Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  "Can I help you?" The harried secretary at the front desk didn't bother to make eye contact with Tess and her clipped words made it clear that she hoped she couldn't help.

  "I'm trying to get some information about one of your former students."

  Tess was nonchalant, as if it were perfectly routine for some stranger to request a student's record, but the secretary was having none of it. A black woman with dyed blond hair, grass-green eyes, and a crumpled linen dress of a tropical pattern with glints of both colors, she stared at Tess as if trying to match her to some of the faces she had seen on the wall during her last trip to the post office.

  "I take it you're not a parent."

  Tess considered lying, but decided she wouldn't get away with it. She hadn't seen a single white student in the office, nor in the school's gloomy corridors. "No, I'm a private investigator who's been hired to find this student."

  "By a custodial parent?" The secretary drew out the legal term, cu-sto-di-aaaaaaal, as if to warn Tess she knew what was what.

  "Um, no, but my client does have a legitimate interest in finding this child."

  "Really? How can anyone—someone who's not a parent, probably not even a relative—have a legitimate need to find one of our students? If it were the law, you'd have a badge. If you were from Child Protective Services, you'd have a state ID. If it's not the law, and it's not the state, then you're not legitimate and I don't want you in my school."

  Tess decided to pull rank. "Look, maybe you should just get the principal. This is a sensitive matter, it requires someone who has authority, and the discretion to use it."

  "I am the principal, Missy, and you're the sensitive matter. Strangers who walk in off the street are something we take real seriously around here. Now clear these premises, and don't come back. If I see you again, I'll have you arrested for trespassing."

  Tess left the way she had always left the principal's office—head down, cheeks hot, certain everyone she passed knew of her misdeeds.

  Donnie Moore's mother wasn't at the address Feeney had provided. The apartment had been taken over by her sister, a spaced-out woman probably ten years younger than Tess. She might have looked younger, too, if not for crack cocaine, which had cooked her body down until it was nothing more than a little skin stretched over some long, knobby bones. Or perhaps her habit was heroin; she seemed in mid-nod when Tess knocked. Head swaying dreamily, like one of those plastic dogs you still saw sometimes in the back of souped-up Chevies, she leaned against the door frame and directed Tess to a rowhouse on Washington Street.

  "Near the hospital?"

  "No, farther south." In her drug-soft mouth, the phrase came out: "Farver sauf."

  "But that's practically back in Butchers Hill." Tess felt as if she had been driving all morning, only to find that what she wanted was a few blocks from her own office.

  "Yeah, that's where Keisha's new house is. Her baby's fahver helped find it for her." The sister faded out for a second, closing her eyes. Then her eyes popped open again. "He treats her good?"

  "Her boyfriend?"

  "Her baby's fahver," she corrected. An important distinction, apparently. "Say hey to her for me, will you? Tell her Tonya says hey."

  "Donna?" Her words were virtually without consonants, almost impossible to understand.

  "Uh-uh. Tone-ya. Like Toni Braxton, you know, 'cept different. Hey, you know my cousin know a girl who know one of her sisters, down in Severna Park, where she's from?"

  "A girl knows your sister?"

  "No, she know Toni Braxton. She says she's really nice, not at all stuck-up. She say she comes home and sings in the backyard, and they have chicken. They gonna call me next time she visits." Tonya closed her eyes and hugged herself, thinking of her private backyard barbecue with Toni Braxton.

  A rat waddled down the sidewalk in front of Keisha Moore's rowhouse. The house looked neat, but dark, its windows shut and curtains drawn against the bright sunlight. It had the feel of a place where everyone was fast asleep, although it was now almost noon. Tess knocked several times and was about to leave when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

  "What you want?" The woman who flung open the door wore nothing but a bra and a pair of baggy athletic shorts. At least, the shorts had been designed to hang loosely. Her substantial frame filled every fold. She wasn't fat, really, but big and solid in a way Tess imagined was probably appealing to most men. Certainly, this wasn't the wasted frame of an addict.

  "Are you Keisha Moore?"

  "You from Social Services?"

  "No—" Tess fumbled with her knapsack, trying to find her wallet and her P.I.'s license.

  "Because I told you, there's no man living here."

  "No, really, I'm a detective."

  Poor word choice. "I ain't done nothing. What the cops want with me? I ain' done nothing and Lavon ain't done nothing. Why you got to be hassling us all the time?"

  "I'm a private investigator, not a cop." Tess found the license at last and thrust it at Keisha. "All I want is to ask you a few questions about your son, Donnie Moore."

  The woman's face seemed to go dead at the mention of Donnie's name. She sucked on her lower lip, looking at Tess's license.

  "That was a long time ago," she said softly. "Why you coming around now?"

  "Can we talk inside? It's awfully warm out here in the sun."

  But the rowhouse was far hotter, stifling and close. In the small front room, two small children slept on two old sofas, which had been set up like church pews, facing the altar of a brass wall unit with a television set and VCR. The children looked tired in their sleep, if such a thing was possible.

  "My nephews," Keisha said, stopping for a second to look at them. "They was up late last night."

  "They belong to your sister, the one I met in your apartment?"

  "Tonya told you how to find me? She never did have good sense. No, these are my brother's children. I'm watching them for my sister-in-law while she's at DSS, trying to straighten out her food stamps. They's trying to cut her off because of one of those new rules, but she don't even know which one she broke."

  "Where's your brother?"

  "Gone," Keisha said, and something in her voice kept Tess from asking for more details.

  Somewhere above them, a baby began to cry. Keisha ran upstairs, her cloth bedroom slippers slapping on the uncarpeted stairs, and returned a few minutes later with a fat, copper-colored baby in a diaper. She had taken the time to throw a plaid cotton shirt over her bra, although she hadn't bothered to button it.

  "She needs a change," she said, leading Tess into the middle room. This would have been the formal dining room when the house was built, but now it was empty, except for an old-fashioned deep freezer against one wall. Keisha used this as a changing table and while her movements were lovingly efficient and competent, it made Tess nervous to see the baby lolling on the slick, hard surface.

  "She's pretty," she said tentatively, not sure if that was the appropriate word. More puckish, really, making a fish mouth that reminded Tess of Harpo Marx, but what mother wanted to hear that?

  "You got any?"

  "Uh-uh," Tess said politely, trying to project the kind of longing she knew mothers expected of nonmothers. She didn't have much of a baby jones. Still, there was something appealing about this chubby girl, a life-of-the-party light in her eyes, a way of churning her arms and legs as if ready to dance.

  "This is Laylah," Keisha said, making the baby wave a tiny hand at Tess.

  "Lay-lay-lay-lah," Tess sang a little riff to the baby, then felt embarrassed. "I guess people do that all the time."

  Keisha looked puzzled. "There's a song with my baby's name? Isn't that something? I'd sure like to hear that sometime."

  "Yeah, Derek and the Dominoes." Keisha looked blank. "You know, Eric Clapton."

  "Oh yeah, that guitar player. The one whose little boy fell out the window. The one who did the song with Baby-face."

  Funny, the different contexts people
brought to the world. Then again, Tess hadn't known Toni Braxton was from Severna Park. "How old are you, if I may ask?"

  "Just turned thirty-one this past April."

  "So when you had Donnie you were"—Tess stopped, in part to do the math, in part because the math made her feel rude.

  "Fifteen. Yes'm. But what do you want to know about Donnie for? Sure was a long time ago."

  "I'm trying to find the other children who were with him at the Nelsons', and I thought you might know where they were."

  "Why? I mean, why do you want to find them?"

  "Because someone asked me to." That sounded a little sinister, so she added, "There may be some money coming to them, because of what happened."

  "Money for them, but not for Donnie?"

  "No, I'm afraid not." She didn't owe Keisha any further explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted by her own grievances. "Because of your lawsuit, I guess. Double jeopardy and all that."

  "Oh," Keisha said. The baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of time to fasten the sides. "Well, I don't know where they are. I never even met 'em."

  "What about the trial? Weren't you at the trial?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "They were there, too, weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses."

  "Oh I s'pose we might have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real way."

  Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving. Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to surface, take a breath, and make another pass. "Why was Donnie in foster care?"

  "I don't s'pose that's anyone's business now, is it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay."

  "They put him in foster care just like that, with no hearing?"

  Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy. Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if babies' necks smelled good to everyone.

  "Look, that was all a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me. What's it to me, you do something for those other chil'ren?"

  In the front room, one of the sleeping nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move, just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.

  Tess put her card on the freezer/changing table. "Just in case," she said. "For what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie."

  When she passed through the front room, the two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny, compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to wake them?

  Tess remembered running barefoot through her summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through their own dreams.

  Chapter 6

  Almost a decade had passed since Gramma Weinstein had given up her big old house in Windsor Hills and moved into a cramped apartment in the suburbs northwest of Baltimore. "So urban," she had said, and the family had been pleased at this uncharacteristic rhetorical restraint on Gramma's part. But in the end, the changing neighborhood was less important to her than the cost of maintaining the house, a rambling wreck of a place with rotting wooden shingles and a weed-choked yard. "I am a woman of reduced circumstances," she liked to tell her children and grandchildren. "You know, Poppa didn't leave me that well fixed." They knew, they knew.

  Yet Gramma still wanted to entertain on the scale to which she had become accustomed when Poppa was alive. For Judith's birthday dinner, she had invited all five of her children, their spouses, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. It added up to twenty people, which would have made her apartment feel like an overcrowded elevator, an elevator filled with tsotchkes and china springer spaniels, each one with its own name and history.

  Her children had handled the situation as they always did, by going behind her back. Tess's mother, Judith, called her four brothers and they agreed to draw straws for the dinner. The losers attended, while the others made up credible excuses for why they could not attend. Even Tess's own father ended up wiggling off the hook, claiming a work conflict. The Monaghans and the Weinsteins still didn't get along that well. So the guest list was limited to Gramma, Uncle Jules and Aunt Sylvia, their daughter Deborah and son-in-law Aaron, Uncle Donald, Uncle Spike, Tess and, of course, the guest of honor, Judith, who had organized it all.

  "Where is everybody?" Gramma asked, as Judith sliced her birthday cake and passed pieces around the table.

  "Commitments," Judith said. "People's lives are so hectic now."

  "Well, Isaac and Nathan were always so driven. That's why they're successful. But I'd think your husband might have been here, at least. Don't the Monaghans celebrate birthdays? God knows, they celebrate everything else."

  "Patrick's taking me to the Inn at Perry Cabin this weekend." Judith broke off a piece of cake with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth. She'd kill me if I did that, Tess thought.

  "A cabin? He takes you to a cabin for your fiftieth birthday?"

  "It's a five-star restaurant and hotel, Gramma," Tess said, as her mother's mouth was still full of cake.

  "Very fancy, I'm sure. I just can't understand why things can't be like they used to be."

  Tess could. It wasn't just the loss of the house, although it had been a wonderful place for parties, that overgrown Victorian perched on a hill above the Gwynn's Falls, full of secret places, like an old dumbwaiter and the remains of a wine cellar. No, it was the loss of Poppa that had changed the nature of their family gatherings. Overworked and overextended, he had still managed to throw his love at them with both hands, like a little kid pushing up waves of water in a swimming pool. Gramma, in defiance of every known stereotype about grandmothers Jewish or otherwise, had served inedible food and begrudged them every mouthful. Unless one ate too sparingly, in which case she was offended.

  "Tessie, you're not eating your cake," Gramma said now, watching Tess halve her slice, then divide it again and again. It was hard to find a cake that Tess didn't love, but Gramma always managed, serving a soggy pineapple store brand with the consistency of frozen concentrate straight from the can.

  Judith gave her a warning look. As if Tess needed to be reminded of the ground rules for this evening: No candor, no simple truths, nothing that can be construed as an insult. Unless, of course, you were Gramma.

  "I'm so full after that wonderful meal."

  "Well, Judith can't open her gifts until you finish your cake. Would anyone like another cup of coffee? I'll make some."

  "No!" Judith almost shouted in her panic to keep her mother from committing yet another culinary felony. "I mean, I'll make it, Mama. I know where everything is."

  "Does it look like Judith is putting on weight?" Gramma asked after she had disappeared behind the kitchen's swinging door. "Or is it that dress?"

  You should talk, Tess thought sourly, still breaking her cake into crumbs. Grandma Weinstein was one of those older women who appeared to be all bosom from shoulder to waist. Tess often wondered if this was the fate that awaited her own body, no matter how much she lifted, ran, and rowed. Every day, it seemed, the papers brought more proof that biology was destiny, that genetics would get you in
the end.

  "You're certainly looking healthy yourself these days, Theresa Esther," Grandma said slyly. Tess flinched. Her grandmother's euphemisms had a way of cutting deeper than anyone else's insults. Needle, needle, needle. It was like going to a bad acupuncturist.

  "She's a beautiful girl," said Uncle Donald, missing the subtext as usual. Funny, in his days as a political fixer, he understood the meaning of the tiniest gestures in Annapolis, could predict a bill's fate by the way the speaker scratched his head. But he seemed to miss all the nuances in his own family's interactions. "When I walk down the street with Tess, I see the men stealing looks at her, wondering how an old man like me got such a gorgeous companion."

  "Feh," said Gramma, unimpressed. "A woman who puts stock in that kind of attention is like a soup bone who thinks the dog has honorable intentions. Nothing counts until you've got a ring on your finger. Don't forget that, Tess."

  Which was the only cue Aunt Sylvie needed: "And when am I going to dance at your wedding, Tesser?"

  "When the Maryland General Assembly outlaws the Electric Slide."

  Deborah smiled at Tess over her son's head, two-year-old Samuel, named for Poppa. Now thirty-seven, Deborah had spent five years and an estimated fifty thousand dollars to produce Samuel, insistent that her child have the same DNA as his parents. As the Chinese say, be careful what you wish for. Samuel was a miniature Aaron and Aaron, in Tess's estimation, wasn't worth anywhere close to fifty thousand dollars. Deborah might have done better shopping around for some sperm that didn't come with that pale, beady-eye, no-lips gene.

  "Oh, Mama, Tess is a career woman," Deborah said. "I heard you opened your own office down on Butchers Hill. How's business?"

  "Great." The afternoon couldn't have been worse. Tess and Esskay had canvassed Beale's neighborhood, to see if anyone knew the whereabouts of Destiny, Treasure, Salamon, and Eldon. It turned out almost everyone knew who her client was and those who didn't assumed she was a cop. Neither camp was inclined to help her beyond "Hello," "Nope," and "Good-bye." Oh, they had been polite enough; they just wouldn't talk to her. She had never felt so white before. Until today, she had thought she was pretty good at inspiring confidence in people, but her open countenance and ready smile hadn't beguiled these folks. Not even Esskay, with her ingratiating little snorts, had been able to break the ice.