No Good Deeds

by Laura Lippman

  Then there was the very nature of Youssef's death—dozens and dozens of stab wounds, made with a small knife that was never found. It was when Tess learned of this detail that she decided that Youssef's murder had been intensely personal. Possibly a crime of revenge, definitely one of rage. The ATM withdrawal? That was in an area known for prostitution, including male prostitution as practiced by out-of-town boys who considered themselves straight even as they took other men's money for sex. The information that Youssef was a devout Christian with a pregnant wife had only confirmed Tess's suspicion that this was a man with a secret life, one that his former colleagues were intent on masking.

  But no one wanted to dwell on such details when the victim was such a well-intentioned striver, the son of Egyptian immigrants, a man who had dedicated his professional life to the justice system because he was horrified to share a surname with the first man who attacked the World Trade Center. What heartless soul would make his widow confront her husband's conflicted nature in the daily newspaper? Gregory Youssef was like a bad smell in a small room: People stared at the ceiling, waiting for the rude fact of his death to dissipate.

  Yet the longer it lingered, the worse it looked for law-enforcement officials, who were supposed to be able to solve the homicide of one of their own. Even if the newspaper hadn't told her to prepare a dossier on this case, Tess would have been drawn to it. The Youssef murder was juicy, irresistible.

  "Thing is, the newspaper has nothing to gain by pursuing the story," Tess told Crow now. "If my theory is right, it will just piss everyone off. But until an arrest is made, there will be rumors and conspiracy theories that are even worse. The U.S. attorney set the tone for the coverage. The moment the body was discovered, he should have been using codes to slow the reporters down. Instead he revved them up, let the story run wild over the weekend, then tried to back away from it."

  "Codes?"

  "If he had considered how…well, personal the murder looked, he might have managed to indicate that to reporters, off the record. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's done all the time. Or was, back in my day." Tess had worked as a reporter for only a few years and accepted long ago that she was more temperamentally suited to life as a private investigator. But she still had some nostalgia for her newshound phase.

  "So why isn't the prosecutor doing that now?"

  "You can't put the news genie back in the bottle. Now everyone is left hanging—the poor saps who got stuck with the case, the widow. It was kind of unconscionable, if you ask me. But if an arrest is made, this stuff is going to come out, and the reporters need to anticipate it. Bet you anything it will be some young country guy, one of those ‘straight' teenagers who comes down here and turns tricks but doesn't like it much. Or someone like that weirdo from Anne Arundel County, who drove to Baltimore just to pick up gay men and try to kill them."

  Crow made a face.

  "Yeah, I know. It's a distasteful topic, even in the abstract. That's why this gig pays well."

  "Are your other scenarios unsolved homicides as well?"

  "Nope. I've taken on that perennial favorite: Can it be proven that State Senator Wiley Staunton doesn't actually live in the district he claims as his home? Hard to prove a negative, but it turns out the Beacon-Light reporters neglected to pull a pretty basic record—the guy's voting registration. He may represent the Forty-seventh, but he's been voting in the Forty-first for the last sixteen years. That's a story in itself. You'll probably see that on page one of the paper by week's end. I've also got a nice tidbit on the governor—"

  "The extramarital affair?" That particular rumor about Maryland's governor had hung in the air for months, like a shiny helium balloon bobbing over the heads of children, tantalizingly out of reach, suspiciously unchanging in its proportions and altitude.

  Tess snorted. "He wishes. An extramarital affair is positively benign when compared to what I found in the governor's garbage. Two words: ‘adult diapers.'"

  "Is it legal to search the governor's garbage?"

  "Better question—should the state's chief executive violate federally mandated privacy laws by not shredding confidential documents about his employees? That's the real find. The diapers were just a bonus. If anyone wants to threaten me with charges for Dumpster diving on private property, I'll just wave those. Not literally, of course."

  "But as you said, the reporters can't break the law."

  "True." Tess allowed herself another pause-and-stretch on her crawling path among the documents. "But they can use information of dubious provenance if they don't probe too closely the whys and wherefores of how it was obtained. My hunch is that this whole enterprise is sort of…an overture on the newspaper's part. I think Feeney's bosses would like to figure out a way to put me on retainer."

  "To what purpose?"

  "You know how banks and businesses can launder dirty money? A private investigator could launder dirty information for a media outlet. Take credit reports, for example. I can get those in a heartbeat. Fact is, so could the Blight, using its own business offices, but that would be unethical—and illegal."

  "Then wouldn't it be equally wrong to get the same information from a third-party source?"

  "Probably. But newspapers are so besieged right now. On the one hand, they're all playing Caesar's wife, suspending and even firing reporters for the tiniest slip-ups. But they're also trying to compete with the weekly tabloids on the gossip front."

  "Would you be interested?"

  "I'd like to avoid it. It's one thing to run a daylong seminar on how PI techniques can be applied to investigative reporting. If they like me, I could parlay that into a national gig. But actually working on stories? I'll probably say no."

  "Probably?"

  "If money continues tight…" She tried for a lighthearted shrug.

  "I could kick in more. There's no reason you have to carry the mortgage alone. I'm not asking for equity, just saying I could pay rent."

  "I don't see how you could contribute more than you do. I know what you make, and my dad's much too cheap to give you a raise."

  "I'll give up my MBA classes, get a part-time gig, find some money…somewhere."

  "No, no. Don't sweat it. We just need to implement some belt-tightening measures—fewer steaks from Victor's, more wine from the marked-down barrel at Trinacria. And maybe—" Tess turned her gaze on the two dogs that had been keeping mute sentry at Crow's elbow, in hopes that a bite of cereal might fall. Esskay, the greyhound, was the unlikely alpha dog of the pair, while Miata was the world's most docile Doberman. "And maybe stop feeding those two parasites altogether."

  Esskay's ears actually seemed to twitch in alarm, while Miata's sorrowful eyes held, as always, untold worlds of misery. Tess and Crow laughed, snug and warm on a rainy Sunday, delighted with the mundaneness of their problems. So money was tight. So Tess had a job she didn't particularly relish. Things would work out. They always did. Until they didn't.

  Gregory Youssef's face stared up at her from the floor in mute reproach. He had almost movie-star good looks, but his image had grown meaningless from repetition, another face in the news. They all ran together after a while. The guy who killed his wife, the guy who got killed, the guy who raped and pillaged his company. Four months after his murder, all Youssef's face evoked was a vague sense that one had seen him somewhere before. Oh, yeah, that guy. Everyone knew of him, yet no one really knew him. As Tess studied the photo, it seemed to dissolve into a series of dots until his face disappeared completely, became an abstraction. Yet he would never become abstract or obscure to his widow. Tess hoped Mrs. Youssef had found a version of the truth that allowed her peace, no matter how wrong it might be. Who could be mean enough to begrudge her the myths that would pull her through, the story she was even now preparing to tell a child who had never known his father? Besides, Youssef's secret life, whatever it was, didn't void his love for his wife. People were more complicated than that.

  The problems of three people didn't amount to a hill of
beans, Bogart tells Bergman. But a hill of beans can seem mountainous when it's your hill of beans. Tess actually felt a tear welling up in her eye, and she swabbed it with a corner of her T-shirt. What was wrong with her? She had started crying over The Longest Yard last night, too, although she had told Crow it was because she was imagining what a desecration the remake would be. Truth was, she had been blubbering for Caretaker, the sly fixer who could anticipate everything but his own death.

  She must be premenstrual. Or more anxious about her financial status than she was willing to admit. She shouldn't, in hindsight, have turned down all that work around Valentine's Day. A fussy private detective was a paradox, like a gardener who refused to touch soil or mulch or fertilizer. Tess had come to embrace Dumpster diving, because a hot shower banished the experience so readily. Entering a man's secret life, even in theory, made her feel far dirtier.

  Now Youssef's staring face seemed castigating, accusing. Tess placed a stack of papers over it and returned to the confidential documents she had found in the governor's trash, including copies of several e-mails that would seem to indicate that the governor's wife had been directly involved in a smear campaign against the Senate president. Really, couldn't the state of Maryland afford to requisition a shredder for the governor's mansion?

  MONDAY

  2

  "Shit."

  Crow couldn't have been inside the Holy Redeemer parish hall more than ten minutes tops, dropping off produce that the East Side soup kitchen would stretch into salad for three hundred. How had his right rear tire, which had started the journey as plump and round as the others, gone so suddenly flat?

  Worse, it wasn't even his tire. It was Tess's, on her precious Lexus SUV, which she had lent him reluctantly because Sunday's rain had turned to Monday's snow and sleet—what the local weather forecasters called a wintry mix—and Crow had deliveries to make all over Baltimore. She had insisted on taking his Volvo for her shorter trip downtown. The Volvo wasn't bad in the snow, but it needed a new muffler and a brake job that Tess thought Crow couldn't afford. And it was easier to let her continue thinking that for now than to get his car repaired.

  "You want help changing that, mister?"

  The young man seemed to appear from nowhere on the empty street. Fifteen or sixteen, he was ill dressed for the weather, a fleece hoodie thrown over baggy jeans and no gloves on the raw, chafed hands that—oh, so providentially—held a tire tool. At least he had a pair of Timberlands, although the brand had lost its cachet. Maybe that was the reason he was willing to expose the pristine suede to the elements.

  "I mean, if you've got a spare, I can take off the lug nuts." He brandished the tool in his hand.

  How convenient, as Tess would have said. But then, Tess would have been onto this kid the moment he appeared. Crow had allowed him the benefit of the doubt. Only for a second, but it was that split second of optimism that defined the difference between them. He was the original half-full guy, while she saw everything as half empty.

  "I can change my own tire," Crow said shortly. "Is it simply flat, or did you puncture it?"

  The young man widened his eyes in an excellent show of innocence, undercut only by their amber color and cat shape, which suggested an innate cunning. "Hey, I just happened to be walking by earlier and I saw it was flat, so I went home and got this. I didn't do shit to your tire."

  "Sure." Crow popped the trunk, grateful that Holy Redeemer was his last delivery of the day. At least he didn't have to shift boxes of food to get to the spare. He moved quickly and capably. It wouldn't be the first tire he had changed, or even the worst circumstances under which he had changed one. The ever-shifting precipitation was now a light, fluffy snow, and the wind had died. In early winter such a snowfall would have been picturesque. In the penultimate week of March, it was merely depressing.

  "You need help?"

  "Not really."

  Still, the young man lingered, offering commentary as Crow worked. "That's a little tight, ain't it?" he said of one lug nut. Then: "That's a decent whip, but I prefer the Escalade or the Expedition. Like they say: If you gonna go, go big. These Lexuses is kinda small."

  And finally, when everything was done: "So can I have ten dollars, man?"

  Even Crow found this a bit much. "For what? Giving me a flat tire or irritating the hell out of me while I changed it?"

  "I tol' you, I didn't do shit to your tire." A pause. "Five dollars?"

  "I don't think so."

  "C'mon, man. I'm hungry."

  It was a shrewd appeal. A white man in a Lexus SUV bringing food to a soup kitchen should be suffused with guilt and money, enough to throw some cash at a hungry adolescent, even one who had punctured his tire.

  And it worked.

  "You're hungry?"

  "Starvin'." He patted his stomach and pushed out his lower lip. He wasn't exactly a handsome kid, but there was something compelling about his face. The eyes might seem sly, but the grin was genuine, almost sweet. "Like those commercials. You know, ‘You can feed this child for seventeen cents a day—or you can change the channel.' 'Course it's more than seventeen cents here. We ain't in Africa, ya feel?"

  "Okay, get in the car, we'll go buy you a sandwich."

  "Naw, that's okay. I just wanted to buy groceries and shit."

  "How many groceries can you buy for five dollars?"

  "I could get a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a large soda down at the Korean's."

  "What about the Yellow Bowl? I'll spring for a full lunch." The Yellow Bowl was a well-known soul food restaurant not too far away.

  An Elvis-like curl of the lip. "I don't eat that country shit."

  "Look, you name the place and I'll take you there for lunch."

  "Anyplace?"

  "Anyplace in the Baltimore metro area."

  "How about Macaroni's?"

  "Marconi's?" The choice couldn't have been more surprising. The restaurant was one of the city's oldest, a fussy, white-tablecloth landmark where H. L. Mencken had dined in his prime. The only thing that had changed since Mencken's time was the wallpaper and a few members of the waitstaff. Tess, of course, loved it. But then, Tess suffered acutely from Baltimorosis in Crow's opinion, a disease characterized by nostalgia for all things local, even when their glory days preceded one's own birth by decades. A nonnative, Crow was less susceptible.

  "Are you sure you want to go to Marconi's?"

  "Macaroni's."

  Crow decided to chalk the choice up to that weird gentry vibe in the bling culture, the same impulse that had made Bentleys and Burberry plaid so popular. The kid was trying to aspire.

  "Doesn't matter how you say it, we'll go there. It's on me."

  "Man—I got things to do. Can't you just give me a dollar or two?"

  "What do you have to do? Go find another mark, slash his tire?"

  "Didn't do shit to your tire." Still, he got in the car.

  "My name's Edgar Ransome, but people call me Crow." Lately he was wishing that weren't so. Childhood nicknames didn't wear well as one approached the age of thirty. They yoked you to the past, kept you infantile. But he also didn't feel like an Edgar, Ed, or Eddie, and his last name sounded like a soap opera character's. "What's your name?"

  "Lloyd Jupiter."

  "Seriously."

  "I am serious."

  Lloyd scrunched down in the seat, sullen and unhappy at the prospect of being forced to eat at one of the city's best-known restaurants. He did not speak again until Crow pulled up in front of the old brownstone on Saratoga Street.

  "What's this shit? I thought we were going to Macaroni's."

  "Look at the sign, Lloyd. It's Marconi's."

  "I know what it says. I can fuckin' read. But I wanted to go the Macaroni Grill out Columbia way. They got a salad bar. My mom took me there for my birthday once."

  Crow considered persuading Lloyd to settle for Marconi's French-influenced menu, force-feeding him shad roe and lobster imperial and potatoes au gratin and vanilla ice c
ream with fudge sauce. It had to be a thousand times better than any franchise restaurant. Instead he turned the car around and headed south to the suburbs, to the place that Lloyd Jupiter had specified. A deal was a deal.

  "Where is it, exactly?" Crow and Tess didn't spend much time outside the city limits.

  "Out Columbia way," Lloyd repeated. "On that highway, near that place."

  "The mall?"

  "Naw, on the highway to the mall. Across from Dick's Sporting Goods."

  "You get those Tims at Dick's?"

  Lloyd rolled his eyes, perhaps at Crow's use of the shorthand for Timberlands, perhaps for some other unspecified ignorance and whiteness and general uncoolness on Crow's part. "Downtown Locker Room."

  "That the place to go, huh?"

  Lloyd shifted in his seat, stiff and uncomfortable. Did he think that Crow was cruising him, taking him out to lunch and studying his material desires in order to extract some kind of sexual favor? Street-level life in Baltimore, as Crow thought of it, was viciously homophobic. Tess had that much right: White country kids would turn tricks and still consider themselves straight, but black kids simply didn't try to play it that way. You were queer or you weren't. And if you were, you'd better be ready to get your ass kicked or kick back.

  Tess would laugh at him later. Laugh at tenderhearted Crow, insisting on buying lunch for the street kid who had punctured her tire and tried to extort money from him. Roar at the idea of taking said kid to Marconi's, then acquiescing to his desire for the chain-restaurant glories of Macaroni Grill, slipping and sliding along slick highways on a day when people who didn't have to drive were being exhorted to stay at home.

  Still, he couldn't help loving her, although loving Tess Monaghan was a challenging proposition, what a union man might call the lobster shift of romance. The summer he was nineteen, Crow had worked for exactly three days at a factory owned by a family friend. His job was to insert a metal fastener in a hole on a piece of cardboard, which would later be assembled into a floor display for a mattress. Because he worked the late shift, the lobster, he had received an extra twelve cents an hour—the lobster-shift differential.