No Good Deeds Part 4

He barely felt the frigid air, except in his exposed fingers. He was that flush with his insight, that proud of the detail he had caught. Collins was nodding and taking it in, his esteem for Gabe growing larger by the second, silent as those seconds were.

Then Collins stubbed out his cigarette in the sand-filled ashtray and said: "You think a lot about what goes on in the mind of a guy who's about to get his d.i.c.k sucked by another guy?"

With that he walked away, leaving Gabe feeling very small and very cold. Except for his face, where the blood now rose, flaming the handsome, symmetrical features that his female relatives always swore would grease his way through life.

5.

Tess arrived home to the usual havoc of a Crow-prepared meal, which she never minded. He was not only an excellent cook but a considerate one as well, insistent on cleaning up after himself. So it was easy to tolerate the by-products of his feasts-the bursts of flour, the dribbles of olive oil, the littered countertops.

Crow's guest, however, was a tougher sell. The sullen teen was sitting at their dining room table locked in a staring contest with the dogs, both of whom seemed highly skeptical. Esskay's instincts weren't worth much; the greyhound disapproved of anyone who didn't fawn over her. Miata, shy and reserved, was a better barometer. Her narrowed gaze and the slight rumble in the back of her throat did not speak well for the young man facing her.

"h.e.l.lo," Tess said.

He looked harmless enough-a skinny, almost scrawny kid with close-cropped hair and skin the color of a full-bodied lager. His most striking features were his amber eyes, one with a black dot in the iris, and slightly pointed ears, which gave his face an elfin cast.

"Hmmmmmph," he said, not lifting his gaze from the dogs' glare.

"Lloyd, this is my girlfriend, Tess," Crow called from the kitchen. "Tess, Lloyd Jupiter. He's going to be staying with us for a while."

"A while?" Tess echoed. "No, I'm not," Lloyd said.

"Well, you're definitely staying here for the night."

Tess poured a gla.s.s of red wine for herself and Pellegrino for Lloyd, who sniffed suspiciously at the bubbles before he sipped it.

"This 7-Up got no taste," he said.

"It's water. I'm afraid we don't keep soda in the house. Where do you go to school?" She was determined to be a good hostess.

"I don't."

"Where did you go before you dropped out?"

"Didn't say I dropped out."

"Sorry-I just a.s.sumed. So did you? Go to school and then drop out? Graduate early? Or are you just truant?"

"I was over at Clifton Park. It didn't have much for me."

"What do you do now?"

"I get by."

"Puncturing people's tires and then offering to help change them. I heard." Crow had briefed her on that part while she was driving home, perhaps banking on Tess's inability to work up a truly righteous rage at him while distracted by rush-hour traffic.

"I didn't. Another kid did it. Look, you got television? Xbox?"

"There's a television in the den, which doubles as my office and our guest room. No Xbox or PlayStation, I'm afraid. The only computer game we have is the chess software that came loaded on my laptop."

"Can I see it?"

Tess took him to her office and set up the wireless laptop. Lloyd didn't actually know how to play, she noticed. He asked for the computer's recommendations and sometimes tried to move pieces in ways that were promptly disallowed. But it was a game on a screen, which seemed to satisfy him.

"Hey," he said after a moment. "This computer's talking to me."

"Well, it gives you suggestions-"

"No, it's talking to me, in this, like, little box. Asking me about"-he squinted at the screen, sounding out the words-"the giant scam."

"What?" Tess leaned over his shoulder and saw the instant-message box that had opened in the corner. She must have logged on to her IM account by force of habit. The Snoop Sisters-the unfortunate Yahoo group name used to identify the women PIs with whom Tess worked-were enjoying a live chat, and Gretchen from Chicago had a.s.sumed it was Tess who was online. Gretchen's question was pretty much the way Lloyd had conveyed it, albeit even ruder: So how was the giant scam you perpetrated on Christy Media Inc.? Any chance of the rest of us getting cut in on this action?

Not really here, Tess typed back, reaching around Lloyd, who seem to draw himself in as if terrified of contact. Guest using computer. Will provide details via tomorrow's digest.

"What is that?" Lloyd's voice was animated for the first time.

"Just IM."

He looked mystified, but he didn't ask for clarification. Lloyd seemed resigned to not understanding things.

"IM, instant messaging. If you have friends logged on to a computer at the same time, they can communicate by typing."

"How?"

He had her there. Tess didn't have a clue how the technology worked.

"It's like a phone, sort of, only it's attached to a computer keyboard. Didn't they have computers at your school?"

"Yeah, but they didn't always work and we just used them to, like, write stuff. I been on the Internet at the public library a couple of times, but that was before you needed a library card to use it." The topic seemed to embarra.s.s him, and his eyes slid away from hers, toward the piles of paper that had migrated back to her office when she finished prepping late yesterday. "Is that your boyfriend?"

He was pointing to the photo of Gregory Youssef, which topped her file on the case, and it took enormous effort on Tess's part not to laugh. Other than dark hair, Crow and Youssef shared absolutely no resemblance. White men must all look alike to Lloyd.

"That's the federal prosecutor who was killed."

Another blank look with no follow-up.

"Right before Thanksgiving. Remember?"

"Oh, yeah, when they jacked everybody up."

It was Tess's turn to look confused.

"They, like, picked up every player in the neighborhood, took 'em downtown on all kinda bulls.h.i.t. Then, like that"-he snapped his fingers-"they let 'em all go. Most of 'em, at least. Some they put charges on, just for the h.e.l.l of it, or 'cause they was paper on 'em. But they knew all along it wasn't any of them that messed with him."

Of course, Tess thought. In the first forty-eight hours, when it was a.s.sumed Youssef's death was job-related, they had probably looked closely at his drug cases, then released the men they had detained without so much as an apology.

"They decided his death didn't have anything to do with being a prosecutor after all," she said. "The investigation indicated it was personal."

"Girlfriend?"

"Not exactly."

"So they ever find who done it? They usually pretty good at finding out who kills white people."

There was no edge of resentment in Lloyd's voice, no political undertone. He was speaking a simple fact. A private-school teacher had been shot and killed in the parking lot of a suburban mall just this month, and suspects had been in custody within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile the board listing Baltimore City's homicide victims-mostly young black men-was flush with red, the color used to indicate open cases.

"No, they've yet to make an arrest in the death of Gregory Youssef."

"You-who?" His voice cracked a little.

"Gregory Youssef, the prosecutor. His murder remains unsolved. That guy." She tapped the photo.

Lloyd turned his attention back to the computer screen, his posture rigid, his fingers poised above the keys like a bird's talons, curved and prehensile. He seemed not offended but suddenly annoyed by Tess's presence, irritable. "How come the horses can't move straight?"

"The knights. And I don't know the whys of chess. Crow's good at it, but it doesn't play to my strengths. I suck at what our chief executive calls strategery. I prefer the Pickett's Charge approach to life."

"What?"

"Gettysburg?" It didn't seem to register. "The Civil War?"

"Oh, yeah. That."

"Gettysburg was one of the pivotal battles in the war, the so-called high tide of the Confederacy. Pickett went straight up the middle-and lost all his men."

"Well, that was ignorant," Lloyd said, and Tess really couldn't disagree. Truth be told, she had no admiration of Pickett, and she had related the story just to make conversation. Her tactics were quite the opposite of Robert E. Lee's. She wanted to lead Lloyd back to the story of Gregory Youssef, and she didn't dare do that too directly. How could one know the name but not his face, or the larger story of his death?

But the name had clearly meant something to Lloyd-something that terrified him.

"So," she said, coming into the kitchen and closing the old-fashioned swinging door behind her. When she had overseen the renovation of the house, her father and Crow had tried to persuade her to create a great-room effect, allowing the living room, dining room, and kitchen to blend into each other. But Tess had decided to respect the bungalow's old divisions. Tess liked walls. "What the h.e.l.l are you up to?"

"Nothing but lamb stew."

"We can't run a shelter, Crow. Not for even one kid."

"Tomorrow I'll take him by South Baltimore Station or someplace like that, see what they can do for him. But I couldn't leave him out there tonight."

"South Baltimore Station is for adult addicts in recovery, and it has a waiting list. Does he have a substance-abuse problem?"

"I don't get that vibe from him."

"He seems to be familiar with neighborhood dealers. He knew they all got "jacked up' when investigators thought Youssef's murder was connected to his job. The very mention of Youssef's name made him jumpy and anxious."

"Knowing drug dealers in his part of Baltimore is like knowing Junior Leaguers in Roland Park. You make small talk with plenty of young m.u.f.fys and Paiges down at Evergreen Coffee House, but that doesn't mean you put on a big hat and sell lemon sticks at the Flower Mart."

"Fair enough. But he's a dropout who tried to cadge money out of you, changing a tire that he punctured."

"No, another guy did it. He just bird-dogged that guy's scam. It's very enterprising, if you think about it."

"That's a distinction of little difference, Crow. What do you really know about this kid? Just who have you brought under my-our-roof?"

"Taste this." Crow spooned a little lamb in her mouth, but all the rosemary and garlic in the world couldn't distract her.

"One night only," she said. "Then he goes."

Summoned to dinner, Lloyd said a brief prayer over his food, which made Tess squirm a little at how much she took for granted in her life. And someone had dinged manners into him along the way, although the job wasn't entirely finished. He gamely tried the lamb stew, chewing as if he were being forced to consume balsa wood but ultimately cleaning his plate. He then poked at the salad, clearly suspicious of the dark green leaves and toasted nuts.

"This lettuce go bad?" he asked Crow.

"It's spinach. We eat it for the lutein."

Lloyd pointed with his fork. "This a peanut?"

"Pistachio."

"For real?" He shrugged and ate it, without enthusiasm, but also without resistance. When he took a bite out of the chipotle corn m.u.f.fins that Crow had made from scratch, however, he bellowed as if something had bitten him.

"I thought they was cornbread," he said after gulping down half his gla.s.s of water-tap water this time, at his request. "s.h.i.t's all hot and spicy."

"They're corn m.u.f.fins with chilies in the batter," Crow apologized. "They just caught you off guard."

"My mother says right people put sugar in their cornbread," Lloyd said as if announcing a core belief on a par with monotheism. "I coulda eaten cornbread without sugar, but this s.h.i.t is just wrong."

"Where is your mother?" Tess asked. "What's her name?"

Ignoring her, Lloyd tried another bite, and it did seem to go down easier now that he knew what to expect. And he had no quarrel with dessert-a choice of chocolate, pistachio, or strawberry ice cream from Moxley's, served with homemade brownies. His plate cleared, he stood to return to his chess game.

"Want to give me a hand cleaning up?" Crow asked in his easygoing way.

"You cooked. Why doesn't she clean?"

"Sometimes she does. But Mondays are my day off and she worked today, so I don't mind carrying the full load."

Lloyd looked at Tess, sitting at the table with her gla.s.s of wine, scratching Esskay behind one ear. "Did you go spying today?"

"Spying? Oh, no. I just gave a presentation down at the newspaper, talked about investigative techniques." Curious to see how he would react, she embroidered a bit. "That's why I had that picture of Youssef."

"You got nunchucks?"

"Excuse me?"

"Nunchucks. For kung fu." Lloyd did a demonstration that owed more to Karate Kid than it did to John Woo.