Charm City

This was new. "An ambulance?"

"Uh-huh. At night. It's easy to see an amb'lance at night. And, of course, Mr. Athol was alive then, and I remember we talked about it, how sad it was for a young couple to be so unhappy all the time."

At least she had solved the mystery of Bertie's gender. "Yes. Yes it is. Can you remember anything else about those fights? When the amb'lance came-" Jesus, Bertie's inflections were catching. "When the ambulance came, did they have to take Mrs. Wynkowski out on a stretcher, or did she walk out on her own? Could you tell how badly she was hurt? Was it the kind of injury that might have happened accidentally?"

Bertie closed her eyes and leaned back as if reliving a particularly vivid dream. It was very dramatic, but not particularly effective.

"I don't recall," she said, after several seconds. "All I remember is the lights. It's not like I stood there all night, peeking through the curtains."

I bet you stayed until the show was over, though. "Thank you, Mrs. Athol. We're glad to know we got your part of the story right. You were very helpful."

"So how much money do I get?"

Tess was confused. "Newspapers don't pay for information, Mrs. Athol. It's unethical."

"The other girl did. You see, at first I just remembered it being the one time the amb'lance came. She asked me if I could be wrong, if maybe it came three times instead of the oncet, or at least twice, if there was a pattern. That was the word she used, pattern. She gave me fifty dollars, and I remembered it was more like three times."

Tess felt a strange flip in her stomach, at once hopeful and unhappy. A.J. Shepard had told her this would be easy, but she couldn't believe Rosita would be this stupid. "Are you sure?"

"Course I'm sure. You think someone hands me fifty dollars, I'm go

"You want money?"

"Only twe

"I'm not authorized to do that."

"How about a discount on my subscription?"

"No, Bertie. Not even the reporters get a discount."

Bertie pushed her lower lip out in a pout, a ma

"Why do the reporters need a discount? They already know what's in the paper."

An only child, Tess had had relatively little experience with the lurid charms of tattling. Should she tell Sterling what she knew about the pay-off to Bertie Athol? Should she keep going, see if there was more damning information to be uncovered about Rosita's reporting methods? At least the leopard had changed her spots. Now she paid people up front and didn't use their names.

Sterling would want to know, she was sure of it. Checkbook journalism was so low that some of the tabloid television shows had forsaken it. But Tess was uncomfortably aware she longed to speak to Sterling for other, less self-righteous reasons. She wanted his approval, wanted him to smile at her and say, "Great work!" A crush. She was in the throes of a damn schoolgirl crush.

Well, at least Violetville was convenient to St. Agnes. She might as well check in on Spike, give her mind and hormones a chance to cool.

She was glad to see one of Durban's boxers waiting unobtrusively in the hall. At least something was going as pla

"Hi, Uncle Spike." He was so still. What had she expected-someone sleeping like a man in a cartoon, or like one of the Three Stooges, his chest rising and falling with an exaggerated movement, a faint whistling noise escaping around the various tubes. Tess thought she saw his eyelids flicker, his mouth twitch. Wishful thinking.

"What's the doctor say?"

"Nothin' to me," Tommy said sullenly, his bad mood erasing the usual question marks. It would be a while before he forgave Tess their last meeting. Had it really been just yesterday morning?

"My folks been here?"

He snorted, then trilled. "It's not that we don't love him as much as you do, Tommy. It's just that we have jobs."

Tess laughed. His imitation of Judith was unca

"I miss him," he added in his own voice.

"We all do."

"No, you don't, not the way I do," he said, his voice so fierce and loud that Durban's bodyguard poked his head in to make sure everything was all right.

Tommy dropped the volume, but his body quivered with emotion. "If he died, you'd be sad, but you wouldn't miss him every day, every minute, like I do. You'd miss him when you wanted to stop off at The Point with your friends, giggling at how ugly it is. Or you'd miss him at fambly gatherings. But you wouldn't miss him every day, any more than you miss the City Fair."

"Tommy, there hasn't been a City Fair for years."

"Exactly. And when was the last time you thought about it?" He stood, putting the candy box on his chair, and stalked from the room.

Tess couldn't decide if Tommy was right, or merely a

She had never needed an ambulance, though, just a washcloth to press against the mess of the day as her father did his best Mario Andretti down Wilkens Avenue. The ambulances carried people with graver injuries, people who needed oxygen or CPR. Tess had never lost consciousness, not after vomiting all night, not even when she had fallen on a broken bottle in some underbrush and emerged with a most unexpected view of the inside of her knee, straight to the bone, like some illustration in a textbook.

She watched a young man help a woman out of a battered old Dodge. He could have been the same man she had met at the courthouse, the one who was so pathetically proud of his legitimate marriage and his almost legitimate child. This woman held her arm awkwardly in front of her, as if it were an interesting piece of driftwood she had found on the beach. The man-really more of a boy-man-circled her shoulders with his arms as if she were made of porcelain. So why did you break her, Tess wanted to ask, for she had no doubt he was the one who had brought her here in every sense of the word. Of course, she had domestic violence on her mind just now.