Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“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 glass 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.

“I have a gun. That’s the best form of self-defense.”

“‘Can I see it?”

“No.” But Lloyd’s question reminded Tess that she needed to lock the Beretta in the safe next to her bed. She didn’t always remember, but with a young guest in the house, she had to be at her most conscientious.

She came back and watched Lloyd clear the table, which had more than its share of suspenseful moments. Her everyday dishes were also her only dishes, a mismatched collection of state commemoratives culled from flea markets and yard sales. They would be impossible to replace, except via eBay, which always struck her as cheating. The quest should be as important as the object when one was a collector. But Tess was trying not to be a person who prized things too highly, so she clenched her jaw and let Lloyd go, reasoning that his agreeable helpfulness was more important than keeping North Dakota in one piece.

After dinner they watched Minority Report on DVD, which Lloyd seemed to like once he got used to the idea that it was supposed to be the future. “Parts of Baltimore look worse ’n that,” he said dismissively of Philip K. Dick’s Washington as imagined by Spielberg and his designers. The movie over, they left him to his own devices, telling him to feel free to use the television or Tess’s laptop. “You can also read anything you like,” Crow said, gesturing to the shelves in Tess’s office.

“You got any comics?” Lloyd asked.

“No, but I’ve got some books about comics,” said Crow, ever game. He brought down Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat , then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. “And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight.”

Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance in Crow’s suggestions, she understood that he loved these books. And whatever Crow loved, he wanted to share. Besides, Lloyd might like Philip K. Dick, although she would have been inclined to start him on Richard Stark or Jim Thompson, something hard-boiled and brutal.

Curled up in bed with her own book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum , Tess finally had a chance to tell Crow what had been bothering her all evening.

“He didn’t recognize Youssef’s face. But the name-the name seems to bother him. He changes the subject whenever it comes up.”

“So?”

“How do you know the name but not the face? Sure, certain beat cops are known on the street. But I’d be surprised if the average street kid could name the Baltimore state’s attorney, much less an assistant U.S. attorney. If you’ve heard of Gregory Youssef, it’s because he was murdered. But Lloyd hadn’t made that connection. He knew that a prosecutor had been murdered, he knew the name Gregory Youssef. But in his mind the two had nothing to do with each other.”

“Hmmmmmm.” Crow was lost in the world of Bernard Cornwell.

“Hey. Hey. I’m just as interesting as the Napoleonic era,” Tess said.

“Prove it.”

In her opinion she proceeded to make her case quite persuasively.

Barry Jenkins was the type of guy who always found a way to turn his weaknesses into strengths. Slow, stocky, and patient, he had learned early to make the choices that rewarded his build and temperament. In high school he crouched behind home plate as a catcher, blocked on the football team, then dated the girls who were impressed by such achievements. Work with what you’ve got, he told the guys he had mentored over the years, and you’ll always get ahead. And for most of his time in the FBI, that advice had proved golden.

The bar at the Days Inn on Security Boulevard also fell squarely into the category of working with what you were given. While the other federal agencies were downtown, the FBI was tucked away in this butt-ugly bit of suburbia near the Social Security complex in Woodlawn. This physical distance from the DEA, ATF, and IRS guys was supposed to emphasize the Bureau’s superiority. At least that had been the rationale once upon a time, and that attitude still prevailed. So let those other guys sip imported beer and cocktails in those desperate-to-be-chic downtown bars. And never mind that most of his coworkers went to an old-fashioned tavern in the heart of old Woodlawn. Barry preferred the bar at the Days Inn, a straight-up, honest place. Back in the day, it had been a family-owned motel with pretensions and a fancy restaurant, Meushaw’s. That is, Barry’s family, which really didn’t have anything to compare it to, had thought it ritzy. His folks had brought him here for supper after his first communion, and Barry had considered himself pretty worldly, ordering the chicken Kiev. In fact, it was at the moment that his fork pierced the breaded crust and butter oozed forth that he had vowed to have a life where he would see Kiev, or whatever it was called now, see the whole wide world. And he had. He could honestly say he had done what he dreamed of doing when he was a kid, and how many people could make that claim?

Sure, the younger agents considered Jenkins washed up, one of those doddering types just marking time until he hit mandatory retirement. But that assessment, like Meushaw’s demotion to the Days Inn bar, was all about appearances, wasn’t it? Jameson’s was Jameson’s no matter where you drank it, or in whose company. Barry was still Barry-shrewd beneath his good-boy exterior, analytical, easygoing with people. It just depended on how you looked at things, and Jenkins was an expert at considering situations from every angle. He could always see the whole where others saw parts, hold the whole playing field in his head. “Court vision,” they called it in basketball, but that was one game Jenkins had never played. No speed, no jump. Again, it was all about knowing what he could do and what he couldn’t, and the latter knowledge mattered just as much, if not more. If Barry were one of the fabled blind men locked up with the elephant, he would feel it from tail to trunk, bottom to top, and when he left the room and removed his blindfold, he would know it was a goddamn elephant.

Mike Collins arrived at 10:00 P.M. sharp, on-the-dot punctual as always, which accounted for his nickname-“Bully,” short for Bulova, or so the official story went. It had proved to be an unfortunate nickname for a while there, but Collins had ridden out that mess like the soldier he was. Big and handsome, he could have stepped off a recruiting poster-if the DEA had recruiting posters. But what made Collins remarkable, in Jenkins’s opinion, was that he actually had all the qualities that people projected onto this kind of masculine attractiveness. Nerves of steel, balls of brass, heart of gold. All those metals.

“I can’t believe you wanted to meet in this shithole,” Collins said after ordering a bottle of Heineken and bringing it to Barry’s table, one of several along the bank of windows that overlooked this unlovely stretch of Security Boulevard. But the table was isolated, and the reflection made it easy to see if anyone was in earshot.