Part 25 (2/2)

”Did you...?”

”I can't talk to you. You're FBI, right? Barry Jenkins. Tess sent us pictures of you. Are you crooked, too? Were you part of this?”

Jenkins took out his service weapon.

”s.h.i.+t,” Ed said. ”Give it up, man. It's over.”

Jenkins could blame it all on Collins, of course. Pretend ignorance. Say he'd been duped as everyone else had, that it was Youssef's plan and Collins had killed him. That had been built into the equation from the beginning. No one could link Barry Jenkins to anything directly-not Bennie Tep, not Youssef, no one. True, he'd been there the night Youssef died, driven behind Collins up the highway to the turnpike exit where they dumped the car, and the very setup suggested an accomplice. But no one could prove it was him. Except Collins.

”Is he dead?”

The boyfriend, what's-his-name, considered the question and nodded.

”How?”

”I'd prefer to wait for the local police and an attorney before I say anything else.” Even now the old man was moving toward the phone. Like Jenkins gave a s.h.i.+t.

Jenkins pointed his gun at the boy. ”Tell me your name.”

”I'm calling 911,” the old cop roared, grabbing the phone. ”Don't think that I won't.”

”Just your name. That's all I want. Tell me who you are.”

”Lloyd Jupiter,” the boy whispered. He was trembling, the little s.h.i.+t.

Jenkins thought fleetingly of going outside. But Jenkins was afraid he would lose his nerve if he took another step, and he was determined to do the right thing, the honorable thing, as awful as it was.

”Lloyd Jupiter,” he echoed.

With that, Barry Jenkins nodded, put his weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

MAY.

34.

I almost made it,” Tess says to me, perhaps for the twentieth time. It's something of a sore point.

”Almost,” I agree, crus.h.i.+ng the Metro section of the Beacon-Light into a ball and tossing it into a trash can. Two men were killed in Baltimore yesterday, their deaths dutifully reported on page B-3. Meanwhile City Man is on the cover of the Maryland section again, arrested by federal agents for alleged ties to terrorists.

In other words, in the immortal words of the Talking Heads-same as it ever was. But Tess can't let go of that night in particular, or the past in general. That's what makes her a true Baltimorean.

”The thing is, there's this sign, at the intersection of 26 and 20, tells you to go right to Fenwick? But 20 takes you around to the south end. I would have been better off going through Bethany and then heading down the coastal highway. And I still got there before the Delaware police, although not before...''

”Uh-huh.”

We're sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer, as we've done every Monday, hoping to get lucky. The afternoon lunch service has just started, and the line is long, because Holy Redeemer is serving chicken and word travels fast. People come from as far as West Baltimore on Chicken Day.

”I mean, I thought it out. I had a plan. They were going to be in Baltimore, waiting for me, while I went and got you. I kept trying to call you, too, just in case anyone beat me there-but your G.o.dd.a.m.n cell phone was off.”

”It lost the charge.”

”Whatever. All that folderol with the phones, and do you realize we never once spoke on them? That they were off, or out of range, or out of juice-”

”I know, Tess. I overthought it.”

It isn't-for once-that she has to prove she's right. Tess needs absolution. She feels bad about my nose, which is healing just fine with no damage to the sinuses, and that's all I care about. It isn't quite as straight as it once was, but I like the b.u.mp. Makes me look like more of a tough guy. It was just that night, seeing me all b.l.o.o.d.y and f.u.c.ked up in Ed's trailer, that threw Tess. She came galloping in, gun drawn, not even two minutes after Jenkins killed himself, frantic because she recognized the boxy sedan parked outside. Now you know how it feels, I wanted to say.

And I know how she felt, so it all evens out.

My nose is just a portion of Tess's guilt. She thinks this is all her fault. If she hadn't decided to track down Lloyd and force him to tell what he knew about Greg Youssef, none of this-the deaths of Gabe Dalesio and Le'andro Watkins-would have happened. But if I hadn't brought Lloyd home in the first place...if Lloyd hadn't slashed my tire...if I hadn't borrowed the Lexus that day because the brakes on my Volvo were squishy...if I hadn't concealed my inheritance from Tess, making it difficult to explain to her how I could afford to fix my squishy brakes. The bottom line is, if it doesn't snow on that particular Monday in March, none of this happens. But it did, and it has, and that's that. We'll keep circling back to the subject again and again, each making the case for our central role. My fault. No, my fault. But I also know that there is as much ego as guilt in this argument, and time will wear it down. Eventually. If you think about it, Tess and I actually came in at the end of this story. The people who should feel guilty aren't alive. And I don't think Mike Collins ever felt much of anything, although there was something akin to remorse and sorrow in Barry Jenkins's face that night.

The question is whether he felt it for himself and the failure of his grand scheme or for the people who had died because of it. I suppose it could have been both.

Strange to say, the worst part of the whole ordeal wasn't that night on the beach, when I at least had adrenaline on my side. The scary part was the three days when I was held for the death of Mike Collins. Killing a DEA agent is serious stuff, even if you can persuasively make the case that he was going to execute an innocent kid in front of your eyes, even if you had good reason to think he was going to kill you as well. No one believes in law and order more than those charged with keeping it, and things were rough for Lloyd and me those first seventy-two hours in Delaware. But Tess's call to Martin Tull proved helpful, along with the information about how hard Jenkins and Collins had pressed her for Lloyd's name. Turns out Jenkins had wormed his way into the Youssef investigation, but Collins had no official role, and it was beyond bizarre that an FBI agent and a DEA agent were working together. Nothing to get a bureaucracy's attention like the flouting of its own precious rules.

And when investigators started discovering the a.s.sets in the two agents' names, it began to come together. Wilma was the one who delineated it for us, who saw how easy it would be for federal agents to blackmail a drug dealer who was at no risk of indictment. They were stickup men with badges instead of guns. Wilma made a semiclean breast of things, telling investigators she had found fifty thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in her husband's name. ”Triple that,” Tess told me, but she kept still. Me, I think that Wilma's motive wasn't greed so much as spin. The smaller the amount, the more likely it was that her dead husband was a blackmailer instead of a full-fledged coconspirator. It may seem like a silly distinction, but I'm not going to begrudge her that. We all need certain myths to get by.

”Are you going to tell Lloyd about the money?” Tess asks me. ”Your money, I mean.”

”First I just want to find him.”

Secrets are corrosive. Remember that. Oh, I suppose it's okay to conceal birthday gifts and Christmas and other pleasant surprises, but every other deception leads to rot. If I had told Tess about my inheritance when I came into the trust at the beginning of this year, then it wouldn't have mushroomed into such a big deal. But I hated the money, loathed the very thought of it. It was blood money twice over, and I couldn't bring myself to speak of it.

The first part of the story, Tess knew. Years ago my grandfather had disinherited my mother for running off with my father. Grandfather-and it was always ”Grandfather,” nothing shorter or sweeter-saw money as a cudgel, a whip, a means of control. He thought he could bend my mother to his will with it. Much to his surprise, my mother was perfectly happy with her life as a professor's wife. But after I was born, she sent me to her father in the summers, an olive branch of sorts, an indication that she was willing to make amends if he would meet her halfway. Unfortunately, my grandfather saw me as another weapon, another way to punish my mother. He made me heir to a trust that she had to administer, thinking that would shame and hurt her. My mother didn't mind, but I did. I hated being a p.a.w.n in the old man's game.

And that was before my mother told me last fall, just before I came into the trust, that it was time I knew the origins of the family's fortunes.

”Whaling,” I said. ”Grandfather never shut up about it.” My Nantucket summers had included a lot of briefings on my ancestors.

”Whaling in the nineteenth century,” she said. ”But earlier, in the eighteenth...well, they had started with a very different kind of cargo.”

”Oh.”

Growing up in Charlottesville, I had gone to schools with various Lees and Jacksons and Stuarts, marveled at cla.s.smates who actually looked forward to joining the Sons of the Confederacy. I always wondered how they lived with their family's legacies. And now it turned out my own history was just as complex. A million dollars. Did time wash money clean of its sins? Was I culpable for my ancestors' moral relativism, in which the men enabled the slave trade and the women then protested it, achieving some kind of karmic equipoise? And wasn't I guilty of the same kind of hypocrisy, giving it away a dollar a time but not ready to relinquish it whole? My very approach to philanthropy was cavalier, ill-conceived. My Monday-morning food drive, which recycles food from area bars and restaurants? Pure bulls.h.i.+t. I drive down to the wholesale market in Jessup and buy what I think the soup kitchens can use. Without me there is no Chicken Day at Holy Redeemer. I was straddling, too.

Charlotte Curtis, the director at Holy R, says Lloyd is in the wind again. He tried to go home, but it was the old Thomas Wolfe story. Within days he and Murray had clashed and he was back to his old life-scamming, loafing, scrounging. Lloyd turns seventeen this summer, and he missed most of tenth grade. How can anyone reasonably expect to help Lloyd if he won't help himself?

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