No Good Deeds Part 6

8.

What do you mean, Crow won't press charges?"

Whitney Talbot's voice, never demure, was like a ship's horn when she was surprised or outraged. It sliced through the midday din of Matthew's, which, admittedly, was not difficult to do. The sixty-year-old restaurant took up only the front half of an old rowhouse, and there were few diners at this time of day.

Still, even in a place used to voluble and excitable customers, Whitney attracted attention. She always did. Tess, who had known her since college, had decided having Whitney as a friend was like traveling around Baltimore with a white Siberian tiger. Seldom dull, always the center of attention, but also a little unpredictable.

"Lloyd has a jacket-" Tess began, shaking hot pepper flakes over the traditional tomato pie. Whitney was having the house specialty, a crab pie, but sh.e.l.lfish-averse Tess never risked contact with the local delicacy. Unless she was desperate to leave a social occasion early. Then a little anaphylactic shock was just the ticket.

"A jacket? Did he steal that, too?"

"A record. He's already been in Hickey for auto theft. Crow doesn't want to bring charges because he'll almost certainly end up back inside. And maybe not as a juvenile this time."

"But even if he's not a car thief, he's still guilty of leaving the scene of an accident, right? And you have to tell police who he is, or you're liable."

"Crow gave them a fake name," Tess said, still feeling sheepish for letting that bit of deception fly. "Bob Smith. No one batted an eye, even when Crow helpfully added, "That's Bob with one o.""

"Isn't it illegal to lie to cops?"

"Sort of. But with no real injuries, the cops aren't exactly making this a priority. And Crow told them the truth when he said he didn't know how to find our houseguest again. You know what's really embarra.s.sing? I think the cops thought it was some kind of kinky pickup. Two white suburbanites cruising for decadent thrills, bringing home a young hustler and getting metaphorically screwed instead. They've probably opened a pervert file on us."

If Whitney's voice was loud, then her laugh was a borderline bray. "It sounds like the damage was pretty minor," she said at last. "Other than that done to your reputations with Northern District, I mean. You said the other guy had nothing more than a crumpled b.u.mper, and the Volvo's such a junker you can't really damage it."

"Yeah, but he's claiming the impossible-to-pin-down soft-tissue injury. Worse yet, the responding cops let him go without administering a Breathalyzer. Believe me, he would have flunked. You could smell the gin on him ten feet away. Everyone in the neighborhood knows about Mr. Parrish. He goes over to the Swallow at the Hollow, then literally coasts home, sliding down Oakdale and then making the turn toward his house on Wilmslow. He rationalizes that it's not driving drunk if his foot isn't on the accelerator and the engine is off. Just coasting drunk."

"Well, it's not like Crow has any money. Can't get blood from a stone."

"If Parrish has a cagey lawyer, they might go after me-through my homeowner's or the umbrella policy I carry for the business. And my carrier won't be so blase about accepting Crow's bogus Bob Smith story. They could refuse to cover me, and even a small settlement would wipe me out right now."

Whitney didn't laugh at this. Despite being born rich-or perhaps because of it-Whitney took money very seriously.

"Then Crow's being an idiot. This kid doesn't deserve his n.o.bility. You took him into your home, fed him, gave him shelter, and how did he reward you? By trying to steal from you and wrecking Crow's car. You've got to convince Crow to tell the truth and press charges."

Tess sighed and focused on her pizza, but even a Matthew's tomato pie could not soothe her. With Crow this morning, she had taken Whitney's side of the argument. She had, in fact, been far more shrill and unkind. The past twelve hours had been a series of shocks-the jolt of the Lexus's alarm, the cold air that hit them as they raced outside with only jackets and boots added to their nightclothes, the dogs trotting excitedly behind. The scene at the bottom of the hill, with Mr. Parrish stalking around his car in inebriated indignation, saying some terribly racist things about what and whom he never thought he would see in Roland Park. It was Mr. Parrish's diatribe, as much as anything else, that had hoisted Crow with his sanctimonious petard. By the time the police arrived, he was adamant that Lloyd-well, Bob-was their guest and that he had implicit permission to use Crow's car. And the fact was, Mr. Parrish's mammoth Buick had struck the Volvo so far back along the midsection that Tess was inclined to agree with Crow: Lloyd was stalled in the street at the moment of impact, so Mr. Parrish was to blame for the collision. After all, the one thing that they hadn't heard that night was the Volvo's engine, and it was a noisy, raucous car, audible for blocks.

Even so, Crow shouldn't have given the police a false name for Lloyd. That had been rash, a mistake that was sure to come back and haunt them. The boy was still liable for leaving the scene of an accident, although, given the small stakes-no real injuries, the minor damage to Mr. Parrish's car-Tess doubted that the police would spend a lot of time trying to find and arrest him. And the insurance companies wouldn't be much interested in him either. Lloyd had no figurative pockets, shallow or deep, under any name, so Crow's carrier couldn't transfer the fiduciary responsibility to him. Yet Mr. Parrish would collect nothing if the case were treated like the theft that it was. No, as long as Crow claimed that Lloyd had his permission to use the car, Crow would be on the hook for everything. Tess's only hope was that Mr. Parrish's insurance company, once it ferreted out how few a.s.sets Crow had, would give up.

Tess worked a lot with insurance companies. The industry's very aversion to paying out large sums had generated several small ones for her over the years, so she would never stoop to gross generalizations where agents and actuaries were concerned. She hated to think what another Tess Monaghan might do if presented with such a case. She would make short work of the a.s.signment, getting Mr. Parrish a nice little check and never caring what happened to the irresponsible driver on the other side of the equation.

"Crow may be a soft touch, but that's a large part of who he is," she said to Whitney now. "You of all people should get that. You're the one who told me we had to stop trying to change each other."

"He could stand to toughen up a little bit. It's not just the car-it's being naive enough to bring this kid home in the first place. Whatever story he's feeding the insurance company doesn't change the fact that you nursed a viper in your bosom, as Aesop would say. Took the kid in, gave him a meal and a warm place to sleep, and he rewarded your hospitality by trying to steal from you."

"The moral of Aesop's story was that you can't change someone's ingrained nature."

"Exactly."

"No, I mean this kid did seem to have some genuine sweetness to him. And he wasn't very good at lying-not when the name of Gregory Youssef came up."

"Really? Do you think-"

The two old friends, who had once rowed in perfect sync at moments, were still capable of thinking that way. Tess knew that Whitney's mind had jumped to the obvious conclusion-a young man from the East Side, not far from the neighborhood Youssef was last known to be. Police had a.s.sumed that Lloyd was a hustler. Wasn't he, in a sense?

"No," Tess said, shaking her head. "He didn't know what Youssef looked like, so he can't be the pickup. Besides, you don't see a lot of black kids hiring themselves out as trade. It's a weird racial division. White boys from farm country do it, sometimes. They rationalize they're not gay, just taking advantage of gay men. But the black kids don't go for that double standard."

"All the more reason to be covert about it."

"Uh-uh." Tess took another bite of pizza. The crust recipe was said to be secret, which compelled her to a.n.a.lyze it every time she visited. It had a pastry feel, flaky and light. And Matthew Ciccolo had started as a baker. A little sugar, perhaps more lard? "Remember, he knew the name, not the face. He'd clearly never seen the guy in his life. But Lloyd knows something. And he's not the kind of kid who's going to speak voluntarily to the cops-not without a charge hanging over him, which would force him to make some deals fast."

"You've got the auto-theft thing."

"I'm not sure that's enough of a threat to get Lloyd to talk to the cops. You know what the antisnitching culture is like in Baltimore." The city had been abuzz for weeks about a homemade DVD, Stop Snitching, that showed an NBA player hanging with drug dealers, making ominous threats about what happened to those who cooperated with the police. "But it might be enough leverage to get him to talk to a reporter. Which would sort of make up for the fact that I embarra.s.sed Feeney by telling his boss to go f.u.c.k himself. The thing is, we have to find Lloyd."

"I'm in," Whitney said, eyes gleaming. It was what made her such a satisfactory friend. She was always up for whatever Tess was planning, even when she didn't have a clue what it was.

"We'll need your mother's car. And"-Tess looked up, catching the waitress's eye-"an order of curly fries."

"Are the curly fries the bait?"

"No, my dear. You are."

"Here?" Crow asked.

"Almost. A little higher. A little to the right-and yes. Yes."

Kitty Monaghan stood in the center of her ever-expanding bookstore, Women and Children First. It was a family enterprise, twice over. Tess's aunt, her father's only sister, had acquired the old pharmacy from Tess's maternal grandfather, who had presided over the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall of Weinstein's Drugs.

Kitty was having far more luck at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare streets, although it had required endless ingenuity on her part. Over the years the bookstore had enlarged its original mission, adding annexes known as Dead White Men and Live! Males! Live! But instead of the ubiquitous coffee bar, Kitty had put the old soda fountain back into service, providing an array of ice cream drinks and baked goods. She let people drift in with coffee from the Daily Grind and Jimmy's and perch at the counter for hours, buying nothing more than a newspaper and a cookie. Somehow she made a profit.

Now she was creating a gallery s.p.a.ce within the store, and Crow was helping her install the first show, a grouping of tin-men sculptures-a firefighter, a policeman, a dog walker, an astronaut-all with the same conical tops, yet somehow distinctive, too. Most of the pieces stood no more than three feet high, but there was one life-size one, and Kitty had decided she wanted it suspended from the ceiling so it appeared to be flying. It was an angel, after all, its face at once goofy and benevolent. An angel with the best of intentions, one that would try to take care of you and probably would succeed in the end, but not without a few b.u.mps along the way.

Kitty agreed with Crow's a.s.sessment of the angel's character.

"Like Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life," she said, offering Crow a gla.s.s of real seltzer. Not the store-bought variety but the stuff that had to be delivered by a New York deliveryman. Kitty's life was full of people who fell over themselves to do her favors. Crow had come under her spell almost five years ago, when he took a job as a part-time clerk here-and then he met Tess. Crow studied the angel again. Now the smile seemed more mocking than kind.

"I used to think I was going to be an artist, remember? An artist, a musician...all I've ever really been is a dilettante."

"You'll always be an artist, Crow. No matter how much you throw yourself into business, you're not going to be able to snuff out that part of yourself. Tess fell in love with you when you were a bookstore clerk, remember?"

"And fell out love with me. Remember?"

"Her faith faltered once or twice along the way. Her faith in herself, not you. Besides, you're the one who bails, leaving when things don't go exactly the way you want. You first bolted when she admitted she was attracted to someone else. You did the same thing when she said she wasn't sure she wanted to get married. Not that she didn't love you or didn't want to be with you. Just that she was unsure of marriage-and of your motives for proposing when you did."

"I love her. That's not a motive."

Kitty may have carried the name and looks of an Irishwoman, but she had the soul of a Jewish mother. Throughout the conversation she had been working behind the counter, heating a cheese tart, slicing fruit, then placing it all before Crow on a large Fiestaware platter. He hadn't even realized he was hungry, but he fell on the food happily.

"Of course you love her. But you asked her to marry you because you felt guilty about what she went through when she was almost killed. Which, by the way, was entirely her fault. Not yours."

"She was targeted by a psycho. That's not exactly something she brought on herself."

"Fair enough. But the way she chose to handle it-that was her decision, before and after. No one could have protected her. How do you think her parents felt? Or me? Or Tyner? We were all horrified, after the fact."

"Okay, but why doesn't she want to get married? Her parents are happy enough-"

"Now. They were a little feistier when Tess was young, always bickering. They found it fun and even erotic, I think, but try to explain that to a five-year-old. The main thing is, I don't think Tess wants to have children, not yet. And what's the point of getting married if you're not going to have children?"

Crow thought he had her at last. "Kitty, you got married for the first time in your forties. Are you planning to have children?"

"I'm not playing by anyone else's rules," she said, smiling.

Crow was too distracted to notice how neatly Kitty had sidestepped his question. The physical activity of setting up the exhibit had provided only a temporary reprieve from the thoughts that had been troubling him all day. He had always known it was risky keeping secrets from Tess, no matter how benign. She despised looking foolish under any circ.u.mstances. As much as she fibbed and lied her way through her professional life, she was scrupulously honest in her personal one and expected the same from others.

But really, there had never been any point in full disclosure and, more important, never an appropriate time. He'd been waiting for all the stars to align, for Tess's business to pick back up, so she wouldn't feel pitied or patronized. Perhaps he should volunteer the information now, to soothe her fears over what the insurance companies might do to her. But she would be angry, and he hated to invoke her wrath, especially when things between them were so smooth, almost honeymoon-like.

Or had been, before he brought home a joyriding thief who tried to burglarize them.

9.

By sundown it was clear that Lloyd's only choices for the night were the streets or one of the mission shelters, which he despised, with their enforced G.o.d s.h.i.t, not to mention all the other rules. Might as well live with Murray's bulls.h.i.t, in that case. And some of the hard-core men smelled so, a nasty funk of wet clothes and body odor and cheap wine. He had been trying to panhandle enough to get into the motel over on North Avenue, which wasn't fussy about ID and age as long as you had cash, but he hadn't come close to sc.r.a.ping up the almost forty dollars he needed. As a panhandler Lloyd lacked the natural advantages-no gimp, no limp-and while kindhearted women sometimes gave him a few dollars for food, he could never pull off those big scores, the ones that involved a lot of talking, a complicated story about a broke-down car or a bus, the one where you took the person's name and swore to Jesus that you would repay them soon. No, all he had was fifteen dollars and some change, and the only thing that was good for was getting stolen.

Maybe his mother would actually take him in for the night. She'd do it for sure if he offered her the fifteen dollars, or even ten, but a mother should stand her boy to a bed for free. Plus, he hated Murray, Jamaican motherf.u.c.ker always talking about the value of hard work. Home was almost as bad as the missions, especially if Antone, the four-year-old, was still peeing the bed.

Dub's flop, though. That would work. Cold, but free. Lloyd would buy a sub and a Mountain Dew.

He stopped at Lucy's and ended up getting a chicken box, which he wolfed down on the steps of an abandoned house a block away. He had meant to take it to Dub's, share a little, but it smelled so good and warm, and it was heat that Lloyd craved as much as anything. He was down to the bones of the chicken, the Styrofoam box balanced on his knees, when he felt a vicious clap across the side of his head that knocked him to the street, the remains of his meal scattering.

"What the fu-"

The two boys who had jumped him worked silently and quickly, turning out his pockets and taking his change. They must have followed him from Lucy's. It was business to them. They had seen him with cash and they wanted it, so they took it. Lloyd had no allegiances, no real backup. He was a free agent, and a free agent was prey. It made him angry, but it was like a mouse getting angry at a cat. Way of the world, outside his control.

Luckily, he had stashed the unicorn box in an inside pocket, deep inside the folds of his jacket where they couldn't feel it. And at least he had finished his meal before they jumped him.

Knees and ego bruised, he collected himself with as much dignity as possible and limped toward Dub's house of the month. It was boarded up, like most of the houses in the block, but Lloyd knew how to swing open the plywood on the door and crawl over the threshold. Cold, but not as cold as outside, and Dub had collected a good pile of blankets from the Martin Luther King Day giveaway at one of the soup kitchens.

"Hey," Dub greeted him. He was reading a book by flashlight. Boy was a fool for schoolwork. "There's a spot over there."

"You wanna work tomorrow? I'm bust."

"I could do it after school, if you wanna."

"Midday's better. More places. We gonna have to go work some strange territory, we wait until after school."

"Got a test. And you know I can't cut, or they gonna send a note home and find out I got no home to send it to."

"Don't know why you're still f.u.c.kin' with that school s.h.i.t."

Dub shrugged, pretending he didn't know either. But Dub was smart. The teachers were always marveling at his brain, and they didn't know the half of it. No one over at the school knew that his mother was in the wind, or that he hunkered down in vacant rowhouses with his brother and sister, Terrell and Tourmaline. If Dub stopped coming, the whole Lake Clifton faculty would probably take to the streets searching for him. And if he ever got busted for one of their "enterprises," as Lloyd liked to think of the cons they pulled, those teachers would go to court, ask the judge to forgive and forget. Dub, not Lloyd. No one at the lake remembered who Lloyd was.

But Dub never got caught at anything. That's how smart he was.

Lloyd picked his way among the others that Dub took in, preferring a spot by the wall, just one less person next to him. Once situated on his blanket, he took out the unicorn box, but he didn't open it or propose smoking what he had brought. Dub was like a churchwoman when it came to drugs, didn't want them anywhere near his brother and sister. Was it truly less than twenty-four hours ago that Lloyd had first seen this box, slipped it into his pocket, his head full of plans? He was going to sell the laptop and the camera, buy his mother some flowers or a pair of gold earrings, show up all flush, say he had a job.

But there would have been questions, he admitted to himself now, too many questions, and Murray would have broken him down, accused him of lying, which Lloyd would have denied with outraged innocence, because by then he would totally believe his own bulls.h.i.t. It wouldn't have been at all like he imagined.

Seemed like nothing ever was. The thing he had done last fall-but he hadn't known. It was just a favor. He'd bet Le'andro didn't know what it was all about either.

It was almost ten o'clock, and even the cleaning crew had cleared out of the U.S. attorney's offices, but Gabe Dalesio was still at his desk, looking at office reports. Page after page after page of the most mundane stuff. The target discussed women and television shows, the Ravens, the relative merits of local sub shops. But he never alluded to drugs or crime, not unless he was using some elaborate code that they had failed to discern. Perhaps the sandwich orders could be translated into drug transactions. For example, "with hots" might be-But no, it just wouldn't hang together. There was no doubt the guy was a dealer, given that it had gotten to a t.i.tle III. But he was cautious and disciplined-although not so disciplined that he eschewed landlines.

It hadn't been Gabe's bright idea to go after this particular dealer. But he had inherited the case, so he had to make it work. Some previous AUSA had been shrewd, shedding this loser. Who had initiated it? Gabe flipped back through the file. Gregory Youssef. Of course. No wonder the guy had lobbied to get into the ant.i.terrorism unit, with these kinds of dog cases dragging him down. No one was going to make a name for himself with this s.h.i.t.

Gabe's thoughts returned, as they had almost obsessively over the last twenty-four hours, to yesterday's conversation with Collins, out on the smoking pad. Do you spend a lot of time imagining what it's like to get your d.i.c.k sucked by another guy? A day later, Gabe still wasn't sure what the snappy comeback should have been. He almost felt obligated to get one of those fat secretaries to lie down on his desk, timing it so Collins would be pa.s.sing by his just-ajar door, know that he was verifiably straight.

He walked over to his window, which afforded a slice of a view, if you could call it that-office buildings, an old Holiday Inn with a revolving restaurant on top, that strange Bromo-Seltzer Tower glowing blue. He should have held out for a real city, Boston or Chicago. The guy who hired him had done a total sell job, claiming that Baltimore was the best office for those who were aiming up, up, up. Close to D.C., easy to stand out, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and that guy was now hiding out in some high-priced law firm, trying to sock away enough money to retire in style.

Traffic was light-nothing happened in Baltimore at night-but there was a steady stream of brake lights in the street below. He thought again about the lines at the tollbooths. No one would wait in those f.u.c.king lines who didn't have to, regardless of the circ.u.mstances. It would be automatic to head toward the flashing yellow light, to glide through as you had dozens of times before. Youssef had used his E-ZPa.s.s coming into the city, up I-95. Why would he have been so patient going out?

Because he wasn't at the wheel of his own car even then. Because the person who was driving didn't know that the car was equipped with E-ZPa.s.s, and Youssef didn't tell him. Why? Because he didn't see any reason to expedite his own kidnapping. And if he was kidnapped, then it was a federal crime, and Gabe's office had every reason to stick its beak in.

The idea delighted him so much that he brought up his hands and smacked them against the gla.s.s, in essence high-fiving himself. And if Youssef wasn't driving...well, then what? How did that jibe with what everyone thought they knew? If Youssef's piece of trade had already freaked out, where was Youssef? Dead already-but no, he'd clearly been killed where he was found. There had been no blood evidence in the car. Still, he could have been in the trunk, or hog-tied in the backseat, although that might have caught the eye of even the most brain-dead toll taker. But if he had been in the car, alive and sentient, he could have jumped out when the car slowed for the toll, run to the little office maintained by the transportation police.

"Steady, now," Gabe addressed his reflection in the window. "Stay cool." He wouldn't make the same mistake twice, running to someone to get affirmation for his latest brainstorm. He would hold this insight close, continue to mull.

He would make his name on the Youssef case, not on Youssef's hand-me-downs and leftovers.

WEDNESDAY.