Laura Lippman - Baltimore Blues

"Did you have to wait to sell the property until the body was found?"

Mrs. O'Neal gave Tess an appraising look. Tess glanced down the long hallway to the front door, ready to bolt.

"What is it you think you know, Miss Monaghan? Why don't you just tell me that?"

"You and your husband paid Tucker Fauquier a lot of money-well, not a lot of money to you-to confess to that murder. The details were passed through Abramowitz. What the boy looked like, where he was buried. Fauquier was a little vague about where he found this particular boy, but it was a long time ago and Fauquier didn't know Baltimore that well. Yet he remembered he had buried the body near Cross-Tree Creek, according to his confession. As your husband once said, nobody calls it that. Except your family."

Tess looked up nervously, as if Mrs. O'Neal were a stern professor, giving her an oral examination. But she merely nodded, a sign for Tess to continue.

"So if you paid Fauquier, where's the money?" At this point Tess almost forgot about Mrs. O'Neal. She was figuring this part out as she went. "He said Abramowitz stole it, and Abramowitz did leave a sizable estate. But Abramowitz was a good lawyer; he might have earned much of that while in his own practice. Or maybe he got paid, too. After all, he was obstructing justice, suborning perjury-disbarment was the least of what he was facing if caught. Of course, he was too clever and you were too careful to write out personal checks. You had to pass it through something innocuous. Luckily for you, the William Tree Foundation, which your family controls, gives out more than five million dollars a year. What was another $50,000?"

Tess pulled out the faxes she had collected this morning, clutching the papers so hard that only the sweat on her palms kept them from tearing. "Today I asked a friend at the attorney general's office to send me the William Tree Foundation's allocations list for the past three years. Year after year, only two grants, which happen to total $50,000, are made in perpetuity-to VOMA and the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, both chartered by Michael Abramowitz. They're also the only two crime-related groups on your list. Everything else goes to the arts, the poor, the mentally ill, or religious-based charities."

"Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish," Mrs. O'Neal said. "My father set it up that way."

Tess didn't even hear her. "I'm guessing now. I'll admit that. The foundation made the allocations to the two groups Abramowitz had set up. But instead of passing the money on to Fauquier, he let the charities keep it. In the case of VOMA, which gets $30,000 a year, he was ripped off by a greedy accountant, but that's another story. He thought he was doing a good deed. As for the Maryland Coalition for Survivors, it receives only a $20,000 grant, so it has no tax disclosure forms. It does, however, have a mailing address in Friendsville, Maryland: Care of Delores 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."