But with a little purple paint and a heavy dose of whimsy, the Paper Moon had vanquished the ptomaine ghosts of the previous regime. The place now radiated good cheer, with its collection of Pez containers and old-fashioned toys. Christmas lights shone from the exposed rafters year-round, and naked department store mannequins lurked in the shrubbery out front. The service was also divine, thanks to what Crow referred to as the only successful model for socialism in the new millennium: All tips were shared, so everyone on the staff had a vested interest in getting the food to the table and keeping drinks refilled. The menu needed an entire page to explain this system, and the explanation verged on manifesto, but the Paper Moon always made Tess feel as if she were John Reed in the Soviet Union: She had seen the future of restaurant service, and it worked.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Crow said, yawning over his coffee. They had stayed up late the night before, until almost 3 a.m. It had been worth it.
“I like the Paper Moon.”
“No, I mean this Poe thing. It’s all my fault.”
“How do you figure?”
“If I hadn’t insisted we go to Westminster and ”protect‘ the Visitor, you wouldn’t have felt obligated to start looking for this man. Now that you’ve found him…“
“Now that I’ve found him,” Tess sang, “I can let him go.” The Paper Moon’s whimsy was infectious. Besides, she didn’t want to talk about Arnold Pitts. She wanted to prolong the warm, happy mood in which she had awakened. Later, stomach full, she would contemplate Pitts’s nasty threat, try to figure out if he had left her any room in which to maneuver. Could she launch a preemptive strike, go to Rainer and tell him to expect Pitts’s false accusations?
But Pitts was shrewd in his judgments: Rainer disliked her so much, he’d want to believe the worst of her. She was stuck. She studied the menu, wondering if it was too early in the day to order the hummus, which was billed, perhaps inevitably in this self-referential city, as “Hummuside: Life on the Pita.”
Puns ruined her appetite. Perhaps an omelet instead.
“You know, one day-not at breakfast, but if we come here for lunch or dinner-I’m going to order a beer milkshake. If any place on the planet would make you one, it would be the Paper Moon.”
“Wasn’t there a character in a book who had a beer milkshake?”
“Doc, in Cannery Row,” Tess replied, glad to know a piece of literary trivia. She was still embarrassed at being the butt of Arnold Pitts’s literary joke. The twentieth, now that was her century If someone had come into her office claiming to be Edmund “Bunny” Wilson or Harold Bloom, she’d have been in on the joke from the jump.
Two women walked into the dining room and took seats beneath a mobile of flying Barbies. Tess couldn’t help noticing the dark and light heads bent over the menus. Both women had short razor-cut hair, which exposed willowy necks. If it weren’t for their coloring-the one so dark, the other a rose-petal blonde- they might have been mistaken for sisters. There was a sameness in the way they dressed, in their posture. Tess was so caught up in trying to figure out how they could look so different and yet seem so related, that it took a second for the dark-haired woman’s familiar profile to register.
“Cecilia Cesnik,” she said, for the second time in three days.
And for the second time in three days, Cecilia turned and gave Tess a wary smile.
“Now I remember why the City Paper suggested Tiny Town as a nickname for Baltimore,” Cecilia said. “Sometimes it seems as if there are only a couple dozen people living here.”
The blonde’s blue-green eyes had a frosty glaze that would have done a doughnut proud. Tess realized she must be Cecilia’s girlfriend, and she was trying to assess the nature of the relationship between Cecilia and this strange woman.
“I’m Tess Monaghan,” she said, “and this is my boyfriend, Crow Ransome.”
That was all it took to melt the frost. “Charlotte Menaker,” she said. “How do you and Cecilia know each other?”
The answer was complicated-and involved so many events better left forgotten, so much violence and waste-that Tess and Cecilia, after exchanging a look, shrugged and laughed.
“Another Baltimore story,” Tess said. “We were… thrown together once, by circumstances. Then Cecilia clerked one summer for the lawyer I work with, Tyner Gray.”
“The handsome man in the wheelchair?”
“I suppose,” Tess said, knowing she would never carry the compliment back to Tyner. Bad enough that heterosexual women thought he was attractive. If he heard a pretty young lesbian had called him handsome, his conceit would be unbearable.
Crow, who had met Cecilia about the same time Tess did, suddenly got up and enveloped her in a bear hug. Cecilia looked faintly alarmed, then relaxed in his grip.
“You look great,” he told her. “I saw you on the news, and I was so proud of you.”
“Oh, yeah, the news,” Tess said. “So how goes the crusade? Has Rainer unbent, told you anything more about his investigation?”
Cecilia appeared torn. Clearly her instinct was to spin the story to her advantage, but Tess was a friend, more or less, not a gullible newscaster.
“The mainstream media gave us cursory mentions, sort of the obligatory crackpot-theories rubric,” she admitted. “But I have a television appearance tomorrow on an hour-long news show, Face Time. We’re going to talk about hate crimes and whether legislation can make a difference.”
“Face Time? That show with Jim Yeager?” Tess asked, nonchalant in the extreme.
“Yes. I know he’s not exactly a friend to our cause, but he does provide a forum for free and open debate.”
Tess wondered if Cecilia had ever seen the show in question, or if she was simply buying into Yeager’s version of what he offered the viewing public.
“I wouldn’t trust him, if I were you,” she said, deciding not to reveal she had turned down a chance to be on the same show.
Cecilia could not bear instructions, no matter how mild or well intended. “I don’t recall asking your advice. Besides, I have a great visual. We just came from the SPCA, where I bailed out Shawn Hayes’s Doberman. The family doesn’t know what to do with her, so they’re boarding her there. I’m going to take her on the show with me. People may not respond to the plight of a gay man, almost beaten to death, but a little doggie mourning for her master gets them every time.”
She pointed to Twenty-ninth Street, where a blue RAV-4 was parked. Tess saw the long snout of a Doberman poking through the window, which had been lowered about an inch to let fresh air circulate in the car.
She hated to anthropomorphize, especially from this distance, but the dog did appear depressed.
“How does a Doberman not come to her master’s aid when he’s being beaten?” she wondered.
“Good question,” Cecilia said. “The police want to think it’s because Shawn Hayes’s attacker was someone he knew. But that would only explain why the dog didn’t bark when the person entered the house. You told me you have a dog. Would it sit idly by while someone was hurting you?”
Tess thought about this. “No, she’d lie idly by, at least if you gave her something to eat first. In fact, if you were feeding her bacon, you could set me on fire and Esskay wouldn’t notice. But she’s no Doberman.”
“The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Crow mused. “Why didn’t the Doberman bark?”
“Ah, but this is a story of Poe, not Conan Doyle,” Tess reminded him.
“It’s not a story about Poe at all.” Cecilia’s voice was edged with irritation. “That’s the very problem I’m having with the press. One man is dead, another is near death, and all anyone wants to do is make weak puns about ”The Telltale Heart‘ and Baskerville hounds, whatever they are.“