Butchers Hill (21 page)

"I'm going to tell you
again. I didn't kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan.
It's true, I told you a little lie at first. I
didn't think you'd be able to find the children if
you weren't dangling money in front of their noses. Once you
found 'em, I planned to tell you the truth. But all I ever
wanted to do was to talk to them, to find out why they lied, why they
didn't mention the other gunshots, or the car that turned
onto Fairmount just as Donnie died."

He finished his iced tea in one long
swallow, then immediately took the glass to the sink, rinsed it out,
and put it in the rack on the drainboard. Watching him, Tess struggled
with her own feelings. She wanted to believe him, if only because she
didn't want to be implicated in Treasure's death.
But she couldn't let him off the hook just to get herself off
the hook.

"Are you still going to work for
me?" he asked.

"The police told me you had a PBJ
for agg assault. So you're not quite the righteous man you
hold yourself out to be. You hurt someone once, almost killed him
according to the cops. Why wouldn't you do it
again?"

Beale pulled a long, gold chain from his
pocket, worrying it between his fingers the way Tess's
Monaghan relatives manipulated their rosary beads. "I told
you about my Annie, how she wanted children. But her body
wasn't kind to her. It killed the babies she wanted, and then
it killed her, the female parts turning against her. She was dying, no
way around it, and I rushed over to the hospital from work each day,
wanting only to be with her when she finally slipped away. One day, the
boss kept me late after work, some stupid thing. When I got there, an
orderly was pulling the sheet over her face."

Tess waited.

"So I pulled it down to look at
her, one last time. She was so thin at the end, she had lost most of
her hair, she didn't even look like the woman I had married,
but she was my Annie. I looked at her, and I saw her neck was bare. The
orderly, his fist was clenched, he was trying to back out of the room.
I knocked him down and I sat on him, and I beat his head against that
hospital floor until he opened his hand and gave me back my
Annie's locket. Then I pounded his head on the floor until he
was unconscious and had to be admitted to his own emergency room. When
the judge heard the whole story, he gave me PBJ."

He flipped open the locket at the end of the
chain in his hand and showed Tess the faded photo there. Luther Beale,
the young Luther Beale that Annie had known.

"He had her wedding ring, too. But
it was the locket that made me crazy."

"It's a nice picture.
You were a handsome young man." He was, although there was
something severe and cold in his face, even as a young man. Luther
Beale looked like he had come into this world feeling righteous.

"I always wonder if I should put
Annie's photo in there now. I mean, should it be the way it
was, or is it my locket now, my way of remembering her?"

Tess couldn't begin to answer that
question. How do you remember your dead? Light a candle, unveil a
stone, sit in the dark and drink tequila. Although she had tried only
the last of these three rituals, it was something she had been
struggling with for almost a year, since she had seen Jonathan Ross run
down by a taxi on a foggy morning in Fells Point. She drank tequila and
went through the dreary litany of what-ifs.
What
if they had slept in that morning. What if they had left by the front
door instead of the side. What if, what if, what if
.

She assumed Luther Beale had his own
version. What if Annie had lived? What if they had had children? Then
they might have moved, in order to find better schools, and then Luther
Beale would have been long gone from Fairmount Avenue.

"I didn't kill Donnie
Moore, Miss Monaghan. I didn't kill those twins. And if I
didn't, someone else did. I'm too damn old to serve
more time for a crime I didn't do. You still working for me,
Miss Monaghan? You believe me now?"

"I believe you didn't
kill the twins," Tess said slowly. "And I believe
you didn't mean to kill Donnie Moore. Is that good
enough?"

"It's better than what
most people think of me."

And they sat in the kitchen, waiting for the
cops to come.

T
he
cops came for Luther Beale late that afternoon. They had a search
warrant, but he wasn't being officially charged, not yet,
just taken in for questioning. Tyner suspected they had waited until
late in the day hoping Beale would be tired, presumably easier to wear
down during the interrogation. Tess thought the cops should know Luther
Beale better than that.

"But this is good for
us," Tyner told Tess, when she telephoned to say they had
taken Beale away and started searching his apartment. "I bet
they don't have any physical evidence or eyewitnesses to link
him to the twins' deaths."

"They want my files, though, and
they want to interview me. The homicide detective in charge of the case
tried to tell me my files aren't privileged because Beale
hired me before he was a suspect. When that didn't work, they
brought back Tull, who went all moral on me, saying he just wanted me
to do the right thing for myself, so my conscience could be
clear."

Tyner laughed. "Good effort. But
we have my paperwork to show that Beale came to you as a referral.
I'll be at police headquarters if you need me. Luther Beale
and I have a long night ahead of us, but I'll have him out
eventually."

Tess had her own long night waiting for her.
Given that she felt about three weeks had passed since that morning,
she was less than enthusiastic about meeting Jackie at her office. But
a promise was a promise, and a client was a client, even if the search
for Jackie's daughter now seemed mundane alongside the
Butcher of Butchers Hill, the Sequel.

Jackie met her at the office with a current
telephone directory, a criss-cross directory, a sheaf of photocopies,
and a brown bag of little cartons.

"Chinese food?" Tess
asked, her spirits lifting a little bit.

"Fresh Fields," Jackie
said. Tess made a face, although she had never actually been inside
that earnestly good-for-you grocery. Fresh Fields was too far afield
for her. Besides, she had heard it specialized in healthy stuff,
low-fat and organic. She boycotted the place on general principle, on
the grounds that grocery stores should not be in picturesque old mill
buildings with a Starbucks next door. Still, Jackie's haul of
containers looked pretty good.

"Vegetable pad thai, sushi,
chicken curry salad, smoked couscous, focaccia, pasta salad,"
Jackie said. "Eclairs for dessert."

"Pad thai? Isn't that a
fish thing? And sushi is a
raw
fish thing. I might have to eat both eclairs." Tess peered
into the empty bag. "No wine?"

"We're working,
remember? You can't afford to have any of the edges
blurred."

"What are we doing,
anyway?"

"We're going to do an
easy little telephone survey, not unlike something I'd set up
for one of my clients. You take the Johnsons, A through M,
I'll take Johnson N through Z. Then we'll move on
the Johnstons. You check the current phone book, then cross-reference
it to these pages I photocopied from a thirteen-year-old phone book. If
the name doesn't show up on the photocopy, put an asterisk
next to it, then move on. If it shows up, you call."

"There are almost a dozen pages of
Johnsons in the phone book. This will take forever."

"Not once you control for
longevity and location." Jackie patted the county
criss-cross. "Remember, we know our Johnson-Johnston lived in
North Baltimore County. Call only those listings that show up in the
old phone book with an address in that area. That should narrow it down
considerably."

Tess was impressed, but determined not to
let Jackie know it.

"So we're just going to
call this people and say, ‘Yo, is Caitlin
home?'"

"No, because then
there's a chance we'd get a Caitlin who's
the wrong age, or whose parents don't fit the profile.
Caitlin was the WASP name of choice for a while there. Instead, we say
we're doing a survey about popular children's
names, specific to the Baltimore metro area. In exchange for the
person's time, tell them they might win a twenty-seven-inch
color television in a drawing. Ask how many kids they have, what their
names are. Then ask the ages. If we find a thirteen-year-old Caitlin,
zero in, ask for the exact date of birth. By the time we're
finished, we should have at least a few possibilities."

"Assuming they haven't
moved. Assuming Willa Mott was right."

Jackie's world held no room for
doubt. "Let's not concede defeat before
we've started, okay? Now eat your supper, then
we'll start calling about seven-thirty so we won't
catch people at their dinner tables."

"You mean I finally get a chance
to be a telemarketer and I'm
not
going to interrupt people while they're eating?
They're going to know we're imposters."

Jackie was setting up work stations for the
two of them, arranging piles of photocopied phone lists alongside two
maps, so they could cross-reference each listing. Apparently, she was
going to work from her cell phone, while Tess would use her office
phone. But
two
maps, Tess
thought. Couldn't they share the map at least?

"Part of the reason I'm
so good at what I do is that I don't call people at
supper," Jackie said. "I also stop promptly at ten
o'clock. People don't like to hear a phone ring
after ten. They always think it's going to be bad news, and
you never get past that first little buzz of fear they feel."

Tess, who had started with the eclairs and
planned to work backward to the couscous, didn't say
anything. Her mouth was full.

Jackie had written a script, which she stuck
to with almost grim determination, rattling off her lines into her cell
phone. "We're not trying to sell you
anything…just doing a survey for a local publisher on
Baltimore's favorite baby names…for answering our
questions, your name will be entered into a raffle for a
twenty-seven-inch color television set…May I ask what you
and your husband do for a living? Do you have any children? Their names
are? Their ages?…Thank you. Have a nice night."

Tess tried to vary the pitch, partly to keep
herself interested, partly because she didn't want to admit
even to herself how clever Jackie's plan was. But she quickly
learned it was inefficient to try the spiel extemporaneously and
resorted to the script Jackie had made for her. But where Jackie had a
talent for making each call sound fresh and spontaneous,
Tess's voice became deader and deader as the evening worn on.
How did anyone do this for a living?

By ten, Jackie's witching hour,
they had worked through about half of the names. And Tess, despite her
slow start, had ended up reaching a few more families than Jackie. They
had found a five-year-old Caitlin, an eleven-year-old Caitlin, and even
one thirty-two-year-old Caitlin, a woman whose parents obviously were
ahead of their time. But not a single thirteen-year-old Caitlin, not in
North Baltimore County.

"You may have a future at
this," Jackie said, studying Tess's list.
"If the private detective thing doesn't work out,
you could always come work for me. Although then you really would have
to ask people for money, and that's a different skill
altogether."

"Can I have a drink now, boss, as
it's quitting time?"

"Sure, but I didn't
bring anything like that."

"We can always go down to the
Korean's. He sells beer. ‘The
Korean's.' Listen to me. I'm beginning to
talk like everyone else on Butchers Hill."

"I'm not much of a beer
drinker," Jackie said, wrinkling her nose. "I
prefer wine."

"Now that's a problem.
Mr. Kim stocks more kinds of Doritos than he does of wine. I know,
we'll go over to Rosie's Place. It's
around the corner from here."

"Aren't these
neighborhood taverns kind of rough?"

Tess laughed. "Not
Rosie's. You'll understand when we get
there."

From the outside, Rosie's looked
like any of the corner bars in East Baltimore. A neon sign advertising
Budweiser on tap, a pair of porcelain fisherman in one window, two of
the Marx Brothers in the other, Harpo and Chico. The inside was nothing
more than a long bar, with a television set turned to some sitcom, and
a set of pale green booths along the far wall.

"People are looking at
us," Jackie whispered to Tess as they seated themselves in a
booth. "Is it because I'm the only black woman in
here?"

"Well, you're better
dressed than everyone else. They don't see a lot of Chanel
suits in Rosie's. But they probably don't see many
interracial couples, either."

"You mean…?"

"You were quick to notice it was
all-white, but you missed it's all-female as well,"
Tess said. "Can you imagine a more tolerant group than
working-class lesbians? I think I'll have a mixed drink,
after all, something different. You know what I want? A mint
julep."

"Do you think they have white
wine?" Jackie was still whispering.

Tess whispered back. "Of course
they have white wine. They even have decent white wine. But have a
julep with me. The bartender makes the syrup from her own mint plants,
which she grows out front. They're fabulous."

The juleps were served in ten-year-old
Preakness glasses, commemorative cups used at the track, usually with a
vile concoction of vodka, grapefruit juice, and peach schnapps known as
black-eyed Susans. The bartender at Rosie's was wise enough
to keep the glasses and avoid the drink.