Butchers Hill Read online

  "Right there," she said, placing the picture back on the wall. She could find something more appropriate later. Poker-playing dogs were always nice.

  "Miss Monaghan?"

  The man she let into her office was barrel-chested with skinny legs that seemed ridiculously spindly beneath such a large bulk. He stepped around Tess, as if encased in an invisible force field that required him to keep great distances between himself and others, then settled slowly into the chair opposite her desk. His joints creaked audibly, the Tin Man after a long, hard rain. No it was another Oz character he reminded her of, the lesser-known Gnome King from the later books in the series. He had the same rotund girth atop skinny legs. What else? The Gnome King had been deathly afraid of eggs.

  "So this is Keyes, Inc.," her visitor said. "Would you be Keyes?"

  "I'm his partner, Tess Monaghan. Mr. Keyes is, uh, semi-retired."

  "I'm retired myself," the man said, eyes fixed on his own lap. For all Tess's last-minute worrying, nothing in the surroundings seem to register with him—not the furnishings, not the photograph, not even Esskay, who had opened her eyes and was doing her adorable bit, just in case the visitor wanted to toss her one of the biscuits that Tess kept in a cookie jar on her desk.

  "I guess you know who I am." His voice was meek, but his chest, already so large, seem to swell with self-importance.

  She didn't. Should she? He was an elderly black man, which in his case meant he had skin the color of a stale Hershey bar—dark brown, with a chalky undercast. He wore a brown suit two shades lighter than his face, and although it was clean and neat, it wasn't quite right. Too tight in the shoulders, slightly baggy in the legs and paired with a rose-pink shirt and magenta tie. He held a once-white Panama hat, now yellow as a tortilla chip. No woman had watched him dress this morning, Tess decided.

  "I'm afraid I don't," she admitted.

  "Luther Beale," he said, as if his full name would be enough. It wasn't. She did hear in his voice the same ponderous, overenunciated quality that had led her to think he was drunk on the phone.

  "Luther Beale?"

  "Luther Beale," he repeated solemnly.

  "I'm afraid I don't…"

  "You might know me as the Butcher of Butchers Hill," he said stiffly, and Tess was embarrassed at the little noise she made, halfway between a squeal and a gasp. The nickname had done the trick. In fact, her former employer, the defunct Baltimore Star, had bestowed it on him. The Star had been good at bestowing nicknames, while the surviving paper, the stodgy Beacon-Light, was good only at attracting them. The Blight, most called it, although Blite was beginning to gain currency, thanks to a new media column in the city's alternative weekly.

  Luther "the Butcher" Beale. The Butcher of Butchers Hill. For a few weeks, he had been famous, the leading man in a national morality play. Luther Beale, evil vigilante or besieged old man, depending on one's point of view. Luther Beale. His name had been invoked more often on talk radio than Hillary Clinton's. Hadn't "60 Minutes" done a piece on him? No, that had been Roman Welzant, the Snowball Killer, acquitted almost two decades ago in the shooting death of a teenager tossing snowballs at his home outside the city limits a decade earlier. Beale had killed a much younger boy for breaking one of his windows. Or was it a windshield? No matter. The main thing was that a county jury let Welzant walk, while a city jury sent Beale away.

  "Yes, Mr. Beale. I remember your…incident."

  "Do you remember how it ended?"

  "You were convicted—manslaughter, I guess, or some lesser charge, not murder, if you're sitting here today—and you went to prison."

  Beale leaned forward in his chair and wagged a finger in Tess's face, an old man used to teaching lessons to insolent young folks. "No, no, no. I got probation for the manslaughter charge. It was the gun charge I had to do time for. I killed a boy, a terrible, terrible thing, but they would have let me stay on the streets for that, because I had no intent. They put me away for using a gun in the city limits. Mandatory sentencing. Isn't that something?"

  Tess was inclined to agree. It was indeed something, something twisted and warped. But she recognized the question as a rhetorical one and sat back, waiting. She had met people like Beale before. They were like one of those minitrain rides at the zoo or a shopping mall, just going around and around on the same track all day long.

  "So what can I do for you, Mr. Beale?"

  "You know, I was sixty-one when I went to prison. I'm sixty-six now, out for three months. This neighborhood is worse than it was when I went in. I guess even hell can get hotter. Which is why I took notice when I saw a nice girl like you opening up a business here. I hope you have some protection, Miss, something besides that skinny dog. You should have a gun. Because you can bet the little boys 'round here have them. Yet I can't have a gun any more. I'm a convicted felon. Isn't that something?"

  This time, he seemed to expect an answer. Tess tried to think of a noncommittal, noninflammatory reply. "It's the law."

  "The law! The law is foolish. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, not thou shalt not use a firearm in the city limits. You know I'd never done a thing in my life before they arrested me for shooting that boy? They looked, believe me they looked. They wanted me so bad. I never understood that, why did those police officers and those prosecutors want me so bad? It was as if locking me up would make everything right in the city. But I had no record. I didn't even have an unpaid parking ticket. You know what they found on me, after all that looking and looking?"

  Tess shook her head, if only to indicate she was listening.

  "Sometimes I did contracting work on the weekends, but I didn't have a state license for home improvements. Oh yeah, they had themselves Public Enemy Number One, right then and there, that they were sure of. Man goes out and paints rooms and cleans gutters, doesn't have a state license. Lock him up and throw away the key."

  "I hear they've got a warrant out for Bob Vila, too," Tess offered.

  Beale swatted the air, as if Tess's joke were a pesky gnat. "So now I have a record. It's all I have. It's all anyone knows about me. Used to be, people saw me on the street, they might say, ‘Oh there's Luther Beale, he lost his wife Annie to the cancer.' Or, ‘Luther Beale, he works over at the Procter and Gamble in Locust Point, he could afford a nicer house in a nicer place, but he likes Fairmount Avenue, lived here all his life.' You know what they say about me now?"

  She waited a beat. "No, I guess I don't."

  Tess thought she saw tears in the corners of Beale's eyes. "They say, ‘That's Luther Beale. He'd kill you as soon as look at you. He killed a little boy one time, just for throwing rocks at some cars.'"

  Well, you did. But there was no percentage in antagonizing a prospective client with the truth. Tess couldn't see any percentage in this conversation at all. Had Beale confused her with a street-corner psychiatrist? Or did he assume, as so many men did, that a woman's primary function on earth was to listen to a man? Maybe she could make some extra money that way, just listening to men speak of their troubles. Forget phone sex. How about 1-900-UBOREME, or a web page, www.tellyourtroubles.com.

  "Mr. Beale, is there anything I can help you with today?"

  "Retribution."

  The word, pronounced with great care in Luther Beale's deep, growly voice, seemed to hang and shimmer in the air. Tess envisioned it in black plastic letters on the marquee outside one of those hellfire churches on the Eastern Shore, the little cinderblock buildings that stood in the middle of vast cornfields. Today's sermon: Retribution. Don't forget Guild Ladies annual scrapple breakfast.

  "Retribution," he repeated. "A beautiful word, don't you think?"

  She thought not. "Vengeance is an ugly business. You may have a legitimate grudge against the system, but if that's what you're after, Mr. Beale, you better find someone else to help you with it."

  "You're an educated woman, Miss Monaghan? A college graduate?"

  "Yes, Washington College, over in Chestertown."

  "I would
hope such a fine school might have taught you the meaning of such a common word. I read a lot in prison—the Bible, history. But I also read the dictionary, which is one of the best books we have. No lies in the dictionary, just words, beautiful words, waiting for you to make something of them. The heart of retribution is tribute. From the Latin, to pay back. It can mean to reward as well as to punish."

  Beale was enjoying his little vocabulary lesson. Tess wasn't. Several replies of varying degrees of heat and wit occurred to her. But her aunt and her former employer had repeatedly impressed upon her that running one's own business meant eating several healthy doses of crap every day.

  "Okay, so to whom do you wish to make tribute?"

  Beale twisted his hat, kneading the brim with fingers as plump and long as the Esskay Ballpark Franks that had given the greyhound her name. Hot dog fingers and ham hands, Tess thought, then wondered why she had pork products on the brain. Apparently her usual morning bagels weren't going to hold her until lunch today.

  "As I told you, I worked at the Procter and Gamble on Locust Point. It was a good place to work—decent pay, good benefits. The company shut it down while I was…gone."

  Prison, you were in prison. For killing a little boy.

  "That was hard on folks, but the stock went up, up, up. That was my retirement fund and I couldn't touch it for almost five years, so it went up even more. I'm a rich man by my standards, richer for not working than I ever would have been working. I couldn't spend all this money if I tried. And I've got no wife, no kids, no family at all, no one to leave it to."

  Tess nodded, although she still wasn't sure what he was getting at.

  "Now there was a television show, before your time, ‘The Millionaire.' A guy named Michael Anthony used to show up, tell folks they were going to get some money. My wife and I always liked that show. I got to thinking—maybe I could have my own Michael Anthony, someone who could find the children, then help them out. Not with millions—I'm not doing that well—but with a thousand here or there."

  "The children?" He had lost her completely.

  "The ones who were there that night. The ones who saw what…happened."

  Tess tried to remember the news stories about the Butcher of Butchers Hill. There had been much about his victim—Donnie Moore, it was coming back to her in bits and pieces. The media had worked hard to find something of interest to say about an eleven-year-old who wasn't particularly nice or bright, yet didn't deserve to be shot in the back for an act of vandalism. The best they could come up with was that Donnie was a work in progress. The other children, the witnesses, had been virtually anonymous figures by law and custom. As foster children, their names were confidential and the local media kept them that way during the trial. The court artists hadn't even sketched the children on the stand, if memory served.

  "Why would you do this? Those kids taunted and tormented you."

  "And one of them was killed. That's not God's justice. I may be right with the courts now, but I'm not right with myself, and I'm not right with God. I can't do anything for the boy who died, except pray for both of us, but I might be able to help the others. Scholarships, if they want to go to college. A car to get to a part-time job. Help at home. I don't know. Doesn't everybody need money?"

  He had her there. Boy, did he have her there.

  "So who are these kids? Where are they?"

  "Well, there was the chubby one. And the twins, I remember their names. Truman, that was the boy, and the girl was Destiny, I think. Then another boy, a skinny one who did most of the talking."

  "You don't have full names?" She tried not to sigh audibly.

  "No'm. They were foster kids, lived with the Nelsons, a nice young couple that took in lots of kids. They meant well, but they couldn't handle those kids, couldn't even keep 'em in clean clothes. The Nelsons moved away after the shooting, and the kids all went to new homes. But they'd be eighteen now, out on their own anyway, right?"

  "If they were at least thirteen at the time, they would be. But if they're still minors and in foster care, they're going to be hard to find, even with names. Donnie was only eleven, there's no guarantee the others were much older. We can't even expect them to have drivers' licenses. City kids—" She had started to say "poor black kids," but caught herself. "City kids often don't, you know."

  "Oh." Beale thought for a moment. "I think the chubby one was named Earl. Or Errol."

  "Errol?"

  "Maybe Elmer. An E name with an L in it somewhere, I'm pretty sure of that. Does that help?"

  Tess forced another would-be sigh back into her throat. "Look, Mr. Beale, I have to tell you the odds I can find these kids are pretty slim and, while it won't be expensive, it will cost money, probably more than you ever dreamed. You'll pay not only my hourly rate, but any expenses I have. Mileage. Fees for computer searches."

  "I can pay," he insisted.

  "Before I can begin working on your case officially, you have to visit an attorney named Tyner Gray and ask for a referral to a private detective." She opened her desk and pulled out one of Tyner's cards. "He'll draw up a contract for my services. That guarantees our relationship is privileged, which may not seem important to you, but it's extremely important to me."

  "It means you don't have to talk to people about me, right?"

  "Yes." Maybe. Even Tyner couldn't guarantee that the cops wouldn't challenge her on this some day. The trick was to stay away from the kind of matters that interested cops, which she had every intention of doing. "Tyner will charge you his hourly fee for your visit. It may seem like a lot for not much work, but there's no getting around it if you want me to take your case."

  "I told you, money isn't a problem."

  "In my experience, money is always a problem eventually. You have to understand, this isn't a fee-based result. I look, you pay. Finding people is easier today than it's ever been. But not when you don't have their names. You'd be surprised how many kids are named Destiny in Baltimore alone."

  "Destiny doesn't matter so much. She's a girl."

  Healthy doses of crap, healthy doses of crap, Tess chanted to herself. "And why don't girls matter?"

  Beale wasn't so self-absorbed that he couldn't sense her irritation. "I didn't mean—it's just that I'm a man, and I'm worried about the young black men I see. The girls sometimes find a way out on their own. It's harder for the boys. It's hard to be a black man, but it's even harder to get to be a black man, if you know what I mean."

  Tess knew, much in the same way she knew certain facts about Bosnia, Singapore, and the Gaza strip. Parts of Baltimore were foreign countries to her, places she couldn't reach even with a passport. That was just the way it was, the way it had always been, the way it was always going to be.

  "Okay, I'll try to find the boys and the girl, once I figure out who they are. Let's say a miracle happens and I located them all. Then what? Do you want me to arrange a meeting?"

  "I wouldn't mind meeting them, but I guess they're not much interested in seeing me again. No, you just find 'em and figure out what they need, and what it might cost. I'll write you a check, then you'll write them a check. I have to be anonymous in this. I don't want to risk them turning down the money, out of some strange sort of pride."

  Tess jotted these instructions on her desk calendar, although she doubted there was much chance Beale's philanthropy would be rejected. That kind of virtuous pride was the stuff children's stories were made of, not real life.

  "If you give any one of them more than ten thousand dollars, you can't be anonymous with the IRS. There's a gift tax, you know. You might want to consider setting up a foundation or nonprofit of some sort. Tyner can walk you through the process. It might be advantageous, tax-wise."

  "I'm not interested in saving on my taxes. I am interested in—"

  "Retribution, I know. From the Latin. To pay back. A reward as well as a punishment."

  Beale stood and looked at her. From the look of his furrowed brow, he was trying to decide if she
was mocking him or simply demonstrating what careful attention she had paid.

  "You're a smart girl, Miss Monaghan, aren't you?"

  She decided to let the "girl" pass. This time. "I'd like to think I'm reasonably intelligent, yes."

  "But you're not yet wise. Do you know your Bible? ‘Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.' Proverbs, Chapter 4, Verse 7."

  The broad, sunny smile on Tess's face could only be described as a non-shit-eating grin.

  "Before you leave, you should know the getting of wisdom in this case requires a sizable retainer."

  Chapter 2

  By the time Beale left, Tyner's card clutched in hand, Tess had thirty minutes before her next appointment. She decided to take Esskay for a quick walk, find a snack to tide her over to lunch, explore a little more of her new neighborhood. She grabbed the leash from its peg by the front door and Esskay was instantly alert, rolling off the sofa in one fluid movement and tapping her toenails on the linoleum, happier than Gene Kelly on a rainy day.

  But this was a perfect day. Spring had started out cool and wet in Baltimore this year, then settled into a pattern of eerily exquisite days. Sunny, dry, not too hot, the tiniest city gardens riotous with azaleas and then lilies that never seemed to wilt or lose their blossoms. To top it off, the Orioles were playing .600 ball. Naturally, all this Edenic perfection made the natives nervous. The local wisdom was that good things always had a hidden price, like those rent-to-own deals where you ended up paying a thousand dollars for a three-hundred-dollar television set. Sooner or later, the bill would come due.