Butchers Hill

by Laura Lippman

  Jackie had already downed more than a third of her beer. She stared into the bottle as if her daughter might be at the bottom. Tess was remembering how adamant Jackie had been that first day, how sure of herself. Why did you choose Keyes Investigations? You were in the paper, weren't you? Something about shooting someone or someone shooting you? Yes, she had been in the paper quite a bit, but not for being a private detective. The announcement of the agency's opening, a paragraph in the Baltimore Business Journal, had been a brief item, using the more formal version of her name, Theresa Esther Monaghan. You had to be paying close attention to link the two articles, to know that Tess the near-shooting victim was now the near-entrepreneur.

  And you had to be paying really close attention to know of Tess's fondness for chocolate malts, a detail Jackie had known before Tess mentioned it. How can you know what kind of dark smear a kid has on her face in a black-and-white photo? You can know it's chocolate, perhaps, but you can't know it's malt. Yet Jackie had always known.

  "It wasn't just a woman you wanted, was it? It's me. It had to be me. Why Jackie?"

  Jackie Weir raised her eyes from the bottle and looked at Tess helplessly, as if she could no longer speak. Then she shifted her gaze to the wall, to that photo. The crying girl on the flying rabbit.

  "I knew you," she said at last. "When we were younger."

  "Were we at Western together?" Jackie could have been a senior when she was a freshman.

  "No, at the drugstore," she said, pointing her beer bottle at the photo. "Not that one, the big one, the one on Bond Street."

  "The Weinstein flagship on Bond and Shakespeare? That's my Aunt Kitty's bookstore."

  "It wasn't then. Not when I was eighteen. Not when you were fifteen. Not when you used to come in after school and drink chocolate malteds, and talk to your grandfather about your day. Your hair was usually in a long, shiny plait down your back and you were so thin, then, almost scrawny. That must have been when you were running all the time."

  "It was. But I don't—" She stopped, embarrassed.

  "Don't remember me? There's no reason you would. I was just the girl in the back, flipping burgers. I wore an apron, and a hairnet, and those big glasses. But I could hear you. You told your grandfather about the good grades you were getting and the parties you were going to and what this boy or that boy had said to you. It was like watching a rerun of those old Patty Duke shows, listening to your life."

  "Funny, my adolescence seemed more like a sitcom based on Kafka to me."

  Jackie heard her, but she wasn't having any of it, any more than she had let Tess see herself as some poor frail female about to plunge through the tattered safety net. "Then last March, I read about you in the paper. Your picture was there, with that dog. Like I said, you look just the same. Later, when I saw you had opened up a private detective agency, I knew I had to hire you. I knew when it became difficult, or rough, you couldn't drop me, like the first detective did, or spend my money without getting results, like the second one did. You had to help me. You had to."

  "Just because you once worked for my grandfather, because I was out front sipping sodas while you were in the back, making burgers?"

  Jackie looked frightened, as if the words she were about to utter were so forbidden, so long unspoken, that she wasn't quite sure what they might do once let loose in the world.

  "You have to help me because Samuel Weinstein was my baby's father."

  Chapter 19

  As many times as she had been there, Tess always needed the marker of the wheelchair ramp to find Tyner's house in Tuxedo Park. It was so dark in his neighborhood on a summer night—darkness being the perogative of truly safe places as well as the really dangerous ones—and the shingled houses were virtually indistinguishable. Hard enough to find the street, St. John's, much less the house itself. Once she did, she waited on his front porch, drinking from the international six-pack she had assembled at Alonso's Tavern, where they allowed you to mix-and-match the beers. A Red Stripe, a Bohemia, a Royal Oak, a Tsing-Tao, a Molson, and an Anchor Steam. Around the World in eighty beers.

  It was past eleven. The velvety voices of television anchors drifted from open windows, filling the night with authoritative sounds. So emphatic, so sure. You didn't even have to hear the words to know how a story was supposed to make you feel. The pitch told you everything you needed to know. Bad thing had happened. Important thing had happened. Funny thing had happened. Weather had happened.

  Shit happened. Where was Tyner, anyway? Tess drained the Red Stripe. She was halfway through Mexico by the time his van pulled up out front. She called to him as he came up the ramp, so he wouldn't be startled to find her on his shadowy front porch. But nothing ever really surprised Tyner. Lucky him.

  "Not a very good training regimen," he observed, looking at the glass bottles at her feet.

  "Depends on what you're training for. Where have you been, burning the midnight oil on Luther Beale's case?" She couldn't help sounding a little petulant, as if Tyner should know she would be waiting on his front porch.

  "Luther Beale is safe at home, where I expect him to stay unless the police come up with something significantly more substantial than the circumstantial bullshit they threw at us all day. I had a date."

  "A date?" She had known women found Tyner attractive, but she hadn't known he actually did anything about it. "Who is she?"

  "Another lawyer. No one you know."

  "How old is she? Or should I ask, how young is she? Young enough to be your daughter? Young enough to be your granddaughter?"

  "What an odd thing to say."

  "Not so very odd."

  And she told him everything. She began with her conversation with Jackie, veering off into wild digressions about Willa Mott and Adoption Rights and the leather seats in Jackie's Lexus. Somewhere in the middle of her rambling story, Tyner reached for the Anchor Steam and the bottle opener, but he never spoke. By the time Tess's voice wore down, the street was silent, the televisions long turned off, all the windows dark.

  "So I'm looking for my aunt, I figured out," she said. "What's that stupid West Virginia joke, the one about the song. ‘I'm My Own Grandpa?' I'm looking for my thirteen-year-old aunt."

  "Lots of people have aunts and uncles younger than they are. Given the imperatives of biology, it's not that unusual."

  "Jesus, Tyner, there was a fifty-year age difference."

  "So?"

  "So that's sick."

  "It was legal, though. She was of age to give consent."

  "He was her boss, which makes it sexual harrassment. And adultery. Which isn't legal in the state of Maryland, no matter how old you are."

  "Does Jackie think she was sexually harrassed, or is that your take on it?"

  Shrewd Tyner. He always did have a way of knowing what truly bothered her. She was the angry one, not Jackie. The man Jackie remembered—a man she called Samuel, in an affectionate voice that made Tess's skin crawl—had been kind to her. If it hadn't been love between them, it had been a genuine fondness, two lonely, unhappy people finding solace in one another's company. He had given her gifts, encouraged her to think about life beyond the grill at Weinstein's Drugs. When she told him she was pregnant, he had given her money for an abortion, which she had pocketed, knowing she was too far gone for the procedure. He had even offered to help her with college, but his business troubles had kept him from honoring that pledge. Still, Jackie had nothing unkind to say about him. He had never promised to leave his wife for her, she had told Tess. He had never promised anything, except to provide her a corner of warmth and regard in a world that had given her so little of either.

  "She's crazy," Tess muttered.

  "That's a possibility. Or she could be lying. Remember, she lied the first time you met her."

  Tess had not thought of this and it was a tempting out. Would Jackie tell such an outlandish story to keep Tess working for her? True, she had known much about Weinstein Drugs, but it was possible she had worked there
without being bedded there. Perhaps she had hated her employer and waited all these years to punish his descendants. Tess allowed herself the fleeting pleasure of embracing this theory, then just as quickly discarded it. Not even Gramma Weinstein could have provoked someone into seeking such a convoluted revenge. Besides, there was definitely a daughter out there somewhere, Jackie had convinced her of that much. It suddenly occurred to her that the strange detail Willa Mott had remembered about the father of Jackie's baby was not his race, but his advanced age.

  "I'd give anything if I could prove this was all some sick lie, but I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "Because in my heart of hearts, I know it's true." Tess opened the Royal Oak.

  "So what are you going to do?" Tyner asked.

  "I don't know. Even if the whole thing didn't make me nauseated, I still maintain she'd be better off with a more experienced investigator. Being related to her daughter doesn't make me any more qualified to find her. Besides, I wasn't bullshitting her. Luther Beale has to be priority one, right?"

  She looked at Tyner hopefully, but he had no intention of letting her off the hook.

  "Nothing's going to happen with Beale, unless a witness comes forward, or some physical evidence links him to one of those bodies. It was kind of sad about Destiny, actually. One of the reasons they didn't make the ID was because her body looked so used up. They were carrying her as a Jane Doe, twenty-five to thirty-five, and she was only seventeen."

  "Well, as long as she looked twenty-five, right?"

  "Jesus, Tess. When you turn on someone, you really turn, don't you?"

  "I looked like a grown woman when I was fourteen. Do you know what that's like? I couldn't make it the six blocks from the bus stop to home without fielding at least three offers to climb into someone's car. Some of them left me alone when I told them my age. Some of them, especially the geezers, just got a lot more interested. Gee, I wonder why Poppa didn't invite me into the back room?"

  "Just because a man would want to be with a young woman doesn't mean he would go after his own granddaughter. Give your grandfather that much credit."

  "Sorry, Poppa's account is closed. Gramma's, on the other hand, suddenly shows a huge balance. Maybe that's why she's such a sour old woman, because her husband was diddling the help all those years. I bet Jackie wasn't the only one. Who knows how many undiscovered aunts I have throughout Baltimore?"

  Tyner reached for the Molson. "You know, I'm probably as old as your grandfather was when you were a teenager, right?"

  "Thereabouts."

  "What would you say if I told you my date tonight was twenty-five?"

  "You said she was a lawyer."

  "There are twenty-five-year-old lawyers."

  "Well…that's different."

  "Why?"

  "Because she's older and because—well, it's not like you're having sex with her."

  "No, but only because it was our first date. I'm too much of a gentleman to make my move so early. Or did you think we didn't have sex because I'm in a wheelchair?"

  "Of course not." Tess's voice was vehement, for that's exactly what she had thought. Sure, older men had sex and men in wheelchairs had sex, but surely the combination disqualified Tyner. She couldn't be more grossed out if her parents had started talking about their sex lives in detail.

  "Tess, tell the truth."

  "Okay, that is what I meant. But I'm drunk. Book me for TWI—talking while intoxicated." She held up her wrists as if to be handcuffed, and noticed her hands were shaking.

  "Meanwhile, there's Kitty," Tyner said, ignoring her outstretched hands. "How old is her current boyfriend? Or how young, I guess I should say. Certainly, she's been with men young enough to be her sons."

  "It's not the same. He was in his sixties, she was a girl who worked for him. I don't care if she's not angry with him. I'm angry. I'm furious. There was a person I loved, and now he's not who I thought he was, and I can't love him anymore. I wish Jackie Weir-Susan King-Mary Browne had never walked through my door."

  Her words exploded in the night, as loud and sudden as a car backfire. Someone shouted from a nearby house. "Keep it down out there. This isn't Hampden, you know."

  "And this isn't Roland Park, although I bet you tell people it is," Tess called back. She was suddenly sick of Baltimore's little hierarchies, as reflected in the rigid neighborhood system. Roland Park looked down on Tuxedo Park, which felt itself superior to Evergreen, where people fretted they would be mistaken for Hampden-ites, whose feelings were hurt by the suggestion they lived in Remington, where people sneered at Pigtown. On and on, down and down the social ladder. Say you lived near the water tower on Roland Avenue and old-timers asked: Which side? How silly people were, how stupid.

  "Well, you're right about at least one thing," Tyner said, when the night was quiet again.

  "Yeah? I must have missed it."

  "You've had too much to drink. You better bed down in the spare room here, lest you add a DWI to your TWI. At least the latter isn't a felony."

  "Why not? It can be just as dangerous."

  The Patapsco looked deceptively inviting the next morning, with only a few oily spots along the surface. Although Tyner had told Tess to stay close in during her workout, she had ignored him and headed down a narrow tributary, where she knew she would be alone. Few other rowers wanted the hassle of passing beneath the low bridges here, which forced you to bring in your oars, duck your head and use the pilings as hand-holds to get to the other side.

  She had not slept well. The beers, the strange night, the strange bed, which made her realize how seldom she slept anywhere except her own lumpy mattress. There had been times in her life when Tess slept around, but she had never slept around. She was a homebody.

  Yet Jonathan Ross had found her anyway.

  Your nightmares always know where to find you, and Tess had been traveling with this particular dream for almost a year now. At first, it was just Jonathan in flight. Lately, though, he had begun to get up, brush himself off and talk to her. He seemed nicer, now that he was dead, and she didn't think it was because she romanticized his memory. She remembered all too clearly what Jonathan had been like alive—arrogant, self-centered, impeccable in his work, duplicitious in his life. Emotional quicksilver. Not that she had absolved herself from responsibility for the unhealthy bond between them. If he were alive, she'd probably still be beating on that sick little triangle of theirs, Jonathan running back and forth between her and his fiancee, trying to stave off being a real grownup for a few more years. Tess, wary of her own adulthood, had been a willing accomplice.

  But Jonathan had gotten pious in death. He lectured her, he hectored her. Not that she remembered much of what he said in these dreams. Jonathan's appearances were like hangovers, dull aches that left her feeling she really must behave better next time, even if she didn't quite remember what she had done.

  You mustn't be afraid of the truth.

  She came to another bridge, but instead of pushing her way through, she held onto the pilings, listening to the humming tires of the cars above her bowed head. Truth. If she had been interested in truth, she would never have gone into journalism, must less the detective business. She was a fact-gatherer, not a truth-teller.

  Here was a truth: she loved the little lies she told as a detective, the license it gave her to nudge people along with harmless falsehoods, a practice presumably forbidden in journalism. Assuming there was such a thing as a harmless falsehood. Little white lies. Could you say that now? Or was that non-PC as well, implying as it did that white was better than black.

  Little white lies. Big white lies. Poppa Weinstein, kind as Jackie insisted he was, had sent her on her way with cash for an abortion, soothing his own conscience. Now Tess wanted to do the same thing more or less—send Jackie on her way, the balance of her retainer refunded to her. All for her own good, of course. There had to be better detectives, people with more experience who knew how to do these kinds of things.

/>   But Jackie wanted her. She was—did Tess dare say it, say it out loud, whisper it here on the water—family. There would be time enough to deal with how this fact made her feel. For now, the important thing was finding Jackie's daughter. Poppa's daughter. A thirteen-year-old timebomb sitting out there somewhere, ready to detonate with a blast that could destroy her family. Tess had to find her, if only to protect everyone else from the fallout.

  Maybe that's what Jonathan Ross was trying to tell her. Maybe he simply wanted her to go ahead and become a real grownup, seeing as he wasn't going to get the chance.

  A medium-sized media clot was outside Tess's office when she arrived that morning. Fucking Jackie. She had sold her out, gone public with her daughter's paternity, decided to destroy the whole family.

  "Have you spoken to your client today, Miss Monaghan?" asked a breathless young brunette.

  "My dealings with clients are confidential," she snapped, unlocking the door and jerking on Esskay's chain. Although the greyhound had already received more than her share of media attention, she was always eager for additional exposure. She faced the cameras delightedly and opened her mouth as if ready to issue a statement.

  "But Luther Beale is your client, isn't he?" a man's voice called after her. The pack stayed on the sidewalk, savvy enough not to trespass.

  "Luther Beale?"

  "The Butcher of Butchers Hill, now a suspect in the deaths of two twins."

  "Two twins? As opposed to three triplets or four quadruplets?" Tess was smiling, and not just because of the reporter's redundancy. Luther Beale. Thank God. She had forgotten most of the tele-weenies were so new to Baltimore that few of them knew there had ever been a Weinstein's drugstore chain. The only way her grandfather could make news today was if he fathered Madonna's baby.

  "Again, that information is confidential," Tess called back. "I'm sure you can appreciate that. After all, you wouldn't want me to tell you if the spouse of one of your general managers had hired a private investigator to find out why he's spending so much time cruising prostitutes. Word is, he's been tooling along Patterson Park every night. And it's not even sweeps month."