F. Compson. Tucker's mom. She remarried.'
Mrs. O'Neal pulled her white cardigan over her shoulders, as if she had caught a sudden chill. When she spoke, her voice was cool, too.
'Mr. Abramowitz emerges as a somewhat heroic figure in your theoretical account. The money goes to a support group for rape victims and the poor mother of his notorious client. Of course, he does violate several laws and enrich himself in the process. Otherwise an admirable man.'
'I think he was trying, in his own confused way, to do what was right. Some people are good and bad.'
'Yes. Well, in that case, Mr. Abramowitz and I have much in common.' Mrs. O'Neal stood up, and Tess almost flinched. Did she really think Luisa O'Neal would hurt her? No, she'd pay someone to hurt her. Mrs. O'Neal walked back to the window, looking down the hill.
'My parents had two children, a son and a daughter. It was my father's wish we should grow up here, on either side of him. But my brother died in a flu outbreak when we were young. My parents died less than a year after my marriage. Shay and I moved into this house. We had a son and a daughter. Mary Julia and William Tree O'Neal. I thought, as my father had, that my children would live on either side of me. But Mary Julia married a Chicago boy. She lives in Lake Bluff.'
'And William?'
'William lives out of state. He has for years.'
'Since he killed Damon Jackson? Did you see that, too, from your window? Or did you just watch him bury the body?'
Luisa O'Neal did not answer. Her eyes, deep gray in the shadowy light, stared down the hill. Whatever she had seen, she was seeing again. Tess almost felt sorry for her, but she had come too far to stop asking questions just because the memories might be hurtful to someone.
'Why did you ask Fauquier to confess? Damon Jackson's body probably never would have been found. It had been there almost five years by the time Fauquier was caught. It was on your property. Even if the body had been discovered, you were the only eyewitness.'
'One can be too neat,' she said, still staring outside. 'The people who make fortunes, men like my father, are reckless and bold. The people who inherit them, or marry them, tend to be more timid. Shay doesn't like loose ends. I didn't like the idea of a woman forever wondering where her son was. Besides, we could never develop the property as long as the body was there. As it turned out Ms. Jackson was a prostitute junkie who had seldom known where her son was when he was alive. But I didn't know that when Shay came up with his plan. I thought it was a good idea.'
'So you approached Abramowitz.'
'Shay did, yes. He said he was representing a friend, but Mr. Abramowitz didn't believe him. It didn't matter. Mr. Abramowitz was burned out. And so very poor. He was paid the same as Fauquier, in the same way as Fauquier. You did a good job, Miss Monaghan, but there were three other ‘dummy' groups on that list: the Park Heights Soup Kitchen, the Hank Greenberg Scholarship Fund for Young Boys, and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Temple Beth-El Gonif. All tax-exempt. Mr. Abramowitz made sure of that. Another law broken, of course.'
'You made checks out to the Temple Beth-El Gonif? Don't you know it means ‘thief'? The Hank Greenberg Scholarship Fund? Even I know he played for Detroit, not the Orioles. Abramowitz was hiding clues everywhere. He even put you and Mr. O'Neal on the VOMA board last year. He wanted someone to figure this out.'
'I wouldn't know about the temple. I don't know Hebrew. But you're right about Abramowitz's longing to be caught. He felt guilty and he wanted everyone else to feel guilty, too. That's why he insisted on joining the firm, so Shay would have to see him and-these were his words-‘think about it every day, as I do.' The only thing Seamon thinks about every day is whether his bran has done its work and where his next affair will come from, the associates or the secretaries.'
Tess liked the image of red-faced Shay on the toilet, day-dreaming of secretaries. But she couldn't afford to be distracted.
'So Abramowitz blackmails his way into the firm, and they give him a nice office with a harbor view and no work. It was brilliant. The best way to drive a workaholic crazy. That was the point, right? To drive him crazy? To make him quit, or commit suicide?'
Mrs. O'Neal's eyes seemed to darken. 'No,' she said, 'I wouldn't wish insanity on anyone.'
'Your son is insane, isn't he? That's why you give so much money to mental illness causes.'
'We earmark about half our donations for the mentally ill.' Very careful, Tess noticed. If she had been recording the conversation, Mrs. O'Neal would be able to argue she never admitted to doing anything. She wasn't taping it, however. For some strange reason she had thought she would be safer if she didn't.
'Does your philanthropy make up for your son killing someone?'
This time Mrs. O'Neal met her eyes. 'Yes, Miss Monaghan, it does. In fact it more than compensates.'
'How do you figure?'
'If William had been arrested he never would have been judged competent to stand trial. He would have been committed to some state asylum, at the state's expense, until he was. Instead he is in a nice place in Connecticut, which costs me $80,000 a year-about four times what prison costs in Maryland, by the way. And my family is still here, contributing to the community. If my son's crime had been publicly exposed, we would have left, taking the foundation with us. There's no stipulation the grants be made in Maryland. The city would have lost out, not us.'
'I see-it was in the best interest of the taxpayers. What if the taxpayers preferred not to pervert our legal system?'
'Lawyers pervert the system,' she replied. 'The jurors pervert it. We sidestepped it.'
'And Jonathan Ross?'
'The reporter? What about him?'
'He was murdered.'
'Really? I read his death was ruled a hit-and-run, an accident.'
'He was going to figure this out. He was starting to research foundations. He had talked to Fauquier. He would have put it together as I did, eventually.'
Mrs. O'Neal just smiled.
'Am I going to be in a police report, Mrs. O'Neal? Am I going to be an accident?'
'Seamon tends to…panic. You've seen how red he becomes, how his voice starts squeaking. Another sign of the compulsively tidy. But when he has time to think-time to listen to advice-he is quite rational.'
'Fauquier will write more letters to other reporters. He wants to tell his story. He wants attention.'
'Yes, he does. You visited him yesterday, I understand. Your name was on the sheet. We've been taking note of his visitors since Mr. Abramowitz's death. Today-' She glanced at her watch, the kind of gold simplicity that costs dearly. 'It's already happened. Shay held a press conference at one-thirty and announced the firm was going to take over Mr. Fauquier's appeals as a memorial to their slain colleague, Mr. Abramowitz. Larry Chambers, a quite capable young man, will handle the case. And if Mr. Fauquier tries to tell him any stories about fake confessions, Larry's going to assure him it will only hurt his appeal. He's also going to inform prison officials that you are not to visit Mr. Fauquier again, nor will any reporter. You need the lawyer's permission, you know.'
'I know.'
Now it was Tess who did not want to meet Mrs. O'Neal's eyes. If Luisa saw the past through her window, Tess saw the future. Fauquier's appeals would run out. His lawyer would whisper to him: 'Don't say anything about that fake confession yet. We have a plan. We're going to announce it just before they give you the injection. You'll get more publicity than any condemned prisoner in the country.' And so Fauquier would go obediently, quietly, sitting in the chamber and waiting for the door to be flung open, waiting for his lawyer to rescue him. The pellets would drop, and Fauquier would die. The last living witness.
'There's only one thing I don't understand, Mrs. O'Neal. Why did you have Abramowitz killed? Was he so miserable that he was going to confess?'
'I'm afraid, dear, you can't blame us for that. We have no idea who killed Abramowitz, although we probably owe whoever it was a debt. It has worked out nicely for us. He was becoming quite a nuisance.'
'Aren't you worried I'll tell?'
'No. I think, on some level, you see my side of things, Miss Monaghan. Justice was done. A boy was killed, a man confessed. My son is in a hospital for the rest of his life, which is longer than he would have stayed in jail.
