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

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“Surveillance isn’t for amateurs,” Tess Monaghan told the bright young faces that stared unnervingly up at her from the seats of the Beacon-Light’s small auditorium, a spanking-new addition to a building that seemed to be under constant renovation. “Remember the Miami Herald and Gary Hart? They staked out his apartment but didn’t realize it had a back door. There’s no such thing as partial surveillance. That’s a classic amateur mistake.”

“But you were an amateur, right?” one of the men asked. It was that logy middle section of the afternoon, the Q-and-A portion of her presentation, and Tess had long ago figured out that this particular reporter was far more interested in his own Q’s than in anyone else’s A’s. She wasn’t sure of his name, which had been given in a flurry of handshakes and greetings over coffee at 10:00 A.M. and reiterated during the lunch break. The men here all looked alike-Ivy League preppy with floppy hair, khaki trousers, and button-down shirts with sleeves rolled up to the exact point just below the elbow, almost as if they had been measured with a ruler. And all white. The male reporters picked for this tutorial in investigative techniques were extremely white, white-white, so white that they made Tess doubt her own credentials as a Caucasian.

As for the women, there were only two, and they were a study in contrasts. One was a demure blonde afraid to make eye contact, while the other was an exotic blend of races who might have wandered in from the Miss Universe pageant. The newspaper probably counted her three or four times over when cooking its diversity stats.

“If you mean I had no formal training as a private investigator, then yes, I started as a self-taught amateur. But I apprenticed to a PI, as required by law, and took over his agency when he retired to the Eastern Shore.”

This was true, as far as it went. Tess seldom bothered to explain that she had never met her mentor face-to-face. Edward Keyes was a retired Baltimore cop and old family friend. As a former detective, he was given a PI’s license automatically and then “hired” Tess. He had signed the incorporation papers, expedited her license, and sold her the agency for a dollar, all without leaving his home on the Delaware shore.

“Tess was a reporter at the Star,” Kevin Feeney put in. “But in just three years, she’s had a lot of success running her own business.”

“Are you expanding?” the same floppy-haired man demanded. “Taking on staff? Landing big corporate accounts?”

“Well, I got this one.” This earned her a generous laugh. Apparently her interrogator wasn’t popular with his colleagues either. “As for expansion, I don’t think I’d be particularly good at managing others. ‘Hell is other people,’ as Sartre said. Instead I work with a loose network of female PIs, nationwide. We trade out our time and brainstorm together, but we remain independent contractors.”

“Why all women?”

“Why not?” No laugh this time, just stony looks of confusion, although Tess thought she saw Miss Universe hide a smile behind her left hand while raising her right and waiting to be recognized. The men raised their hands, too, but they seldom waited for Tess to call on them.

“Is your work dangerous?” Miss Universe asked.

“Not if I’m doing it right.”

Her one insistent questioner was not done. “But you killed a man, right? Didn’t you have to kill someone in self-defense?”

Her grin faded, and behind the podium her hand reached instinctively for her knee. “Yes.”

“How does it feel-”

“One more question,” Feeney cut in. “Preferably from someone who hasn’t asked one yet. Then it’s back to work.”

“Do you actually enjoy what you do?” asked a man at the back of the room. “Your work seems even more dependent on human misery than journalism is.”

The question caught her short, no glib reply at the ready. Tess knew she liked working for herself and was proud of the middle-class living she had managed to achieve, touch-and-go as it could be at times. Just a few years ago, she had been living in a below-market rental in her aunt’s building, carrying balances on her credit cards, scrimping and saving for the tiniest indulgences. Now she had a house that was appreciating so fast the tax bill was threatening to overtake the mortgage-and that was without the city’s assessment division catching up with all the improvements made since she bought the little bungalow.

But did she enjoy her job? The means to the various ends were often unpleasant, a constant reminder of humankind’s capacity for venality. If no one ever cheated an insurance company, much less a spouse, if no one tried to outthink security systems or steal others’ identities…well, then, Tess wouldn’t have been able to purchase a Lexus SUV, even a used one.

She had reunited a family, she reminded herself. Safeguarded a secret that the entire city held dear. Eased a woman’s tortured conscience, stopped a monster in his tracks, cleared a man’s reputation. Saved the lives of three children, whose father remained on friendly terms with her. In fact, Mark Rubin wanted Tess and Crow to attend second-night seder at the family’s house next month.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I really do.”

After a polite round of applause, the star reporters of the Beacon-Light filed out in dutiful, orderly fashion. Ah, Hildy Johnson had long ago left the building, no matter which gender embodied the part. Once they had cleared the room, Tess turned to Feeney and rolled her eyes.

“In my day it was the television reporters who asked how one felt.”

“Sorry, Tess. I told them to avoid that subject out of common courtesy. He’s not the sharpest crayon in the box. If he were a Crayola, he’d be burnt sienna.”

“Burnt sienna? Feeney, only one person in this entire room even approached beige.”

“I mean he’d be one of those second-class colors that no self-respecting kid touches until all the good ones are gone.”

“Ah, but in that case,” Tess said, “he would be the sharpest crayon in the box.”

Feeney laughed. “There are days when I wish I had one of those little built-in sharpeners at my desk and I could just insert their heads in there. Don’t get me wrong. They’re good kids, bright and earnest. But they’re inexperienced and they don’t know the city. Aggressive, yet hamstrung with fear. It ain’t the best combo. That’s why I was hoping a maverick like you might fire them up, inspire them to ‘think different,’ as that ungrammatical ad campaign had it.”

“The best question I got all day,” Tess said, “was if they made female-friendly equipment for bladder relief.”

“I must have stepped out during that part. Do they?”

“Yes, but I prefer the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Speaking of which…?”

“Down the hall, on the left.”

The newsroom that Tess walked through bore little resemblance to her beloved Baltimore Star, dead for almost a decade. In fact, it no longer resembled the Beacon-Light newsroom of just two years ago. Reporters often complained that modern newspaper offices could be insurance companies, but Tess thought the Beacon-Light looked more like an advertising agency where the employees had been kept in sensory deprivation tanks for too long. There were few flashes of personal identity in the pretty maple-veneer cubicles-no toys or rude posters or dartboards with the boss’s face pinned to them, things once common to newsrooms. It took a moment longer to identify what else was missing. Laughter. Chatter. Noise of any kind. No one was joking or shouting or even berating someone over the phone. H. L. Mencken had once complained that copy editors were eunuchs who had never felt the breeze on their faces. But with telephones, the Internet, and e-mail, far too many reporters spent their entire days staring into the sickly glow of computer terminals, removed from human contact. They were at once more connected and less connected.

Still, stupid and impertinent questions aside, Tess’s gig was a godsend-a nice chunk of guaranteed cash for very little effort-and Feeney was probably right when he said that she could spin it into a regular venture, flying to newspapers and television stations all over the country. With budgets cut to the bone, the big media companies would rather pay a onetime fee to a PI than hire seasoned editors and reporters.

Her cell phone vibrated, and she glanced down: Crow, although their wireless service announced him as E. RANSOME. A daytime call from him was rare enough to give her pause; he was not much for idle chat, and he understood that her work often prevented her from answering the phone. Besides, Crow’s own days were fuller and fuller, almost frighteningly so. “He’s growing up right before your eyes,” Tess’s friend Whitney had observed, meaning to make a joke. After years of a rather feckless, careless existence, Crow seemed to have found his inner workaholic, throwing his energy into creating a reputable music club in the most unlikely corner of far west Baltimore, then trying to eradicate hunger in his spare time. The change encouraged Tess, but it also unnerved her a little, as all change did.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“We’re going to have a houseguest tonight. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“Cool. Some college friend passing through?”

“No, more of a friend in need.”

“A friend?”

“Well, a new friend. An acquaintance.”

“Crow-”

“Tess, I met this kid, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go or anywhere to stay, and-I just can’t leave him on the street in this weather, and he doesn’t want to go to the shelters or the missions, and who can blame him?”

“Crow, you are out of your fucking mind.”

“Why? It’s just one night.”

“There are a thousand whys, but I can’t have this conversation outside the ladies’ room at the Blight.”

The use of the paper’s nickname earned her a stern look from a beetle-browed woman stalking by, legal pad in hand. It wasn’t very gracious, disparaging the paper on its own premises.

“I’ll tell you what: We’ll meet for dinner somewhere, and I’ll size this kid up before you bring him into-our house.” She had almost said “my,” a bad habit. “I could be at the Brass Elephant in half an hour.”

“Lloyd’s underage. We can’t take him to a bar.”

So it was Lloyd now, underage Lloyd. “What does he want, an expense-account dinner at Charleston?”

“What he really needs is a home-cooked meal, something that will stick to his ribs. I was thinking lamb stew, some chipotle muffins.” He was trying to soften her up, naming two of her favorite dishes. It was working.

“Okay. To dinner. I’m not guaranteeing him a bed for the night. I get to reserve judgment on that until I meet him.”

“Tess, I’m not the naïf you like to make me out to be. I’ve got some street sense.”

“Of course you do,” she said, but her assurances rang hollow even to her.

She pushed her way into the ladies’ room. This, too, had been upgraded, the once institutional green-and-peach color scheme replaced with gleaming stainless steel and stark white tiles. A young woman, the multinational brunette from the presentation, leaned toward her lovely reflection, inspecting her invisible pores, her nonexistent lines. Asian? Black? Latina? Possibly all three.

“Your talk was fascinating,” she said when she caught Tess’s eye in the mirror. “Completely opened up my mind to new ways of reporting.”

Tess wanted to take the compliment, but the gushing was too rote.

“Please don’t suck up. It makes me nervous.”

“That’s refreshing,” the girl said, returning her gaze to her own face. “The men around here can’t get enough smoke blown up their butts. I tell you, it’s exhausting.”

Tess laughed with relief. Here was the smart-aleck attitude she remembered, the coarse vocabulary she expected from journalists.

“I’m rotten with names. You’re…”

“Marcy. Marcy Appleton.” Tess tried not to smile. It was such a hilariously all-American, blond-cheerleader name. The girl’s accent was midwestern, too, with broad o’s and a’s. “I cover federal courts.”

“You really want to do investigative stuff?”

“It’s the most prestigious thing you can do here, now that they’re consolidating the national bureaus throughout the chain. And everyone knows that the foreign bureaus will go next. Which sucks, because I came here banking on a post in Asia. I’m fluent in Mandarin, and I traveled throughout the region between college and grad school. Know who they sent to cover the tsunami? Thomas H. T. Melville III, who’s barely mastered English.”

“He’s…”

“The idiot who started to ask you what it felt like to kill someone.”

Marcy paused, took a pot of gloss from her purse, and rubbed it gently over her lips. Apparently she wanted to know, too, but was too polite to ask outright. Tess opened her own leather satchel and revealed the Beretta that she always kept at hand.

“I didn’t always carry this. Now I do.”

The girl nodded. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Tess, but she seemed to be from another generation or perhaps even a different species, one characterized by boundless confidence and self-esteem. “And I guess you don’t use it as a figure of speech anymore. It would be impossible to say ‘I want to kill so-and-so’ once you’ve done it literally.”

“Yeah,” Tess said absently. “Yeah.” She was thinking, Actually, I want to kill my boyfriend.

“There was one thing you said-about the Youssef case-that didn’t exactly track for me.”

“Yes?” Tess suddenly didn’t feel as kindly inclined toward the girl.

“The federal courthouse is my beat, although all the boys keep trying to bigfoot me on the story. Only nothing’s coming out. It’s not the most leak-happy place under any circumstances, but the discipline on the Youssef murder is remarkable. I can’t get the feds to speak, even off the record, about what a piss-poor job the Howard County cops are doing, and I can’t get the Howard County cops to say anything about what the feds should or shouldn’t be doing.”

“The old divide-and-conquer technique, huh?”

“Exactly. You were probably a good reporter in your day.”

“Merely adequate. But the closemouthed atmosphere you’re describing-that only supports my theory, right?”

“I suppose so.” Marcy frowned. She really was lovely. With a face like that, she probably wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted from men, and the federal bureaucracy was dominated by men, although the acting U.S. attorney was a woman. “The thing is, Youssef was a flirt. I always thought he was kind of hitting on me. But, you know, it would have been unethical to act on it. He was a source.”

“And married.”

“Oh, yeah,” Marcy said, although this seemed a secondary concern to her. The paper’s ethics policy probably didn’t cover adultery, just sex with sources. “Still, he definitely had an eye for women.”

“Good cover for a closeted man, don’t you think? They can be the worst Lotharios of all. Or maybe he was bi. Or his killer could have been a female prostitute. His wife was eight months pregnant at the time. The particulars remain the same. It was vicious, it was personal-and no one wants to talk about it.”

“Maybe,” Marcy said. “I don’t know. In the end it’s so hard to know what goes on in anyone’s head.”

“Keep that kind of talk within these walls. Out there never admit that you don’t know anything. They don’t.”

Emerging from the sanctuary of the ladies’ room, Tess almost tripped over a lurking man, a whey-faced middle-aged version of the young comers she had been instructing all day. Introduced to him that morning, Tess had already forgotten his name, but she retained his bio: a new assistant managing editor, imported from Dallas just a few months ago, according to Feeney. Rumor was that he had been installed by corporate with orders to gut the newsroom budget. When that was accomplished, he would be rewarded with the top job.

“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.”