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“Huh. Perhaps you know a different kind of rich people. The ones I’ve come in contact with are not only unforgiving but demanding. There was a small private museum up in Philadelphia that lost its endowment after it was revealed a rare piece of jewelry had been stolen. Everyone who had pledged money broke their pledges, and the museum never got off the ground.”
“All because of a single theft?”
“A single theft worth an estimated five hundred thousand dollars. Anyway, it was the library board’s decision to keep the Bobby incident quiet. It’s not as if the library could file an insurance claim or replace what was taken. They were one-of-a-kind items.”
“Such as?”
His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose again. Again, he pushed them up with his thumb. “An early map book of Maryland from the 1700s. A journal kept by one of the Calverts. A copy of the Saturday Visiter with Poe’s ”MS in a Bottle‘-you know, the story he won the prize for, right here in Baltimore. Some letters by Dunbar. That’s what I remember hearing about. I was never convinced Bobby took them, to tell you the truth. Except maybe the map book. Bobby liked…pretty things. Given the choice between something truly rare and something merely beautiful, Bobby would choose beauty. He cared about appearances. That’s why he took the pillbox. It was pretty.“
The bartender put down plates of food in front of them-a wild mushroom risotto for Tess, straccetti for Daniel-and replenished their glasses. Daniel began to eat quickly as if famished.
“I forgot to pack a lunch today” he said, reddening in embarrassment when he caught Tess watching him plow through his food. But Tess felt nothing but admiration and kinship for his appetite. “And I can’t work up much enthusiasm for the hot-dog stand outside the Pratt.”
“Really? I love them.” About every three months, Tess had intense cravings for the grayish tubes found at the handful of portable carts on the city’s corners. The lack of street food was one of her only complaints about Baltimore.
“So the last time you saw Bobby Hilliard-” she began.
“It has to have been at least a year.”
“You said not five minutes ago that it was six months ago.”
“I did?” Daniel looked panicky, as if she had set out to trap him, but the mix-up only convinced Tess of his sincerity. Average people contradict themselves endlessly. It is liars who seldom slip up, whose stories fit together too smoothly. “Actually it was last April-I remember it was cold and rainy, a typical Baltimore April-so I guess I was wrong on both counts. I ran into him in a bar, after going to see those very early paintings by Herman Maril. Do you know his work?”
Tess did, if only because Crow had taught her to love the late local artist, who used color with such tender precision.
“His early stuff is very different from the more famous pieces at the Baltimore Museum of Art. You can see the artist he’s going to become, but he’s borrowing from the Impressionists, still trying to find his… I want to say voice, but I guess that’s a mixed metaphor. I don’t know much about art, but I do like First Thursdays.”
First Thursdays was a moniker the city had hung on a night dedicated to museum openings and gallery exhibits. It was one-third art appreciation, one-third singles gathering, one-third pub crawl. Tess wondered which third was the biggest draw for Daniel. He had almost finished his second Moretti, downing it like Gatorade.
“What bar did you see Bobby Hilliard in?” Tess asked.
Her question could not have been more i
“Okay.”
She had caught his emphasis. The Midtown Yacht Club was a manly place, where people drank beer, played darts, watched ESPN, and threw their peanut shells on the floor. She supposed this was Daniel’s un-subtle way of telling her that he and Bobby had shared a profession once but nothing more.
“So he told you he was making good money, waiting tables at his current overpriced-restaurant job- what else?”
Daniel shook his shaggy head. “It wasn’t a long conversation. Truthfully, I had the feeling he wasn’t comfortable, ru
“Alone?”
Daniel’s face lit up with another fit of blushing. “With a guy. Some older guy.”
“Someone you could identify if you saw him again?”
“I doubt it-hey, why are you so interested in this, anyway? You’re not a cop. What’s in it for you? Is it because you were there? Are you a suspect?”
Fu
“I have a client,” she said, thinking of her anonymous-note leaver. He had sent her to the Poe Room, and look what she had found: Bobby Hilliard’s secret past. Then again, the cops knew too, had already been there. Was there something else she was expected to find, something Rainer wouldn’t deem significant? “I’m trying to figure out why Bobby was there, why he went through the whole charade-and why someone wanted to kill him.”
“Maybe no one did.”
“Excuse me?”
His glasses had slid down his nose yet again and were slightly fogged from the steam of his pasta. Daniel took them off and wiped them with the shirttail. Since she had seen him at midmorning, he had made real progress-his shirttail was now hanging out front and back.
“I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to do your job, but why assume someone was trying to kill Bobby? Maybe it was the other guy they wanted, and they got confused. Dark night, two men in capes-anything could happen. I wonder how Poe would write it?”
“What a librarianish thing to say.”
Daniel put his glasses back on, nodded his head in a formal little bow. “I consider that a compliment.”
“I intended it as one.”
After di
She wondered how Poe would feel about the Baltimore of today. It was a brighter place since the invention of electric lights, with the dangers of his day eradicated, although new ones had taken their place. It was hard to imagine a cholera epidemic, for example, such as the one that swept the city in 1831 and was said to have inspired “The Masque of the Red Death.” Then again, could even Poe’s imagination have anticipated a city where one out of twelve adults was a drug addict? Baltimore also had the wonderful distinction of leading the nation in syphilis infection rates. Al Capone had been ahead of his time in more ways than one.
What had Poe’s Baltimore looked like? So little of it remained, thanks to two scourges, the great fire of 1904 and the mid-twentieth century’s obsession with progress, which had razed so many important buildings before preservationists began to win their battles. Even now, the hospital where Poe had died was at threat for demolition. Soon, the only remnants of Poe would be his grave and the house where he had lived on Amity, ever so briefly. There also was the Poe statue outside the University of Baltimore and some historic markers here and there.
Here and there. And here. Right here. Around the corner from the library. To think she would see it on Mulberry Street, where her anonymous adviser had recommended she park. The Poe Room was a good place to start, but perhaps it wasn’t meant to be her final destination. Tess dashed across Mulberry to the block of town houses on the other side. Daniel followed-at the corner, once the light had changed.