Laura Lippman: No Good Deeds

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.

“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 encompassed exactly one employee-three if you included the dogs, who accompanied her to the office every day-was riding on this assignment.

“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 Guantánamo 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 buttoned-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 reconstituted 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 nobility, 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.