Baltimore Blues

Tess couldn't understand all the people. A car alarm was a common sound in Fells Point, especially on a Sunday morning, when the last drunks brushed against the parked cars on their way home.

Then Kitty was there, her silk robe barely covering her, shouting in Tess's face. It was only when she heard Kitty's voice that she realized the alarm's piercing drone had been drowned out by her own voice, shrill and keening. She had never heard herself scream before, so she stopped to listen. Then there was nothing to hear, a fact she found hilarious. Tess began laughing as Kitty held her in her arms and rocked her like a baby.

'I shut up to hear myself! I stopped screaming so I could hear myself scream!' She laughed at her own idiocy, then cried. Finally she ran out of noises to make, appropriate and otherwise. She listened for ambulance sirens, but the morning was still new. The car alarm had been shut off. Tess saw a man, probably the BMW's owner, bend over Jonathan and shake his head. Now she knew why there were no sirens, why everyone was moving so slowly, as if there was no reason to rush. There was nothing anyone could do.

Chapter 22

'No one murders reporters.'

Tess sat at the big pine table in Kitty's kitchen, surrounded by what looked to be the most unorthodox of families. Kitty, in a slip dress that covered less than most negligees, was Mom. Dad would have to be Thaddeus. Torn between the immodesty of appearing in his bathrobe, or the indiscretion of wearing his bicycle patrol uniform, he had chosen the latter. Rounding out the group was Gramps-Tyner, in a pale rose polo and matching sweats, cantankerous as always. At the emergency room Kitty had called him after Tess begged her not to call her parents. Now Tess almost regretted her injunction. Her parents, more respectable than this crew, might have given her some much needed credibility with the two traffic detectives she faced.

'No one murders reporters,' detective number one repeated. Or was it the other one, echoing his partner's sentiments? The two men looked so alike-medium height, sallow complexions, brown hair and eyes-that Tess worried her fall had made her see double. Only their names were markedly different: Ferlinghetti and Rainer.

'Like the poets?' Kitty had asked Ferlinghetti, squinting at his ID.

'If you say so,' he had said. 'Can we talk to Miss Monaghan?'

While Tess had been in the emergency room and Jonathan in the morgue, the detectives had spent the morning interviewing neighbors, pacing off the distance between the point of impact and where Jonathan's body had landed, drawing little diagrams of the accident. The day was unseasonably warm, and both men now had half-moons of sweat under the arms of their short-sleeved dress shirts. They were hot and irritated, and their mood was not improved by Kitty's hot, bitter coffee or Tess's insistence the old cab had been lying in wait for her, for Jonathan, for both of them, for someone.

'It looks like he was killed on impact,' one of the detectives said, as if this should be cheering news. Tess kept replaying the scene: Jonathan running toward open ground, trying to take refuge behind the parked cars on the other side of the street, the car bearing down on him, his graceless flight. He may have died instantly, but he had a lifetime to think about it. If she knew Jonathan he was composing his own obit just before the car caught up to him.

'It looked intentional,' she ventured. Each time they asked her, she became a little less sure.

'What do reporters know?' Ferlinghetti asked, for once desiring no answer. 'What can reporters do? They're just typewriters. You don't throw a typewriter out the window when it gives you bad news. You don't kick the floor because the roof leaks on it. You fix the roof. Am I right?'

'You're right,' Rainer assured him.

The two detectives then looked sternly at Tess, waiting for her to echo her agreement. She wanted to, wanted desperately to be cooperative, if only so they would leave her alone with her scraped palms and splitting headache. But the events of the morning kept running through her head on an endless loop she could not control, or stifle.

'That car was aiming for us,' she insisted.

'Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it couldn't have been on purpose. I'm saying it's not a workman's comp case. Someone wanted to kill Mr. Ross, it probably had more to do with his hobbies. Does he have a wife? A girlfriend?'

Tess shook her head 'no' to the first question, nodded miserably to the second.

'Maybe someone had the wrong idea.' Ferlinghetti took a sip of Kitty's coffee and winced. 'Maybe someone had the right idea.'

He was repeating himself, or repeating what his partner had said. They had already discussed most of the particulars that led up to Jonathan being with her at 6 A.M., down to the scratches she had left on his face, the bruise on his cheekbone-but not the bite on his wrist. She had recited, like an inventory, every glass of wine they had drunk the night before, every bite of Swiss chocolate eaten. She had admitted they had an off-again, on-again sexual relationship. But she insisted it was off again, at least on this night. Jonathan had dropped by to sleep off a hard night of drinking. She didn't care what the detectives thought of her, but she did want to blunt the pain for Jonathan's girlfriend. Bad enough he was dead; did he have to be a cad, too?

'His girlfriend-Daphne-didn't like to see him drunk. At least that's what he said.'

'And when you found him at your door, where were you coming from?'

'A date.' Crow would have liked hearing that.

'Your date got a name?'

Tess, realizing she had no idea what Crow's real name was, looked blankly to Kitty for help, who swiftly provided the answer: 'E. A. Ransome. He works for me. I can get his number if you want.'

'It wasn't a date date, exactly,' Tess confessed.

'What was it?' Rainer asked.

Oh, breaking and entering at the city's biggest law firm, a few drinks at a neighborhood bar. 'He's a friend. We went to a bar and talked about books we liked. He's six or seven years younger than I am, for God's sake.'

Kitty hid a smile behind her palm. Thaddeus nodded soberly, as if Tess had made an excellent point. He had long forgotten Kitty's chronological age.

'So he was a friend and Jonathan Ross was a friend. You have a lot of friends.'

Tyner raised his right hand slightly, a signal to say nothing. Tess ignored him.

'I just want you to understand this isn't about Crow being jealous of Jonathan, or his girlfriend, Daphne, being jealous of me. Jonathan and I were old friends. There was nothing for anyone to be jealous of.'

'You'd be surprised what makes people jealous. Sleeping with a woman's boyfriend, for example. A lot of women don't like that.'

'Well, if she was the one, wouldn't she have run me down? It would have solved everything.'

'Hey, women drivers.' Ferlinghetti looked at his notes. 'All I'm saying is, if you want to talk murder, don't tell me it was because Jonathan Ross was some big shot investigative reporter. Who do you think it was? An editor, the cops he covered? He wasn't that good a reporter.'

Rainer snickered at that. 'Not that good a reporter,' he repeated. Tess remembered not all police officers had loved Jonathan. While he had ingratiated himself with homicide detectives, portraying them as hero-warriors on an urban battlefield, he had ignored the more prosaic cops. Traffic investigators, for example, many of whom yearned for assignments to homicide.

'What about me, then?' Tess asked. 'Is it possible someone was trying to kill me, and Jonathan got in the way? Someone other than Daphne?'

'You piss a lot of people off as a bookstore clerk? What do you do-shortchange people? Refuse to gift wrap?'

She looked at Tyner, who again raised two fingers on his right hand, waggling them slightly. Don't tell them anything they don't know. Classic defense attorney, she thought. She yearned to brag to these unimpressed, smug detectives, and to Tyner as well. To tell them about her one-woman investigation into