Butchers Hill

grin.

'Before you leave, you should know the getting of wisdom in this case requires a sizable retainer.'

Chapter 2

By the time Beale left, Tyner's card clutched in hand, Tess had thirty minutes before her next appointment. She decided to take Esskay for a quick walk, find a snack to tide her over to lunch, explore a little more of her new neighborhood. She grabbed the leash from its peg by the front door and Esskay was instantly alert, rolling off the sofa in one fluid movement and tapping her toenails on the linoleum, happier than Gene Kelly on a rainy day.

But this was a perfect day. Spring had started out cool and wet in Baltimore this year, then settled into a pattern of eerily exquisite days. Sunny, dry, not too hot, the tiniest city gardens riotous with azaleas and then lilies that never seemed to wilt or lose their blossoms. To top it off, the Orioles were playing.600 ball. Naturally, all this Edenic perfection made the natives nervous. The local wisdom was that good things always had a hidden price, like those rent-to-own deals where you ended up paying a thousand dollars for a three-hundred-dollar television set. Sooner or later, the bill would come due.

Esskay stopped abruptly and Tess banged her knee against the dog's pointy tailbone, hard enough to bruise it. 'What the-' She should have known. The dog had stopped here every day for the past week, since the unparalleled thrill of seeing a cat sunning itself on the windowsill of this particular rowhouse. Esskay had already forgotten what she had seen, but she hadn't forgotten the sensation. Happy, happy, joy, joy, her quivering muscles seemed to sing. Tess allowed the dog the moment, then flicked the leash.

'Walking means moving forward from time to time, Esskay. Let's keep going.'

They crossed the street into Patterson Park, entering through ornate stone portals. 'The city's emerald jewel,' an overwrought Beacon-Light editorial writer had once christened the park. Sure, a gem that had fallen out of its setting and now rattled around in someone's drawer, too expensive to insure or wear. Baltimore was full of such inconvenient treasures. The city's standard solution was to auction them off, or let them go to ruin, but there was always a Save-the-Something group that interceded at the last minute, like the mountie in an old-fashioned melodrama. Talk about hollow victories. What was the point of citizens rallying to save, for example, the beautiful old pagoda that rose here in Patterson Park 's northwest corner when the city crews wouldn't even cut the grass on a regular basis. Just a week ago, a jogger had found a woman's body in the overgrown weeds at the pagoda's feet, her throat slashed, her face literally beaten off. The Blight had given it a paragraph on page three. City woman killed. Tess knew how to translate this particular bit of newspaperspeak, how to decode the clues offered up by the story's very placement and brevity. Drugs, prostitution claim another deserving victim. The piece had caused an uproar in the neighborhood, but only because the paper had placed her body in Butchers Hill instead of Patterson Park proper. So bad for property values, those carelessly strewn corpses.

Butchers Hill. The name had made a conveniently macabre and alliterative nickname for Luther Beale, but its origins couldn't be more stupefyingly literal. At the turn of the century, the city's prosperous butchers had lived in the precincts west of Patterson Park, building fine houses on the proceeds from their tenderloin empires. And it was on a hill, providing a view of the harbor below. Butchers. Hill. End of story, with one ironic postscript. Beale's house technically wasn't even in the neighborhood. But the Butcher of Fairmount Avenue just didn't have the same ring to it.

However you drew the boundaries, the butchers had fled the area long ago. Now the neighborhood was an uneasy mix of old-timers, poor folks, and gentrifiers. Nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital had proved to be a sturdy Lorelei, luring fresh supplies of urban homesteaders to dash themselves on the bricked-in fireplaces and leaded windows. Tess could tell the neighborhood was sizing her up, trying to figure out where she fit in. White+young +whimsically named dog usually equaled yuppie around here. But then, how to explain the twelve-year-old Toyota, with the muffler held on with duct tape?

She checked her Swiss army watch, a parting gift from Tyner. 'Parting gift,' she had mused. 'Isn't that what you get on a game show when you've lost?' 'Good up to 330 feet,' he had replied, as if she ever planned to be even ankle-deep in the Patapsco again, much less the ocean. Almost ten-fifteen. She tugged on Esskay's leash. The dog had literally stopped to smell the roses, relics of some forgotten garden that continued to thrive in this corner of Patterson Park.

'We have to move if we're going to have time to grab some coffee and be on time for our next appointment. If you behave, there might even be a Berger cookie in it for you. Did you hear me? If you want a treat, get moving.'

Esskay, spoiled by having Tess to herself for so much of this spring, paid no attention. The hot sun elicited new, exciting smells from the earth every day, while the harbor-borne breezes made the grass move intriguingly, as if field mice and rabbits were running there. And although the dog had no idea what a Berger cookie was, she knew what 'treat' meant, and she knew she always got one after a walk, no matter what. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

The ten-thirty appointment was waiting outside the office, a bright yellow flame among the faded bricks. Tess could tell the woman was impatient and put out from the moment she rounded the corner, coffee and an open package of Berger cookies in hand, a half-eaten one clenched in her teeth.

'I don't like to be kept waiting,' Mary Browne said as Tess fumbled with her keys.

A blushing Tess choked down her mouthful of chocolate-iced cookie, unlocked the door, and ushered the woman into her office. 'I'm normally very punctual, but I went out to walk my dog and-'

'Fine. You're here now, may we begin?' She took the seat opposite Tess's desk, crossing her legs at the knee, then tugging her skirt down as if Tess might be inclined to look up it.

Tess threw the greyhound the promised piece of cookie, stealing a longing look at the others, nestled in their open box. The one she had gulped on her way back to the office had only whetted her appetite. Perhaps she should put them on a plate, offer them to this unsmiling Mary Browne in the guise of courtesy. Then she could have a few more herself.

'Would you like a cookie, perhaps a glass of water?' Esskay chose this moment to wander into the bathroom at the rear of the office and begin lapping noisily from the toilet bowl. A very classy operation, this Keyes Investigations. 'I also have some orange juice in the refrigerator. And a six-pack of Cokes-'

'I prefer to discuss business,' she said, pulling a small brown envelope out of her purse.

Unlike Luther Beale, who had been oblivious, Mary Browne took in her surroundings with one quick, impassive glance. The fresh eggshell paint seemed to peel beneath her eyes, revealing every decade of the building's inglorious history: the recent incarnation as a cheap studio apartment, when a makeshift kitchen had been shoehorned into the back; its brief fling as a bar; the years as a dry cleaner, which had left a vague chemical smell scored into the walls.

As her prospective client studied the room, Tess studied her. Mary Browne could be Exhibit A for any Afrocentric curriculum that wanted to claim ancient Egypt as its own. Her features were as fine as Nefertiti's, her skin a velvety dark brown, which looked even darker against the yellow suit and matching straw hat. Her hair appeared to be cut very close to the scalp, but not so close that it still didn't curl. With her long neck rising like a stem from the deep V of the suit, and her dark, smooth face framed by the broad brim of a hat with a yellow band, she resembled nothing so much as the black-eyed Susans that would bloom in late summer.

'Miss Monaghan?' Mary Browne's tone was as cold and treacherous as thin ice.

'Please, call me Tess. I'm probably younger than you, after all.'

'I'm only thirty-two-'

'I'm twenty-nine.' It occurred to Tess that telling a prospective client that she looked older than she was might not be one of Dale Carnegie's tips. 'But it's not that you look over thirty, it's that you look so much more…polished. More sophisticated, I guess I'm trying to say.'