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“Tess-” Whitney had gotten as far as lifting her glass to her mouth, only to put it back on the table and grab Tess’s drink for a quick sip. “Hmmm. Their Cosmos are much limier than some. I like it. Anyway, at the risk of sounding bossy-”
“A risk you’d never take.”
“At the risk of sounding bossy, or as if I’m trying to run your life, what’s the point of all this? You tried to find the man who hired you because you didn’t want to give him up to an inexperienced cop. But he’s MIA, so there’s no likelihood of anyone’s finding him. Give it up, move on. You’re getting a little obsessive. I hate to take Tyner’s side in anything, but you do have to earn money. You have a house, a dog, and a boyfriend to support.”
“But the cognac, the roses-”
Like a child forced to eat a hated food, Whitney grabbed her glass, held her nose, and upended half the contents in her mouth. She made a hideous face, but she swallowed. “I’m sorry. I like martinis. I like blue cheese. But this is wrong. Did I resolve to finish every drink on the list or merely try it?”
“Just try it. So congratulations, Whitney. You’re the only person I know who has successfully lived up to the letter of her New Year’s resolutions before the end of January.”
“It’s simply a matter of knowing what’s realistic,” Whitney said, with her perpetually self-satisfied air. “You won’t catch me resolving to read some ridiculously difficult book”-Tess had been toting Ulysses around with her for the last year, as Whitney well knew-“or trying to better myself in some dreary, predictable way. Diet, exercise, yoga: how boring.”
“Is it even possible for you to be better?”
“Well, I can’t get any better at being me, that much is certain. And someone has to be me, and it might as well be me, don’t you think?”
“What I think,” Tess said, “is that a piece of blue cheese has gone straight to your brain and is blocking the passage of blood to an important artery.”
They ordered di
And this meant, she realized, that the likelihood she would be paid for her efforts was very small indeed. Poe had always been broke.
“It is fu
“Oh, yes,” Tess assured her. “Screamingly.”
Tess had a motto: Just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
It was a rule she had formed while still in the newspaper business, where she had watched other reporters rush out the door without reading clip files or even checking the address in the ADC map book. She called such manic bursts the inherent bias in favor of action, and she had learned to resist it. There was a lot to be said for sitting and thinking.
So she sat in her office the next morning, Sunday, and thought. She thought, looking at her roses, which she had propped up in a jelly jar, and occasionally uncapping the Martell’s for a quick sniff. It was head-clearing, reminiscent of the long-ago nights she had worked elections in the classified section and, in the service of scientific inquiry, opened the glue pot on the clerk’s desk between phone calls.
Mind and nostrils now open, she enumerated all the things she didn’t know.
She did not know who left her the flowers and the cognac. Common sense dictated this was a bad thing, and she should be fearful. Right now, however, with a bright sun working around the edges of the Venetian blinds and church bells ringing in the distance, she simply could not work herself into feeling scared or threatened. In fact, the flowers cheered her enormously. They were good roses, not the cheap kind that would die quickly. The gift felt like a tribute. Then again, so did the Trojan horse at first, didn’t it?
More items for her list: She did not know who the Pig Man was, although she knew he was a liar. She wondered if he had left the flowers and the cognac. She hoped not.
Meanwhile, there were things she did not know but could learn painlessly, things about Poe. She had made a head start there, dipping in and out of the books she had purchased, learning a little more of his work, about which she was woefully ignorant, and his life, about which she knew even less. Poe himself was the source of much of the misinformation, weaving fanciful tales about his biography while alive and then entrusting his legacy to a man named Rufus Griswold, who proved to be a more unreliable narrator than anyone Poe had ever created. It was, noted the biography by A. H. Qui
Finally, Tess was learning much about another dead man, courtesy of the Beacon-Light. The victim had been identified, and the newspaper continued to go whole hog on the story-throwing bodies at it, in the parlance of the newsroom.
The vic’s name was Bobby Hilliard, and he would have been twenty-nine if he had managed to live another two months. He had worked at the kind of restaurants that Tess patronized only in her palmist days, one-name establishments that sounded like places she could barely afford to vacation: Hampton’s, Charleston’s, Sava
The newspaper had managed to procure a photograph of the dead man. Tess studied this. She knew the routine, knew how reporters talked parents and friends into giving up a cherished photo, how they promised to take good care of it, to send it back by registered mail. She knew how easily they broke such promises, how the photos ended up, bent and creased, wedged in a desk drawer. This photo appeared to be a cheap snapshot, and she could swear Bobby Hilliard looked irritated at being caught on film. His face and eyes were narrow, and he was terribly pale, or the photograph was simply overlit. He had a drink in his hand and wore a white dress shirt, bow tie askew. He could have been at a wedding, but Tess thought it was more likely he was grabbing a drink after his shift had ended.
Why does a man with a college degree end up waiting tables? Probably because it paid better than library work, and the patrons who patronized you at least washed first. Still, Bobby Hilliard had seemed peripatetic even by the standards of this nomadic class, changing jobs every three months or so.
Why had he been at Poe’s grave? The Beacon-Light, lacking explanations, offered up Poe-ish quotations about loneliness and solitude and midnights dreary. Former co-workers weighed in with the usual noninformation: “quiet guy,” “kept to himself,” “dependable.” Just once, Tess would like to read a story where someone said, “He was a jerk, and we’re not the least bit surprised someone finally offed him.” She was begi