No Good Deeds Part 1

No Good Deeds.

Laura Lippman.

When I was a kid, my favorite book was Horton Hears a Who, and, like most kids, I wanted to hear it over and over and over again. My indulgent but increasingly frazzled father tried to subst.i.tute Horton Hatches the Egg and other Dr. Seuss books, but nothing else would do, although I did permit season-appropriate readings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. See, I had figured out what Seuss only implied: Those Whos down in Who-ville, the ones who taught the Grinch what Christmas was all about? Clearly they were the same Whos who lived on Horton's flower. That realization made me giddy, a five-year-old deconstructionist, taking the text down to its bones. The word was the word, the Who was the Who. For if the Whos lived on the flower, then it followed that the Grinch and his dog, Max, did, too, which meant that the Grinch was super tiny, and that meant there was no reason to fear him. The Grinch was the size of a dust mite! How much havoc could such a tiny being wreak?

A lot, I know now. A whole lot.

My name is Edgar "Crow" Ransome, and I indirectly caused a young man's murder a few months back. I did some other stuff, too, with far more consciousness, but it's this death that haunts me. I carry a newspaper clipping about the shooting in my wallet so I'll be reminded every day-when I pull out bills for a three-dollar latte or grab my ATM card-that my world and its villains are tiny, too, but no less lethal for it.

Tiny Town is, in fact, one of Baltimore's many nicknames-along with Charm City and Mobtown-and perhaps the most appropriate. Day in, day out, it's one degree of separation here in Smalltimore, an urban Mayberry where everyone knows everyone. Then you read the newspaper and rediscover that there are really two Baltimores. Rich and poor. White and black. Ours. Theirs.

A man was found shot to death in the 2300 block of East Lombard Street late last night. Police arrived at the scene after a neighbor reported hearing a gunshot in the area. Those with information are asked to call...

This appeared, as most such items appear, inside the Beacon Light's Local section, part of something called the "City/County Digest." These are the little deaths, as my girlfriend, Tess Monaghan, calls them, the homicides that merit no more than one or two paragraphs. A man was found shot to death in an alley in the 700 block of Stricker Street.... A man was killed by shots from a pa.s.sing car in the1400 block of East Madison Street.... A Southwest Baltimore man was found dead inside his Cadillac Escalade in the 300 block of North Mount. If they have the victim's name, they give it. If there are witnesses or arrests, the fact is noted for the sheer wonder of it. "Witness" is the city's most dangerous occupation these days, homicide's thriving secondary market, if you will. We're down on snitchin' here in Baltimore and have the T-shirts and videos to prove it. Want to know how bad things have gotten? There was a hit ordered on a ten-year-old girl who had the misfortune to see her own father killed.

Here's what is not written, although everyone knows the score: Another young black man has died. He probably deserved it. Drug dealer or drug user. Or maybe just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he should have known better than to hang around a drug corner at that time, right? If you want the courtesy of being presumed innocent in certain Baltimore neighborhoods, you better be unimpeachable, someone clearly, unambiguously cut down in the cross fire. A three-year-old getting his birthday haircut. A ten-year-old playing football. I wish these examples were hypothetical.

I'm not claiming that I was different from anyone else in Baltimore, that I read those paragraphs and wondered about the lives that preceded the deaths. No, I made the same calculations that everyone else did, plotting the city's grid in my head, checking to make sure I wasn't at risk. Shot in a movie theater for telling someone to be quiet? Sure, absolutely, that could happen to me, although there aren't a lot of tough guys in the local art houses. Killed for flipping someone off in traffic? Not my style, but Tess could have died a thousand times over that way. She has a problem with impulse control.

But we're not to be found along East Lombard or Stricker or Mount or any other dubious street, not at 3:00 A.M. Even when I am in those neighborhoods, people leave my ride and me alone. Usually. And it's not because I'm visibly such a nice guy on a dogooding mission. They don't bother me because I'm not worth the trouble. I'm a red ball walking; kill me and all the resources of the city's homicide division will be brought to bear on the investigation. I'll get more than a paragraph, too.

In fact, I think I'd get almost as much coverage as Gregory Youssef, a federal prosecutor found stabbed to death last year. Perhaps I should carry a clipping of that case, too, for it was really Youssef's death that changed my life, although I didn't know it at the time. But I'm not likely to forget Youssef's death soon. n.o.body is.

The hard part would be fitting me into a headline. Artist? Musician? Only for my own amus.e.m.e.nt these days. Restaurant-bar manager? Doesn't really get the flavor of what I do at the Point, which is a bar, but increasingly a very good music venue as well, thanks to the out-of-town bands I've been recruiting. Scion of a prominent Charlottesville family? Even if I were confident I could p.r.o.nounce "scion" correctly, I'm more confident that I would never p.r.o.nounce myself as such. Boyfriend of Tess Monaghan, perhaps Baltimore's best-known private investigator? Um, no thank you. I love her madly, but that's not how I wish to be defined.

I think I'd prefer the simple appellation City Man, the everyday superhero of the headlines. City Man is a fixture in the local paper, too. He wins prizes, he's nominated for national posts, he sues giant corporations, he goes missing on occasion. City Man is eternal.

The everyday homicide cases, those one- or two-paragraph news stories I told you about-those guys never get to be City Man. They are allowed to represent only vague geographic areas-a Southwest Baltimore man, an East Baltimore man, a West Baltimore man. They're even denied their neighborhoods, which in Baltimore is like being denied a piece of your soul. They are not universal enough to be City Men, not emblematic enough to be Collington Square Man or Upper Park Heights Man or even Pig-town Man.

And yet they are. They are more representative of this city than we want to admit. A homicide occurs here, on average, every thirty-six hours. In certain neighborhoods homicide is a way of life, if you'll permit the oxymoron. Yet other neighborhoods a.s.sume that it's their right to remain untouched by this plague and are horrified when the covenant is broken. A few years back, when Tess was still a reporter, a Guilford couple were killed in their mansion, and the city freaked. It was one thing for "those people" to murder each other, quite another if they were going to start crossing the invisible boundaries, killing rich white people in their homes. Within two days an arrest was made, and Tess told me a fake headline circulated the newsroom via the computer system-ARE-LIEVED CITY REJOICES: THE GRANDSON DID IT.

A man was found shot to death in the 2200 block of East Lombard Street late last night. Police arrived at the scene after a neighbor reported hearing a gunshot in the area. Those with information are asked to call...

Just another little death-unless you know the big picture. Once you learn the complex story behind even one of those one-paragraph homicides, once a single life is illuminated, you can't stop thinking about all the other victims, wondering what their stories are. Were. To read the newspaper with this kind of attentiveness is to become Horton the Elephant, besieged by all those tiny beings from Whoville. You are the only one who hears, the only one who knows, their only possible salvation.

And, like Horton, all you can do is hold on tight to that dandelion of a world curled in your trunk and pray you don't get locked up for listening to the voices that everyone else swears aren't there.

PART ONE.

SMALLTIMORE.

SUNDAY.

1.

Tess, do you know who the Baltimore Four were?"

It took Tess Monaghan a moment to surface from her own thoughts, but she eventually came up for air, leaving behind the various newspaper articles and computer printouts strewn across her dining room table-and rug and hallway and breakfront-in seemingly random stacks that were actually quite methodical. She had tried to confine this project to her office, but with the presentation now just twenty-four hours away, such compartmentalization had to be sacrificed. The future of Keyes Investigations Inc., the lofty-sounding name that encompa.s.sed exactly one employee-three if you included the dogs, who accompanied her to the office every day-was riding on this a.s.signment.

"I should hope so," she told her boyfriend, Crow, who had found a corner of the dining room table large enough to hold a bowl of cereal and the New York Times acrostic, which he was working between bites with his usual infuriating nonchalance. "Any native Baltimorean who doesn't should have his or her birth certificate revoked."

"Well, it's not like they were super famous, not as famous as the guys who came after. And it was before you were born."

"My father didn't neglect my education in key areas, I'm happy to say."

"Your dad didn't know either. I asked him the other day at work, and he said it sounded familiar, but it didn't make much of an impression on him."

"Didn't make much of an impression?" Tess, who had been on her hands and knees, the better to crawl through her paper labyrinth, rocked back on her heels. "It was only one of the transforming events of his life."

"Wasn't he already married when the Vietnam draft started?"

"What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The Baltimore Four-Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and Dobson, the four Oriole pitchers who had at least twenty wins in the regular season in 1971."

Crow laughed in his easy way, a laugh that excused her ignorance-and his. "I'm talking about four antiwar activists who poured blood on records at the U.S. Customs House in 1967, sort of a runup to the Catonsville Nine. Philip Berrigan-Berrigan, Lewis, Mengel, and Eberhardt. I heard about them when I was making my rounds at the soup kitchens last week."

Tess was staring at a photograph of a dark-eyed, dark-haired man. "You and that do-gooder crowd. Just remember, no good deed-"

"Goes unpunished. Jesus, Tess, you'd probably have mocked Gandhi if you met him."

"Not to his face."

"Anyway, I think they were pretty cool. Berrigan and that group. Can you imagine someone pouring blood on records today?"

"Yes. And I can imagine that person being detained at Guantanamo without legal counsel, so don't get any ideas."

Tess returned to sorting her papers, only to find her shoulder-length hair falling in her face. It was an impossible length-not quite long enough for the single braid she was trying to coax back into being after an untimely haircut, but too long to be allowed to swing free. She fashioned stubby pigtails on either side of her head, securing them with rubber bands, and went back to work.

"Hey, you look like Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters," Crow said approvingly. "Circa 1999. You going to wear your hair like that tomorrow?"

"It's a thought." An amusing one, actually: Tess as her authentic self, in her favorite sweats, henley shirt, and ad hoc hairstyle, standing in front of the b.u.t.toned-down types that had infiltrated the local newspaper. But at the prices the Beacon-Light editors were paying, they expected and deserved the bogus Tess-hair slicked behind her ears into some semblance of order, a suit, real shoes with heels, which Tess actually liked, as they made her almost six feet tall. "I can't believe they want a PowerPoint for this thing. I'd rather spend the afternoon at Kinko's, photocopying twenty-five sets of every package, instead of fighting with my scanner to load all these images."

"Why is a newspaper hiring a private detective for consulting work anyway? Shouldn't their own reporters know how to do this stuff?"

"They've had an exodus of senior staff, which they've replaced with a lot of inexperienced kids. Feeney thought it was his lucky day when he got promoted to city editor, but herding these rookies is more likely to put him in an early grave."

"So what are you supposed to do?"

"They've asked me to take three recent cases in the news and use them as sort of intellectual object lessons, walk them through all the possible scenarios in an investigation."

"WWTMD-What Would Tess Monaghan Do?"

Tess laughed. "Sort of. Thing is, I have the leeway to work in some, uh, more legally ambiguous ways. I can lie about who I am, pay people for information. Reporters can't. Or shouldn't. So this is going to be mostly about public information, especially stuff that's not online. The Internet is amazing, but you need to leave the office now and then, interact with people. A good courthouse source is better than the world's fastest search engine."

"It's just so strange, you in bed with the Beacon-Light. Feeney, sure. He's your friend. But you've always hated all the top editors at that paper, especially after the way they hyped your-" Crow stopped to find a precise term for the events of almost a year ago, the trauma whose aftermath had driven them apart for a time. "Encounter."

Encounter. Tess liked that. Euphemisms had their uses. "Encounter" was so empty, so meaningless, incapable of holding the horror of the attack, the greater horror of what she had been forced to do to save her life. She reached for her knee, for the fading purplish scar that paradoxically soothed her when the most troubling memories surfaced. A souvenir of the "encounter."

"The money is to drool for. And February was so slow this year. I have to make it up somehow, especially now that I have a car payment."

"Things will pick up."

"They better. I have that other gig-the investigation of that charity that you're going to help me with-but that's small potatoes. I need this."

What went unsaid between them was that February was unusually slow because Tess, reunited with Crow-again-had decided she believed in love. Again. And as a reconst.i.tuted convert to love, she had declined all offers to gather evidence of cheating spouses around Valentine's Day, which is to private investigators what April 15 is to accountants-busy, exhausting, extremely lucrative. It was a costly bit of n.o.bility, but she had no regrets. Pangs of anxiety when she had balanced her accounts and paid her bills on February 28, but no regrets. So far.

"How can a newspaper that's cutting staff afford to pay you so well?"

"It's a cla.s.sic example of how corporate accounting works. On the local level, there's not enough money to hire reporters. But I'm being paid out of the national office in Dallas, and they're awash in money. My fee might seem outrageous to us, but it pales when compared to the two million in consulting fees they bestowed on the departing CEO."

And when Tess had taken the job, she had every intention of phoning it in, just freestyling her way through the symposium, and who cared if it was all bulls.h.i.t and blather? As it turned out, Tess cared. The work ethic pa.s.sed down by both parents kicked in as surely as the recessive gene that had made her eyes hazel. In the end she would rather grumble about being underpaid than endure the shame of underperforming. Besides, Feeney had gone to bat for her. She wouldn't want a lackl.u.s.ter presentation to taint her old friend.

Crow, still in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt as Sunday crested noon, pointed a bare toe at the stack nearest him, topped by the photograph of the handsome dark-eyed man that Tess's eyes kept returning to, almost in spite of herself.

"What are you going to tell them about the Youssef case? It's hard to see how you can think of an angle that hasn't already occurred to the newspaper. Much less the Justice Department, the FBI, the Howard County police..."

"Oh, that one's about reading between the lines. The investigation-and the story-has stalled for reasons that no one wants to discuss in public. I'm going to connect the dots."

"Can you prove your theory?"

"No, but that's the beauty of the project. I don't have to prove anything. I just have to have plausible explanations."

"Homicide as intellectual exercise. Seems like..." Crow bent over his puzzle, filled in a line. "Bad karma. Eight letters. Yes, exactly. It fits. Done."

"It fits your puzzle. Gregory Youssef created his own karma."

a.s.sistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef had disappeared on the eve of Thanksgiving and was found dead late on the day the media insisted on calling Black Friday. The first twenty-four hours had promised a sensational story with national implications-a federal prosecutor, one a.s.signed to ant.i.terrorist cases, kidnapped and killed. Youssef had been sitting down to dinner when he was paged to the office-or so he told his wife. No record of that page was ever found. He returned downtown. Sixteen hours later his body was discovered on the Howard County side of the Patapsco River, not far from I-95. Early speculation centered on the terrorism cases he had just started working and the tough sentences he had won on a handful of drug cases. The U.S. attorney vowed that such a crime against a federal officer of the court would not go unpunished. For the entirety of Thanksgiving, it had seemed there were only two stories in the world, as reporters alternated their live feed from the yellow police lines at the murder site to the lines of the hungry at area soup kitchens. Death and hunger, hunger and death.

But the Youssef story receded from the headlines before most Maryland families had finished their turkey leftovers. The feds, who usually bigfooted such cases, pulled back with amazing and uncharacteristic grace, all but insisting that Howard County detectives take the primary role. The U.S. attorney stopped appearing hourly in front of local television cameras and, coincidentally or no, resigned at the end of the year. Suddenly everyone seemed content to shrug and deem it a genuine mystery, despite some precise evidence about Youssef's final hours-an ATM withdrawal in East Baltimore, the discovery of Youssef's car just off one of the lower exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.

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 prost.i.tution, including male prost.i.tution as practiced by out-of-town boys who considered themselves straight even as they took other men's money for s.e.x. 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 p.i.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 alt.i.tude.

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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments. "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?"