Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

Holy Redeemer’s director didn’t bother masking her hostility to Tess and her mission. “Our kitchen is a haven,” said Charlotte Curtis, a short, compact black woman with graying braids. “I don’t want any of our guests to feel as if we’ve betrayed them. It’s part of the reason I don’t take federal or state money. I don’t want anyone thinking they have a right to my records.”

“I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” Tess said. “Sort of the opposite. I’ve been trying to help a kid named Lloyd Jupiter.”

It felt strange to say his name, given how fiercely she had concentrated on not saying it for the past week. But this woman was so protective of her clients that Tess couldn’t imagine her cooperating with the authorities.

“I know Lloyd,” Charlotte Curtis said, her voice ever so cautious. “He’s a sweet kid, underneath it all.”

“And is there another kid he hangs with, round, a little heavyset, but very quick and light on his feet?” Tess still remembered how speedily and casually the boy had moved after piercing Whitney’s tire.

“Dub.”

“Dub?” Tess was thrown by the name’s redneck vibe.

“Short for Dubnium, an element. His mother liked chemistry when she was in high school.” Charlotte Curtis sighed. “Unfortunately, his mother likes chemicals, too. She’s in the wind. But Dub is some kind of genius. Seriously. He’s not only doing well in school, he’s managing to evade the Department of Social Services, which is determined to put him and his siblings in foster care and collect his mother’s public assistance before she can get to it. No one can find Dub if he doesn’t want to be found.”

The warning registered only as a challenge to Tess. “No one official ,” she countered. “But you can, can’t you? I bet you know where he is.”

“If I knew where he lived, I’d be obligated to do something about it, wouldn’t I?”

“Would you? Do you believe that Dub would be better off in DSS custody?”

Tess felt Charlotte Curtis taking her measure, putting her on some metaphysical scale that weighed and evaluated every bit of her-brain, heart, soul. The woman said at last, “I can’t swear to where he is. He moves a lot. Last I heard, they had a place over on Collington. Look for a red tag on the lower portion of the plywood that covers the door.”

“Tag?”

“Graffiti mark. Dub has an open-door policy for other kids who need a place to stay, Lloyd among them. But he doesn’t give out the address, just the block, because he and his mother are always tussling over the benefits. Dub gets the card, she reports it stolen, he changes the PIN code somehow, has the replacement card sent to him care of…Well, let’s just say he has a regular address he can use. High school is easy for Dub after five years of trying to outthink his mother.”

Tess got to the rowhouse on Collington before school was out, giving her time to explore it. The house was boarded up, with No Trespassing signs stapled to the wooden surfaces, but there was a red squiggle in the lower-right-hand corner, and the plywood over the door swung open easily.

Her stomach lurched a little at the conditions inside-pallets on the floor, no running water, dim even in the afternoon because of the boarded-over windows. Even as a flophouse, it was far from adequate. Charlotte had confided in Tess that the church allowed Dub and his siblings to use their bathroom in the mornings, and the children then relied on the facilities in the branch library the rest of the time. In fact, that was where they spent each afternoon throughout the cold-weather months. Would they stay outside, now that dusk came later and the air was almost warm? Tess waited in her car, certain she would recognize him by his walk.

Not long after five, Tess saw a trio coming down the block, a heavyset teenager and two younger children. Yes, that was the silhouette she remembered, the same light-footed Jackie Gleason grace. She waited until they slipped into the house, then followed about five minutes later.

“Shit,” Dub said.

“I’m not DSS,” Tess assured him. “Just a friend of Lloyd Jupiter’s. He’s in trouble.”

“Don’t know any Lloyd.”

“So it’s just a coincidence that you puncture tires and Lloyd comes along five minutes later, ready to change them?”

Dub didn’t make the mistake of speaking when surprised.

“I saw you, Dub. Week before last. You and Lloyd pulled the scam over on Mount Street. Old Mercedes station wagon. Only Lloyd didn’t show up for a while, did he? And when he did, I bet he had a story about how he didn’t make any money, but he had bags of cookies, maybe some leftover carryout. Am I right?”

“Them cookies were good,” the little girl said wistfully. She looked about eight, and she wore her hair in a timeless style-three poufy plaits, sectioned off as precisely as city blocks, fastened with plastic barrettes at the ends. Tess marveled at the care that had been taken with the little girl’s hair. The boy, slightly taller, was spick-and-span as well, although his trousers were a tad too short. She hoped kids no longer got teased for wearing high-waters.

“I haven’t seen Lloyd for a while,” Dub said. “I don’t know where he is.”

“That makes two of us. But did he come to you after Le’andro Watkins was killed? Did he tell you he feared for his life?”

Dub felt in the pocket of his jacket and took out three limp bills, dollars that looked as if they had been dug out of a trash can or a gutter, and perhaps they had. “Go down to the corner store, buy yourselves a treat,” he instructed the younger ones. His voice was gentle, yet the tone defied them to argue back. “Whatever you want.”

The boy grabbed the bills and bolted, the girl at his heels. “You’ve got to share,” she said. “Dub, tell him he’s got to go halves.”

“Be nice, Terrell,” he said. “You know you have to look after Tourmaline when I’m not around.” He waited until the plywood door swung back into place before he spoke to Tess again. “They don’t need to know everything I do. Besides, I stay away from that side of things. Lloyd and me, we run a few low-risk games, when there’s time and opportunity.”

“Like a snow day,” Tess said, remembering that school had been canceled the day that Crow and Lloyd first met. “But on Wednesday-”

“That day with the Mercedes? Staff-development day at the school, so they let us out two hours early. But I always told Lloyd that I would draw the line at anything to do with Bennie Tep.”

“Bennie Tep?”

“He’s the drug dealer that Le’andro worked for. Lloyd, too, for a while, but Bennie got no use for Lloyd. Says he lacks focus, can’t be trusted to do even small things right. But Le’andro liked Lloyd, if only because Lloyd was fool enough to think that Le’andro was someone worth looking up to. He let him hang around, threw him some little things he didn’t want to do.”

“Things like using an ATM card in a very precise way, at a very precise time?”

Dub didn’t answer, so Tess continued. “That’s practically public record at this point. Lloyd’s admitted as much to me. It was in the newspaper a week ago Sunday, only without Lloyd’s name attached. Which is probably the reason that Le’andro was killed-because Lloyd pretended he was the only one in on the scam.”

“Yeah, okay. Back last fall, Lloyd bragged on how they put one over on this guy big-time-that he tried to double-cross Lloyd, but Lloyd triple-crossed him.”

“They? You mean Le’andro and Lloyd fooled this guy Bennie?”

“No, not Bennie. Lloyd wouldn’t never have fucked with Bennie. This guy, you know, he wasn’t gonna to be around ongoing. I think he was from out of town. So Lloyd thought he could put a few extra things on the card. What was the guy gonna do? And, sure enough, we-he-didn’t catch no flak over it. No one ever came around, asked what was up, told him he had done wrong. If anything, Lloyd wished he’d held that card a little longer, charged a little more.”