Gramma held her hand up at her only daughter like an impatient traffic cop, her eyes still fixed on Tess's. What had Treasure Teeter called that move? Doin' the Heisman.
"There's still time to take your name off that deed, Missy. What do you say to that?"
Tess had much she wanted to say to that. Go ahead, take it away from me, you bitter old woman. Give my share to one of your beloved china springer spaniels. You can't hold me hostage with money. You're mean and you're petty. Poppa probably died because he couldn't take living with you any more.
Uncle Donald started whistling another show tune, "Some Enchanted Evening." Judith simply looked miserable, even unhappier than she had when Tess had glimpsed her in the parking lot outside her grandmother's apartment building. But was the cause of her unhappiness her mother or her daughter?
"I say"—Tess took one last glance at Judith's face—"that I'm sorry if I sounded impudent and of course I'm grateful for your generosity. Can I bring anything Wednesday night?"
A plump, vaguely familiar woman was waiting on Tess's doorstep when Tess returned to her office.
"Miss Monaghan?" She wore a kelly-green suit with a red silk blouse. Merry Christmas, Tess thought, but she was touched at the same time. The woman, whoever she was, considered visiting Keyes Investigations important enough to dress up.
"That's me." Tess unlocked the door. The moment the key was in the lock, she could hear Esskay unfurling herself from the sofa, rushing across the floor with a great clatter of toenails. The dog sounded pretty impressive—she could be a Rottweiler or a pit bull, except for the lack of bark—and the visitor cowered behind Tess.
"The only thing my dog will do is lick you to death," she assured her visitor, who edged through the door, trying to keep Tess between her and the dog. "Now what can I do for you?"
"Don't you remember me?"
Tess hadn't, at first. She had made the mistake of looking at the clothes, not the woman's face. "Keisha Moore. Donnie's mother. Where's Laylah?"
"My sister-in-law's looking after her."
There was an awkward silence, Tess waiting for Keisha to say why she had come, Keisha apparently waiting for Tess to start asking her questions.
"Is there something I can help you with, Keisha?"
"I heard, on the news, that the man who killed my boy may have killed some other children. The ones you were looking for."
Shit. Tess had counted on the television stations not catching wind of the police department's suspicions unless Beale was officially charged. Either they had more evidence than Tyner thought, or someone at the police station had leaked the story, hoping to turn the heat up on Beale. As a convicted killer, he was a tough man to libel, alas.
"That's just speculation, Keisha."
The green suit was much too tight, and when Keisha sat down, her shiny red blouse seemed to surge out of the top. It was hard for Tess to believe that all this show was just for her.
"Well, if those other ones are dead, who gets their money?"
She certainly was focused. For five years now, Keisha Moore had tried to find a way to turn her son's death into a payday, and she hadn't given up hope there was some cash to be squeezed out of it.
"I regret to tell you there isn't any money for anyone. I thought there was, but it turns out things were not quite as they seemed."
"I heard the girl got her money. It's all over the street."
"You didn't know anything about her when I stopped by your house," Tess pointed out.
"Yeah, well I just didn't make the connection, you know? I was thinking of some little girl. How much she get, anyway?"
"All Destiny got was a pretty ugly death."
Without realizing it, Keisha was holding the tip of her tongue between her teeth, as unselfconsciously as a child. The tongue disappeared, and her eyes suddenly looked sly.
"Did you help him kill her and her brother, the one who burnt up?"
"Jesus, no. What a horrible thing to ask."
Keisha was unrepentant. "Well, you asked me some pretty rude things when you came to my house. Why was Donnie in foster care, as if that had anything to do with anything. What did I do to lose him? You were worse than any cop or social worker. That's the worst thing about being poor, having to answer people's goddamn questions all the time. ‘You own a car? You got any money in savings? You got a man living with you? Who's your baby's father?' I get sick of it, okay?"
"I can understand that."
"Huh. Like you ever had to answer some nosy bitch's questions."
"I was on unemployment for a while. Trust me, I answered my share of questions."
Keisha didn't seem mollified. She slumped in her chair, chin lowered to her scarlet chest, glaring at Tess.
"Do you need money, Keisha?"
"You know anyone who doesn't?" she countered.
"It's early in the month to be running short."
"I had some…unexpected expenses. There's a dining room set I put money down on. If I don't make a payment today, I'm going to lose it." So the Christmas finery was for the guy at the furniture store. Tess didn't want to think about what Keisha might do in lieu of payment. Jackie was right. She had never really known what it was like to scrape bottom, or even how far down the bottom was.
"I might be able to help you out. But first, I want to ask you some of the same questions I asked you before. Only this time, I'd like some answers."
Keisha's eyes were amber, Tess noticed. A cold, hard amber with a swirl of green at the center of the iris.
"I'll get my dining room set?"
"You'll get your furniture," Tess assured her. "Now why was Donnie in foster care?"
"I went off on an errand, up to Atlantic City. I thought I'd be home that night, but there was, like, an accident. When his teacher found out Donnie had spent the night alone, the Social Service came and took him."
"A car accident? A breakdown?"
Keisha squirmed a little in her chair, but said nothing.
"If I call a friend in New Jersey, am I going to find out you have a record?" Tess didn't actually have any friends in New Jersey, but Keisha didn't know that. It was plausible. Someone must have a friend in New Jersey.
"I was a mule, okay? I was a mule and I got popped."
"A mule?"
"I carried drugs for a man. I was taking them to Atlantic City on the train, and they picked me up the second I got off. The public defender up there got me off—he asked for a lab test and it turned out the stupid-ass motherfucker had put me on the train with a case of powdered sugar and quinine. But by the time I got home, I'd been gone for a week, and they had taken Donnie. He had to go to school and flap his big mouth about how he didn't have no mama and he was living off cereal. Social Services told me he couldn't come home until I took some class about how to be a parent. I had two more classes to go when he was killed."
"The man you carried the drugs for—was he Donnie's father?"
"No." Keisha's look told Tess that she found the question incredibly stupid. "He was just some guy I was with for a while."
"What was his name?"
"Look, he's dead. What you need to know his name for? He was a stupid, stone-ass junkie and he ended up the way most junkies do. I may have tried to help him sell some drugs, but I never took any."
"The guy you're with now, Laylah's father—he's not part of that life, is he?"
"Don't worry. I'm not planning on being the same fool twice." Keisha stood, her curves shifting again. She was like a big, walking Jell-O mold of a woman. She opened her purse, a bright yellow bag bigger than some suitcases. "You got any more questions, or can I go get me my dining room set now? I owe $119 on it. You can just round it up to $120 if you need to go to the ATM to get it."
"I said I'd get you furniture. I didn't say it would necessarily be the furniture you had paid down on."
Keisha's mouth was a round little O of rage, although no sound came out. If she hadn't been wearing her Sunday best, she might have flown across the des
k at Tess. Instead, she snapped her purse shut, stamped her feet, stamped her feet some more. Tess ignored her dramatics, scrawling a set of numbers on a piece of paper.
"There's a man named Spike Orrick," she said, passing the paper to Keisha. "Call him at this number, and say Tesser sent you. It's important that you refer to me as Tesser, that's how he'll know I gave you this number. He'll get you the furniture you need by nightfall and some food, too. He may even throw in a new television set, or a stereo, if he has one handy."
Keisha looked at the piece of paper skeptically. "We talking new furniture, or some secondhand shit?"
"It will be as nice as whatever you picked out, probably nicer," Tess assured her. "And Keisha?"
"Yeah?"
"Why don't you have Spike throw in a changing table? On me."
Chapter 18
The Butcher of Butchers Hill was back. With a vengeance, one might say. Certainly, that was what every single television reporter in Baltimore felt obligated to say, as if they were all working from the same handbook of tasteless clichés.
Tess and Kitty watched the six o'clock news together that night in Kitty's kitchen, clicking from channel to channel in order to see the same five-year-old footage unspool again and again. As Tyner had predicted, the police didn't have enough evidence to charge Luther Beale. As Tess had suspected, that didn't keep the media from going hog-wild with the story. On each of Baltimore's four early evening newscasts, another solemn face beneath another fluffy head of hair recounted the same scant details: Beale questioned in murders of teenage twins who had testified against him. No charges filed. At least one resourceful reporter then resorted to the time-honored punt of journalists everywhere: the man on the street, live and uncensored.
"I think we need more people like Luther Beale," said a balding white man identified as Joe of Remington, a scrappy, lower-middle class neighborhood. "I mean, who did he kill? Three punks. A delinquent, a whore, and a druggie. This city could use a few more Luther Beales."
Words to warm Martin Tull's heart, Tess thought. He wasn't the primary on the case, thank God, but she knew he wouldn't give up on trying to get her to talk to the police. Tull had a zealot's conviction when it came to Luther Beale, and the case seemed to become more personal for him every day.
On camera, Joe kept speaking, his features pinched in an uglier and uglier rage, but with voice-over narration from the anchor substituting for his other thoughts on the case. You didn't have to be a particularly good lip-reader to make out the non-FCC sanctioned words flying from Joe's mouth, along with a few choice racial epithets. Another drawback of doing man-on-the-street interviews. Sometimes, the man said what he really thought.
"Now what's the point of giving air time to someone like that?" Kitty asked, genuinely puzzled.
"Don't you know, that's their version of providing ‘both' sides of the story," Tess said. "On the one hand, killing is wrong. On the other hand, what if you kill the right people? Jesus Christ. Have you noticed no one is entertaining the notion Beale didn't do it? At least Tyner was smart enough to keep Beale away from reporters. If it gets out he doesn't think he killed Donnie Moore, he's going to look like a lunatic."
"How can you work for him if you don't believe him?"
"I believe he didn't kill the Teeter twins. I believe he saw a car and heard something the night Donnie was killed. Did someone else shoot Donnie Moore? I don't know and it's not important. For what it's worth, I believe he believes in his innocence, but Luther Beale is a man who likes to be right. Over the past five years, he may have gone over and over that night in his mind until he's found a way to clear himself. It doesn't matter. They're not going to try him again for the death of Donnie Moore."
"It seems to me everyone is overlooking one possibility in this," Kitty said, switching the television to a cooking show on one of the cable channels. Kitty didn't like to cook any more than Tess did, but she liked to watch. "This could be a coincidence. A hideous, totally random event."
"What do you mean?"
"Destiny had a habit of getting into strange men's cars, right? Treasure just had a habit. They lived high-risk lives. If you have a sister who hang-glides and a brother who sky-dives, would it be so unusual if each died within a few weeks of each other? It would be strange and stunning, worth a story in a newspaper, but it wouldn't be unheard of. You read about leukemia clusters, strange concentrations of cancer cases in certain places, like the one up in Massachusetts, but they can never quite prove the link. I think there are sorrow clusters, too, unexplained critical masses of tragedy."
Tess considered this. Kitty's logic was screwy yet appealing. But she didn't buy it, even if a Baltimore jury might.
"I think the two deaths are connected. Treasure said Destiny had gone somewhere, and when she came back, they were going to be rich. He said she had gone to Burma. Maybe that's some new street term for selling drugs."
"I think Burma's called Myanmar now."
"Do you expect some kind of geographic exactness in the local drug trade? Look, Keisha Moore told me today about being a ‘mule,' an unwitting deliverywoman for some dealer. I wonder if Destiny got caught up in something like that, and someone killed Treasure, thinking his drug-addled brain could hold onto enough details to be dangerous."
"I like my theory," Kitty said stubbornly. "Sorrow clusters."
"So it does," Tess said. "Shit, look at the time. If I'm late for my second night of telemarketing, the boss will have my head. I thought having my own business meant not answering to anyone. But clients expect far more than my bosses ever did."
"It helped," Kitty said, "that you worked for me and Uncle Donald."
Tess provided dinner for that night's round of calls, carry-out from a storefront more notable for its ambitions than its accomplishments. Butchers Hill Hot Food Hot served pizza, Italian entrees, subs and burgers—"American sandwiches" in the parlance of its menu—along with passable Indian food. It was the latter Tess had chosen, ordering an array of samosas, nan, and a double portion of rogan josh. She also had asked the delivery boy to tuck four bottles of Kingfisher Beer in with the order.
"Look, I need a beer tonight, okay?" she said, when she caught Jackie's disapproving look.
"I didn't say anything," Jackie said, examining the foil containers, the plastic lids fogged over from steam. "From Fresh Fields to the Grease Pits in twenty-four hours. For all you know that's greyhound meat in that so-called lamb dish."
Esskay whimpered, not because she understood Jackie's slur, but because she adored rogan josh and seldom got more than a smear of sauce and a few grains of rice.
"It's better than that fish-and-tofu abomination you brought in here last night. Do you really like that food? Or do you just think you should like it?"
"You know, I think I'll have one of those beers after all. But whatever you do, don't eat or drink while you're on a call. It's too tacky."
They had started with a sense of excitement, but the hours dragged slowly this time, each call putting them further away from the possibility of an answer. Twenty-four hours ago, victory had seemed so imminient. Even skeptical Tess had become convinced that Jackie's systematic approach would lead them to her daughter. But tonight's calls yielded no new clues. Not a single Caitlin. Not even a thirteen-year-old Kate or Katie. With the end so tantalizingly close, the work became dull and frustrating. Tess raced too quickly through her rehearsed lines, only to repeat them for bewildered listeners. Jackie become impatient and imperious, bullying her Johnsons as if she suspected them of lying about their children's names.
At 9:55, when Tess punched in the number for Wyler Johnston and heard the quavering voice on the end of the line, she simply hung up.
"That's it," she said. "She's not out there."
"You didn't even ask that household any of the questions," Jackie protested, reaching for Tess's sheet of numbers.
Tess grabbed the paper back from her, tearing it, not caring that she was tearing it: "He sounded as if he was ninety-f
ive. According to the criss-cross, he's lived at that address for forty-five years. Do you really think he's your daughter's adoptive father?"
"He could be her grandfather. And there are still people we haven't made contact with." Jackie began shuffling through her papers. "Maybe we should broaden our search to the whole metro area, canvass anyone with a name close to Johnson and Johnston. Or it could be Jones. Willa Mott's memory isn't perfect, you know, you said so yourself. No one remembers everything just right."
"Jackie—"
Jackie put her hands over her eyes, although Tess suspected it was her ears she really wanted to cover, like a child who chants over words she can't bear to hear.
"Maybe someone else can help you." She tried to sound kind and caring, instead of just tired and frustrated. "I don't know. But I feel like I'm taking your money under false pretenses at this point. We're not getting anywhere here, and I don't know where else to go. Sure, there was a chance that Willa Mott remembered the name right, that the family who took your daughter in was right where they always were, and that they named her Caitlin. But it was always a long-shot. People don't stay in the same place for thirteen years anymore. Maybe the people at the Adoption Rights group have some ideas, but I'm fresh out."
"They don't, you know they don't. The agency was the only lead we have."
"Then you need a private investigator who knows more about this kind of work than I do. The truth is, the other case I'm working on is going to take more and more time. There might be criminal charges, and I'm in pretty deep. You'd be better off working with someone else, someone who can give you first priority."
"No. I want you to help me."
They had saved two of the Kingfishers, planning to drink them in a triumphant toast. Tess opened both now and began to pour one in Jackie's glass, but Jackie took the bottle from her and drank straight from it, just as Tess always did.
"Look, it's great that you wanted to give a break to a new businesswoman. But there's got to be some other female private investigator starting out on her own. Go to her."
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