Laura Lippman: No Good Deeds

“Initial feedback on your presentation was very positive,” he said. He had that unfortunate bad breath that nothing can mask, so it ends up being bad breath with a minty, medicinal overlay. “The reporters said you had lots of insight into out-of-the-box thinking.”

“I hope no one actually said ‘out of the box.’ Or if they did, they were promptly fired.”

“We’re a union paper, we can’t fire anyone,” the editor said, wringing his hands mournfully. Hector Callahan, that was his name. Hector-the-Nonprotector. Hector-the-Nonprotector-Complete-with-Pocket-Protector-Who-Liked-to-Talk-About-News-Vectors. Tess was training herself to use rhymes as mnemonic devices.

“I was joking.”

“Oh.” He looked puzzled, as if jokes were an archaic social custom. “You know, I think that there could be a place for you here. On staff. Well, not on staff-we couldn’t offer benefits-but on retainer, as a consultant.”

Here was the offer that Tess had dreaded, the one she must sidestep adroitly if she was going to turn this into a traveling gig throughout the chain’s holdings.

“That would create all sorts of conflicts of interest for me. Few clients are going to feel comfortable working with a private investigator who also works for the local newspaper.”

“But if we did it on a case-by-case basis-the Youssef matter, for example. If you, as a private detective, fleshed out your theory-did some actual legwork to verify your…um, suppositions-and brought that report to the newspaper, then we could report your findings.”

“You mean, I could be the messenger that everyone wants to shoot and the paper could claim it was just reporting what someone else said. It would be an ingenious way of advancing a salacious story-and then the paper could promptly back off, throw me to the dogs if I made even the tiniest mistake. Have your dirt and make me eat it, too.”

“Being on retainer for the paper would be a steady source of income that would help you weather the…um, droughts endemic to small businesses such as yours.”

He said “small businesses” as if the very concept were distasteful, as if it smelled as rotten as his breath.

“You sound almost as if you know something of my finances, Hector.” She managed, just, not to add the rest of the rhyme now bouncing in her head. Hector the Nonprotector / Likes to Talk about News Vectors / Does he have a brain, this Hector? / That is simply mere conjecture.

He smiled, expelling another puff of minty-bad breath.

“We do know how to do some basic investigative work. Just think about it, Miss Monaghan. Don’t be so hasty. Don’t make your decision now. Think about it, sleep on it.”

Somewhere in Tess’s brain, a cautionary voice reminded her to count to ten, to wait before saying the words springing so automatically to her lips. But the voice was too faint, too weak. Sentences were already forming and heading out into the world, as impossible to marshal as the wind.

“You know, whenever anyone tells me to think about a proposition, he-and it’s almost always a he, come to think of it-seems to disregard the fact that I have thought about it. Thought about it, considered it from every angle, and rejected it. So no, I’m not going to think about it. You don’t need a PI on retainer. You need to devote more resources to hiring experienced reporters who can do the kind of investigative journalism you want, or else come to terms with the fact that you’re putting out a piece-of-shit newspaper that’s interested only in its bottom line.”

Hector backed away from Tess, then turned and, in his haste to escape from this Cassandra-like creature, caromed off the wall with a loud thud, righted himself, and limped into the newsroom, favoring his left hip.

“What was that noise?” Marcy asked, coming out of the bathroom, hands smoothing her silky brown hair.

“Me, derailing my own gravy train.”

Gabe Dalesio debated whether he would need a coat to dash over to the courthouse for the 3:00 P.M. initial-appearances hearing, running through the pros and cons with the same swift analysis he brought to everything he did. Pro: There was snow on the ground. Con: The snow had pretty much stopped. Pro: It was still cold. Con: If he stopped at the smoking pad afterward, the men who smoked-the DEA agents, Customs, ATF, even IRS-almost never wore top-coats, no matter how bitter the day, and Gabe wouldn’t want to look like a pussy. Six months in, he was still enough of a newbie to worry about the impression he made on the guys. If he could only impress them, maybe they would start bringing him cases and he wouldn’t have to play second goddamn chair on other AUSA’s cases. The smoking pad was usually a reliable place for nicotine freaks to bond, but he had yet to make a single real friend.

If only the boss smoked. That would be a golden opportunity. But the interim U.S. attorney was a pinch-faced, uncharmable woman. Lesbo? Gabe didn’t automatically assume that a woman was gay just because she was immune to what all his female relatives had long assured him was a completely irresistible charm. Still, one had to consider the possibility. He almost hoped for her sake that she was, because he couldn’t imagine what kind of man would want to be with her. Fug ly bitch.

He left his coat in his office, a decision he regretted when he felt the air. He regretted it more when he finished the mind-numbing routine of extraditing the lowlife of the day and saw that two middle-aged secretaries were the only people on the slice of patio allotted to the federal courthouse’s smokers. They welcomed Gabe nicely enough, and he flashed his boyish smile. Force of habit. Besides, secretaries were always worth sucking up to, although these two didn’t seem particularly interested in him. Perfunctory greetings exchanged, they turned back to their conversation, which centered on what they had done over the weekend.

Weekend talk -that was the mark of going-nowhere losers in Gabe’s head, people who were always talking about their weekends, either the one just past or the one about to come. It was why he had been such a bad fit in Albuquerque with all those outdoorsy types, whose jobs seemed to exist only to support their skiing and hiking habits. That and the fact that he didn’t speak any Spanish beyond sí and huevos rancheros , and he couldn’t give a shit about immigration casework. Gabe didn’t even like three-day weekends, feeling they disrupted the rhythm of work. January and February had been a bitch for just that reason. The Christmas holidays finally over, all he had wanted to do was work, get some traction, and here came Martin Luther King Day and then Presidents’ Day. The city even took a holiday for Lincoln ’s birthday, which he found totally bush. But then he found everything about Baltimore bush league.

Gabe wasn’t a monk. If he met a woman worth dating, he’d take her out to a restaurant, try to extract the reasonable quid pro quo. (And any woman who said she didn’t operate on a sliding scale, who claimed to behave no differently whether it was the Double-T Diner or Charleston, was lying through her teeth.) He went to the gym, sometimes took in a Ravens game, although the brokers’ prices were steep and he couldn’t accept anything from anyone. The ethics policy for federal prosecutors was about as strict as they come: Nothing from nobody. They couldn’t even accept freebies to redistribute to orphans, for Christ’s sake. But Gabe was cool with that. He wasn’t consciously preparing himself for Senate confirmation down the road, but he’d be ready just in case. His life was going to be so clean it squeaked.

Besides, what was wrong with dreaming big? You had to be able to envision something in order to achieve it. Once, he had read this interview with the guy who did the Dilbert cartoon, and he said he had used visualization techniques, that self-actualization thing where you write down what you want every day, over and over again. Gabe had been a little scared to try the writing-down part-it would be too embarrassing if someone found those hopeful sentences, as damning as a teenage girl twining her initials with some boy’s-but yes, in his mind he pictured himself in the robes of the federal judiciary. Look, someone had to be a federal judge. Why not him?