No Good Deeds

by Laura Lippman

  "I know Lloyd," Charlotte Curtis said, her voice ever so cautious. "He's a sweet kid, underneath it all."

  "And is there another kid he hangs with, round, a little heavyset, but very quick and light on his feet?" Tess still remembered how speedily and casually the boy had moved after piercing Whitney's tire.

  "Dub."

  "Dub?" Tess was thrown by the name's redneck vibe.

  "Short for Dubnium, an element. His mother liked chemistry when she was in high school." Charlotte Curtis sighed. "Unfortunately, his mother likes chemicals, too. She's in the wind. But Dub is some kind of genius. Seriously. He's not only doing well in school, he's managing to evade the Department of Social Services, which is determined to put him and his siblings in foster care and collect his mother's public assistance before she can get to it. No one can find Dub if he doesn't want to be found."

  The warning registered only as a challenge to Tess. "No one official," she countered. "But you can, can't you? I bet you know where he is."

  "If I knew where he lived, I'd be obligated to do something about it, wouldn't I?"

  "Would you? Do you believe that Dub would be better off in DSS custody?"

  Tess felt Charlotte Curtis taking her measure, putting her on some metaphysical scale that weighed and evaluated every bit of her—brain, heart, soul. The woman said at last, "I can't swear to where he is. He moves a lot. Last I heard, they had a place over on Collington. Look for a red tag on the lower portion of the plywood that covers the door."

  "Tag?"

  "Graffiti mark. Dub has an open-door policy for other kids who need a place to stay, Lloyd among them. But he doesn't give out the address, just the block, because he and his mother are always tussling over the benefits. Dub gets the card, she reports it stolen, he changes the PIN code somehow, has the replacement card sent to him care of…Well, let's just say he has a regular address he can use. High school is easy for Dub after five years of trying to outthink his mother."

  Tess got to the rowhouse on Collington before school was out, giving her time to explore it. The house was boarded up, with No Trespassing signs stapled to the wooden surfaces, but there was a red squiggle in the lower-right-hand corner, and the plywood over the door swung open easily.

  Her stomach lurched a little at the conditions inside—pallets on the floor, no running water, dim even in the afternoon because of the boarded-over windows. Even as a flophouse, it was far from adequate. Charlotte had confided in Tess that the church allowed Dub and his siblings to use their bathroom in the mornings, and the children then relied on the facilities in the branch library the rest of the time. In fact, that was where they spent each afternoon throughout the cold-weather months. Would they stay outside, now that dusk came later and the air was almost warm? Tess waited in her car, certain she would recognize him by his walk.

  Not long after five, Tess saw a trio coming down the block, a heavyset teenager and two younger children. Yes, that was the silhouette she remembered, the same light-footed Jackie Gleason grace. She waited until they slipped into the house, then followed about five minutes later.

  "Shit," Dub said.

  "I'm not DSS," Tess assured him. "Just a friend of Lloyd Jupiter's. He's in trouble."

  "Don't know any Lloyd."

  "So it's just a coincidence that you puncture tires and Lloyd comes along five minutes later, ready to change them?"

  Dub didn't make the mistake of speaking when surprised.

  "I saw you, Dub. Week before last. You and Lloyd pulled the scam over on Mount Street. Old Mercedes station wagon. Only Lloyd didn't show up for a while, did he? And when he did, I bet he had a story about how he didn't make any money, but he had bags of cookies, maybe some leftover carryout. Am I right?"

  "Them cookies were good," the little girl said wistfully. She looked about eight, and she wore her hair in a timeless style—three poufy plaits, sectioned off as precisely as city blocks, fastened with plastic barrettes at the ends. Tess marveled at the care that had been taken with the little girl's hair. The boy, slightly taller, was spick-and-span as well, although his trousers were a tad too short. She hoped kids no longer got teased for wearing high-waters.

  "I haven't seen Lloyd for a while," Dub said. "I don't know where he is."

  "That makes two of us. But did he come to you after Le'andro Watkins was killed? Did he tell you he feared for his life?"

  Dub felt in the pocket of his jacket and took out three limp bills, dollars that looked as if they had been dug out of a trash can or a gutter, and perhaps they had. "Go down to the corner store, buy yourselves a treat," he instructed the younger ones. His voice was gentle, yet the tone defied them to argue back. "Whatever you want."

  The boy grabbed the bills and bolted, the girl at his heels. "You've got to share," she said. "Dub, tell him he's got to go halves."

  "Be nice, Terrell," he said. "You know you have to look after Tourmaline when I'm not around." He waited until the plywood door swung back into place before he spoke to Tess again. "They don't need to know everything I do. Besides, I stay away from that side of things. Lloyd and me, we run a few low-risk games, when there's time and opportunity."

  "Like a snow day," Tess said, remembering that school had been canceled the day that Crow and Lloyd first met. "But on Wednesday—"

  "That day with the Mercedes? Staff-development day at the school, so they let us out two hours early. But I always told Lloyd that I would draw the line at anything to do with Bennie Tep."

  "Bennie Tep?"

  "He's the drug dealer that Le'andro worked for. Lloyd, too, for a while, but Bennie got no use for Lloyd. Says he lacks focus, can't be trusted to do even small things right. But Le'andro liked Lloyd, if only because Lloyd was fool enough to think that Le'andro was someone worth looking up to. He let him hang around, threw him some little things he didn't want to do."

  "Things like using an ATM card in a very precise way, at a very precise time?"

  Dub didn't answer, so Tess continued. "That's practically public record at this point. Lloyd's admitted as much to me. It was in the newspaper a week ago Sunday, only without Lloyd's name attached. Which is probably the reason that Le'andro was killed—because Lloyd pretended he was the only one in on the scam."

  "Yeah, okay. Back last fall, Lloyd bragged on how they put one over on this guy big-time—that he tried to double-cross Lloyd, but Lloyd triple-crossed him."

  "They? You mean Le'andro and Lloyd fooled this guy Bennie?"

  "No, not Bennie. Lloyd wouldn't never have fucked with Bennie. This guy, you know, he wasn't gonna to be around ongoing. I think he was from out of town. So Lloyd thought he could put a few extra things on the card. What was the guy gonna do? And, sure enough, we—he—didn't catch no flak over it. No one ever came around, asked what was up, told him he had done wrong. If anything, Lloyd wished he'd held that card a little longer, charged a little more."

  Of course, that would have created a longer, more detailed trail for investigators in the Youssef murder. Which meant, Tess realized, that Lloyd really didn't have any idea at the time how radioactive that ATM card was, how much trouble it could cause.

  "So Lloyd told you about this?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did he have any details about the guy who hired Le'andro?"

  "Naw. He didn't know him."

  "But did Le'andro mention a name, say where he was from? Any new scrap of information would help, maybe keep the police from trying to charge Lloyd with being an accomplice."

  Dub thought. "Lloyd said the man drove a punk-ass car. Some shitty Chevy, like a Malibu or something. Said thieving wasn't what it used to be if a player like this had to drive something that raggedy."

  "But I thought he never met the guy."

  "He didn't."

  "So how could he know what he drove?"

  "Maybe Le'andro told him."

  Tess tried to work this through. Lloyd hadn't met the man who hired Le'andro, but he knew the make of his car. Had Lloyd been lying all along?
Was Dub lying now, intent on shielding his friend? But then if the man who gave the ATM card to Le'andro had met Lloyd, knew who he was or at least what he looked like, why hadn't he killed them both once the story got out?

  "Lloyd ever mention Gregory Youssef to you?"

  "Who?"

  "It's been on the front page of the papers just this past week—"

  Dub's blank look persuaded her to abandon the story before she began it. She was talking to a homeless seventeen-year-old, a kid who was trying to go to school, keep his family together, and stay one step ahead of whatever forces—his mother, the Department of Social Services—would break them up. Dub had heard Lloyd's side of things, nothing more.

  "Look, is there anything I can do for you?"

  He looked wary. "Naw. We fine."

  "I mean money, groceries. I know you don't want DSS in your life, but there's got to be a better way to keep your family together."

  "We'll be okay. I got one more year of high school, then I'll get a scholarship, go to community college part-time, work the rest. When I'm eighteen, I can petition for custody of Terrell and Tourmaline, official like, and I won't have to fight my mom for theirses checks anymore. Then I'll get those two through. Long as we show up for school and don't cause trouble, no one needs to know anything about us."

  "What do you use for a mailing address?"

  Dub smiled as if he found Tess naïve. By his standards, she was.

  "How much do you and Lloyd get for the tire trick?"

  Dub shrugged as if he had no idea what she was referencing, although he had already admitted his role. He might not have been born this cagey, but life had schooled him as well as the Baltimore city school system, probably better.

  "Twenty? Forty?" Tess took three twenties from her wallet. "The way I see it, my household has thwarted you twice." When he didn't reach for the money, she added, "I pay for information all the time. You earned this, same as anyone. No special treatment, no handout."

  "I didn't tell you much," he said, his fingers closing over the bills.

  "You know, I can find odd jobs for you," she said. "My office isn't two miles from here, and my aunt has a bookstore nearby. Between us, there are lots of little jobs, things that would work around your school schedule. And my aunt's store stays open late. She'd let you hang there until closing—"

  "We fine," he repeated.

  27

  Back in her car, Tess checked her watch. Almost six, but that was early in high-powered-lawyer land. The secretaries and receptionists might have gone home, but she was betting that a young comer such as Wilma Youssef was still at her desk—depending on her day-care situation.

  Wilma worked at one of Baltimore's better-known firms, a string of Italian and Jewish surnames where politicians came to roost when they tired of public life or, in some cases, the public had tired of them prematurely. In fact, the most recent U.S. attorney, the one who had seen Youssef's death largely as a publicity bonanza, had dropped hints about how much he would like to work here, to no avail. It wasn't his Republican affiliation; the firm was apolitical, throwing its weight behind power and money and those who already had them. But the firm also valued discretion, and the former U.S. attorney had failed to impress on that score. High in the glossy white IBM tower near the harbor, this was a genteel, old-fashioned law practice, one that eschewed criminal cases in favor of civil ones. Again, it was all about money.

  Wilma Youssef, squirreled away in a small office far from the pristine reception area, did not appear to be getting her share, not yet. This was not where partners sat, Tess decided after sweet-talking a custodian into unlocking the main doors for her and pointing her toward Wilma's office. She had claimed to be a client with an appointment, which barely seemed a lie.

  Wilma jumped a little when Tess appeared in her doorway.

  "Have you decided to cooperate with the police?" Wilma asked, skipping past any pretend niceties.

  "I'm prepared to make a deal with you. You get your husband's safe-deposit box open, find out what's in it—and then I'll name my informant."

  Okay, she would name Lloyd in a few days in order to avoid prosecution on the mortgage charge. It was still the truth. Why shouldn't she leverage it any way she could?

  "What do the two things have to do with each other?"

  "Nothing, probably. But I want to be sure of that. See, I've been thinking. Someone made your husband's death look like what it wasn't. So then we all jumped to the conclusion that it must be the other, a virtuous prosecutor cut down for his work. Maybe that's not it either."

  Wilma was one of those fair, thin-skinned blondes who blushed readily and deeply from emotion.

  "I've lived through the past five months with all this crap innuendo about my husband, delivered our child even as the nurses were gossiping about Greg. Was he gay? Did he have a lover? You, better than anyone, should know that my husband was murdered because of something he had worked on. Why do you persist in protecting these people?"

  "These people?"

  Once in full blush, a person can hardly moderate the meaning of the blood that has rushed to the face. But Tess thought she saw a flicker of shame in Wilma's expression.

  "Drug dealers, I mean. Criminals."

  Tess plopped herself into the chair opposite Wilma's desk, tired of waiting for an invitation. "My source isn't pure, I'll grant you that. In fact, if the informant in this case didn't have a record, I doubt I would have ever extracted any information to begin with. But the source isn't a drug dealer, I can guarantee you that."

  "Still—"

  Tess had read of people tossing their heads but seldom seen it done with any true flair. Wilma, however, managed to execute the gesture with style, lifting her chin with the force of a skittish racehorse being led into post position at Pimlico. Too bad that her blond hair was too short and too lacquered with spray to make a satisfactory mane.

  "Still," Tess echoed. "You mean there's your husband's death, which matters, and the life of my informant, which matters to you not at all."

  "My husband is dead. Your informant is a lowlife who needs to be coerced into doing his civic duty."

  "Less than forty-eight hours after the newspaper article appeared—the one that detailed how your husband's ATM card was handed over, along with the code and explicit instructions on how and when to use it—a teenager was killed in Baltimore. Shot to death while standing on a corner."

  "So?"

  "So the kid, Le'andro Watkins, was the one who was supposed to handle the ATM card, but he passed it on to someone else—my source. My source talks, Le'andro is killed."

  "These things happen."

  "Exactly. Young black kids get shot and killed in East Baltimore. And, by the way, men who live secret lives sometimes end up on the wrong side of a trick, too. ‘These things happen.' But what if they're happening this time because someone knows what it looks like, how the crimes will be perceived? We have two homicides that are meant to look like something they're not. That's the connection."

  Wilma was settling down, listening to Tess's words, allowing intellect to trump emotion. Met under the best of circumstances, Wilma Youssef was never going to be a kindred spirit. She struck Tess as incurious and self-centered, a woman who lived her entire life as if she inhabited some abstract gated community where all evil could be kept at bay. Her religious beliefs and early good fortune in life had made her smug, dogmatic.

  But for Tess to dismiss her because they agreed on so little would be no different from Wilma's disdain for "those people." She was a widow, a single mother trying to perform in a job that was demanding and exhausting under any conditions. She yearned for the truth, but she was terrified of it, too.

  And that, more than anything, seemed to Tess the universal human condition.

  "If I open the box and what's inside doesn't have any relevance to Greg's death, will you agree to keep it confidential?"

  Tess wondered just where Wilma's imagination had taken her over the past few m
onths. Some very dark places, no doubt, places far scarier than any gossiping nurse could imagine.

  "Absolutely. But we need to expedite this, okay? I don't know how it's done—you're the lawyer—but there's got to be a way for you, as your husband's heir, to get into that safe-deposit box quickly. Maybe a judge in Orphans' Court, maybe—"

  "A judge already has ruled," Wilma said, sheepish for once. "It's actually pretty automatic when a spouse dies. In fact, the bank has told me they'll open it for me whenever I can make it in."

  "So why haven't you examined its contents if you had the right all along?"

  Wilma shook her head, clearly not trusting herself to speak for a few seconds, then said, "Pandora's box, you know? I'm scared what might be unleashed."

  "Hope was in Pandora's box, too. Don't forget that. The last thing that came out was hope."

  28

  Gabe could tell that Collins was surprised by the invite—a drink? just the two of us?—prompting another bout of anxiety for Gabe. What if he really does think I'm a fag? The rejoinder in his head—but he's black, and I'm not into black chicks, so why would I be into black guys?—made him feel only more squirmy and strange. Even on the telephone with Collins, he felt awkward and tongue-tied, like he was a teenager calling a girl.

  But all Collins said, after an interminable pause, was "Okay, where?"

  Even that simple question provoked another round of second-guessing. It had to be a guy-guy place, but not so obvious a guy place that it would look like Gabe was insecure about that stuff. Besides, a sports bar would be too rowdy for conversation.

  "Um, that martini bar? The new one on Canton Square?"

  "Sure," Collins said. "What time?"

  "Eight?"

  Shit, he had to figure out a way to stop speaking in questions around the guy. He decided to get to the bar early, so he'd have a drink in progress, be in control of the situation. But the lack of street parking undermined him, and he arrived fifteen minutes late, which clearly irritated Collins. Gabe's rushed apology, his explanation that he had parked far away, didn't seem to help much.