Charmed, aware that she was being charmed, she let him in and offered him water. He was practically wheezing after the climb to her third-floor apartment.

“Nice place,” he said. “I almost went to the other address by mistake, but my source set me straight.”

“The other . . . ?”

“Where you lived before.”

For a moment, she thought he meant Gist Avenue. Then she realized he had almost visited the house where Milton and Seth still lived. A catastrophe averted, she thought, then wondered why she felt that way. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It would be nice if Seth at least knew his mother had found Tessie Fine.

“My husband and I are divorcing,” she said.

“Happens in the best of families. Anyway, I thought it was quite a human-interest story, you and your friend finding Tessie Fine. A story worth telling, don’t you think?”

Part of her longed to say yes. But it meant laying too much bare. Not just her current stature, but also the chain of thought that had led her to the arboretum. It suddenly seemed impossible to explain her line of thinking if she didn’t mention the fearsome necking she had done in that location. She worried if she offered even a sanitized version of that story, she would end up telling everything. Ferdie, how she had pretended to be a virgin on her wedding night, maybe even the identity of the man who had made that pretense necessary, a secret she had safeguarded all these years.

“I’m not interested in publicity,” she said.

“We could use just your first name,” he said. His manner was kind, polite, yet there was a coiled tenacity about him. He wasn’t going to move from her kitchen chair, even if he did have his hat and coat still on. “Obscure some details.”

“I’m not obligated to talk to you. I know that. My husband is a lawyer.”

He smiled. “Of course you’re not obligated. Not legally. But it’s a story people want to know and it’s yours. Don’t you want to share it?”

She allowed herself to live the moment in her imagination. All eyes on her. What would that feel like? And why was she so keen to know? But no, not this way, she decided. She remembered the patrolman’s warnings.

Yet she felt she had to give this man something. Why? She couldn’t have said. All she knew was that when a man showed up and needed something from her, she felt obligated to help him. But it was like raising children. You could divert them. You substituted the healthy food for the lolly or sweet they wanted, making them think it was their idea all along.

“I’m not the story,” she said. “The man from the pet shop—he is.”

“How do you know that? They haven’t arrested him.”

She could not say, I know because my lover told me. Instead: “There’s something about the body that the police haven’t shared yet. Something they found on it. They’re waiting to get some kind of report back. When they do, they’ll probably arrest the clerk.”

He was impressed. More important, he was, in fact, no longer interested in her. “I hate to ask—it’s not something that could ever be in the paper—but do they think it’s a sex crime?”

She didn’t know the answer, yet she felt some weird desire to protect Tessie Fine. “No,” she said. “But he’s the one. Watch.”

He doffed his hat. “Mrs. Schwartz, you have been extremely helpful.”

“You won’t mention my name, right?”

He smiled. “No, I can’t even call you a ‘source.’ But when I chat up my friends at headquarters, I can tell them that I have firsthand information. It is firsthand, right?”

She wasn’t completely sure what firsthand meant in this situation, but she nodded.

The Columnist

The Columnist

I’m a columnist. I don’t have to break stories, worry about getting beat. I don’t really do that much news anymore. It’s supposed to be a badge of honor, reaching the point where you’re above the fray, allowed to pontificate, or just write these little sketches about your own life. That’s my gig, most of the time. I write about life in suburbia—my wife, my kids. Then, sometimes, I get to thinking I need to horn in on a story. H. L. Mencken didn’t get his own room at the Pratt library by writing funny stories about his wife. If you’re a Baltimore reporter, Mencken’s the standard-bearer. Mencken, Jim Bready, maybe Russell Baker, although I remember when he started on night cops and he was no great shakes.

But Tessie Fine—I had to write about her. I had to know. The obvious thing would have been to go talk to the parents. They would have opened their door to me. Almost everyone does. There’s something about being a cartoon that makes people more susceptible to trusting you. What could be the harm in talking to me? I’m just that funny drawing come to life.

I think about that a lot. How I’m an actual cartoon.

Anyway, I was chatting up Diller, our nighttime cop reporter, been on the job so long that he’s more cop than reporter. About as incurious a guy as I’ve ever known. There are more of those types in newspapers than you might think. If you could teach a dog to put on a fedora and carry a notepad, he would do his job the way Diller does, barking out facts to night rewrite. Girl, dead. Found alongside Cylburn Avenue. No arrests at this time. Sources confirm it’s Tessie Fine. But sometimes Diller knows stuff without knowing what he knows and he’s the one who described to me the two women at the scene. I still have enough sources down at the cop shop that I was able to unearth the one’s name.

I walk to her place over on Cathedral Street because I always forget how hilly the city is as you head north from the harbor, where the Star offices are. It isn’t a bad neighborhood, but it isn’t a good one. What’s a nice girl doing in a place like this? I want to say when I see her coming up the street. She looks young, in her beatnik clothes. Okay, maybe not that young when she gets closer, but still pert and fresh, like the very breeze on this day, which feels more like early autumn than late winter. She reminds me of my wife, my real wife, not the woman I’m married to now. I mean, I’m married to the same woman, going on twenty-seven years, but she’s not the woman I met back in Quincy, Pennsylvania, when we were in high school. And I’m not the same man. I can’t blame her. Not even Job himself would have survived what we’ve been through.

I am shocked when this lady doesn’t want to talk to me. Everybody wants to talk to Bob Bauer. But, fair play, she gives me something better. I assume it’s because she was eavesdropping at the scene, or some patrolman was indiscreet. A pretty woman like that—you might be tempted to blow and brag a little bit. Anyway, I call a detective I know, someone who’s always been kind to me. Out of pity, probably, but that’s okay. I’ll take it. I’ve earned it. I ask him to meet me at a bar where we wouldn’t see other cops and reporters, so we end up at Alonso’s on Cold Spring Lane.

And go figure, the lady was right. The clerk is the primary suspect.

“They found something under the fingernails,” my detective friend says. “And in her hair. Mainly.”

“Somebody else’s blood?” Thinking: She promised me it wasn’t sexual.

My friend shakes his head. “This weird dirt, more like sand. It wasn’t like anything you’d find in that park. You don’t find it in all of Maryland.”

“How can that be?”

“Aquarium sand!” the guy says. “But you can’t write that until they serve the warrant tomorrow. They’re going to arrest him at home. He lives with his mother.”

We both snort, knowing what a loser that makes him, although my heart would soar and burst like fireworks if my grown son wanted to be in our house.

“Might be good if one reporter had the inside track on this,” I say. “Someone you could trust to emphasize how smart you guys are.”

The flattery works. It usually does. I don’t accompany the cops to the actual arrest, but I’m at headquarters when they bring the guy in. He tries to say he’s crazy, but the crazy ones never say that.