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.
Chapter 16
The cops came for Luther Beale late that afternoon. They had a search warrant, but he wasn't being officially charged, not yet, just taken in for questioning. Tyner suspected they had waited until late in the day hoping Beale would be tired, presumably easier to wear down during the interrogation. Tess thought the cops should know Luther Beale better than that.
"But this is good for us," Tyner told Tess, when she telephoned to say they had taken Beale away and started searching his apartment. "I bet they don't have any physical evidence or eyewitnesses to link him to the twins' deaths."
"They want my files, though, and they want to interview me. The homicide detective in charge of the case tried to tell me my files aren't privileged because Beale hired me before he was a suspect. When that didn't work, they brought back Tull, who went all moral on me, saying he just wanted me to do the right thing for myself, so my conscience could be clear."
Tyner laughed. "Good effort. But we have my paperwork to show that Beale came to you as a referral. I'll be at police headquarters if you need me. Luther Beale and I have a long night ahead of us, but I'll have him out eventually."
Tess had her own long night waiting for her. Given that she felt about three weeks had passed since that morning, she was less than enthusiastic about meeting Jackie at her office. But a promise was a promise, and a client was a client, even if the search for Jackie's daughter now seemed mundane alongside the Butcher of Butchers Hill, the Sequel.
Jackie met her at the office with a current telephone directory, a criss-cross directory, a sheaf of photocopies, and a brown bag of little cartons.
"Chinese food?" Tess asked, her spirits lifting a little bit.
"Fresh Fields," Jackie said. Tess made a face, although she had never actually been inside that earnestly good-for-you grocery. Fresh Fields was too far afield for her. Besides, she had heard it specialized in healthy stuff, low-fat and organic. She boycotted the place on general principle, on the grounds that grocery stores should not be in picturesque old mill buildings with a Starbucks next door. Still, Jackie's haul of containers looked pretty good.
"Vegetable pad thai, sushi, chicken curry salad, smoked couscous, focaccia, pasta salad," Jackie said. "Eclairs for dessert."
"Pad thai? Isn't that a fish thing? And sushi is a raw fish thing. I might have to eat both eclairs." Tess peered into the empty bag. "No wine?"
"We're working, remember? You can't afford to have any of the edges blurred."
"What are we doing, anyway?"
"We're going to do an easy little telephone survey, not unlike something I'd set up for one of my clients. You take the Johnsons, A through M, I'll take Johnson N through Z. Then we'll move on the Johnstons. You check the current phone book, then cross-reference it to these pages I photocopied from a thirteen-year-old phone book. If the name doesn't show up on the photocopy, put an asterisk next to it, then move on. If it shows up, you call."
"There are almost a dozen pages of Johnsons in the phone book. This will take forever."
"Not once you control for longevity and location." Jackie patted the county criss-cross. "Remember, we know our Johnson-Johnston lived in North Baltimore County. Call only those listings that show up in the old phone book with an address in that area. That should narrow it down considerably."
Tess was impressed, but determined not to let Jackie know it.
"So we're just going to call this people and say, ‘Yo, is Caitlin home?'"
"No, because then there's a chance we'd get a Caitlin who's the wrong age, or whose parents don't fit the profile. Caitlin was the WASP name of choice for a while there. Instead, we say we're doing a survey about popular children's names, specific to the Baltimore metro area. In exchange for the person's time, tell them they might win a twenty-seven-inch color television in a drawing. Ask how many kids they have, what their names are. Then ask the ages. If we find a thirteen-year-old Caitlin, zero in, ask for the exact date of birth. By the time we're finished, we should have at least a few possibilities."
"Assuming they haven't moved. Assuming Willa Mott was right."
Jackie's world held no room for doubt. "Let's not concede defeat before we've started, okay? Now eat your supper, then we'll start calling about seven-thirty so we won't catch people at their dinner tables."
"You mean I finally get a chance to be a telemarketer and I'm not going to interrupt people while they're eating? They're going to know we're imposters."
Jackie was setting up work stations for the two of them, arranging piles of photocopied phone lists alongside two maps, so they could cross-reference each listing. Apparently, she was going to work from her cell phone, while Tess would use her office phone. But two maps, Tess thought. Couldn't they share the map at least?
"Part of the reason I'm so good at what I do is that I don't call people at supper," Jackie said. "I also stop promptly at ten o'clock. People don't like to hear a phone ring after ten. They always think it's going to be bad news, and you never get past that first little buzz of fear they feel."