Chapter 24
As she left Starbucks, Tess once again had the sensation that an overstuffed sofa was following her down the sidewalk. Yes, there was Mrs. Blossom, trying to be inconspicuous on the south side of Baltimore Street. Tess couldn’t fault her clothing – a large, flowery dress was not particularly out of place in downtown Baltimore – but there was something about Mrs. Blossom that drew the eye, a delicacy of movement, not unlike the tutu’ed hippos in Fantasia. Caught, she gave a cheerful wave, and dashed across the street to join Tess. For a large woman, she moved pretty fast.
“You only had to do the surveillance exercise once, Mrs. Blossom,” Tess said.
“But I keep getting caught,” she panted out, a little breathless from her sprint through traffic. “Except the other night, but I lost you for part of the evening, so I didn’t think I should count that.”
“The other night?”
“Yes, when you were with Selene Waites. And then you came out of the bar with Derek Nichole. I like him.” She frowned. “Well, I liked him better, before he started doing movies with so much cursing. I don’t like cursing.”
“You – you followed me to New York?” Tess had been trying to do a walk-and-talk, hurrying toward her car – and a meter that was due to expire any moment – but this conversation was worth slowing down for, even if it meant a twenty-seven-dollar parking fine. “All the way in?”
“Yes, although it seemed kind of cheating because you weren’t driving, so you wouldn’t have been as alert. I didn’t go into the restaurant-”
Tess made a conscious effort not to smile at the thought of Mrs. Blossom trying to make her way into that achingly hip eatery. That would have been something to see. Then again, they might have mistaken her for the latest drag queen to play Edna Turnblad in Broadway’s version of Hairspray and welcomed her as a star.
“And, you know, it’s so hard to park in New York, I just kept circling. I know that’s not a good technique – and if you had been in there a long time, I could have run out of gas – but I decided to commit, like you told me. I got lucky, too. I had just turned on the block when I saw you come out.”
“Did you pay attention to the time? Did you see him pick me up?”
Mrs. Blossom fished through her purse, a bright purple bag the size of a small suitcase, and pulled out a memo pad. “It was about eleven-thirty when you went in, ten to midnight when you came out.” She looked up from the pad, her eyes sorrowful. “Miss Monaghan, you looked like you’d been drinking. That doesn’t seem very professional.” Mrs. Blossom consulted her memo pad again, all Joe Friday just-the-facts seriousness. “At twelve-ten A.M. – should I use military time?”
“No, you can use A.M. and P.M.” Tess didn’t want to bother with the math.
“At twelve-ten A.M., the Town Car arrived at a hotel.”
“Name of the hotel?”
“The SoHo Grand.”
That was the hotel where Selene had been seen drinking later, where Derek Nichole was staying.
“I found a parking place around the corner and went into the bar, off the hotel lobby. It was tricky, because the lobby is on the second floor, and I couldn’t be sure I would see you coming and going, but I figured if I sat next to the window, I’d be able to see you leave. I went up there and had a nonalcoholic beer. It cost ten dollars! And they were so rude, made me wait forever, and it was loud. I don’t know why people go to places like that. But I could see the lobby from where I sat, and pretty soon, Derek Nichole and Selene Waites showed up, and they were given one of the sofas, although the table said it was ‘reserved.’ She’s so pretty in person. And little. Is she as sweet as she looks?”
“Hmmmmm,” Tess said, trying to be diplomatic. “What did they do?”
“They came in and ordered drinks – a beer for him, a cocktail for her, although she kept drinking cranberry juice – and they were talking very low to each other, kind of serious. I tried to hear what they were saying, but I wasn’t close enough. And then the bar closed, so I went outside and got in my car, and waited until I saw the Town Car come back. That was about four A.M., and this time, it was Mr. Nichole who brought you out.”
It was oddly embarrassing to think about Mrs. Blossom watching her drugged body being hauled around New York like a sack of potatoes. True, it wasn’t her fault that she had been dosed with roofies – or ketamine or GBH – but it was still humiliating. Where had she been during the interval, in Derek Nichole’s hotel room? If the two had wanted privacy, hadn’t that put a crimp in their plans? Was Selene that desperate to drink that she had to knock Tess out in order to party hearty? Nothing really added up. She thought about the multiple gossip items, her text messages to Ben – what was Selene doing?
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Blossom – are you sure Selene was drinking cranberry juice? The gossip columns said she was drinking it with vodka and Red Bull.”
“Oh, she ordered a drink, but she had a bottle of Nantucket Nectar with her, and she drank from that. The waitperson tried to give her a hard time about bringing in an outside beverage, so she tucked her bottle under the table and ordered a drink, but she kept sneaking sips from the bottle under the table and barely touched her drink.” She snorted. “I don’t blame her. They probably charge fifteen dollars for a glass of cranberry juice!”
They had arrived at Tess’s parking spot, but she was too fascinated by Mrs. Blossom’s story to worry about the meter. The woman may have signed up for the class to give herself something to do on Monday nights, but she seemed to be a bit of a prodigy. A woman such as Mrs. Blossom, properly trained, could learn to be so visible as to be invisible.
“Look,” Mrs. Blossom said, pointing skyward.
They were at the corner of Charles and Baltimore streets, where the downtown outpost of Johns Hopkins ran an old-fashioned electronic news ribbon around the top of the building. The headlines were written by the staff of the Beacon-Light, and they were well known throughout Baltimore for their wordy obtuseness and not infrequent grammatical errors. But the message that had caught Mrs. Blossom’s eye was crystal clear to Tess: MAN WANTED IN TV SET MURDER KILLED BY POLICE IN STANDOFF.
Part of Tess’s mind couldn’t help deconstructing the headline. “TV set murder” – that made it sound as if a large Magnavox had been the weapon. Besides, Greer hadn’t been killed on set; she had died in the production office, which was across town from the soundstage. But even as she picked those nits, Tess had no problem discerning the larger meaning – Greer’s boyfriend had been killed when police officers caught up with him. If running was a good marker of guilt, in Tull’s worldview, then resisting arrest was an unsigned confession. So, a dunker for Tull. The obvious answer was the obvious answer.
She was happy for her friend but disappointed that she would never have a chance to talk to JJ Meyerhoff about his ex-fiancée, Greer, and whether she had any connection to Mann of Steel’s problems.