Free Charm City by Laura Lippman

motif—lassos, spurs, and horseshoes in shades of
copper and gold, against a navy-and-ivory background.
    "Cool," Tess said.
"Now can you make a quarter come out of my ear?"
    "I've got better tricks
than that." Whitney arranged the scarf so it filled in the
expanse of flesh without making Tess look as if she were a
cross-dressing Boy Scout. "There, that creates interest
around the face, as they say."
    "It does make the
outfit," Tess admitted grudgingly. "But if they
didn't want me as a reporter, why would they want to hire me
as an investigator?
    Whitney put her arm around her shoulders,
joining her in the mirror. Cool Snow White and flushed Rose Red stared
back. White bread and rye bread, baked potato and potato hash.
    "Half the editors at the Beacon
Light today weren't even there when
the Star folded," Whitney reminded her. "The other half can
barely remember what their wives look like, much less the hundreds of
supplicants they've turned down over the years.
You'll be a whole new person to them, someone with the power
to turn them down. By the
way, I hinted you might not be able to take the job, because
you're so much in demand."
    "Wives?" That was Tyner,
who seemed to be enjoying his temporary membership in this
girls' club. Tess expected him to start wielding a lipstick
or mascara brush in her direction any moment. "I never
thought I'd catch you being a sexist, Whitney. You mean
spouses."
    "No, I mean wives .
Little women. Helpmates. There's only one woman in the upper
ranks at the Beacon-Light ,
the managing editor, and she's got the biggest balls of all
of them. She had a husband once, maybe two, but I think they went into
the federal witness protection program. Now she makes do with a little
slave boy at home, running around in nothing but a ruffled apron, with
a Scotch and water at the ready when she comes clomping home at ten or
eleven."
    "It doesn't sound so bad
to me," Tess said.
    "Well, that's what you
have, isn't it?"
     
    The Beacon-Light 's
founders, the Pfieffer family, had been savvy about many things. Real
estate was not one of them. The family had calculated on the
city's center moving west over time, beyond the great
department stores along the Howard Street corridor. So after World War
II, when the expanding paper needed a new building, Pfieffer III had
built the plant on Saratoga Street, near the ten-story
Hutzler's, the grandest of all the stores. The result was a
marvel of blandness, a building of tan bricks with no discernible
style. Its only charm had been its real beacon, a Bakelite lighthouse
revolving on a small pedestal above the entrance. The lighthouse had
been torn down in the '70s and was now the Holy Grail among
local collectors. The City Life museum was dying to find it, but rumor
had it that a former Star columnist had unearthed it at a flea market and kept it on the third
floor of his Bolton Hill townhouse, where he performed quasi-voodoo
rituals intended to make Baltimore the country's first
no-newspaper town.
    Tess glanced up at the empty pedestal as she
climbed the low, broad steps, picking her way among windblown
McDonald's wrappers and crumpled newspaper pages. The local
department stores, the few that had survived the '80s, were
long gone from downtown. A drunk was sleeping among the daffodil shoots
in an ill-kept flower bed. Squeegee kids—really, squeegee
adults, a few squeegee senior citizens—had staked out the
intersection. As the Pfieffers had predicted, the city had moved. Only
it was in the other direction, south and east, toward the water. The Beacon-Light was a lonely and inconvenient outpost on the edge of an urban
wilderness. Reporters consoled themselves with its proximity to two of
Baltimore's best dining experiences, the open stalls of
Lexington Market, and the white tablecloths of Marconi's. The Beacon-Light also was
convenient to St. Jude's shrine. According to newsroom lore,
reporters made pilgrimages there after deadline, always uttering the
same heartfelt