"No Good Deeds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lippman Laura)

MONDAY
2

“Shit.”

Crow couldn’t have been inside the Holy Redeemer parish hall more than ten minutes tops, dropping off produce that the East Side soup kitchen would stretch into salad for three hundred. How had his right rear tire, which had started the journey as plump and round as the others, gone so suddenly flat?

Worse, it wasn’t even his tire. It was Tess’s, on her precious Lexus SUV, which she had lent him reluctantly because Sunday’s rain had turned to Monday’s snow and sleet-what the local weather forecasters called a wintry mix-and Crow had deliveries to make all over Baltimore. She had insisted on taking his Volvo for her shorter trip downtown. The Volvo wasn’t bad in the snow, but it needed a new muffler and a brake job that Tess thought Crow couldn’t afford. And it was easier to let her continue thinking that for now than to get his car repaired.

“You want help changing that, mister?”

The young man seemed to appear from nowhere on the empty street. Fifteen or sixteen, he was ill dressed for the weather, a fleece hoodie thrown over baggy jeans and no gloves on the raw, chafed hands that-oh, so providentially-held a tire tool. At least he had a pair of Timberlands, although the brand had lost its cachet. Maybe that was the reason he was willing to expose the pristine suede to the elements.

“I mean, if you’ve got a spare, I can take off the lug nuts.” He brandished the tool in his hand.

How convenient, as Tess would have said. But then, Tess would have been onto this kid the moment he appeared. Crow had allowed him the benefit of the doubt. Only for a second, but it was that split second of optimism that defined the difference between them. He was the original half-full guy, while she saw everything as half empty.

“I can change my own tire,” Crow said shortly. “Is it simply flat, or did you puncture it?”

The young man widened his eyes in an excellent show of innocence, undercut only by their amber color and cat shape, which suggested an innate cunning. “Hey, I just happened to be walking by earlier and I saw it was flat, so I went home and got this. I didn’t do shit to your tire.”

“Sure.” Crow popped the trunk, grateful that Holy Redeemer was his last delivery of the day. At least he didn’t have to shift boxes of food to get to the spare. He moved quickly and capably. It wouldn’t be the first tire he had changed, or even the worst circumstances under which he had changed one. The ever-shifting precipitation was now a light, fluffy snow, and the wind had died. In early winter such a snowfall would have been picturesque. In the penultimate week of March, it was merely depressing.

“You need help?”

“Not really.”

Still, the young man lingered, offering commentary as Crow worked. “That’s a little tight, ain’t it?” he said of one lug nut. Then: “That’s a decent whip, but I prefer the Escalade or the Expedition. Like they say: If you gonna go, go big. These Lexuses is kinda small.”

And finally, when everything was done: “So can I have ten dollars, man?”

Even Crow found this a bit much. “For what? Giving me a flat tire or irritating the hell out of me while I changed it?”

“I tol’ you, I didn’t do shit to your tire.” A pause. “Five dollars?”

“I don’t think so.”

“C’mon, man. I’m hungry.”

It was a shrewd appeal. A white man in a Lexus SUV bringing food to a soup kitchen should be suffused with guilt and money, enough to throw some cash at a hungry adolescent, even one who had punctured his tire.

And it worked.

“You’re hungry?”

“Starvin’.” He patted his stomach and pushed out his lower lip. He wasn’t exactly a handsome kid, but there was something compelling about his face. The eyes might seem sly, but the grin was genuine, almost sweet. “Like those commercials. You know, ‘You can feed this child for seventeen cents a day-or you can change the channel.’ ’Course it’s more than seventeen cents here. We ain’t in Africa, ya feel?”

“Okay, get in the car, we’ll go buy you a sandwich.”

“Naw, that’s okay. I just wanted to buy groceries and shit.”

“How many groceries can you buy for five dollars?”

“I could get a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a large soda down at the Korean’s.”

“What about the Yellow Bowl? I’ll spring for a full lunch.” The Yellow Bowl was a well-known soul food restaurant not too far away.

An Elvis-like curl of the lip. “I don’t eat that country shit.”

“Look, you name the place and I’ll take you there for lunch.”

“Anyplace?”

“Anyplace in the Baltimore metro area.”

“How about Macaroni’s?”

“Marconi’s?” The choice couldn’t have been more surprising. The restaurant was one of the city’s oldest, a fussy, white-tablecloth landmark where H. L. Mencken had dined in his prime. The only thing that had changed since Mencken’s time was the wallpaper and a few members of the waitstaff. Tess, of course, loved it. But then, Tess suffered acutely from Baltimorosis in Crow’s opinion, a disease characterized by nostalgia for all things local, even when their glory days preceded one’s own birth by decades. A nonnative, Crow was less susceptible.

“Are you sure you want to go to Marconi’s?”

“Macaroni’s.”

Crow decided to chalk the choice up to that weird gentry vibe in the bling culture, the same impulse that had made Bentleys and Burberry plaid so popular. The kid was trying to aspire.

“Doesn’t matter how you say it, we’ll go there. It’s on me.”

“Man-I got things to do. Can’t you just give me a dollar or two?”

“What do you have to do? Go find another mark, slash his tire?”

“Didn’t do shit to your tire.” Still, he got in the car.

“My name’s Edgar Ransome, but people call me Crow.” Lately he was wishing that weren’t so. Childhood nicknames didn’t wear well as one approached the age of thirty. They yoked you to the past, kept you infantile. But he also didn’t feel like an Edgar, Ed, or Eddie, and his last name sounded like a soap opera character’s. “What’s your name?”

“Lloyd Jupiter.”

“Seriously.”

“I am serious.”

Lloyd scrunched down in the seat, sullen and unhappy at the prospect of being forced to eat at one of the city’s best-known restaurants. He did not speak again until Crow pulled up in front of the old brownstone on Saratoga Street.

“What’s this shit? I thought we were going to Macaroni’s.”

“Look at the sign, Lloyd. It’s Marconi’s.”

“I know what it says. I can fuckin’ read. But I wanted to go the Macaroni Grill out Columbia way. They got a salad bar. My mom took me there for my birthday once.”

Crow considered persuading Lloyd to settle for Marconi’s French-influenced menu, force-feeding him shad roe and lobster imperial and potatoes au gratin and vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce. It had to be a thousand times better than any franchise restaurant. Instead he turned the car around and headed south to the suburbs, to the place that Lloyd Jupiter had specified. A deal was a deal.

“Where is it, exactly?” Crow and Tess didn’t spend much time outside the city limits.

“Out Columbia way,” Lloyd repeated. “On that highway, near that place.”

“The mall?”

“Naw, on the highway to the mall. Across from Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

“You get those Tims at Dick’s?”

Lloyd rolled his eyes, perhaps at Crow’s use of the shorthand for Timberlands, perhaps for some other unspecified ignorance and whiteness and general uncoolness on Crow’s part. “Downtown Locker Room.”

“That the place to go, huh?”

Lloyd shifted in his seat, stiff and uncomfortable. Did he think that Crow was cruising him, taking him out to lunch and studying his material desires in order to extract some kind of sexual favor? Street-level life in Baltimore, as Crow thought of it, was viciously homophobic. Tess had that much right: White country kids would turn tricks and still consider themselves straight, but black kids simply didn’t try to play it that way. You were queer or you weren’t. And if you were, you’d better be ready to get your ass kicked or kick back.

Tess would laugh at him later. Laugh at tenderhearted Crow, insisting on buying lunch for the street kid who had punctured her tire and tried to extort money from him. Roar at the idea of taking said kid to Marconi’s, then acquiescing to his desire for the chain-restaurant glories of Macaroni Grill, slipping and sliding along slick highways on a day when people who didn’t have to drive were being exhorted to stay at home.

Still, he couldn’t help loving her, although loving Tess Monaghan was a challenging proposition, what a union man might call the lobster shift of romance. The summer he was nineteen, Crow had worked for exactly three days at a factory owned by a family friend. His job was to insert a metal fastener in a hole on a piece of cardboard, which would later be assembled into a floor display for a mattress. Because he worked the late shift, the lobster, he had received an extra twelve cents an hour-the lobster-shift differential.

He often thought that there should be a Tess differential as well. Not that life with her was as mind-numbing as those three days in the factory. Quite the opposite. But she required a lot of extra work.

There was a short wait at the Macaroni Grill-it was twelve-thirty now, and the restaurant’s vestibule was filled with a backlog of not-quite-homebound families, desperate to amuse their children on a snow day when there wasn’t enough actual snow to do anything outside. Crow and Lloyd sat on a bench opposite a row of newspaper boxes, and Crow bought a paper, but Lloyd wanted nothing to do with it, not even the comics or the sports section, although he did ask Crow how the Detroit Pistons had done the night before.

“Tell me about yourself, Lloyd.”

All he received was a narrowed-eye look in return.

“That’s my girlfriend’s SUV you vandalized, by the way. Her new-to-her precious baby.” Tess had bought the Lexus from a dealership that insisted on calling it preowned, a semantic shenanigan that had so annoyed Tess that she walked out in the final round of negotiations. The salesman had knocked off another five hundred dollars to get her back to the table.

“It looked like a woman’s car,” Lloyd said. “That’s why-” He stopped himself.

“What? That’s what you were counting on when you slashed the tire? A woman who would need help changing the tire?”

“Didn’t do shit to your tire.”

“Well, you’re lucky she wasn’t driving it today. She’s a lot tougher than I am.”

Lloyd gave Crow a look as if to say, That’s not so tough.

“For one thing, she’s licensed to carry a gun.”

“She a cop?” This prospect was clearly unnerving.

“Private detective.”

Lloyd couldn’t maintain his studied indifference. “For real? Like Charlie’s Angels and shit?”

“A little more down to earth. Skip traces, insurance stuff, missing persons, financial background checks.”

“She ever kill anybody?”

“Once. It was self-defense…’’ He had Lloyd’s full attention now. Tess would rather that Crow post nude photos of her on the Internet than speak of the near-death encounter that had thrust her onto the front page last year. The scar on her knee was slowly disappearing, but Crow had noticed how often her fingers went to that spot, fingering the lumpy, purple-white line as if it were a crooked pennywhistle. Hot cross buns. Hot cross buns. One gunshot, ten gunshots, hot cross buns.

He had a scar, too, but Tess seemed to forget that. Everybody had scars, one way or another.

“She know kung fu? I do.”

Lloyd jumped to his feet, executing a mishmash of moves that appeared to have been gleaned from films such as The Matrix, Hero, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His impromptu performance alarmed the mostly white, all-suburban audience of waiting families. It wasn’t Lloyd’s race so much as his loudness, the sudden movements. That just didn’t play in Columbia.

“She has her methods.”

“Is she like the White She Devil in Undercover Brother?” Lloyd struck another pose, shaking his head violently from side to side as if trying to dislodge a bug from his ear. Crow considered himself well versed in all forms of pop culture, but Lloyd had left him behind with that reference.

The pretty brunette hostess hurried forward, ready to seat them even though several other parties had been waiting longer.

“Where do you live, Lloyd?” Crow asked as he watched Lloyd tuck in to his salad-bar creation, more cheese than lettuce. Cheese, lettuce, and nothing else.

“’Round.”

“Round where?”

“I don’t like to specify too much about myself. But you know, I turned sixteen last fall. They can’t make me go to school anymore.”

“So what are you doing if you don’t go to school?”

“I worked for a man ’round the way.”

The past tense didn’t escape Crow. “Doing what?”

Lloyd gave him a look. “You sure you’re not a cop?”

“I’m a bartender.” Not quite the truth, but more expedient than trying to explain his jack-of-all-trades role at Pat Monaghan’s bar, the Point.

“Why you so interested in me?”

“Because you’re a person, sitting opposite me in a restaurant. Why wouldn’t I be interested in another human being?”

Lloyd pointed a fork at him. “A human being that you think slashed your tire.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

Lloyd grinned. He was so long and bony, thinner than even Crow had been at that age, and he was rampaging through his salad as if he hadn’t had a solid meal for a while. Weekends were light on free food in the Baltimore area, with only a few churches open for business. That’s part of the reason Crow had started using his day off to take supplies to the smaller soup kitchens, the ones that didn’t get as much publicity as the name-brand charities.

“Did not. Word. But I saw the guy who did, and I told him that an old lady had seen him and called the police and he better run. I told him I’d hold his tool for him so the police wouldn’t pick him up. Then I waited for you to come back. Tire was already flat, right? No harm in helping out.”

His last words echoed in Crow’s brain. It was true, despite what Tess maintained. There could be no harm in helping anyone.

“Lloyd, tell me straight: You got a place to sleep tonight? The temperature’s supposed to go down into the twenties.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, but when I take you home, I’m taking you to an address and watching you go inside. In fact, I’m coming inside with you and meeting your folks.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Why not?”

“Some white dude bring me home, my mom starts asking questions, and she’ll figure out that I wasn’t up to any good, and I’ll be beat.”

Lloyd’s tone and reasoning were persuasive, but he had hesitated just long enough for Crow to know he was lying.

“But according to you, all you did was take advantage of someone else’s crime.”

“Yeah, but she won’t believe that. My mama ain’t got much use for me.”

“Lloyd-do you live with your mom? Or any adult? Is anyone looking out for you?”

Their entrées arrived-the speed of the service was setting records, as if the staff could not be free of Lloyd and Crow soon enough-and Lloyd busied himself with spaghetti and meatballs. He ate as a child might, Crow noticed, holding the fork in his fist, cutting the strands instead of winding them around the fork.

“I’m not dropping you off on the street, not in this weather. Either I take you to a place where an adult comes to the door and vouches for you or I’ll find you a shelter bed-”

“No fucking shelters!” Lloyd almost yelped in his distress. “You show up there, you young, they call juvenile services or social services and they haul you away for what they say is your own good. That ain’t for me.”

“Then I’ll take you to where I live. Just for the night, okay? You can sleep in the spare bedroom, and I’ll take you back to the neighborhood tomorrow morning. Even drop you off at school, if you like.”

“Told you, I’m sixteen. I don’t have to go.”

“Fine, Lloyd. You don’t have to go. But do you want to go?”

“Hell no.” His look was scornful, contemptuous of the very idea that one could want to go to school if it wasn’t required by law. Crow decided to change his tack, to become Lloyd’s supplicant, allow him the illusion that he had the upper hand in their dealings.

“Here’s the thing, man. I need you to tell my girlfriend what happened with her car. She’s going to be pissed about the tire, and she’s not going to believe me.”

“What-you whipped?”

“A little,” Crow said. “A little.”

Of course, if he were truly cowed by Tess, he wouldn’t dare bring Lloyd Jupiter home with him.

“Women,” Lloyd said with a world-weary sigh, as if he had a lifetime of experience.

“They can be demanding. But they’re usually worth the effort.”

“True dat,” Lloyd said, reaching for a fistful of garlic bread. “Can I have dessert?”