Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  The Peabody was gone, demoted to a chain hotel with polyester bedspreads and no rooftop bar. And her best friend Whitney was gone—at least temporarily to Japan. Ah, the local litany of loss. Now that was the real Baltimore Catechism, the ecumenical prayer known to every native. Tess curled up in the window well, deep and low enough to be a proper window seat, and skimmed a copy of Mary McCarthy's first volume of memoirs while she waited. Soon enough, she heard the heavy tread of hiking boots on the tile floors. A plump woman, as soft and disarrayed as an unmade bed, entered the room.

  "About time—" Tess began, but Dorie Starnes held a finger to her mouth, in imitation of the librarian stereotype.

  "Did you check the stalls?"

  "The doors are all open, Dorie. See?"

  Unsatisfied, Dorie pushed each of the stall doors, then glanced up at the ceiling, in case someone might be clinging to one of the light fixtures.

  "You can't be too careful, you know," she said, closing and locking the heavy wooden door to the outside corridor.

  "Actually, you can. There's a point where precaution has a diminishing return. For example, let's say you're so afraid to fly that you drive everywhere. That's not only more risky, statistically, it also costs you money through lost time."

  "I don't fly."

  "Right, because you're afraid."

  "Because I've never wanted to go anywhere that was more than three hours from Baltimore by car."

  "Oh." Tess tried to think of a nonflying analogy about the benefits of risk-taking, but nothing came to mind. "I take it back. Maybe you can't be too careful."

  "You better believe it. If my titular bosses ever find out I've opened my own shop while still working for them, that would be the end of little Dorie. This may seem like cloak-and-dagger bullshit to you, but it keeps my health insurance and 401-K safe for another day."

  "Nice use of titular. Still doing those vocabulary builders?"

  "Yeah. It's a twelve-cassette program, for kids taking the SATs. I already know what most of the words mean, this way I get to hear how they should sound." Dorie glared at Tess, in case she was mocking her. But Tess had learned early in their relationship never to aggravate the Beacon-Light's systems manager. From her cubicle at the newspaper, Dorie ran a vigorous trade in black-market information, tapping into the newspaper's on-line resources and, more valuable still, the business side's computers, something even the reporters couldn't do. Forget the hand that rocks the cradle. It's the fingers that can access your credit rating that truly rule the world.

  "It's not only your vocabulary. Your voice sounds different, too. Fuller."

  "I've been listening to Derek Jacobi read the Iliad on tape. It's like, I don't know, twenty hours altogether, and if I keep my headphones on too long, I start sounding as if I'm from a whole different kind of Essex."

  "Indeed," Tess said. Dorie had mispronounced the English actor's name, but she'd never hear about it from Tess. "Well, duchess, let me tell you what I need."

  Dorie listened intently, taking it all in. Tess would have gladly given her copies of her files, but Dorie was paper-averse. She maintained that her "organic hard disk" was the safest way to store information. No power surges, no system crashes, and not even the world's best hackers could get to it.

  "Jeez, Tess," she said after hearing the details of the two cases, shaking her head. "I mean, normally, no problem, but it happens I've got a few people with rush jobs. People who pay me considerably more money than you do."

  "Hey, I qualified for my lifetime discount by suggesting you set up this little sideline, remember?"

  "Sure, and I'll take you for a ride in my new Ford Explorer someday to show you how grateful I am. In the meantime, the Beacon-Light, my employer of record, has a few things they expect of me as well. Tyrannical despots. Can the Susan King search wait a couple days?"

  "Sure." In fact, it was probably better that way. A too-swift result might prompt the demanding Mary Browne to wonder if she had been charged too much. "What about the Beale case? Can you help me on that at all?"

  Dorie ran her fingers through her shortish hair, whose tendency toward cowlicks gave her the look of an exotic bird, the faintly cross-eyed ones with the comical little crests. "You gotta be kidding. First names only, and the geezer isn't even sure of those? Minors, no less, probably in state custody at some level, whether it's foster care or the juvenile justice system."

  "The state has computers," Tess wheedled. "Department of Juvenile Services, Department of Human Resources—all their stuff must be on a mainframe somewhere."

  "Look, I'm not saying I can't hack my way into the state system, but once you get there, it's a mess. None of the agencies' files are compatible, and there's no cross-referencing. And even within the state bureaucracy, Tess, you gotta have more than a first name. I could get you the clips on Beale's trial pretty fast, though. Maybe the kids are named in there."

  "I already thought of that. But as minors in foster care, their identities wouldn't have been publicly disclosed."

  "Then try the old-fashioned shoe leather approach in the neighborhood. Maybe someone knows where they all went, or can hook you up with the foster parents. Use those long legs for something besides rowing that stupid little boat of yours."

  "Okay." It was the answer Tess had expected, although she had half-heartedly hoped Dorie might know some secret, omnipotent database.

  Dorie started to leave. Tess knew the drill, knew she would have to wait five minutes before she departed. She may have chosen the site, but everything else about their meeting had been dictated by Dorie.

  "So what are you doing later?" Dorie asked as she unlocked the door and checked the corridor. "Want to grab a beer somewhere?"

  "Sure. Oh—no, I can't. I'm having coffee with Martin Tull when he gets off."

  "That shrimp? What, is he the next big romance? He's too small for you. Throw him back."

  "Just a friend. I need friends more than big romances right now."

  Dorie laughed knowingly. "Sure you do, Tess. Keep telling yourself that."

  "He's a buddy, nothing more. I like him. Besides, it can't hurt to have a friend who happens to be a homicide detective."

  "Hey, maybe he can help you with this Beale thing."

  "No shit, Sherlock." It wasn't often that Tess got the last word with Dorie, but when she did, it was sweet. Fleeting, but sweet. Tomorrow, there would be a sarcastic email on her computer, a subtle reminder of just who needed whom in this relationship.

  At her apartment that evening, Tess opened up two cans for dinner—ravioli for her, Pedigree for Esskay. Having read somewhere that single people shouldn't stint on the niceties, she took the time to put the ravioli on a plate and made a salad with a mustard vinaigrette from the pages of Nora Ephron's Heartburn, one of the two "cookbooks" she owned. She even added a drizzle of olive oil to Esskay's food, then carried both dishes out to the "terrace," a sooty expanse of roof reached by the French doors off her bedroom. During the warm-weather months, it was her dining room of choice, as long as Esskay kept the dive-bombing seagulls at bay.

  A few weeks back, she had gotten overly optimistic about where the decimal point belonged in her checking account and ended up purchasing a cafe table and matching chairs from the Smith and Hawken store. She had intended to buy only one chair, but the saleswoman had made her feel so odd that she had ended up taking home four, over-compensating as always. She tried to remember to sit in a different one each night, just in case the green-painted metal was susceptible to wear patterns. She felt like Goldilocks, going from place to place, only these were all the same and never quite right.

  Was she lonely? That wasn't the word she would put to what she felt—the quick, rapid pulse in her throat, the dryness in her mouth, the constant sensation that somewhere, somehow, she had left an important task undone. No, loneliness was melancholy and still, a feeling experienced when one was far from family and friends. Sure, Whitney had moved to Japan and she was—thankfully, really—on a hiatu
s from romance, but she had other friends and an embarrassment of relatives rattling around Baltimore. What she was feeling must be anxiety over the new business, pure and simple.

  "But things are looking up," she told Esskay and herself, picking at her food with uncharacteristic delicacy. "We put money in the bank today. We've got a cushion now."

  The greyhound gazed soulfully at Tess's plate, as if to say, Well, then, let me help you celebrate by finishing your dinner. Tess used the leftover ravioli to lure Esskay back into the apartment, then went downstairs to the bookstore on the first floor, hoping a visit with the proprietor, her Aunt Kitty, might take the edge off her strange mood.

  Kitty was in the front, shelving a new shipment of books. Women and Children First had started as a family deal struck at a crab feast several years back, when a suddenly flush Kitty Monaghan literally collided with a not-so-suddenly bankrupt Poppa Weinstein. Of course he had been taken with the petite redhead—almost all men were—but he had also admired her idea for a specialty bookstore in what had once been his flagship drugstore. "I always served women and children," he told Kitty, as they swung their crab mallets, "so why not books for women and children? Make me an offer."

  But the Titanic-inspired name was a misnomer within a year. "Women and Children First, but not exclusively," Kitty had decreed, gradually adding male authors to the women's side of the store. Her only requirement was that the men's books must have strong female characters, a stipulation that excluded many famous writers.

  "I mean, you can sequester yourself, but what does it accomplish?" she asked Tess this evening, unpacking books by yet another round of interlopers. Amis, Ellroy, Updike, the two Roths, Henry and Philip, and the latest from the local guys, Madison Smartt Bell and Stephen Dixon. "You can shut yourself off for a while, but eventually you've got to face them."

  "That's why I fought against going to Western High School," Tess said, sitting on the old U-shaped soda fountain that still sat in the center of the store. "A public all-girl high school is a nice concept, but I never wanted to be safe in some little namby-pamby girl world."

  "Bullshit," Kitty said, breaking down and flattening the now empty boxes. "You didn't want to go to Western, my dear niece, because you came out of the womb with a taste for testosterone. You hated Western because you resented being in a flirting-free zone."

  "You've got it backward. We could flirt all we wanted—out in the quad at lunch time, with the boys from Polytechnic. I wanted to argue with them, compete with them for the highest grades and see if they would still ask me out."

  "Tess, you were a C-cup at age twelve. Einstein could have gotten a date with a Poly boy if he had breasts. In fact, Einstein with breasts is probably the Poly ideal to this day."

  Kitty's latest boyfriend, who appeared to be twenty-five to her forty-whatever, picked this moment to enter the store, clutching an armful of irises whose ragged stems indicated they had been pilfered from someone else's garden. Will Elam. Will He Last, to Tess. A graduate student, he was a little scrawny and a lot too brainy for Kitty. The smart ones never went quietly at the end of the two, three weeks she allotted her boyfriends. They always wanted to know why, when there was no why, other than Kitty's low threshold for boredom.

  "Now that you mention it, I think I know which side of the family that boy-crazy gene came down on," Tess said.

  Kitty, cooing over her flowers, ignored her. Will was lost in Kitty-land, that tiny country where the flag was the color of strawberry-blond curls, the official scent was Garden Botanika freesia, and the only sound one heard was a contralto whisper.

  "I'm going out," Tess announced, on the off chance someone might be paying attention to her. "Don't wait up."

  Chapter 4

  At the Daily Grind, Tess insisted on paying for Martin Tull's latte and chocolate biscotti.

  "I take it you want a favor," he said dryly.

  "How crass. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I want to treat for once, instead of having you grab the check as if I were a charity case?"

  "And maybe you want a favor."

  "Maybe," she said, stirring a little sugar into her cappuccino. No reason to rush. Tull's curiosity would eventually get the better of him. He had an avid interest in her little business, in part because he had played matchmaker between her and his retired colleague, Edward Keyes. Tess suspected the switch to private detective was a change he might make himself one day, if the commissioner ever made good on his threat to rotate him to other departments. Homicide was Tull's calling. As long as he was allowed to practice his vocation, he wouldn't leave.

  But he was distracted just now, his eyes sliding over to the recreation pier across the street from the coffeehouse.

  "They're not there," Tess said.

  "Who?" His voice was all innocence, as if he hadn't glanced at the pier several times already.

  "Your alter egos. They're on hiatus. I always forget, which one is based on you? The blond one whose eyes are too close together or the bald, smoldering one?"

  "He's not bald anymore and he's leaving the show, even if it gets picked up for another season."

  "Thought you didn't watch."

  "It's in the papers, sometimes. I read the articles to make sure the show isn't going to be a shoot in my neighborhood. They close streets and everything, it's a real hassle. They like Hamilton, I guess. There's a lot of variety in the houses up in Northeast District. Looks good on TV."

  Tess smiled. Leave it to Baltimore, usually so finicky about its national image, to embrace a television program that spotlighted its murder rate. The network television show about Baltimore homicide cops was such a part of the city now that a robber had once surrendered to the actors by mistake. True, production could be something of a pain, especially here in Fells Point, where the recreation pier stood in for police headquarters. But the show got the city right, and after all those years of being force-fed Los Angeles and New York locations, it was thrilling just to hear some pretty boy say "Wilkens Avenue" and "Fort McHenry Tunnel" on national television, as if they were real places.

  "But it's why we always meet here, isn't it? Because you like to sneak peeks at the actors."

  "I like coffee, and I don't like bars," Tull said. "You live in Fells Point. Where else are we going to meet?"

  "Another coffeehouse?"

  A blonde at the next table was trying to catch Tull's eye, with no luck. He never noticed women. Well, almost never—an ex-wife lurked somewhere in his past. Then again, maybe that's why she was an ex, because he hadn't paid any attention to her. Tull was maddeningly reticent on the subject. Meanwhile, women were always heaving and sighing in his presence, practically falling at his feet, but this ace detective just couldn't crack the case of his own intriguing looks. Inside, he was forever a short, skinny kid with bad skin, not to mention those comically small hands and feet.

  Tess didn't have any romantic yearnings toward him. She would remain under her self-imposed dating ban until she figured out why her judgment in these matters had been so historically wretched. Of the last three men in her life, one was dead, one was in jail, and one was in Texas. She wouldn't wish any of those fates on Tull the teetotaler.

  "Do you have a drinking problem?" she asked suddenly.

  "Now that would be a cliché, wouldn't it?" replied Tull. "The alcoholic cop."

  "A cliché is merely a truth that's become banal through repetition."

  "What if I told you I think you drink too much, so I make you meet me here, where you can't abuse anything but caffeine?"

  Tess considered this. Such personal observations fascinated her, even unflattering ones. Did she drink too much, or was Tull simply trying to deflect her question? She followed H. L. Mencken's tips for responsible alcohol consumption: Never drink before sundown and never drink three days in a row. Well, she more or less followed those rules. Obviously, you weren't supposed to wait for evening once daylight savings time kicked in. And an occasional glass of wine at lunch was merely civilized.
r />   "I'd say you were trying to change the subject on me," she said. "Besides, talk about clichés. Everyone thinks I do everything to excess. I can go cold turkey on anything, any time. Just try me."

  "Like men. Which means I can't try you." He was teasing her. Tull would have run for the exits if he thought she had a romantic interest in him. Tess was suddenly aware of Nancy LaMott's voice on the sound system, rubbing against them like an affectionate cat. It was one of those uncanny moments when background music suddenly became a suitable soundtrack. "Moon River" in this case. Two drifters. Huckleberry friends, whatever the hell that meant.

  "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Tull said.

  "Great story, crappy movie." Tess sobbed every time she saw it.

  "Did I ever tell you how George Peppard got me through insomnia? Some station was showing ‘Banacek' reruns every night. Cleared up my problem in no time."

  "When was this? After your divorce?"

  "I don't remember." So near, so far away. She had run smack into another one of Martin Tull's internal firewalls. He could remember the details of every homicide he had worked in the city, but he always claimed virtual amnesia when asked a personal question.

  "So, I actually had clients today," she said, knowing this was a subject he would welcome.

  "Yeah?"

  "Two clients in one day. One very direct, slam-dunk missing persons thing. God bless Autotrack."

  Tull snapped his biscotti in two with his small, very even white teeth. "A lot of that computer stuff is illegal, or should be. I don't want to know too much about how you do what you do. Puts me in a difficult position."

  "I don't do it personally, if that's any comfort. But it's the other case I want to ask you about. It involves finding minors, possibly in foster care. The computer is useless, or so I'm told."