No Good Deeds

by Laura Lippman

  "You didn't borrow any of the money for the down payment?"

  "No."

  "Didn't take money from your father?"

  "My father's contribution was a gift."

  "Right." Gabe produced another piece of paper from the file. "And here's his notarized statement that the money was a gift. Nine thousand nine hundred fifty dollars—just under the limit for taxable gifts under the codes then."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And here's where you swore on the application that no borrowed money was used for the down payment. You remember checking that?"

  "I checked a lot of things in the process of buying the house, but sure. As my father's letter said, it was a gift."

  "But you've since made two payments to your father—five thousand dollars year before last, seven thousand last fall."

  Last fall. Tess remembered wistfully how flush she had been.

  "I was grateful to my father. He had helped me buy my house. When times were good for me, I wanted to repay the favor."

  "In other words, it was a loan, and you repaid it with interest."

  Tyner ran his fingers through his hair, a sign that he was nervous, but only Tess would know that.

  "No," Tess said. "He gave me a gift. I gave him a gift. It's like—if my dad gave me a turkey for Christmas and I gave him a ham for Easter."

  "I'm afraid the federal government doesn't see it that way. Call it turkey, call it ham, but it was a loan, and you lied about it."

  Tess flounced in the hard plastic chair, impatient and out of sorts. They had been trying to scare her with their talk about federal charges, but this was so chickenshit. She thought of the blatantly illegal things she had done as part of her job. Taking confidential documents out of the governor's trash, for one. And this was the best they could do? Nitpicking over payments from a father to a daughter and back again.

  "Fine—" she began, ready to concede the point, but Tyner put a cautionary hand on her arm and interrupted.

  "They were gifts," he said. "It's our position they were gifts."

  "Well, it's our position that your client lied on a federal form," Gabe said. "And we plan to charge her with that."

  Tess rolled her eyes. Jenkins, who had been letting Gabe run the interview, caught her exasperated expression, but it didn't seem to bother him. The three men were like proud hens sitting on some monstrous egg.

  "The penalty for what you've done," Gabe said, "is thirty years in federal prison."

  "Oh, get out," Tess said. But even as she spoke, she saw Tyner nodding unhappily.

  "And your dad has done the same thing. Lie in this notarized statement." Jenkins held up the letter for Tess's edification. "So we can go after him, too. And we will, unless you tell us the name of your source. Give it to us and all this will be forgotten. We'll cut an immunity deal for you and your dad, and this will never come up again."

  Tess felt dizzy, weak—and almost bizarrely grateful. It was going to end now. This had gone too far. Her dad was already unnerved by their inquiries into his business. This would drive him over the edge. But even as she readied herself to break her promise to Lloyd, her brain clicked along, hearing the false note, the sour chirp of illogic, but not being able to pounce on it.

  Tyner could, however.

  "You're saying this is an official plea bargain, something Gail Schulian has approved?"

  "Well…" Gabe glanced at Jenkins, lost for just a second. It was a fatal mistake. Tyner's instinct for weakness and ineptness was as sharp and astute as that of anyone Tess had known. She sometimes felt that Tyner had learned to compensate for his physical limitation, the paralysis caused in a car accident almost fifty years ago, by developing a sixth sense that allowed him to discern the tiniest frailty on a cellular level. If you were going to go up against Tyner, not a single mitochondrion could be having an off day.

  "Does Gail know about this?" Tyner pressed.

  "Gail?"

  "Your boss. Gail Schulian. Has she signed off on making an official plea agreement, in which the government agrees never to prosecute Tess for what we've yet to affirm is a violation of this federal statute, in return for naming the confidential source in the Youssef case?"

  "We don't take everything to the boss," Gabe countered, but his optic muscles seemed to have snapped, so his gaze went everywhere around the room, avoiding Tyner's. "I have the authority to offer this plea."

  "I don't doubt that," Tyner said, in a tone that indicated he had no faith in the young man whatsoever. "But given that your boss is an interim U.S. attorney, I think it's important we involve her in these discussions from the beginning. It would make me feel more comfortable, especially since her replacement could be named at any time. Also—should Tess tell you what you want to know, are you going to share the information with the Howard County detectives? It is their case, after all. Seems odd, the feds expending so many resources on a case they didn't even want to investigate. Let's get everyone in the room—this suspiciously bare-bones, under-decorated room—and do this just once."

  Why was Tyner talking about interior decorating now?

  "Gregory Youssef was my colleague," Gabe said. "Of course I care what happened to him."

  "Yes, now that you believe he wasn't killed by a male prostitute. But when that was the going scenario, this office couldn't get far away enough from Youssef."

  Gabe gathered up the papers he had spread so lovingly across the desk, straightening and bouncing them ostentatiously in an obvious delaying tactic.

  "Your client is guilty of a felony," he said. "We're offering you a deal. Take it or leave it."

  "Are you prepared to charge my client?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Then do it. Enter the charge and let me get her in front of a federal magistrate, so bond can be set and she can be released. We don't have to work out a plea today. You think she broke the law? You think you can prove it? Go ahead."

  "There's no need to be all official—" Jenkins put in.

  "Really? I guess that would explain why we keep meeting in an office that the U.S. attorney vacated back in January of this year. Are you that paranoid about your colleagues looking over your shoulder, Mr. Dalesio—or that nervous about the boss finding out about this little freelance investigation?"

  "Look, this is just beginning." Gabe Dalesio's olive-skinned complexion was now more of an eggplant shade, his forehead perspiring. "I've got the paperwork to seize her car today. And to start the process on seizing her house."

  "On what grounds?"

  "She told the Howard County police that her source feared for his life because his contact has been killed. Our office has been able to establish that the dead man was Le'andro Watkins, killed last Monday night in a drive-by shooting."

  "I don't know the contact's name," Tess put in. She had gone to great lengths not to know it. "It was never revealed to me, so I can't verify it one way or another."

  But she did know when he had died, and the timing was right. How had they pinpointed this? How could they be so sure? They must have assumed the murder was subsequent to the newspaper story and examined only those homicides that occurred in that five-day window, from when the story first appeared to her interview with the Howard County cops.

  "Le'andro Watkins is a drug dealer," Jenkins said. "He was part of Bennie Tep's organization over on the East Side. Low-level, but he was rising up. So if he trusted your friend to do something for him, your friend was probably involved with drug dealing, too."

  "Not my ‘friend,'" Tess said sharply. "And your logic sucks. If Androcles took the thorn from the lion's paw and the lion turned out to be a drug dealer, would he be vulnerable to these seizure laws?"

  "It's up to a federal grand jury to evaluate our logic," Jenkins said, long past pretending to play second chair behind the young prosecutor. "We're going to link you to a dead drug dealer. We're going to figure out if anyone ever connected with drugs worked out of your house or used your car. We're going to look into your father and your aun
t, see if their businesses are used as fronts for drug money. And all because you insist on protecting someone who's almost certainly a criminal."

  Tess was speechless, her mouth shut tight in order to combat the instinct that was dying to scream "Lloyd Jupiter" over and over again. She had every right to break the promise. They were probably on the verge of figuring it out themselves. They had identified the dead kid, Le'andro Watkins, with no help from her. With that lead they could definitely flush out the secret to Lloyd's identity. So why didn't they do it? Why was it so important for them to get her to tell what she knew? It was childish to think of this as a battle of wills, but this had gotten personal in a way that Tess couldn't fathom.

  "Bring Gail in," Tyner said, "and we'll do this properly. Tess is not telling you anything until we have her promise that all of this goes away. Forever. And we're going to want some assurances about the rest of her family as well."

  "Your wife," Mike Collins said, making the commonplace word sound uncommonly rude, and Tess knew that Tyner longed to strike him for insulting Kitty.

  Instead he said, "Everyone. Tess, her father, her aunt, her boyfriend, her friend Whitney."

  "We don't offer blanket immunity for life—" Gabe began, but Jenkins's voice rose over his. "We'll get back to you."

  "Is she free to go?"

  "Sure." Jenkins paused in the doorway. "We never have any problem finding her, do we?"

  The trio left them alone in the room. It was only then that Tess noticed how odd she felt. Her face was flushed, feverish, as if she were a kid with a guilty conscience called to the principal's office. Her hands and feet were ice cold, as if no blood were getting to them, yet her palms were sweating, too.

  But it was Tyner's hand, placed gently on her shoulder, that worried her the most. She must be in a lot of trouble if Tyner was being so kind to her.

  "The thing about the office—how did you figure that out?" A trivial question, but she couldn't quite bring herself to form the more central one.

  "I had thought the surroundings pretty bloodless, even by government standards. On a hunch I called a friend who does a lot of federal bankruptcy work, and he confirmed that they relocated across the street."

  "Am I…could they…I mean, shit, thirty years. How can that be?"

  "The prosecutor's not particularly bright," Tyner said. "And he clearly jumped on this hobby horse without getting Gail's say-so. But I think she'll take his side and they'll charge you. That max really is thirty years. They use it all the time to squeeze people they can't get on anything else."

  "We could go to the press…." She must be desperate if she was considering trying to manipulate the local media.

  "Thing is, I don't think we can win this public-relations war. The average citizen sees it their way—you're protecting a person of interest in the murder of a federal prosecutor. And if it drags on even a little while, the cost of defending yourself would be exorbitant. You'd have to hire someone else, for one thing, someone with more expertise in the federal system—a system in which more than ninety percent of all cases plead out, because more than ninety-five percent of the people who go to trial are found guilty."

  "Maybe I could borrow some money from Crow," she said. "Crow, with his secret money-market account. I still don't know what to make of that. I don't know what to make of any of this. And I've been terrified to speak to him on the phone, for fear he'll tell me something that these guys will ask about and then I'll be at risk for lying and incurring more federal charges."

  Tyner gave her shoulder another squeeze. She turned away from him, and using the wheeled chair to motor across the floor, like a toddler astride a Big Wheel, she rolled to the trash can in the corner and threw up.

  25

  The afternoon was gray and overcast, a perfect complement to Crow's mood. Yet he kept postponing his departure, finding another chore to do for Ed, another errand to run. He dropped the Books on Tape in the library's off-hour boxes. He and Lloyd would never listen to Early Autumn now. On the way back to FunWorld, he stopped at Ed's trailer park and found the older man sitting on the screened-porch annex to his motor home, wearing shorts and clutching a beer.

  "It's Opening Day," Ed said. "And on Opening Day I sit on my porch in shorts and drink beer."

  "I thought there was only one game and it's tonight on ESPN, the Red Sox at the Yankees. Everyone else plays Tuesday."

  "Tradition," Ed said. "You find the boy?"

  Crow winced a little at the "boy" part, conscious of how it would land on Lloyd if he were here. Then again, Lloyd was a very young sixteen. Maybe not a boy, but boyish, as evidenced by his disappearing act.

  "No," he said. "And he doesn't know how to call me, because I switched burners last night, dumping the other phone. I suppose he could try to call FunWorld if he knew the number, or get your listing from directory assistance. But why would he call? He clearly wanted to get away."

  "You know I was a cop, right?"

  "Yeah. A cop, but also a friend of Spike's. You held his liquor license, in fact. What was that about?"

  "Spike has a past. The kind of past that keeps you from having a liquor license. Not even his family knows about it. He was…a little out of control as a young man. I locked him up."

  "You locked him up, but then you helped him get a liquor license when he got out?"

  "What he did—Look, it's not my story to tell. One day you'll have a past and you'll want people to keep it to themselves. Trust me."

  "I already have a few mysteries in my life," Crow said.

  Ed snorted, as if Crow didn't know from secrets, and he had a point. Most people would think that Crow's secret was a cause for joy and celebration, but Crow felt marked by it, shamed and unsure. "Anyway, let's just say I could see the bigger picture, see that maybe Spike didn't have any choices in what he did. So when he did his time and wanted a fresh start, I helped him out."

  "What's your point?"

  "I don't know. I kind of lost it." He scratched a pale, freckled calf. "Oh, yeah. Like I said, I was a cop. The boy?"

  "Lloyd."

  "Yeah, him. He's hiding something, too."

  "He was in hiding because he had stopped hiding something."

  "I get the distinction, but that's what I'm telling you. He ain't told you everything he knows. That's why he's so jumpy-like. There's another shoe going to drop with him. Maybe you're better off, not being around him. Someone wants to kill the kid, you're trying to protect him, and he's not straight with you. That means he's risking your life along with his."

  Crow wanted to indulge the older man, but he didn't think a retired cop's instincts were worth much.

  "Well, I guess we'll never know. I don't think I'll ever see Lloyd Jupiter again."

  "You want a beer?"

  Ed was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which had enjoyed a brief, strange vogue among the wannabe hipsters that came to the Point. Crow was pretty sure, however, that Ed had been drinking PBR since before those kids were born and would still be drinking it after some of them died.

  "Sure."

  They sat in companionable silence, pretending the day was suitably warm and sunny, and listened to the callers on WBAL, whose signal was faint but clear here on the shore. It was the happiest, most optimistic day of the baseball season, with the Orioles fans convinced that they were going to go 162–0. Hey, it could happen. Anything could happen.

  Tess dug the cell phone out of her laundry hamper and called the only number on the message list. No answer. How else could she get in touch with Crow? She examined the phone, which had more bells and whistles than hers—pictures, video, Internet access. She could e-mail him, then. She went to her computer and sent Crow a message headed SIX INCHES FOR YOU, a long-standing joke with them.

  Call me. Urgent.

  All she could do was hope he would check the e-mail via phone—he was clearly too canny to use a computer that could be traced. Oh, she had raised her little spy boy well. Spy boy made her think of flag boys, and she p
ut on a CD of the New Orleans music that Crow loved so much—and kept booking into the club, despite mixed results. "Jockamo fee-NO-MONEY," her father had complained privately to her.

  My flag boy told your flag boy….

  She should forward those photos that Whitney had taken of the three caballeros, she decided, although if that trio got close enough for Crow to identify, it would be too late. But at least he would recognize his hunters should they come for him, understand how serious things were. Not that it mattered. Tyner figured she had perhaps seventy-two hours before she would be charged officially and faced with the choice of giving up Lloyd Jupiter or rolling the dice on the federal charge. Of course, once she identified Lloyd, they would still have to find him, and she couldn't help them with that. Would they believe her? Or would they deny her the promised immunity, thinking she had reneged?

  As for Crow's disappointment when she caved—well, who was Crow to be disappointed with her? Crow, who had listened to her fret about money while he sat on his secret nest egg. She didn't believe that Crow would be involved in anything illegal, but then—she had never thought he would be cruel or selfish either. He had been playing poor. She really was.

  Tess downloaded the three photos, then sent them as e-mail attachments. The nausea came back, and she couldn't think of anything to do except to lie on the floor, although what she really needed to do was put something, anything, in her stomach. The dogs came over and comforted her, pressing their damp, cold noses to her neck and ears. She was touched—until she realized they were simply petitioning her to take them for their afternoon walks. Man's best friend, sure, as long as your interests were congruent with theirs.

  Her restless, association-prone mind leapfrogged back to the motto she had invoked the first time the happy trio had come for her. It was one beloved by her father, a longtime public servant. What's the most frightening sentence in the English language? he would ask her when his friends came over. Other kids did the itsy-bitsy spider, but this was Tess's shtick.