Charm City (25 page)

R
osita's
notes were virtually indecipherable. She had assigned numbers to
people—Wink was obviously "#1," the rest
a toss-up, although "#2" was someone close to him,
someone who, judging from Rosita's notes, she suspected of
killing him. And she had made a plausible case for homicide, arranging
and rearranging the known facts of the case until a scenario emerged:
Wink, drunk and then drugged by someone he knew, had been placed in the
car when he passed out. The problem was, Rosita had made an even more
plausible case for herself as a pathological liar. How could Tess trust
anything she said, even in her private, coded notes?

"Garage door locked,"
Rosita had written. "But was door from garage to mud room
locked? If number 2 had dragged number 1 to car from house, number 2
could have left through house. Ask cops about drag marks. Burglar alarm
on? Ask number 3 who has keys to house. Ask the M.E. if it's
possible to know whether number 1 was unconscious before carbon
monoxide kicked in. Check enrollment records."

Enrollment records? Rosita had lost her
completely. But perhaps Rosita was lost, too, for she hadn't
been able to take these electronic files with her when she left. If
Tess offered her the printouts, would she break the code in exchange?
It was worth a try. If Rosita was working on something legitimate, it
would be nice to pass the information along to Feeney as a peace
offering, even if neither of them had started the war between them.
Perhaps it was time for another surprise visit to Rosita's.

Cutting through downtown and heading uptown
on Charles Street, she noticed people streaming out of churches, palm
fronds in hand. How could it be Palm Sunday beneath these leaden skies?
A lot of Easter hats and outfits were going to be wasted if the weather
didn't improve markedly over the next week. No matter the
weather, it was a torturous season for Tess. April meant the return of
rowing, and it was always a struggle to readjust to a 5:30
A.M.
alarm, especially
after daylight savings stole yet another hour. Worse, this time of year
meant putting in appearances at both the Monaghans' Easter
Sunday dinner and the Weinsteins' Seder, with little time for
recovery in between. April was the cruelest month.

At Rosita's apartment building, it
was no trick to once again blend in with a group of residents, allowing
them to carry her through the security door and into the elevator. On
the eighteenth floor, she knocked—politely at first, then a
sharp rap, and finally an out-and-out pounding. No response. Tess tried
the door and it swung open. Wonderful. Maybe Rosita was down in the
basement laundry room, or making a quick run for Sunday papers at the
deli across the street. She'd just take a quick look around.

The apartment hadn't changed, with
the exception of a pizza box and an empty Chardonnay bottle on the
kitchen counter. Same impersonal air, same Kit-Kat Klock keeping time.
Tess looked around, her gaze settling again on the pizza box. She
couldn't help herself—she loved cold pizza and she
hadn't eaten anything since the Mint Milanos at
Colleen's apartment. She looked at the side of the box,
trying to figure out which pizzeria it had come from, then flicked open
the grease-spotted lid. Sausage, her favorite. She picked off one of
the nubbly pieces, popped it in her mouth. Yech. Turkey sausage. What
an aberration. What an oxymoron—healthful sausage, low-fat
fat. You should do things full out, Tess always reasoned. Hedging,
trying to have it both ways, was what got you into trouble.
She'd have to share this bit of wisdom with Rosita.

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. Funny, Rosita didn't have a
computer—that seemed unthinkable for someone of her age and
profession. Perhaps she had set up an office in a corner of her bedroom.

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, stunned and bewildered. Journalists had no
language for their own tragedies. When it was one of their own, they
could not make grim jokes or callow rationalizations, or call up
relatives with that age-old assurance:
it might
be cathartic for them to speak of it
. And they
could not reduce someone they had actually known to the series of
meaningless catch-phrases used for strangers.
Smart
but down-to-earth. Ambitious but caring. A quiet person who kept to
himself
—no, that was the code reserved
for demented loners. At any rate, by any measure, Rosita Ruiz was not a
good death.

It was almost 8 o'clock when
Feeney found Tess, an empty plate of tortellini in front of her. She
had no memory of eating it. She could, however, remember martinis 1 and
2, and she was now on martini 3, using the discarded toothpicks to
trace figures in the linen tablecloth. Curvy number 2s, which
disappeared in a few moments, like the magnetic lines on those
"magic" drawing boards you had as a kid.

"First things first,"
Feeney said. "Your uncle's awake."

"And?" Her heart
sky-rocketed, then plummeted to earth. Feeney was playing good news-bad
news with her.

"That's all I know.
Kitty called the paper, looking for you. Said Spike's awake.
His speech is a little slurry and his right side doesn't have
much feeling, but he's awake. Keeps talking about the years,
Kitty said."

"The ears," Tess
corrected absently. "Now what about Rosita?"

"The box of notes was in the trunk
of her car, and there's nothing in them, not of any
importance. And there was pizza in Rosita's
stomach."

"She was killed, Feeney, I know
she was. By number two."

"Number two?"

"I saw files she had in the
computer—don't ask me how, I won't tell
you. But there was someone, someone she called number two. She thought
this person killed Wink, although her notes didn't provide a
motive."

"So who is number two?"

"I haven't a clue. It
could be Lea—she's wife number two, although the
notes suggest she's number three. Or his first
wife—if Wink is number one, there's no reason Linda
couldn't be number two. If Wink had threatened to cut off her
alimony because he needed to be more liquid…and there was
something about enrollment records, and Wink and Linda were in school
together after all—"