No Good Deeds

by Laura Lippman

  "Call the police," Crow said to Ed. "And then I need to call a lawyer."

  "Did you…?"

  "I can't talk to you. You're FBI, right? Barry Jenkins. Tess sent us pictures of you. Are you crooked, too? Were you part of this?"

  Jenkins took out his service weapon.

  "Shit," Ed said. "Give it up, man. It's over."

  Jenkins could blame it all on Collins, of course. Pretend ignorance. Say he'd been duped as everyone else had, that it was Youssef's plan and Collins had killed him. That had been built into the equation from the beginning. No one could link Barry Jenkins to anything directly—not Bennie Tep, not Youssef, no one. True, he'd been there the night Youssef died, driven behind Collins up the highway to the turnpike exit where they dumped the car, and the very setup suggested an accomplice. But no one could prove it was him. Except Collins.

  "Is he dead?"

  The boyfriend, what's-his-name, considered the question and nodded.

  "How?"

  "I'd prefer to wait for the local police and an attorney before I say anything else." Even now the old man was moving toward the phone. Like Jenkins gave a shit.

  Jenkins pointed his gun at the boy. "Tell me your name."

  "I'm calling 911," the old cop roared, grabbing the phone. "Don't think that I won't."

  "Just your name. That's all I want. Tell me who you are."

  "Lloyd Jupiter," the boy whispered. He was trembling, the little shit.

  Jenkins thought fleetingly of going outside. But Jenkins was afraid he would lose his nerve if he took another step, and he was determined to do the right thing, the honorable thing, as awful as it was.

  "Lloyd Jupiter," he echoed.

  With that, Barry Jenkins nodded, put his weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  MAY

  34

  "I almost made it," Tess says to me, perhaps for the twentieth time. It's something of a sore point.

  "Almost," I agree, crushing the Metro section of the Beacon-Light into a ball and tossing it into a trash can. Two men were killed in Baltimore yesterday, their deaths dutifully reported on page B-3. Meanwhile City Man is on the cover of the Maryland section again, arrested by federal agents for alleged ties to terrorists.

  In other words, in the immortal words of the Talking Heads—same as it ever was. But Tess can't let go of that night in particular, or the past in general. That's what makes her a true Baltimorean.

  "The thing is, there's this sign, at the intersection of 26 and 20, tells you to go right to Fenwick? But 20 takes you around to the south end. I would have been better off going through Bethany and then heading down the coastal highway. And I still got there before the Delaware police, although not before…''

  "Uh-huh."

  We're sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer, as we've done every Monday, hoping to get lucky. The afternoon lunch service has just started, and the line is long, because Holy Redeemer is serving chicken and word travels fast. People come from as far as West Baltimore on Chicken Day.

  "I mean, I thought it out. I had a plan. They were going to be in Baltimore, waiting for me, while I went and got you. I kept trying to call you, too, just in case anyone beat me there—but your goddamn cell phone was off."

  "It lost the charge."

  "Whatever. All that folderol with the phones, and do you realize we never once spoke on them? That they were off, or out of range, or out of juice—"

  "I know, Tess. I overthought it."

  It isn't—for once—that she has to prove she's right. Tess needs absolution. She feels bad about my nose, which is healing just fine with no damage to the sinuses, and that's all I care about. It isn't quite as straight as it once was, but I like the bump. Makes me look like more of a tough guy. It was just that night, seeing me all bloody and fucked up in Ed's trailer, that threw Tess. She came galloping in, gun drawn, not even two minutes after Jenkins killed himself, frantic because she recognized the boxy sedan parked outside. Now you know how it feels, I wanted to say.

  And I know how she felt, so it all evens out.

  My nose is just a portion of Tess's guilt. She thinks this is all her fault. If she hadn't decided to track down Lloyd and force him to tell what he knew about Greg Youssef, none of this—the deaths of Gabe Dalesio and Le'andro Watkins—would have happened. But if I hadn't brought Lloyd home in the first place…if Lloyd hadn't slashed my tire…if I hadn't borrowed the Lexus that day because the brakes on my Volvo were squishy…if I hadn't concealed my inheritance from Tess, making it difficult to explain to her how I could afford to fix my squishy brakes. The bottom line is, if it doesn't snow on that particular Monday in March, none of this happens. But it did, and it has, and that's that. We'll keep circling back to the subject again and again, each making the case for our central role. My fault. No, my fault. But I also know that there is as much ego as guilt in this argument, and time will wear it down. Eventually. If you think about it, Tess and I actually came in at the end of this story. The people who should feel guilty aren't alive. And I don't think Mike Collins ever felt much of anything, although there was something akin to remorse and sorrow in Barry Jenkins's face that night.

  The question is whether he felt it for himself and the failure of his grand scheme or for the people who had died because of it. I suppose it could have been both.

  Strange to say, the worst part of the whole ordeal wasn't that night on the beach, when I at least had adrenaline on my side. The scary part was the three days when I was held for the death of Mike Collins. Killing a DEA agent is serious stuff, even if you can persuasively make the case that he was going to execute an innocent kid in front of your eyes, even if you had good reason to think he was going to kill you as well. No one believes in law and order more than those charged with keeping it, and things were rough for Lloyd and me those first seventy-two hours in Delaware. But Tess's call to Martin Tull proved helpful, along with the information about how hard Jenkins and Collins had pressed her for Lloyd's name. Turns out Jenkins had wormed his way into the Youssef investigation, but Collins had no official role, and it was beyond bizarre that an FBI agent and a DEA agent were working together. Nothing to get a bureaucracy's attention like the flouting of its own precious rules.

  And when investigators started discovering the assets in the two agents' names, it began to come together. Wilma was the one who delineated it for us, who saw how easy it would be for federal agents to blackmail a drug dealer who was at no risk of indictment. They were stickup men with badges instead of guns. Wilma made a semiclean breast of things, telling investigators she had found fifty thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in her husband's name. "Triple that," Tess told me, but she kept still. Me, I think that Wilma's motive wasn't greed so much as spin. The smaller the amount, the more likely it was that her dead husband was a blackmailer instead of a full-fledged coconspirator. It may seem like a silly distinction, but I'm not going to begrudge her that. We all need certain myths to get by.

  "Are you going to tell Lloyd about the money?" Tess asks me. "Your money, I mean."

  "First I just want to find him."

  Secrets are corrosive. Remember that. Oh, I suppose it's okay to conceal birthday gifts and Christmas and other pleasant surprises, but every other deception leads to rot. If I had told Tess about my inheritance when I came into the trust at the beginning of this year, then it wouldn't have mushroomed into such a big deal. But I hated the money, loathed the very thought of it. It was blood money twice over, and I couldn't bring myself to speak of it.

  The first part of the story, Tess knew. Years ago my grandfather had disinherited my mother for running off with my father. Grandfather—and it was always "Grandfather," nothing shorter or sweeter—saw money as a cudgel, a whip, a means of control. He thought he could bend my mother to his will with it. Much to his surprise, my mother was perfectly happy with her life as a professor's wife. But after I was born, she sent me to her father in the summers, an olive branch of sorts, an indication that she was wi
lling to make amends if he would meet her halfway. Unfortunately, my grandfather saw me as another weapon, another way to punish my mother. He made me heir to a trust that she had to administer, thinking that would shame and hurt her. My mother didn't mind, but I did. I hated being a pawn in the old man's game.

  And that was before my mother told me last fall, just before I came into the trust, that it was time I knew the origins of the family's fortunes.

  "Whaling," I said. "Grandfather never shut up about it." My Nantucket summers had included a lot of briefings on my ancestors.

  "Whaling in the nineteenth century," she said. "But earlier, in the eighteenth…well, they had started with a very different kind of cargo."

  "Oh."

  Growing up in Charlottesville, I had gone to schools with various Lees and Jacksons and Stuarts, marveled at classmates who actually looked forward to joining the Sons of the Confederacy. I always wondered how they lived with their family's legacies. And now it turned out my own history was just as complex. A million dollars. Did time wash money clean of its sins? Was I culpable for my ancestors' moral relativism, in which the men enabled the slave trade and the women then protested it, achieving some kind of karmic equipoise? And wasn't I guilty of the same kind of hypocrisy, giving it away a dollar a time but not ready to relinquish it whole? My very approach to philanthropy was cavalier, ill-conceived. My Monday-morning food drive, which recycles food from area bars and restaurants? Pure bullshit. I drive down to the wholesale market in Jessup and buy what I think the soup kitchens can use. Without me there is no Chicken Day at Holy Redeemer. I was straddling, too.

  Charlotte Curtis, the director at Holy R, says Lloyd is in the wind again. He tried to go home, but it was the old Thomas Wolfe story. Within days he and Murray had clashed and he was back to his old life—scamming, loafing, scrounging. Lloyd turns seventeen this summer, and he missed most of tenth grade. How can anyone reasonably expect to help Lloyd if he won't help himself?

  The thing is, I'm not particularly reasonable. So I'm sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer hoping against hope that Lloyd shows up. It's Chicken Day, after all. Chicken and mashed potatoes and bags of Otterbein cookies to go. How could anyone stay away? In fact, Charlotte thinks I overdid it a little. But I keep thinking Lloyd will come, especially after Tess sees Dub, Terrell, and Tourmaline leaving with the red-and-white bags of gingersnaps clutched in their hands. They stop, exchanging cautious greetings, but when Tess begins, "If there's anything I can do—" Dub waves her off.

  "We fine," he says. And he will be. Like the genetic marvels that emerge from inner-city neighborhoods to play pro sports, Dub was born with something extra. He'll make it out through sheer will and intelligence. Lloyd, on the other hand…

  Go figure, he comes in just under the wire, getting in line at one minute before four. He sees us, but he's clearly anxious for his food, so we hang back, letting him go inside and eat. He must inhale it, because he's back out in under ten minutes, Miss Charlotte locking the door behind him. Last man standing.

  "Hey, Lloyd."

  "Hey." A beat. "Crow." I can't tell if he's forgotten my name or isn't sure he wants to grant me that much intimacy. He blames me for Delaware. Nothing really bad happened to him while we were detained, but he was terrified every minute of it, and he begrudges my knowing this. But that was a month ago, and with no evidence to lead the federal authorities back to Bennie Tep or any other local drug dealer, Lloyd's in the clear. The only person he could identify, in the end, was Mike Collins. In Howard County the death of Greg Youssef is a closed case.

  In Baltimore City the death of Le'andro Watkins remains open, probably forever, and the only person who cares is Rainier, stuck with another stone-cold whodunit.

  "How you doing, Lloyd?"

  "Things're cool," he says, taking a few steps backward. Maybe he thinks we're going to grab him and throw him in a car again.

  "You know, there was a reward…."

  "Ummmm." He's still moving backward.

  "It was supposed to be for information leading to the arrest of Youssef's killers, but they decided we're entitled to it. Tess, me. You."

  This gets his attention. "Yeah? How much?"

  "Here's the thing: Because you're a minor, I'm going to hold your share in trust. To get it you have to go through me."

  "Shit." He makes it two syllables. "That's just a way of saying you're never going to give it to me."

  "No, I'm going to safeguard your share. It's not a lot of money, Lloyd, but it's enough. Enough to go to college, even set you up in your own apartment. Buy a car, assuming you ever get a license. But I am allowed to set conditions."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Condition number one: you're going to work this summer. At FunWorld. Room and board, plus two hundred sixty-five dollars a week."

  "Fuck, I already done that."

  "Did you hear me? There's a wage this time."

  "Slave wages."

  That makes my skin jump. But there will be time enough, as Prufrock learned, to tell Lloyd my secrets. After all, Lloyd hasn't always been forthcoming with me. "During the summer the dormitories will be filled with kids your age. And Mrs. Anderson, that nice lady who helped you out? She said she'll make sure you get to church every Sunday. And you get a bonus if you stay the whole summer. You'll come home with over two thousand dollars, if you don't blow it on fried dough and saltwater taffy."

  "Then what?"

  Good question.

  "Your choice—back to school or you start tutoring for your GED. Then college or a job. The trust will be used for essential costs. But if you keep up your end of the bargain, you'll come out of school with no debt and a nice lump sum to start your life."

  Lloyd stops moving backward, but everything in his posture suggests that he still wants to cut and run, get away from me. He likes his life just the way it is, or thinks he does. He can't imagine what else it would be, so he has to pretend he's happy.

  "When I got to start?"

  "Most of the kids begin after school lets out. But since you're not enrolled—this semester—Ed could use you starting Mother's Day weekend. In fact, he says your whole family could come down, spend the weekend."

  "Even Murray?"

  "Even Murray," I say, knowing it's not what he's hoping to hear.

  "And where do I live when I come back? Not with you?" The idea clearly horrifies him. Give Tess credit: It horrifies her more, but she doesn't let it show.

  "We'll work something out, maybe rent a place that you can share with Dub and his people. But it would be my name on the lease, so you'd have to live according to my rules."

  "Rules," Lloyd said, his voice crackling with contempt. "School. Books and shit. Like all the answers are written down someplace and all I have to do is learn them."

  "Yep."

  "I'll think on it." He takes a few steps forward, shakes my hand. Then he ambles away before I can find out how to get in touch with him, where to find him. As Miss Charlotte said, Lloyd Jupiter's in the wind these days, aiming to please no one but himself.

  "Go ahead," I say to Tess, who's clearly bursting to say something. "Tell me I'm crazy. Tell me I'm a fool for trying, for caring."

  "It was easier to save his life one night than it will be over the long haul," Tess said. "But you already know that. You've always known that."

  Miss Charlotte comes out, locking the door behind her. "Did you see Lloyd?"

  "Yeah."

  "I wasn't sure, because he gave me something to give to you."

  She pulls out Tess's unicorn box and hands it to her. Tess starts to open it, then thinks better of it. She passes it to me instead, and I shake it gently. Hollow, not even a seed swishing inside. Nobody's perfect.

  "Do you think," I ask Tess, "that it's a good sign? Or does this mean he's through with us entirely and doesn't want any unfinished business between us?"

  She traces the crooked line of my nose with her index finger. At some point the face of one's beloved becomes so fa
miliar as to be abstract. What does she see? What do I see? Is Tess pretty? Are her features even? I don't know. All I can absorb are the expressions that play across the surface, the amazing nuance. In this instance there is mockery, yes, the impression that she's always amused by me. But there is sympathy, too, a shared weakness for lost causes. Sadness and respect for the bond we now share. I finally understand that when Tess fingers her scar, it's not because she's scared but because she wants to remind herself that she has what it takes to survive.

  She touches my scar and concedes the melancholy bond between us. My grandfather arbitrarily established that my life as an adult would start on my twenty-sixth birthday, December 15. But I know it began on April 5, on a deserted stretch of beach north of Fenwick, Delaware. Not because I killed a man but because I realized that a man could kill me, that immortality was not my birthright.

  "Go for it," she says at last. "God forbid another native should come of age not knowing who the Baltimore Four were."

  "The Oriole pitching staff of 1971, right?"

  "Berrigan, Lewis, Mengel, and Eberhardt. The Customs House,1967."

  This surprises me more than anything. "I didn't think you were listening that day."

  "Well, I was."

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Readers often ask where writers get their ideas, and in the case of No Good Deeds it seems more important than usual to anticipate and address that question. In December 2003, I heard a radio report that a federal prosecutor in Baltimore had been killed on the eve of closing arguments in a big case. Jonathan Luna's death remains unsolved, and my knowledge of it goes only as far as what was reported in the media. It was someone else's casual observation about the coverage of the case that sparked my imagination and led to this story, which has been built on what-if upon what-if upon what-if.