Butchers Hill (2 page)

"Shit, old man, you
ain't gonna use that," the skinny one said, but he
didn't seem as cocky as before.

"That what you think?"
He fired straight up, into the sky.

"He's gonna kill us.
He's gonna kill us all," the girl screamed and
began running. She was fast, that girl, faster than the rest, although
her twin was almost as fast. The two of them were at the end of the
block and turning north before he knew what was happening. The chubby
one took off then, while the tall, skinny one tugged at the littlest
one, the snot-nose one, who seemed frozen not so much in fear as in
open-mouthed stupidity.

"C'mon,
Donnie," the skinny one pleaded, yanking at his arm.
"The old man's got a gun. He ain't
messing with us this time."

Snot-nose hesitated for a moment, then began
heading toward the corner in a clumsy, loping stride, more or less
keeping even with Skinny's long-legged sprint. He could have
caught them, if he wanted. Instead, he fired again, then again, the gun
a living thing in his hand, separate and apart from him. A car was
turning onto Fairmount as they ran, someone raised a window and shouted
to stop all the noise down there, and there was a backfire, a young
boy's voice screaming, another backfire, and the gun just
kept shooting. The noises all jumbled together, he couldn't
tell which had come first. The littlest one stumbled and fell, and now
the skinny one was screaming, high and thin like a girl.

And then the street was empty, except for a
crumpled little pile of clothes near the corner.

He looked at the gun, still held out at
shoulder height in his strangely steady right hand, but quiet now. He
was waiting for something to happen, then realized it already had.

He went inside and put the gun beneath a
pile of quilts on the floor in Annie's closet, a door he
seldom opened. He grabbed his broom and his dustpan, put on some shoes
to protect his feet. By the time the police and the paramedics arrived,
he was almost done sweeping up the broken glass from in front of his
house. Wouldn't you know, this would be the one time they
would get here so fast, when he had so much to do.

"Give me a minute," he
said, and the police officers, speechless for once, waited as his broom
hunted down the last few bits of glass and trash on his little patch of
Fairmount.

"Okay," he said, leaning
the broom and dustpan against the stoop, knowing he would never see
them again. "I guess I'm ready."

T
ess
Monaghan's blotter-size appointment calendar was the largest,
whitest space she had ever contemplated. Thirty boxes of June days,
vast as the Siberian steppes, stretching across her desk until it
seemed as if there were room for nothing else. She thought she might go
blind staring at it, yet she couldn't tear her gaze away.
Thirty perfect squares, all awaiting things to do and places to go, and
only today's, the fourth, had a single mark on it:

There was also a doodle in the lower
left-hand corner, which she thought a pretty good likeness of a man in
a wheelchair taking a long roll off a short pier. In terrible taste, of
course, unless one recognized the man as her erstwhile employer, Tyner
Gray, in which case the drawing took on a droll charm.

She had told Tyner that June
wasn't the right time to open her own office, but he had
pushed and nagged as usual, promising enough work from his law office
to carry her through those early dry months. At her darker
moments—this one would qualify—she believed all he
had really wanted was to free up a desk for his summer clerk.

Well, she had only opened for business last
week. One expected things to be a little slow just after Memorial Day
weekend. Then again, July and August would be quieter still, as most of
Baltimore escaped to Ocean City and the Delaware beaches.

"But not us, Esskay.
We're working girls," she told her greyhound, who
was doing a fair imitation of a Matisse odalisque from her post on the
lumpy mauve sofa. "The Pink Nude." No,
"The Black, Hairy Nude with the Pinkish Belly." A
one-time racer, Esskay was now a world-champion napper, putting in
about eighteen hours a day between the sofa here and the bed at home.
Esskay could afford to sleep. She didn't have overhead.

Overhead—now there was a
wonderfully apt word. Tess was over her head all right, deep in debt
and sinking a little more each day. So far, her Quicken accounting
program showed only outgo at Tess Monaghan, Inc., technically Keyes
Investigations, Inc. The business took its name from a retired city cop
whose credential was essential if Tess wanted to operate as a licensed
private detective in the state of Maryland. She had never actually met
Edward Keyes, who put in the incorporation papers in return for a small
percentage of her profits. She hoped he was a patient man.

But now her first prospective client, a Mr.
Beale, was due in ten minutes. She suspected he would be pathologically
punctual, given that he had literally tried to be here yesterday. He
had called just after eight the night before, as if his need for a
private detective were a craving that required instant gratification.
Tess, who had stayed late in a futile attempt to make her new office
look more officelike, wasn't in a position to turn down any
client, but she thought it wiser to let this one stew in his own juices
overnight. Or
un
stew, as
the case may be. Beale had sounded the slightest bit drunk over the
phone, his words pronounced with the elaborate care of the inebriated.
Tess had given him a nine-thirty appointment, after much ostentatious
fretting about the havoc it would wreak in her busy, busy day. Yes
indeed, she had cut her morning workout by almost thirty minutes,
rowing her Alden racing shell only as far as Fort McHenry.

Last night, in the almost-summer twilight,
the office had looked clean and professional, a few easy touches away
from being a first-class operation. Today, with bright sun slanting
through the plate glass window, it looked like what it
was—the bottom floor of a too-often-renovated rowhouse in one
of the iffier blocks on Butchers Hill. Almost 100 years old, the
building had long ago buckled with fatigue, its linoleum floors
rippling like tide pools, the doors and the jambs barely on speaking
terms. Eggshell paint, even three coats, could only do so much.

If Tess had more money, she might have done
better by the old storefront, bringing in real furniture instead of
family castoffs. Of course, if she had more money she would have taken
a better place in a better neighborhood, a bonafide office with wooden
floors, exposed brick walls, maybe a harbor view. In nicer
surroundings, her junk could have achieved funk status. Here, it was
just junk.

Her Aunt Kitty's office-warming
gift of framed family photographs, seemingly so whimsical and inspired,
only made things worse. What type of businesswoman had a tinted
photograph of herself smeared with chocolate, holding fast to the neck
of a coin-operated flying rabbit while her grandmother tried to pry her
off? Impulsively, Tess yanked this off the wall, only to be reminded
that the enlarged photo hid the small wall safe, where her gun rested
in solitary confinement. Petty cash would be housed there, too, as soon
as she had some.

A hand rapped at the door, with such force
it sounded as if it might crash through the glass pane at its center.
Eager-beaver Beale, ten minutes early by the neon
"It's Time for a Haircut" barbershop
clock that hung on the wall, another contribution from her aunt.
"Come in," Tess shouted over her shoulder, looking
around quickly to see if there was anything else she could hang over
the safe. The doorknob rattled impatiently, reminding her that she kept
it locked, a sad but necessary precaution in Butchers Hill.

"Right there," she said,
placing the picture back on the wall. She could find something more
appropriate later. Poker-playing dogs were always nice.

"Miss Monaghan?"

The man she let into her office was
barrel-chested with skinny legs that seemed ridiculously spindly
beneath such a large bulk. He stepped around Tess, as if encased in an
invisible force field that required him to keep great distances between
himself and others, then settled slowly into the chair opposite her
desk. His joints creaked audibly, the Tin Man after a long, hard rain.
No it was another Oz character he reminded her of, the lesser-known
Gnome King from the later books in the series. He had the same rotund
girth atop skinny legs. What else? The Gnome King had been deathly
afraid of eggs.

"So this is Keyes,
Inc.," her visitor said. "Would you be
Keyes?"

"I'm his partner, Tess
Monaghan. Mr. Keyes is, uh, semi-retired."

"I'm retired
myself," the man said, eyes fixed on his own lap. For all
Tess's last-minute worrying, nothing in the surroundings seem
to register with him—not the furnishings, not the photograph,
not even Esskay, who had opened her eyes and was doing her adorable
bit, just in case the visitor wanted to toss her one of the biscuits
that Tess kept in a cookie jar on her desk.

"I guess you know who I
am." His voice was meek, but his chest, already so large,
seem to swell with self-importance.

She didn't. Should she? He was an
elderly black man, which in his case meant he had skin the color of a
stale Hershey bar—dark brown, with a chalky undercast. He
wore a brown suit two shades lighter than his face, and although it was
clean and neat, it wasn't quite right. Too tight in the
shoulders, slightly baggy in the legs and paired with a rose-pink shirt
and magenta tie. He held a once-white Panama hat, now yellow as a
tortilla chip. No woman had watched him dress this morning, Tess
decided.

"I'm afraid I
don't," she admitted.

"Luther Beale," he said,
as if his full name would be enough. It wasn't. She did hear
in his voice the same ponderous, overenunciated quality that had led
her to think he was drunk on the phone.

"Luther Beale?"

"Luther Beale," he
repeated solemnly.

"I'm afraid I
don't…"

"You might know me as the Butcher
of Butchers Hill," he said stiffly, and Tess was embarrassed
at the little noise she made, halfway between a squeal and a gasp. The
nickname had done the trick. In fact, her former employer, the defunct
Baltimore
Star
, had bestowed it on him. The
Star
had been good at bestowing nicknames, while the surviving paper, the
stodgy
Beacon-Light
, was
good only at attracting them. The
Blight
,
most called it, although
Blite
was beginning to gain currency, thanks to a new media column in the
city's alternative weekly.

Luther "the Butcher"
Beale. The Butcher of Butchers Hill. For a few weeks, he had been
famous, the leading man in a national morality play. Luther Beale, evil
vigilante or besieged old man, depending on one's point of
view. Luther Beale. His name had been invoked more often on talk radio
than Hillary Clinton's. Hadn't "60
Minutes" done a piece on him? No, that had been Roman
Welzant, the Snowball Killer, acquitted almost two decades ago in the
shooting death of a teenager tossing snowballs at his home outside the
city limits a decade earlier. Beale had killed a much younger boy for
breaking one of his windows. Or was it a windshield? No matter. The
main thing was that a county jury let Welzant walk, while a city jury
sent Beale away.

"Yes, Mr. Beale. I remember
your…incident."

"Do you remember how it
ended?"

"You were
convicted—manslaughter, I guess, or some lesser charge, not
murder, if you're sitting here today—and you went
to prison."

Beale leaned forward in his chair and wagged
a finger in Tess's face, an old man used to teaching lessons
to insolent young folks. "No, no, no. I got
probation
for the manslaughter charge. It was the gun charge I had to do time
for. I killed a boy, a terrible, terrible thing, but they would have
let me stay on the streets for that, because I had no intent. They put
me away for using a gun in the city limits. Mandatory sentencing.
Isn't that something?"

Tess was inclined to agree. It was indeed
something, something twisted and warped. But she recognized the
question as a rhetorical one and sat back, waiting. She had met people
like Beale before. They were like one of those minitrain rides at the
zoo or a shopping mall, just going around and around on the same track
all day long.

"So what can I do for you, Mr.
Beale?"

"You know, I was sixty-one when I
went to prison. I'm sixty-six now, out for three months. This
neighborhood is worse than it was when I went in. I guess even hell can
get hotter. Which is why I took notice when I saw a nice girl like you
opening up a business here. I hope you have some protection, Miss,
something besides that skinny dog. You should have a gun. Because you
can bet the little boys 'round here have them. Yet I
can't have a gun any more. I'm a convicted felon.
Isn't that something?"

This time, he seemed to expect an answer.
Tess tried to think of a noncommittal, noninflammatory reply.
"It's the law."

"The law! The law is foolish. The
Bible says thou shalt not kill, not thou shalt not use a firearm in the
city limits. You know I'd never done a thing in my life
before they arrested me for shooting that boy? They looked, believe me
they looked. They wanted me so bad. I never understood that, why did
those police officers and those prosecutors want me so bad? It was as
if locking me up would make everything right in the city. But I had no
record. I didn't even have an unpaid parking ticket. You know
what they found on me, after all that looking and looking?"