Charm City

The porridge segment of her Goldilocks impersonation concluded, she began prowling around the small apartment, looking for the box of files Rosita had carried home on Friday. Maybe the key to her notes was there. She checked the hall closet, looked beneath the sagging springs of the sofa, opened kitchen cabinets. The apartment was eerily quiet, the only sound coming from the swinging tail of the Kit-Kat Klock, moving back and forth in the same cadence as its wide eyes. Fu

A blast of cold air surprised Tess when she opened the bedroom door. The sliding door to the tiny balcony was open, its gauzy curtains blown parallel to the floor in the stiff wind. Tess walked over to shut the door, then stepped outside instead, an acrid taste in her mouth.

Some people experience dread as a sensation that their stomachs are falling twenty stories; others feel a humming-bird-fast pulse flapping high in their chests. For Tess, fear and anxiety always had the flavor of something bitter, like a shriveled peanut in a bag of fresh roasted ones. Or a piece of turkey sausage, when you were expecting the real thing.

She leaned over the balcony, not sure what she would see from this height, not sure what she was looking for. Everything was still so brown and lifeless, even the overgrown brush in the gully that ran behind the apartment house. The only color was from the hundreds of blue plastic grocery bags caught on the dried vines, like puffy wild-flowers. And a flash of white surrounded by beige, one shade lighter than the earth.

When the coroner pulled Rosita Ruiz from the gully, she was wearing bicycle shorts and the same mermaid T-shirt she had worn the last time Tess had visited her. La Sirena. Well, La Sirena had sung her last song.

Tess called Sterling from Rosita's apartment and he arrived while the two homicide detectives were still questioning her. The detectives were politely solicitous of Tess, who looked a little green at the edges, but she could tell they had no real interest in considering Rosita's death a homicide, too. That would involve admitting fault, prolonging a case the county cops were ready to close as soon as the tox screens came in. If there was an angry lover or ex-lover, someone with a personal grudge against Miss Ruiz-fine, they were all ears. But it was inconceivable to them that Rosita had been thrown off the balcony by Wink's killer, because it was inconceivable to them that Wink had a killer.

"That's kind of far-fetched, Miss Monaghan, especially when you consider Miss Ruiz was fired on Friday," said Detective Tull, a slight, short man with remarkably tiny feet and an acne-scarred face. The scars gave his handsome face a touching vulnerability. He must be used for the remorseful ones, Tess thought, the tearful women who yearned to confess.

"You see, Miss Monaghan, it makes more sense if she jumped-especially when you see the empty bottle of white wine. Alcohol is a depressant and she was probably plenty depressed, right? She drinks, she eats a little pizza, she thinks about her life, and she steps out on her balcony, then steps out into space. The medical examiner will look for signs of a struggle-skin beneath her fingernails, scratches on her body that might tell us more about how she fell. But everything here is saying suicide. A footstool is pushed up next to the balcony, so she could climb up to the railing. The open balcony door. No one reported hearing a scream last night or early this morning, and no one saw anyone going into her apartment last night."

"No one here ever sees anyone," Tess protested. "Besides, she was a writer, or thought of herself as one. She would have left a note."

"Notes are less common than you think. A whole bottle of wine is considerable when you're as small as she is and you haven't eaten very much-there are only two slices of pizza gone. My guess is the M.E. is going to find she was legally intoxicated." Tull turned to Sterling. "Do you know how to find the next of kin? We'll have to notify them."

"We should have a contact number down at the paper."

Tull stood to leave. His partner, a tall, graceful black man who looked like a dancer, had been standing all along, leaning against the kitchen counter as if he were just passing through.

"You know, normally we don't give the victim's name to the press until we've made that call," Tull said. "We can't keep you from printing what you know, but it would be better if you waited until we talk to her parents."

"Under these circumstances, there won't be a story. We don't write about suicides unless they're somehow public, or involve public figures."

"Well, for now, it's not officially a suicide." Tull looked at Tess, and she knew he was humoring her. "The M.E. will make the ruling on that. We're going to canvass the building, see if anyone heard anything or saw anything. You can sit here for a while, Miss Monaghan, if you don't feel up to driving just yet."

Tess smiled wanly at Tull. She did feel light-headed. Rosita's broken body had looked disturbingly peaceful and composed, sleeping on its bier of brambles and blue grocery bags. If there was an argument to be made for suicide, it was the strange serenity in her face, more relaxed in death than it had ever been in life.

As soon as the detectives left, Sterling got up and came back with a glass of water and two ibuprofen capsules from Rosita's medicine cabinet.

"I don't know what good these will do, but I can't help wanting to do something for you," he said. "You've had a pretty rough day."

To say nothing of a rough night. She thought of telling him about her conversation with Colleen Reganhart, but it didn't seem particularly important now. Her brain was stuck in a single gear, endlessly revving. She looked around the apartment-the strafing glance of the Kit-Kat Klock, the disappearing cowboy poster, the pizza box on the counter, the empty wine bottle, the piles of books and papers.

"Pizza!"

Sterling looked startled at her sudden interest in food. "Sure. We can go get pizza if you like."

"No, it's the pizza box. There's no delivery slip on it. When you order a pizza to be delivered, there a piece of paper on the box-trust me, this is one of my fields of expertise. Rosita was barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt. Someone brought this pizza to her, Jack-used it to get in the door downstairs, so they wouldn't look suspicious."

"And then sat down, shared a couple of pieces with her and tossed her off the balcony?" Sterling shook his head. "I hate to side with the detectives on this, Tess, but that's nonsensical. She could have gone out and gotten the pizza, then changed."

"Okay, so where's the box, the box of notebooks and personal artifacts she carried home from work? It's not here, so someone must have taken it. And why would someone take it? Because her notes held the key to Wink's murder."

Sterling made the same walk-through of the apartment she had already made, opening drawers and closet doors, looking under the sofa's sagging springs. Then he picked up the pizza box, turning it slowly in his hands, as if the delivery slip still might show up.

"I'll go get Detective Tull," he said at last.

Sterling went back to the office to wait for Detective Tull's call. Tess went home and tried to sleep, but she was too restless and ended up at the Brass Elephant. Although anxious to hear what the police had found, she could never sit in the newsroom, where she knew the skeleton staff of Sunday reporters would be wandering around, stu