“I think she feels the same way about Baltimore. It’s imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It’s not all marble steps and waitresses calling you ‘hon,’ you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.
“The bottom line,” Ransome says, turning around to head back to the Point, “is that Tess really can’t handle change. When I first knew her, she had been eating the same thing for breakfast at Jimmy’s in Fells Point for something like two years straight. Oh, she will change, but it’s very abrupt and inexplicable, and the new regimen will simply supplant the old one. When she crosses the threshold to our neighborhood coffeehouse, they start fixing her latte before she gets to the cash register. She’s that predictable.
“Truthfully, I keep worrying that I’ll wake up one morning and I’ll no longer be one of Tess’s ruts.”
But Ransome’s smile belies his words. He clearly feels no anxiety about his relationship with Monaghan, whatever its ups and downs in the past. What about marriage or children?
Unlike Monaghan, he doesn’t sidestep the question. “If children, then marriage. But if children—could Tess continue to do what she does, the way she does it? The risks she takes, her impulsiveness. All of that would have to change. I don’t want her on surveillance with our baby in the car seat, or taking the child on her Dumpster diving escapades. I’m well suited to be a stay-at-home father, but that doesn’t mean I’ll give Tess carte blanche to do whatever she wants, professionally.”
Is he signaling, ever so subtly, an end to Monaghan’s involvement in Keys Investigations?
“Everything comes to an end,” he says. “When you’ve had near-death experiences, as Tess and I both have, that’s more than a pat saying or a cliché.”
Yes, about those near-death experiences—but here, Ransome proves as guarded as his girlfriend.
“She doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it. But I’ll tell you this much—when she reaches for her knee? She’s thinking about it. She has a scar there, from where she fell on a piece of broken glass the night she was almost killed. Sometimes I think the memory lives in that scar.”
NOT A LONE WOLF
The private detective has been a sturdy archetype in American pop culture for sixty-plus years, and it’s hard not to harbor romantic notions about Monaghan. But she is quick to point out that she has little in common with the characters created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and not just because Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are fictional.
“I’m not a loner, far from it. I live with someone, I have friends. I have so much family it’s almost embarrassing at times. My father was one of seven, my mother one of five. I was an only child, but I was never a lonely one. In fact, most of my clients are referrals from people I know.” A rueful smile. “That’s made for some interesting times.”
A favor for her father, in fact, led to Monaghan identifying a Jane Doe homicide victim—and unraveling an unseemly web of favors that showed, once again, Maryland is always in the forefront when it comes to political scandals. Her uncle Donald asked her to find the missing family of furrier Mark Rubin. And it was Talbot who, inadvertently, gave Monaghan the assignment that almost led to her death. Once one pores over Monaghan’s casework, it begins to seem as if almost all her jobs are generated by nepotism.
“Whew,” she says. “Strong word. A loaded word, very much a pejorative. How did you get your job?” When no answer is forthcoming, she goes on: “How does anyone get anywhere, get anything in this world? I got into Washington College on my own merits, I guess, but otherwise I’ve needed family and friends. Not to pull me through or cover for me, but to help me here and there. Is that wrong? Does it undercut what I have done?”
Then what’s her greatest solo accomplishment? What can she take credit for?
Monaghan waits a long time before answering. We are in the Brass Elephant, her favorite bar, and she is nursing a martini—gin, not vodka, to which she objects on principle. Monaghan is filled with such idiosyncratic principles. She won’t drink National Bohemian since the brewery pulled up stakes in Baltimore. She says Matthew’s serves the best pizza in town, but confesses that her favorite is Al Pacino’s. She doesn’t like women who walk to work in athletic shoes or people who let their dogs run off lead as a sneaky way to avoid cleaning up after them. She hates the Mets even though she wasn’t alive for the indignity of 1969 and has a hard time rooting for the Ravens because of “bad karma.” (Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell brought the team here in the mid-nineties and, although the NFL made sure Cleveland kept its name and records—a concession not made to Baltimore when the Colts decamped for Indianapolis—it still bothers Monaghan.)
“I’ve managed, more or less, to live according to what I think is right. Not always—I can be unkind. I’ve indulged in gossip, which should be one of the seven deadly sins. I’m quick to anger, although seldom on my own behalf. Overall, though, I’m not a bad person. I’m a good friend, a decent daughter, and a not-too-infuriating girlfriend.”
She slaps her empty glass on the counter and says: “Look at the time. We have to go.”
“Where?”
“Just follow me.”
She runs out of the bar, down the Brass Elephant’s elegant staircase and into Charles Street, heading south at an impressive clip. In a few blocks, she mounts the steps to the Washington Monument, throwing a few dollars into the honor box at its foot.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she exhorts. “It’s only two hundred and twenty-eight steps.”
So this is the run that Monaghan planned to take this evening. The narrow, winding stairwell is claustrophobically close and smells strongly of ammonia, not the best fragrance on top of a gin martini, but Monaghan’s pace and footing seem unaffected by her cocktail hour. She jogs briskly, insistent that everyone keep up.
At the top, the reason for her rush becomes explicable. The sun is just beginning to set and the western sky is a brilliant rose shade that is kind to the city’s more ramshackle neighborhoods, while the eastern sky is an equally flattering inky blue. To the north, Penn Station is a bright white beacon dominated by the monstrous man-woman statue with its glowing purple heart. To the south, lights begin to come on along the waterfront. Monaghan points out the Continental Building on Calvert Street.
“Hammett worked there, as a Pinkerton. And the birds that are used as ornamentation, the falcons? They’re gold now, but it’s said they were black back in Hammett’s day, so we might be the birthplace of the Maltese Falcon. Look to the southwest, toward Hollins Market, and you can also see where Mencken lived, and Russell Baker. Anne Tylerville is out of sight, but you were there this morning, when you visited my home. That church, virtually at our feet? It’s where Francis Scott Key worshipped, while his descendant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, liked to drink at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere, only a few blocks to the north.”
She inhales deeply, a little raggedly; even Monaghan isn’t so fit that the climb has left her unaffected. She seems drunker now than she did at the bottom, giddy with emotion. She throws open her arms as if to embrace the whole city.
“I mean, really,” she says. “Why would anyone live anywhere else?”
Read on for an exclusive extract from Laura Lippman’s forthcoming novel The Innocents.
Prologue
They throw him out when he falls off the barstool. Although it wasn’t a fall, exactly, he only stumbled a bit coming back from the bathroom and lurched against the bar, yet they said he had to leave because he was drunk. He finds that hilarious. He’s too drunk to be in a bar. He makes a joke about a fall from grace. At least, he thinks he does. Maybe the joke was one of those things that stays in his head, for his personal amusement. For a long time, for fucking forever, Gordon’s mind has been split by a thick, dark line, a line that divides and defines
his life as well. What stays in, what is allowed out. But when he drinks, the line gets a little fuzzy.
Which might be why he drinks. Drank. Drinks. No, drank. He’s done. Again. One night, one slip. He didn’t even enjoy it that much.
“You driving?” the bartender asks, piloting him to the door, his arm firm yet kind around Gordon’s waist.
“No, I live nearby,” he says. One lie, one truth. He does live in the area, but not so near that he hasn’t driven here in his father’s old Buick, good old Shitty Shitty Bang Bang they called it. Well, not this Buick, but the Buick before, or the Buick before that. The old man always drove Buicks, and they were always, always, crap cars, but he kept buying them. That was Timothy Halloran Sr., loyal to the end, even to the crap of the crap of the crap.
Gordon stumbles and the bartender keeps him steady. He realizes he doesn’t want the bartender to let go of him. The contact feels good. Shit, did he say that out loud? He’s not a faggot. “I’m not a faggot,” he says. It’s just been so long since his wife slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so long since his daughters put their sticky little hands around his neck and whispered their sticky little words into his ears, the list of the things they wanted that Mommy wouldn’t let them have, but maybe Daddy would see it differently? The bartender’s embrace ends abruptly, now that Gordon is out the door. “I love you, man!” he says, for a joke. Only maybe he didn’t. Or maybe it isn’t funny. At any rate, no one’s laughing and Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran always leaves ’em laughing.
He sits on the curb. He really did intend to go to a meeting tonight. It all came down to one turn. If he had gone left—but instead he went straight. Ha! He literally went straight and look where that had gotten him.
It isn’t his fault. He wants to be sober. He strung together two years this time, chastened by the incident at his younger daughter’s first birthday party. And he managed to stay sober even after Lori kicked him out last month. But the fact is, he has been faking it for months, stalling out where he always stalls out on the twelve steps, undermined by all that poking, poking, poking, that insistence on truth, on coming clean. Making amends. Sobriety—real sobriety, as opposed to the collection of sober days Gordon sometimes manages to put together—wants too much from him. Sobriety is trying to breach the line in his head. But Gordon needs that division. Take it away and he’ll fall apart, sausage with no casing, crumbling into the frying pan.
Sausage. He’d like some sausage. Is there still an IHOP up on Route 40?
Saturday morning. Sausage and pancakes, his mother never sitting down as she kept flipping and frying, frying and flipping, loving how they all ate, Gordon and his brothers and his father, stoking them like machines. Come Saturday morning, I’m going away. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert!
When he moved back home six weeks ago, he asked his mother to make him some pancakes and she’d said, “Bisquick’s in the cabinet.” She thought he was drinking or whoring again, assumed that was why Lori had thrown him out. It was easier to let her think that. Then it turned out it was easier to be that, to surrender to drink and bad habits.
When it comes down to it, drunk and sober are just two sides of the same coin, and no matter how you flip it, you are still your fucked-up own self. It sure didn’t help that his current AA group meets in his old parish school, now a Korean church. It’s too weird, sitting on the metal chairs in an old classroom. Drink and the line gets fuzzy. Get sober and the line comes back into sharp relief, but then everyone starts attacking the line, says he has to let it go, break it down. Take down the line, Mr. Gorbachev. Boy, he’s all over the place tonight, tripping down memory lane in every sense of the word. Funny, he has a nice memory associated with Reagan, but it feels like he was really young at the time. How old was he when Reagan made that Berlin Wall speech? Sixteen? Seventeen? Still in high school and already a fuck-up.
But to hear everyone tell it, he has always been a fuck-up, came into the world a fuck-up, is going to leave as a fuck-up. Then again, whoever followed Sean was destined to be a disappointment. Sean-the-Perfect. You would think that with three kids in the family, the two imperfect brothers would find a bond, gang up on that prissy middle fuck. But Tim has always taken Sean’s side. Everyone gangs up against Go-Go, the nickname Gordon can’t quite shake even at age forty. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. That’s what the others had chanted when he did his dance, a wild, spastic thing, steel guitar twanging. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. GoGoGoGoGoGo.
Give Sean this: He’s the one person who consistently uses Go-Go’s full name. Gordon, not even Gordy. Maybe that’s because he needs two full syllables to cram all the disappointment in. Actually, he needs four. “Jesus, Gordon, how many times can you move back home?” Or: “Jesus, Gordon, Lori is the best thing that ever happened to you and you’ve got kids now.” Jesus, Gordon. Jesus, Gordon. Maybe he should have been Gee-Go instead of Go-Go.
He thinks about standing up but doesn’t, although he could if he wanted to. He isn’t that drunk. The beer and the shot hit him fast, after almost two years of sobriety. He was doing so good. He thought he had figured out a way to be in AA while respecting the line. They don’t need to know everything, he reasoned. No one needs to know everything. There would be a way to tell the story that would allow him to make it through all twelve steps, finally, without breaching any loyalties, without breaking that long-ago promise, without hurting anyone.
He gets up, walks down the once-familiar avenue. As kids, they had been forbidden to ride their bikes on the busy street that essentially bounded their neighborhood, which should have made it impossible to find their way to this little business district, tempting to them because of its pizza parlor and the bakery and the High’s Dairy Store. And there was a craft store with an unlikely name, a place owned by the family whose daughters had disappeared. He was little then, not even five, but he remembered a chill had gone through the neighborhood for a while, that all the parents had become strict and supervigilant.
Then they stopped. It was too hard, he guesses, being in their kids’ shit all the time and the children slipped back into their free, unfettered ways. Nowadays ... he doesn’t even have the energy to finish the cliché in his head. He thinks of Lori, standing guard at the kitchen window of their “starter” home, a town house that cost $350,000 and to which he is now barred entry. Is that fair? Is anything fair? Sean is still perfect and even Tim does a good imitation of goodness, Mr. State’s Attorney, with his three beautiful daughters and his plumpish wife, who was never that hot to begin with, yet Gordon can tell they still genuinely like each other. He’s not sure he ever really liked Lori and he has a hunch Sean’s in the same boat with his wife, Vivian, who’s as frostily perfect as Sean. Tim and Sean, still married to their first wives, such good boys, forever and ever. Hey, he got an annulment, he’s technically in the clear. Besides, fuck the church! Where was the church when he needed it? And now it’s Korean Catholic, whatever the fuck that is, probably Kool-Aid and dog on a cracker for communion.
Where was he? Where is he? On Gwynn Oak Avenue, thinking about how Sean, of all people, had figured out that if they rolled their bikes across the bridge to Purnell Drive, they could technically obey the rule never to ride their bikes on Forest Park Avenue and still manage to get over to Woodlawn, where the shops are. Or was it Mickey who had figured it out? Mickey was the one who lived above Purnell Drive, after all. She would have known the route, too. Even when they were kids, Mickey had been smart that way. She should have become the lawyer, not Tim. She was the real brains.
He walks for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, willing his head to clear. He walks down to the stream, where there once were swans and ducks, then to the public park, the site of an amusement park that closed before Go-Go was old enough to go there. It survived integration, his father always said, but it couldn’t beat back Hurricane Agnes. Still, one roller coaster remained standing for years, long enough for Go-Go to feel thwarted, denied. Sean and Tim claimed to have gone many, m
any times, but they weren’t that much older. Sean would have been seven or eight when the park closed. Maybe they had lied? It makes Gordon feel better, catching perfect Sean in a potential lie.
Soon enough, the hypothetical becomes real to him, and he has worked up a nice fury. He gets out his cell phone and punches his brother’s name on his contact list, ready to fight with him. But his hands aren’t steady and he fumbles the phone as Sean’s voice comes on, cool and reserved. The phone ends up on the ground, where the black turtle shape is hard to find in the dark. As Go-Go crawls around on his hands and knees, he hears Sean’s voice, disgust evident. “Gordon? Gordon? Jesus, Gordon—”
I shoulda been Gee-Go. Does he say that out loud? His hand closes over the cell phone, but Sean has hung up. Okay, it isn’t exactly the first time he has drunk-dialed his brother. But he’s had a good run of sobriety, so Sean shouldn’t have been all pissy and judgmental. Sean has no way of knowing he took a drink. No, Sean expects him to fail. That’s unfair. And what kind of brother is that, anyway, expecting—rooting—for his younger sibling to fail? But that’s Sean’s dirty little secret. His perfection is relative, dependent upon the fuck-ups of Go-Go and Tim, and Tim isn’t giving him much breathing room these days. In another family, Sean wouldn’t even be all that. In another family, Sean might be the problem child, the loser. Especially if he had been treated like a loser from jump, the way Gordon was. They set him up. Of course he did whatever he was asked. He was just a little boy. Any little boy would have done what he did. Right?
His head clearer, he walks to the convenience store, buys a cup of scorched coffee, and drinks it in his car, his father’s old Buick, the last iteration of Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, which has survived his father by almost fifteen years now. He is less than two miles from his mother’s house. He has to make exactly four turns—two lefts, two rights. There are—he counts—one, two, three lights? The first one is there, right in front of him, complicated because there are actually five points at this intersection—five points, like a star. He sees Mickey making the drawing in the dirt, the stick slashing down and up, across and down, then up.
The Accidental Detective and other stories Page 12