Butchers Hill

'None of your business.'

'Homicide it is. A homicide with kids as witnesses.' Tess could almost see Tull riffling the mental files of his mind, processing each of the two thousand-plus cases the city homicide squad had handled in the past seven years. 'Kids, kids, kids. The one who was shot by the guy in Cedonia, for bringing his daughter home too late from the movies?'

'If I told you the name of my client, Tyner could be disbarred. Besides, you couldn't be further off.'

'The one where the guy shot the fourteen-year-old for jostling his car when he walked by, setting off the car alarm?'

That caught her off-guard. 'How did I miss that one?'

'No, that can't be it. The kid was killed, the witness was an old woman sitting on her porch.' Tull snapped his fingers. 'Dead kid. Kid witnesses. Beale. Luther Beale. That crazy motherfucker.'

'I don't know about crazy. A little odd, but then who wouldn't be, given the circumstances?'

'Then it is Beale.' In his delight, Tull actually slapped himself five, high and low. 'Man, I can't believe you're gullible enough to believe anything that old bastard has to say.'

Tess stood up abruptly, angry at how easily he had tricked her into confirming his hunch. Tull took one look at her face and said, 'Why don't we pour our coffee in togo cups and take a walk?'

Fells Point was crowded and rowdy on a Friday night, but Tess and Tull knew how to leave the drunken throngs behind. They walked down Fell Street, a narrow block of newer townhouses and condominiums jutting into the harbor on a long spit of land. There wasn't enough parking for cars to be prowling for a space here, and the only bar was a relatively sedate place. They made their way to the dock and sat on its edge, staring out across the water to Locust Point. Tess could see the remains of the Procter and Gamble plant where Beale had once worked, alongside the Domino's plant. The 'Sugar House' to the locals, with a blazing neon sign that had written itself across a thousand Baltimore memories.

'Luther Beale is trying to make amends for what he's done,' she said. 'Is that so hard to believe? Do you have to be gullible to think someone might want to do the right thing?'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't have used that word. But Luther Beale-Jesus, Tess, he's the devil. His name should be Lucifer Beale.'

'The devil? That old man, in his brown suit? Oh, Martin, I know he killed a little boy, and it sickens me, but he's not evil. He's an old man who made a terrible mistake. He wouldn't be the first guy with a gun to do that. At least he wants to make amends, or try.'

'That's the problem. He's still a vigilante at heart, making up his own justice system as he goes along. First he was the judge and executioner, now he wants to be the jury, allocating the punitive damages.'

'He made a mistake. One horrible, terrible, tragic mistake. I'm not saying it's defensible, but it's not what you're making it out to be.'

'One mistake? One mistake?' Tull's voice rose almost to a shout. He stopped himself, fighting for control. 'I bet he told you he didn't have a record, right?'

'He said there was a rap on him for doing home improvements without a license-'

'Run his name, Tess. You'll find an agg assault arrest from fifteen years ago. If the other guy hadn't been 250 pounds and six-foot-six, that probably would have been Beale's first murder charge. He got PBJ-probation before judgment.'

'I know what PBJ is,' Tess snapped. 'I also know it's the legal equivalent to having a clean record, so Beale told me the truth. If I ran it, I wouldn't find anything.'

'Yeah, Beale learned something important from that encounter,' Tull continued, ignoring her. 'Pick on someone your own size. No. Someone smaller, a kid. An eleven-year-old kid, Tess, who weighed maybe seventy- five pounds. He had some rocks. Luther Beale had a.357 Magnum. It wasn't exactly a fair fight on Fairmount.'

'I met him,' Tess objected. 'I talked to him. He's genuinely contrite. If anything, he feels he hasn't paid enough for what he's done. That's all this is about. He was quoting the Bible. He wouldn't be the first criminal who found God in prison.'

'Yeah, and he wouldn't be the first one to lose him again once he got out.' Tull looked up at the moon, a full one rising over the harbor, fat and sickly green-yellow. 'Tell me, Tess, didn't you feel anything weird, anything off about this guy? I've got a lot of faith in your instincts. I met you over a dead body, and I trusted your feelings about that.'

'Not at first,' she reminded him. 'Not until I almost died, too.'

Good, her little barb had hurt him, although it really hadn't been his fault. He had hurt her, too, questioning her judgment.

'Yeah, okay, point taken. But didn't Beale give you the creeps?'

'No, not really,' she said. 'Kind of annoying, in that attention-must-be-paid, listen-to-your-elders kind of way. Abrupt to the point of rudeness. Truth be told, talking to him wasn't much different from talking to my grandmother.'

'Rude doesn't begin to describe it. Word around the courthouse was that he wanted to take the stand, claim self-defense or some other crazy-ass scenario. His lawyer talked him out of it, which didn't improve Beale's disposition any. Donnie Moore's mother came to that courthouse every day, sat through every minute of that trial. All she wanted was for Beale to say, ‘I'm sorry.' You know what he said to her, when they finally met in the hallway?'

'No,' Tess said, even as her memory began retrieving all those soundbites from five years ago. 'I don't need to know.'

'I'll tell you, anyway.' Tull leaned closer, lowering his voice the way an old woman might if forced to repeat a vulgar epithet. 'He said to this woman, grieving for her only child, ‘if you had been a good mother in the first place, Donnie wouldn't have been living in my neighborhood, and he wouldn't be dead now.' Nice guy, huh? Real sweetheart.'

Tess said nothing, just stared at the man in the moon. All her life, she had looked to the moon when it was full, hoping to see the smiling face you were supposed to see. But she always saw a sad one, the mouth formed in a tiny rueful O, as if he were whistling a sad tune.

Tull put his hand over hers, a strange gesture for him. A strange gesture for them, newly minted friends that they were, and neither one a touchy-feely type. 'I'm going to tell you one more time, Tess, and you can ignore me one more time if you like, but it's true: Luther Beale is bad news. Drop him.'

'Did you work the case?'

'No, but I knew the guys who did-'

'So this is hearsay on your part.'

Tull nodded reluctantly. 'I guess you could say that.'

'You really hate vigilantes, don't you? Is it a cop thing? Is it because you honestly fear for what will happen if people start taking the law into their own hands? Or is it because every Luther Beale is evidence of the police department's failings? If the cops had stopped those kids, he wouldn't have been driven to do what he did.'

'That's not fair, Tess.'

No, it wasn't. But friends got to disagree, piss one another off, forgive and forget. Even in her anger, Tess realized she and Tull had passed a little milestone in their relationship. They had fought, and now they were making up.

'What is it that bothers you so much about Luther Beale? I really want to know.'

Tull took his time answering. 'I don't like vigilantes because their sense of justice lacks proportion. They take lives for property. They value themselves more than they value anyone or anything. We're close enough to anarchy as it is. We don't need any more Luther Beales to rush us there.'

'But he was right, wasn't he? As cruel as he was, he was right.'

'Right to kill Donnie Moore?'

'He was right that Donnie Moore wouldn't have been on Fairmount Avenue in the middle of the night if his mother had done her job in the first place.'

'You're harsh, Tess.'

This time, she didn't bother to defend herself.