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“Have fun, honey,” she called to him.
He turned back to kiss her, which seemed to infuriate Rainer, so Tess prolonged it.
Once they were gone, she had a bad moment, wondering if Crow would contradict her account, tell Rainer about her would-be client. But Crow was careful with her confidences. He would never reveal to anyone, under any circumstances, that she had discussed her work with him. If anything, Crow would tell Rainer even less than she had, only in many, many more words. He would tell Rainer about growing up in Virginia, and how his real name, Edgar Allan Ran-some, was inspired by the writer. And then he might explain that his nickname was an allusion to a childhood joke he had made about “The Raven.” He would tell Rainer about his one-time band, Poe White Trash, and how he was now booking acts into the little club that Tess’s father and aunt ran out on Franklintown Road. He would ask him to come this weekend, to see the zydeco band. He would offer to comp him.
And he would be so sincere, so genuinely su
Smiling to herself, Tess curled up in the chair and stole back what little of the night was left.
Chapter 4
Tess was the first to see the delicious irony in the fact that John P. Ke
She tried the latter. Desk and head were both harder than she realized, and the noise woke the greyhound, who glanced at her reproachfully, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
She sat up, rubbing her forehead. As usual, the Greeks had a word for it: hubris. She had sat in this same spot, just seventy-two hours ago, and smirked inwardly at “Ke
Or so she thought.
Of course, Ke
She had been right about the media onslaught. She could take some comfort in that. The story was too perfectly macabre: a murder at Poe’s gravesite, two cloaked figures, a beloved Baltimore ritual colliding with the more modern Baltimore pastime of homicide. Before the sun was up on the morning of Poe’s birthday, the local media trucks were jockeying for parking spots on Fayette. The national reporters soon followed, then international ones-Poe being a big draw overseas-until the sidewalk around Westminster was a media encampment.
An enterprising Norwegian radio reporter had even tracked her down this morning. Tess suspected Rainer was playing a joke on her, giving her name to this terribly earnest, humorless man who seemed to be under the impression that she was a rabid Poe fan. He had demanded to know her hourly rate and then tried to convert it into guilders or herrings or whatever the Norwegian currency was. He had even asked to see her gun.
“I understand all American women must carry guns,” he had said. “Have you been violated many times?”
“I guess you could call it that,” Tess had replied, excusing herself, saying she had much work to do. She wished.
Her cocoa done, she poured it into a Maryland is for crabs mug, a joke gift from someone who found Tess’s allergy to shellfish hilarious, and carried it out to her desk, where Esskay waited. The dog didn’t wag her tail so much as swish it, with a metronomelike precision. The barbershop clock on the wall might say Time for a Haircut, but Esskay knew it was always time for a snack at Keyes Private Investigations, Inc. The name belonged to an ex-cop to whom Tess was technically apprenticed. He signed the incorporation papers, she sent a small check every month, and they never spoke.
It was everything she had ever dreamed of in a mentor.
Tess tossed Esskay one of the homemade biscuits, while she made do with a pumpkin chocolate-chip muffin from the Daily Grind and settled in with the morning newspaper she had neglected to read.
Competing with the national press always made the Beacon-Light nervous; its coverage of the Poe murder was at once exhaustive and exhausting. The story jumped to two inside pages, with numerous sidebars, and the metro columnist had weighed in on What It All Meant. Nothing good, as it turned out, although Tess couldn’t quite follow how this isolated homicide could be used to argue against zero tolerance policing.
For all the column inches the Blight had spewed forth, information on the victim was still sketchy. Tess inferred this meant Rainer had not yet notified next of kin, because the dead man was identified only as a twenty-eight-year-old man who had worked in “the restaurant industry.” Aka, a waiter or a cook.
The features department warmed up the oldest chestnut of all, the rundown of Poe death theories. There were now twenty-plus and counting. Tess had thought the rabies theory, advanced by a Baltimore cardiologist who had studied the medical records of a so-called Patient X, had been pretty firm, but apparently not. The theories that the cardiologist was said to have discredited-Poe’s death through alcohol or drug overdose-still held sway in the public imagination.
It’s as if we want him dying in the gutter, shivering from delirium tremens, Tess marveled. She hadn’t known Freud had theorized that early childhood trauma had killed Poe, or that impotence had been cited by yet another medical expert. How did impotence kill? She supposed a man might die of embarrassment, but only figuratively. She smiled smugly, a thirty-one-year-old in love with a twenty-five-year-old, unaware that she was once again flirting with hubris.
But her subconscious must have made the co
Trust me, Tess felt like saying, I wish I were trying to sell you long-distance service or credit-card insurance. It would be more fun.
She studied the business card he had left. John P. Ke