting down the two hundred forty days left in his appeal'-a little background on Thanos, woven seamlessly in, and then, whammo! The obligatory fourth graph nut, which reads: ‘Inmates on Death Row believe Thanos's execution opened the floodgates for a rash of executions in Maryland, where a complicated appeals process once made Death Row a misnomer.''

'Bitch,' Jonathan said, but there was no edge to it. As an excommunicated journalist, Tess could get away with mocking him. 'Not bad, though. Maybe I'll steal it.'

His beeper went off and Jonathan lunged for the phone. The city desk. 'No. No. Hey, I'm trying. No.' He winked at Tess. 'I'm working on that right now.' Then he put down the phone, pulled her on top of him and started over, taking his time. Better, Tess thought, much better.

Later, the room dark, six empty bottles of Molson on the bedside table, Jonathan hooked his fingers in Tess's unbraided hair and said: 'So you know this Darryl Paxton guy, don't you? One of your rowing buddies?'

Tess freed her hair and slid across the bed, trying to put as much distance between them as she could find on the full-size mattress. 'You still working that story?'

'Not officially.' He was cool, not at all embarrassed. That was one thing about Jonathan. His unabashed ambition, his sheer candor about his motives, made his manipulation and callousness almost charming.

'But you could be, if you got some wonderful stuff, I suppose.' Tess was determined to be as cool as he was, a poker face. 'Sorry. I don't have any wonderful stuff.'

'You know something, though,' he wheedled. 'Maybe a little bit more about the motive? Everyone knows it was over a woman, but we don't have any specifics. Did Abramowitz make a pass at her? Was he doing her?'

'Can't help you, Jonathan.'

'A name.'

'No.'

'A great detail-one fabulous detail no one else has. Something about Paxton. Does he have a ferocious temper? Maybe a history of punching people who piss him off? Where's he from originally? I could work sources, see if he had a history as a juvie.'

Tess sat still. She wouldn't even shake her head yes or no.

'We could go with the angle on Paxton hiring an ex-Olympic rower to defend him, and getting a rowing buddy to help investigate the case.' He smiled, not very pleasantly. 'Oh yeah. I called Joey Dumbarton today to see what else he knew. He's a good guy, gave me the tip about the sign-in sheet. But he had already talked to someone today and was tired of being bugged. He called you a babe, by the way.'

'Well, that's the only reason I'm doing this, to meet eligible men.'

'The rowing angle could make your friend look stupid. Irrational.'

Tess shrugged. It was good for a paragraph. Not even Jonathan could build it into an entire story.

He got up, pulling on his clothes. 'I would have come by anyway. I missed you. Missed that body. No hard feelings?'

'Jonathan, if I was going to have hard feelings over any rude, insensitive behavior I suffered at your hands, I'd have turned into a pillar of salt a long time ago.'

'That's not why Lot 's wife turned into a pillar of salt. She turned back to look at Sodom. As a Catholic-Jew, you should at least know the Old Testament.'

'I'm not a Catholic-Jew. I'm nothing, not even an atheist. Just nothing.'

'Have it your way.' He kissed her neck. 'See you later, nothing.'

'Whenever. You better get home. Isn't it almost time for bed check?'

She knew almost nothing about his girlfriend, not even her name. Some girl he had gone to high school with down in the Washington suburbs. Probably rich, if she even existed. Sometimes Tess wasn't sure. If she did exist she might as well get used to Jonathan cheating on her. For a good story Jonathan Ross would crawl in with anybody.

Tess's Toyota ended up behind Rock's bicycle on Light Street the next morning. She chased him along Hanover Street and down Waterview to the boat house. The attendant was missing in action again, so Rock unlocked the door with his key.

'Catch you on the flip side,' he said to Tess. To get to the exercise room and the stairs beyond, one had to pass through the men's or ladies' locker rooms. Tess threw her keys in an empty locker, stopping to examine her face in the long mirror. Gray, a little puffy under the eyes, as she always was at 6 A.M. Jonathan's visit hadn't left any unusual marks. She pushed through the swinging door into the small anteroom, crammed with weights and Concept II ergometers. Rowing machines to laymen. Torture devices to Tess.

Rock was staring out the window to the west.

'Downpour in fifteen minutes,' he said authoritatively, like some movie Indian predicting a herd's movement by pressing his ear to the ground. Tess thought the clouds were the kind that burned off with the rising sun, but she didn't care enough to argue.

'Good,' she said. 'It's God's way of telling me to go back to bed.'

'How about a challenge on the erg? A five-thousand-meter piece?'

'Terms?'

'Breakfast for the one who comes closest to his personal best.'

'Above or below?'

'Right. If I come in ten seconds over my best time, and you're nine over, you win.'

'Assuming I'd take this bet, what's your personal best for five thousand? Mine is…twenty-two minutes.'

'You're such a liar. I was here the day you did sub-twenty-one and threw up on your shoes.'

'OK, twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds for my mark. But don't forget I've seen you do five thousand in eighteen.'

'You're on.'

Tess set the distance on the erg and strapped her feet into the blocks. Despite her height she had to stretch to reach the wooden pull bar, worn smooth by rowers' rough hands. The bar was attached to a chain, the chain connected to a large flywheel. She slid the bicycle-like seat to the top of the metal shaft, knees bent, her right arm between her legs, her left arm outside, head down. At Rock's signal she pulled the bar into her rib cage, sliding back, then up, and the meters started clicking by on the odometer. But as fast as the meters went by, the seconds flew faster.

The erg, unlike most exercise machines, measured how hard one worked, precisely the reason Tess loathed it. Unlike a stair-climber, on which she could lock her arms and spare her legs, or a stationary bike on which she could ease up for a few miles, the erg knew if she was trying. Pull hard and efficiently, and the meters mounted up. A fast stroke rate-the number of pulls per minute-wouldn't fool the machine, not if there was no power behind the strokes.

The digital readout said her stroke rate was twenty-five per minute, her five hundred-meter time just over 2:10. Tess closed her eyes and settled in this groove, simulating a head race, powering on and off, barely aware of Rock at her side, locked in his own fantasy race. She was on the Chester River now, eyes fixed on the bony