“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
