“How?”
He had her there. Tess didn’t have a clue how the technology worked.
“It’s like a phone, sort of, only it’s attached to a computer keyboard. Didn’t they have computers at your school?”
“Yeah, but they didn’t always work and we just used them to, like, write stuff. I been on the Internet at the public library a couple of times, but that was before you needed a library card to use it.” The topic seemed to embarrass him, and his eyes slid away from hers, toward the piles of paper that had migrated back to her office when she finished prepping late yesterday. “Is that your boyfriend?”
He was pointing to the photo of Gregory Youssef, which topped her file on the case, and it took enormous effort on Tess’s part not to laugh. Other than dark hair, Crow and Youssef shared absolutely no resemblance. White men must all look alike to Lloyd.
“That’s the federal prosecutor who was killed.”
Another blank look with no follow-up.
“Right before Thanksgiving. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah, when they jacked everybody up.”
It was Tess’s turn to look confused.
“They, like, picked up every player in the neighborhood, took ’em downtown on all kinda bullshit. Then, like that”-he snapped his fingers-“they let ’em all go. Most of ’em, at least. Some they put charges on, just for the hell of it, or ’cause they was paper on ’em. But they knew all along it wasn’t any of them that messed with him.”
Of course, Tess thought. In the first forty-eight hours, when it was assumed Youssef’s death was job-related, they had probably looked closely at his drug cases, then released the men they had detained without so much as an apology.
“They decided his death didn’t have anything to do with being a prosecutor after all,” she said. “The investigation indicated it was personal.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Not exactly.”
“So they ever find who done it? They usually pretty good at finding out who kills white people.”
There was no edge of resentment in Lloyd’s voice, no political undertone. He was speaking a simple fact. A private-school teacher had been shot and killed in the parking lot of a suburban mall just this month, and suspects had been in custody within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile the board listing Baltimore City ’s homicide victims-mostly young black men-was flush with red, the color used to indicate open cases.
“No, they’ve yet to make an arrest in the death of Gregory Youssef.”
“You-who?” His voice cracked a little.
“Gregory Youssef, the prosecutor. His murder remains unsolved. That guy.” She tapped the photo.
Lloyd turned his attention back to the computer screen, his posture rigid, his fingers poised above the keys like a bird’s talons, curved and prehensile. He seemed not offended but suddenly annoyed by Tess’s presence, irritable. “How come the horses can’t move straight?”
“The knights. And I don’t know the whys of chess. Crow’s good at it, but it doesn’t play to my strengths. I suck at what our chief executive calls strategery. I prefer the Pickett’s Charge approach to life.”
“What?”
“ Gettysburg?” It didn’t seem to register. “The Civil War?”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
“ Gettysburg was one of the pivotal battles in the war, the so-called high tide of the Confederacy. Pickett went straight up the middle-and lost all his men.”
“Well, that was ignorant,” Lloyd said, and Tess really couldn’t disagree. Truth be told, she had no admiration of Pickett, and she had related the story just to make conversation. Her tactics were quite the opposite of Robert E. Lee’s. She wanted to lead Lloyd back to the story of Gregory Youssef, and she didn’t dare do that too directly. How could one know the name but not his face, or the larger story of his death?
But the name had clearly meant something to Lloyd-something that terrified him.
“So,” she said, coming into the kitchen and closing the old-fashioned swinging door behind her. When she had overseen the renovation of the house, her father and Crow had tried to persuade her to create a great-room effect, allowing the living room, dining room, and kitchen to blend into each other. But Tess had decided to respect the bungalow’s old divisions. Tess liked walls. “What the hell are you up to?”
“Nothing but lamb stew.”
“We can’t run a shelter, Crow. Not for even one kid.”
“Tomorrow I’ll take him by South Baltimore Station or someplace like that, see what they can do for him. But I couldn’t leave him out there tonight.”
“South Baltimore Station is for adult addicts in recovery, and it has a waiting list. Does he have a substance-abuse problem?”
“I don’t get that vibe from him.”
“He seems to be familiar with neighborhood dealers. He knew they all got ‘jacked up’ when investigators thought Youssef’s murder was connected to his job. The very mention of Youssef’s name made him jumpy and anxious.”
“Knowing drug dealers in his part of Baltimore is like knowing Junior Leaguers in Roland Park. You make small talk with plenty of young Muffys and Paiges down at Evergreen Coffee House, but that doesn’t mean you put on a big hat and sell lemon sticks at the Flower Mart.”
“Fair enough. But he’s a dropout who tried to cadge money out of you, changing a tire that he punctured.”
“No, another guy did it. He just bird-dogged that guy’s scam. It’s very enterprising, if you think about it.”
“That’s a distinction of little difference, Crow. What do you really know about this kid? Just who have you brought under my-our-roof?”
“Taste this.” Crow spooned a little lamb in her mouth, but all the rosemary and garlic in the world couldn’t distract her.
“One night only,” she said. “Then he goes.”
Summoned to dinner, Lloyd said a brief prayer over his food, which made Tess squirm a little at how much she took for granted in her life. And someone had dinged manners into him along the way, although the job wasn’t entirely finished. He gamely tried the lamb stew, chewing as if he were being forced to consume balsa wood but ultimately cleaning his plate. He then poked at the salad, clearly suspicious of the dark green leaves and toasted nuts.
“This lettuce go bad?” he asked Crow.
“It’s spinach. We eat it for the lutein.”
Lloyd pointed with his fork. “This a peanut?”
“Pistachio.”
“For real?” He shrugged and ate it, without enthusiasm, but also without resistance. When he took a bite out of the chipotle corn muffins that Crow had made from scratch, however, he bellowed as if something had bitten him.
“I thought they was cornbread,” he said after gulping down half his glass of water-tap water this time, at his request. “Shit’s all hot and spicy.”
“They’re corn muffins with chilies in the batter,” Crow apologized. “They just caught you off guard.”
“My mother says right people put sugar in their cornbread,” Lloyd said as if announcing a core belief on a par with monotheism. “I coulda eaten cornbread without sugar, but this shit is just wrong.”
“Where is your mother?” Tess asked. “What’s her name?”
Ignoring her, Lloyd tried another bite, and it did seem to go down easier now that he knew what to expect. And he had no quarrel with dessert-a choice of chocolate, pistachio, or strawberry ice cream from Moxley’s, served with homemade brownies. His plate cleared, he stood to return to his chess game.
“Want to give me a hand cleaning up?” Crow asked in his easygoing way.
“You cooked. Why doesn’t she clean?”
“Sometimes she does. But Mondays are my day off and she worked today, so I don’t mind carrying the full load.”
Lloyd looked at Tess, sitting at the table with her glass of wine, scratching Esskay behind one ear. “Did you go spying today?”