Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“But you could challenge it. Upend it.”

Lloyd continued to shake his head, uninterested.

“What if knowing how to swim could save your life?”

“How that gonna happen? Flood gonna come down Monument Street one day?”

Even here, more than a hundred miles from East Baltimore, Lloyd still couldn’t imagine a life beyond a small nexus of streets.

“You’re not on Monument Street now. You’re sitting a couple hundred yards from an ocean. And it was only a few months ago that an entire ocean rose up and killed almost two hundred thousand people.”

“I don’t remember nothin’ about how the people died because they didn’t know how to swim.”

Crow laughed. “You’ve got me there. There are some situations you can’t prepare for.”

Lloyd nodded wearily, as if Crow had just realized something that Lloyd had been born knowing.

“When we get to go back?”

“You tell me. We can go back anytime you agree to talk to the police.”

“Uh-huh. That’s gonna get me killed.”

“And going back without talking to the police might get you killed, too. So what’s it going to be?”

“I’m so bored.” He tilted his head back against the lip of the Jacuzzi, stared at the ceiling.

“So you want to go back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If I could just go to a club or something, get out for a night.”

“No clubs around here, Lloyd. And we can’t go back to Baltimore just to go clubbing. We could go to the movies, though.”

“Seen all that shit at the Sun ’n’ Surf.”

“Maybe we could find some decent paperbacks at the bookstore up in Bethany Beach.”

Lloyd rolled his eyes. “Man, we listen to books all day. Do we have to read ’em at night, too?”

“Ed said he might finish blowing out the bumper-car machines with the air hose today.”

“He saves all the good jobs for himself,” Lloyd grumbled. “He gets to stay inside, out of the wind, tinker with shit, while we just paint and scrape, scrape and paint.”

“You’re missing the bigger picture, Lloyd. Once the bumper cars are up and running, Ed will need to do some test drives.”

“Now, that,” Lloyd said, “is something I could do.”

Given Lloyd’s experience behind the wheel of the Volvo, Crow somehow doubted that. Then again-no stick shifts on bumper cars. Maybe Lloyd would do better.

“Your finances look pretty shaky,” Gabe Dalesio informed Tess an hour later. She was in an office in the federal courthouse, not an official interrogation room, but that didn’t comfort her.

“It’s been a thin few months, but things are turning around. I started an excellent job today-although you guys pretty much ruined it for me. And the Beacon-Light owes me quite a bit of money.”

“They paid for you to turn over that source? I didn’t think legitimate newspapers played that way.”

“I did a seminar on investigative techniques. The two things aren’t related.” Not directly .

“You were asked to teach their reporters how to report? You think they would have picked someone more successful.”

Tess supposed that Gabe thought this would hurt her feelings. She simply looked away, not even bothering to shrug.

“It’s been established,” Tyner said, “that my client doesn’t have a lot of cash in her accounts. Is that a federal crime now? Is federal enforcement going to be part of the overhaul of Social Security, with citizens being rounded up if they’re not putting away enough for retirement?”

“It’s just I don’t get why she’s carrying her boyfriend and all. Why doesn’t he pitch in?”

“He does what he can. The house is in my name, so I pay the mortgage, and that’s how I want it. But we split everything else.”

“That’s big of him, going dutch when he’s sitting on almost a hundred fifty thousand in his checking account.”

Tess didn’t have to fake her laugh at the bluff. “Don’t be ridiculous. Crow doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Jenkins didn’t literally elbow the young prosecutor aside, but he did square his shoulders back, signaling that the interview was now his. “According to bank records, he deposited that amount in his account on Tuesday, right before his…um, road trip. That was what you told us, wasn’t it? That he went out of town for business?”

Again she had to tell the truth without telling too much. “He’s out of town, and I don’t know where he is.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No.” Listened to his voice mail less than an hour ago, but not spoken to him.

“Heard from him?”

“He left a message, said he was safe.”

“Safe?” Shit. “Unusual choice of words, don’t you think? Why wouldn’t he be safe?”

“It’s what he said. I didn’t think about it.”

“Safe,” Jenkins repeated. “Safe. Is it dangerous, what he does?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Of course, he’s got five thousand in cash on him, so maybe that’s why he’s worried. See, the deposit was for a hundred and fifty K, less five thousand.”

Five thousand? Five thousand dollars? Crow didn’t have enough money to fix the muffler on his Volvo.

“You and your boyfriend ever use illegal drugs?”

Tess glanced at Tyner. “She doesn’t have to answer that question. Self-incrimination.”

“Okay, your boyfriend ever use illegal drugs?”

Tess sat, stony-faced.

“Your boyfriend dealing in illegal drugs? Because I have to tell you, that’s the only thing that makes sense. The cash, the road trip. I bet he deals out of your daddy’s bar. Lord knows that business needs all the help it can get, too.”

“He would never do that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I know him.”

“Yet you didn’t know he had all this money.”

“I never said that.”

“Did you? Did you know?”

Again there was the not-lying problem. The federal rules seemed so unsporting. “His parents are very well-to-do.”

“I guess we’ll have to put them on our list.”

“List?” She hated the way her voice squeaked, making the word two syllables.

“Yeah. We’ve already started checking into your finances, your father’s. I mean, when there’s a drug dealer in the family, who knows how far it goes?”

“You keep saying that as if you’ve established the fact.” Tyner spoke, as Tess was having trouble with complete sentences. “I know the young man. He is not a drug dealer.”

“We think he is.”

“Based on?”

“Information that we’ve gathered.”

Tess’s mind felt as if it might split in two. One part was stuck on this stupid accusation, trying to shoo it away, but wondering maybe, what if, did he…? The other part was trying to be heard over these shrill fears, signaling to her urgently. You can’t lie to them, but / You can’t lie to them, but / You can’t lie to them, but…

They can lie to you.

“It’s illegal for me to tell you anything that I know to be untrue, right?”

“Yes,” Jenkins said, leaning forward on the table, hands clasped as if in prayer. So friendly, so kind, so inviting.

“Then why is it legal for you to lie?”

Jenkins’s mask of collegiality slipped then. Just for a moment, but Tess saw the angry man behind the warm and fuzzy façade. “We haven’t said anything that’s demonstrably untrue,” he said.

“But you can, right? You can say anything you want to get me to talk, but if I say the least little thing wrong, you’ll pounce on me. It hardly seems fair. If you’ve got proof my boyfriend is a drug dealer, then show me. Get a warrant to search my house.” She remembered belatedly the phone buried beneath her dirty underwear, as well as the minuscule amount of marijuana concealed in her unicorn box, and regretted the offer, but there was no turning back. She was on a roll. “Show one iota of evidence that he’s done anything but turn up with a lot of money in his checking account. If he deposited it in one lump sum, the bank has to report it, right? Hardly seems like the work of a criminal mastermind trying to launder money. And where did the funds come from anyway?”