Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

“This your ride?” Collins asked when Gabe stopped by his Acura. “Nice.”

He laughed, getting that Collins was still busting his balls, but in a friendly way. “Not particularly.”

“Nicer than a Malibu. Nice enough to get carjacked for.”

“Yeah, right. Not in this neighborhood.”

“I’m dead serious.”

Gabe hiccuped, but only because he had been laughing too much, sucking in air much of the evening. Collins could be pretty funny when he made an effort. He did an imitation of Jenkins that was to die for-the super concerned manner, the fatherly sighs.

Collins’s fist shot out, hitting Gabe so quickly and violently in the midsection that he just crumpled into the street as if his spine had been removed. What the -The last sensations he knew in this life were all metal-the scrape of the keys being dragged from his fingers, the barrel of a gun at the back of his head. He didn’t piss himself, but only because Collins was moving even faster than Gabe’s instincts could. He was going to die, and the only thing he managed to figure out before it happened was that it had absolutely nothing to do with his car. Did I -

Gone.

Tess and Wilma had agreed to meet at the bank when it opened, which meant Tess had to leave Baltimore at 8:00 A.M. and fight rush-hour traffic every inch of the trip. Even without all the frazzled commuters, it would have been a charmless journey. The bank, a branch of a multinational that was relatively new in the state, was on a strip clogged with chain restaurants and stores catering to every part of one’s automobile-fast-lube places, tire joints, brake jobs, windshield glass.

“Why here?” Tess asked Wilma. “It’s quite a haul from where you live and where he worked. It’s not like he could get here on his lunch hour.”

“Probably because it’s one place I’d never come. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before in my life.” Wilma’s face was grayish, as if the suburb of Laurel were a disease she was worried about catching.

The bank manager studied the court order in a way that made Tess fear complications. A chubby Latina packed into a bright yellow suit, the manager had the air of someone who would make things difficult just because it would make her day more interesting. But perhaps she was simply a slow reader, for she handed the paper back to Wilma and led them into the small area the bank kept for safe-deposit boxes.

“ She can’t come in,” the woman said, pointing at Tess. “And I gotta watch.”

“I’m an officer of the court,” said Tess, who had prepared the lie ahead of time, along with a reasonably official-looking ID, created on her computer and then laminated at a twenty-four-hour hardware store last night. She had also talked to Tyner, who’d assured her that there was no law requiring a bank employee to observe, but some insisted on it, if only out of sheer nosiness. “The order specifies that this has to be done under supervision because the estate is still in probate. She’s allowed to inventory the contents but not to remove them.”

The woman looked skeptical-as well she should, because nothing Tess had said was remotely true-but fate decided to throw Tess a bone. Another bank employee arrived at that moment with a pink, orange, and white Dunkin’ Donuts box. Saved by the cruller. Anxious to make her selection, the woman waved them in.

Wilma’s hands shook as she fitted her key into the lock. She then took the box, a medium-size one, to the semiprivate area set aside. She lifted the lid and revealed a black-and-white photocopy of a bearded man in a straw hat, a man who looked strangely familiar to Tess. There was a layer of pink tissue paper beneath it. When Tess pushed it aside, the overwhelming impression was a landscape of green, a veritable Emerald City in a box.

“I thought you were the earner and Greg was the one who was bound for glory,” she said.

Wilma was silent for a moment. “That-that- asshole ,” she said at last. Tess regularly heard-and said-far worse words, but it was a shock to see the prim and self-righteous Wilma let loose this way. “If you knew how tight things were for us at times-college loans, the baby, the mortgage on the new house. Although now I understand where he got some of the cash to buy the new house. He said that he had borrowed money from his mother.”

“I hope you reported it as a loan on your mortgage application,” Tess said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Should we count it?”

“Not really. If I know how much it is, I think I might get angrier. Whatever Greg was doing, there wasn’t…It couldn’t be…It had to be…” Illegal , Tess wanted to say, but Wilma still wasn’t ready to concede that. “He got himself killed, and for what? We would have been okay, in the long run. I would have made partner. He could have gone into private practice if it came to that. What was the rush?”

Tess had extracted one bundle of cash, counted it, and done some quick multiplication in her head. Sixteen packs, $10,000 per pack-$160,000, give or take. “He was shaking someone down. Who?”

“I don’t know,” Wilma said. “Honestly.”

Tess pulled up each pack of bills, to make sure there was nothing left in the box.

“What are you looking for?” Wilma asked, her voice at once bitter and teary. It was clear that this secret cache, if not exactly what she had feared all along, was also anything but an innocuous discovery. “Waiting for hope to fly out? I don’t think she’s here.”

“A note. But I guess that would be too easy, right? A nice and neat confession about what he was into.”

“To write something like that, he would have to believe he was in imminent danger. And the one thing I’m sure about the last time I saw Greg alive is that he was buoyant, happy. In fact, he was happier in the weeks before his death than he’d been in a long time. He went into a horrible mope around the time I got pregnant. At the time I thought it was money woes-”

“Could be. Maybe this was a sudden windfall, and that’s why he cheered up. He was in antiterrorism, right? This would be chump change to some of those Saudis.” Tess was studying the log-Greg had last visited the bank in September. The account had been opened in August year before last, and he had been here monthly, through July. Then-nothing.

“Maybe.” Wilma’s eyes were on the money, but she wasn’t seeing it. She was trapped in her own thoughts. “Only, we bought the house last winter. I found out I was pregnant in March, and he was irritable from then on. I worried that he felt trapped in a way he hadn’t before. But come fall his bad mood vanished. On Halloween, when the kids came to the door, he was just so into it. He said to me, ‘I can’t wait until our little boy does that.’ Something changed over the summer.”

The employees’ doughnut buzz was fading fast, and Tess thought it would be best to put the drawer back in place, continue their conversation elsewhere. At the last minute, she grabbed the Xeroxed photograph, stashing it in her pocket.

She steered Wilma to the Silver Diner, not even fifty yards up the highway. It was an ersatz diner, the kind of faux-fifties place that Tess didn’t normally condone, but it was the best bet for breakfast in these parts.

“Think back to Greg’s work,” Tess said. “Was there anyone he might have blackmailed?”

“No. The terrorism unit was having virtually no luck. Truth is, Greg was kind of floundering since the transfer. He was brought on for PR, a suitable face to put before the cameras. The dirty little secret about the FBI’s antiterrorism work is that there is no work. Until, well, there is again. Get me?”