No Good Deeds Part 7

10.

Whitney glided to the curb in her mother's Mercedes station wagon, an older model that, in the WASP fas.h.i.+on, had not been particularly well maintained. The once-burgundy exterior had faded to the color of a scab, and the window gla.s.s was clouded with age.

Still, the car looked like a rich woman's ride, especially after its deluxe treatment at Wash Works just that morning. A burst of opera escaped when Whitney opened the door, so loud that Whitney must have had the radio set at eardrum-bursting levels. She removed the key from the ignition, took a second to adjust the cashmere scarf draped around the shoulders of her mother's old mink, and cut across Mount Street without looking in either direction, clearly expecting traffic to stop for her. It did. In her hands-encased in leather driving gloves, naturally-she carried an open cardboard box filled with bags of Otterbein Cookies, purchased so recently that one could almost smell them. She could not have been more obnoxiously conspicuous, her presence all but screaming, Look at me! Rob me! Carjack me!

Excellent, Tess thought from her hiding place in the alley. Whitney was like a piece of cheese in a cartoon, a yellow triangle so toothsome that the mouse in this game of cat and mouse would never notice the figurative box poised overhead, ready to slam down when the stick was removed.

Granted, it was their fifth stop this afternoon, and the plan had yielded no results, although several local soup kitchens had been happy to receive the red-and-white bags of chocolate chip and lemon sugar cookies from this glamorous and heretofore-unknown benefactor. And most of the providers were familiar with Lloyd, Whitney reported back, although they just smiled and shook their heads ruefully when asked where he might be found. Tess and Whitney were running out of stops and cookies, and while Whitney had drawn plenty of stunned looks, Lloyd had yet to put in an appearance.

Still, Tess was certain that the kid's ruse wasn't a onetime gig. In fact, once she had thought it through, she found his scheme rather brilliant. Stake out a street near one of the local soup kitchens, pick out a car that clearly doesn't belong to the neighborhood. In the case of her Lexus, the parking sticker for the Downtown Athletic Club had marked it as an outsider's vehicle. Whitney's Suburban, while clearly a rich person's car-only the wealthy could afford to fill the bottomless gas tank-wouldn't register as rich in Southwest Baltimore. But her mother's Mercedes station wagon, with its I CORGIS b.u.mper sticker, all but screamed its Greenspring Valley pedigree.

Crouched behind a ripe, overflowing trash can, Tess kept an eye on the street. A short kid, round of face and body, ambled toward Whitney's car and, with a quick look around, bent over and jabbed something in the tire. d.a.m.n. But she had warned Whitney that it was likely the tire would be slashed, not just flattened. "Mother has a full spare" was Whitney's airy response.

The more troubling fact was that this squat kid clearly wasn't Lloyd. It would be a hollow victory, nabbing the wrong culprit. Maybe the tire scam was to inner-city neighborhoods what the squeegee market used to be.

The fat kid, who had the wonderful ability to move swiftly without appearing to, sauntered away. Just as Tess was debating whether she should chase after him, she saw Lloyd coming down the block, tire tool in hand, positioning himself. Another kid did it. I didn't do s.h.i.+t to your tire. Wasn't that what Crow said Lloyd had insisted, over and over, with winning sincerity? It had been a technical truth, then. One boy slashed it, another offered to fix it.

Whitney left the soup kitchen, once again making herself as ostentatious as possible-tossing her blond hair, shooting her cuffs, revealing her watch and gold bangle bracelet, also borrowed from her mother. Playing her part brilliantly, she headed back to the car as if it never occurred to her that anything could be amiss, opening the driver's door. It was then that Lloyd materialized at her elbow.

Tess couldn't hear their initial exchange, although it did strike her that Whitney was overplaying the damsel in distress a bit, flailing her arms and even chewing on a gloved knuckle at one point. Finally Whitney popped the trunk and then, as she and Tess had rehea.r.s.ed, began filling Lloyd's arms with the remaining boxes of cookies, ostensibly to get to the spare.

"The tire's just here, under this compartment," she was braying when Tess crept up behind Lloyd.

"Hey, Lloyd," Tess said.

They had antic.i.p.ated that his instinct would be to hurl his armful of cookies and make a run for it. But Tess had also counted on a split-second delay, a moment in which Lloyd would hesitate-and be lost. Even as he tried to throw the cookies at Tess, Whitney stepped forward and pushed him into the open luggage compartment, then slammed the door shut and locked it with the b.u.t.ton on her key ring. The Mercedes may have been more than a decade old, but the era of child-safety locks had already been in full swing then. The old station wagon also had a mesh screen separating the luggage compartment from the rest of the car, an option added for Mrs. Talbot's beloved but lively corgis. Lloyd was trapped. He banged on the windows with his fists, cursing them, but there was nowhere he could go.

Tess kept watch over him, even as Whitney ran around the corner to the Lexus, fetched her spare from Tess's trunk, and proceeded to change her own tire, a task made slightly more difficult by Lloyd's heaving body, which rocked the Mercedes a little.

"What now?" Whitney asked, eyes gleaming.

"I don't know." Tess raised her voice so Lloyd might hear her over his pummeling fists. "What now, Lloyd? Cops? Division of Juvenile Services? Your call."

"f.u.c.k you, b.i.t.c.hes!" he yelled back. "You can't make me do s.h.i.+t! You got nothing on me! I didn't do anything!"

"I saw it, Lloyd. I know you're working with that other kid. All I have to do is call 911 on my cell, and the cops will be here in a few minutes. Or maybe I'll go chase your friend, who's almost certainly hiding around the corner, let the two of you decide who wants to take responsibility."

The mention of his accomplice seemed to increase Lloyd's rage and panic. "f.u.c.k YOU, YOU MOTHERf.u.c.kIN' WHITEa.s.s b.i.t.c.h! I will cut you if I get out of here, I will f.u.c.k you up, I will-"

"Nice talk. Look, we've got you on auto theft, hit-and-run-enough charges to put you back in Hickey for several months, if not central booking at city jail, where people are staying up to forty-eight hours these days before they even see a judge. But we're reasonable people. You can make a deal."

"I DON'T TALK TO COPS!"

"You don't have to talk to anyone but me. For now."

"Where?" Whitney asked, ever practical. "Your house?"

"Yours. I'll drive your mother's car back to her while you take mine." She thought she should be behind the wheel of the Mercedes if Lloyd did anything unpredictable. "Plus, your house is so remote that he can't run away that easily. Even if he gets away from us, he won't get far."

Once at Whitney's house, Lloyd came out of the luggage compartment feetfirst, aiming straight for Tess's midsection. Again, she had expected nothing less and needed nothing more than a simple sidestep to avoid the blow. Still, without Whitney to help her, she would never have been able to subdue the young man. Thin as he was, he had a feral strength, twisting and turning in their grasp, cursing them all the while. The two women ended up straddling him, so his face was sc.r.a.ping the gravel in the driveway.

"f.u.c.k you, b.i.t.c.hes," he said. "The minute you get up, I'm going to kill you both."

Tess pulled out her gun, just to remind him that she had one-and he didn't have any weapon at all. Not even a knife, based on her inexpert pat-down, for all his talk of cutting people.

"You ain't gonna use that on me. That's not your way."

"What do you know of my ways?"

"All I did was try to steal your car. White folks like you don't shoot you for s.h.i.+t like that."

"You're right." Tess put the gun away and pulled out her cell phone. "Calling the police is more my style. County police. I'll tell them that Whitney and I caught you trying to break into her carriage house out here and that you attacked her. You want to get picked up by county police on attempted rape and burglary?"

"That won't hold."

"It will hold long enough for someone to beat the c.r.a.p out of you in an interrogation room in Towson."

Tess didn't actually believe that county cops would automatically brutalize any black teenager in their custody, not even one accused of an attack on a Valley resident. But she thought the threat would be credible to Lloyd-and it was. He allowed the two women to escort him inside, where Whitney produced a length of rope.

"What's that for?" Tess asked.

"To tie him up. He doesn't have the best record for staying put."

"f.u.c.k you." Lloyd spit on the floor and started to writhe in Tess's grasp. Whitney dropped the rope and grabbed his other arm.

"Look," Tess said, forcing Lloyd to make eye contact. "We'll give you a chance to sit and talk to us. If you run, we call the police. It's that simple. The driveway is a mile long, Lloyd. By the time you get to the end, a squad car will be waiting for you. And if you try to cut across the property, you'll find that picturesque fence is electrified."

He considered her offer.

"I'm hungry," he said at last. "You got any food or soda?" Then, as a hasty afterthought, as if remembering the chipotle m.u.f.fins that had so distressed him: "I mean normal food."

"Well, there are several bags of those cookies, although they're now broken into pieces," Whitney said. "Other than that, I think I have some olives. And maybe some gin."

Lloyd settled for a gla.s.s of tap water and a bag of the shattered lemon cookies.

"When you were at my house, you saw a photograph of Gregory Youssef," Tess began.

"Who?" He wasn't very good at faking ignorance-or masking the nervousness that the name always seemed to inspire in him.

"Don't be coy, Lloyd. Youssef is the federal prosecutor who was killed the night before Thanksgiving. You knew that a federal prosecutor had been killed, because the dealers in your neighborhood were pulled in for questioning. You knew Gregory Youssef's name. But the two weren't linked in your mind. Who was Gregory Youssef to you?"

"Never met the man."

He seemed sincere, but Tess had already observed that Lloyd had a knack for technical truths that sidestepped larger ones.

"How do you know his name, then? And why do you try to avoid the subject when it comes up? Are you scared?"

"I ain't likely to be scared of you."

"Not of me. But definitely of someone, something. Someone who can link you to Gregory Youssef. And perhaps indirectly to his murder."

Lloyd finished a bag of lemon cookies and started in on the chocolate chip ones. Tess couldn't help envying his metabolism. She had once been able to eat that way, but that had been on the other side of thirty.

"I didn't know anything about no murder," he said. "Not a bit of it. All I was told is there was a guy and he'd crossed some folks, and they were going to scare him a little, take his money to show that they could, that he was a fool to think he was a player. Guy gave me the card and the code, told me when to use it and where."

"A guy?"

"I ain't naming names. I don't know a name to give. He was just some guy, an a.s.sociate of a man I know."

Tess didn't believe Lloyd, but she let it go. "What about the security camera? Didn't you realize you'd show up on it?"

"I wore a hoodie pulled up tight so hardly any of my face showed." He demonstrated with his hands, cupping them around his face so only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible. "My North Face jacket was over it, but it got stole that very night. Which is why...well, that and the fact that I didn't get no money..."

"You're losing me, Lloyd. Take it step by step, minute by minute. When did you get the card?"

"Around eleven that night. Near Patterson Park."

"And who gave it to you?"

He shook his head. "There were no names. I don't know his, he don't know mine."

"Really?"

"Uh-uh. Just a friend of a friend of a friend."

"Okay, but he gives you the card and the code, tells you an ATM and a time. Right?"

"Yeah, I was to hit this machine on Eastern Avenue at exactly twelve-thirty A.M. So I did. And I get rolled like fifteen minutes later, guys take my jacket and the cash. And I'm thinking-" He stopped himself. "I'm thinking the guy who hired me done f.u.c.ked me over, told his boys what he had me do, so he could get the money that was s'pose to be mine. They got my jacket and the cash, but I still had the card in my back pocket. And I was hungry. So I go to an all-night deli, use the card to buy a sub and a bag of chips."

"The deli had an ATM machine?"

"Just for purchase, but it takes Independence Cards and s.h.i.+t."

Tess had to fight the urge to tell Lloyd that "and s.h.i.+t" was not equivalent to "et cetera." Listening to Lloyd was like some hip-hop version of The King and I.

"Does the deli have video surveillance?"

"Don't think so. Korean's too cheap. He got a baseball bat instead."

"Even if he did," Whitney put in, "he would have reused the tape by now. Most of those places recycle the tapes every twenty-four hours if nothing happens."

Tess knew this to be true. "What time was this?"

"Like going on two."

Tess made a note. Youssef's killer had been tracked by E-ZPa.s.s along the I-95 corridor about the same time. Investigators must have noticed that discrepancy-Youssef's car in the northern reaches of Maryland, perhaps already in Delaware, his ATM card still in Baltimore. By using the card when he did, Lloyd had raised the possibility that there was an accomplice, a key fact the police had managed to hold close.

Tess wondered if Lloyd understood he would be seen as just that-an accomplice. His ignorance of the larger plan would be of no protection to him. He could be turned into a scapegoat, an easy arrest to a.s.sure the public that some progress had been made.

"Was that the last time you used the card?"

"Yeah, that was it. For food."

"Was it the last time you used the card for anything?"

Lloyd extended his feet sheepishly, showing off his whiter-than-white Nikes. "I figured I deserved a pair of new shoes and a jacket, to make up for the one that got stole. I went to the Downtown Locker Room at Towson Town Mall on Friday. Then I cut the card up and threw it in the sewer, like I was's'pose to do in the first place. I didn't see how anyone could mind. I was just trying to stay even."

"The person who gave you the card, Lloyd-did he kill Youssef? Would he have known that was the plan?"

"I dunno. He didn't look it."

"How did he look?"

"Just like, I dunno. Like a guy."

"Still, this stranger asked you to use an ATM card at a certain time and place. To use it just once, then throw it away. You noticed the name and you memorized the code-you still know the code, by the way?"

"Two-four-one-one," he shot back. Another detail that would matter, another detail that only a very small circle of people could know.

"Here's the thing I don't get, Lloyd. How did it escape your notice that the name on the card was the same as the name of the man who was killed that night?"

He shrugged. "Don't follow that news s.h.i.+t unless it's, like, a good chase or something. Everybody kept talking about the lawyer that got killed, but no one was saying his name, you know? And this guy, he had said what we were doing was no big thing. He said they were just going to teach a guy a lesson, f.u.c.k with him a little."

"You ever see him again?"

"Naw."

Tess glanced over at Whitney, who had been taking notes on a c.o.c.ktail napkin, which must have been the closest thing at hand. She held up the monogrammed sc.r.a.p so Tess could see what she had written: Hoodie pulled tight Deli at 2 a.m.

Downtown Locker Room two days later.

Nikes and a new North Face.

2 4 1 1.

"It's pretty d.a.m.n specific," Whitney said. "If it's all true, everyone's going to want to talk to him."

"NO COPS," Lloyd said. "No cops, no names. Not mine, not n.o.body's. You know they'll lock me up, and I ain't done s.h.i.+t. They'll hang a charge on me to get me to talk, but I got nothin' to say. I done told you what I know. You promised you ain't gonna make me."

"I did promise," Tess said. "And I'll do my best to keep my word. But will you talk to a reporter if I can guarantee your confidentiality?"

"Will they make my voice sound all funny?"