Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

Tess did, but she didn’t want to think about it.

“What about his earlier cases, the drug stuff he did?”

“He was known for being a hard-liner and getting convictions. In fact, he was contemptuous of his colleagues who couldn’t nail suspects no matter how close they got. So who would pay him off? He got the federal death penalty for that one group of gang members.”

Wilma said the last with great pride, reminding Tess that the two of them did not see eye to eye on many things. Tess opposed the death penalty in theory, and it pained her that she had taken another man’s life so readily. But she was learning to hold her tongue and her opinions. She and Wilma weren’t here to become BFFs.

“In the terrorism unit-was there anything he said about his work that centered on a single individual? They might not have been making arrests, but they still could have been up on wiretaps, monitoring someone. A wealthy Saudi Arabian might have paid money to know what his unit was doing, skimpy as it was.”

Wilma shook her head. “I’m telling you, all he did was speak of their incompetence and the futility of the whole operation.”

“So why did he volunteer for it in the first place?”

“I’m not sure. He’d been working a few things with a guy named Mike Collins, but he said Collins couldn’t bring him anything good since he stopped working undercover. You have to understand-the way the office is set up, the AUSA’s are often dependent on agents to bring them good cases.”

“But he must have known other agents.”

“He liked Mike best and thought he’d gotten a raw deal. Do you know him?”

“Yeah, I know him.” Tess decided not to share that she wasn’t his biggest fan.

“Greg really admired him. An authentic Horatio Alger story, up from the streets, basketball star at Langston Hughes.”

“Dunbar,” Tess corrected absently. She dug the photocopy out of her pocket, stared at the old man in the hat.

“Whatever.”

“He talked about Mike a lot?”

“I don’t know if I’d say ‘a lot.’ Enough that I knew he resented the agency’s treatment of him.”

“Wilma-”

“What?”

“Did you ever have a crush on a guy?”

“Sometimes.” Wilma’s tone was smug, as if to suggest she was far more familiar with being an object of crushes, not a holder of them.

“So when you were obsessed with some guy, didn’t you say his name over and over, whenever you could, bring him up in the most irrelevant conversations, just to have the thrill of saying his name?”

Wilma blushed her furious blush. “Greg was not queer for Mike Collins.”

“No, but they might have shared a secret that they would be even more desperate to conceal.” Tess showed her the photocopy. “This is taken from one of those literary postcards you can buy at Nouveau or Barnes amp; Noble. It’s Walt Whitman.”

“So?”

“Poet. Poet. If Mike Collins played for Dunbar, then he was a star on the Poets. I guess he couldn’t find a Dunbar postcard, so he settled for Whitman. ‘I sing the body electric’? ‘I dote on myself, for there is that lot of me, and all so luscious’?”

Wilma, despite her Ivy League education, still looked mystified. But Tess had no doubt that her husband had hedged his bets, leaving this subtle clue for someone who would eventually make the connection but treat Youssef’s old friend with dignity and respect. Who else had to know that Collins played for the Poets?

Jenkins had been surprised to find Mike Collins at his door first thing that morning. As much as he liked the young man, he’d never had him to his apartment. In fact, he didn’t even realize that Mike knew where he lived.

He wondered what else Bully knew about him.

“You want coffee?” he asked, although the kid seemed so wired that a shot of Jameson might have been more appropriate.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Well, I need some.”

He motioned Collins to follow him into the apartment’s kitchen, not that it was a trip that required a tour guide. Since returning to Baltimore, Jenkins had lived in one of those sterile, rent-by-the-month gigs, already furnished. The kitchen was separated from the so-called great room by a Formica-topped bar. Collins sat there, perched on one of the wicker stools that had come with the place, rocking a little from side to side. Kid was het-up. Jenkins hoped he wasn’t doing drugs, a curious but not unheard-of liability for DEA agents. But Collins’s disdain for drugs had always been persuasively virulent. He saw them as a plague that had swept through his once-middle-class neighborhood, destroying almost every young black man in their path. No, it was impossible to imagine Collins using drugs.

Jenkins pulled out his filters and the can of grounds he kept in the freezer, although he was always hearing conflicting opinions on that method of storage. It seemed to him that they kept changing the rules about everything. Plastic cutting boards, wooden cutting boards, back to plastic. Coffee with tap water, coffee with purified water, coffee with eggshells and old socks, back to tap water. Whatever Jenkins did, he made crap coffee, but at least it was cheap. Jenkins didn’t like giving someone two dollars for something he could make at home for a fraction of the cost. Made him feel like a sucker. He thought about Gabe Dalesio, who never seemed to be without a large cup of pricey coffee. The guy must have spent at least four, five dollars a day on coffee drinks. Four dollars a day, almost thirty dollars a week, over fifteen hundred dollars a year on coffee. Jenkins’s first wife, Martha, had criticized Jenkins for the way he tipped, the ones and fives and even tens that had slipped through his fingers so readily. But a tip went to a person at least, not some corporation. You hand a girl a five-dollar tip for checking your coat and you make her day. Give Mr. Starbucks or Ms. Seattle’s Best Coffee three dollars for some fancy hot drink and you were just one of the multitudes of suckers.

The coffee machine puffed and huffed, quite a production for the task of pouring hot water over a paper filter of coffee grounds. It tasted better if you waited until the whole pot brewed, but Jenkins could never resist pulling the carafe out and letting his mug catch the first syrupy cupful.

“You sure you don’t want any?”

“I’m fine.”

It was only when Jenkins turned back to the counter, FBI mug in his hand, that he saw the gun on the counter. Not a service revolver, his mind registered. A street weapon, a piece of shit. Then: Why does Mike have it? Why is he showing it to me?

“Mike,” he said, his voice soft and pleading. “Bully. What’s this about? What’s wrong?”

Even in this agitated state, he was so very handsome. Extremely dark-skinned, with features that had always seemed vaguely Native American to Jenkins-strong straight nose, high cheekbones, a bow-shaped mouth. That mouth was trembling, just a little now. Yet any show of emotion in Collins’s face was noteworthy.

“Mike…?”

The young man picked up the gun, studying it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was or where it had come from, then put it back down.

“I…I may have overstepped, Barry.”

“Overstepped?”

“Gabe Dalesio learned something, and it struck me as key, but I knew if we acted on it, he might begin to put things together. So, um, I killed him.”

This was a new situation to him. As a father to his own sons, Jenkins had been the one who disappointed, who stood before his children’s sorrowful and disapproving faces again and again. Here at last was his chance to assure someone that it was okay to screw up, to give comfort and succor.

Succor. Funny word. Say it out loud and it sounded just like “sucker.”