“I’m prepared to make a deal with you. You get your husband’s safe-deposit box open, find out what’s in it-and then I’ll name my informant.”

Okay, she would name Lloyd in a few days in order to avoid prosecution on the mortgage charge. It was still the truth. Why shouldn’t she leverage it any way she could?

“What do the two things have to do with each other?”

“Nothing, probably. But I want to be sure of that. See, I’ve been thinking. Someone made your husband’s death look like what it wasn’t. So then we all jumped to the conclusion that it must be the other, a virtuous prosecutor cut down for his work. Maybe that’s not it either.”

Wilma was one of those fair, thin-skinned blondes who blushed readily and deeply from emotion.

“I’ve lived through the past five months with all this crap innuendo about my husband, delivered our child even as the nurses were gossiping about Greg. Was he gay? Did he have a lover? You, better than anyone, should know that my husband was murdered because of something he had worked on. Why do you persist in protecting these people?”

“These people?”

Once in full blush, a person can hardly moderate the meaning of the blood that has rushed to the face. But Tess thought she saw a flicker of shame in Wilma’s expression.

“Drug dealers, I mean. Criminals.”

Tess plopped herself into the chair opposite Wilma’s desk, tired of waiting for an invitation. “My source isn’t pure, I’ll grant you that. In fact, if the informant in this case didn’t have a record, I doubt I would have ever extracted any information to begin with. But the source isn’t a drug dealer, I can guarantee you that.”

“Still-”

Tess had read of people tossing their heads but seldom seen it done with any true flair. Wilma, however, managed to execute the gesture with style, lifting her chin with the force of a skittish racehorse being led into post position at Pimlico. Too bad that her blond hair was too short and too lacquered with spray to make a satisfactory mane.

“Still,” Tess echoed. “You mean there’s your husband’s death, which matters, and the life of my informant, which matters to you not at all.”

“My husband is dead. Your informant is a lowlife who needs to be coerced into doing his civic duty.”

“Less than forty-eight hours after the newspaper article appeared-the one that detailed how your husband’s ATM card was handed over, along with the code and explicit instructions on how and when to use it-a teenager was killed in Baltimore. Shot to death while standing on a corner.”

“So?”

“So the kid, Le’andro Watkins, was the one who was supposed to handle the ATM card, but he passed it on to someone else-my source. My source talks, Le’andro is killed.”

“These things happen.”

“Exactly. Young black kids get shot and killed in East Baltimore. And, by the way, men who live secret lives sometimes end up on the wrong side of a trick, too. ‘These things happen.’ But what if they’re happening this time because someone knows what it looks like, how the crimes will be perceived? We have two homicides that are meant to look like something they’re not. That’s the connection.”

Wilma was settling down, listening to Tess’s words, allowing intellect to trump emotion. Met under the best of circumstances, Wilma Youssef was never going to be a kindred spirit. She struck Tess as incurious and self-centered, a woman who lived her entire life as if she inhabited some abstract gated community where all evil could be kept at bay. Her religious beliefs and early good fortune in life had made her smug, dogmatic.

But for Tess to dismiss her because they agreed on so little would be no different from Wilma’s disdain for “those people.” She was a widow, a single mother trying to perform in a job that was demanding and exhausting under any conditions. She yearned for the truth, but she was terrified of it, too.

And that, more than anything, seemed to Tess the universal human condition.

“If I open the box and what’s inside doesn’t have any relevance to Greg’s death, will you agree to keep it confidential?”

Tess wondered just where Wilma’s imagination had taken her over the past few months. Some very dark places, no doubt, places far scarier than any gossiping nurse could imagine.

“Absolutely. But we need to expedite this, okay? I don’t know how it’s done-you’re the lawyer-but there’s got to be a way for you, as your husband’s heir, to get into that safe-deposit box quickly. Maybe a judge in Orphans’ Court, maybe-”

“A judge already has ruled,” Wilma said, sheepish for once. “It’s actually pretty automatic when a spouse dies. In fact, the bank has told me they’ll open it for me whenever I can make it in.”

“So why haven’t you examined its contents if you had the right all along?”

Wilma shook her head, clearly not trusting herself to speak for a few seconds, then said, “Pandora’s box, you know? I’m scared what might be unleashed.”

“Hope was in Pandora’s box, too. Don’t forget that. The last thing that came out was hope.”

28

Gabe could tell that Collins was surprised by the invite-a drink? just the two of us?-prompting another bout of anxiety for Gabe. What if he really does think I’m a fag? The rejoinder in his head-but he’s black, and I’m not into black chicks, so why would I be into black guys?-made him feel only more squirmy and strange. Even on the telephone with Collins, he felt awkward and tongue-tied, like he was a teenager calling a girl.

But all Collins said, after an interminable pause, was “Okay, where?”

Even that simple question provoked another round of second-guessing. It had to be a guy-guy place, but not so obvious a guy place that it would look like Gabe was insecure about that stuff. Besides, a sports bar would be too rowdy for conversation.

“Um, that martini bar? The new one on Canton Square?”

“Sure,” Collins said. “What time?”

“Eight?”

Shit, he had to figure out a way to stop speaking in questions around the guy. He decided to get to the bar early, so he’d have a drink in progress, be in control of the situation. But the lack of street parking undermined him, and he arrived fifteen minutes late, which clearly irritated Collins. Gabe’s rushed apology, his explanation that he had parked far away, didn’t seem to help much.

But once Gabe got going, laid out the connections he had uncovered, he could tell that Collins was impressed.

“Do you know for a fact that this Keyes guy helped to hide the source and her boyfriend?”

“No, but we always figured they went by car, right? It’s the beach, off season. The locals probably notice every out-of-towner, especially some salt-and-pepper combo.”

Shit, what he wouldn’t have given to take that back.

Collins took a long swallow of his Heineken. He was drinking from a glass, which made Gabe feel as if there were something unmanly about settling for a bottle, Sam Adams at that, although he was drinking shots of Jameson on the side.

“What makes you so sure,” Collins said, “that the informant is black? The fact that he bought Nikes at the Downtown Locker Room? Could be some punk-ass whigger, you know.”

“Um, I didn’t-Imean…”

Collins smiled, gave him a playful punch in the shoulder, one hard enough to leave a bruise. “I’m just busting balls. Of course the source is a black kid. Just like…”

“Just like?”

“Just like the ATM photo. Can’t see his face, but we can see his hands.”

“Right,” Gabe said. “Of course.” He wasn’t a bigot. He had simply forgotten how he knew what he knew.

“You keeping this close, this insight to where they might be? Or have you gone to Schulian, opened up an official file?”

“Hell, no. It’s our secret so far. I haven’t even told Jenkins.” Gabe was feeling the rush of camaraderie now, burbling in spite of himself. “I gotta say, I don’t have utter confidence in him. Those FBI guys are so full of themselves. I mean, what’s he ever done? You, you’ve been out there, did undercover. You risked your life.” He sensed he was entering dangerous territory, but he decided to chance it. “That was bullshit, what they put you through.”