“How much?”
“This is about blackmail, right? I pay you, and you go away. Until you come back again and ask for more.”
“I see. You assume I’m a crook and a liar. Funny, how often crooks and liars make that assumption about others.”
“I’m not a crook,” he said swiftly. At least he had the good grace not to deny being a liar.
“Let’s start over. You came to me to find out the identity of the Visitor. Why?”
“I told you, there was a bracelet-”
Tess held up a hand. “We’re starting over, remember? I’m giving you a blank slate. Use it well.”
“Or?”
“Or I’ll tell the police to look into your whereabouts the night Bobby Hilliard was shot. Did you miss? Was the Visitor really your target? Or did you know Bobby Hilliard?”
“I have an alibi,” he said swiftly. “I was in an all-night diner in Silver Spring with a friend.”
“At three a.m.?”
“We had been to the theater in Washington.”
“It sounds as if you went to a lot of trouble to establish an alibi. Why? What was Gretchen O’Brien’s assignment?”
But beneath his nervous stammers and eye-rolling histrionics, Pitts had a tough little center, as hard as a peach pit.
“What does it matter?” he said. “Clearly, she failed at her task, a fact she omitted to mention when she briefed me this weekend-and collected partial payment. I was too quick to accept her explanation that the unexpected developments at the grave site created so much confusion that she couldn’t follow her quarry. The news accounts made it easy for her to cover up her failure. It never occurred to me she wasn’t there. Or that you were.”
“I never said I was there.”
He smiled at the way she pounced on this detail. “No, but the homicide detective did, when he told me to watch out for you. When he said a private detective might visit me, I was within my rights to ask why you were so interested in the case. He said you were a glory hog. Frankly, I thought it took you a little while to follow such an obvious trail.”
“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I was faxed the burglary reports,” she said defensively. Besides, hadn’t Pitts seemed surprised when she caught up with him outside the 7-Eleven?
“And you still don’t know why they’re grouped together, do you? Two burglaries, an assault, and a homicide. You have no idea what the link is. Neither do the police, if that’s any comfort to you-neither do I.”
The last statement seemed hasty tacked on.
“If you’ll tell me what this is all about, I won’t go to the police about your visit to me and how you hired Gretchen O’Brien to do what I wouldn’t do. She won’t have privilege, if you didn’t go through a lawyer. She’ll have to talk to them.”
He took a moment, as if considering her offer, then shook his head. “I think not. You’ll tell them everything, eventually. You’re such a good citizen.” She had never before heard so much disdain for that simple word. “But if you do tell them about me-why, if you do, I will have to inform them that you visited me in order to extort me. I think the homicide detective would be so hungry for a complaint like that, he might be willing to suspend his usual professional skepticism.”
“But that’s a lie. You were the one who brought up the idea of blackmail. I’d never be party to such a thing.”
“What’s the old saying? A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on? True, it won’t hold up, it’s all he-said, she-said, but it will do a little damage while it’s out there. So you think carefully about what you do next and where you carry your tales. Your reputation is all you have. And, as I understand it, there are members of your family who have shown they are all too capable of a certain moral relativism.”
“That’s ancient history,” she said, even as she realized she didn’t know if he was referring to her father, her grandfather, or two of her uncles. The Monaghans and Weinsteins had taken a somewhat ad hoc approach to upward mobility, but that was all in the past. Assuming Uncle Spike was behaving in Boca, which was a pretty large assumption. “And it has nothing to do with me.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve been portrayed in press accounts as squeaky clean, but as I understand the traditional media arc, it’s about time for you to get some negative publicity. They build you up so they can tear you down. Read more about Mr. Poe’s posthumous life if you want to see a case study in the vagaries of public opinion. The Beacon-Light might not bite, but the local television stations would love a piece on sleazy private eyes. You and Gretchen O’Brien. They say it takes three to make a trend, but maybe they can throw in the historic example of Allan Pinkerton, the original Baltimore PI, whose inability to track the Army of the Confederacy probably extended the Civil War by several years.”
The long rapid speech had left Pitts breathlessly delighted with his own moxie. Tess felt a little breathless, too, at how he had turned the tables on her. The only knowledge she had gained here was that the fat man was shrewder than he appeared. He had chosen her because he knew her family history left her vulnerable to being manipulated in just this fashion. He had gone shopping for a private investigator he could control. She wondered what he had on Gretchen. It didn’t matter. He had just been handed a nifty piece of blackmaiclass="underline" Gretchen had defrauded him by collecting money for work she never did. She, too, was now hopelessly compromised, vulnerable to Arnold Pitts’s dictates.
“I think,” Pitts said, when she declined to say anything, “this is what they call a Mexican standoff. You’re not telling me anything; I’m not telling you anything.”
“But I know where you live now,” Tess said. “I know who you are. I might come back.”
“Good night,” he said. “Good-bye.” It was an order.
She looked around the low-ceilinged room. The floors that peeked out from the edges of Pitts’s green carpets were wide-planked pine. The ceiling had exposed beams, and the walls were a rough plaster that probably fought every nail. It was a little gem of a house, built better than it needed to be, and crying out for simple furnishings. Pitts’s re-creations verged on vandalism.
“Why would you buy a house like this and fill it with fifties kitsch?” Tess asked. “What’s the point?”
“Kitsch? Kitsch? These are my memories. This is my life.” Pitts, so cool and calm when he was threatening her, became completely rattled when his taste in furnishings was questioned.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t… breathtaking in its attention to detail. But why here? Why not in a nice little split-level out in Lutherville? Don’t you want to create the full effect?”
“But I have,” he said with genuine bewilderment. “Besides, Mother still lives in the house in Cockeysville. And she’s done horrible things to it. Why, she actually got one of those refrigerators with an icemaker in the door.” He shuddered. “The old refrigerators are so beautiful, with their rounded tops and those huge handles, as if what you were opening was something important. One day, when she dies-”
Tess left it-and him-there. It was reassuring to know Mother Pitts was in the suburb of Cockeysville, not stuffed in a nearby crawl space.
Then again, she recalled when she was back in her car, Norman Bates also had insisted his mother was alive.
Chapter 16
Crow had a yen for French toast the next morning, so they ended up at the Paper Moon Diner, a twenty-four-hour oasis near the Baltimore Museum of Art. It had once been a dreary coffee shop, the Open House, a place so bad that Tess kept returning to see if it could possibly be as awful as she remembered. It was. The Open House had been a place where the jelly on your English muffin turned out to be mostly mold and whatever white substance they provided for the coffee was invariably curdled. If anyone dared to complain, the help glared, put out to find customers there.