Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

Then his stomach sent up a sad, sour rumble, and Lloyd recognized it for the plea it was. Go to Denny’s. Get a meal. Maybe borrow some bus fare, you lucky. Then you can be as got-damn tough as you want to be. Just take this little kindness, for once.

“Yes’m,” he said, meek as a girl.

“You smell,” Shavonda Grace repeated, giggling behind her hand.

“Yeah, well, at least I don’t-” He was going to say something mean about her dress, her hair, her nose, her ears, whatever he could find, and although she was a pretty thing, there was no shortage of material to work with. There was always something you could find to use against a person, tear her down. But she was just a little girl, and her mother-or aunt or whoever-was doing him a kindness. Besides, he remembered the insults flung at him when he was her age, the way they stuck. He wouldn’t do that to her.

“Don’t what?” Shavonda Grace demanded to know.

“Don’t take up too much room, so you can scoot as far from me as you like and hold your nose. I won’t take no offense.”

Shavonda Grace made a great show of pinching her nose shut and fluttering her eyes, but she didn’t slide one inch away. If anything, she seemed to move a little closer.

“February two years ago, you took a loan out for your house,” Gabe said, pushing a photocopy of the mortgage application toward Tess. She didn’t have to see the paper to remember the transaction. She had been almost nauseous after the hour at the title company, stunned by the dollar amounts, the commitment she was making. Thanks to Baltimore ’s real-estate market, she looked brilliant now, but at the time all she could fixate on was the actual cost of a $140,000 loan over thirty years.

“You got me there,” Tess said. “I bought a house.”

“And you made a down payment of twenty percent.”

“Sure. That’s mandatory to avoid private mortgage insurance.”

“Where did you get thirty-five thousand?” Gabe asked.

“I had just closed a case that included a generous reward for information about a long-missing girl.”

“So you made the down payment on your own?”

Were they trying to bring this back to Crow and his mystery money? Tyner looked as mystified as she was. Tess nodded tentatively.

“You didn’t borrow any of the money for the down payment?”

“No.”

“Didn’t take money from your father?”

“My father’s contribution was a gift.”

“Right.” Gabe produced another piece of paper from the file. “And here’s his notarized statement that the money was a gift. Nine thousand nine hundred fifty dollars-just under the limit for taxable gifts under the codes then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And here’s where you swore on the application that no borrowed money was used for the down payment. You remember checking that?”

“I checked a lot of things in the process of buying the house, but sure. As my father’s letter said, it was a gift.”

“But you’ve since made two payments to your father-five thousand dollars year before last, seven thousand last fall.”

Last fall. Tess remembered wistfully how flush she had been.

“I was grateful to my father. He had helped me buy my house. When times were good for me, I wanted to repay the favor.”

“In other words, it was a loan, and you repaid it with interest.”

Tyner ran his fingers through his hair, a sign that he was nervous, but only Tess would know that.

“No,” Tess said. “He gave me a gift. I gave him a gift. It’s like-if my dad gave me a turkey for Christmas and I gave him a ham for Easter.”

“I’m afraid the federal government doesn’t see it that way. Call it turkey, call it ham, but it was a loan, and you lied about it.”

Tess flounced in the hard plastic chair, impatient and out of sorts. They had been trying to scare her with their talk about federal charges, but this was so chickenshit. She thought of the blatantly illegal things she had done as part of her job. Taking confidential documents out of the governor’s trash, for one. And this was the best they could do? Nitpicking over payments from a father to a daughter and back again.

“Fine-” she began, ready to concede the point, but Tyner put a cautionary hand on her arm and interrupted.

“They were gifts,” he said. “It’s our position they were gifts.”

“Well, it’s our position that your client lied on a federal form,” Gabe said. “And we plan to charge her with that.”

Tess rolled her eyes. Jenkins, who had been letting Gabe run the interview, caught her exasperated expression, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The three men were like proud hens sitting on some monstrous egg.

“The penalty for what you’ve done,” Gabe said, “is thirty years in federal prison.”

“Oh, get out ,” Tess said. But even as she spoke, she saw Tyner nodding unhappily.

“And your dad has done the same thing. Lie in this notarized statement.” Jenkins held up the letter for Tess’s edification. “So we can go after him, too. And we will, unless you tell us the name of your source. Give it to us and all this will be forgotten. We’ll cut an immunity deal for you and your dad, and this will never come up again.”

Tess felt dizzy, weak-and almost bizarrely grateful. It was going to end now. This had gone too far. Her dad was already unnerved by their inquiries into his business. This would drive him over the edge. But even as she readied herself to break her promise to Lloyd, her brain clicked along, hearing the false note, the sour chirp of illogic, but not being able to pounce on it.

Tyner could, however.

“You’re saying this is an official plea bargain, something Gail Schulian has approved?”

“Well…” Gabe glanced at Jenkins, lost for just a second. It was a fatal mistake. Tyner’s instinct for weakness and ineptness was as sharp and astute as that of anyone Tess had known. She sometimes felt that Tyner had learned to compensate for his physical limitation, the paralysis caused in a car accident almost fifty years ago, by developing a sixth sense that allowed him to discern the tiniest frailty on a cellular level. If you were going to go up against Tyner, not a single mitochondrion could be having an off day.

“Does Gail know about this?” Tyner pressed.

“Gail?”

“Your boss. Gail Schulian. Has she signed off on making an official plea agreement, in which the government agrees never to prosecute Tess for what we’ve yet to affirm is a violation of this federal statute, in return for naming the confidential source in the Youssef case?”

“We don’t take everything to the boss,” Gabe countered, but his optic muscles seemed to have snapped, so his gaze went everywhere around the room, avoiding Tyner’s. “I have the authority to offer this plea.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Tyner said, in a tone that indicated he had no faith in the young man whatsoever. “But given that your boss is an interim U.S. attorney, I think it’s important we involve her in these discussions from the beginning. It would make me feel more comfortable, especially since her replacement could be named at any time. Also-should Tess tell you what you want to know, are you going to share the information with the Howard County detectives? It is their case, after all. Seems odd, the feds expending so many resources on a case they didn’t even want to investigate. Let’s get everyone in the room-this suspiciously bare-bones, under-decorated room-and do this just once.”

Why was Tyner talking about interior decorating now?

“Gregory Youssef was my colleague,” Gabe said. “Of course I care what happened to him.”

“Yes, now that you believe he wasn’t killed by a male prostitute. But when that was the going scenario, this office couldn’t get far away enough from Youssef.”