"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."