The Accidental Detective and other stories (14 page)

“Definitely, one of those old-fashioned ones, cast iron. The kind you had to heat.”

“The kind,” Tess said, “that a man's laundress might use.”

“Mebbe. Does it really matter? Does any of this really matter? If it did, would they have taken forty years to find me? I'll tell you this much—if Maurice Dickman had been a white man, I bet I wouldn't have been walking around all this time. He wasn't a nice man, Mr. Dickman, but the police didn't know that. For all they knew, he was a good citizen. A man was killed and nobody cared. Except Edna Buford, peeking through her curtains. They should have found me long ago. Know something else?”

“What?” Tess leaned forward, assuming a confession was about to be made.

“I did put the mayonnaise on that man's shoe. It had been a light day here, and I wanted to pick up a few extra dollars on my way home. I'm usually better about picking my marks, though. I won't make that mistake again.”

A
LAWYER OF
T
ESS'S ACQUAINTANCE
, Tyner Gray, asked that the court throw out the charges against William Harrison on the grounds that his confession was coerced. A plea bargain was offered instead—five years' probation. “I told you so,” Mr. Harrison chortled to Tess, gloating a little at his prescience.

“Lifted up her pretty head and cried,” Tess said.

“What?”

“That's the line I thought you were quoting. You said ‘threw,' but the line was ‘lifted.' I had to feed it through Google a few different ways to nail it, but I did. ‘Miss Otis Regrets.' It's about a woman who kills her lover and is then hanged on the gallows.”

“Computers are interesting,” Mr. Harrison said.

“What did you really want? Were you still trying to protect your sister, as you've protected her all these years? Or were you just trying to get away from her for a while?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about. Mattie did no wrong in our mother's eyes. My mother loved that girl and I loved for my mother to be happy.”

So Martin Tull got his stat and a more or less clean conscience. Miss Harrison got her protective older brother back, along with his Social Security checks.

And Tess got an offer of free shoeshines for life, whenever she was passing through Penn Station. She politely declined Mr. Harrison's gesture. After all, he had already spent forty years at the feet of a woman who didn't know how to show gratitude.

by Laura Lippman
Special to the
Beacon-Light

B
ALTIMORE—Tess Monaghan spends a lot of time thinking about what she calls the relief problem. Not relief to foreign hot spots, although she can become quickly vociferous on almost any political subject you wish to discuss. No, Monaghan, perhaps Baltimore's best-known private investigator, thinks a lot about what we'll call feminine relief.

“If you're a guy on surveillance, you have a lot more options,” she says, sitting in her Butchers Hill office on a recent fall morning and flipping through one of the catalogs that cater to the special needs of investigators and private security firms. Much of this high-tech gadgetry holds little interest for Monaghan, who admits to mild Luddite tendencies. That said, she's so paranoid about caller ID that she uses two cell phones—one for outgoing calls, one for incoming.

“Do you know that the tracks in Delaware, the ones with slot machines, find dozens of adult diapers in the trash every day?” she asks suddenly. “Think about it. There are people who are so crazed for slots that they wear Depends, lest they have to give up a ‘hot' machine. Do you think Bill Bennett wore Depends?” Monaghan, who assumes that others can follow her often jumpy train of thought, has moved on to the former secretary of education, reported to have an almost pathological addiction to slot machines, even as he made millions advocating family values.

“No, no, no,” she decides, not waiting for answers to any of the questions she has posed. “That's why he had the machines brought to him in a private room. Slots—what a pussy way to lose money. Give me the track every time. Horse plus human plus variable track conditions equals a highly satisfying form of interactive entertainment. With gambling, that's the only way to stay sane. You have to think of it as going to a Broadway show in which you have a vested interest in the outcome. Set aside how much you're willing to lose, the way you might decide how much you're willing to pay to go to a sporting event. If you go home with a dollar more than you were willing to lose, you've won.”

So now that Monaghan has held forth on compulsive gambling, adult diapers and, by implication, her own relief needs, could she share a few biographical details? The year she was born, for example?

“No,” she says, with a breezy grin. “You're a reporter, right? Look it up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you can't track down something that basic, you're probably not the right woman for the job.”

Rumor has it that Monaghan loathes the press.

“Rumor,” Monaghan says, “isn't always wrong.”

S
he has been called Baltimore's best-known private detective, Baltimore's hungriest private detective and, just once, Baltimore's most eligible private detective. (Her father went behind her back and entered her into
Baltimore
magazine's annual feature on the city's “hot” singles.) But although her work and its consequences have often been featured in the news, Monaghan, a former reporter, has been surprisingly successful at keeping information about herself out of the public domain. At least until now. Oh yes, Ms. Monaghan, this reporter knows her way around public documents.

Monaghan was born in St. Agnes Hospital, and while official documents disagree on the year, she's undeniably a member of Generation X or Y, a post-boomer born to an unlikely duo who prove the old adage that opposites attract. Patrick Monaghan, described by his daughter as the world's most taciturn Irishman, was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a crowded South Baltimore rowhouse and, later, the Charles Village area.

Meanwhile, Judith Weinstein was the youngest of five from a well-to-do Northwest Baltimore family. She was just entering college when her father's eponymous drugstore chain entered a messy and devastating bankruptcy. Monaghan and Weinstein met via local politics, working on Carlton R. Sickle's failed 1966 bid for the Democratic nomination for governor. The couple remains active in politics; Monaghan remembers riding her tricycle around the old Stonewall Democratic Club as a five-year-old. Her father worked for years as a city liquor inspector, then began running his own club, the Point, which has thrived in an unlikely location on Franklintown Road. Her mother works for the National Security Agency and says she cannot divulge what she does.

“I'm pretty sure she's a secretary,” Monaghan says, “but for all I know she's a jet-setting spy who manages to get home by five thirty every night and put supper on the table.”

The family settled in Ten Hills on the city's west side and Monaghan attended public schools, graduating from Western High School's prestigious A-course and then attending Washington College in Chestertown, where she majored in English. By her testimony, she discovered two lifelong influences on the Eastern Shore—rowing and Whitney Talbot. A member of a very old, very rich and very connected Valley family, Talbot has a work ethic as fierce as the one instilled in Monaghan by her middle-class parents, and the two have long reveled in their competitive friendship.

Upon graduation, Monaghan joined the
Star
as a general assignments reporter, while Talbot—who had transferred to Yale and majored in Japanese—landed a job on the
Beacon-Light
's editorial pages. But Monaghan's timing turned out to be less than felicitous—the
Star
folded before she was twenty-six, and the
Beacon-Light
declined to hire her. Cast adrift, she relied on the kindness of family members to help her make ends meet on her meager freelance salary. She lived in a cheap apartment above her aunt's bookstore in Fells Point and relied on her uncle to throw her assignments for various state agencies. It was in Kitty Monaghan's store, Women and Children First, that she met her current boyfriend, Edward “Crow” Ransome. When she was twenty-nine, she fell into PI work and likes to call herself the “accidental detective,” a riff on Anne Tyler's
The Accidental Tourist.

“Does anyone plan to become a private detective?” Monaghan asks. “It's not a rhetorical question. I suppose somewhere there's a little boy or girl dreaming of life as an investigator, but everyone I know seems to have done some other kind of work first. Lawyer, cop. All I know is I did a favor for a friend, botched it royally, and then tried to help his lawyer get him out of the mess I created. When it was over, the lawyer pressed me to work for him as an investigator, then pushed me out of the nest and all but forced me to open my own agency.”

That lawyer, Tyner Gray, would end up marrying Tess's aunt Kitty. Monaghan pretends to be horrified by this development but seems to have genuine affection for the man who has mentored her since she was in her late twenties.

Her agency, Keys Investigation Inc., is technically co-owned by Edward Keys, a retired Baltimore police detective who seems to spend most of his time in Fenwick Island, Delaware. (Asked to comment for this story, Keys declined repeatedly and would not respond to rumors that he has, in fact, met Monaghan in the flesh only once.) Monaghan appears to be the sole employee on the premises of the onetime dry cleaner's that serves as her office, although she jokes that there are two part-time workers “who have agreed to accept their compensation in dog biscuits.” Those would be Esskay, a retired racing greyhound named for her love of Baltimore's best-known sausage, and Miata, a docile Doberman with infallible instincts about people. “If she had growled at you, I wouldn't have let you over the threshold,” Monaghan says. “I've learned the hard way to trust Miata.”

The office is filled with Baltimore-bilia—the old “Time for a Haircut” clock from a Woodlawn barbershop and several Esskay tins. “People give them to me,” Monaghan says. “I'm not prone to collecting things.”

Has anyone ever commented on the irony that Monaghan, who sits beneath that “Time for a Haircut” clock, once had a most untimely haircut, in which a serial killer sliced off her signature braid? Monaghan shot the man in self-defense, but not before he killed a former transportation cop with whom she was working.

“I don't talk about that,” she says. “I understand you have to ask about it. I was a reporter, and I'd have asked about it, too. But it's something I never discuss.”

Okay, so life and death have been shot down as topics. What would she prefer to talk about?

“Do you think the Orioles are ever going to get it together? One World Series in my lifetime. It's so depressing.”

M
onaghan lives in a renovated cottage on a hidden street alongside Stony Run Park in the prestigious Roland Park neighborhood. That's how she puts it, her voice curlicued with sarcasm: “Welcome to the prestigious Roland Park neighborhood.” The house continues the rather whimsical decorating themes of her office, with a large neon sign that reads “Human Hair.” What is it with Monaghan and hair?

“You're a little overanalytical,” she counters. “One of the liabilities of modern times is that everyone thinks they're fluent in Freudian theory, and they throw the terms around so casually. I don't have much use for psychiatry.”

Has she ever been in therapy?

“Once,” she admits promptly. “Court-ordered. You know what, though? I'd like to reverse myself. In general, I don't have much use for psychiatry and I thought it was bulls--t when they put me in anger management. But it did help, just not in the way it was intended.”

How so?

“It's not important,” she says, reaching for her right knee, a strange nervous tic that has popped up before. “Let's just say that it doesn't hurt sometimes to be a little angry.”

Monaghan is speaking in low tones, trying not to awaken her boyfriend. Six years her junior, Ransome works for Monaghan's father, scouting the musical acts that appear at the father's bar. Ransome's workday ended a mere four hours ago, at 4
A.M.
, while Monaghan's day began at 6
A.M.
with a workout at the local boathouse.

Monaghan and Ransom have been a couple, on and off, for more than four years. Do they plan to marry?

“You know what? You and my mom should get together. You'd really hit it off. She asks me that every day. Ready to experience the exciting life of a private detective?” She draws out the syllables in “exciting” with the same sarcasm she used for “prestigious.”

What's her destination this morning?

“The most wonderful place on earth—the Clarence Mitchell Jr. Courthouse.”

And, truth be told, the courthouse does seem to be a kind of fairyland to Monaghan, who stalks its halls and disappears into various records rooms, greeting many clerks by name. But wouldn't it be more efficient to work from her office? Isn't most of the information online?

“Some,” says Monaghan, who also relies on an online network of female investigators from across the country. “Not all. And there's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the book you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life. Google's great, but it's no substitute for getting out and talking to people. Plus, the courthouse is only a block from Cypriana. So whenever I come here, I can reward myself with a celebratory chicken pita with extra feta cheese.”