Baltimore Blues

"You're a lawyer. I assume if you were a victim of sexual harassment, you'd know how to handle it a little better than that."

"Did you hear about that case in Philadelphia? A woman lawyer sued this big-shot partner, and the jury found in her favor, then gave her nothing in damages. What good is that? A victim deserves compensation, don't you think?"

"Are you a victim?"

"At this point it's a matter of opinion, and I think I am," Ava said. She stood up, pulling her purse close to her body, making no move to put money down for her beer. "A court may not agree with me, but I'm sure Darryl will. That's the only jury I need to persuade."

Tess was flustered, incapable of a response. She had assumed Ava would rush to tell Rock her version, burying herself by revealing too much. She had counted on Ava being more concerned about her affair than her tendency to steal underwear. But in her version the sex, unwanted, was making her shoplift. What if Rock believed her? What if she was telling the truth?

George fell off his bar stool again as Ava walked by, knocking her down with him. The tangle of arms gave Tess some pleasure, but Ava, even trapped beneath the 300-pound frame of a sometimes incontinent alcoholic, kept her Princess Grace cool. As she stood up, brushing off her now not-so-white unitard, she looked smug, untouchable.

"On your mark, get set, go," she called back. By the time Tess figured out what she meant, and ran to the door of the tavern, Ava was already in her silver Miata, dialing her car phone as she made an illegal left turn out of the parking lot.

Chapter 7

Tess dawdled the next morning, reluctant to show up at the boat house. When she finally arrived Rock apparently was already on the water, as she had hoped. She rowed her usual route. If he wants to find me, she told herself, he will. If he doesn't he'll stay out of sight, hiding on that little branch that heads south. It was a tricky route-shallow in spots, with bridges forcing one to duck, pull in oars, and skim beneath them-but Rock preferred it when he felt sulky. Tess rowed to Fort McHenry and back, then out to the fort again. She saw eights and fours and two-man crews, but no other single.

It was a glorious morning, a day to savor. Brilliant blue sky, light wind, crisp air. Indian autumn, Tess called it-a fake fall to be replaced by another wave of muggy weather any day now. Tess felt she could row the length of the Chesapeake, find her way to the Atlantic, and make England by lunchtime. She settled for a power piece back to the dock. Bursting with endorphins, she waited in the practice room, pretending to stretch until 8 A.M., when she finally gave up on Rock. He was off licking his wounds somewhere. He'd come around eventually.

She skipped Jimmy's and ate breakfast at her aunt's kitchen table, feasting on leftover cornbread that Officer Friendly had prepared the night before, and reading the papers her aunt had left behind in a tidy pile. Tess worked from back to front, a childhood habit reinforced by her days as a reporter. When she had worked at a paper, she already knew the local news, so she saved it for last, reading features and sports, then the Washington Post and The New York Times. She read the Beacon-Light last-or the Blight, as most readers called it-so it was 9:30 A.M. before she saw the story below the fold: Prominent Lawyer Dead; Biologist Held.

Michael Abramowitz, a lawyer whose amateurish but unforgettable advertisements made him an unlikely local celebrity, was strangled last night in his I

A suspect was arrested within an hour of the slaying, which police described as unusually brutal. Darryl Paxton, a thirty-three-year-old researcher at Johns Hopkins medical school, was to be held overnight in the central district lockup, then taken before a commissioner for bail review this morning.

According to sources close to the investigation, Mr. Abramowitz was beaten and squeezed in a pythonlike grip, then beaten viciously. He also had bruises on his face, presumably from a fight with Mr. Paxton, who visited him at the office just after 10 P.M., according to a security guard's log. The body was discovered by a custodian…

Shirley Temple. Tess felt her stomach clutch and saw the child movie star's dimpled face swimming before her, a ghostly apparition in pale blue. When she was a child-well, fourteen-she had broken her mother's Shirley Temple cereal bowl and blamed it on a neighbor's child. No one had ever discovered her lie. Twenty years later, guilt always evoked the same reaction-Shirley's face, followed by nausea and fear. She had never been good, but she had always been good at not being caught.

She picked up the paper again. There was nothing new beyond that third paragraph, only boilerplate on Abramowitz and his career. Certainly, nothing was new to Tess. Even the style and the reporting were as familiar to Tess as a lover's kiss. In a sense, it was her lover's kiss. The article was the handiwork of Jonathan Ross, her sometime bedmate and a consistent star in the Blight's galaxy. In her shock at the headline, she had skipped over the byline. All his trademarks were there-u

"But I know more," she said out loud. What Jonathan wouldn't give to know what she knew-the woman at the center of this triangle, the trysts at the Renaissance Harborplace, Rock's suspicions. She was the one person who could put it all together. With that thought she threw the paper down and called for Kitty, her voice thin and shrill.

"Tesser?" Kitty came on a run, dressed in an Edwardian frock of white lawn, a white ribbon in her curls and white canvas Jack Purcells on her size five feet. The effect was a little bit flapper, a little 1920s Wimbledon, a little 1970s Baltimore, when anyone who wore shoes other than Jacks was ridiculed for appearing in "fish heads."

Tess thrust the paper at her: "Remember my detective job? It was quite a success. I caught Rock's fiancée with her boss. Now the boss is dead and Rock's in jail."

Kitty skimmed the article.

"Did you tell Rock what you found out?"

"No, I goaded Ava into telling him last night. She says it was sexual harassment. She had to sleep with Abramowitz to keep her job. The last time I saw her, she was on her car phone, telling Rock her story."

Kitty was a quick study. "You need to disappear for a while," she a

"I'll have to talk to them eventually."

"Yes, you will," Kitty agreed. "But it wouldn't hurt to be unavailable for a few days while you figure out how you want to handle this. Take any money you need out of the cash register and leave me a check. I won't cash it unless I have to. Find a cheap motel or a friend's house, then call me collect from pay phones. In a few days we'll know where this is headed, and you can come home."

Tess took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and began throwing clothes into a battered leather knapsack. Her friend Whitney's family had a house on the shore near Oxford, with a small guest house on the property's edge. She and Whitney had used it during college when they had wanted to get away. Rich friends had their charms. She would have to assume she was still welcome there, as calling Whitney would only further complicate things. Whitney worked for the Beacon-Light, too, and although she would be under no legal requirement to talk, Tess didn't want to find out what would happen if Whitney had to choose between her friend and some tantalizing details in what promised to be a big story. Asking Whitney not to act out of self-interest was akin to asking a cat not to chase a bird. Better not to test her.