Butchers Hill

Chapter 15

Luther Beale was scrubbing his marble steps, a cherished visual cliché in Baltimore. Even if he hadn't been out front of his house, Tess would have known instantly where he lived. In a block where the other brick rowhouses looked wilted and unloved, Beale's home was painted a soft yellow with white trim. A tub of yellow daisies sat next to the marble stoop. The paint job appeared fresh to Tess's eyes, which admittedly were not expert in matters of home improvement. At any rate, it did not look like Luther Beale had been planning to leave this house any time soon.

Plans change.

"Pretty flowers," said Tess. Sometimes, being furious made her absolutely banal.

"Those are my second ones this season," Beale said, never looking up from his task. "Someone stole the first tub. I expect someone will steal this one as well, although God knows why. I can't imagine you can get more than a dollar selling flowers." Beale dipped his brush back into the aluminum pail and attacked another spot, rubbing at it fiercely and methodically, determined to eradicate it.

"Can we go inside? I need to talk to you."

"Then talk to me while I work. I got started late today. I'm behind."

"This isn't a conversation we can have out on the street."

She wished he looked more surprised, that he would resist a little more, or pepper her with insistent questions. Instead, he dropped the brush back into the soapy water and stood, knees creaking.

"I'm on the third floor," he said, unlocking the outside door, then another inside the vestibule, a wooden one polished to a high sheen and smelling of lemon furniture oil. "I used to rent out the first two floors, but I don't anymore. I'd rather have my privacy than the money."

Beale's apartment looked like the kind of place where the occupant spent a lot of time sitting in the dark. Clean, which Tess had expected, but also quite bare. She thought old people always had a surplus of stuff, the way her grandmother did. Beale's apartment, with its empty white walls and clean taupe carpeting, felt like a gallery waiting for an exhibit to be installed. She followed him through the living room, which had only one chair, a computer, and a television set, into the kitchen. Here, at least, there were two chairs, vinyl padded ones that matched the yellow-topped formica table.

"You want a cold drink?" Beale asked. She had asked Tull the same question not even a half-hour ago. Perhaps it was instinctive, this offering of beverages to forestall unpleasantness.

"No, thank you," She paused, and still couldn't find a place to begin. "Your place is pretty spare. I like it, though."

"People broke in while I was in prison, stole what they could and broke the rest. Once I got the walls painted and the new carpet done, it seemed easier to keep it simple." He looked at her sternly. "You didn't come here to talk about my interior decorating. What do you want?"

"Why didn't Destiny matter?" It wasn't where she had meant to start, but it would have to do.

"Destiny?"

"Destiny Teeter, the girl twin. You said she didn't matter, that it was okay if I couldn't find her. Was it really because she was just a girl? Or was it because you knew she was dead? Knew she was dead because you had killed her."

"The girl's dead?" He sounded more confused than surprised. He rubbed his temples, as if his head suddenly hurt.

"She's the one whose body was found in the park a few weeks back, before you hired me. Her brother, Treasure, was killed in an arson fire yesterday. Someone hit him over the head, then set a fire, hoping to make it look like an accident. When the cops ID'ed him through the dental records, they had the inspiration of trying to match Destiny's records to the dead girl."

She had hoped her torrent of words might provoke a similar stream from Beale. He merely looked thoughtful. "Well, that's a shame. But the others are still alive, right? Didn't you go out to the skinny boy's school yesterday? How's he doing? Besides, the fat one still might show up. Those boys don't stay away forever when they run. They always come home. They don't have the imagination to start over somewhere else."

His coldness, his obtuseness, infuriated her even as it gave her new hope. If he had killed the twins, wouldn't he be stammering excuses or alibis by now?

"Mr. Beale, I don't think you understand the significance of what I've just told you. Destiny and Treasure Teeter were murdered, and the police are going to be here with a warrant for you real soon."

"Me. They always blame me. Doesn't anyone else in this city ever do anything? It doesn't make much sense, paying money to find children just so I can kill them."

"The police believe you killed Destiny in a rage-that you didn't plan it, but when it happened, it felt good, cathartic. So you decided to kill the others, too, to punish them for testifying against you. But you didn't know how to find them, did you? That's where I came in. I would find them, thinking I was doing a good deed, and then you'd kill them."

If Tull was right, Beale's plan had been ingenious and multilayered. After his chance meeting with Destiny, he had sought Tess out to locate the others. He had insisted on not meeting the children face-to-face, so he could then have plausible deniability when the bodies started turning up. According to Tull's theory, Beale had broken into her office and stolen his own file, in order to find out what she had learned while still declaring his ignorance. But the file he would have printed out early Saturday morning had only the information about the Teeter twins. She hadn't had a chance yet to summarize Jackie's findings about Sal and his scholarship to the Penfield School. Lives often hinged on such coincidences. So Treasure Teeter was dead and Sal Hawkings was alive. He would have been harder to get to, anyway. Beale would have needed to think long and hard about finding a credible death for Sal.

"The police are going to arrest you today," Tess said. "They'll be here any minute with a warrant. But I wanted to talk to you first, see what you had to say for yourself."

Beale walked over to a wall calendar hanging by his kitchen door, the kind given out at hardware stores. This month's picture was a covered bridge, the reminder beneath it was to buy gardening supplies. Each day in June so far was X'ed, except for yesterday. He took a black pen and carefully crossed off that square as well.

"Forgot to mark my calendar. Like I said, I got a late start this morning. I've been out of prison for sixty-seven days now. Do you know how many days I was in prison?"

Tess was pretty good at doing math in her head, the byproduct of having to know her checking account balance almost to the penny over the last few years. "Five times 365, for a total of-1,500 plus 300 plus 25, 1,825."

"You forgot the leap year, so 1,826. I figure I have to live to be seventy-two to get all those days back. And I never really get them back, do I? You never get anything back in this life, once it's taken from you. My wife Annie, the babies who died inside her. We tried five times to have children, but she just couldn't carry a baby. She was all messed up inside. Nowadays, you're like that, the doctors can do things, as long as you got money. Isn't that a fact?"

"Yes, I guess it is." Tess hadn't known how this conversation was going to go, but she surely hadn't envisioned discussing modern obstetrics.

He sighed. "Children, children, children. Truth is, I was disappointed only for Annie's sake. The way I see it, children are one of the shakiest investments you'll ever make. You spend all this money on 'em, spend all this time and there's no way knowing how they're going to turn out. Now that boy Treasure, he was a cute little boy once. Mouthy, in with bad company, but a real good-looking boy. The girl was pretty, too, or would have been if she had worn nice clothes. All those children, always dressed so shabby. I'm sorry they're dead, but I didn't kill them."

"But you never intended to help them, did you? This was never about helping these children at all."

"I believe I'll have some iced tea. You sure you don't want some?" When Tess shook her head, Beale took a jar of presweetened, instant powder from the top of the refrigerator and stirred it into a tall, amber glass filled with tap water. He took a long time stirring, as if making instant iced tea required a great deal of precision.

"You ever listened to a child tell you the plot of a picture show?" The teaspoon was still hitting the sides of his glass, tap, tap, tap. "You know how they get all mixed up, forget the important parts, double back to the beginning? And no two children will tell the story quite the same way. It likes to drive you crazy, listening to them."

Tess waited. It seemed to her that Luther Beale wasn't a much better storyteller himself.

"Now the children who saw Donnie Moore die all saw the exact same thing. They all told the jury the same story, almost word for word. Me, standing there with my gun out, looking like the devil. The girl saw it, although she was around the corner and heading up the alley before Donnie went down. Her brother was right behind her, but he saw me, too. The fat one saw it, although his back was to me. Yet they all told the same story, almost word for word. Now isn't that something?"

"Their testimony had probably been rehearsed to some degree," Tess said. "They were children, after all, the prosecution had to prepare them for taking the witness stand. You'd expect a certain similarity."

"Which would be fine, except for one thing. I didn't kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan."

What had Tull told her, when they watched the moon rise over Locust Point? He wanted to take the witness stand in his own defense. Luckily, his lawyer wasn't that crazy. How had she ever gotten involved with such a crazy old man?

"You mean someone else with a gun just like yours happened to be on Fairmount Avenue that night and just happened to shoot Donnie after you opened fire and it just happened that no one heard the other shots? You'll have to do better than that."

"I heard two shots. At the time, I thought it was a car backfiring. Later, I realized they were gunshots, probably came from the car I saw coming round the corner."

"But the bullet they found in Donnie matched your gun, right?"

"The bullet passed through Donnie. They never found it. But then they weren't looking for it. They didn't need to find any bullets. They had me, they had my just-fired gun, they had four children saying I did it."

"It still sounds pretty incredible to me. But okay, I'll play along. Someone else shoots Donnie Moore. Why?"

"It wouldn't be the first time a child was shot when some drug dealer was trying to hit someone else. See, it's gotta be drugs, because if it wasn't, why didn't the folks in that car slow down? Why didn't they call the prosecutor and offer to testify, too? And if there was someone else there they were trying to kill, that person's not going to help me out. He's just going to run. The children say it was me because they don't want to go against the drug dealers."

"But after Donnie died, the other children were separated. They were put in different foster homes. They couldn't have conspired to tell the same story even if they wanted to."

"I'm going to tell you again. I didn't kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan. It's true, I told you a little lie at first. I didn't think you'd be able to find the children if you weren't dangling money in front of their noses. Once you found 'em, I planned to tell you the truth. But all I ever wanted to do was to talk to them, to find out why they lied, why they didn't mention the other gunshots, or the car that turned onto Fairmount just as Donnie died."

He finished his iced tea in one long swallow, then immediately took the glass to the sink, rinsed it out, and put it in the rack on the drainboard. Watching him, Tess struggled with her own feelings. She wanted to believe him, if only because she didn't want to be implicated in Treasure's death. But she couldn't let him off the hook just to get herself off the hook.

"Are you still going to work for me?" he asked.

"The police told me you had a PBJ for agg assault. So you're not quite the righteous man you hold yourself out to be. You hurt someone once, almost killed him according to the cops. Why wouldn't you do it again?"

Beale pulled a long, gold chain from his pocket, worrying it between his fingers the way Tess's Monaghan relatives manipulated their rosary beads. "I told you about my Annie, how she wanted children. But her body wasn't kind to her. It killed the babies she wanted, and then it killed her, the female parts turning against her. She was dying, no way around it, and I rushed over to the hospital from work each day, wanting only to be with her when she finally slipped away. One day, the boss kept me late after work, some stupid thing. When I got there, an orderly was pulling the sheet over her face."

Tess waited.

"So I pulled it down to look at her, one last time. She was so thin at the end, she had lost most of her hair, she didn't even look like the woman I had married, but she was my Annie. I looked at her, and I saw her neck was bare. The orderly, his fist was clenched, he was trying to back out of the room. I knocked him down and I sat on him, and I beat his head against that hospital floor until he opened his hand and gave me back my Annie's locket. Then I pounded his head on the floor until he was unconscious and had to be admitted to his own emergency room. When the judge heard the whole story, he gave me PBJ."

He flipped open the locket at the end of the chain in his hand and showed Tess the faded photo there. Luther Beale, the young Luther Beale that Annie had known.

"He had her wedding ring, too. But it was the locket that made me crazy."

"It's a nice picture. You were a handsome young man." He was, although there was something severe and cold in his face, even as a young man. Luther Beale looked like he had come into this world feeling righteous.

"I always wonder if I should put Annie's photo in there now. I mean, should it be the way it was, or is it my locket now, my way of remembering her?"

Tess couldn't begin to answer that question. How do you remember your dead? Light a candle, unveil a stone, sit in the dark and drink tequila. Although she had tried only the last of these three rituals, it was something she had been struggling with for almost a year, since she had seen Jonathan Ross run down by a taxi on a foggy morning in Fells Point. She drank tequila and went through the dreary litany of what-ifs. What if they had slept in that morning. What if they had left by the front door instead of the side. What if, what if, what if.

She assumed Luther Beale had his own version. What if Annie had lived? What if they had had children? Then they might have moved, in order to find better schools, and then Luther Beale would have been long gone from Fairmount Avenue.

"I didn't kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan. I didn't kill those twins. And if I didn't, someone else did. I'm too damn old to serve more time for a crime I didn't do. You still working for me, Miss Monaghan? You believe me now?"

"I believe you didn't kill the twins," Tess said slowly. "And I believe you didn't mean to kill Donnie Moore. Is that good enough?"

"It's better than what most people think of me."

And they sat in the kitchen, waiting for the cops to come.