“I got these from Memorial Stadium,” he said. “The president of the United States sat in them on Opening Day.”

“Which president?” Tess asked. “Which opening day?”

“Well, one of them. Christ, I don’t know.”

“All the seats from Memorial Stadium were removed under supervision and sold at auction last spring, in preparation for the demolition. Did you buy those?”

“Um, well, a guy… a guy gave ‘em to me, as a gift.”

“Where did he get them?”

“I guess he bought them.”

“The seats are cloth and they’re stamped school #201 on the back.”

Fuzzy looked, feigning amazement. “What do you know?”

Tess sighed. It was a given in her line of work that sometimes the client was as big a cheat as the person she was asked to expose. You had to be capable of thinking like a rip-off artist before you could imagine catching one. In fact, most of her clients were a little bent. She wondered if other private detectives had the same problem. Gretchen O’Brien, for example, with her no-doubt-shiny office and her claims to professionalism.

“I don’t want a row of old school auditorium seats. I don’t want another oyster tin-”

“How about an old Park’s Sausage sign, for that weird dog of yours?”

Now that was tempting, even if her dog was named for the other local pork product. She heard the old commercial in her head and felt a twinge of nostalgia. More Park’s sausages, Mom-puh-leeze? But no, she had to be firm.

“I want money, Mr. Iglehart. Cash, or a certified check, because you bounced a check to me in September, remember? Which is illegal, by the way. I could have taken out a complaint on you then.”

“I had an awful summer. Awful. Sometimes I think there ain’t no fish left in that bay.”

Tess thought the problem might be as simple as his stand’s name. Even if one wasn’t ichthyophobic, fuzzy fish didn’t inspire confidence. But she was in no mood to offer marketing tips to the small-business man.

“I’ll give you until February first, and then I’m going to have to call a bill collector. Which means I get less money, and then I’m going to be really pissed off. In fact, I may take a tumble right here, to make up the shortfall.”

She pointed at the puddle next to the refrigeration unit with the toe of her suede boot, careful not to make contact. “You could at least get that fixed. Haven’t you learned anything from all this?”

“Can’t afford it,” Fuzzy said mournfully.

Tess walked down the aisle, glad to be away from the morose stares of the dead fish on ice. How did people eat things with scales? Not to mention oysters, mussels, clams-and crabs. Crabs were the worst. Had anyone in Baltimore ever taken a hard look at its unofficial mascot? Tess was thankful for the excuse of her allergies. Otherwise, she would have been forced almost daily to justify her instinctive aversion to shellfish. She wondered if there was some contrary little girl up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, grateful to be lactose-intolerant because it got her off the hook for eating chocolate.

But Tess needed only a few steps for her appetite to revive. It was almost lunchtime, by her stomach, if not by the clock. She stopped at a sandwich stand and ordered a turkey sub, a bag of sour-cream-and-onion Utz potato chips, and a sixteen-ounce Coca-Cola, frowning when the counterman asked, “You mean a Diet Coke?”

“Regular,” she growled, miffed by the assumption that all women drank diet cola. “And extra hots on the sub.”

“I thought I was the only one who got extra hots,” someone behind her said. The guttural Baltimore accent-Ah thought Ah was the only one who got extra hots-belonged to a tall homely woman, whose daisy-patterned scarf didn’t quite cover the short red-pink hair she had coaxed around two small pin curls at her temples.

“A cheese steak can hold its own, but the turkey needs a little help,” Tess said agreeably, glancing down at the woman’s feet, curious to know the fashion choices made by a woman who wore pin curls in public. This extra-hots fan wore a pair of men’s Oxfords, broken at the backs and untied, and pantyhose that sagged on gaunt, bony shins. The hair suggested a South Baltimore housewife, making a quick trip to the market, but the shoes indicated someone who was homeless. Or a gentle lunatic, on the lam from an overworked family member who had dropped her guard, exhausted by the constant demands of caretaker duty.

“I sure would like me one of those turkey sammiches,” the woman said, staring openmouthed at Tess’s white-papered sub as the counterman slid it into a paper sack.

“You want a turkey sub? Or just money?” Tess preferred to buy food for panhandlers instead of handing over cash.

“I sure would like a sammich,” the woman repeated, eyes fixed on the sack now, literally smacking her lips. “I like turkey.” Ah lüke turkey.

Tess handed the sub to the woman. “You want the chips too? And something to drink?”

“The barbecue ones. And a Mountain Dew.”

Tess nodded to the counterman, who rang up another package of chips, another bottle of soda.

“You take this sandwich, I’ll wait for another one. You got a place to stay around here? Because-”

The woman had already scuttled away, the bag tucked under her arm like a football. Still, Tess felt good about her little burst of charity, until she caught Fuzzy Iglehart at the end of the aisle, smiling crookedly at her. Now that he knew what a soft touch she was, it would be even harder to collect.

Work, paying work, was still on Tess’s mind when she called on Tyner after lunch, to see if he had anything to throw her way. After twenty months on her own, she still wasn’t used to the ebb and flow of self-employment. Her taxes for last year showed a respectable income, more than she had ever made in the newspaper trade. But the house seemed to consume every dollar, and this year had gotten off to a slow start. January, to quote Fuzzy Iglehart, was terrible, and while February always brought a spate of work, it tended toward suspicious spouses staking out their partners on Valentine’s Day. Perhaps she was more dependent on her occasional spasms of publicity to drum up new business than she liked to think. Maybe she should have taken Jim Yeager up on his offer.

And maybe she should have a small hole drilled between her eyes, so what little common sense she had could dribble out once and for all.

“I’ve got some courthouse stuff-property records, incorporation records-that I could get my paralegal to do, but she’s snowed under, so I’ll throw it to you,” said a strangely agreeable Tyner. The relationship with Kitty had mellowed him, but Tess wasn’t sure Tyner was meant to be mellow. Without his usual astringency he was a bit like paint thinner that could no longer thin paint. “Easy stuff.”

“I’m no enemy of the easy buck.”

“So, what else is going on?” he asked her, trying to do the fond-uncle thing. But Tess, as she often reminded Tyner, had nine uncles: five on her father’s side, four on her mother’s. She wasn’t auditioning any new ones.

“Not much. You?”

“I went to a community meeting for Mount Vernon businesses and residents last night. People are concerned that there’s been no arrest in the attack on Shawn Hayes, and this rumor that it’s connected to the Poe killing only fans the flames. The gay men who live in the neighborhood want to know if the assault was motivated by his lifestyle. Everyone else secretly wants it to be exactly that.”

“I can’t believe people here are that hateful.”

“Not hateful, scared, and desperate to believe they’re immune from misfortune. They rationalize it can’t happen to them-because they’re smarter, more prudent, with better security systems. Because they’re richer, or they’re poorer. It’s funny. It’s not just rape victims who get blamed for being victims. I’ve noticed that people who fear certain things will turn themselves inside out, trying to find a reason it won’t happen to them. They often find that reason in the victim’s behavior. ”Oh, he went out late at night.“ ”She talked to strangers.“ That kind of thing.”