Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“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.

Whitney glided to the curb in her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, an older model that, in the WASP fashion, had not been particularly well maintained. The once-burgundy exterior had faded to the color of a scab, and the window glass was clouded with age.

Still, the car looked like a rich woman’s ride, especially after its deluxe treatment at Wash Works just that morning. A burst of opera escaped when Whitney opened the door, so loud that Whitney must have had the radio set at eardrum-bursting levels. She removed the key from the ignition, took a second to adjust the cashmere scarf draped around the shoulders of her mother’s old mink, and cut across Mount Street without looking in either direction, clearly expecting traffic to stop for her. It did. In her hands-encased in leather driving gloves, naturally-she carried an open cardboard box filled with bags of Otterbein Cookies, purchased so recently that one could almost smell them. She could not have been more obnoxiously conspicuous, her presence all but screaming, Look at me! Rob me! Carjack me!

Excellent, Tess thought from her hiding place in the alley. Whitney was like a piece of cheese in a cartoon, a yellow triangle so toothsome that the mouse in this game of cat and mouse would never notice the figurative box poised overhead, ready to slam down when the stick was removed.

Granted, it was their fifth stop this afternoon, and the plan had yielded no results, although several local soup kitchens had been happy to receive the red-and-white bags of chocolate chip and lemon sugar cookies from this glamorous and heretofore-unknown benefactor. And most of the providers were familiar with Lloyd, Whitney reported back, although they just smiled and shook their heads ruefully when asked where he might be found. Tess and Whitney were running out of stops and cookies, and while Whitney had drawn plenty of stunned looks, Lloyd had yet to put in an appearance.

Still, Tess was certain that the kid’s ruse wasn’t a onetime gig. In fact, once she had thought it through, she found his scheme rather brilliant. Stake out a street near one of the local soup kitchens, pick out a car that clearly doesn’t belong to the neighborhood. In the case of her Lexus, the parking sticker for the Downtown Athletic Club had marked it as an outsider’s vehicle. Whitney’s Suburban, while clearly a rich person’s car-only the wealthy could afford to fill the bottomless gas tank-wouldn’t register as rich in Southwest Baltimore. But her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, with its I CORGIS bumper sticker, all but screamed its Greenspring Valley pedigree.

Crouched behind a ripe, overflowing trash can, Tess kept an eye on the street. A short kid, round of face and body, ambled toward Whitney’s car and, with a quick look around, bent over and jabbed something in the tire. Damn. But she had warned Whitney that it was likely the tire would be slashed, not just flattened. “Mother has a full spare” was Whitney’s airy response.

The more troubling fact was that this squat kid clearly wasn’t Lloyd. It would be a hollow victory, nabbing the wrong culprit. Maybe the tire scam was to inner-city neighborhoods what the squeegee market used to be.

The fat kid, who had the wonderful ability to move swiftly without appearing to, sauntered away. Just as Tess was debating whether she should chase after him, she saw Lloyd coming down the block, tire tool in hand, positioning himself. Another kid did it. I didn’t do shit to your tire. Wasn’t that what Crow said Lloyd had insisted, over and over, with winning sincerity? It had been a technical truth, then. One boy slashed it, another offered to fix it.

Whitney left the soup kitchen, once again making herself as ostentatious as possible-tossing her blond hair, shooting her cuffs, revealing her watch and gold bangle bracelet, also borrowed from her mother. Playing her part brilliantly, she headed back to the car as if it never occurred to her that anything could be amiss, opening the driver’s door. It was then that Lloyd materialized at her elbow.

Tess couldn’t hear their initial exchange, although it did strike her that Whitney was overplaying the damsel in distress a bit, flailing her arms and even chewing on a gloved knuckle at one point. Finally Whitney popped the trunk and then, as she and Tess had rehearsed, began filling Lloyd’s arms with the remaining boxes of cookies, ostensibly to get to the spare.

“The tire’s just here, under this compartment,” she was braying when Tess crept up behind Lloyd.

“Hey, Lloyd,” Tess said.

They had anticipated that his instinct would be to hurl his armful of cookies and make a run for it. But Tess had also counted on a split-second delay, a moment in which Lloyd would hesitate-and be lost. Even as he tried to throw the cookies at Tess, Whitney stepped forward and pushed him into the open luggage compartment, then slammed the door shut and locked it with the button on her key ring. The Mercedes may have been more than a decade old, but the era of child-safety locks had already been in full swing then. The old station wagon also had a mesh screen separating the luggage compartment from the rest of the car, an option added for Mrs. Talbot’s beloved but lively corgis. Lloyd was trapped. He banged on the windows with his fists, cursing them, but there was nowhere he could go.

Tess kept watch over him, even as Whitney ran around the corner to the Lexus, fetched her spare from Tess’s trunk, and proceeded to change her own tire, a task made slightly more difficult by Lloyd’s heaving body, which rocked the Mercedes a little.

“What now?” Whitney asked, eyes gleaming.

“I don’t know.” Tess raised her voice so Lloyd might hear her over his pummeling fists. “What now, Lloyd? Cops? Division of Juvenile Services? Your call.”

“Fuck you, bitches!” he yelled back. “You can’t make me do shit! You got nothing on me! I didn’t do anything!”

“I saw it, Lloyd. I know you’re working with that other kid. All I have to do is call 911 on my cell, and the cops will be here in a few minutes. Or maybe I’ll go chase your friend, who’s almost certainly hiding around the corner, let the two of you decide who wants to take responsibility.”

The mention of his accomplice seemed to increase Lloyd’s rage and panic. “FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKIN’ WHITEASS BITCH! I will cut you if I get out of here, I will fuck you up, I will-”

“Nice talk. Look, we’ve got you on auto theft, hit-and-run-enough charges to put you back in Hickey for several months, if not central booking at city jail, where people are staying up to forty-eight hours these days before they even see a judge. But we’re reasonable people. You can make a deal.”

“I DON’T TALK TO COPS!”

“You don’t have to talk to anyone but me. For now.”

“Where?” Whitney asked, ever practical. “Your house?”

“Yours. I’ll drive your mother’s car back to her while you take mine.” She thought she should be behind the wheel of the Mercedes if Lloyd did anything unpredictable. “Plus, your house is so remote that he can’t run away that easily. Even if he gets away from us, he won’t get far.”

Once at Whitney’s house, Lloyd came out of the luggage compartment feetfirst, aiming straight for Tess’s midsection. Again, she had expected nothing less and needed nothing more than a simple sidestep to avoid the blow. Still, without Whitney to help her, she would never have been able to subdue the young man. Thin as he was, he had a feral strength, twisting and turning in their grasp, cursing them all the while. The two women ended up straddling him, so his face was scraping the gravel in the driveway.