Butchers Hill (32 page)

"Someone probably complained about
all the cars parked out front," Patrick grumbled, getting up
to go to the gate.

But it was a county cop car, not a city one,
and the two officers seemed tentative and embarrassed.

"Is there a Miss Tess Monaghan
here?"

Everyone in the family turned to look at
her, their eyes so accusing, so ready to believe the worst of her, that
Tess felt just the tiniest bit affronted.

"That's me,"
she said, putting down the garbage bag of crab shells she had been
tying up, brushing her hands off on her jeans.

"You don't have to say
anything to them," her father assured her. "Let me
go call our lawyer."

"You want I should call the chief
of the state police, or Arnold Weiner even?" Uncle Donald
asked. "I don't see how the county cops have
jurisdiction here."

Penfield School is in
Baltimore County's jurisdiction
, Tess
thought as she walked toward the gate, her mouth dry and ashy. If
something had happened to Sal Hawkings, it would be county cops who
would investigate, the county cops who would want to question her, the
county cops who would want to know about Luther Beale's
unvarying alibi.

"How can I help you,
officers?"

"We found someone," said
the taller cop, a strapping near-giant, his name plate at
Tess's eye level. Officer Buske. With his broad chest and
shiny black hair, he reminded Tess of the smiling boy in red-and-white
checked overalls, hawking burgers at Shoney's Big Boys.

"Is he dead?" she asked.

The big cop, Buske, looked at her strangely.
"Dead? He? No, it's a she and she says
she's not going anywhere until she talks to you. We found her
walking barefoot along the Hanover Pike, up toward the state line. She
said she had been kidnapped, but she didn't want to press
charges, that you would take care of it. She had your business card in
her pocket. We took her down to your office, and when you
weren't there, we went over to your apartment. Your aunt said
we'd find you here." Buske suddenly blushed.
"She sure is pretty, your aunt."

Tess couldn't help imagining this
broad-shouldered lad sitting at the breakfast table, wearing the
flannel robe that Kitty kept for all her gentlemen callers. Husky Buske.

"Back up a minute," she
said. "You found
who
on the Hanover Pike? Some kidnap victim who wants to speak to me? This
doesn't make any sense."

The smaller cop—actually, he was
almost six feet, but Buske Big Boy dwarfed him—opened the
back door of the patrol car and Willa Mott limped out, her bare feet as
red as her perpetually stuffed-up nose, but much more painful looking.

"Willa?"

"I told them you'd take
care of me," she said stiffly. "That you worked for
my lawyer."

Tess decided to play along, even if she
wasn't quite sure just what game was afoot. "Of
course. Tyner will be so upset when he hears what happened. Your
ex-husband again? Are you finally ready to press charges?"

"I think we should talk about this
in private," she said, stumbling forward. Not only where her
feet raw and swollen, but her ankles were criss-crossed with tiny
scratches and insect bites.

The big cop lowered his voice.
"Truthfully, ma'am, we think she ought to go in for
psychiatric observation. She was muttering to beat the band the whole
time she was riding around in the back seat, using every curse word in
the book."

"She has problems, but
she's okay as long as she takes her medication,"
Tess said. "It's the same old story. She starts
feeling good, then decides she doesn't need to take the
lithium any more. This happens every six months or so."

Willa glowered, but didn't dare
contradict her. The officers retreated to the car somewhat reluctantly,
called in on their radio, and backed out of the driveway about a minute
later. As soon as they were out of sight, Willa turned to Tess.

"That crazy nigger bitch friend of
yours did this to me," she screamed. Tess couldn't
believe such a loud sound was coming out of mousy Willa Mott.
"That crazy nigger bitch kidnapped me, took my shoes, and
then put me out on the road in the middle of nowhere."

Tess glanced back at her family. Her mother
looked stricken, as if she had always feared exactly this: some white
cracker friend of Tess's crashing an otherwise pleasant
family gathering, screaming expletives and epithets. Cousin Deborah
leaned forward, a hint of delight in her shocked face, while Gramma
merely looked impatient. Baby Samuel continued to pound on the table
with his crab mallet. "C'azy nigga bit.
C'azy nigga bit," he chanted happily.

Tess said the only thing that occurred to
her. "Would you like to join us for dessert?"

Willa Mott passed on the cake, although she
let Tess's father tend to her feet, whimpering as the
hydrogen peroxide bubbled and hissed over her open wounds.

"That just means it's
working," Patrick assured her.

"Now tell me what happened with
Jackie," Tess said.

They were in the upstairs bathroom, away
from the rest of the family, although Judith had insisted on being
here, too. It was her house, after all. Willa sat on the closed toilet,
Patrick at her feet, while Judith blocked the door. Tess was left with
the rim of the tub, wedged in tight by Willa Mott's side, so
she was facing her profile. Willa seemed to prefer it that way, making
eye contact with Patrick instead of Tess.

"About four-thirty today, after
the last of the kids had been picked up, that nigger bitch pulled up in
her fancy car, said she wanted to talk to me."

"Jackie," Tess
corrected. "Her name is Jackie and if you keep calling her
that, I'm going to smack you."

Willa shrugged, as if so much had happened
to her today that one more smack wouldn't make a difference.
"So then she says, she knows. She knows, and she's
going to kill me if I don't give her what she
wants."

"Knows what?"

Willa's voice was inaudible.

"Speak up, Willa."

"She knows I have the records from
Family Alternatives, and she's going to kill me if I
don't turn over her file."

Patrick and Judith were completely
bewildered, but Tess had an instant image of Willa walking back and
forth through her living room, her arms full of juice packs. The whole
operation had taken much longer than it should have, but Tess had
chalked it up to Willa's general ineptness.

But it was only after she had returned from
the garage that she began to remember the details of Jackie's
case. A quick peek at the records had probably done more to freshen her
memory than all the twenties Tess had dropped in her lap.

"How did Jackie figure it
out?"

Willa shrugged, indifferent. "I
don't know. Something I said about the baby's
father. Besides, I wasn't in a position to argue with her,
the way she was yelling and threatening to kill me. So yeah, I had the
records. So what? Those creeps I worked for left in the middle of the
night, owing me two weeks' salary. I figured the files could
be my severance."

"What good are adoption files for
some defunct agency?"

"You think you're the
first hot-shit investigator who's tracked me down, looking
for one of the babies we placed?"

Yes, in fact, Tess had thought she was.
"So you sell the information."

"Only after talking to the
adoptive parents."

Now Tess was confused, but her father was
nodding. He had seen his share of graft in his years as a city liquor
board inspector, and he was a quick study when it came to such schemes.
"A bidding war," Patrick explained to Tess and
Judith. "She gives the adoptive parents a chance to pay more
not
to reveal the information. And the parents have to go on paying, right,
because you can hold it over their heads forever."

"I never thought of
that." Willa looked dejected, contemplating her lost
blackmail opportunities. "I just charged them a flat fee of
five thousand dollars. That's how I got the money to put down
on my house, start my business. But it had been a long while since
anyone had come around. Maybe I should have worked with some of those
adoption rights groups, let them know what I had. But they would have
shut me down."

Something didn't fit. Tess drummed
her fingers on the tub's rim, trying to pinpoint what was
wrong.

"Jackie's baby
wasn't
adopted. There were no parents to blackmail in her case. Why
didn't you name your price and tell her that the baby had
gone back into the system? Why didn't you tell her what we
wanted to know when we first came out there?"

Willa lowered her eyes. "The
people who took her baby and gave her back, their…privacy
meant a lot to them. They wouldn't have wanted that crazy
ni—that crazy bitch showing up at their house, asking
questions, making a fuss."

Tess grabbed Willa's arm and shook
it, quite roughly. "What did you tell Jackie?"

"I told her what she wanted to
know." At her best, Willa Mott was plain and ordinary. Angry,
her features seemed to shrink, until her eyes almost disappeared and
her mouth was as small as a bug's. "I told her the
name of the people who took her baby, the people who gave it
back—when they found out it was half-nigger. You see, they
paid for a white baby, and they said it wasn't enough if it
looked
white, it had to be white. The agency offered them a discount to keep
it, but they said no way. I can't say as I blame
them."

Tess leaned to the side until her right
temple touched the cool black-and-white tile. It was a big bathroom,
but it wasn't built for four people, and it suddenly seemed
stiflingly close.

"You didn't tell Jackie
that part, did you?"

"I had to tell her,"
Willa Mott whined. "I didn't have a
choice."

"You could have lied, the way you
did before. Why did you pick today to become so honest and
aboveboard?"

"Because today is the day your
fancy friend held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if I
didn't tell her everything I knew."

"A gun? Where would Jackie get a
gun?" Tess ran downstairs to the front door, where she had
dropped her knapsack by the hall tree. Sure enough, her Smith and
Wesson was gone. Jackie must have faked her headache, so she could
sneak the gun out of Tess's bag and into her purse. She had
been planning this all along, perhaps from the moment they had left the
Edelmans'.
Do you think there ever were
any Johnsons who planned to name their baby Caitlin? I guess
we'll never know
.

"Where did Jackie go after she put
you out of the car?" she asked Willa, a little breathless
from taking the stairs so fast. "She went to the adoptive
parents' house, didn't she? Where do they live?
What are their names?"

Willa suddenly looked coy. "Why,
I'm not sure I can remember, just like that. What's
it worth to you to find that crazy nigger bitch?"

Tess backhanded her, and Willa's
head snapped back, hitting the wall was a dull thud. It felt pretty
good, probably better than it should have.

"Tess!" her mother
shouted. "This is how you do business?" But her
father looked impressed.

"You are through making money off
your files, Willa Mott. Do you understand that?" Tess held
her by the shoulders, the way someone might grip a sullen child, and
shook her hard enough to make her head wobble on her skinny neck.
"You are never going to sell another piece of information as
long as you live. Now tell me what you told Jackie."

"Dr. and Mrs. Becker, Edgevale
Road in Roland Park," Willa whimpered. "And that
crazy—that woman already took my files anyway."

"So everything you told us was a
fucking lie, wasn't it? The name, the location, what the
adoptive father did for a living. You were making sure we never got
close, so you could milk them instead."

Gramma picked this moment to come upstairs.
"Aren't you done in here yet?" she
demanded from the doorway. There hadn't been this many people
in the Monaghan bathroom since a memorable high school party, in which
Tess and her friends had discovered the mixed pleasures of mixed
drinks. "You're holding everything up."

"This is kind of
important," Tess said between gritted teeth, but too
intimidated by her grandmother to just push past her and make a mad
dash for her car. "People's lives may be at stake.
There's a woman—Jacqueline Weir, you might remember
her as Susan King. She worked for Poppa in the Fells Point store, and
she's about to make the biggest mistake of her
life."

She couldn't help it, she was
curious to see what her grandmother's face would reveal,
curious to see how she would react to the name. But Gramma looked
unimpressed.

"That troublemaker?
Wouldn't you know she'd pop up again just now, when
there's money to be made. She always did have a nose for
money. Well you tell her that she's not getting another
penny, you tell her that. Nothing's changed."

Pop up again
?
"What do you mean, Gramma? When did
Jackie—Susan—pop up before?"

"Oh, she came around ten or twelve
years ago, asking Samuel for money for college, but I put my foot down.
So he got her pregnant, the stupid man, and had to give her money for
an abortion. You think someone who owned a drugstore might have had the
means to prevent such a thing, might have taken the time to sell
himself a prophylactic kit. But he didn't and he had to pay.
I accepted that. Once. Were we to pay for his stupidity for the rest of
our lives? When she asked for help again, I told Samuel it was out of
the question. Otherwise, she'd never be out of our lives. Now
you tell me she's back. I can't say I'm
surprised. I wonder how she heard about the land sale?"