“Between us”-Tess leaned forward, a finger on her lips, knowing her words would get back to Pat before the day was out-“sooner than he might think.”

“You engaged then?” That was Marley. Tess had suddenly dropped off Gene Fulton’s radar. Some men live to poach. Others figure it’s too much trouble. Fulton was a lazy bastard, bless his heart.

“Practically,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a jeweler’s box beneath my tree this Christmas.”

Which was the truth, because she was sure Jackie would, in fact, find the perfect pair of earrings.

“Huh,” Fulton said. “Well, don’t be a stranger. I’ve got my beeper, Marley, anyone needs me.”

Tess was left with the files. The temptation was to plunge in, but she had learned to be systematic in such things. One by one, bird by bird, she’d go through each report, looking for the syllable Dom, the word sugar or an owner’s name that correlated. On a computer, she could have done this in seconds, but Tess preferred paper files. She was no Luddite, but she knew the trade-offs in using computers. A search could be too targeted, too easy. On the Internet, plugged into a search engine, one traded serendipity for straight-up dippiness, for page after page of worthless hits, while the thing one wanted might be tantalizingly out of reach, a single keystroke off. Getting lost had always been part of the journey for her.

Within an hour, she had three viable candidates-Hummers Café, whose owner was listed as Harold Sugarman; Bo’s Tavern, which had started life as Dom’s Tavern; and Domenick’s, owned by Lawrence Purdy. Although the last seemed the most promising, it had the skimpiest file of the three, with none of the usual neighborhood complaints about noise and after-hours operation.

“Why’s the file so thin? Others are inches thick.”

Marley had a smug, knowing look. “They’re either very well-behaved, or”-she glanced around, saw no one, decided to lower her voice anyway-“very connected.”

“I thought the bribery and fraud trial against the old boss and Billy Madonna would have slowed down any such activity.”

“You can chase a few bears away from a honey pot, but as long as it’s there, the bears are going to keep coming back. A lot of bar owners are willing to pay for special favors. An inspector would have to be almost inhumane to be tempted.”

The secretary’s little malaprop might have afforded Tess some pleasure, if it weren’t for the implication. “You’re not saying my dad-”

“Pat Monaghan? Oh no, Tess, I didn’t mean anything like that. Honest as the day is long. But he’s one of the old guys, been here almost thirty years now. He made a career here. It’s the ones who come and go who are trouble.”

Tess checked her watch. “Ten-thirty. I guess it’s too early to start visiting bars.”

“Not necessarily. Under law, you can open as early as six A.M.”

“You know, I’ve never actually needed to know the legal time to start.” The thought was oddly cheering. Obviously, she wasn’t anywhere near as decadent as she sometimes feared.

Hummer’s Café, out on Arabia Avenue, was closed and the dusty windows indicated it had been a long time since anyone had worked in the small frame house. Tess had slightly better luck at Bo’s, once known as Dom’s, which appeared to have taken its original name from the Latin dominatus-to rule, to exert control, to charge people ridiculous amounts of money for drinks, simply because they were served by men and women in rubber suits.

Yet Bo’s, which happened to be in one of East Baltimore ’s old synagogues, seemed strangely tepid to Tess, sort of the TGIFridays version of an S-M club. Of course, it was only noon when she arrived there, not exactly the hour at which such clubs thrive, and she did not have much experience in these matters. Like most well-brought-up women of her generation, Tess had practiced her masochism privately, within the confines of relationships.

But she was pretty sure that S-and-M shouldn’t be so…clean, so desultory, so absent of shock value. Baltimore just didn’t do debauchery well, but it kept trying.

The manager was not happy to have a private investigator on the premises, but he eventually stopped running his long, twitchy fingers through his dyed blond hair and got down to cases.

“I’ve been here two years,” said the man, who had identified himself only as Hurst. “Not Horst,” he had made a point of saying, “ Hurst.” He was extremely tall, perhaps six-foot-six, rail-thin, and tricked out with so many nervous mannerisms that he seemed to be one gigantic tic of a man. “The turnover is constant, but no different from any other bar or restaurant in the city. In fact, I think we keep our people a bit longer. Our customers tip terrifically, which really doesn’t make sense. If you were going to stiff someone, wouldn’t it be in a place where you were supposed to be, um, in command?”

“Would you have noticed if a girl just disappeared one day and never came back?”

“It happens. It happens all the time. It’s not the kind of job where people give two weeks notice and ask for references, you know what I mean? Do you have a photo?”

Tess didn’t want to show him the photo of Jane Doe’s corpse. It wasn’t only that it seemed less than helpful-she couldn’t imagine anyone making an ID from the battered, bulging face. But the photo seemed pornographic to her, degrading.

She showed him the police sketch instead, although she doubted it was a good likeness. The drawing was a little flat, but it had the particulars-the shape of the face, the high cheekbones, the large eyes beneath the winged brows, the archer’s bow of a mouth, with its plump lower lip.

“Pretty,” Hurst said. “But it doesn’t ring any bells.”

Tess noticed his pupils were pinpricks set in amber, that his hands kept returning to his lank blond locks. A man with his own problems. Bo’s clientele probably came for the speed and stayed for the decor. She wondered how long Hurst had been helping himself to the house wares.

“I never knew this place existed before I checked the liquor licenses this morning, but I know there are bars that try to draw as little scrutiny as possible, for their clientele’s sake. Does Bo’s have a nickname? A kind of code name used by the people who come here, or work here?”

Hurst looked mystified. “Why would a place named Bo’s need something like that? We have tourists wander in who think we’re a crab house as it is.” He giggled. “And I guess we are, sometimes. Not everyone is as clean as he should be, you know.”

“Does anyone ever call this the Sugar House?”

“I should hope not.” He made a face. “That reminds me of that hideous song. Besides, whatever this place is, it isn’t sweet.”

Tess looked around. It was so perfect for her purposes-an S-and-M bar that trafficked in crystal meth, which had once been called Dom’s. But if Bo’s wasn’t sweet, neither did it seem particularly threatening.

“Who comes here?” she asked Hurst. “I’m not asking for names, I’m just curious. Is there really a demand for this kind of place in Baltimore?”

His bony shoulders popped up and down in what might have been a shrug on a person moving at normal speeds. “Kids come for the music and…side benefits. But we get a lot of fat, middle-aged guys from Linthicum. Go figure.”

Tess felt like saying: “Well, I’m tracking down a lead that came from a pathological liar. Go figure.” But it was only noon. She might as well check out the last place on her list, Domenick’s in Southwest Baltimore. Her mind was already skipping ahead to lunch, trying to remember if there was a decent place left to eat in Sowebo since Mencken’s Cultured Pearl shut down.

Southwest Baltimore was an object lesson in what can happen when a neighborhood’s ballyhooed renaissance falls short of the mark. Dingy and defeated, it reminded Tess of someone who jumps from one rooftop to the next, only to dangle by his fingernails from the downspout. Most of the restaurants that had cropped up in the neighborhood’s hour of hope had moved on, as had their bohemian clientele, artists attracted by the low rents. Hampden, up north, was the happening neighborhood now. No more Mencken’s Cultured Pearl, or Telltale Hearth, or Gypsy Café. At one point, the city had even put H. L. Mencken’s house on the block. Officials backed off, claiming it was a misunderstanding, but Tess never doubted they would have sold the place if they could have. The sad fact was that the biggest tourist site in the area was “The Corner,” an open-air drug market immortalized in a book by the same name. Politicians held press conferences there and the city routinely swept it clean, as if it were the only place in Baltimore to buy crack cocaine. When Hollywood came to town to film The Corner, the real corner wasn’t even good enough. The caravan of movie trailers-and, more important, the trail of money left in their wake-had ended up in East Baltimore.