Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“All in good time,” the old one, Jenkins, said, and although he was just playing along, Tess felt the goose-prickly chill that her mother described as someone walking over her grave.

“I don’t talk without my lawyer present.”

“Oh, it’s not that official,” Jenkins said, the epitome of avuncular. “In fact, Gabe and I watched your interview with Howard County, so in a sense we’ve already done the lawyer thing. This is more of a friendly conversation. A social call.”

“Then I can ask you to come back when I feel more like having visitors?”

“Well, no.” He smiled, ever so apologetic.

“Would you please wait here while I go inside and call my lawyer?” She unlocked the door, peeling a “We missed you” sticker from FedEx off the glass. Must be something Crow had ordered. She scrawled her name on the back, reattached it, and closed the door pointedly behind her.

They ignored her, of course, filing in behind her as if she hadn’t asked them to stay outside. Tess would have done the same thing if she had their authority. The dogs inspected the men with interest. Esskay, the attention slut, showed her usual lack of discrimination. Miata, however, reared back when Collins reached out to scratch her behind the ears. Great, her dog was acting like a racist.

“Back up, guys-I mean the dogs. Although, well…” She hustled the dogs into the kitchen, where she dialed Tyner from behind the closed door. No answer at home or office, and he didn’t pick up his cell. Damn his unending honeymoon bliss with Kitty. He was probably feeding her raw oysters at Charleston, or sharing the gingerbread with lemon chiffon sauce at Bicycle. She left messages at all the numbers-his office, his cell, Kitty’s business, Kitty’s cell, their home above the bookstore-but if Tyner and Kitty were having a romantic evening out, voice mail wouldn’t be his first priority upon arriving home.

Desperate, she dialed one last number. “Get here now ,” she hissed, allowing no greeting, offering no explanation. She then returned to the living room, where the three men were inspecting her home décor in such a way that the most innocuous items now seemed sinister, redolent of meaning-the Mission-style furniture, the small legal bookcase filled with Crow’s most precious books, not rare titles per se, but ones he prized highly nonetheless: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Confessions of a Mask, Don Quixote, Tally’s Corner. Determined not to betray her own persona, she turned on a neon sign that Crow had given her for Christmas a few years back, the one that proclaimed HUMAN HAIR in bright red letters.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked, as if she were vapid enough to confuse this with a social call. “Water, beer, wine, crackers, cheese, raisins, nuts-”

Jenkins raised his hand, uninterested in the contents of Tess’s pantry. “That won’t be necessary. We just need to talk to you, unofficial-like.”

“I really don’t want to talk without a lawyer here.”

“We could take you downtown, wait for your lawyer to meet us there. If it’s going to be like that, we might as well go all the way, right?”

His tone was friendly as ever, his manner casual, but Tess didn’t miss the implicit threat in his words. She took a seat at the head of her dining room table, and the men followed her lead. Perhaps she could bluff her way through this, speaking without saying anything.

“We just want to impress upon you how important it is that you tell us now , without further delay, who your source is.”

“And where he is,” put in Collins, the DEA agent. Why DEA? That was still troubling her.

“I can’t answer those questions.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“Okay, to be precise, I won’t answer the first, but I can’t answer the second.”

“You told Howard County police that he left town.”

“He or she. That’s my understanding, yes. I haven’t spoken to the source directly, however. In fact, I haven’t had any contact with the source since I arranged the meeting with the Beacon-Light reporters a week ago.”

“Tell us this,” said the prosecutor, Dalesio, the one who struck Tess as the odd man out. “Was your source a number-one male?”

Tess actually understood the police jargon, although it seemed strange for a federal prosecutor to speak as if he were on police radio.

“A black man,” Jenkins supplied when she didn’t answer right away. “African-American.”

“I’m not going to answer that question.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to provide any identifying information. And I want to point out that I still haven’t assigned a gender to the source. You may use ‘he’ and ‘him’ if you like, but I’m not going to do that.”

Jenkins rested his hands on his belly in the manner of a beloved uncle settling in after a particularly satisfying Thanksgiving meal. “African-American, that’s not exactly a big clue in a city that’s sixty-six percent black-and where ninety percent of the homicide victims are black men.”

Tess raised an eyebrow. She was conscious of what she was doing-by refusing to give the expected answer, she was making them consider the possibility that the source was white, throwing them off the trail. The main thing was not to say anything untrue, no matter how trivial. That required a lot of self-control for Tess, who was used to lying in work situations.

“So if the source isn’t a black man,” Jenkins continued, his voice a calm and easygoing drone, “then we can rule out that he’s the young man who was staying at your home last week.”

Any sense of control she had vanished.

“Collins here canvassed your neighborhood yesterday, asked some questions about you. Your neighbors find you a, uh, colorful personality. Your comings and goings attract more attention than you might realize.”

This was news to Tess, who thought she had successfully disappeared into this leafy, quiet neighborhood, taking on the camouflage of seminormalcy, just another working gal. Oh, sure, there were her dogs, especially Esskay, who was notorious for trying to eat the smaller dogs in Stony Run Park, mistaking them for squirrels and rabbits. And Crow, with his handsome face and exuberant personality, was much beloved by the not-so-desperate housewives who swapped recipes with him at the local coffeehouse. There was the time she had come home to find an intruder in the house and had ended up crawling across the yard on her belly, skirt up to her hips, gun in hand. But even this had seemed all so Anne Tyler idiosyncratic, the kind of gentle lunacy on which North Baltimoreans prided themselves. Certainly she was no more notable than Mr. Parrish, with his nightly drunken coasts.

Mr. Parrish. Fuck. And the police report on the incident. What was that fake name that Crow had given?

“Bob Smith,” the prosecutor read from a photocopy. “Believed to be age sixteen, of 400 Battery Avenue, an address that would put him in the middle of the harbor. Is Bob Smith the correct name for the young man who was staying with you?”

“If it’s the name in the report, then it’s the name my boyfriend gave the police. He’s the one who brought the kid home.”

“Yes, and given that the police decided that fault couldn’t be ascertained in the accident and left it to the insurance companies to untangle, they probably don’t care if the name is correct or not. But we do. Is this the name of the young man who stayed with you, Miss Monaghan? And is this young man the source you’re protecting?”

There’s no time limit, she reminded herself, no penalty for not speaking immediately. Think this through, anticipate where they’re going.