"Are you saying—?"
Tess walked back to the door, mindful that she might be able to get some free publicity out of this. "I'm saying Keyes Investigations is a discreet firm, where all clients are assured of absolute confidentiality. As I'm just an associate here, it's impolitic for me to speak for the firm in any event. I do know Tyner Gray is representing Mr. Beale. As for any questions about the agency, you should probably call the owner, Edward Keyes."
"How do we get in touch with either of them?"
"Well, as seasoned investigative reporters, you probably have your own methods. Me, I'd try the phone book." Tess smiled and waved at the cameras, while Esskay poked her nose around the door, wagging her tail in best "Hi, Ma!" fashion. They probably wouldn't make the news—it would have been a much better shot if Tess had ducked her head and run past them. But if they did use the sound bite, viewers would know that Keyes Investigations was scrupulously tight-lipped, pathologically smart-assed, and equipped with a remarkably friendly watchdog.
Tess tried Jackie's pager number and got the voice mail. "I'm in," she told the empty air. "I don't know how I'm going to help you, but I am going to try. But it's a new deal, a new contract, according to my specifications." She then dialed her Uncle Donald's number. Another machine. Underemployed as he was, Uncle Donald made it a point to never answer his phone and to carry a clipboard with him as he roamed the halls, from coffee pot to men's room and back again. It was more important to look busy than be busy, as he had once explained to his niece.
"Favor time," she told the machine. "A big one." Uncle Donald would understand she was going to ask him to do something that was, technically, illegal. He just wouldn't know it involved his own father. That was her new deal. Instead of charging Jackie a fee for her services, all Tess wanted was the guarantee of her silence. Once the girl was found, Jackie had to get out of her life forever.
Esskay's ears, more sensitive than hers, suddenly stood straight up. Tess heard it, too, a creaking sound from the bathroom. Nothing unusual there. The old building often sighed and moaned as it settled. But this sound was unlike any she had heard before. Quietly, she slid her gun out of her knapsack. Perhaps her burglar had come back. Just as quietly, she started to slide her gun back into her knapsack. What if the burglar were bigger than she, or better-armed? The gun might provoke him to shoot when he had no intention of doing so. People burgled because they disliked confrontation. Otherwise, they'd be robbers.
She took a dog biscuit out of the cookie jar on her desk and threw it down the hall, just past the bathroom door. Esskay took off, sounding suitably ferocious. She heard a muffled, involuntary cry, the sound of something falling in water, the whine of a window opening too quickly.
A brown topsider was floating in the toilet and a pair of khaki-clad legs was about to disappear through the window when Tess caught her intruder by his sodden ankles. He twisted and fought in her grip, but succeeded only in bumping his head, first on the window sash and then on the old-fashioned bathtub. The second hit gave Tess the opportunity she needed to grab his backpack, which she used to flip him over and straddle him.
"Am I bleeding?" Sal Hawkings asked.
Chapter 20
There was, in fact, quite a bit of blood on Sal Hawkings, which made Tess nervous. What if she had knocked out a tooth or two in the mouth of Maryland's best extemporaneous speaker? But the blood came from a gash on his forehead and although there was a lot of it, the wound was superficial. She gave him a wad of paper towels to stem the flow, but it was too late to save his white shirt and navy blazer.
"Shouldn't you wash it?" he asked worriedly. "That bathroom floor was pretty dirty. I could get an infection."
"What do I look like, the school nurse?"
"No, she's fat, wears bright red lipstick, and spends most of her time smoking on the loading dock behind the dining hall."
Very charming. Or would be if Tess was amenable to being charmed just now. She folded up another wad of paper towels and passed it to Sal.
"I could take you to a hospital emergency room if you like. After I call the police, of course, and Penfield. You're AWOL, I assume?"
"Why would you drop the dime on me?" Must be hard, keeping up with the current slang while ensconced at Penfield. Tess wondered if Sal tried to impress his well-heeled classmates by playing the part of the savvy street kid. If so, he really ought to be a little more current. Drop the dime. She figured if she knew a term, it was long out of date.
"You broke into my office, second time in a week that's happened. Someone was in here over the weekend, too. Maybe it was you."
"I didn't even know you existed until you came to my school Tuesday morning."
"Chase Pearson knew who I was, though. I wonder—is it possible he started working on my little dossier before I called him? He pulled together quite a bit of information in a short time."
"You'd have to ask him."
"Perhaps I will. But for now, you're here and he's not." Sal's knapsack was sitting on her desk, a much nicer, newer version of the one she carried. Its leather wasn't as scarred or stained. She pulled it into her lap and undid the shiny brass buckle.
"That's illegal search and seizure."
"Only if you're a cop." Tess pulled out a notebook, two pens, a small leather case that carried a set of screwdrivers, and an old, thick book bound in faded green cloth. The letters on the spine had almost been rubbed off over the years. The Kipling Compendium, the book Sal had been reading in the library.
"What are the screwdrivers for? Just burglary, or boosting cars, too?"
Sal scowled. "I take wood shop. The screwdrivers were a gift from Mr. Pearson. Besides, I told you, I wasn't here this weekend. You can check with Penfield if you don't believe me."
"You definitely were here this morning." Tess gestured to his soggy topsider, dark with water, drying in a patch of sun on the windowsill. "Quite a little Cinderella act."
"I wasn't breaking in exactly."
"No, you appeared to be breaking out. Which raises the question of how you got in to begin with. I didn't go to Penfield, but I think that follows logically. What goes out must have come in."
Maryland's best extemporaneous speaker, middle school division, was briefly silent. Tess picked up the telephone and dialed 311. Busy, of course, so she faked getting a connection. "Eastern District—I have a burglary I'd like to report on—"
Sal reached over and depressed the disconnect button. "Mr. Pearson came to school the day before yesterday and told me they were going to take Luther Beale in."
Going to take—Chase Pearson had good sources. He had known about Beale's arrest before it happened. Tess said nothing, just put the phone back in the receiver and waited, hoping Sal would keep talking if she didn't.
"I know Beale hired you to find all of us. You found me. You found Treasure. You couldn't find Destiny because Beale had already killed her."
"That hasn't been established, Sal. Far from it."
"Sure." He gave her a superior look, as if she were hopelessly naive. It was strange to be on the receiving end of a look like that from a seventeen-year-old kid, but Sal almost carried it off.
"What do you want, Sal?"
Here came the charm again—the bright eyes, the eager smile. "I was wondering if you know where Eldon is. Of all us who lived at the Nelsons', we were the closest. I mean, everybody was close, living in a three-bedroom house like that, but Eldon was my special buddy, you know. We were tight. I wrote him letters for a while, after they split us up, but he never wrote back. Eldon wasn't much for writing."
Sal Hawkings looked so rueful that Tess almost felt sorry for him. After all, she knew what it was like to have a best friend who didn't write. Whitney was given to beautiful gifts and the occasional hour-long phone call out of the blue, but she wouldn't sit down and compose a letter with a gun pointed at her bright blond head. The written lines of communication between Bond Street and Tokyo had been decidedly one way.
"Eldon's tra
il is pretty cold," she said. "According to records, he's wanted on a bench warrant because he failed to show up for a hearing. That was about seven months ago. My guess is he left the state. He's probably taking great care not to be found."
"Eldon's only seventeen, two months younger'n me. How'd he end up in the adult system?"
"I guess he was so precocious they skipped him ahead."
Sal Hawkings wasn't amused. "Hey, Eldon's good people. If he ran, it's probably because he didn't even do it, but doesn't know how to get anyone to believe him. He just doesn't know there's any other life, okay? He's just trying to get by."
"You learned there was another life, though. Think about it, Sal. Five kids living in the Nelsons' house on Fayette Street. One was shot. One took drugs, one turned tricks, and now one is a felon on the run. You got out because Chase Pearson helped you, but Pearson wouldn't have helped you if you hadn't started winning all those public speaking awards. What made you different, Sal? What separated you from the others?"
Sal scowled, folding his arms tight across his chest as if to keep Tess from peering into his heart, his soul. "Now you sound like the psychologist at Penfield. Everyone always poking at me, wanting to know why, why, why. Some dude from the University of Maryland even wanted to write a paper on me. ‘Sal H. A Success Story in Spite of the Odds.'"
"Did he?"
"Hell, no. Mr. Pearson said he wasn't going let them turn me into some damn syndrome. I'm just a kid, just myself, you know. You can't take me apart and find the answer to all the world's problems. They made me feel like some freak." Sal put on a Massachusetts accent, in apparent mimickry of someone, and stroked his chin. Was he playing the social worker, the psychologist, or just some generic busybody? "My God—a black male who thinks! Who wishes to better himself! What could it possibly mean?"
"They meant well," Tess said, somewhat defensively. After all, she had been asking the same thing in a slightly different fashion. "If they can figure out why you succeeded, maybe they can help other kids."
"Sure." He gave her the superior look again. "Maybe I succeeded because I'm special. Isn't that an option?"
"Oh you're very special. Public speaker, star student, and a little burglar in training, hanging halfway out my bathroom window."
"I told you. I wanted to know where Eldon was."
"Yes, but did you come down here to ask me, or to search my office for that information? If you really wanted to see me, you could have made an appointment."
"I don't think Mr. Pearson would let me see you."
"Probably not. How did you get away from Penfield, anyway?"
"We had a field trip to the National Aquarium and the Columbus Center this morning. I grabbed a cab and came over here. When I saw all those reporter types out front, I decided to go around the alley way."
Good story, smoothly told. But that was Sal Hawkings's particular talent, wasn't it? Thinking on his feet, making things sound smooth and plausible.
"Tell me about the car, Sal."
"It was a Checker cab, nothing special. Polish dude at the wheel, barely spoke English, had some lame-ass radio station on."
He couldn't be that dense. It was almost as if he knew the question was coming, and had a dodge prepared. "Not the car that brought you here. The car that was turning onto Fairmount Avenue the night Donnie was killed."
"I don't know what you're talking about." The answer was prompt, too prompt. It was if Sal had learned a part so well that he could still slip into it on a moment's notice, the way Tess could recite the memorized dialogues from junior high French class after all these years. Bonjour Jean, comment vas-tu? Dis donc, ou est la biblioteque?
"Luther Beale told me there was a car and two shots, shots he didn't fire. Yet none of you mentioned the car, or any other gunshots. You all told the same exact story, with the same details. But Luther says Destiny and Treasure had already rounded the corner, and even Eldon's back was still to him when he started firing. You couldn't have all seen the same thing."
"He's a damn liar. We wouldn't do that, okay? We were a posse, we stuck together, we wouldn't abandon one of our own. We ran afterward, after Donnie was dead, because we were scared. Who wouldn't be? He was going to kill us, too."
"And there was no car?"
"No car, no second shooter, no O. J. Simpson, okay? That's why the old man's killing the rest of us, you know, because once we're all dead, there won't be anyone to contradict his sorry lies, and he wins. But he did it. He's just gonna have to learn to live with that, the way we had to live with Donnie's death and the way they broke us up, sending us to new families."
Sal grabbed his knapsack and began throwing in the items Tess had spread out on her desk. Tess let him have everything except the Kipling, which she hugged to her chest. She suspected it was the one thing he wouldn't leave the office without, and he did look anxious when he saw it in her hands.
"You don't see a lot of kids reading Kipling these days, although in my day, we had to memorize reams of it. But I guess Penfield is kind of old-fashioned."
"Gimme that. It's mine."
She flipped through the pages. The old color plates were quite beautiful, if a little worse for wear. There was the female of the species, so much more deadly than the male, the road to Mandalay and, of course, good old Gunga Din. "Merry Christmas, Love, Grandmere,'" was inscribed on the frontispiece. Tess guessed that faded, cursive inscription had not been written to Sal. Both the book and the handwriting were at least forty years older than he was.
"That's mine," he repeated, his voice a childish whine. "It's the first book I ever owned, it was a gift from Mr. Pearson. At Penfield, the poetry is all those modern guys, Kunitz and Cummings and Merwin and shit. I'd rather read this."
"I'm not sure I'd agree with your assessment of modern poets, but I am impressed if you read Kipling for pleasure. You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."
Sal looked at her sullenly, hand outstretched. Probably he thought it was a racial slur, non-PC at the very least, likening him to the faithful water boy. She handed him the book and he brushed its spine before putting it back in his knapsack, as if her touch had contaminated it in some way.
"How will you explain the cut on your head when you join up with your class at the aquarium?"
"I'll think of something," he said, shouldering his book bag, checking the brass fastener to make sure the Kipling was safe inside, then taking his shoe from the windowsill.
Tess had no doubt of that. It was all too clear that Sal Hawkings could think on or off his feet. She watched him go, his right topsider still squishing a bit.
Chapter 21
Uncle Donald worked fast when he had something to do. Tess and Jackie were instructed to meet him Monday morning at his office in the Department of Human Resources. The destination made Tess nostalgic, for the agency was housed in the old Hutzler's, once the city's grandest department store. Ten stories high, so full of things to buy and covet that it had a second building to the south to catch the overflow. Tess had bought her first makeup here, cutting school and taking the #10 bus downtown. By today's standards—department stores with grand pianos and marble floors and espresso bars—the old Hutzler's wouldn't seem quite so grand. But something caught in Tess's throat when she saw what it had been reduced to, just another state office building with flimsy walls and little warrens of offices.
"Let's take a walk," Uncle Donald said when he met them in the lobby, clipboard in hand.
Glancing at his watch, he led them to the Light Rail stop around the corner and sat on the benches, the ones designed so homeless people could never stretch out along their length.
"As soon as I started making inquiries, I was told there was a judge," Uncle Donald began. "He does this for a fee, usually."
"How much?" Jackie asked.
"Ten thousand dollars."
"I have that." And Jackie actually took out her check book and her Mont Blanc pen. No ordinary Bics for Jackie. Uncle Donald put his hand over hers before
she could start filling it out. Tess could just imagine what she might have written there. Pay to the order of judge-so-and-so. Ten Thousand Dollars. For: just a little bribe.
"It's strictly a cash business, dear. Besides, I said he usually does this. When I told him of your situation, he said he can't help. See, all he can do is unseal the original birth certificate. But you know what's on that, right? And there's nothing that connects the original birth certificate with the second one issued."
"Another dead-end," Jackie said bitterly. "From everything I've learned, it sounds as if my daughter could find me pretty easily, but I'll never be able to find her."
The Light Rail train pulled up just then, half-empty as usual. A tall, broad-shouldered man with curly blond hair poking out from beneath the brim of a Yankees cap got off and sat down next to them, studying the sports pages of the New York Post. He wore a denim shirt, untucked, faded jeans and dirty-white Chuck Taylors. Normally, wearing a Yankee cap in Baltimore was akin to sporting a "kick me" sign, but it was hard to imagine anyone bothering this man. It wasn't just his size. He carried himself with an assurance as formidable as it was irritating to Tess. She disliked natural self-confidence, given how much she had to work at faking it.
"If you're headed to Camden Yards, you're about six blocks too far north," Tess told the man, put off by his invasion of their personal space. What kind of creep sat down right next to you when there were plenty of benches free? "If you're heading for Yankee Stadium, that's two hundred miles to the north."
"Believe me, I know where I can go when I want to watch some real baseball," the man said in a quiet voice, his eyes focused on the box scores. "The Yankees are only three back in the all-important loss column. Only three back in the loss column, five out of first place. You know baseball? You understand the significance of that?"
"We're sort of having a private conversation here, and it's not about baseball geekery."
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