No Good Deeds Part 2

"Where do you live, Lloyd?" Crow asked as he watched Lloyd tuck in to his salad-bar creation, more cheese than lettuce. Cheese, lettuce, and nothing else.

"'Round."

"Round where?"

"I don't like to specify too much about myself. But you know, I turned sixteen last fall. They can't make me go to school anymore."

"So what are you doing if you don't go to school?"

"I worked for a man 'round the way."

The past tense didn't escape Crow. "Doing what?"

Lloyd gave him a look. "You sure you're not a cop?"

"I'm a bartender." Not quite the truth, but more expedient than trying to explain his jack-of-all-trades role at Pat Monaghan's bar, the Point.

"Why you so interested in me?"

"Because you're a person, sitting opposite me in a restaurant. Why wouldn't I be interested in another human being?"

Lloyd pointed a fork at him. "A human being that you think slashed your tire."

"Well, didn't you?"

Lloyd grinned. He was so long and bony, thinner than even Crow had been at that age, and he was rampaging through his salad as if he hadn't had a solid meal for a while. Weekends were light on free food in the Baltimore area, with only a few churches open for business. That's part of the reason Crow had started using his day off to take supplies to the smaller soup kitchens, the ones that didn't get as much publicity as the name-brand charities.

"Did not. Word. But I saw the guy who did, and I told him that an old lady had seen him and called the police and he better run. I told him I'd hold his tool for him so the police wouldn't pick him up. Then I waited for you to come back. Tire was already flat, right? No harm in helping out."

His last words echoed in Crow's brain. It was true, despite what Tess maintained. There could be no harm in helping anyone.

"Lloyd, tell me straight: You got a place to sleep tonight? The temperature's supposed to go down into the twenties."

"I'll be fine."

"Okay, but when I take you home, I'm taking you to an address and watching you go inside. In fact, I'm coming inside with you and meeting your folks."

"Uh-uh."

"Why not?"

"Some white dude bring me home, my mom starts asking questions, and she'll figure out that I wasn't up to any good, and I'll be beat."

Lloyd's tone and reasoning were persuasive, but he had hesitated just long enough for Crow to know he was lying.

"But according to you, all you did was take advantage of someone else's crime."

"Yeah, but she won't believe that. My mama ain't got much use for me."

"Lloyd-do you live with your mom? Or any adult? Is anyone looking out for you?"

Their entrees arrived-the speed of the service was setting records, as if the staff could not be free of Lloyd and Crow soon enough-and Lloyd busied himself with spaghetti and meatb.a.l.l.s. He ate as a child might, Crow noticed, holding the fork in his fist, cutting the strands instead of winding them around the fork.

"I'm not dropping you off on the street, not in this weather. Either I take you to a place where an adult comes to the door and vouches for you or I'll find you a shelter bed-"

"No f.u.c.king shelters!" Lloyd almost yelped in his distress. "You show up there, you young, they call juvenile services or social services and they haul you away for what they say is your own good. That ain't for me."

"Then I'll take you to where I live. Just for the night, okay? You can sleep in the spare bedroom, and I'll take you back to the neighborhood tomorrow morning. Even drop you off at school, if you like."

"Told you, I'm sixteen. I don't have to go."

"Fine, Lloyd. You don't have to go. But do you want to go?"

"h.e.l.l no." His look was scornful, contemptuous of the very idea that one could want to go to school if it wasn't required by law. Crow decided to change his tack, to become Lloyd's supplicant, allow him the illusion that he had the upper hand in their dealings.

"Here's the thing, man. I need you to tell my girlfriend what happened with her car. She's going to be p.i.s.sed about the tire, and she's not going to believe me."

"What-you whipped?"

"A little," Crow said. "A little."

Of course, if he were truly cowed by Tess, he wouldn't dare bring Lloyd Jupiter home with him.

"Women," Lloyd said with a world-weary sigh, as if he had a lifetime of experience.

"They can be demanding. But they're usually worth the effort."

"True dat," Lloyd said, reaching for a fistful of garlic bread. "Can I have dessert?"

3.

Surveillance isn't for amateurs," Tess Monaghan told the bright young faces that stared unnervingly up at her from the seats of the Beacon-Light's small auditorium, a spanking-new addition to a building that seemed to be under constant renovation. "Remember the Miami Herald and Gary Hart? They staked out his apartment but didn't realize it had a back door. There's no such thing as partial surveillance. That's a cla.s.sic amateur mistake."

"But you were an amateur, right?" one of the men asked. It was that logy middle section of the afternoon, the Q-and-A portion of her presentation, and Tess had long ago figured out that this particular reporter was far more interested in his own Q's than in anyone else's A's. She wasn't sure of his name, which had been given in a flurry of handshakes and greetings over coffee at 10:00 A.M. and reiterated during the lunch break. The men here all looked alike-Ivy League preppy with floppy hair, khaki trousers, and b.u.t.ton-down shirts with sleeves rolled up to the exact point just below the elbow, almost as if they had been measured with a ruler. And all white. The male reporters picked for this tutorial in investigative techniques were extremely white, white-white, so white that they made Tess doubt her own credentials as a Caucasian.

As for the women, there were only two, and they were a study in contrasts. One was a demure blonde afraid to make eye contact, while the other was an exotic blend of races who might have wandered in from the Miss Universe pageant. The newspaper probably counted her three or four times over when cooking its diversity stats.

"If you mean I had no formal training as a private investigator, then yes, I started as a self-taught amateur. But I apprenticed to a PI, as required by law, and took over his agency when he retired to the Eastern Sh.o.r.e."

This was true, as far as it went. Tess seldom bothered to explain that she had never met her mentor face-to-face. Edward Keyes was a retired Baltimore cop and old family friend. As a former detective, he was given a PI's license automatically and then "hired" Tess. He had signed the incorporation papers, expedited her license, and sold her the agency for a dollar, all without leaving his home on the Delaware sh.o.r.e.

"Tess was a reporter at the Star," Kevin Feeney put in. "But in just three years, she's had a lot of success running her own business."

"Are you expanding?" the same floppy-haired man demanded. "Taking on staff? Landing big corporate accounts?"

"Well, I got this one." This earned her a generous laugh. Apparently her interrogator wasn't popular with his colleagues either. "As for expansion, I don't think I'd be particularly good at managing others. "h.e.l.l is other people," as Sartre said. Instead I work with a loose network of female PIs, nationwide. We trade out our time and brainstorm together, but we remain independent contractors."

"Why all women?"

"Why not?" No laugh this time, just stony looks of confusion, although Tess thought she saw Miss Universe hide a smile behind her left hand while raising her right and waiting to be recognized. The men raised their hands, too, but they seldom waited for Tess to call on them.

"Is your work dangerous?" Miss Universe asked.

"Not if I'm doing it right."

Her one insistent questioner was not done. "But you killed a man, right? Didn't you have to kill someone in self-defense?"

Her grin faded, and behind the podium her hand reached instinctively for her knee. "Yes."

"How does it feel-"

"One more question," Feeney cut in. "Preferably from someone who hasn't asked one yet. Then it's back to work."

"Do you actually enjoy what you do?" asked a man at the back of the room. "Your work seems even more dependent on human misery than journalism is."

The question caught her short, no glib reply at the ready. Tess knew she liked working for herself and was proud of the middle-cla.s.s living she had managed to achieve, touch-and-go as it could be at times. Just a few years ago, she had been living in a below-market rental in her aunt's building, carrying balances on her credit cards, scrimping and saving for the tiniest indulgences. Now she had a house that was appreciating so fast the tax bill was threatening to overtake the mortgage-and that was without the city's a.s.sessment division catching up with all the improvements made since she bought the little bungalow.

But did she enjoy her job? The means to the various ends were often unpleasant, a constant reminder of humankind's capacity for venality. If no one ever cheated an insurance company, much less a spouse, if no one tried to outthink security systems or steal others' ident.i.ties...well, then, Tess wouldn't have been able to purchase a Lexus SUV, even a used one.

She had reunited a family, she reminded herself. Safeguarded a secret that the entire city held dear. Eased a woman's tortured conscience, stopped a monster in his tracks, cleared a man's reputation. Saved the lives of three children, whose father remained on friendly terms with her. In fact, Mark Rubin wanted Tess and Crow to attend second-night seder at the family's house next month.

"Yes," she said. "I do. I really do."

After a polite round of applause, the star reporters of the Beacon-Light filed out in dutiful, orderly fashion. Ah, Hildy Johnson had long ago left the building, no matter which gender embodied the part. Once they had cleared the room, Tess turned to Feeney and rolled her eyes.

"In my day it was the television reporters who asked how one felt."

"Sorry, Tess. I told them to avoid that subject out of common courtesy. He's not the sharpest crayon in the box. If he were a Crayola, he'd be burnt sienna."

"Burnt sienna? Feeney, only one person in this entire room even approached beige."

"I mean he'd be one of those second-cla.s.s colors that no self-respecting kid touches until all the good ones are gone."

"Ah, but in that case," Tess said, "he would be the sharpest crayon in the box."

Feeney laughed. "There are days when I wish I had one of those little built-in sharpeners at my desk and I could just insert their heads in there. Don't get me wrong. They're good kids, bright and earnest. But they're inexperienced and they don't know the city. Aggressive, yet hamstrung with fear. It ain't the best combo. That's why I was hoping a maverick like you might fire them up, inspire them to "think different," as that ungrammatical ad campaign had it."

"The best question I got all day," Tess said, "was if they made female-friendly equipment for bladder relief."

"I must have stepped out during that part. Do they?"

"Yes, but I prefer the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Speaking of which...?"

"Down the hall, on the left."

The newsroom that Tess walked through bore little resemblance to her beloved Baltimore Star, dead for almost a decade. In fact, it no longer resembled the Beacon-Light newsroom of just two years ago. Reporters often complained that modern newspaper offices could be insurance companies, but Tess thought the Beacon-Light looked more like an advertising agency where the employees had been kept in sensory deprivation tanks for too long. There were few flashes of personal ident.i.ty in the pretty maple-veneer cubicles-no toys or rude posters or dartboards with the boss's face pinned to them, things once common to newsrooms. It took a moment longer to identify what else was missing. Laughter. Chatter. Noise of any kind. No one was joking or shouting or even berating someone over the phone. H. L. Mencken had once complained that copy editors were eunuchs who had never felt the breeze on their faces. But with telephones, the Internet, and e-mail, far too many reporters spent their entire days staring into the sickly glow of computer terminals, removed from human contact. They were at once more connected and less connected.

Still, stupid and impertinent questions aside, Tess's gig was a G.o.dsend-a nice chunk of guaranteed cash for very little effort-and Feeney was probably right when he said that she could spin it into a regular venture, flying to newspapers and television stations all over the country. With budgets cut to the bone, the big media companies would rather pay a onetime fee to a PI than hire seasoned editors and reporters.

Her cell phone vibrated, and she glanced down: Crow, although their wireless service announced him as E. RANSOME. A daytime call from him was rare enough to give her pause; he was not much for idle chat, and he understood that her work often prevented her from answering the phone. Besides, Crow's own days were fuller and fuller, almost frighteningly so. "He's growing up right before your eyes," Tess's friend Whitney had observed, meaning to make a joke. After years of a rather f.e.c.kless, careless existence, Crow seemed to have found his inner workaholic, throwing his energy into creating a reputable music club in the most unlikely corner of far west Baltimore, then trying to eradicate hunger in his spare time. The change encouraged Tess, but it also unnerved her a little, as all change did.

"What's up?" she asked.

"We're going to have a houseguest tonight. Just wanted to give you a heads-up."

"Cool. Some college friend pa.s.sing through?"

"No, more of a friend in need."

"A friend?"

"Well, a new friend. An acquaintance."

"Crow-"

"Tess, I met this kid, and he doesn't have anywhere to go or anywhere to stay, and-I just can't leave him on the street in this weather, and he doesn't want to go to the shelters or the missions, and who can blame him?"

"Crow, you are out of your f.u.c.king mind."

"Why? It's just one night."

"There are a thousand whys, but I can't have this conversation outside the ladies' room at the Blight."

The use of the paper's nickname earned her a stern look from a beetle-browed woman stalking by, legal pad in hand. It wasn't very gracious, disparaging the paper on its own premises.

"I'll tell you what: We'll meet for dinner somewhere, and I'll size this kid up before you bring him into-our house." She had almost said "my," a bad habit. "I could be at the Bra.s.s Elephant in half an hour."

"Lloyd's underage. We can't take him to a bar."

So it was Lloyd now, underage Lloyd. "What does he want, an expense-account dinner at Charleston?"

"What he really needs is a home-cooked meal, something that will stick to his ribs. I was thinking lamb stew, some chipotle m.u.f.fins." He was trying to soften her up, naming two of her favorite dishes. It was working.

"Okay. To dinner. I'm not guaranteeing him a bed for the night. I get to reserve judgment on that until I meet him."

"Tess, I'm not the naif you like to make me out to be. I've got some street sense."

"Of course you do," she said, but her a.s.surances rang hollow even to her.

She pushed her way into the ladies' room. This, too, had been upgraded, the once inst.i.tutional green-and-peach color scheme replaced with gleaming stainless steel and stark white tiles. A young woman, the multinational brunette from the presentation, leaned toward her lovely reflection, inspecting her invisible pores, her nonexistent lines. Asian? Black? Latina? Possibly all three.