Butchers Hill

Chapter 5

Somewhat 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."

Tess waved good-bye, still grinning at the idea of Feeney and his nieces bobbing through the Pirates of the Caribbean, Feeney with the animatronic Lincoln, Feeney being accosted by various Disney characters, who would be drawn like a magnet to his surly countenance. If only she could obtain photographic evidence, the extortion potential alone would allow her to retire.

The main office at Gwynn's Falls Middle School was in a figurative and almost literal meltdown-sweaty miscreants lined up outside the vice principal's office, all the phone lines lit up, and the air conditioner on the fritz. Tess, who had been called in by the vice principal a time or two during her own middle school days, felt guilty and paranoid just standing in the midst of this bedlam, as if the unpunished sins of her youth might suddenly come to light.

"Can I help you?" The harried secretary at the front desk didn't bother to make eye contact with Tess and her clipped words made it clear that she hoped she couldn't help.

"I'm trying to get some information about one of your former students."

Tess was nonchalant, as if it were perfectly routine for some stranger to request a student's record, but the secretary was having none of it. A black woman with dyed blond hair, grass-green eyes, and a crumpled linen dress of a tropical pattern with glints of both colors, she stared at Tess as if trying to match her to some of the faces she had seen on the wall during her last trip to the post office.

"I take it you're not a parent."

Tess considered lying, but decided she wouldn't get away with it. She hadn't seen a single white student in the office, nor in the school's gloomy corridors. "No, I'm a private investigator who's been hired to find this student."

"By a custodial parent?" The secretary drew out the legal term, cu-sto-di-aaaaaaal, as if to warn Tess she knew what was what.

"Um, no, but my client does have a legitimate interest in finding this child."

"Really? How can anyone-someone who's not a parent, probably not even a relative-have a legitimate need to find one of our students? If it were the law, you'd have a badge. If you were from Child Protective Services, you'd have a state ID. If it's not the law, and it's not the state, then you're not legitimate and I don't want you in my school."

Tess decided to pull rank. "Look, maybe you should just get the principal. This is a sensitive matter, it requires someone who has authority, and the discretion to use it."

"I am the principal, Missy, and you're the sensitive matter. Strangers who walk in off the street are something we take real seriously around here. Now clear these premises, and don't come back. If I see you again, I'll have you arrested for trespassing."

Tess left the way she had always left the principal's office-head down, cheeks hot, certain everyone she passed knew of her misdeeds.

Donnie Moore's mother wasn't at the address Feeney had provided. The apartment had been taken over by her sister, a spaced-out woman probably ten years younger than Tess. She might have looked younger, too, if not for crack cocaine, which had cooked her body down until it was nothing more than a little skin stretched over some long, knobby bones. Or perhaps her habit was heroin; she seemed in mid-nod when Tess knocked. Head swaying dreamily, like one of those plastic dogs you still saw sometimes in the back of souped-up Chevies, she leaned against the door frame and directed Tess to a rowhouse on Washington Street.

"Near the hospital?"

"No, farther south." In her drug-soft mouth, the phrase came out: "Farver sauf."

"But that's practically back in Butchers Hill." Tess felt as if she had been driving all morning, only to find that what she wanted was a few blocks from her own office.

"Yeah, that's where Keisha's new house is. Her baby's fahver helped find it for her." The sister faded out for a second, closing her eyes. Then her eyes popped open again. "He treats her good?"

"Her boyfriend?"

"Her baby's fahver," she corrected. An important distinction, apparently. "Say hey to her for me, will you? Tell her Tonya says hey."

"Donna?" Her words were virtually without consonants, almost impossible to understand.

"Uh-uh. Tone-ya. Like Toni Braxton, you know, 'cept different. Hey, you know my cousin know a girl who know one of her sisters, down in Severna Park, where she's from?"

"A girl knows your sister?"

"No, she know Toni Braxton. She says she's really nice, not at all stuck-up. She say she comes home and sings in the backyard, and they have chicken. They gonna call me next time she visits." Tonya closed her eyes and hugged herself, thinking of her private backyard barbecue with Toni Braxton.

A rat waddled down the sidewalk in front of Keisha Moore's rowhouse. The house looked neat, but dark, its windows shut and curtains drawn against the bright sunlight. It had the feel of a place where everyone was fast asleep, although it was now almost noon. Tess knocked several times and was about to leave when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

"What you want?" The woman who flung open the door wore nothing but a bra and a pair of baggy athletic shorts. At least, the shorts had been designed to hang loosely. Her substantial frame filled every fold. She wasn't fat, really, but big and solid in a way Tess imagined was probably appealing to most men. Certainly, this wasn't the wasted frame of an addict.

"Are you Keisha Moore?"

"You from Social Services?"

"No-" Tess fumbled with her knapsack, trying to find her wallet and her P.I.'s license.

"Because I told you, there's no man living here."

"No, really, I'm a detective."

Poor word choice. "I ain't done nothing. What the cops want with me? I ain' done nothing and Lavon ain't done nothing. Why you got to be hassling us all the time?"

"I'm a private investigator, not a cop." Tess found the license at last and thrust it at Keisha. "All I want is to ask you a few questions about your son, Donnie Moore."

The woman's face seemed to go dead at the mention of Donnie's name. She sucked on her lower lip, looking at Tess's license.

"That was a long time ago," she said softly. "Why you coming around now?"

"Can we talk inside? It's awfully warm out here in the sun."

But the rowhouse was far hotter, stifling and close. In the small front room, two small children slept on two old sofas, which had been set up like church pews, facing the altar of a brass wall unit with a television set and VCR. The children looked tired in their sleep, if such a thing was possible.

"My nephews," Keisha said, stopping for a second to look at them. "They was up late last night."

"They belong to your sister, the one I met in your apartment?"

"Tonya told you how to find me? She never did have good sense. No, these are my brother's children. I'm watching them for my sister-in-law while she's at DSS, trying to straighten out her food stamps. They's trying to cut her off because of one of those new rules, but she don't even know which one she broke."

"Where's your brother?"

"Gone," Keisha said, and something in her voice kept Tess from asking for more details.

Somewhere above them, a baby began to cry. Keisha ran upstairs, her cloth bedroom slippers slapping on the uncarpeted stairs, and returned a few minutes later with a fat, copper-colored baby in a diaper. She had taken the time to throw a plaid cotton shirt over her bra, although she hadn't bothered to button it.

"She needs a change," she said, leading Tess into the middle room. This would have been the formal dining room when the house was built, but now it was empty, except for an old-fashioned deep freezer against one wall. Keisha used this as a changing table and while her movements were lovingly efficient and competent, it made Tess nervous to see the baby lolling on the slick, hard surface.

"She's pretty," she said tentatively, not sure if that was the appropriate word. More puckish, really, making a fish mouth that reminded Tess of Harpo Marx, but what mother wanted to hear that?

"You got any?"

"Uh-uh," Tess said politely, trying to project the kind of longing she knew mothers expected of nonmothers. She didn't have much of a baby jones. Still, there was something appealing about this chubby girl, a life-of-the-party light in her eyes, a way of churning her arms and legs as if ready to dance.

"This is Laylah," Keisha said, making the baby wave a tiny hand at Tess.

"Lay-lay-lay-lah," Tess sang a little riff to the baby, then felt embarrassed. "I guess people do that all the time."

Keisha looked puzzled. "There's a song with my baby's name? Isn't that something? I'd sure like to hear that sometime."

"Yeah, Derek and the Dominoes." Keisha looked blank. "You know, Eric Clapton."

"Oh yeah, that guitar player. The one whose little boy fell out the window. The one who did the song with Baby-face."

Funny, the different contexts people brought to the world. Then again, Tess hadn't known Toni Braxton was from Severna Park. "How old are you, if I may ask?"

"Just turned thirty-one this past April."

"So when you had Donnie you were"-Tess stopped, in part to do the math, in part because the math made her feel rude.

"Fifteen. Yes'm. But what do you want to know about Donnie for? Sure was a long time ago."

"I'm trying to find the other children who were with him at the Nelsons', and I thought you might know where they were."

"Why? I mean, why do you want to find them?"

"Because someone asked me to." That sounded a little sinister, so she added, "There may be some money coming to them, because of what happened."

"Money for them, but not for Donnie?"

"No, I'm afraid not." She didn't owe Keisha any further explanation, but decided to make one up, in case Keisha was distracted by her own grievances. "Because of your lawsuit, I guess. Double jeopardy and all that."

"Oh," Keisha said. The baby's diaper was the kind with tape, and Laylah wasn't a squirmer, but it still took Keisha quite a bit of time to fasten the sides. "Well, I don't know where they are. I never even met 'em."

"What about the trial? Weren't you at the trial?"

"Uh-huh."

"They were there, too, weren't they? I know they were called as witnesses."

"Oh I s'pose we might have spoke, once or twice. But we didn't meet in any real way."

Keisha reminded Tess of the weight you had to pick up from the bottom of the pool to pass Junior Lifesaving. Sometimes, if you didn't come at it just right, you had to surface, take a breath, and make another pass. "Why was Donnie in foster care?"

"I don't s'pose that's anyone's business now, is it? It wasn't right, I'll tell you that much. It was all a stupid mix-up. They took my boy from me for no reason and they got him killed, and they didn't have to pay."

"They put him in foster care just like that, with no hearing?"

Keisha hugged Laylah to her, dropping her head so she could sniff the back of her daughter's neck. She smiled, as if the baby's scent was a kind of aromatherapy. Tess wondered if you had to be a mother to smell it, or if babies' necks smelled good to everyone.

"Look, that was all a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it. I don't want to remember much. I got Laylah and I'm a good mother now, a real good mother, and my baby's father is good to me. What's it to me, you do something for those other chil'ren?"

In the front room, one of the sleeping nephews whimpered like a puppy. Keisha Moore didn't move, just stood in the shadowy dining room, rocking Laylah in her arms.

Tess put her card on the freezer/changing table. "Just in case," she said. "For what it's worth, Laylah really is a cutie."

When she passed through the front room, the two little boys slept on, their cheeks patterned by the rough weave of the old sofas, their clothes twisted and wrinkled on their skinny, compact bodies. She hadn't noticed before that they were wearing their shoes, high-top athletic shoes with Velcro fasteners at the ankles, shoes that had cost someone dearly. They had probably been too tired to take their sneakers off when they went to sleep. But why hadn't Keisha or her sister-in-law followed behind, undoing the straps and sliding the shoes gently down their ankles so as not to wake them?

Tess remembered running barefoot through her summer days, careless and free, a stubbed toe or a dropped jar of fireflies her biggest fears. On Washington Street, the children couldn't even afford the luxury of running barefoot through their own dreams.