Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“Project Zeus?” Whitney asked when they were alone again, using the code they had agreed on when Tess realized that Whitney also could be pressured to provide Lloyd’s name if anyone guessed her part in this whole affair. Other friends might have used an astronomical reference, but this Roman-to-Greek transposition of Lloyd’s surname was a natural for two former English majors.

“Yeah. Feds.”

“Shit.”

“What was that thing with the photos?”

“I couldn’t be sure who they were. If they weren’t official, they would have balked, right? Besides, it freaks people out when you pull a camera on them. When you call me like that, I know it’s because you’re trying to fuck with someone. I was just doing my part.”

Tess raised her glass to her friend. “You did beautifully.”

“So what do they want? I mean, I know what they want, but why are the feds stepping in? They were content to let Howard County have this investigation when it was a gay pickup gone wrong.”

“I guess there’s glory in it now, avenging a fallen colleague whose death may have something to do with the drug cases he prosecuted. I don’t want to think about it, much less talk about it. Let’s hope this movie you brought over is good for a few laughs.”

Funny Bones was good for quite a few laughs, although not quite in the straightforward way the title had seemed to promise. Things went unexplained-Oliver Reed and those strange eggs-and there was a moment in which everything literally hung in the balance. It was, in fact, one of the few films that Tess had ever seen in which she could not predict the tenor of the ending, could not figure out if she was watching a comedy or a tragedy.

It made for an admirable quality in a movie, she decided, but an unnerving situation in one’s own life.

Gabe didn’t have a photographic memory, although he had a good one. Gabe’s talent was that he knew paper, as if it were a language unto itself, an unmapped country. Gabe was good at paper even when it wasn’t paper, when it was just a facsimile of a document captured in a computer screen. If files and forms were women, Gabe would have been the Casanova of his time. In fact, if Gabe had been content to play to his greatest strength, he would be a forensic accountant, being summoned to testify as an expert witness in corporate scandals.

But Gabe had disliked the idea of life on the sidelines, waiting for things to happen. That wasn’t how he saw himself. So he had chosen the prosecutorial track, hoping that his knack for paper, for details, would pay off.

Finally it had.

“Barry told me that you expect to get a subpoena soon,” said the point guy at the bank, a former fed, just as Jenkins had predicted. “Until then we can’t give you copies. And, technically, you shouldn’t even take notes, so I’ll pat you down for pad and paper.”

He waved his hands in front of Gabe, maintaining three feet of space between them. “Nope, I don’t feel any thing. Anyway, enjoy yourself.”

The files were so straightforward that Gabe didn’t really need to take notes. Tess Monaghan maintained only two accounts at the bank, one personal, one corporate, both small. There were bumps of incoming cash here and there, but in amounts that jibed with the nature of her business.

But not for a while, he noticed. She was living pretty close to the margins these past few months. Interesting, but not necessarily of use. In fact, kind of the opposite. He wanted to find some big, mysterious sum, something that he could say looked like it had come from a drug dealer or an individual otherwise involved in a criminal enterprise. But this was just, well, pathetic. He wondered how she could afford that house up in Roland Park. According to the property-tax records he had checked this morning, she had bought it at a bargain price, $175,000. Even accounting for Baltimore ’s overheated real-estate market and the fact that it was probably a falling-down wreck when she acquired it, that was a suspiciously good deal. City rolls had it assessed at $275,000 for tax purposes, and that was low, based on his quick eyeballing of the place. She had probably made some of the improvements on the sly. Great, he could get the city to fine her for not pulling the proper permits. Yeah, that would scare her. Given her father’s juice as a former liquor-board inspector, she probably had the city types eating out of her hand.

The father-that was another lead. Gabe called up Patrick Monaghan’s records, but the old man didn’t keep the corporate account at this bank, just the personal ones. Wait, here was some overlap-a check from daughter to father, for $7,000, made out last fall after she had a fairly respectable deposit in her business account, which she then transferred to her personal account. Like a lot of self-employed types, she didn’t appear to pay herself a salary per se, just transferred a regular amount to her personal checking every month. Anyway, the father was still worth pursuing. All relatives were good. Even the toughest targets got upset when you started dragging family members into things.

Which brought him to the boyfriend. Gabe pulled out his pad to remind him of the full name-Edward “Crow” Ransome IV. Sounded like some inbred preppie to Gabe, the kind of guy that he had loathed in law school. The type who didn’t study, didn’t sweat making law review because he had a soft place to land at Daddy or Granddaddy’s firm. Barry’s preliminary inquiry had established that Ransome kept a brokerage account, but he had his checking at this bank, too. God bless consolidation. Five years ago they might all have been at different places, but there were fewer and fewer banks these days.

Fuck. He did a double take, counted the zeros again. Oh, this was rich, pun intended. This was fascinating. He should check into this further. No-back up, rethink. He didn’t need to know any more about this, not yet. He just had to be there to see the girlfriend’s face when she was asked how much she knew about her boyfriend’s finances. Gabe had seen how they lived, what they drove, what they owned, and it didn’t correlate with this kind of dough-re-mi.

It was going to be sweet, lobbing this little grenade at that self-satisfied bitch.

The last thing Tess felt like doing on Friday was starting a new job, but there it was on her calendar, indifferent to her red-wine hangover and generally jittery state. It wasn’t even supposed to be her gig; Crow had agreed to do the undercover work on this one, which would have come much more naturally to him. In fact, it was one of Crow’s do-gooding buddies who had hired her. A board member of a local nonprofit had asked Tess to investigate its “public face”-an up-from-welfare success story who had effectively branded the charity with her name and image. Ellen Mars was the charity, the charity was Ellen Mars. She was a beloved figure, an inspirational role model-and the world’s shoddiest bookkeeper, putting the organization at risk for an IRS audit. Incompetent or crook, that was the question bedeviling the board member, who didn’t dare pursue the inquiry openly. He had asked Tess to volunteer for the organization on a part-time basis. It had been her plan to send Crow in her stead-he was the philanthropist, after all, and would arouse far less suspicion. He also had some context for how a charity should be run, given his work recycling leftovers. But Crow was gone and the client was anxious, so Tess got up Friday morning and reported for her afternoon shift at the Ellen Mars West Side Helping Hand.

As soon as she turned off her block, she saw a familiar car idling at the small traffic island on Oakdale, not far from where Mr. Parrish had collided with Lloyd-and Tess’s life. The beige sedan followed her, not even bothering to lag back or disguise its intentions. Mike Collins was at the wheel, Barry Jenkins in the seat beside him. Tess gave them a little wave in the rearview mirror, but they didn’t acknowledge her in any way. That made it creepier somehow. They were following her yet refusing to concede the fact that she existed, that she was another person on the planet. Tess wanted it to be like the cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf punching in and out at the time clock. Just a job, nothing personal. But these guys seemed to feel it was extremely personal. She wondered if they had known Youssef, worked with him. How would she feel if she believed that someone was obstructing the investigation into a colleague’s death?