"That's me." Tess unlocked the door. The moment the key was in the lock, she could hear Esskay unfurling herself from the sofa, rushing across the floor with a great clatter of toenails. The dog sounded pretty impressive-she could be a Rottweiler or a pit bull, except for the lack of bark-and the visitor cowered behind Tess.
"The only thing my dog will do is lick you to death," she assured her visitor, who edged through the door, trying to keep Tess between her and the dog. "Now what can I do for you?"
"Don't you remember me?"
Tess hadn't, at first. She had made the mistake of looking at the clothes, not the woman's face. "Keisha Moore. Donnie's mother. Where's Laylah?"
"My sister-in-law's looking after her."
There was an awkward silence, Tess waiting for Keisha to say why she had come, Keisha apparently waiting for Tess to start asking her questions.
"Is there something I can help you with, Keisha?"
"I heard, on the news, that the man who killed my boy may have killed some other children. The ones you were looking for."
Shit. Tess had counted on the television stations not catching wind of the police department's suspicions unless Beale was officially charged. Either they had more evidence than Tyner thought, or someone at the police station had leaked the story, hoping to turn the heat up on Beale. As a convicted killer, he was a tough man to libel, alas.
"That's just speculation, Keisha."
The green suit was much too tight, and when Keisha sat down, her shiny red blouse seemed to surge out of the top. It was hard for Tess to believe that all this show was just for her.
"Well, if those other ones are dead, who gets their money?"
She certainly was focused. For five years now, Keisha Moore had tried to find a way to turn her son's death into a payday, and she hadn't given up hope there was some cash to be squeezed out of it.
"I regret to tell you there isn't any money for anyone. I thought there was, but it turns out things were not quite as they seemed."
"I heard the girl got her money. It's all over the street."
"You didn't know anything about her when I stopped by your house," Tess pointed out.
"Yeah, well I just didn't make the connection, you know? I was thinking of some little girl. How much she get, anyway?"
"All Destiny got was a pretty ugly death."
Without realizing it, Keisha was holding the tip of her tongue between her teeth, as unselfconsciously as a child. The tongue disappeared, and her eyes suddenly looked sly.
"Did you help him kill her and her brother, the one who burnt up?"
"Jesus, no. What a horrible thing to ask."
Keisha was unrepentant. "Well, you asked me some pretty rude things when you came to my house. Why was Donnie in foster care, as if that had anything to do with anything. What did I do to lose him? You were worse than any cop or social worker. That's the worst thing about being poor, having to answer people's goddamn questions all the time. ‘You own a car? You got any money in savings? You got a man living with you? Who's your baby's father?' I get sick of it, okay?"
"I can understand that."
"Huh. Like you ever had to answer some nosy bitch's questions."
"I was on unemployment for a while. Trust me, I answered my share of questions."
Keisha didn't seem mollified. She slumped in her chair, chin lowered to her scarlet chest, glaring at Tess.
"Do you need money, Keisha?"
"You know anyone who doesn't?" she countered.
"It's early in the month to be running short."
"I had some…unexpected expenses. There's a dining room set I put money down on. If I don't make a payment today, I'm going to lose it." So the Christmas finery was for the guy at the furniture store. Tess didn't want to think about what Keisha might do in lieu of payment. Jackie was right. She had never really known what it was like to scrape bottom, or even how far down the bottom was.
"I might be able to help you out. But first, I want to ask you some of the same questions I asked you before. Only this time, I'd like some answers."
Keisha's eyes were amber, Tess noticed. A cold, hard amber with a swirl of green at the center of the iris.
"I'll get my dining room set?"
"You'll get your furniture," Tess assured her. "Now why was Donnie in foster care?"
"I went off on an errand, up to Atlantic City. I thought I'd be home that night, but there was, like, an accident. When his teacher found out Donnie had spent the night alone, the Social Service came and took him."
"A car accident? A breakdown?"
Keisha squirmed a little in her chair, but said nothing.
"If I call a friend in New Jersey, am I going to find out you have a record?" Tess didn't actually have any friends in New Jersey, but Keisha didn't know that. It was plausible. Someone must have a friend in New Jersey.
"I was a mule, okay? I was a mule and I got popped."
"A mule?"
"I carried drugs for a man. I was taking them to Atlantic City on the train, and they picked me up the second I got off. The public defender up there got me off-he asked for a lab test and it turned out the stupid-ass motherfucker had put me on the train with a case of powdered sugar and quinine. But by the time I got home, I'd been gone for a week, and they had taken Donnie. He had to go to school and flap his big mouth about how he didn't have no mama and he was living off cereal. Social Services told me he couldn't come home until I took some class about how to be a parent. I had two more classes to go when he was killed."
"The man you carried the drugs for-was he Donnie's father?"
"No." Keisha's look told Tess that she found the question incredibly stupid. "He was just some guy I was with for a while."
"What was his name?"
"Look, he's dead. What you need to know his name for? He was a stupid, stone-ass junkie and he ended up the way most junkies do. I may have tried to help him sell some drugs, but I never took any."
"The guy you're with now, Laylah's father-he's not part of that life, is he?"
"Don't worry. I'm not planning on being the same fool twice." Keisha stood, her curves shifting again. She was like a big, walking Jell-O mold of a woman. She opened her purse, a bright yellow bag bigger than some suitcases. "You got any more questions, or can I go get me my dining room set now? I owe $119 on it. You can just round it up to $120 if you need to go to the ATM to get it."
"I said I'd get you furniture. I didn't say it would necessarily be the furniture you had paid down on."
Keisha's mouth was a round little O of rage, although no sound came out. If she hadn't been wearing her Sunday best, she might have flown across the desk at Tess. Instead, she snapped her purse shut, stamped her feet, stamped her feet some more. Tess ignored her dramatics, scrawling a set of numbers on a piece of paper.
"There's a man named Spike Orrick," she said, passing the paper to Keisha. "Call him at this number, and say Tesser sent you. It's important that you refer to me as Tesser, that's how he'll know I gave you this number. He'll get you the furniture you need by nightfall and some food, too. He may even throw in a new television set, or a stereo, if he has one handy."
Keisha looked at the piece of paper skeptically. "We talking new furniture, or some secondhand shit?"
"It will be as nice as whatever you picked out, probably nicer," Tess assured her. "And Keisha?"
"Yeah?"
"Why don't you have Spike throw in a changing table? On me."
Chapter 18
The Butcher of Butchers Hill was back. With a vengeance, one might say. Certainly, that was what every single television reporter in Baltimore felt obligated to say, as if they were all working from the same handbook of tasteless clichés.
Tess and Kitty watched the six o'clock news together that night in Kitty's kitchen, clicking from channel to channel in order to see the same five-year-old footage unspool again and again. As Tyner had predicted, the police didn't have enough evidence to charge Luther Beale. As Tess had suspected, that didn't keep the media from going hog-wild with the story. On each of Baltimore's four early evening newscasts, another solemn face beneath another fluffy head of hair recounted the same scant details: Beale questioned in murders of teenage twins who had testified against him. No charges filed. At least one resourceful reporter then resorted to the time-honored punt of journalists everywhere: the man on the street, live and uncensored.