Baltimore Blues

The last name was pronounced not like the chain of preppy clothing stores but like the Eastern Shore county where Whitney's family summered. 'Tall, but.' Tess had been struck by Whitney's drawling rendition of her name when they met freshman year in college. 'Whitney Tall-but,' she said, squeezing Tess's hand quite hard, as if to measure her strength. Tess squeezed back, staring skeptically at this fabulous creature-straight blond hair, narrow green eyes, long bones, and a jaw so sharp she could have cut cheese with it. I can like this woman or hate her, Tess told herself, but I'll never be indifferent to her. She decided to like her. It was a decision she seldom regretted.

Still, they could never stop competing. Whitney was the best rower, Tess the strongest. Whitney was rich and thin, Tess wild and impulsive. In the classroom they fought for top honors and dreamed of the Sophie Kerr prize, a no-strings endowment granted to the school's best writer. Whitney took herself out of the running, transferring to Yale to major in Japanese. Tess lost the Kerr prize to a quiet, long-haired young man she had never noticed.

Maybe I chose wrong that day, Tess thought as she waited for Whitney in the Tate's fusty dining room. Maybe I should hate her after all.

'If I ever pay for lunch, can we go someplace decent?' Tess asked when Whitney finally arrived. 'You Wasps have the worst taste buds in the world.'

'This is the perfect comfort food. Iceberg lettuce with bottled thousand island dressing. Macaroni and cheese. Go up the street'-Whitney pointed with her cameo-perfect chin to the nearby Tuscany Grille, currently Baltimore 's trendiest restaurant-'and it's food miscegenation. Pistachios and mint jelly. Fajitas with leeks. Goat cheese and peanut butter. Give me a break.'

'Miscegenation,' Tess mused. 'That's not a word you hear much these days.'

'Keep reading the Beacon-Light. I think they're going to ask me to write an editorial against it next week.' She took a sip of iced tea-presweetened, and overly so-and sighed as if it were pure nectar. The old women in the dining room gazed approvingly at the young woman with her blond hair twisted into a soft chignon, her elegant frame encased in a sea green knit dress from Jones amp; Jones. Whitney's taste was everywhere but in her mouth, Tess marveled, although she did have a nose for fine whiskey. Even in college she had preferred good Scotch, and she had been almost tiresome in her quest for the Eastern Shore 's best martini.

Without a trace of self-consciousness, Whitney rapped a spoon against the glass, as if calling a meeting to order. After all, she came from a long line of garden club presidents. The North Side Chapter of the Washington College Alumnae Fund was now convened. Any old business? No. Any new business? Yes, ruthless prying.

'So, what's up with your new career, whatever it is. Private investigator? Paralegal? And working on one of the hottest cases in town. Tell all.'

This was Whitney's style, straight up the middle, but Tess had eleven years of experience deflecting Whitney's frontal assaults. 'Are you asking me as a friend or as a Beacon-Light employee? Either way I can't tell you much. I'm working for his lawyer. Everything I know is confidential.'

'Fair enough. What about the rumor that you caused it all, telling your friend Rock that his girlfriend was cheating on him?'

Her casually inaccurate version of events stung. Obviously Whitney had done more than just eavesdrop on Jonathan's conversation with an editor.

'You know, this is the second time in two days a Beacon-Light employee has tried to chat me up on this. Don't you have any other ways of getting information?'

'‘Chat you up.' That's an interesting term for Jonathan's method of information gathering. Did you do a lot of ‘chatting' last night?'

Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney's mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil's advocate? Whitney could have been the devil's mentor.

'Stop milking me,' Tess said. 'I told you I can't talk about the case, and I can't.'

'Oh, Tesser-' Whitney was truly contrite. 'I didn't come here to milk you. In fact I'm going to feed you. I just thought I could have some fun first. When did you get so damn prickly?'

She took a manila folder out of her briefcase and dropped it on the table with a heavy plop. Photocopies and clippings about Michael Abramowitz spilled out. Computer printouts of recent news stories, photographs, a resume, biographical information. Only the Beacon-Light's library, off-limits to civilians such as Tess, could have provided this treasure trove.

'I glanced at the stuff after one of the librarians pulled all the material for me,' Whitney said. 'Nothing jumped out, although he was quite the controversial little public defender before he went into business for himself. Recently he's been in chin-and-grin mode, trotting around town in a rented tux.'

Tess extracted a glossy black-and-white of Abramowitz from last year's Black-Eyed Susan Ball. He stared dutifully at the camera, drink in hand, his narrow shoulders lost inside his tuxedo. She didn't need Whitney's eye to see it was a rental, and a particularly ill fitting one at that. Thin women in ugly dresses, the kind that cost more than pretty ones, stood on either side of him, faces forward but bodies angled away, as if embarrassed to be seen with the once notorious lawyer.

'Interesting-but I'm not sure what to do with all this. Tyner has defined my role in the case pretty narrowly.'

'Balls.' Whitney's voice was only a shade below a hoarse cry. Luckily most of the women who lunched at the Tate were too vain to wear hearing aids, so they continued to steal fond looks at the elegant young woman. Why can't our granddaughters be so ladylike? they asked one another. 'OK, I confess: Jonathan told me you were working for Tyner. Interviewing security guards and custodians- too boring. You need to start tracking down anyone who's ever held a grudge against Abramowitz. It shouldn't be hard. He was a world-class shit who defended scum. Then he was a world-class shit who helped scum sue scum. He ended up defending an asbestos company, scum par excellence. There should be no shortage of people who loathed him.'

'Yes, but Tyner said-'

'Tyner said. Since when do you give a fuck what anyone tells you to do? When did you become this cautious little mouse, waiting for permission all the time, terrified to take the initiative on something?'

Direct hit.

'I became a cautious little mouse, to use your perfect phrase, at precisely the same moment I realized my last fling with initiative may have inspired one of my dearest friends to kill someone. You see, the grapevine has it more or less right, Whitney. I got Rock's fiancee to confess to him she was sleeping with her boss. I thought he would break up with her, not break the guy's neck.'

'Do you think he did it?'

'He says he didn't, and he's not a liar. But if he had been angry enough…' Tess didn't want to finish her own thought.

'I remember him from some of the races.' Whitney hadn't kept up with her own rowing, but she still attended the big events. 'He struck me as one of those guys so immense and strong he has to be gentle, or else he'd destroy everything in his path.'

'Like Lennie in Of Mice and Men.'

'Exactly.'

'There's only one problem with that comparison, Whitney. Lennie had a bad habit of breaking people's necks by accident.'

Back home, Tess changed into a T-shirt and shorts and turned on her stereo. Although she had a CD player, she owned almost no compact discs-she had signed on to the technology revolution about a month before the Star folded. By financial necessity she listened primarily to the albums and tapes of her college days. Alternative stations kept her current with new music, but she found herself more interested in old music: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Rodgers and Hart. All the standards, except Irving Berlin. She had been forced to play the Statue of Liberty in eighth grade and never quite gotten over 'Give me your tired…' And one of the immigrants had pinched her ass.