"Who are you?"
"I'm Jackie Weir," said the woman Tess knew as Mary Browne. Certainly, she dressed like Mary Browne. Today, it was a coral suit with white trim at the cuffs and collars. The white was picked up by her high-heeled shoes, pearl earrings, and a double strand of pearls against her dark throat. All this, just to sit in her home-office, waiting for Tess to come to the punchline of her sick little joke.
"But Jackie Weir is Susan King."
"Right."
"And ‘Mary Browne' hired me to find Susan King. You hired me to find you." For a moment, Tess wished she were in the habit of carrying her gun. This was crazy, and crazy people made her nervous.
"Yes, which you've done. Congratulations. As I said, I thought you might have been here even faster-it's really not that hard, once you find the name change, and any competent private investigator should have been able to do that. But I'm impressed, nevertheless."
They were still standing in the foyer of Mary's-of Susan's, no, of Jackie's-apartment. Tess studied the parquet floors, the other woman's lethal-looking white pumps, her own nubuck flats. They were from the Tweeds catalog and she would have called them off-yellow, but the catalog had labeled them cornmeal. Why am I thinking about shoes? Because she was embarrassed and humiliated, and concentrating on her shoes kept her from admitting how angry she was.
"I don't like this," Tess began. "You came to my place of business, you lied to me-"
"I suppose you never lie."
Better to skip past that one. "You wasted my time."
"I paid for your time. A new private investigator, starting out-all your cases should be so easy. I know what it's like to start a business. You can't have too many easy jobs. But my next job is harder. You won't have such an easy time finding the person I'm really looking for."
Tess looked up. "What makes you think I'd do any more work for you at all, after the way you dicked me around?"
Jackie's smile was the smile of a businesswoman used to coddling difficult types, smoothing ruffled feathers, working her to way to yes. "Look, it's past noon. Can we talk about this over lunch? There's always Clyde's, just across the way."
"No Clyde's," Tess said petulantly, a child saying no just to say no. "I've never forgiven their menu for inspiring that insipid song ‘Afternoon Delight.'"
"Let's go into Clarksville, then."
"Clarksville? What's out there, the local Dairy Queen?" Actually a hot dog and a Peanut Buster Parfait would hit the spot. One drawback to city living was the serious lack of Dairy Queens.
"You obviously haven't been keeping up with Howard County real estate. Clarksville is home to some of the ritziest subdivisions around-and one amazing French restaurant. Expensive, but worth it. Come on, it's on me."
"You bet it's on you," Tess said. "After all, you have a stock portfolio worth almost two hundred thousand dollars as of market close yesterday."
There was a small victory in seeing Jackie Weir's eyes widen at that factoid. Good-let her wonder what else Tess might have uncovered along the way.
Clarksville had changed. Tess remembered farmland, a few simple houses scattered among the trees. Now huge, elaborate homes sat on landscaped lots. These weren't the kind of developments that looked naked and raw in their early years; too much money had been spent for the owners to tolerate anything less than instant perfection. But the very lack of flaws, the absence of anything as spontaneous as a fallen bicycle or an overgrown lilac tree, made the houses forbidding to Tess.
"Mini-mansions, they call them in the trade," Jackie said as they drove west. "The covenant actually specifies a minimum square footage of ten thousand feet and all natural materials."
"But that was a lavender stone house. How can that be natural?"
"Closer to periwinkle, if you want to be precise. The owner's Mercedes has been custom-painted to match. Or was it the other way around?"
After seeing the overdone, overlarge houses, Tess assumed the restaurant would be built along the same nightmarish proportions. To her relief, Trouve was a small, fieldstone farmhouse that looked as if it had been moved, stone by stone, from the French countryside. If it weren't for the parking lot full of expensive cars, it might have passed for the working farm it once was.
"Miss Jacqueline, do you have a reservation today?" the maitre d' asked. Tess, glancing at the clientele in the almost-full dining room, suddenly felt underdressed and frumpy. Her warm-weather clothes tended toward things that made as little contact with the skin as possible-a loose, white T-shirt today, and an ankle-length cotton skirt that allowed her to skip pantyhose, but was now badly wrinkled from all her driving.
"I didn't plan ahead, but I was hoping you just might find a place for us, Michel."
"Of course." Tess assumed two women would be hidden away by the kitchen or bathroom, especially when one was so sloppily dressed. But Michel led them to a table next to a large bay window, overlooking a small orchard of fruit trees and, beyond that, a meadow of wild flowers.
Jackie allowed herself to preen just a little. "As I said, I bring a lot of clients here."
"What is it you do, exactly?"
"Professional fund-raiser. I started out in development at a hospital in the Washington suburbs, but I found I could make better money on my own, raising money on a contract basis. I do a few good causes to salve my conscience-Advocates for Children and Youth, Health Care for the Homeless, Manna House-but I barely break even on those. The big money is in capital projects."
"And politicians?"
"When I first started. Not so often now. I prefer diseases to politicians."
"Who doesn't?"
Jackie looked at Tess over the top of her menu, clearly puzzled.
"A joke," Tess explained.
"Oh, I get it." But she didn't smile.
At least Jackie-it was still an effort to remember which name to use-had an appetite. She ordered an appetizer, salad, and entree, which meant Tess could follow her lead without feeling the need to explain she had rowed that morning and then run three miles. It was refreshing to be with a woman who ate as much as she did, without apology. So many of the women she knew seemed intent on deprivation, playing some unfathomable game in which the winner was the person who ordered the most pleasureless meal. Her mother specialized in exactly that kind of denial. In Jackie's company, Tess felt she could hang a banner over the table: Bring on the cream sauces!
"I really do have legitimate business for a private investigator," Jackie told her after they had ordered. "But I had a bad experience. I hired a guy several months back, and he didn't do anything, just sat on his ass and cashed my checks. Another one gave up when it got hard. So I decided the next time I hired someone, I was going to make sure they could do some rudimentary investigative work. Finding me isn't hard, but you do have to have enough gumption to run my name through a Chicago Title search, then run my name through the MVA to get my address."
"Which name would that be exactly?" Tess asked innocently, slathering butter on a fresh, warm roll.
"The story I told you was essentially true. Susan King got pregnant when she was a teenager, and had a falling-out with her mother as a result. She ended up leaving home and, I'm sorry to say, never quite reconciled with her mother."
"Do you have to speak of yourself in the third person? It's a little on the creepy side."
"Susan King is a third person to me and as dead as my mother."
"Why did you change your name? Were you hiding from your mother after she kicked you out?"
Questions seemed to make Jackie impatient. It occurred to Tess that she had rehearsed this little scene in her head, and now Tess wasn't playing her part as scripted. How she must have enjoyed sitting in her apartment, waiting for Tess to knock on her door.
"My mother didn't kick me out because I was going to have a baby. She was cool with that. After all, I wasn't the first girl in Southwest Baltimore to turn up pregnant."
"Southwest Baltimore? Which part?" asked Tess, a true Baltimorean, forever focused on the precise boundaries of where people lived.
"Pigtown," Jackie muttered. "Pigtown, okay? Anyway, Mama wanted me to keep the baby, so she could raise it, get a little extra AFDC money and food stamps every month. I almost went for it, too. But you know, I had finished high school and I had this nothing job, and I suddenly saw my future. I told myself, ‘This is it, girl. You've still got a chance to make something of yourself, but not if you keep this baby.'"
The appetizers arrived-a tart with woodland mushrooms for Tess, some goat cheese thingie for Jackie.
"What about the baby's father?"
"He wasn't interested in being a father. But you know, I give him credit for admitting it up front, for not pretending to be into it and then dumping me as soon as the baby came. I saw that happen often enough to my girlfriends. Anyway, I signed my daughter over to a private agency and never looked back. And when I got a scholarship to Penn, I decided to change my name legally, sort of a symbol of my new life. In the back of my mind, I think I didn't want my baby to come looking for me one day. You see, I figured I was going to be somebody real famous, real successful, and I didn't want any tabloid trash reunion in my future."
Jackie's story was at once impressive and repellent to Tess. How could someone be that calculating at eighteen? Yet the woman's confidence in herself had been rewarded. Here she was, her life tricked out with the material trappings of success at an age when many of her contemporaries were still slacking. Tess knew now she had seized on the issue of "Mary Browne's" age with such glee because she couldn't bear to think that someone just a few years older than herself, someone born without wealth or privilege, could accomplish so much. But Susan-Jackie had tripped over her own age only because that was the one part of her masquerade she hadn't thought out. An uncharacteristic slip, most likely.
"So why did you come to me? Are you worried your daughter is going to show up on your doorstep? Do you want to launch some kind of preemptive strike, make sure it's impossible to find you? It can probably be done, but I specialize in finding people, not hiding them."
"I don't want to hide. I'm not ashamed of my past." Well, well, well. Jackie had a temper, one she couldn't quite control. Hands shaking, she took several long, steady sips from her water glass. When she spoke, she was in control again, her voice steady and smooth.
"As I told you, my mother died within the past year. We had gotten to the point where we had some contact, but I was little more than a human bank machine to her. She'd call to complain about some crisis in her life, I'd send her some money. Once she was gone, I waited to feel bereft. Instead, I felt haunted, as if someone were following me. I found myself blowing off appointments, driving around Pigtown and looking at the young girls there. I kept thinking, Are you out there? What became of you? Do you hate me?"
"Your daughter was put up for adoption, probably with some nice middle-class family. She'd have to be an awful ingrate to hate the woman who made it possible for her to have a better life."
"I wish I knew that. She'll be thirteen this summer. I wasn't much older when I met her father. Five years later, she was inside me."
Tess wondered what it was like to be pregnant. She knew only what it was like to fear it, to worry obsessively over failed contraception, to count the days in the calendar over and over again, calculating ovulation and wondering if maybe, just maybe, the pharmaceutical companies of America had let her down. Nothing was 100 percent effective. Then again, what if you couldn't have a baby? What if you spent all this time and money and worry preventing something that would never happen? Could you get a rebate?
"Do you want to be part of your daughter's life again? Because that's not something I'd be party to. I believe your parents are the people who rear you."
"No, absolutely not. I just want to see her, know she's okay. What could I be to her, anyway? I'm a little young to be a mother figure, too old to be a friend. I'll put my name in the state registry and when she turns eighteen, she can find me there if she wants. For now, if I could just see her, even from a distance, and know that it all paid off, I'd be happy. Blood tells. I made so many mistakes when I was younger. I just want to know she isn't making the same ones."
Another lost child, Tess thought, and this one doesn't even have a name. She couldn't imagine where to start.
"Will you do it? Will you help me find my baby?" Jackie had dropped her detached, professional tone. Her voice was urgent, almost pleading.
"I don't know. What you're asking is pretty hard. Truthfully, I wouldn't even know where to begin."
"There's this Adoption Rights group that meets in Columbia every other week. We could go there first, learn some strategies."
"It's not just the ‘how' part that bothers me. After all, I could give it my best shot, earn some money without worrying I was bleeding you dry. I'm still not sure I want to work for you."
"Why?"
"Because you tricked me, you jerked me around. Okay, you got burned by some other detectives. But there were other ways to figure out I'm legitimate. I can't shake the feeling you liked that whole elaborate game, that you really got off on your Mary Browne disguise. I feel like a little mouse, batted back and forth in some cat's paws. Besides, you're bright, you must have connections if you worked for politicians. You can probably find out as much as I can, even more."
"It's true, I'm successful-more successful than you, for a fact."
"Why, thanks for pointing that out," Tess said dryly.
"But when it comes to dealing with people who have power over me-especially white people who have power over me-I lose it. I either get all bashful and tongue-tied, or I start screaming lawsuit. Neither approach is particularly effective."
Tess had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if she knew exactly what Jackie meant. The principal at Gwynn's Falls Middle School, taciturn Keisha, Beale's uncooperative neighbors, even the Nelsons. They had thwarted her, been less helpful than they might have been, and all because of her race.
"Okay, quid pro quo," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"I'll take your case, but I want more than money from you. I want your help, talking to people who won't talk to me, on another case I'm working."
Jackie's look was contemptuous. "You mean poor black folks, don't you? What, do you think there's some secret language I speak that will get me by? That some poor black kid is going to talk to a sister, who happens to be driving a Lexus and wearing the kind of clothes I wear?"
"Maybe. I am willing to bet you can convince a middle school principal that you're a particular kid's next of kin, which is something I can't pull off. That's a start. We'll see how it goes from there."
Their entrees arrived and Jackie attacked her pompano en croute with a ferocity Tess found admirable, even familiar. She was bent over her meal with the same intensity. But Jackie could concentrate on her food without losing her train of thought.
"So, if I help you on this other case, do I get a discount?"
"Nope," Tess said cheerfully. "The wages of sin, for not being straight with me from the beginning. Consider it a fraud surcharge."
Finally, Jackie smiled, but it was a cool smile, even a little supercilious. "Good for you. You've already learned one of the cardinal rules for the small businesswoman. Don't give it away-unless you have to."
"Did you ever give it away?"
"No. But then I was good from the very beginning."