The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  “SHOW ME THE REAL DUBLIN,” she said to Rory later that afternoon, feeling bold. They had just had sex for the sixth time, and if anything, he seemed to be even more intent on her needs.

  “This is real,” he said. “The hotel is real. I’m real. How much more Dublin do you need?”

  “I’m worried there’s something I’m missing.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re not.”

  “Something authentic, I mean. Something the tourists never see.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Like a pub?”

  “That’s a start.”

  So he took her to a pub, but she couldn’t see how it was different from any other pub she had visited on her own. And Rory didn’t seem to know anyone, although he tried to smoke and professed great surprise at the new antismoking laws. “I smoke here all the time,” he bellowed in more or less mock outrage, and she laughed, but no one else did. From the pub, they went to a rather sullen restaurant, and when the check arrived, he was a bit slow to pick it up.

  “I don’t have a credit card on me,” he said at last—sheepishly, winningly—and she let Barry pay.

  Back in bed, things were still fine. So they stayed there more and more, although the weather was perversely beautiful, so beautiful that the various hotel staffers who visited the room kept commenting on it.

  “You’ve been cheated,” said the room service waiter. “Ask for your money back. It’s supposed to rain every day, not pour down sunlight like this. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.”

  “And is there no place you’d like to go, then?” the chambermaid asked when they refused her services for the third day running, maintaining they didn’t need a change of sheets or towels.

  Then the calls began, gentle but firm, running up the chain of command until they were all but ordered out of the room, so the staff could have a chance to freshen it. They went, blinking in the bright light, sniffing suspiciously at the air, so fresh and light after the recirculated air of their room, which was now a bit thick with smoke. After a few blocks, they went into a department store, where he fingered the sleeves of soccer jerseys. Football, she corrected herself. Football jerseys.

  “Where do you live?” she asked Rory, but only because it seemed that someone should be saying something.

  “I have a room.”

  “A bed-sit?” She had heard the phrase somewhere, perhaps in a British novel, and was proud of being able to use it. Although, come to think of it, Ireland and Great Britain were not the same, so the slang might not apply.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She must have used it wrong.

  “I like this one.” He indicated a red-and-white top. She had the distinct impression that he expected her to buy it for him. Did he think she was rich? That was understandable, given the hotel room, her easy way with room service, not to mention the minibar over the past few days. All on Barry, but Rory didn’t know that.

  Still, it seemed a bit cheesy to hint like this, although she had played a similar game with Barry in various stores and her only regret was that she hadn’t taken him for more, especially when it came to jewelry. Trips and meals were ephemeral and only true high-fashion clothing—the classics, authentic couture—increased in value. She was thirty-one. (Or thirty, possibly thirty-two.) She had only a few years left in which to reap the benefits of her youth and her looks. Of course, she might marry well, but she was beginning to sense she might not. She did not inspire matrimony, not that she had been trying. Then again, it was when you didn’t care that men wanted to marry you. What would happen as thirty-five closed in? Would she regret not accepting the proposals made, usually when she was in a world-class sulk? Marriage to a man like Barry had once seemed a life sentence. But what would she do instead? She really hadn’t thought this out as much as she should.

  “Let’s go back to the room,” she said abruptly. “They must have cleaned it by now.”

  They hadn’t, not quite, so they sat in the bar, drinking and waiting. It was early to drink, she realized, but only by American standards. In Rory’s company, she had been drinking at every meal except breakfast and she wasn’t sure she had been completely sober for days.

  Back in the room, Rory headed for the television set, clicking around with the remote control, then throwing it down in disgust. “I can’t get any scores,” he said.

  “But they have a crawl—”

  “Not the ones I want, I mean.” He looked around the room, restless and bored, and seemed to settle on her only when he had rejected everything else—the minibar, the copy of that morning’s Irish Times, a glossy magazine. Even then, his concentration seemed to fade midway through and he patted her flank. She pretended not to understand, so he patted her again, less gently, and she rolled over. Rory was silent during sex, almost grimly so, but once her back was to him, he began to grunt and mutter in a wholly new way and when he finished, he breathed a name into the nape of her neck.

  Trouble was, it wasn’t hers. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but she recognized the distinct lack of her syllables—no “Bluh” to begin, no gentle hiss at the end.

  “What?” she asked. It was one thing to be a stand-in for Barry, when he was footing the bills, to play the ghost of Moira. But she would be damned before she would allow a freeloader such as Rory the same privilege.

  “What?” he echoed, clearly having no idea what she meant.

  “Whose name are you saying?”

  “Why, Millie. Like in the novel Ulysses. I was pretending you were Millie and I was Bloom.”

  “It’s Molly, you idiot. Even I know that.”

  “Molly. That’s what I said. A bit of playacting. No harm in that.”

  “Bullshit. I’m not even convinced that it was a woman’s name you were saying.”

  “Fuck you. I don’t do guys.”

  His accent had changed—flattened, broadened. He now sounded as American as she did.

  “Where are you from?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you live in Dublin?”

  “Of course I do. You met me here, didn’t you?”

  “Where do you live? What do you do?”

  “Why, here. And this.” He tried to shove a hand beneath her, but she felt sore and unsettled, and she pushed him away.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve made you happy, haven’t I? Okay, so I’m not Irish-Irish. But my, like, ancestors were. And we’ve had fun, haven’t we? I’ve treated you well. I’ve earned my keep.”

  Bliss glanced in the mirror opposite the bed. She thought she knew what men saw when they looked at her. She had to know; it was her business, more or less. She had always paid careful attention to every aspect of her appearance—her skin, her hair, her body, her clothes. It was her only capital and she had lived off the interest, careful never to deplete the principle. She exercised, ate right, avoided drugs, and, until recently, drank only sparingly—enough to be fun, but not enough to wreck her complexion. She was someone worth having, a woman who could captivate desirable men—economically desirable men, that is—while passing hot hors d’oeuvres or answering a phone behind the desk at an art gallery.

  But this was not the woman Rory had seen, she was realizing. Rory had not seen a woman at all. He had seen clothes. He had seen her shoes, high-heeled Christian Lacroixs that were hell on the cobblestones. And her bag, a Marc Jacobs slung casually over the shoulder of a woman who could afford to be casual about an $800 bag because she had far more expensive ones back home. Only “home” was Barry’s apartment, she realized, and lord knows what he had done with her things. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet alerted the credit card company, because he was back in New York, destroying all her things. He would be pissed about the T-shirts, she realized somewhat belatedly. They were authentic vintage ones, not like the fakes everyone else was wearing now, purchased at Fred Segal last January.

  And then she had brought Rory back to this room, this place of unlimited room service and the sumptuous breakfasts and the “H
ave-whatever-you-like-from-the-minibar” proviso. She had even let him have the cashews.

  “You think I’m rich,” she said.

  “I thought you looked like someone who could use some company,” Rory said, stretching and then rising from the bed.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  He was she, she was Barry. How had this happened? She was much too young to be an older woman and nowhere near rich enough.

  “What do you do?”

  “Like I said, I don’t worry about work too much.” He gave her his lovely grin, although she was not quite as charmed by it.

  “Was I … work?”

  “Well, as my dad said, do what you love and you’ll love what you do.”

  “But you’d prefer to do men, wouldn’t you. Men for fun, women for money.”

  “I told you I’m no cocksucker,” he said, and landed a quick, smart backhand on her cheek. The slap was professional, expert, the slap of a man who had ended more than one argument this way. Bliss, who had never been struck in her life—except on the ass, with a hairbrush, by an early boyfriend who found that exceptionally entertaining—rubbed her cheek, stunned. She was even more stunned to watch Rory proceed to the minibar and crouch on all fours before it, inspecting its restocked shelves.

  “Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Guinness and Jameson.”

  The first crack of the door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and his neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague goal and she barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her. She settled for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on his head until he was still.

  But still was not good enough. She wrestled a corkscrew from its resting place—fifteen euros—and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she spied a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor and somehow gone undetected. She finished her work, even as the hotel was coming to life around her—the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on her robe. She was rather … speckled.

  “HOW OLD ARE YOU, THEN?” the police officer—they called them gardai here—asked Bliss.

  “How old do I look?”

  “You look about twenty-five, but the records require more specific data.” He was still being kind and solicitous, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered. They were gallant and professed horror that she had been hit and insulted. But their real horror, she knew, was for Rory.

  “Really? Twenty-five? You’re not just saying that?”

  “I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”

  Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty, thirty-one? Thirty, she decided. Thirty.

  A GOOD FUCK SPOILED

  It began innocently enough. Well, if not innocently—and Charlie Drake realized that some people would refuse to see the origins of any extramarital affair as innocent—it began with tact and consideration. When Charlie Drake agreed to have an affair with his former administrative assistant, he began putting golf clubs in the trunk of his car every Thursday and Saturday, telling his wife he was going to shoot a couple holes. Yes, he really said “a couple holes,” but then, he knew very little about golf at the time.

  Luckily, neither did his wife, Marla. But she was enthusiastic about Charlie’s new hobby, if only because it created a whole new category of potential gifts, and her family members were always keen for Christmas and birthday ideas for Charlie, who was notoriously difficult to shop for. And as the accessories began to flow—golf books, golf-themed clothing, golf gloves, golf hats, golf highball glasses—Charlie inevitably learned quite a bit about golf. He watched tournaments on television and spoke knowingly of “Tiger” and “Singh,” as well as the quirks of certain U.S. Open courses. He began to think of himself as a golfer who simply didn’t golf. Which, as he gleaned from his friends who actually pursued the sport, might be the best of all possible worlds. Golf, they said, was their love and their obsession, and they all wished they had never taken it up.

  AT ANY RATE, THIS CONTINUED for two years and everyone—Charlie, Marla, and Sylvia, his former administrative assistant—was very happy with this arrangement. But then Sylvia announced she wanted to go from mistress to wife. And given that Sylvia was terrifyingly good at making her pronouncements into reality, this was a rather unsettling turn of events for Charlie. After all, she had been the one who had engineered the affair in the first place, and even come up with the golf alibi. As he had noted on her annual evaluation, Sylvia was very goal-oriented.

  “Look, I want to fuck you,” Sylvia had said out of the blue, about six months after she started working for him. Okay, not totally out of the blue. She had tried a few more subtle things—pressing her breasts against his arm when going over a document, touching his hand, asking him if he needed her to go with him to conferences, even volunteering to pay her own way when told there was no money in the budget for her to attend. “We could even share a room,” she said. It was when Charlie demurred at her offer that she said: “Look, I want to fuck you.”

  Charlie was fifty-eight at the time, married thirty-six years, and not quite at ease in the world. He remembered a time when nice girls didn’t—well, when they didn’t do it so easily and they certainly didn’t speak of it this way. Marla had been a nice girl, someone he met at college and courted according to the standards of the day, and while he remembered being wistful in the early days of his marriage, when everyone suddenly seemed to be having guilt-free sex all the time, AIDS had come along and he decided he was comfortable with his choices. Sure, he noticed pretty girls and thought about them, but he had never been jolted to act on those feelings. It seemed like a lot of trouble, frankly.

  “Well, um, we can’t,” he told Sylvia.

  “Why? Don’t you like me?”

  “Of course I like you, Sylvia, but you work for me. They have rules about that. Anita Hill and all.”

  “The point of an affair is that it’s carried on in secret.”

  “And the point of embezzlement is to get away with stealing money, but I wouldn’t put my job at risk that way. I plan to retire from this job in a few years.”

  “But you feel what I’m feeling, right? This incredible force between us?”

  “Sure.” It seemed only polite.

  “So if I find a job with one of our competitors, then there would be nothing to stop us, right? This is just about the sexual harassment rules?”

  “Sure,” he said, not thinking her serious. Then, just in case she was: “But you can’t take your Rolodex, you know. Company policy.”

  A month later, he was called for a reference on Sylvia and he gave her the good one she deserved, then took her out to lunch to wish her well. She put her hand on his arm.

  “So can we now?”

  “Can we what?”

  “Fuck?”

  “Oh.” He still wasn’t comfortable with that word. “Well, no. I mean, as of this moment, you’re still my employee. Technically. So, no.”

  “What about next week?”

  “Well, my calendar is pretty full—”

  “You don’t have anything on Thursday.” Sylvia did know his calendar.

  “That’s true.”

  “We can go to my apartment. It’s not far.”

  “You know, Sylvia, when you’re starting a new job, you really shouldn’t take long lunches. Not at first.”

  “So it’s going to be a long lunch.” She all but growled these words at him, confusing Charlie. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t committed himself to anything, yet somehow Sylvia thought he had. He had used the company’
s sexual harassment policy as a polite way to rebuff her, and now it turned out she had taken his excuse at face value. The thing was, he did not find Sylvia particularly attractive. She had thick legs, far too thick for the short skirts she favored, and she was a little hairy for his taste. Still, she dressed as if she believed herself a knockout and he did not want to disabuse her of this notion.

  (And did Charlie, who was fifty-six, with thinning hair and a protruding stomach, ever wonder what Sylvia saw in him? No.)

  “I’m not sure how I could get away,” he said at last.

  “I’ve already thought that out. If you told people you were playing golf, you could get away Thursdays at lunch. You know how many men at the company play golf. And then we could have Saturdays, too. Long Saturdays, with nothing but fucking.”

  He winced. “Sylvia, I really don’t like that word.”

  “You’ll like the way I do it.”

  He did, actually. Sylvia applied herself to being Charlie’s mistress with the same brisk efficiency she had brought to being his administrative assistant, far more interested in his needs than her own. He made a few rules, mostly about discretion—no e-mails, as few calls as possible, nothing in public, ever—but otherwise he let Sylvia call the shots, which she did with a lot of enthusiasm. Before he knew it, two years had gone by, and he was putting his golf clubs in his car twice a week (except when it rained, which wasn’t often, not in this desert climate) and he thought everyone was happy. In fact, Marla even took to bragging a bit that Charlie seemed more easygoing and relaxed since he had started golfing, but he wasn’t obsessive about it like most men. So Marla was happy and Charlie was happy and Sylvia—well, Sylvia was not happy, as it turned out.

  “When are you going to marry me?” she asked abruptly one day, right in the middle of something that Charlie particularly liked, which distressed him, as it dimmed the pleasure, having it interrupted, and this question was an especially jarring interruption, being wholly unanticipated.

  “What?”

  “I’m in love with you, Charlie. I’m tired of sneaking around like this.”