“Well, there was the bracelet, remember? If it’s really made of gold and emeralds-and never mind who it belonged to or who wore it-then it has to be worth something.”
“Yes, it’s probably worth a lot to someone,” Tess agreed. “But I’m beginning to think the bracelet is only a piece.”
“Right, it’s part of a set.” Gretchen’s voice was impatient. “You told me that.”
“No, I mean it’s a piece of something larger, something that connects all this.”
Outside, the city was beginning to come awake. The traffic noise from nearby Martin Luther King Boulevard was steady now. The windows had kept them from realizing the sun was up.
“Take the key from the door and go get copies made, so we can leave the original here and Pitts won’t know someone has been here if he comes back. I’m going to repack, make sure the room looks just as it did when we discovered it.”
“Then what?” It was a good question.
“And then… and then we’re going to find out if there are some more potential members for our little club.”
“What club is that?”
She held up one of the shirts from the cache of Maryland Lottery merchandise, bright green with a wishbone insignia. “You know: Arnold Pitts screwed me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
Chapter 27
Gretchen had three keys made at a Southwest Baltimore convenience store where the owner was surprisingly blasé about such a request, so early in the day. One for Tess, one for Gretchen, and one that Tess put in an envelope and left in a mailbox at a certain Bolton Hill town house, with nothing more than a typewritten note providing the address for the door the key would open and suggesting the right time to use it.
She left a similar note-with no key, of course, for he would not need a key-at the Stone Hill home of Arnold Pitts.
Tess was not unaware, as she crept up to their doors in the winter twilight, looking around to make sure she was unobserved, that her behavior was no different from her own stalker’s. There was a dirty little thrill in skulking, in leaving anonymous notes. She didn’t want to feel it, but she did.
They had decided to leave the notes about 6 p.m., just before the two men returned home from work. This gave them a window of an hour, an hour in which no end of things could go wrong. Gretchen had suggested trying to put a contingency plan in place, involving Crow and Whitney, but Tess felt strangely confident.
“I don’t want to work with a net,” she told Gretchen, when they stopped for dinner at Baltimore ’s last surviving Roy Rogers to form their plan.
“It’s not a net, it’s common sense. If Pitts decides to go somewhere else-if he decides to flee-we’ve lost him.”
“He won’t.” Tess dredged a fry through her own mix of barbecue sauce and ketchup, feeling in control of events for the first time in days. “The note promised him something he really wants. He won’t be able to stay away.”
“I just hope you’re right.”
“I was right about following him, wasn’t I? Now it’s time to make this little piggy go wee-wee-wee all the way to Central Booking.”
Dinner finished, they returned to the house in Southwest Baltimore -and waited. There was nothing left to do now but to wait. It was strangely peaceful. They didn’t listen to the radio or make conversation, just sat in the front seat of Gretchen’s rental car and watched the night deepen around them. The street had the sodium vapor lamps used in high-crime areas, but most of them were burned out. Vagrants began making their way to the abandoned buildings, toting small paper bags and greasy sacks of take-out food, not that much different from other workingmen heading home at the end of the hard day. Shoulders slumped, heads down, they looked exhausted. Perhaps being a drug addict really was the hardest job in America.
Ensor arrived first, but then he had been told a time fifteen minutes earlier than Pitts. He drove a Mercedes-Benz, an older model the color of a robin’s egg.
“What an ugly old pile,” Gretchen said.
“But not old enough to have that charming retro thing going for it,” Tess agreed, then realized they could have been describing the car’s driver as well.
Five minutes later, Pitts’s van took the corner on two wheels and squealed to a stop.
“The whole time we were following him, I couldn’t help thinking that thing looked like a bladder,” Gretchen said.
“Really? I thought of it as a stomach,” Tess said, surprised that literal-minded Gretchen was capable of such whimsy.
Pitts jumped out and, with a quick furtive look around him, went up to the door. When he found it was already unlocked, he hesitated, his hand on the knob as if he were frozen. He must have inhaled deeply, for Tess saw the cloudy smoke of his exhale. Finally, he squared his shoulders, marching inside with a convincing air of determination.
“No guns, right?” she asked Gretchen. “You checked the permits with the state police.”
“No legal guns. There’s no way to know if one of those fuckers is carrying an illegal weapon.”
“Did you recognize Ensor? Have you seen him before?”
“No, the only one I ever dealt with was Pitts, and he never said anything about a partner. It was all between him and the Visitor, to hear him tell it.”
“Ensor and the Visitor are about the same height,” Tess said thoughtfully. “And the man who killed Yeager was tall, too.”
Gretchen had her Glock out. “Are we going in loud or quiet?” she asked.
“Quiet, I think. And remember to block the hallway to the kitchen. I don’t want either one running past us toward the rear stairs and that window in the back. If I got in that way, one of them could get out.” Although Pitts, rotund as he was, would probably get stuck if he tried to go through and would have to wait there, suspended like Pooh Bear in Rabbit’s front door.
“You ever done anything like this before?” Gretchen asked.
“Not really. You?”
“Nope.” Gretchen grinned. “I was a patrol cop. Never fired my weapon once in two years.”
“Did you take long dinner breaks?”
“I ate on my dashboard, like a real cop.”
“Coffee?”
“I prefer tea.”
“Maybe that’s why they forced you out. You clearly didn’t have the right stuff.”
Gretchen frowned, and Tess realized it was not possible to joke about this chapter in Gretchen’s history. Not now, perhaps not ever. Or perhaps simply not for her. Gretchen O’Brien was a very angry lady. It was interesting, to say the least, to be reminded of the gaps in their partnership at the precise moment they needed to trust each other, work as one.
Pitts had locked the door behind him, an interesting choice to Tess’s mind. Was he trying to keep Ensor inside? Or hoping to keep someone else from entering? No matter, she and Gretchen had their keys. They opened the door as quietly as possible, not sure where the men would be in the house.
The light was on in the foyer, and the sliding doors to the parlor were open. Tess noticed cloths had been pulled from several items-not just the Beacon-Light beacon but an old mahogany sideboard, a black velvet portrait of Johnny Unitas, and a large sign advertising Pikesville Rye, a local brand. Good, Ensor had used his head start just as they had anticipated. She and Gretchen stood as still as possible and listened, waiting for a sound that would help them close in on their quarry. They heard voices upstairs, an area they had explored all too quickly on their last visit, but it appeared to be where Pitts stored more fragile goods- antique clothes, hatboxes from the old department stores, silver from the defunct Stieff Company. She and Gretchen exchanged a look and nodded. Tess headed to the back staircase, while Gretchen crept up the front.
As she neared the top of the stairs, Tess crouched and listened. The voices appeared to be coming from a middle room, whose door was shut. Gretchen approached from the front and they stood outside the door, straining to hear. It wasn’t hard, as the voices were rising in volume with every sentence.