Baltimore Blues Read online

  “I’ll see you then.”

  At 1:15, sure of her destination this time, Tess headed north. There was a chill in the air, as if fall had decided it had to make a fainthearted stab at showing up just in time for the last day of September. This was Baltimore at its best—clear blue sky, a steady breeze, warm in the sun and cool in the shadows. As she did every year at this moment in time—and it sometimes seemed no more than a moment—Tess forgave the city its wretched summer and forgot winter would return. Constant clemency and a talent for amnesia. Both were key to life here.

  She turned off Charles Street onto Cross Place. PRIVATE PROPERTY, a sign reminded her. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN. Luckily the blue and white banner she had saved after the last visit flew from her antenna. In the weeks since Tyner and Tess had fled the street, autumn had taken hold here, too. The trees along the cul-de-sac were scarlet and gold. Blood and money, Tess thought.

  No maid met her at the curbside, not today. And when Tess knocked it was Mrs. O’Neal who let her in and led her to the sun room.

  “Tea?” she began, but Tess held up a hand.

  “I don’t really need any refreshments,” she said. “This isn’t exactly a social call.”

  Without her husband in the room, Mrs. O’Neill did not seem so washed-out and fragile. Her face was still strikingly pale—she must wear a cap on the tennis court, Tess thought—but her limbs, left bare by an all-white tennis dress and the cardigan across her shoulders, were deeply tanned. The bones of her shins were long and sharp, her wrists knobby. Tess had not realized how tall Mrs. O’Neal was, almost six feet, or how muscular.

  “Yes, I understand that. I am surprised, Miss Monaghan, you didn’t want my husband here. We have no secrets, you know. We are partners in everything.”

  I didn’t want to be double-teamed. I’m not ready for two-on-one. “Everyone has secrets, Mrs. O’Neal. If I remember correctly you didn’t know about your husband’s interest in Ava Hill until my last visit.”

  “I should say we don’t have secrets about important things.” She walked over to the window and looked out, sighing and hugging her arms. The leaves behind the house were already thinning out. Baltimore’s cruel, brief autumn. It did improve the view, however. One could see all the way to the creek bed, to the meadow beyond. The houses on the far hill were almost visible, instead of just windows winking through the trees.

  “You have such a nice view,” Tess said.

  “We owned all of this once, you know. Up until ten years ago we still owned the houses on either side and all the land to the creek.”

  “Did something happen ten years ago?” Tess’s voice wavered a little, despite her best efforts.

  “You tell me, Miss Monaghan.”

  She walked back to her wing chair, crossing her legs at the ankle and folding her hands in her lap. Tess, feeling like Scheherazade, took a deep breath. After weeks of telling lies and bluffing, with uneven results, it felt odd to speak the truth, to say only what she knew and nothing more. It also felt dangerous. If she was right about Mrs. O’Neal, the woman would do anything to protect her family.

  “Ten years ago Tucker Fauquier’s killing spree ended. He had been raping and killing little boys off and on since the late 1970s, since he was eighteen. But when he was arrested they could charge him with only one murder, because only one was witnessed. It was a capital crime and he got the death penalty. But because Fauquier buried his victims in carefully concealed places, only confessions could resolve the other murders. Encouraged by his lawyer because he was already condemned to die, he eagerly told police all the details. Bodies were found all over the state—twelve in all. One of them was unearthed at the foot of your property, along Little Wyman Falls. An eleven-year-old named Damon Jackson. He lived near the old stadium, off Greenmount Avenue, and had disappeared early in Fauquier’s career, as he prefers to call it.”

  “Yes, I know all this. I was at home the day the police came. I watched from here as they unearthed the body. Actually we didn’t sell the property until after that, so I guess it was less than ten years ago.”

  “Did you have to wait to sell the property until the body was found?”

  Mrs. O’Neal gave Tess an appraising look. Tess glanced down the long hallway to the front door, ready to bolt.

  “What is it you think you know, Miss Monaghan? Why don’t you just tell me that?”

  “You and your husband paid Tucker Fauquier a lot of money—well, not a lot of money to you—to confess to that murder. The details were passed through Abramowitz. What the boy looked like, where he was buried. Fauquier was a little vague about where he found this particular boy, but it was a long time ago and Fauquier didn’t know Baltimore that well. Yet he remembered he had buried the body near Cross-Tree Creek, according to his confession. As your husband once said, nobody calls it that. Except your family.”

  Tess looked up nervously, as if Mrs. O’Neal were a stern professor, giving her an oral examination. But she merely nodded, a sign for Tess to continue.

  “So if you paid Fauquier, where’s the money?” At this point Tess almost forgot about Mrs. O’Neal. She was figuring this part out as she went. “He said Abramowitz stole it, and Abramowitz did leave a sizable estate. But Abramowitz was a good lawyer; he might have earned much of that while in his own practice. Or maybe he got paid, too. After all, he was obstructing justice, suborning perjury—disbarment was the least of what he was facing if caught. Of course, he was too clever and you were too careful to write out personal checks. You had to pass it through something innocuous. Luckily for you, the William Tree Foundation, which your family controls, gives out more than five million dollars a year. What was another $50,000?”

  Tess pulled out the faxes she had collected this morning, clutching the papers so hard that only the sweat on her palms kept them from tearing. “Today I asked a friend at the attorney general’s office to send me the William Tree Foundation’s allocations list for the past three years. Year after year, only two grants, which happen to total $50,000, are made in perpetuity—to VOMA and the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, both chartered by Michael Abramowitz. They’re also the only two crime-related groups on your list. Everything else goes to the arts, the poor, the mentally ill, or religious-based charities.”

  “Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish,” Mrs. O’Neal said. “My father set it up that way.”

  Tess didn’t even hear her. “I’m guessing now. I’ll admit that. The foundation made the allocations to the two groups Abramowitz had set up. But instead of passing the money on to Fauquier, he let the charities keep it. In the case of VOMA, which gets $30,000 a year, he was ripped off by a greedy accountant, but that’s another story. He thought he was doing a good deed. As for the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, it receives only a $20,000 grant, so it has no tax disclosure forms. It does, however, have a mailing address in Friendsville, Maryland: Care of Delores F. Compson. Tucker’s mom. She remarried.”

  Mrs. O’Neal pulled her white cardigan over her shoulders, as if she had caught a sudden chill. When she spoke, her voice was cool, too.

  “Mr. Abramowitz emerges as a somewhat heroic figure in your theoretical account. The money goes to a support group for rape victims and the poor mother of his notorious client. Of course, he does violate several laws and enrich himself in the process. Otherwise an admirable man.”

  “I think he was trying, in his own confused way, to do what was right. Some people are good and bad.”

  “Yes. Well, in that case, Mr. Abramowitz and I have much in common.” Mrs. O’Neal stood up, and Tess almost flinched. Did she really think Luisa O’Neal would hurt her? No, she’d pay someone to hurt her. Mrs. O’Neal walked back to the window, looking down the hill.

  “My parents had two children, a son and a daughter. It was my father’s wish we should grow up here, on either side of him. But my brother died in a flu outbreak when we were young. My parents died less than a year after my marriage. Shay and I moved into this house. We had a son and
a daughter. Mary Julia and William Tree O’Neal. I thought, as my father had, that my children would live on either side of me. But Mary Julia married a Chicago boy. She lives in Lake Bluff.”

  “And William?”

  “William lives out of state. He has for years.”

  “Since he killed Damon Jackson? Did you see that, too, from your window? Or did you just watch him bury the body?”

  Luisa O’Neal did not answer. Her eyes, deep gray in the shadowy light, stared down the hill. Whatever she had seen, she was seeing again. Tess almost felt sorry for her, but she had come too far to stop asking questions just because the memories might be hurtful to someone.

  “Why did you ask Fauquier to confess? Damon Jackson’s body probably never would have been found. It had been there almost five years by the time Fauquier was caught. It was on your property. Even if the body had been discovered, you were the only eyewitness.”

  “One can be too neat,” she said, still staring outside. “The people who make fortunes, men like my father, are reckless and bold. The people who inherit them, or marry them, tend to be more timid. Shay doesn’t like loose ends. I didn’t like the idea of a woman forever wondering where her son was. Besides, we could never develop the property as long as the body was there. As it turned out Ms. Jackson was a prostitute junkie who had seldom known where her son was when he was alive. But I didn’t know that when Shay came up with his plan. I thought it was a good idea.”

  “So you approached Abramowitz.”

  “Shay did, yes. He said he was representing a friend, but Mr. Abramowitz didn’t believe him. It didn’t matter. Mr. Abramowitz was burned out. And so very poor. He was paid the same as Fauquier, in the same way as Fauquier. You did a good job, Miss Monaghan, but there were three other ‘dummy’ groups on that list: the Park Heights Soup Kitchen, the Hank Greenberg Scholarship Fund for Young Boys, and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Temple Beth-El Gonif. All tax-exempt. Mr. Abramowitz made sure of that. Another law broken, of course.”

  “You made checks out to the Temple Beth-El Gonif? Don’t you know it means ‘thief’? The Hank Greenberg Scholarship Fund? Even I know he played for Detroit, not the Orioles. Abramowitz was hiding clues everywhere. He even put you and Mr. O’Neal on the VOMA board last year. He wanted someone to figure this out.”

  “I wouldn’t know about the temple. I don’t know Hebrew. But you’re right about Abramowitz’s longing to be caught. He felt guilty and he wanted everyone else to feel guilty, too. That’s why he insisted on joining the firm, so Shay would have to see him and—these were his words—‘think about it every day, as I do.’ The only thing Seamon thinks about every day is whether his bran has done its work and where his next affair will come from, the associates or the secretaries.”

  Tess liked the image of red-faced Shay on the toilet, day-dreaming of secretaries. But she couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  “So Abramowitz blackmails his way into the firm, and they give him a nice office with a harbor view and no work. It was brilliant. The best way to drive a workaholic crazy. That was the point, right? To drive him crazy? To make him quit, or commit suicide?”

  Mrs. O’Neal’s eyes seemed to darken. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t wish insanity on anyone.”

  “Your son is insane, isn’t he? That’s why you give so much money to mental illness causes.”

  “We earmark about half our donations for the mentally ill.” Very careful, Tess noticed. If she had been recording the conversation, Mrs. O’Neal would be able to argue she never admitted to doing anything. She wasn’t taping it, however. For some strange reason she had thought she would be safer if she didn’t.

  “Does your philanthropy make up for your son killing someone?”

  This time Mrs. O’Neal met her eyes. “Yes, Miss Monaghan, it does. In fact it more than compensates.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If William had been arrested he never would have been judged competent to stand trial. He would have been committed to some state asylum, at the state’s expense, until he was. Instead he is in a nice place in Connecticut, which costs me $80,000 a year—about four times what prison costs in Maryland, by the way. And my family is still here, contributing to the community. If my son’s crime had been publicly exposed, we would have left, taking the foundation with us. There’s no stipulation the grants be made in Maryland. The city would have lost out, not us.”

  “I see—it was in the best interest of the taxpayers. What if the taxpayers preferred not to pervert our legal system?”

  “Lawyers pervert the system,” she replied. “The jurors pervert it. We sidestepped it.”

  “And Jonathan Ross?”

  “The reporter? What about him?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Really? I read his death was ruled a hit-and-run, an accident.”

  “He was going to figure this out. He was starting to research foundations. He had talked to Fauquier. He would have put it together as I did, eventually.”

  Mrs. O’Neal just smiled.

  “Am I going to be in a police report, Mrs. O’Neal? Am I going to be an accident?”

  “Seamon tends to…panic. You’ve seen how red he becomes, how his voice starts squeaking. Another sign of the compulsively tidy. But when he has time to think—time to listen to advice—he is quite rational.”

  “Fauquier will write more letters to other reporters. He wants to tell his story. He wants attention.”

  “Yes, he does. You visited him yesterday, I understand. Your name was on the sheet. We’ve been taking note of his visitors since Mr. Abramowitz’s death. Today—” She glanced at her watch, the kind of gold simplicity that costs dearly. “It’s already happened. Shay held a press conference at one-thirty and announced the firm was going to take over Mr. Fauquier’s appeals as a memorial to their slain colleague, Mr. Abramowitz. Larry Chambers, a quite capable young man, will handle the case. And if Mr. Fauquier tries to tell him any stories about fake confessions, Larry’s going to assure him it will only hurt his appeal. He’s also going to inform prison officials that you are not to visit Mr. Fauquier again, nor will any reporter. You need the lawyer’s permission, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Now it was Tess who did not want to meet Mrs. O’Neal’s eyes. If Luisa saw the past through her window, Tess saw the future. Fauquier’s appeals would run out. His lawyer would whisper to him: “Don’t say anything about that fake confession yet. We have a plan. We’re going to announce it just before they give you the injection. You’ll get more publicity than any condemned prisoner in the country.” And so Fauquier would go obediently, quietly, sitting in the chamber and waiting for the door to be flung open, waiting for his lawyer to rescue him. The pellets would drop, and Fauquier would die. The last living witness.

  “There’s only one thing I don’t understand, Mrs. O’Neal. Why did you have Abramowitz killed? Was he so miserable that he was going to confess?”

  “I’m afraid, dear, you can’t blame us for that. We have no idea who killed Abramowitz, although we probably owe whoever it was a debt. It has worked out nicely for us. He was becoming quite a nuisance.”

  “Aren’t you worried I’ll tell?”

  “No. I think, on some level, you see my side of things, Miss Monaghan. Justice was done. A boy was killed, a man confessed. My son is in a hospital for the rest of his life, which is longer than he would have stayed in jail. What more would you ask?”

  “I don’t see your side. I could never think the way you do.” Tess was almost yelling, frantic in her hope that she was telling the truth.

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you the second reason I’m not worried. You’re no one, and no one will ever believe you. But if you’d like a little money, a reward for being so clever, it could be arranged.”

  “Actually,” Tess said, surprising even herself, “I might.”

  Chapter 29

  Tess left the O’Neals’ and drove to a copy store out in the suburbs, a bright
, lively place with an espresso bar and throngs of people. Despite Mrs. O’Neal’s kind assurances that she was too inconsequential to kill, she felt safer in public. She paid for computer time and typed up the story she had told Mrs. O’Neal, fleshed out now with Mrs. O’Neal’s details. At the end she listed all her resources, a bibliography of sorts. She smoothed out and photocopied the crumpled, damp faxes, paid for the disk on which she had worked, and put everything in a manila envelope, which she then sent by certified mail to Kitty. She wrote on the back flap, “To be opened only in the event of my death.” Kitty was one of the few people who would unquestioningly follow those instructions. She wouldn’t even find it particularly odd. Tyner, while the more logical choice in some ways, would have opened it immediately.

  Strangely Tess almost believed Mrs. O’Neal when she said they had not arranged Abramowitz’s death. More importantly she believed she couldn’t prove it if they had. All this work, all this effort, and she had ended up solving the wrong case—Jonathan’s death and the death of a little boy whose name she had not even known two days ago.

  That’s why I hated being a reporter. You were always getting the wrong answers to your questions.

  The thought darted across her mind like a cockroach running from the kitchen light, trying to disappear into a dark crevice. But Tess caught it before it vanished. Hated being a reporter? No, she had loved it. She had worked hard at it. It was the only career she had ever known. She had been a reporter because…because.

  Because Whitney wanted to be a reporter, and you could never stop competing with Whitney. Because Jonathan was a great reporter, and you loved him once and wanted him to love you. Because James M. Cain was a reporter who went to Washington College, then had gone on to write wonderful books and have an interesting life. You wanted to be a writer with a regular paycheck. That didn’t make you a reporter. Or a writer. It made you a coward and a fake. An imitation.