Baltimore Blues by Laura Lippman

might really go. You know, some of them have been there forever, long enough to forget they’re supposed to be executed. They don’t feel so complacent anymore.”
    “I can’t see how his case affects these guys, if they’re not begging to die. The law hasn’t changed.”
    “But the appeals have to run out eventually,” Jonathan insisted. “Thanos will open—”
    “The floodgates? Let me guess—your nut graph is alreadywritten. Your whole story is already written.” She spoke into her beer bottle as if it were a microphone, putting on the officious voice of a newscaster. “We begin with three moving paragraphs on one inmate—‘John Smith sits in his cell on Maryland’s Death Row, counting down the two hundred forty days left in his appeal’—a little background on Thanos, woven seamlessly in, and then, whammo! The obligatory fourth graph nut, which reads: ‘Inmates on Death Row believe Thanos’s execution opened the floodgates for a rash of executions in Maryland, where a complicated appeals process once made Death Row a misnomer.’”
    “Bitch,” Jonathan said, but there was no edge to it. As an excommunicated journalist, Tess could get away with mocking him. “Not bad, though. Maybe I’ll steal it.”
    His beeper went off and Jonathan lunged for the phone. The city desk. “No. No. Hey, I’m trying . No.” He winked at Tess. “I’m working on that right now .” Then he put down the phone, pulled her on top of him and started over, taking his time. Better, Tess thought, much better.
    Later, the room dark, six empty bottles of Molson on the bedside table, Jonathan hooked his fingers in Tess’s unbraided hair and said: “So you know this Darryl Paxton guy, don’t you? One of your rowing buddies?”
    Tess freed her hair and slid across the bed, trying to put as much distance between them as she could find on the full-size mattress. “You still working that story?”
    “Not officially.” He was cool, not at all embarrassed. That was one thing about Jonathan. His unabashed ambition, his sheer candor about his motives, made his manipulation and callousness almost charming.
    “But you could be, if you got some wonderful stuff, I suppose.” Tess was determined to be as cool as he was, a poker face. “Sorry. I don’t have any wonderful stuff.”
    “You know something, though,” he wheedled. “Maybe a little bit more about the motive? Everyone knows it was over a woman, but we don’t have any specifics. Did Abramowitz make a pass at her? Was he doing her?”
    “Can’t help you, Jonathan.”
    “A name.”
    “No.”
    “A great detail—one fabulous detail no one else has. Something about Paxton. Does he have a ferocious temper? Maybe a history of punching people who piss him off? Where’s he from originally? I could work sources, see if he had a history as a juvie.”
    Tess sat still. She wouldn’t even shake her head yes or no.
    “We could go with the angle on Paxton hiring an ex-Olympic rower to defend him, and getting a rowing buddy to help investigate the case.” He smiled, not very pleasantly. “Oh yeah. I called Joey Dumbarton today to see what else he knew. He’s a good guy, gave me the tip about the sign-in sheet. But he had already talked to someone today and was tired of being bugged. He called you a babe, by the way.”
    “Well, that’s the only reason I’m doing this, to meet eligible men.”
    “The rowing angle could make your friend look stupid. Irrational.”
    Tess shrugged. It was good for a paragraph. Not even Jonathan could build it into an entire story.
    He got up, pulling on his clothes. “I would have come by anyway. I missed you. Missed that body. No hard feelings?”
    “Jonathan, if I was going to have hard feelings over any rude, insensitive behavior I suffered at your hands, I’d have turned into a pillar of salt a long time ago.”
    “That’s not why Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. She turned back to look at Sodom. As a Catholic-Jew, you