Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  "In Baltimore?" Tull drummed his fingers against the table, instantly engaged.

  "Maryland. I think. I hope. I don't even have their full names."

  "Who wants to find them? Why?"

  She sidestepped the first question. It was none of Tull's business who came to her door, but the why, if finessed, might be enough to get the help she needed. "They testified in this court case several years back. My client feels indebted to them, and he wants to make good on it."

  "Car accident?"

  "An accident of sorts. These kids were the only witnesses. He doesn't remember their last names, though, and isn't sure of their first names."

  "Tess, that's a no-brainer. I mean, it's so easy, you should be ashamed of yourself for not knowing how to do it."

  She pretended to pout. "Okay, I'm ashamed of myself. I'm totally lost. What do I do? Where do I start?"

  "These kids were witnesses in a court case, right? So all you have to do is put the case name in the court computer, and the witness list will pop right up. Even minors have their full names on file if they're called as witnesses. Even in a civil case."

  Tess sipped her cappuccino, feeling smug. "Of course, I didn't say it was civil. That was your supposition."

  "Civil or criminal, same difference, but you said—" Tull looked at her. "You yanking my chain, Tess? Who is your client, anyway? Someone on my side of the street?"

  "The names of my clients are confidential, Detective Tull, as you know."

  "Criminal, criminal, criminal," he muttered to himself. "Homicide?"

  "None of your business."

  "Homicide it is. A homicide with kids as witnesses." Tess could almost see Tull riffling the mental files of his mind, processing each of the two thousand-plus cases the city homicide squad had handled in the past seven years. "Kids, kids, kids. The one who was shot by the guy in Cedonia, for bringing his daughter home too late from the movies?"

  "If I told you the name of my client, Tyner could be disbarred. Besides, you couldn't be further off."

  "The one where the guy shot the fourteen-year-old for jostling his car when he walked by, setting off the car alarm?"

  That caught her off-guard. "How did I miss that one?"

  "No, that can't be it. The kid was killed, the witness was an old woman sitting on her porch." Tull snapped his fingers. "Dead kid. Kid witnesses. Beale. Luther Beale. That crazy motherfucker."

  "I don't know about crazy. A little odd, but then who wouldn't be, given the circumstances?"

  "Then it is Beale." In his delight, Tull actually slapped himself five, high and low. "Man, I can't believe you're gullible enough to believe anything that old bastard has to say."

  Tess stood up abruptly, angry at how easily he had tricked her into confirming his hunch. Tull took one look at her face and said, "Why don't we pour our coffee in togo cups and take a walk?"

  Fells Point was crowded and rowdy on a Friday night, but Tess and Tull knew how to leave the drunken throngs behind. They walked down Fell Street, a narrow block of newer townhouses and condominiums jutting into the harbor on a long spit of land. There wasn't enough parking for cars to be prowling for a space here, and the only bar was a relatively sedate place. They made their way to the dock and sat on its edge, staring out across the water to Locust Point. Tess could see the remains of the Procter and Gamble plant where Beale had once worked, alongside the Domino's plant. The "Sugar House" to the locals, with a blazing neon sign that had written itself across a thousand Baltimore memories.

  "Luther Beale is trying to make amends for what he's done," she said. "Is that so hard to believe? Do you have to be gullible to think someone might want to do the right thing?"

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have used that word. But Luther Beale—Jesus, Tess, he's the devil. His name should be Lucifer Beale."

  "The devil? That old man, in his brown suit? Oh, Martin, I know he killed a little boy, and it sickens me, but he's not evil. He's an old man who made a terrible mistake. He wouldn't be the first guy with a gun to do that. At least he wants to make amends, or try."

  "That's the problem. He's still a vigilante at heart, making up his own justice system as he goes along. First he was the judge and executioner, now he wants to be the jury, allocating the punitive damages."

  "He made a mistake. One horrible, terrible, tragic mistake. I'm not saying it's defensible, but it's not what you're making it out to be."

  "One mistake? One mistake?" Tull's voice rose almost to a shout. He stopped himself, fighting for control. "I bet he told you he didn't have a record, right?"

  "He said there was a rap on him for doing home improvements without a license—"

  "Run his name, Tess. You'll find an agg assault arrest from fifteen years ago. If the other guy hadn't been 250 pounds and six-foot-six, that probably would have been Beale's first murder charge. He got PBJ—probation before judgment."

  "I know what PBJ is," Tess snapped. "I also know it's the legal equivalent to having a clean record, so Beale told me the truth. If I ran it, I wouldn't find anything."

  "Yeah, Beale learned something important from that encounter," Tull continued, ignoring her. "Pick on someone your own size. No. Someone smaller, a kid. An eleven-year-old kid, Tess, who weighed maybe seventy-five pounds. He had some rocks. Luther Beale had a .357 Magnum. It wasn't exactly a fair fight on Fairmount."

  "I met him," Tess objected. "I talked to him. He's genuinely contrite. If anything, he feels he hasn't paid enough for what he's done. That's all this is about. He was quoting the Bible. He wouldn't be the first criminal who found God in prison."

  "Yeah, and he wouldn't be the first one to lose him again once he got out." Tull looked up at the moon, a full one rising over the harbor, fat and sickly green-yellow. "Tell me, Tess, didn't you feel anything weird, anything off about this guy? I've got a lot of faith in your instincts. I met you over a dead body, and I trusted your feelings about that."

  "Not at first," she reminded him. "Not until I almost died, too."

  Good, her little barb had hurt him, although it really hadn't been his fault. He had hurt her, too, questioning her judgment.

  "Yeah, okay, point taken. But didn't Beale give you the creeps?"

  "No, not really," she said. "Kind of annoying, in that attention-must-be-paid, listen-to-your-elders kind of way. Abrupt to the point of rudeness. Truth be told, talking to him wasn't much different from talking to my grandmother."

  "Rude doesn't begin to describe it. Word around the courthouse was that he wanted to take the stand, claim self-defense or some other crazy-ass scenario. His lawyer talked him out of it, which didn't improve Beale's disposition any. Donnie Moore's mother came to that courthouse every day, sat through every minute of that trial. All she wanted was for Beale to say, ‘I'm sorry.' You know what he said to her, when they finally met in the hallway?"

  "No," Tess said, even as her memory began retrieving all those soundbites from five years ago. "I don't need to know."

  "I'll tell you, anyway." Tull leaned closer, lowering his voice the way an old woman might if forced to repeat a vulgar epithet. "He said to this woman, grieving for her only child, ‘if you had been a good mother in the first place, Donnie wouldn't have been living in my neighborhood, and he wouldn't be dead now.' Nice guy, huh? Real sweetheart."

  Tess said nothing, just stared at the man in the moon. All her life, she had looked to the moon when it was full, hoping to see the smiling face you were supposed to see. But she always saw a sad one, the mouth formed in a tiny rueful O, as if he were whistling a sad tune.

  Tull put his hand over hers, a strange gesture for him. A strange gesture for them, newly minted friends that they were, and neither one a touchy-feely type. "I'm going to tell you one more time, Tess, and you can ignore me one more time if you like, but it's true: Luther Beale is bad news. Drop him."

  "Did you work the case?"

  "No, but I knew the guys who did—"

  "So this is hearsay on your part."
r />   Tull nodded reluctantly. "I guess you could say that."

  "You really hate vigilantes, don't you? Is it a cop thing? Is it because you honestly fear for what will happen if people start taking the law into their own hands? Or is it because every Luther Beale is evidence of the police department's failings? If the cops had stopped those kids, he wouldn't have been driven to do what he did."

  "That's not fair, Tess."

  No, it wasn't. But friends got to disagree, piss one another off, forgive and forget. Even in her anger, Tess realized she and Tull had passed a little milestone in their relationship. They had fought, and now they were making up.

  "What is it that bothers you so much about Luther Beale? I really want to know."

  Tull took his time answering. "I don't like vigilantes because their sense of justice lacks proportion. They take lives for property. They value themselves more than they value anyone or anything. We're close enough to anarchy as it is. We don't need any more Luther Beales to rush us there."

  "But he was right, wasn't he? As cruel as he was, he was right."

  "Right to kill Donnie Moore?"

  "He was right that Donnie Moore wouldn't have been on Fairmount Avenue in the middle of the night if his mother had done her job in the first place."

  "You're harsh, Tess."

  This time, she didn't bother to defend herself.

  Chapter 5

  Somewhat to her chagrin, Tess found herself humming a Garth Brooks song as she finished up her row along the Patapsco early the next morning. One of her beloved routines, and how she had missed it when injuries kept her off the water earlier this year. Her mind was a screen on a rain gutter, she couldn't help what got caught there—but Garth Brooks, for God's sake, the synthetic poseur with the big hat. Still, her parody fit nicely with the movements propelling her Alden through the murky water. I have low friends, took her from the start to the top of the stroke, while in high places brought her to the finish. Four verses, each a little faster than the last, were enough to power her from the Hanover Street Bridge to the boathouse.

  She did, in fact, have a handy supply of friends and relatives in the city's key institutions. Uncle Donald had worked in virtually every state agency over the years, while her dad's job as a liquor board inspector had earned him an interesting assortment of indebted types across Baltimore. She also knew a reporter who, unlike Dorie, didn't charge for his services. A reporter who was running a real favor deficit on Tess's ledgers. Magnanimous Tess decided she would give him a chance to settle his account simply by pulling the file from Luther Beale's court case and finding the list of witness names. She'd leave a message on his voice mail as soon as she got home and by the time she finished her shower, her work would be done.

  The Clarence Mitchell Courthouse had a head start on the summer doldrums. No satellite trucks outside, which meant no hot trials inside. The air trapped inside its dim hallways was cold and stale, like your refrigerator after two weeks at Ocean City.

  "Who's that tap-tap-tapping at my door?" a voice growled when Tess knocked at the press room.

  "It's the littlest Billygoat Gruff, you troll. May I cross your bridge?"

  "Not by the hair on your mother's chinny-chin-chin."

  "You're mixing up your fairy tales. That's what the three little pigs said to the big bad wolf."

  "Eat me. Oh, I'm so sorry, that's what Hansel and Gretel said to the witch."

  The door swung open. As usual, Kevin Feeney hadn't even bothered to get up to open it, just rolled across the floor in his office chair, phone cradled to his ear, then rolled back to his desk, berating someone all the while.

  "You useless sack of shit. I've known that for weeks." A source, Tess decided. If it had been a boss, Feeney would have been much harsher. "Yeah, well tell me something I don't know. Really? Well, I hear there's breaking news out of Spain the world is round."

  As he spoke, he pawed through a pile of papers on his desk, then handed Tess the printout she had asked him to pull from the court computers. Yes! Easy as that, there were the names. Destiny Teeter. Treasure Teeter. Salamon Hawkings. Eldon Kane.

  "Amazing. Beale was one for four." One name right out of four, and it was the one who mattered least to him, the girl, Destiny. He had been right about the "El" name, too—that must be the little chubby one he had spoken of.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Feeney muttered into the phone, motioning to Tess to stay put. "Why don't you call someone who gives a shit? I am so tired of this crap. You know I don't write the fucking editorials or the goddamn headlines. You want to jaw at me about delivery, too? Are we getting the paper right on your porch, or do you have to walk all the way out to the sidewalk?"

  A pause, while his caller murmured something. "Lunch? Sure. Next Wednesday is good for me. Let's go to the noodle place in Towson. Noon? Make it twelve-thirty."

  "Your latest girlfriend?" Tess asked when he hung up the phone.

  "Your mama. Only she likes to go to those cheap motels over on Pulaski Highway for nooners."

  "I wish. I might respect my mother more if I thought she ever lost control. Or learned to just say no to my grandmother. Gramma's throwing my mother a fiftieth birthday party tonight, which really means she's making my mother put on her own birthday dinner at Gramma's apartment."

  "Not that I'm not absolutely fascinated by the ins and outs of your wacked-out family, but I've got some more stuff for you. I ran all the kids' names through the newspaper's electronic library in case one of them grew up to be a National Merit Scholar or a cabinet member. I even tried Nexis, although it was a long shot, but I like spending the paper's money on frivolous shit. Two came up. I'm pleased to be the first to tell you—Eldon Kane, just eighteen, has graduated to the adult justice system. Don Pardo, why don't you tell the folks at home what Eldon has won."

  Feeney switched to the smooth tones of a television announcer. "Well Bob, Eldon has qualified for a bench warrant on car theft charges, because he didn't show up for his arraignment. He's now a wanted man and is probably no longer in the state."

  Tess, who was beginning to hope Feeney had done more of her work than she even dreamed, slumped. "Great. If the cops can't find him, how will I?"

  "You've got another shot, though. Another name came up in the Beacon-Light's files. The Hawkings kid won some statewide forensic contest three years ago, while he was an eighth-grader at Gwynn's Falls Middle School, just over the city line. Only a list, in agate type yet, but there he was."

  "That's something," Tess said, making a note on the printout. "Maybe the middle school can tell me where he went on to high school."

  "You got parents' names? Sure would help."

  "Hey, I didn't even have their names until you handed me this. What about the foster parents, though? Anything on them?"

  "Yeah, George and Martha Nelson. They're in D.C. now. Privatization and the current political climate has been very, very good to them. During the last spasm of back-to-the-orphanage chatter, they picked up a big grant to run a combination home-boarding school for ‘at risk' young black men. The Benjamin Banneker Academy. Got glowing write-ups just two months ago in both the Washington Post and the Washington Times, probably the only thing those two papers have ever agreed on. But neither article mentioned what happened in Baltimore five years ago. Chances are the reporters didn't make the connection and the Nelsons didn't volunteer it."

  "Maybe they figured they might not get such big grants if they admitted a kid got killed in their care."

  "Look, they didn't exactly give him permission to go out at two a.m., breaking windshields." Feeney flipped through the pages of his reporter's notebook. "I dug up an address on Donnie Moore's mom—she tried to file a civil action against Beale while he was in prison, figuring she could attach his pension and Social Security. Here it is—she's in those projects they're about to blow up, over on the west side."

  Tess made another note on her legal pad, copying the address scrawled on the inside cover of Feeney's reporter's notebook.r />
  "What happened to her lawsuit?"

  "She settled. It was sealed, but word around the courthouse was she ended up with less than five figures after her lawyer took his cut. It's a little ugly, how they do the math in these cases. Donnie Moore's worth was calculated on his future earning potential."

  "Damn, I wonder what I'd be worth according to that formula."

  "Hell, Tess, they'd get more for you if they sold you for parts." Feeney cackled at his own joke.

  "Thanks. You want to get together for dinner sometime soon?"

  "Maybe later this summer. I'm taking four weeks off. I've got so much vacation banked they're ordering me to take some of it."

  "Where you headed?"

  Feeney looked embarrassed. "California. My sister lives in Long Beach and I haven't seen her daughters for three years. We're going to do some family junk together. Go to the zoo down in San Diego, stuff like that, then I'm going to head into Baja by myself, sit on the beach and drink. You ever been there? Beautiful, beautiful place."

  Tess wasn't distracted by his babbling about Baja. "Feeney, are you going to Disneyland with your nieces?"

  He nodded, mortified. The phone rang and he grabbed it, shouting into the phone in glad relief: "Yeah? Well, fuck you too, Bunky. You know, if I wanted shit from you, I'd squeeze your head."

  Tess waved good-bye, still grinning at the idea of Feeney and his nieces bobbing through the Pirates of the Caribbean, Feeney with the animatronic Lincoln, Feeney being accosted by various Disney characters, who would be drawn like a magnet to his surly countenance. If only she could obtain photographic evidence, the extortion potential alone would allow her to retire.

  The main office at Gwynn's Falls Middle School was in a figurative and almost literal meltdown—sweaty miscreants lined up outside the vice principal's office, all the phone lines lit up, and the air conditioner on the fritz. Tess, who had been called in by the vice principal a time or two during her own middle school days, felt guilty and paranoid just standing in the midst of this bedlam, as if the unpunished sins of her youth might suddenly come to light.