Baltimore Blues

He was standing now, his voice a hoarse scream, spit flying at her. Tess stood up, too, glad to see she was at least five inches taller.

'I'm going to call for Mr. Lardner now. I want you to stay on your side of the table.'

It was eerie how quickly Fauquier calmed down. He wasn't scared of the prison official, Tess realized, or of her. He wanted to be in control. The 'model prisoner' probably tried to hide his rage as much as possible. By the time Lardner arrived he looked angelic.

'Did you have a nice visit?' he asked Tess and Fauquier.

'We sure did,' Fauquier said, beaming. 'She's pretty, don't you think, Mr. Lardner? I'd sure like to take her out on a date.'

The official nodded as if this seemed reasonable.

'I'm not exactly your type,' Tess said. 'And not just because I'm a woman. You see, Mr. Fauquier, I don't think you could be attracted to anyone you couldn't kill or hurt. And unlike your little boys, I could definitely kick your ass. You are one twisted fucker.'

Fauquier glowered. Garfield Lardner stood openmouthed, shocked that the granddaughter of Ed Monahan, the seafood king, would be so crude.

Chapter 27

Home again, Tess tried to think like a newspaper editor, like Jonathan's boss. She sat in front of her computer and transformed herself into someone pedantic and nit-picking, someone who could lecture for hours on 'infer' and 'imply,' unaware a five-alarm fire burned across the street.

What hoops would an editor have asked Jonathan to jump through in order to get his story in the paper? First of all he would have had to figure out, without Fauquier, which was the wrong confession. There could be any number of ways to do that. Interviews with homicide detectives from the time. Examining the police reports and court papers.

But that wouldn't be enough. With Abramowitz dead and Fauquier condemned to die, about as disreputable as a source could be, Jonathan needed to find the money, where it came from, and where it went. Like a bird building its nest, he would have ferreted out every available material. Twig, string, paper. Mainly paper.

Follow the money, Deep Throat had whispered in a Washington parking garage. Or had he? It didn't matter. Journalists of Jonathan's generation and ambition had been intoning those instructions ever since, their professional mantra. Follow the money. Michael Abramowitz had left an estate of almost one million dollars. That was one place to start. But a shortcut through Jonathan's brain would be nice. His brain being unavailable, Tess would have to settle for the next best thing.

Tess reached for the phone and called Whitney at her office.

'Have they cleaned out Jonathan's desk yet?'

'Not yet, but I'm sure they will soon. They don't have enough desks around here for prolonged periods of mourning. And Jonathan's desk was by a window, so a lot of people want it.'

'What about his computer files? Are they still in the system?'

'Hmmmm-actually, the head computer geek is at some conference learning how to make the system even more complicated and cumbersome to use, so he hasn't been here to reclaim all that storage space for his precious mainframe. But you couldn't get in without Jonathan's password, and only the geek would know that.'

'I'd never get permission to go into the Blight's computer, anyway. Even if Tyner went to court, the paper would have to claim it's privileged, on principle. And if the judge decided in Rock's favor, the computer geek would ‘accidentally' kill everything.'

Whitney laughed. 'You have it all figured out, don't you? I bet you even have an alternative plan.'

'I will, after you explain the Blight's computer system to me. But Whitney-I want to do this tonight.'

Several hours later Tess and Whitney set out from Fells Point in Whitney's Jeep Cherokee. Like Crow, Whitney seemed to find this a great adventure, but she was better dressed, in black leggings and an open-weave black sweater over a white T-shirt. She had accessorized with clunky black boots with white socks, and gold earrings set with onyx and seed pearls.

'No white gloves?' Tess asked facetiously, only to have Whitney thrust a pair at her, probably left over from dancing school.

'I can afford to leave fingerprints in the building. You can't, my dear.'

'White gloves with blue jeans after September first? OK, but I think this is a major fashion faux pas.'

Technically an all-day newspaper, the Beacon-Light liked to boast it had reporters on duty twenty-four hours. From midnight until 4 A.M., however, the staff consisted of a solitary police reporter. Young and scared, he sat by a scanner, petrified he might have to leave the building. He seldom did, but Tess and Whitney could avoid him altogether just by using the back stairs. The electronic traps were a little harder to elude.

First they had to get in the building without leaving any trace. Whitney had a key card, which unlocked the doors along the way, but she didn't want the security system to have a record of her entering at 1 A.M., a record that could come back to haunt her if someone discovered the computer had been breached. Whitney had solved that problem easily. After Tess's call she had waited until the editorial writer in the cubicle next to hers had gone to the men's room, then she'd slipped his card out of his jacket pocket and left hers in its place.

'I'll swap back tomorrow,' she told Tess, sliding the card through the lock at the building's side entrance. 'Ted will never notice he spent twenty-four hours being 1375 instead of 926. And, if someone ever asks him what he was doing here in the middle of the night, he should be very convincing in his protestations of innocence.'

After taking the back stairs to the fourth floor, Whitney led Tess to the editorial department's writing room. The editorial writers had their own cubicles, but they were forced to use a communal room when it was time to put their punditry on the computer screen.

'They thought we needed to develop camaraderie,' Whitney said. 'Instead all the editorial writers have developed crushes on different computers, claiming there are significant differences. They pitch fits if they can't get their favorites.'

Whitney signed on. 'I'm not using my real handle, but the all-purpose one they give the interns,' she explained. 'OK, look-reporters create stories in all-access baskets, but they can store them in confidential baskets only the system manager can access. Jonathan was more paranoid than most and always used his private basket. But there's a chance he ran out of storage space and had to depend on one of the obscure all-access baskets for backup. There are hundreds of baskets hidden in the computer no one knows about.'

She typed in 'Ross,' instructing the computer to pull up any file created by that user. It gave her only two, which Whitney quickly scanned.

'A FOIA request from last winter to the chronically corrupt housing department. Nothing odd there-we file one of those every week. And a copy of a wire story about the Chicago foundation that gives out those ‘genius' grants. It has the address, out in Chicago. I guess Jonathan was trying to figure out how to apply for one.' Whitney turned to Tess. 'End of the line. If you want to find any more, you have to get in as Jonathan.'

To log on as Jonathan, all Tess had to do was stroke the command button, type in 'Ross,' then fill in his password. The computer would give her three chances to get the password right. If she failed to guess correctly, the terminal would freeze and send a message to the internal security system, warning it someone had tried to break in, a message that would probably go ignored until late tomorrow morning when someone reviewed the tapes. No one could the Whitney to the infraction-thanks to the stolen key card and the intern user handle, it couldn't be proven she had been here-and it could escape notice, just another line in the thousands of messages recorded every day. But it would still be recorded somewhere.

'So, do you know his password?' Whitney asked Tess.

'No, but I think I know Jonathan well enough to guess. And I've got fifteen tries, right? Three per terminal.'

'Uh-uh. Too dangerous. Trying to use someone else's password is grounds for firing. One weird little incident