Tull shook his head. “One thing. He didn’t know what the murder weapon was. Said he forgot.”
“Well, forty years. It’s possible.”
“Maybe.” Tull, who had already finished his coffee, reached for Tess’s absentmindedly, grimacing when he realized it was a latte. Caffeine was his fuel, his vice of choice, and he didn’t like it diluted in any way.
“Take the easy stat, Martin. Guy’s named in a warrant and he said he did it. He does have a temper, I saw that much. Last night it was a soda can. Forty years ago, it very well could have been an iron.”
“I’ve got a conscience, too, you know.” Tull looked offended.
Tess realized that it wasn’t something she knew that had prompted Tull to call her up, but something he wanted her to do. Yet Tull would not ask her directly because then he would be in her debt. He was a man, after all. But if she volunteered to do what he seemed to want, he would honor her next favor, and Tess was frequently in need of favors.
“I’ll talk to him. See if he’ll open up to his tag-team partner.”
Tull didn’t even so much as nod to acknowledge the offer. It was as if Tess’s acquiescence were a belch, or something else that wouldn’t be commented on in polite company.
THE SHOESHINE MAN—William Harrison, Tess reminded herself, she had a name for him now—lived in a neat bungalow just over the line in what was known as the Woodlawn section of Baltimore County. Forty years ago, Mr. Harrison would have been one of its first black residents and he would have been denied entrance to the amusement park only a few blocks from his house. Now the neighborhood was more black than white, but still middle-class.
A tiny woman answered the door to Mr. Harrison’s bungalow, her eyes bright and curious.
“Mrs. Harrison?”
“Miss.” There was a note of reprimand for Tess’s assumption.
“My name is Tess Monaghan. I met your brother two nights ago in the, um, fracas.”
“Oh, he felt so bad about that. He said it was shameful, how the only person who wanted to help him was a girl. He found it appalling.”
She drew out the syllables of the last word as if it gave her some special pleasure.
“It was so unfair what happened to him. And then this mix-up with the warrant…”
The bright catlike eyes narrowed a bit. “What do you mean by ‘mix-up’?”
“Mr. Harrison just doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who could kill someone.”
“Well, he says he was.” Spoken matter-of-factly, as if the topic were the weather or something else of little consequence. “I knew nothing about it, of course. The warrant or the murder.”
“Of course,” Tess agreed. This woman did not look like someone who had been burdened with a loved one’s secret for four decades. Where her brother was stooped and grave, she had the regal posture of a short woman intent on using every inch given her. But there was something blithe, almost gleeful, beneath her dignity. Did she not like her brother?
“It was silly of William”—she stretched the name out, giving it a grand, growling pronunciation, Will-yum—“to tell his story and sign the statement, without even talking to a lawyer. I told him to wait, to see what they said, but he wouldn’t.”
“But if you knew nothing about it…”
“Nothing about it until two nights ago,” Miss Harrison clarified. That was the word that popped into Tess’s head, “clarified,” and she wondered at it. Clarifications were what people made when things weren’t quite right.
“And were you shocked?”
“Oh, he had a temper when he was young. Anything was possible.”
“Is your brother at home?”
“He’s at work. We still have to eat, you know.” Now she sounded almost angry. “He didn’t think of that, did he, when he decided to be so noble. I told him, this house may be paid off, but we still have to eat and buy gas for my car. Did you know they cut your Social Security off when you go to prison?”
Tess did not. She had relatives who were far from pure, but they had managed to avoid doing time. So far.
“Well,” Miss Harrison said, “they do. But Will-yum didn’t think of that, did he? Men are funny that way. They’re so determined to be gallant”—again, the word was spoken with great pleasure, the tone of a child trying to be grand—“that they don’t think things through. He may feel better, but what about me?”
“Do you have no income, then?”
“I worked as a laundress. You don’t get a pension for being a laundress. My brother, however, was a custodian for Social Security, right here in Woodlawn.”
“I thought he shined shoes.”
“Yes, now.” Miss Harrison was growing annoyed with Tess. “But not always. William was enterprising, even as a young man. He worked as a custodian at Social Security, which is why he has Social Security. But he took on odd jobs, shined shoes. He hates to be idle. He won’t like prison, no matter what he thinks.”
“He did odd jobs for the man he killed, right?”
“Some. Not many. Really, hardly any at all. They barely knew each other.”
Miss Harrison seemed to think this mitigated the crime somehow, that the superficiality of the relationship excused her brother’s deed.
“Police always thought it was a burglary?” Tess hoped her tone would invite a confidence, or at least another clarification.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. That, too. Things were taken. Everyone knew that.”
“So you were familiar with the case, but not your brother’s connection to it?”
“Well, I knew the man. Maurice Dickman. We lived in the neighborhood, after all. And people talked, of course. It was a big deal, murder, forty years ago. Not the happenstance that it’s become. But he was a showy man. He thought awfully well of himself, because he had money and a business. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made such a spectacle of himself and then no one would have tried to steal from him. You know what the Bible says, about the rich man and the camel and the eye of the needle? It’s true, you know. Not always, but often enough.”
“Why did your brother burglarize his home? Was that something else he did to supplement his paycheck? Is that something he still does?”
“My brother,” Miss Harrison said, drawing herself up so she gained yet another inch, “is not a thief.”
“But—”
“I don’t like talking to you,” she said abruptly. “I thought you were on our side, but I see now I was foolish. I know what happened. You called the police. You talked about pressing charges. If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened. You’re a terrible person. Forty years, and trouble never came for us, and then you undid everything. You have brought us nothing but grief, which we can ill afford.”
She stamped her feet, an impressive gesture, small though they were. Stamped her feet and went back inside the house, taking a moment to latch the screen behind her, as if Tess’s manners were so suspect that she might try to follow where she clearly wasn’t wanted.
THE SHOESHINE MAN DID WORK at Penn Station, after all, stationed in front of the old-fashioned wooden seats that always made Tess cringe a bit. There was something about one man perched above another that didn’t sit quite right with her, especially when the other man was bent over the enthroned one’s shoes.
Then again, pedicures probably looked pretty demeaning, too, depending on one’s perspective.
“I’m really sorry, Mr. Harrison, about the mess I’ve gotten you into.” She had refused to sit in his chair, choosing to lean against the wall instead.
“Got myself into, truth be told. If I hadn’t thrown that soda can, none of this would have happened. I could have gone another forty years without anyone bothering me.”
“But you could go to prison.”
“Looks that way.” He was almost cheerful about it.
“You should get a lawyer, get that confession thrown out. Without it, they’ve got nothing.”
“They’ve got a closed case, tha
t’s what they’ve got. A closed case. And maybe I’ll get probation.”
“It’s not a bad bet, but the stakes are awfully high. Even with a five-year sentence, you might die in prison.”
“Might not,” he said.
“Still, your sister seems pretty upset.”
“Oh, Mattie’s always getting upset about something. Our mother thought she was doing right by her, teaching her those Queen of Sheba manners, but all she did was make her perpetually disappointed. Now if Mattie had been born just a decade later, she might have had a different life. But she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and that’s that.”
“She did seem…refined,” Tess said, thinking of the woman’s impeccable appearance and the way she loved to stress big words.
“She was raised to be a lady. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lady’s job. No shame in washing clothes, but no honor in it either, not for someone like Mattie. She should have stayed in school, become a teacher. But Mattie thought it would be easy to marry a man on the rise. She just didn’t figure that a man on the rise would want a woman on the rise, too, that the manners and the looks wouldn’t be enough. A man on the rise doesn’t want a woman to get out of his bed and then wash his sheets, not unless she’s already his wife. Mattie should never have dropped out of school. It was a shame, what she gave up.”
“Being a teacher, you mean.”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone vague and faraway. “Yeah. She could have gone back, even after she dropped out, but she just stomped her feet and threw back that pretty head of hers. Threw back her pretty head and cried.”
“Threw back her pretty head and cried—why does that sound familiar?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Threw back her pretty head…I know that, but I can’t place it.”
“Couldn’t help you.” He began whistling a tune, “Begin the Beguine.”
“Mr. Harrison—you didn’t kill that man, did you?”
“Well, now I say I did, and why would anyone want to argue with me? And I was seen coming from his house that night, sure as anything. That neighbor, Edna Buford, she didn’t miss a trick on that block.”
“What did you hit him with?”
“An iron,” he said triumphantly. “An iron!”
“You didn’t know that two days ago.”
“I was nervous.”
“You were anything but, from what I hear.”
“I’m an old man. I don’t always remember what I should.”
“So it was an iron?”
“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 TESS’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.
THE ACCIDENTAL DETECTIVE
by Laura Lippman
Special to the Beacon-Light
BALTIMORE—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.”
BALTIMORE BORN, BRED AND BUTTERED
She 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.
Hardly Knew Her Page 20