Laura Lippman: No Good Deeds

“How can a newspaper that’s cutting staff afford to pay you so well?”

“It’s a classic example of how corporate accounting works. On the local level, there’s not enough money to hire reporters. But I’m being paid out of the national office in Dallas, and they’re awash in money. My fee might seem outrageous to us, but it pales when compared to the two million in consulting fees they bestowed on the departing CEO.”

And when Tess had taken the job, she had every intention of phoning it in, just freestyling her way through the symposium, and who cared if it was all bullshit and blather? As it turned out, Tess cared. The work ethic passed down by both parents kicked in as surely as the recessive gene that had made her eyes hazel. In the end she would rather grumble about being underpaid than endure the shame of underperforming. Besides, Feeney had gone to bat for her. She wouldn’t want a lackluster presentation to taint her old friend.

Crow, still in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt as Sunday crested noon, pointed a bare toe at the stack nearest him, topped by the photograph of the handsome dark-eyed man that Tess’s eyes kept returning to, almost in spite of herself.

“What are you going to tell them about the Youssef case? It’s hard to see how you can think of an angle that hasn’t already occurred to the newspaper. Much less the Justice Department, the FBI, the Howard County police…”

“Oh, that one’s about reading between the lines. The investigation-and the story-has stalled for reasons that no one wants to discuss in public. I’m going to connect the dots.”

“Can you prove your theory?”

“No, but that’s the beauty of the project. I don’t have to prove anything. I just have to have plausible explanations.”

“Homicide as intellectual exercise. Seems like…” Crow bent over his puzzle, filled in a line. “Bad karma. Eight letters. Yes, exactly. It fits. Done.”

“It fits your puzzle. Gregory Youssef created his own karma.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef had disappeared on the eve of Thanksgiving and was found dead late on the day the media insisted on calling Black Friday. The first twenty-four hours had promised a sensational story with national implications-a federal prosecutor, one assigned to antiterrorist cases, kidnapped and killed. Youssef had been sitting down to dinner when he was paged to the office-or so he told his wife. No record of that page was ever found. He returned downtown. Sixteen hours later his body was discovered on the Howard County side of the Patapsco River, not far from I-95. Early speculation centered on the terrorism cases he had just started working and the tough sentences he had won on a handful of drug cases. The U.S. attorney vowed that such a crime against a federal officer of the court would not go unpunished. For the entirety of Thanksgiving, it had seemed there were only two stories in the world, as reporters alternated their live feed from the yellow police lines at the murder site to the lines of the hungry at area soup kitchens. Death and hunger, hunger and death.

But the Youssef story receded from the headlines before most Maryland families had finished their turkey leftovers. The feds, who usually bigfooted such cases, pulled back with amazing and uncharacteristic grace, all but insisting that Howard County detectives take the primary role. The U.S. attorney stopped appearing hourly in front of local television cameras and, coincidentally or no, resigned at the end of the year. Suddenly everyone seemed content to shrug and deem it a genuine mystery, despite some precise evidence about Youssef’s final hours-an ATM withdrawal in East Baltimore, the discovery of Youssef’s car just off one of the lower exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Then there was the very nature of Youssef’s death-dozens and dozens of stab wounds, made with a small knife that was never found. It was when Tess learned of this detail that she decided that Youssef’s murder had been intensely personal. Possibly a crime of revenge, definitely one of rage. The ATM withdrawal? That was in an area known for prostitution, including male prostitution as practiced by out-of-town boys who considered themselves straight even as they took other men’s money for sex. The information that Youssef was a devout Christian with a pregnant wife had only confirmed Tess’s suspicion that this was a man with a secret life, one that his former colleagues were intent on masking.

But no one wanted to dwell on such details when the victim was such a well-intentioned striver, the son of Egyptian immigrants, a man who had dedicated his professional life to the justice system because he was horrified to share a surname with the first man who attacked the World Trade Center. What heartless soul would make his widow confront her husband’s conflicted nature in the daily newspaper? Gregory Youssef was like a bad smell in a small room: People stared at the ceiling, waiting for the rude fact of his death to dissipate.

Yet the longer it lingered, the worse it looked for law-enforcement officials, who were supposed to be able to solve the homicide of one of their own. Even if the newspaper hadn’t told her to prepare a dossier on this case, Tess would have been drawn to it. The Youssef murder was juicy, irresistible.

“Thing is, the newspaper has nothing to gain by pursuing the story,” Tess told Crow now. “If my theory is right, it will just piss everyone off. But until an arrest is made, there will be rumors and conspiracy theories that are even worse. The U.S. attorney set the tone for the coverage. The moment the body was discovered, he should have been using codes to slow the reporters down. Instead he revved them up, let the story run wild over the weekend, then tried to back away from it.”

“Codes?”

“If he had considered how…well, personal the murder looked, he might have managed to indicate that to reporters, off the record. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It’s done all the time. Or was, back in my day.” Tess had worked as a reporter for only a few years and accepted long ago that she was more temperamentally suited to life as a private investigator. But she still had some nostalgia for her newshound phase.

“So why isn’t the prosecutor doing that now?”

“You can’t put the news genie back in the bottle. Now everyone is left hanging-the poor saps who got stuck with the case, the widow. It was kind of unconscionable, if you ask me. But if an arrest is made, this stuff is going to come out, and the reporters need to anticipate it. Bet you anything it will be some young country guy, one of those ‘straight’ teenagers who comes down here and turns tricks but doesn’t like it much. Or someone like that weirdo from Anne Arundel County, who drove to Baltimore just to pick up gay men and try to kill them.”

Crow made a face.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a distasteful topic, even in the abstract. That’s why this gig pays well.”

“Are your other scenarios unsolved homicides as well?”

“Nope. I’ve taken on that perennial favorite: Can it be proven that State Senator Wiley Staunton doesn’t actually live in the district he claims as his home? Hard to prove a negative, but it turns out the Beacon-Light reporters neglected to pull a pretty basic record-the guy’s voting registration. He may represent the Forty-seventh, but he’s been voting in the Forty-first for the last sixteen years. That’s a story in itself. You’ll probably see that on page one of the paper by week’s end. I’ve also got a nice tidbit on the governor-”

“The extramarital affair?” That particular rumor about Maryland ’s governor had hung in the air for months, like a shiny helium balloon bobbing over the heads of children, tantalizingly out of reach, suspiciously unchanging in its proportions and altitude.