Butchers Hill (5 page)

"Yes. You still wear your hair in
a braid and you still have a smudge of chocolate on your
face." Mary Browne didn't say good-bye, just
allowed herself another no-teeth-showing smile and left even as Tess
dabbed at the errant bit of frosting from her Berger's
cookie. She must have had that dimple of chocolate on her face for the
entire interview.

"Wait a minute!" she
called after Mary Browne, her computerized form not even close to
complete. But when she reached the door, Mary Browne was pulling away
in a baby-blue, late-model Taurus with Virginia tags. Virginia tags
often meant a rental car in these parts, but Tess took down the license
plate, just in case. Homicide detective Martin Tull had recommended
such mnemonic tricks to sharpen her powers of observation.

Back at her desk, she allowed herself the
venal pleasure of staring at the two checks she had collected that
morning, filling out a deposit slip with great ceremony. Mary Browne
might be a little mysterious, but finding Susan King was going to be a
slam-dunk. This was the kind of case she needed—easy, lots of
cash up front. The check was even a money order, so she
didn't have to worry about it bouncing.

A money order
?
Why would someone pay with a money order? Did Mary Browne have a
husband at home who might ask questions about a checkbook entry to Tess
Monaghan, private investigator? Or, appearances aside, was she scraping
so low she didn't even have a checking account? Tess looked
at the application form still open on her computer. A P.O. box for an
address. That hadn't seemed so strange when she had called,
but now Tess's heart jumped up and out, beating against her
ribcage as if it wanted to escape.

Her fingers clumsy with nervousness, she
punched in the phone number Mary had left, only to hear the precise,
silky voice that had so recently filled her office: "You have
reached the pager-voice mail for Mary Browne. Please leave a message at
the beep, or punch in your number and I will return your call as
quickly as possible."

Tess smothered her relieved laugh.
"I just wanted to tell you to plan on seeing your sister by
the fourth of July, Mary Browne," she told the pager.
"I almost guarantee I can find her by then."

Actually, Tess couldn't find
anyone who wasn't in the phone book. But she knew someone who
could, and she wasn't too proud to delegate.

T
he
third-floor ladies room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library was empty. It
usually was, which was why Tess had chosen it for a meeting place. She
didn't know why the library's top floor, home to
the humanities department and the Mencken Room, should be so
relentlessly male, but it was, and always had been. There was probably
a class-action suit in this, but it would have to find another
plaintiff. Tess had long cherished this island of privacy in downtown
Baltimore, with its view of the verdigris-domed Basilica of the
Assumption.

"Hello, Wee Willie
Keeler," she said, waving to the blank windows across
Cathedral Street. That was Kitty's pet name for the cardinal,
Kitty being about as lapsed as anyone named Monaghan could be.

Tess had her own lapses. Once, as a college
senior home for winter break, she had taken an over-the-counter
pregnancy test in one of the stalls here. She didn't dare try
it at home, and yet she couldn't stand the suspense of
waiting until she returned to school. The test had been negative and
she had celebrated by meeting Whitney Talbot at the bar at the top of
the old Peabody Hotel. Wearing slinky little dresses, they had lied
about their ages, names, and just about everything else to the men who
insisted on buying them drinks. "Auditioning new sperm
donors," Whitney had called it.

The Peabody was gone, demoted to a chain
hotel with polyester bedspreads and no rooftop bar. And her best friend
Whitney was gone—at least temporarily to Japan. Ah, the local
litany of loss. Now that was the real Baltimore Catechism, the
ecumenical prayer known to every native. Tess curled up in the window
well, deep and low enough to be a proper window seat, and skimmed a
copy of Mary McCarthy's first volume of memoirs while she
waited. Soon enough, she heard the heavy tread of hiking boots on the
tile floors. A plump woman, as soft and disarrayed as an unmade bed,
entered the room.

"About time—"
Tess began, but Dorie Starnes held a finger to her mouth, in imitation
of the librarian stereotype.

"Did you check the
stalls?"

"The doors are all open, Dorie.
See?"

Unsatisfied, Dorie pushed each of the stall
doors, then glanced up at the ceiling, in case someone might be
clinging to one of the light fixtures.

"You can't be too
careful, you know," she said, closing and locking the heavy
wooden door to the outside corridor.

"Actually, you can.
There's a point where precaution has a diminishing return.
For example, let's say you're so afraid to fly that
you drive everywhere. That's not only more risky,
statistically, it also costs you money through lost time."

"I
don't
fly."

"Right, because you're
afraid."

"Because I've never
wanted to go anywhere that was more than three hours from Baltimore by
car."

"Oh." Tess tried to
think of a nonflying analogy about the benefits of risk-taking, but
nothing came to mind. "I take it back. Maybe
you
can't be too careful."

"You better believe it. If my
titular bosses ever find out I've opened my own shop while
still working for them, that would be the end of little Dorie. This may
seem like cloak-and-dagger bullshit to you, but it keeps my health
insurance and 401-K safe for another day."

"Nice use of titular. Still doing
those vocabulary builders?"

"Yeah. It's a
twelve-cassette program, for kids taking the SATs. I already know what
most of the words mean, this way I get to hear how they should
sound." Dorie glared at Tess, in case she was mocking her.
But Tess had learned early in their relationship never to aggravate the
Beacon-Light
's
systems manager. From her cubicle at the newspaper, Dorie ran a
vigorous trade in black-market information, tapping into the
newspaper's on-line resources and, more valuable still, the
business side's computers, something even the reporters
couldn't do. Forget the hand that rocks the cradle.
It's the fingers that can access your credit rating that
truly rule the world.

"It's not only your
vocabulary. Your voice sounds different, too. Fuller."

"I've been listening to
Derek Jacobi read the
Iliad
on tape. It's like, I don't know, twenty hours
altogether, and if I keep my headphones on too long, I start sounding
as if I'm from a whole different kind of Essex."

"Indeed," Tess said.
Dorie had mispronounced the English actor's name, but
she'd never hear about it from Tess. "Well,
duchess, let me tell you what I need."

Dorie listened intently, taking it all in.
Tess would have gladly given her copies of her files, but Dorie was
paper-averse. She maintained that her "organic hard
disk" was the safest way to store information. No power
surges, no system crashes, and not even the world's best
hackers could get to it.

"Jeez, Tess," she said
after hearing the details of the two cases, shaking her head.
"I mean, normally, no problem, but it happens I've
got a few people with rush jobs. People who pay me considerably more
money than you do."

"Hey, I qualified for my lifetime
discount by suggesting you set up this little sideline,
remember?"

"Sure, and I'll take you
for a ride in my new Ford Explorer someday to show you how grateful I
am. In the meantime, the
Beacon-Light
,
my employer of record, has a few things they expect of me as well.
Tyrannical despots. Can the Susan King search wait a couple
days?"

"Sure." In fact, it was
probably better that way. A too-swift result might prompt the demanding
Mary Browne to wonder if she had been charged too much. "What
about the Beale case? Can you help me on that at all?"

Dorie ran her fingers through her shortish
hair, whose tendency toward cowlicks gave her the look of an exotic
bird, the faintly cross-eyed ones with the comical little crests.
"You gotta be kidding. First names only, and the geezer
isn't even sure of those? Minors, no less, probably in state
custody at some level, whether it's foster care or the
juvenile justice system."

"The state has
computers," Tess wheedled. "Department of Juvenile
Services, Department of Human Resources—all their stuff must
be on a mainframe somewhere."

"Look, I'm not saying I
can't hack my way into the state system, but once you get
there, it's a mess. None of the agencies' files are
compatible, and there's no cross-referencing. And even within
the state bureaucracy, Tess, you gotta have more than a first name. I
could get you the clips on Beale's trial pretty fast, though.
Maybe the kids are named in there."

"I already thought of that. But as
minors in foster care, their identities wouldn't have been
publicly disclosed."

"Then try the old-fashioned shoe
leather approach in the neighborhood. Maybe someone knows where they
all went, or can hook you up with the foster parents. Use those long
legs for something besides rowing that stupid little boat of
yours."

"Okay." It was the
answer Tess had expected, although she had half-heartedly hoped Dorie
might know some secret, omnipotent database.

Dorie started to leave. Tess knew the drill,
knew she would have to wait five minutes before she departed. She may
have chosen the site, but everything else about their meeting had been
dictated by Dorie.

"So what are you doing
later?" Dorie asked as she unlocked the door and checked the
corridor. "Want to grab a beer somewhere?"

"Sure. Oh—no, I
can't. I'm having coffee with Martin Tull when he
gets off."

"That
shrimp
?
What, is he the next big romance? He's too small for you.
Throw him back."

"Just a friend. I need friends
more than big romances right now."

Dorie laughed knowingly. "Sure you
do, Tess. Keep telling yourself that."

"He's a buddy, nothing
more. I like him. Besides, it can't hurt to have a friend who
happens to be a homicide detective."

"Hey, maybe he can help you with
this Beale thing."

"No shit, Sherlock." It
wasn't often that Tess got the last word with Dorie, but when
she did, it was sweet. Fleeting, but sweet. Tomorrow, there would be a
sarcastic email on her computer, a subtle reminder of just who needed
whom in this relationship.

At her apartment that evening, Tess opened
up two cans for dinner—ravioli for her, Pedigree for Esskay.
Having read somewhere that single people shouldn't stint on
the niceties, she took the time to put the ravioli on a plate and made
a salad with a mustard vinaigrette from the pages of Nora
Ephron's
Heartburn
,
one of the two "cookbooks" she owned. She even
added a drizzle of olive oil to Esskay's food, then carried
both dishes out to the "terrace," a sooty expanse
of roof reached by the French doors off her bedroom. During the
warm-weather months, it was her dining room of choice, as long as
Esskay kept the dive-bombing seagulls at bay.

A few weeks back, she had gotten overly
optimistic about where the decimal point belonged in her checking
account and ended up purchasing a cafe table and matching chairs from
the Smith and Hawken store. She had intended to buy only one chair, but
the saleswoman had made her feel so odd that she had ended up taking
home four, over-compensating as always. She tried to remember to sit in
a different one each night, just in case the green-painted metal was
susceptible to wear patterns. She felt like Goldilocks, going from
place to place, only these were all the same and never quite right.

Was she lonely? That wasn't the
word she would put to what she felt—the quick, rapid pulse in
her throat, the dryness in her mouth, the constant sensation that
somewhere, somehow, she had left an important task undone. No,
loneliness was melancholy and still, a feeling experienced when one was
far from family and friends. Sure, Whitney had moved to Japan and she
was—thankfully, really—on a hiatus from romance,
but she had other friends and an embarrassment of relatives rattling
around Baltimore. What she was feeling must be anxiety over the new
business, pure and simple.

"But things are looking
up," she told Esskay and herself, picking at her food with
uncharacteristic delicacy. "We put money in the bank today.
We've got a cushion now."

The greyhound gazed soulfully at
Tess's plate, as if to say,
Well, then,
let me help you celebrate by finishing your dinner
.
Tess used the leftover ravioli to lure Esskay back into the apartment,
then went downstairs to the bookstore on the first floor, hoping a
visit with the proprietor, her Aunt Kitty, might take the edge off her
strange mood.

Kitty was in the front, shelving a new
shipment of books. Women and Children First had started as a family
deal struck at a crab feast several years back, when a suddenly flush
Kitty Monaghan literally collided with a not-so-suddenly bankrupt Poppa
Weinstein. Of course he had been taken with the petite
redhead—almost all men were—but he had also admired
her idea for a specialty bookstore in what had once been his flagship
drugstore. "I always served women and children," he
told Kitty, as they swung their crab mallets, "so why not
books for women and children? Make me an offer."

But the
Titanic
-inspired
name was a misnomer within a year. "Women and Children First,
but not
exclusively
,"
Kitty had decreed, gradually adding male authors to the
women's side of the store. Her only requirement was that the
men's books must have strong female characters, a stipulation
that excluded many famous writers.