Baltimore Blues

myself in here, I can't remember what I hoped to gain. I can't bear to practice law, in any form, yet I can't leave here. So I come in each day and draw my percentage as a partner and I count paper clips and I make bets with myself about the seagulls I see outside the window. I can't wait for spring. I wish there were more day games at Camden Yards. With the radio on and a pair of good binoculars, it's better than a sky box.'

The writer-Abramowitz, it must be Abramowitz-had then written in the words to 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game.' This was followed by several lines of poetry, many of which meant nothing to her. But she recognized Milton toward the end: 'When I consider how my light is spent.' This line was repeated for three pages, until it changed subtly: 'When I consider how my life was spent.' And then, for two more pages, increasing in type size as if he were screaming: 'My life!' 'My life!' 'MY LIFE!'

It was like a little boy writing on the blackboard after school, but this little boy had devised his own punishment. It was like Finnegans Wake, if Joyce had been a pudgy Baltimore lawyer without much feel for language. It was like a frog dissecting himself. Fascinated, she continued to work her way through the dense, difficult prose.

He wrote about Northwest Baltimore in the 1950s, going to synagogue in the old Park Heights neighborhood, where many of his mother's people still lived. His family apparently was Orthodox, and he was obsessed with trayf.

'I am nine,' he wrote. 'I must eat something nonkosher. I have thought about my betrayal at great length. My sin must be a large sin. I walk miles, so I am far from the neighborhood, so I am somewhere no one I know has ever been. Or so I think. I order a cheeseburger and a milk shake. It is amazing how much significance I place on these two foods. I am certain that the world will change when I take a bite from that cheeseburger. And I'm right. I still remember that first bite, juice coming out of the burger like venom, cheese running down its side. I have high expectations for sin, and all of them are met. Sin is wonderful. I will be drawn to it all my life.'

The Proust of Park Heights, she thought. What an odd little guy. Then, just as the narrative seemed to be leading somewhere, he spent ten pages writing the Bill of Rights over and over again, italicizing different words in each version. Was he having a nervous breakdown, or just trying to fill his days, days that were mysteriously empty? A little of both, she suspected.

The Bill of Rights gave way to a discussion of the death penalty, filled with legal cites. Now he appeared to be working on a brief, aimed at releasing everyone from Maryland 's Death Row. But the legal argument gave way abruptly.

'Because I didn't want to face the difficult decisions posed by my personal life, I chose a professional life. Now that I've lost my professional life, I have no personal life to go back to. After being asexual for much of my life, how do I start being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two? I don't have a clue.'

Homosexual? Tess did a double-take, reading the sentence again. Michael Abramowitz was gay. No, he must be bisexual; he had made a pass at Ava, after all. The circumstances of their affair may have been in doubt, but she had seen them together, and Abramowitz had admitted the relationship to Rock.

Or had he? She went to her desk, where she kept copies of the transcripts she had prepared for Tyner. What had Rock said?

'And he said, ‘But she really is beautiful.' So I hit him.' Rock had treated this as a confession, much as Mr. Macauley had assumed Abramowitz was a smart ass when he agreed someone should kill him. Macauley had tried to pummel Abramowitz, and Abramowitz had held him in his arms and protected him from arrest. Rock and Macauley had expected a villain, and so they found one. But what if Abramowitz had been sincere? Then, 'But she really is beautiful' became a compliment from someone trying to be polite. And 'Maybe you're right,' the rejoinder to Macauley's assertion that someone should kill Abramowitz, was simple agreement.

She scrolled through the memoirs, looking for some other reference to his personal life. She was barely fifty pages into the 1,000-plus pages and Abramowitz had returned to his brief, slogging his way through case law again. Then she found these words.

'Burned all your bridges. I know the term, of course, but I always saw it as linear. You burned a bridge and moved on. There was always another road ahead, a place to go. I burned a bridge at the public defender's office, got out. I burned another bridge, came here. Now I see I am a little island and I have burned every bridge that led to me. I am alone now, isolated, and no one can help me. I put myself above the law and, by doing so, lost it. I have nothing now but time.'

'Wrong again, Abramowitz,' Tess said to her computer screen. 'You didn't even have that. C'mon, give me a clue. Who wanted you dead?'

She instructed the computer to search for Macauley's name. Nothing. What about O'Neal? The computer came up empty again. Ava? No, no names were mentioned. A lawyer to the end, Abramowitz had violated no one's confidentiality but his own.

'How do I start being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two?' Good question. She knew one person who could help her answer it.

Chapter 24

The next evening, when Ava Hill opened her door at Eden 's Landing, Tess could see immediately that there had been significant changes in Ava's life, or at least her bank account, since Tess's last visit. The cheap-looking leather sofa had been replaced with a longer, better-made version, this time in a rich shade of dark green. The same color snaked through the navy rug, brushed the legs of a low coffee table, then disappeared only to reappear at the throat of a vase on the glass-topped table. Even Ava's new briefcase, resting on an antique hall tree in the foyer, was the exact shade of dark green. Tess remembered this, the Coach bag Ava had stroked so lovingly before hurrying to the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel and Michael Abramowitz. It was a new decorating trend, Tess supposed, using an expensive handbag as a theme for an entire room.

'Your circumstances seemed to have changed,' Tess told Ava, whose dress, a burgundy coatdress, provided the perfect contrast against the sofa. Tess was seated in the old director's chair, the one from the terrace, with the torn orange cover. Apparently the apartment was a work in progress, with some improvements left to be made. Tess would have liked to urge some restraint. From her perch she could see the once-empty dining room. Now the room was too full, overwhelmed by a glass-topped table and six sleek chairs of blond wood, upholstered with peach damask. Expensive, but impractical to Tess's eye. The seats would be destroyed by one stray buttered pea, or a sesame noodle slipping from its chopstick.

'Yes. I came into some money.'

'An inheritance from a dead relative?'

'No, no such luck.' She smiled at the expression on Tess's face. 'Oh, lighten up. I'm only trying to live down to your expectations of me. I assume, from your urgent phone call this morning, you have more accusations to hurl at me. You've always thought the worst of me. I'd hate to start disappointing you now.'

'I was wrong, wasn't I?'

Ava looked at her suspiciously, not persuaded by Tess's conciliatory tone. 'Wrong about what? It's such a long list. As I recall you accused me of having an affair with my boss, then of setting up my fiance to kill my boss. You even suggested I'd killed my boss. Is that everything?'

'Until now. I do have a couple of new ones, though.'

'This should be fun.' Ava cradled a glass of wine the color of her dress, warming the globe with her cupped palms. She had not offered Tess any. Her circumstances had improved, but not her manners.

Tess took a deep breath, trying to remember everything she must say, how to say it, the order in which it had to be said. She would have liked to use notes, but Kitty had thought it would make her look tentative and unsure of herself, and Officer Friendly had agreed.

After mulling over the one real revelation in Abramowitz's diary, Tess had dragged the happy couple from bed the night before, almost literally, and begged for their help. Seated around the kitchen table, each with a legal pad, they had tried to fit together the pieces. Thaddeus wrote down what was known, irrefutable, absolute.