Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  "Forgot to mark my calendar. Like I said, I got a late start this morning. I've been out of prison for sixty-seven days now. Do you know how many days I was in prison?"

  Tess was pretty good at doing math in her head, the byproduct of having to know her checking account balance almost to the penny over the last few years. "Five times 365, for a total of—1,500 plus 300 plus 25, 1,825."

  "You forgot the leap year, so 1,826. I figure I have to live to be seventy-two to get all those days back. And I never really get them back, do I? You never get anything back in this life, once it's taken from you. My wife Annie, the babies who died inside her. We tried five times to have children, but she just couldn't carry a baby. She was all messed up inside. Nowadays, you're like that, the doctors can do things, as long as you got money. Isn't that a fact?"

  "Yes, I guess it is." Tess hadn't known how this conversation was going to go, but she surely hadn't envisioned discussing modern obstetrics.

  He sighed. "Children, children, children. Truth is, I was disappointed only for Annie's sake. The way I see it, children are one of the shakiest investments you'll ever make. You spend all this money on 'em, spend all this time and there's no way knowing how they're going to turn out. Now that boy Treasure, he was a cute little boy once. Mouthy, in with bad company, but a real good-looking boy. The girl was pretty, too, or would have been if she had worn nice clothes. All those children, always dressed so shabby. I'm sorry they're dead, but I didn't kill them."

  "But you never intended to help them, did you? This was never about helping these children at all."

  "I believe I'll have some iced tea. You sure you don't want some?" When Tess shook her head, Beale took a jar of presweetened, instant powder from the top of the refrigerator and stirred it into a tall, amber glass filled with tap water. He took a long time stirring, as if making instant iced tea required a great deal of precision.

  "You ever listened to a child tell you the plot of a picture show?" The teaspoon was still hitting the sides of his glass, tap, tap, tap. "You know how they get all mixed up, forget the important parts, double back to the beginning? And no two children will tell the story quite the same way. It likes to drive you crazy, listening to them."

  Tess waited. It seemed to her that Luther Beale wasn't a much better storyteller himself.

  "Now the children who saw Donnie Moore die all saw the exact same thing. They all told the jury the same story, almost word for word. Me, standing there with my gun out, looking like the devil. The girl saw it, although she was around the corner and heading up the alley before Donnie went down. Her brother was right behind her, but he saw me, too. The fat one saw it, although his back was to me. Yet they all told the same story, almost word for word. Now isn't that something?"

  "Their testimony had probably been rehearsed to some degree," Tess said. "They were children, after all, the prosecution had to prepare them for taking the witness stand. You'd expect a certain similarity."

  "Which would be fine, except for one thing. I didn't kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan."

  What had Tull told her, when they watched the moon rise over Locust Point? He wanted to take the witness stand in his own defense. Luckily, his lawyer wasn't that crazy. How had she ever gotten involved with such a crazy old man?

  "You mean someone else with a gun just like yours happened to be on Fairmount Avenue that night and just happened to shoot Donnie after you opened fire and it just happened that no one heard the other shots? You'll have to do better than that."

  "I heard two shots. At the time, I thought it was a car backfiring. Later, I realized they were gunshots, probably came from the car I saw coming round the corner."

  "But the bullet they found in Donnie matched your gun, right?"

  "The bullet passed through Donnie. They never found it. But then they weren't looking for it. They didn't need to find any bullets. They had me, they had my just-fired gun, they had four children saying I did it."

  "It still sounds pretty incredible to me. But okay, I'll play along. Someone else shoots Donnie Moore. Why?"

  "It wouldn't be the first time a child was shot when some drug dealer was trying to hit someone else. See, it's gotta be drugs, because if it wasn't, why didn't the folks in that car slow down? Why didn't they call the prosecutor and offer to testify, too? And if there was someone else there they were trying to kill, that person's not going to help me out. He's just going to run. The children say it was me because they don't want to go against the drug dealers."

  "But after Donnie died, the other children were separated. They were put in different foster homes. They couldn't have conspired to tell the same story even if they wanted to."

  "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.

  Chapter 16

  The 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 understan
d 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.

  "Spectacular Bid, Sunday Silence," Jackie read from the side of the glass. "You know, I've never even been to a horse race."

  "It's fun, as long as you keep it in perspective." This batch of juleps was syrupy, and served over so much cracked ice that it was like a snowball with an alcohol kicker. "You can't go to the track expecting to win, not unless you're willing to do the time to become a real handicapper. I got lucky my first few times out, hit an exacta and a dollar triple, total beginner's luck. Then I got cocky and thought I could make real picks, began trying to calculate speed figures and use the past performance charts in the Racing Form. I lost every time. Now when I go, I think of it as an interactive entertainment, like a play in which I have a vested interest in the outcome."