“Don’t be sorry. It’s probably just some sick twist, playing a game with me. For all I know, it’s the homicide detective working the case.” Or Arnold Pitts. Or Gretchen O’Brien. Or Jim Yeager, trying to ignite his own story. After all, he had been outside her home the day the first note appeared. “My boyfriend says he’s trying to tell us he’s not like other boys.”
“But that’s it!” Daniel Clary closed the book with a triumphant thump.
“It is? What is it?”
“He-she, whoever-is trying to get you to look into Bobby’s life. The red cliff of the mountain. I don’t know western Pennsylvania, and the mountains there probably aren’t red, except at sunset, but I think someone wants to get you to go see Bobby Hilliard’s parents, talk to them, see if Bobby told them anything in the last months of his life. The poem is about Bobby, not Poe. ”From childhood’s hour I have not been/As others were.“ If ever a poem were written about Bobby Hilliard, this is it.”
“You think?” Tess asked, not quite convinced. “What could possibly be there?”
“A demon-shaped cloud, I guess. I don’t know. I know you came here for my insights into Poe, but I knew Bobby too. This rings true to me. Whoever this is wants you to go talk to the Hilliards.”
“Well, that rules out Rainer.”
“As in Rilke?”
“As in homicide cop.” Tess checked her watch. “I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend in a bar and watch our friend Cecilia on one of those cable shows, Face Time. They’re doing a segment on the murder. You wanna come?”
Daniel Clary shook his head. “Television stresses me out, even good television. I’m a reader, I want to make up my own pictures. You know what? I couldn’t even watch Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War. That’s when I knew it was over for television and me.”
“Do you go to the movies?”
“Hardly ever. Although”-he grinned-“I did hear the rumor that Michael Jackson wants to play Poe in a movie about his life. That I’ll go see.”
“Well, let’s do something sometime.” Tess was still calculating how she could bring Daniel and Whitney together-but passively, unobtrusively, just a test. “Us beer-drinking bibliophiles have to stick together.”
“Okay,” he said. “But don’t think I’ll tell you my secrets.”
“What secrets?”
“Where I go to buy old books. You’re going to have to find those places on your own.”
Chapter 18
The patrons who had gathered at Frigo’s tavern had assumed they would be watching the Maryland Terrapins play basketball, a reasonable expectation on a winter’s night in Baltimore. But cable-less Tess commandeered the remote and began searching the talk ghetto at the far end of the seventy-five-channel spectrum. She clicked past pontificating head after pontificating head until she finally came to an oversized one with shaggy curls.
“Tess,” the bartender said, a note of pleading in his voice, “you’re killing me.”
“It won’t be for long,” she assured him. As a Frigo’s regular and, more important, the daughter of a former liquor board inspector, Tess enjoyed a potentate’s privileges. “I really need to see this.”
“We’ll buy”-Crow looked at the crowd, which was large for a Thursday night-“we’ll buy a round for everyone along the bar, because they’re most likely the ones who were counting on watching the game.”
They were, and free drinks did little to appease them when the channel changed to Face Time with Jim Yeager.
The live broadcast was normally done from a Washington studio, but Jim Yeager appeared to have taken over the set of some long-forgotten Baltimore talk show for this special edition. Not that one saw much of the 1970s-era set, with the outdated silhouette of Baltimore ’s skyline in the back. For Face Time was aptly named: It was all face, mainly Yeager’s face, shot large enough to fill the television screen.
“I always heard the camera added ten pounds,” Crow said thoughtfully, “but I didn’t think they meant the head.”
“It’s even bigger, and his face is even redder, in real life,” Tess said. “They ought to do this in three-D. He looks as if he’s about to lunge out of the screen at any moment.”
As the show wore on, Yeager’s face grew redder still, his lunges toward the camera more frequent. Tess had assumed Yeager was a cookie-cutter far-right conservative, but his anti-everything views brought to mind Groucho Marx’s anthem from Duck Soup: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Those guests who attempted to argue with him were dismissed with ad hominem attacks, usually a double-noun combination featuring police or Nazi.
“Oh, you’re with the nutrition police,” he sneered at a man in the first segment, a vegetarian who wanted to put federal excise taxes on junk food while providing tax breaks to those who exercised regularly. “Oh, here come the thought Nazis,” he sang out, when a syndicated columnist criticized a basketball coach for making racist comments about his own players. “When do we start burning the books, Herr Commandant?”
“So are you going to go?” Crow said, during the next commercial break.
“Go where?” Tess asked, replenishing their bowl of popcorn and ignoring the bartender’s anguished looks. What could she do? She had assumed Cecilia would be the first guest, and here they were, two Rolling Rock drafts into the dreary hour.
“To visit Bobby Hilliard’s parents, the way Daniel suggested. I think it’s a good idea.”
“I’m not so sure. Why not tell me that directly? Why doesn’t he-or she-tell me what he knows?”
Crow thought about this. “Because I don’t think your visitor knows everything. He has a few pieces of the puzzle and wants to share them with you. He trusts you, for some reason. He thinks you can do this.”
“Trusts me or wants to mislead me,” Tess said. “Hey, Cecilia’s finally up.”
Even on the less-than-stellar resolution on the Frigo bar set, Cecilia looked lovely, as did Miata. Television doted on Cecilia’s big eyes and fine bones, highlighted every muscle in the Doberman’s coiled body.
Unfortunately, the producer used far more shots of Yeager. You couldn’t call them reaction shots, for that would imply Yeager listened. When he wasn’t talking, he was like an orchestra player who cared only for his own part, counting impatiently until he could come in again.
“Cecilia Cesnik is a local advocate who was one of the first to insist the murder at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave was part of a more sinister tale, something Poe himself might have written-if he had lived another hundred and fifty years. Of course, if Poe had lived another hundred and fifty years, I imagine he would be haunted by the permissive attitudes of our culture, the idea that anything is all right as long as it feels good.”
Cecilia’s face was so thin that the camera could catch the brief flicker at the bridge of her nose when she frowned. Yeager’s intro was not promising. Then again, he wasn’t openly baiting her, not yet.
“So, Ms. Cesnik”-Yeager made Ms. buzz, until it sounded like an epithet-“you’ve made quite a fuss, insisting this homicide is related to a so-called hate crime against a prominent Baltimorean. Could you tell us what proof you have of this allegation?”
Cecilia frowned again, probably at the use of the word “so-called,” but plunged in gamely. “A source at the police department had given us information that the homicide detectives were looking at Bobby Hilliard’s death in connection with a violent assault on Shawn Hayes, a man who is well known in our community-”
“When you say ”community‘ do you mean Baltimore at large or the sodomite subculture?“
“Sodomite!” Crow echoed in wonder.