Once the mix-up over Iran ’s name was cleared up, it wasn’t apparent if Lloyd was listening. Then he asked a question about midway through, a clarification of some plot point. Other than that, he was quiet and thoughtful. The wind seemed to settle down and the sun grew stronger, so the work wasn’t quite as hard on their exposed hands. Before they knew it, they had finished scraping and painting most of the shingles.
“That guy write any other stories?”
“A few,” Crow said.
When the wind kicked up as predicted and they had to suspend painting for the day, Crow prevailed on Edward to come to the library with them. He was paranoid enough to want to avoid using his own card to check out materials, even if it turned out that Delaware and Maryland had some sort of reciprocity agreement between their library systems. A silver-haired volunteer with an accent that reminded Crow of his Virginia roots showed them the library’s books-on-tape, which included several unabridged editions. With the tapes running up to twelve hours, they couldn’t get through more than two in a week of work, and it was hard for Crow to imagine they would be in this limbo much longer than that. He encouraged Lloyd to make one of the selections. Lloyd picked Stephen King’s The Stand, despite Crow’s subtle lobbying for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. “No girls,” Lloyd had said. Crow chose Robert Parker’s Early Autumn, then picked up several books as well-Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which Lloyd seemed to find mildly intriguing after being assured it was the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.
“That was kind of conspicuous,” Edward Keyes said when they were back in Fenwick, sitting down to a lunch of warm soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, made on the hot plate in Frank’s office. Crow had considered his own appetite remarkable until he watched Lloyd consume four sandwiches, three glasses of sweet tea, and most of the Utz chips in under ten minutes.
“What? Choosing Stephen King and Robert Parker? Or buying a boom box with a tape deck to play them?”
“The three of us going up to the South Coastal Library. Me getting a library card after living here almost twenty years without needing one, then helping some white kid and some black kid check out books on tape. They’ll be talking about that for months, up to the library.”
In Baltimore fashion he pronounced it “lie-berry.” The very sound of Edward’s vowels made Crow a little homesick.
“It’s not as if anyone is looking for us,” Crow said. “Not in this, um, configuration. True, the authorities are keen to find Lloyd. Maybe,” he added hurriedly, noting Lloyd’s panicky look. “But as far as everyone else is concerned, I’m down south, looking for bands to book at the Point.”
“I told Spike I’d take you in, no questions asked, and I’m not asking any. I’m just making a few commonsense observations. You’re supposed to be laying low. What you did today-that was about as laying low as a mallard tap-dancing at the edge of a duck blind.”
“Okay, so we won’t go to the library again. We probably won’t need to. I’m sure we’ll have this sorted out in less than a week.”
“No hurry,” Edward said. “It’s not like I’m going to run out of work for you two to do. You might not be able to paint in this breeze, but there’s plenty of other stuff to do around here.”
Crow had been afraid of that.
Jenkins decided to take Gabe to a restaurant where he still had some residual drag, dating back to his first tour of duty in Baltimore. McCafferty’s was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging on its walls. “ Baltimore celebrities”-now, there was a phrase that could never be used without invoking in-the-air quotation marks. But the steaks were excellent and the location obscure, so the likelihood of being overseen or overheard was practically nil.
“What do you think?” Jenkins asked Gabe, who was studying the caricatures with what appeared to be a mix of yearning and contempt. He was a New Yorker. Well, a New Jersey kid, but the biggest snobs often came from across the river. He probably wanted to be up on that wall, but felt sheepish about it, as if he were aiming too low.
“It’s a good New York strip, although a little pinker than I normally like. Restaurants just don’t believe you when you ask for medium, but it’s what I prefer.”
Dumb-shit. “No, I mean about the case. Is there a way we could sort of slide our way in, without actually breaking faith with the county police?”
“Oh, the case.” At least the Youssef investigation excited the kid more than the food in front of him. “If you really want to take it from them, we need to press my kidnapping theory. Although we could argue that the mere fact it appears to be job-related-a federal prosecutor, probably killed on orders of a drug dealer-gives us an entrée as well.”
“Yeah.” Jenkins swirled the red wine in his glass, watched the legs run down the side. He had gotten very enthusiastic about wine for a while there, started learning the basics and the vocabulary, then lost interest. Dinner was going to cost him about $140, and he would have to put it on his personal card, given that none of this was authorized, although he would tell the kid it was on the government. Not that he couldn’t afford it, but it seemed unfair somehow. Why shouldn’t an agent be allowed to take an AUSA to a meal, no questions asked? They were talking about a case, damn it, the murder of a federal prosecutor. But it was that kind of loose thinking about his expense account that had caused Jenkins so much grief when they started gunning for him.
“Yeah,” Jenkins repeated. “Thing is, I’m not so sure we want the case, officially. Not the way it is now.”
“What do you mean?” Oh, the kid was a glory hound, wild for the scent.
“They’re gonna drag her to the county grand jury, right? And she’ll probably give in, tell them what she knows. But that’s too public, too drawn out. It builds expectations-and it gives her too much power. I’d like to get to him-and I’m sure it’s a him, fuck that ‘he-or-she’ shit-before this whole thing gets out of hand. Plus, the trail gets colder every day. She says he’s out of town. With our luck he’ll be in Mexico by the time she gives up the name. She could be stalling us for just that reason.”
Gabe chewed thoughtfully, although not thoroughly. When he opened his mouth to speak, he still had a little steak moving around.
“But what else can we do except wait, if we’re not willing to take the case away from the county cops?”
“You’re a federal prosecutor.”
“Yeah.” Realization was dawning, but it was a slow, ponderous dawn. Jenkins preferred young men who thought a little faster on their feet, but he was stuck with this one.
“Example: Collins did a little door-to-door in her neighborhood yesterday, while we were at the interview. One guy said she had a houseguest recently, a black kid who caused all sorts of problems. I say it’s the source. We figure out who his contact is, this allegedly dead guy, and I’ll bet anything it’s a drug dealer. That links her guest to drug dealing, and that means she had a drug dealer staying under her roof.”
Jenkins turned over the palm of his right hand, gesturing Gabe to follow him. But he was still chewing his undercooked-by-his-standards steak.
“RICO statutes,” Jenkins prompted. “You accuse someone of allowing drugs to be dealt from her house, you can file to seize the house, the car. Once her own assets are threatened, she won’t be all Joan of Arc, will she?”
“Bit of a reach. It presumes that we can figure out who the dead contact is and that he’s a drug dealer.”
“Collins said he could have that name in twenty-four hours,” Jenkins said. “Besides, no harm in bluffing, right? We don’t have to actually do any of this. We just have to make her think that we can. But okay, put RICO aside. We also could have her bank records in a day or two, depending on what bank she uses. So many of our old guys are in security gigs around town, they’d let you eyeball her records, probably, if we tell them the paperwork is coming.”