In A Strange City

With her gun in her left hand, Tess pulled on the heel of the woman’s Chuck Taylor high-top. She fell forward and Tess climbed onto her back, straddling her higher this time, so the woman’s arms were pi

“Who are you?”

The woman’s only response was a series of short, hard breaths. Tess surrendered her grip on the hair and patted her captive, somewhat inexpertly. She determined there was a gun stuck in the woman’s waistband, but couldn’t figure out how to reach under the coat without relinquishing her position. There was a billfold in the trench-coat pocket, which she could reach. She pulled it out and squinted at it in the dim light.

“Gretchen O’Brien,” she said out loud, looking at the driver’s license. There were other cards, other squares of plastic, and in a moment of inspiration Tess turned the billfold upside down and let them scatter, then threw the billfold into a corner of the room. It was harder to run when your identity was strewn across the floor.

“That your name?” she asked the back of the woman’s head as she yanked up her coat and grabbed her gun, which she tucked under her armpit. “Gretchen O’Brien?”

“You think I carry a forged Maryland driver’s license?”

“You break into people’s offices. How should I know where you draw the line?”

“Like you never broke into some place.” The woman’s voice was sneering, uncowed. Tess had to admire her attitude.

“I’ve never picked a lock,” Tess said virtuously. She preferred her glass cutter.

“Never trespassed? Never misrepresented yourself? Never used a fake business card? Never lied?”

The questions were disconcertingly knowing, as if Tess were arguing with her own conscience. She glanced at the cards strewn around her captive’s body. A Blockbuster Video card, a Visa, a Discover, a Super-Fresh savings card, all with Gretchen O’Brien’s name on them, some business cards. Soon enough, she glimpsed a less common typeface, a card identifying Gretchen O’Brien as a licensed private detective in the state of Maryland.

Tess rose and walked to the door, where she turned the key in the deadlock and pocketed it. Gretchen O’Brien would have to resign herself to being her guest for just a little longer. She turned on the light and settled in her desk chair, where she removed the cartridge from Gretchen’s 9 mm. She then picked up her.38, motioning at Gretchen to-well, do what exactly? Gretchen pulled herself up to hands and knees, then arranged herself in a half-lotus position and glared at Tess.

“The only thing you had going for you,” Gretchen O’Brien said, “was the element of surprise. You did everything wrong.”

“Everything?”

“I mean, you’re obviously not trained. There’s a reason”-Gretchen’s breath was still a little ragged, but not so ragged as to disguise the contempt in her voice-“there’s a reason the state requires people who haven’t been cops to go through a lengthy apprenticeship. Not that people like you don’t get around the law all the time. You think anyone really believes Al Keyes has anything to do with your operation here? Everyone knows he lives down the ocean in a trailer since he retired from the force, spends his days fishing.”

What could Tess say to that? It was true. “So you were a cop?”

“Yeah. I was a cop. But I figured out the free market would pay me more for my skills than the city ever would, and it’s a helluva lot safer. I’ve been doing this for almost five years now. Doing it better than you, too, judging by your setup here.”

“Is that why you broke in? To compare furnishings, exchange information about earnings?”

Gretchen O’Brien was smoothing her hair, pulling it back into a loose ponytail. She appeared to be a little older than Tess, or else her life had left more marks. Her skin tone was uneven and splotchy, her blue-green eyes had dark bags beneath them, and a sharp line on the inside of her right eyebrow seemed to have been burned in by her semipermanent scowl. But she was tall and well-proportioned, and Tess knew from patting her that her muscle tone was better than average. She probably looked pretty good when she hadn’t been on the losing side of a fight.

“So, you going to call the cops?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m going to have to, if you don’t tell me why you’re here.”

“Fine. They’ll charge me with burglary. I’ll say it was an honest mistake, that a client had told me this was a vacant property where he thought his soon-to-be-ex was warehousing some property.”

“Not a very good story,” judged Tess, who was vain about her ability to lie quickly and creatively.

“Good enough. Anyway, then I’ll charge you with assault, and by the time they get it all straightened out, we’ll both be out a couple of thousand in lawyer fees, but you still won’t have any answers.”

Tess got up and walked around the floor, toeing the flotsam and jetsam of Gretchen’s wallet. “Well, here’s one answer,” she said, bending down to pick up one of the scattered business cards, which identified one John P. Ke

Gretchen sat mum as a surly child.

“I mean John Pendleton Ke

“Or maybe I’m better at surveillance than some self-taught amateur.”

“So you did take the case.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Actually, you sort of did. Where were you?”

A glare was her only answer. Tess imagined the dark street in her mind, saw the various clumps of spectators converge on the grave site. Yes, Rainer had said there were some witnesses who cut out, unwilling to give statements. She had a hunch that Gretchen wasn’t one of them.

“You took the job, but you weren’t there. What did you do-fall asleep, forget to set your alarm?”

“I went earlier in the day to check out the scene, figure out where the exits and entrances were. It’s a fairly common practice-not that I would expect you to know such things.”

“So you weren’t late, you were merely too early. Why didn’t you come back?”

Gretchen stared at the rubber toes of her Chuck Taylors. Tess wore Jack Purcells, which she considered vastly superior, an old Baltimore prejudice she had absorbed without questioning.

“It was the monument,” Gretchen said at last, with the air of someone who needed to confess, or at least justify herself. “The one out front, the place where they moved his body. It threw me off.”

“You were watching the wrong spot in the graveyard?”

“No. It said the wrong day. His own monument says he was born January 20. I figured-” Her mouth had started to form a sound, some soft and open vowel, but she caught herself. “I figured the client made a mistake. I mean, it was literally carved in stone, you know? I thought I was supposed to be there the night of the nineteenth, and he would come early in the morning of the twentieth. How was I supposed to know it was wrong? I’m a Pigtown girl. I was lucky to get through the general course at Southwestern High School and a few semesters at Catonsville Community College.”

Tess smiled at Gretchen’s clumsy attempt to play the class card with her. Her own father had gone to work for the city straight out of Patterson Park High School, and her mother had dropped out of College Park in order to marry him.

“Does your client-I’m sorry, what was his name again?”

Gretchen allowed herself a short snort of a laugh. “Does that work for you? I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked on you.”

“No harm in trying. You almost said his name but caught yourself. Anyway, does our fat friend know you screwed up? Did you break in hoping to find out what I know, because I was there, and to use my work to cover up the deficiencies in yours? Or is there something your client fears I have and wants to retrieve?”