No Good Deeds

by Laura Lippman

  But once Gabe got going, laid out the connections he had uncovered, he could tell that Collins was impressed.

  "Do you know for a fact that this Keyes guy helped to hide the source and her boyfriend?"

  "No, but we always figured they went by car, right? It's the beach, off season. The locals probably notice every out-of-towner, especially some salt-and-pepper combo."

  Shit, what he wouldn't have given to take that back.

  Collins took a long swallow of his Heineken. He was drinking from a glass, which made Gabe feel as if there were something unmanly about settling for a bottle, Sam Adams at that, although he was drinking shots of Jameson on the side.

  "What makes you so sure," Collins said, "that the informant is black? The fact that he bought Nikes at the Downtown Locker Room? Could be some punk-ass whigger, you know."

  "Um, I didn't—Imean…"

  Collins smiled, gave him a playful punch in the shoulder, one hard enough to leave a bruise. "I'm just busting balls. Of course the source is a black kid. Just like…"

  "Just like?"

  "Just like the ATM photo. Can't see his face, but we can see his hands."

  "Right," Gabe said. "Of course." He wasn't a bigot. He had simply forgotten how he knew what he knew.

  "You keeping this close, this insight to where they might be? Or have you gone to Schulian, opened up an official file?"

  "Hell, no. It's our secret so far. I haven't even told Jenkins." Gabe was feeling the rush of camaraderie now, burbling in spite of himself. "I gotta say, I don't have utter confidence in him. Those FBI guys are so full of themselves. I mean, what's he ever done? You, you've been out there, did undercover. You risked your life." He sensed he was entering dangerous territory, but he decided to chance it. "That was bullshit, what they put you through."

  "Before your time. How do you know of it?"

  "People talk." Collins clearly didn't like the idea of being gossiped about, so Gabe quickly added, "Everyone thinks you got a raw deal."

  "It turned out okay. The lawsuits were dismissed. You can't sue a federal agent doing his job—even when he botches it and shoots a citizen."

  "But it ended your time undercover after the newspaper ran your photo, and I heard you were one of the best. That sucks. It was an honest mistake, under the circumstances."

  Collins, back in his usual taciturn mode, said nothing, but Gabe thought he caught a wisp of a smile on his face, a moment of understanding. Finally, with Jenkins out of the way, they were bonding.

  "Another round?" he asked. "My treat."

  "Sure," Collins said. "Night's young. Night's so young that R. Kelly would date it."

  It was almost midnight when Gabe and Collins finally left the bar. Gabe was a little lit—not so much that he couldn't drive, given that it was basically a series of straight shots and left turns until he coasted into his parking pad off Hanover. He just felt fuzzy around the edges. The air was soft, the first true spring evening so far. The season got here a little faster here than it did in Jersey, not even two hundred miles to the north. Just twenty-four hours ago, the Yankees had almost been sleeted out on Opening Day in the Bronx, but here you could see buds on the trees.

  "Where you parked?" Collins asked.

  He had to think about it. "I'm on Fait, like four blocks from here."

  "I'm around the corner from there," Collins said. "I remember when this neighborhood was nothing but toothless old Polacks, the kind who would call the police if a black kid so much as rode his bike down the sidewalk."

  It was the longest sentence Collins had ever uttered in Gabe's presence. It was so cool, them becoming friends. He could ask Collins about being a star on the Poets, or whatever that local basketball team was called. Hadn't Juan Dixon played for them? Steve Francis? Somebody good in the NBA.

  "This your ride?" Collins asked when Gabe stopped by his Acura. "Nice."

  He laughed, getting that Collins was still busting his balls, but in a friendly way. "Not particularly."

  "Nicer than a Malibu. Nice enough to get carjacked for."

  "Yeah, right. Not in this neighborhood."

  "I'm dead serious."

  Gabe hiccuped, but only because he had been laughing too much, sucking in air much of the evening. Collins could be pretty funny when he made an effort. He did an imitation of Jenkins that was to die for—the super concerned manner, the fatherly sighs.

  Collins's fist shot out, hitting Gabe so quickly and violently in the midsection that he just crumpled into the street as if his spine had been removed. What the—The last sensations he knew in this life were all metal—the scrape of the keys being dragged from his fingers, the barrel of a gun at the back of his head. He didn't piss himself, but only because Collins was moving even faster than Gabe's instincts could. He was going to die, and the only thing he managed to figure out before it happened was that it had absolutely nothing to do with his car. Did I—

  Gone.

  TUESDAY

  29

  Tess and Wilma had agreed to meet at the bank when it opened, which meant Tess had to leave Baltimore at 8:00 A.M. and fight rush-hour traffic every inch of the trip. Even without all the frazzled commuters, it would have been a charmless journey. The bank, a branch of a multinational that was relatively new in the state, was on a strip clogged with chain restaurants and stores catering to every part of one's automobile—fast-lube places, tire joints, brake jobs, windshield glass.

  "Why here?" Tess asked Wilma. "It's quite a haul from where you live and where he worked. It's not like he could get here on his lunch hour."

  "Probably because it's one place I'd never come. I don't think I've ever been here before in my life." Wilma's face was grayish, as if the suburb of Laurel were a disease she was worried about catching.

  The bank manager studied the court order in a way that made Tess fear complications. A chubby Latina packed into a bright yellow suit, the manager had the air of someone who would make things difficult just because it would make her day more interesting. But perhaps she was simply a slow reader, for she handed the paper back to Wilma and led them into the small area the bank kept for safe-deposit boxes.

  "She can't come in," the woman said, pointing at Tess. "And I gotta watch."

  "I'm an officer of the court," said Tess, who had prepared the lie ahead of time, along with a reasonably official-looking ID, created on her computer and then laminated at a twenty-four-hour hardware store last night. She had also talked to Tyner, who'd assured her that there was no law requiring a bank employee to observe, but some insisted on it, if only out of sheer nosiness. "The order specifies that this has to be done under supervision because the estate is still in probate. She's allowed to inventory the contents but not to remove them."

  The woman looked skeptical—as well she should, because nothing Tess had said was remotely true—but fate decided to throw Tess a bone. Another bank employee arrived at that moment with a pink, orange, and white Dunkin' Donuts box. Saved by the cruller. Anxious to make her selection, the woman waved them in.

  Wilma's hands shook as she fitted her key into the lock. She then took the box, a medium-size one, to the semiprivate area set aside. She lifted the lid and revealed a black-and-white photocopy of a bearded man in a straw hat, a man who looked strangely familiar to Tess. There was a layer of pink tissue paper beneath it. When Tess pushed it aside, the overwhelming impression was a landscape of green, a veritable Emerald City in a box.

  "I thought you were the earner and Greg was the one who was bound for glory," she said.

  Wilma was silent for a moment. "That—that—asshole," she said at last. Tess regularly heard—and said—far worse words, but it was a shock to see the prim and self-righteous Wilma let loose this way. "If you knew how tight things were for us at times—college loans, the baby, the mortgage on the new house. Although now I understand where he got some of the cash to buy the new house. He said that he had borrowed money from his mother."

  "I hope you reported it as a lo
an on your mortgage application," Tess said.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. Should we count it?"

  "Not really. If I know how much it is, I think I might get angrier. Whatever Greg was doing, there wasn't…It couldn't be…It had to be…" Illegal, Tess wanted to say, but Wilma still wasn't ready to concede that. "He got himself killed, and for what? We would have been okay, in the long run. I would have made partner. He could have gone into private practice if it came to that. What was the rush?"

  Tess had extracted one bundle of cash, counted it, and done some quick multiplication in her head. Sixteen packs, $10,000 per pack—$160,000, give or take. "He was shaking someone down. Who?"

  "I don't know," Wilma said. "Honestly."

  Tess pulled up each pack of bills, to make sure there was nothing left in the box.

  "What are you looking for?" Wilma asked, her voice at once bitter and teary. It was clear that this secret cache, if not exactly what she had feared all along, was also anything but an innocuous discovery. "Waiting for hope to fly out? I don't think she's here."

  "A note. But I guess that would be too easy, right? A nice and neat confession about what he was into."

  "To write something like that, he would have to believe he was in imminent danger. And the one thing I'm sure about the last time I saw Greg alive is that he was buoyant, happy. In fact, he was happier in the weeks before his death than he'd been in a long time. He went into a horrible mope around the time I got pregnant. At the time I thought it was money woes—"

  "Could be. Maybe this was a sudden windfall, and that's why he cheered up. He was in antiterrorism, right? This would be chump change to some of those Saudis." Tess was studying the log—Greg had last visited the bank in September. The account had been opened in August year before last, and he had been here monthly, through July. Then—nothing.

  "Maybe." Wilma's eyes were on the money, but she wasn't seeing it. She was trapped in her own thoughts. "Only, we bought the house last winter. I found out I was pregnant in March, and he was irritable from then on. I worried that he felt trapped in a way he hadn't before. But come fall his bad mood vanished. On Halloween, when the kids came to the door, he was just so into it. He said to me, ‘I can't wait until our little boy does that.' Something changed over the summer."

  The employees' doughnut buzz was fading fast, and Tess thought it would be best to put the drawer back in place, continue their conversation elsewhere. At the last minute, she grabbed the Xeroxed photograph, stashing it in her pocket.

  She steered Wilma to the Silver Diner, not even fifty yards up the highway. It was an ersatz diner, the kind of faux-fifties place that Tess didn't normally condone, but it was the best bet for breakfast in these parts.

  "Think back to Greg's work," Tess said. "Was there anyone he might have blackmailed?"

  "No. The terrorism unit was having virtually no luck. Truth is, Greg was kind of floundering since the transfer. He was brought on for PR, a suitable face to put before the cameras. The dirty little secret about the FBI's antiterrorism work is that there is no work. Until, well, there is again. Get me?"

  Tess did, but she didn't want to think about it.

  "What about his earlier cases, the drug stuff he did?"

  "He was known for being a hard-liner and getting convictions. In fact, he was contemptuous of his colleagues who couldn't nail suspects no matter how close they got. So who would pay him off? He got the federal death penalty for that one group of gang members."

  Wilma said the last with great pride, reminding Tess that the two of them did not see eye to eye on many things. Tess opposed the death penalty in theory, and it pained her that she had taken another man's life so readily. But she was learning to hold her tongue and her opinions. She and Wilma weren't here to become BFFs.

  "In the terrorism unit—was there anything he said about his work that centered on a single individual? They might not have been making arrests, but they still could have been up on wiretaps, monitoring someone. A wealthy Saudi Arabian might have paid money to know what his unit was doing, skimpy as it was."

  Wilma shook her head. "I'm telling you, all he did was speak of their incompetence and the futility of the whole operation."

  "So why did he volunteer for it in the first place?"

  "I'm not sure. He'd been working a few things with a guy named Mike Collins, but he said Collins couldn't bring him anything good since he stopped working undercover. You have to understand—the way the office is set up, the AUSA's are often dependent on agents to bring them good cases."

  "But he must have known other agents."

  "He liked Mike best and thought he'd gotten a raw deal. Do you know him?"

  "Yeah, I know him." Tess decided not to share that she wasn't his biggest fan.

  "Greg really admired him. An authentic Horatio Alger story, up from the streets, basketball star at Langston Hughes."

  "Dunbar," Tess corrected absently. She dug the photocopy out of her pocket, stared at the old man in the hat.

  "Whatever."

  "He talked about Mike a lot?"

  "I don't know if I'd say ‘a lot.' Enough that I knew he resented the agency's treatment of him."

  "Wilma—"

  "What?"

  "Did you ever have a crush on a guy?"

  "Sometimes." Wilma's tone was smug, as if to suggest she was far more familiar with being an object of crushes, not a holder of them.

  "So when you were obsessed with some guy, didn't you say his name over and over, whenever you could, bring him up in the most irrelevant conversations, just to have the thrill of saying his name?"

  Wilma blushed her furious blush. "Greg was not queer for Mike Collins."

  "No, but they might have shared a secret that they would be even more desperate to conceal." Tess showed her the photocopy. "This is taken from one of those literary postcards you can buy at Nouveau or Barnes & Noble. It's Walt Whitman."

  "So?"

  "Poet. Poet. If Mike Collins played for Dunbar, then he was a star on the Poets. I guess he couldn't find a Dunbar postcard, so he settled for Whitman. ‘I sing the body electric'? ‘I dote on myself, for there is that lot of me, and all so luscious'?"

  Wilma, despite her Ivy League education, still looked mystified. But Tess had no doubt that her husband had hedged his bets, leaving this subtle clue for someone who would eventually make the connection but treat Youssef's old friend with dignity and respect. Who else had to know that Collins played for the Poets?

  Jenkins had been surprised to find Mike Collins at his door first thing that morning. As much as he liked the young man, he'd never had him to his apartment. In fact, he didn't even realize that Mike knew where he lived.

  He wondered what else Bully knew about him.

  "You want coffee?" he asked, although the kid seemed so wired that a shot of Jameson might have been more appropriate.

  "No, I'm fine."

  "Well, I need some."

  He motioned Collins to follow him into the apartment's kitchen, not that it was a trip that required a tour guide. Since returning to Baltimore, Jenkins had lived in one of those sterile, rent-by-the-month gigs, already furnished. The kitchen was separated from the so-called great room by a Formica-topped bar. Collins sat there, perched on one of the wicker stools that had come with the place, rocking a little from side to side. Kid was het-up. Jenkins hoped he wasn't doing drugs, a curious but not unheard-of liability for DEA agents. But Collins's disdain for drugs had always been persuasively virulent. He saw them as a plague that had swept through his once-middle-class neighborhood, destroying almost every young black man in their path. No, it was impossible to imagine Collins using drugs.

  Jenkins pulled out his filters and the can of grounds he kept in the freezer, although he was always hearing conflicting opinions on that method of storage. It seemed to him that they kept changing the rules about everything. Plastic cutting boards, wooden cutting boards, back to plastic. Coffee with tap water, coffee with purified water, c
offee with eggshells and old socks, back to tap water. Whatever Jenkins did, he made crap coffee, but at least it was cheap. Jenkins didn't like giving someone two dollars for something he could make at home for a fraction of the cost. Made him feel like a sucker. He thought about Gabe Dalesio, who never seemed to be without a large cup of pricey coffee. The guy must have spent at least four, five dollars a day on coffee drinks. Four dollars a day, almost thirty dollars a week, over fifteen hundred dollars a year on coffee. Jenkins's first wife, Martha, had criticized Jenkins for the way he tipped, the ones and fives and even tens that had slipped through his fingers so readily. But a tip went to a person at least, not some corporation. You hand a girl a five-dollar tip for checking your coat and you make her day. Give Mr. Starbucks or Ms. Seattle's Best Coffee three dollars for some fancy hot drink and you were just one of the multitudes of suckers.

  The coffee machine puffed and huffed, quite a production for the task of pouring hot water over a paper filter of coffee grounds. It tasted better if you waited until the whole pot brewed, but Jenkins could never resist pulling the carafe out and letting his mug catch the first syrupy cupful.

  "You sure you don't want any?"

  "I'm fine."

  It was only when Jenkins turned back to the counter, FBI mug in his hand, that he saw the gun on the counter. Not a service revolver, his mind registered. A street weapon, a piece of shit. Then: Why does Mike have it? Why is he showing it to me?

  "Mike," he said, his voice soft and pleading. "Bully. What's this about? What's wrong?"

  Even in this agitated state, he was so very handsome. Extremely dark-skinned, with features that had always seemed vaguely Native American to Jenkins—strong straight nose, high cheekbones, a bow-shaped mouth. That mouth was trembling, just a little now. Yet any show of emotion in Collins's face was noteworthy.