Butchers Hill (7 page)

"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."

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.

S
omewhat
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.

"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."