Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

This was all too true. Not particularly noble on Lloyd’s part, but true. Tess, driven by insatiable curiosity as sure as Kipling’s elephant was, had dragged Lloyd into this, not the other way around.

“But it’s the only way you’ll be safe. Once you talk to the police, they’ll do everything they can to protect you. You can’t get in trouble for giving a dead man’s name.”

“Yeah, right. You know how many witnesses been killed in my neighborhood? Even locked up, you’re not safe. They want you, they get you. Besides, if I say Le’andro, they gonna go to Bennie Tep and he’ll have me killed. Snitchin’ don’t play where I’m from.”

They had come full circle, in the conversation and in the walk. Lloyd was right. Well, not right exactly, but logical in his own way. Outing himself would achieve nothing. Lloyd had already told everything he knew. True, he had omitted a key detail, Le’andro as middleman, but now that Le’andro was dead, Lloyd truly had nothing more to offer. Police would charge him and hold him. Worse, they might release him to streets where he, too, would be hit. Meanwhile Lloyd couldn’t stay with Crow, because even Barney Fife would quickly ascertain the identity of the black teenager who had suddenly taken up residence in Tess Monaghan’s North Side home. He needed to get away, somewhere safe.

Why not take a page out of Tess’s playbook? If Crow and Lloyd disappeared, she could then say in all innocence that she didn’t know where her source was. He’d have to work it out with Pat-no, let Tess explain to her father why Crow was on the lam and couldn’t come to work. On the lam. He couldn’t help finding the idea somewhat romantic. He and Lloyd would take off today, disappearing into the city. He’d need cash to avoid leaving any trail, but cash was never a problem. They would use disposable cell phones, the kind available from every convenience store now, to stay in touch with Tess; he had learned about that scam from watching HBO. No, no, he wouldn’t call at all. If Tess’s phones weren’t already tapped, they would be soon. He’d have to buy pairs of cell phones, send one to Tess in the mail.

“Lloyd, are you sure no one knows that Le’andro handed the card over to you?”

“Absolutely.” His answer was swift, emphatic. Perhaps too much so.

“Lloyd?”

He sighed, put-upon by his own unreliability. “I got a friend.”

“The kid you run the tire scam with?”

“Uh-huh. But he’s good people. You don’t need to be bothering with him.”

“What if he tells someone?”

“He won’t.” The swift conviction was sincere this time.

“How much does he know?”

“He knows Le’andro gave me a chance to make some money last Thanksgiving. And he was with me when I used the card, out at the mall. I bought him something, too. But he don’t know I talked, and I don’t want him to.”

“Lloyd-you were supposed to tell the reporters everything . That was the deal.”

“I told ’em about what I bought myself. The DVD player was for him. He likes movies, and it got a battery pack, so he can charge it up at the library, watch it in the night.”

Crow remembered the pile of DVDs he had found on the floor of the spare bedroom the day after Lloyd’s memorable first visit, the copy of Throne of Blood in the Volvo.

“You steal the Kurosawa movie for him?”

“What? Oh, no, I just thought it looked cool.”

“It is cool. If we had time, I’d let you watch it.”

“Where we going?”

“To hide in plain sight.”

In principle Tess disliked people who used cell phones in restaurants. But she was getting ready to make an exception for herself, rationalizing that she hadn’t spoken to Crow all day, when Tyner arrived for their meeting. His face was stormy with general disapproval-of her cell phone, of the restaurant, of Tess, who had chosen it-and she meekly slid the phone back into her knapsack.

“You can’t keep playing this silly game of hide-and-seek,” he said as soon as he had barked his drink order at the waitress. Tyner wasn’t big on social preliminaries. “You need to decide what you’re going to do when you finally surface.”

“I could take the Fifth.”

“You haven’t broken any laws.”

“Maybe I think I have,” Tess said.

“Your lawyer,” Tyner said, pointing to his chest in case she had forgotten he was here in a professional capacity, not a family one, “is informing you that you haven’t. You can’t invoke self-incrimination if you haven’t in fact done anything incriminating. That’s a kind of perjury, too.”

“I could marry Lloyd and refuse to testify against my husband.”

“Don’t be droll, Tess. Besides, if you married the boy, you’d create a legal trail that would lead police right to him. That’s the one thing you’ve managed to do right so far, through no real fault of your own. The boy’s name isn’t recorded anywhere. If Crow had given Lloyd’s real name to the police the night of the accident, the detectives would eventually have pieced it together. As it is now, they’re probably searching Baltimore for Bob ‘One O’ Smith.”

“I know,” Tess said. “That’s Crow’s karma. He’s also refused to help the insurance companies, who are just as keen to find our little friend.”

“He won’t be able to stonewall them forever, you know. And you won’t be able to evade the cops much longer. They’ll put you in front of the grand jury when it meets next month. You’ll be asked to name the source you brought to Marcy and Feeney. If you refuse to name a person of interest in a homicide case, you could be jailed. In fact, they’ll take great delight in locking up a middle-class white woman.”

“A lot could happen before the grand jury convenes. Lloyd could decide to come forward on his own-”

Tyner, a champion snorter, gave a short, elegant whiff of air. It was the equivalent of a teenage girl’s “as if.”

“Or they could develop leads in the case that make Lloyd irrelevant.”

That earned a shake of the head and an even more contemptuous snort. Tess didn’t take it personally. Tyner was grouchy with everyone but Kitty, his wife of almost six months. (He insisted on calling her his “bride” with a kind of starry-eyed, gooey devotion that Tess found far more alarming that his usual cantankerousness.) But his mood was particularly dark today, a fact that Tess chalked up to her choice of lunchtime rendezvous, the Club 4100. She had picked the old bar in the Brooklyn section of Baltimore for its twin advantages of cheeseburgers and an off-the-beaten-track location. No one ever ended up in the Club 4100 by accident. She also loved the décor, which had been built around Baltimore sports in general and Johnny Unitas in particular. Alas, the restaurant did have a habit of serving red wine chilled, and she hadn’t warned Tyner off the cabernet in time. The icy grape wasn’t improving his mood.

“Outside a grand jury setting, I can’t be compelled to tell the cops anything, right?”

“No.”

“And it’s not illegal to lie to cops in an interview?”

“It depends, but no, it’s not like with the feds-only why would you even think of trying to lie at this point?”

“I could give them a fake name or say I honestly don’t know the kid’s name, that I met him through someone.”

“They’d want to know who made the introduction, then.”

Tess shrugged. It would be ironic if the cops used the same trick on her that Marcy had played on them, asking her if they would be wrong to assume the source was the kid who had stolen her car. Of course, cops didn’t need to play such games. They could jack her up now, apologize later. After all, that’s what Lloyd said had happened in the wake of Youssef’s death. The drug dealers had been arrested and held on whatever pretense the investigators could manufacture, then let go when a different scenario emerged.