Butchers Hill (27 page)

Good story, smoothly told. But that was Sal
Hawkings's particular talent, wasn't it? Thinking
on his feet, making things sound smooth and plausible.

"Tell me about the car,
Sal."

"It was a Checker cab, nothing
special. Polish dude at the wheel, barely spoke English, had some
lame-ass radio station on."

He couldn't be that dense. It was
almost as if he knew the question was coming, and had a dodge prepared.
"Not the car that brought you here. The car that was turning
onto Fairmount Avenue the night Donnie was killed."

"I don't know what
you're talking about." The answer was prompt, too
prompt. It was if Sal had learned a part so well that he could still
slip into it on a moment's notice, the way Tess could recite
the memorized dialogues from junior high French class after all these
years.
Bonjour Jean, comment vas-tu? Dis donc, ou
est la biblioteque
?

"Luther Beale told me there was a
car and two shots, shots he didn't fire. Yet none of you
mentioned the car, or any other gunshots. You all told the same exact
story, with the same details. But Luther says Destiny and Treasure had
already rounded the corner, and even Eldon's back was still
to him when he started firing. You couldn't have all seen the
same thing."

"He's a damn liar. We
wouldn't do that, okay? We were a posse, we stuck together,
we wouldn't abandon one of our own. We ran afterward, after
Donnie was dead, because we were scared. Who wouldn't be? He
was going to kill us, too."

"And there was no car?"

"No car, no second shooter, no O.
J. Simpson, okay? That's why the old man's killing
the rest of us, you know, because once we're all dead, there
won't be anyone to contradict his sorry lies, and he wins.
But he did it. He's just gonna have to learn to live with
that, the way we had to live with Donnie's death and the way
they broke us up, sending us to new families."

Sal grabbed his knapsack and began throwing
in the items Tess had spread out on her desk. Tess let him have
everything except the Kipling, which she hugged to her chest. She
suspected it was the one thing he wouldn't leave the office
without, and he did look anxious when he saw it in her hands.

"You don't see a lot of
kids reading Kipling these days, although in my day, we had to memorize
reams of it. But I guess Penfield is kind of old-fashioned."

"Gimme that. It's
mine
."

She flipped through the pages. The old color
plates were quite beautiful, if a little worse for wear. There was the
female of the species, so much more deadly than the male, the road to
Mandalay and, of course, good old Gunga Din. "
Merry
Christmas, Love, Grandmere
,'"
was inscribed on the frontispiece. Tess guessed that faded, cursive
inscription had not been written to Sal. Both the book and the
handwriting were at least forty years older than he was.

"That's mine,"
he repeated, his voice a childish whine. "It's the
first book I ever owned, it was a gift from Mr. Pearson. At Penfield,
the poetry is all those modern guys, Kunitz and Cummings and Merwin and
shit. I'd rather read this."

"I'm not sure
I'd agree with your assessment of modern poets, but I am
impressed if you read Kipling for pleasure. You're a better
man than I am, Gunga Din."

Sal looked at her sullenly, hand
outstretched. Probably he thought it was a racial slur, non-PC at the
very least, likening him to the faithful water boy. She handed him the
book and he brushed its spine before putting it back in his knapsack,
as if her touch had contaminated it in some way.

"How will you explain the cut on
your head when you join up with your class at the aquarium?"

"I'll think of
something," he said, shouldering his book bag, checking the
brass fastener to make sure the Kipling was safe inside, then taking
his shoe from the windowsill.

Tess had no doubt of that. It was all too
clear that Sal Hawkings could think on or off his feet. She watched him
go, his right topsider still squishing a bit.

U
ncle
Donald worked fast when he had something to do. Tess and Jackie were
instructed to meet him Monday morning at his office in the Department
of Human Resources. The destination made Tess nostalgic, for the agency
was housed in the old Hutzler's, once the city's
grandest department store. Ten stories high, so full of things to buy
and covet that it had a second building to the south to catch the
overflow. Tess had bought her first makeup here, cutting school and
taking the #10 bus downtown. By today's
standards—department stores with grand pianos and marble
floors and espresso bars—the old Hutzler's
wouldn't seem quite so grand. But something caught in
Tess's throat when she saw what it had been reduced to, just
another state office building with flimsy walls and little warrens of
offices.

"Let's take a
walk," Uncle Donald said when he met them in the lobby,
clipboard in hand.

Glancing at his watch, he led them to the
Light Rail stop around the corner and sat on the benches, the ones
designed so homeless people could never stretch out along their length.

"As soon as I started making
inquiries, I was told there was a judge," Uncle Donald began.
"He does this for a fee, usually."

"How much?" Jackie asked.

"Ten thousand dollars."

"I have that." And
Jackie actually took out her check book and her Mont Blanc pen. No
ordinary Bics for Jackie. Uncle Donald put his hand over hers before
she could start filling it out. Tess could just imagine what she might
have written there.
Pay to the order of
judge-so-and-so. Ten Thousand Dollars. For: just a little bribe
.

"It's strictly a cash
business, dear. Besides, I said he usually does this. When I told him
of your situation, he said he can't help. See, all he can do
is unseal the original birth certificate. But you know what's
on that, right? And there's nothing that connects the
original birth certificate with the second one issued."

"Another dead-end,"
Jackie said bitterly. "From everything I've
learned, it sounds as if my daughter could find me pretty easily, but
I'll never be able to find her."

The Light Rail train pulled up just then,
half-empty as usual. A tall, broad-shouldered man with curly blond hair
poking out from beneath the brim of a Yankees cap got off and sat down
next to them, studying the sports pages of the
New
York Post
. He wore a denim shirt, untucked,
faded jeans and dirty-white Chuck Taylors. Normally, wearing a Yankee
cap in Baltimore was akin to sporting a "kick me"
sign, but it was hard to imagine anyone bothering this man. It
wasn't just his size. He carried himself with an assurance as
formidable as it was irritating to Tess. She disliked natural
self-confidence, given how much she had to work at faking it.

"If you're headed to
Camden Yards, you're about six blocks too far
north," Tess told the man, put off by his invasion of their
personal space. What kind of creep sat down right next to you when
there were plenty of benches free? "If you're
heading for Yankee Stadium, that's two hundred miles to the
north."

"Believe me, I know where I can go
when I want to watch some real baseball," the man said in a
quiet voice, his eyes focused on the box scores. "The Yankees
are only three back in the all-important loss column. Only three back
in the loss column, five out of first place. You know baseball? You
understand the significance of that?"

"We're sort of having a
private conversation here, and it's not about baseball
geekery."

"Donald, you might want to tell
this woman who I am. Well, not who I am, but why I'm
here."

"Tess, Miss Weir, call this
gentleman Mr. Mole."

"What, are we playing
Wind
in the Willows
all of a sudden?" Tess
asked. "Dibs on being Mr. Toad."

Mr. Mole studied her, but not with the
squinty, sun-averse gaze of his namesake. He had bright blue eyes, eyes
that burned so bright they seemed freezing cold. He easily won the
stare-down.

"Mr. Mole works in the Health
Department," Uncle Donald said. "He has access to
birth certificates, which are private under Maryland law. As I said, we
know what's on the original birth certificate, because Jackie
filled that out herself. What Mr. Mole proposes to do is go through all
the birth certificates in the eighteen months following the birth of
Jackie's daughter."

Tess didn't see how this would
work any better than everything they had tried. "How can you
match the new certificate to the old? At this point, we're
not sure of any of the clues we started with—not the name,
not the parents' names, not their location. For all we know,
everything we were told was a lie, or just flat-out wrong."

"I don't need a
name," Mr. Mole said. "I can immediately narrow my
search to any certificate that has a different issue date than the date
of birth. That's the tip-off, you see, it indicates there was
an adoption. Otherwise, the two dates are the same."

"How broad a field of
possibilities are we talking here?" Tess asked, still
skeptical.

"Pretty small, actually. The
certificate had to be issued through the city, because that's
where the adoption took place. It has to be a girl. I'm going
to go through the county records, just in case, but I'm
confident I'll find it in the city records. This baby was
biracial, right?"

"Right," Jackie said,
glancing sideways at Tess, checking to make sure she was allowed to
give this much information. She had immediately understood and accepted
Tess's condition that the Weinstein family be sheltered from
the exact details.

"Once you have the
parents' names and the kid's name, you'll
be amazed at how easy it is to find them. Computers
today—"

"I know all about computers
today," Tess said. Even to her own ears, she sounded like a
cranky, know-it-all child.

Jackie was pulling out her checkbook and
Mont Blanc pen again. "So how much do I owe you for
this?"

Mr. Mole shook his head. "No
money."

Now Jackie was the skeptical one.
"Then why do it? What's in it for you?"

"I'm adopted. When I
started at the Health Department, they showed me how to pull birth
certificates and I found the original of my certificate, with the name
of my mother on there. It was supposed to be under seal, but
it's a bureaucracy, you know? It involves people and people
fuck up. I found my mom. She had lived two miles from me the whole time
I was growing up. It didn't change my relationship with my
‘real' Mom and Pop, but it made me feel as if some
question had been answered. Why shouldn't I give other people
a shot at the same deal?"

They could hear the rumble of the next Light
Rail train approaching from the south. Mr. Mole stood and tossed his
newspaper in the waste bin.

"I need to know what the original
birth certificate says, just in case. Donald told me it was a baby girl
born August eleventh, thirteen years ago this summer, right? What does
the certificate say for mother and father?"

Tess looked anxiously at Jackie. They
hadn't anticipated this question.

"Mother, Susan King,"
Jackie said. "Father unknown."

The Light Rail's squealing brakes
covered the sound of Tess's relieved sigh. She
didn't know if Jackie had told the truth or not about the
father being listed as unknown, but she was keeping her end of the
bargain. Mr. Mole wasn't searching for the original birth
certificate, anyway. And if he should see it, Tess knew he would be
discreet. Mr. Mole wasn't someone she could like, but she had
a feeling he was someone she could trust. He boarded the train without
a backward look.

Uncle Donald stood, clipboard at the ready.
"Back to work. I have many corridors to roam, many cups of
coffee to drink before this day is through."

"How long before we hear from Mr.
Mole?" Jackie asked.

"No idea. He'll signal
me with a coded memo. Truthfully, I think he likes making this a little
more mysterious than it has to be. It's not that exciting,
you know, working at the Health Department."

"How did you find him,
anyway?" Tess thought Mr. Mole looked vaguely familiar, like
an old
Star
reporter who
had gone to work as a Public Information Officer for the state when the
paper folded, then later dropped out of sight completely.

"A guy who
doesn't
charge for information? Oh honey, he's famous in my little
network. Scares the piss out of people. A few more like him, and the
whole system collapses." Whistling to
himself—"Hey, There" was
today's selection—Uncle Donald headed back into DHR
and another long day of underemployment.

Tess and Jackie were in unspoken agreement
that it was bad luck to be too optimistic. They had thought they were
close before, only to find themselves completely stymied. So they did
not discuss Mr. Mole when they stopped for lunch at the
Women's Industrial Exchange, or anything about the case at
all. Which left them with very little to say.

"I can't believe this
place almost closed down," Jackie said, for the second time
since they had been seated.

"It's okay, if
you've got a thing for tomato aspic."

"I have to admit, I always feel
cheated when I don't get Miss Marguerite as my
waitress." Jackie was chattering, as Tess had once chattered
to her, trying to get a response. "Do you think they reserve
her for the big shots, like Jim McKay, since she had her little cameo
in
Sleepless in Seattle
?"

"I don't
know," Tess said listlessly. "Why would you want to
be waited on by a ninety-seven-year-old woman, anyway? Besides,
she's retired."