Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  “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.”

  A DAY IN THE LIFE

  Monaghan 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.”

  Isn’t 11:30 a little early for lunch?

  “I’ve been up since six! Besides, you want to get there before the judges release the various juries for their lunch break.”

  A TREE GROWS IN BALTIMORE

  Whitney Talbot strides into Cypriana with the authority of a health inspector on a follow-up visit. Her green eyes cut across the small restaurant with laserlike intensity.

  “She’s the opposite of Browning’s duchess,” Monaghan whispers. “Her looks go everywhere, but she dislikes whatever she sees.”

  “I heard that,” Talbot says, even as she places her order. “And I like Cypriana just fine. It’s the clientele that worries me. I saw the mayor in here just last week. How am I supposed to digest lunch under those circumstances?”

  She settles at our table with an enormous Greek salad, which she proceeds to eat leaf by leaf, without dressing. “Whitney’s not anorexic,” Monaghan assures me. “Her taste buds were simply destroyed by old WASP cooking.”

  “I prefer to get my calories through gin,” Talbot says primly. “Now what do you want to know about Tess? I know everything—EVERYTHING. I know when she lost her virginity. I know the strange ritualistic way she eats Peanut M&M’s. I know that she rereads Marjorie Morningstar every year—”

  “I do not,” Monaghan objects, outraged only by the last assertion.

  “—and cries over it, too. I re-read the Alexandria Quartet every year.”

  “Because you’re so f---ing pretentious.”

  “‘Pretentious’ suggests pretending, trying to make others believe that you’re something that you’re not. There’s not a pretentious bone in my body.”

  “There’s nothing but bones in your body, you fatless wench.”

  Perhaps it would be better if Talbot were interviewed separately, out of Monaghan’s hearing?

  “Why?” Talbot wonders. “It’s not as if I could be any more candid. My first name should have been Cassandra. I’m a truth-teller from way back. It saves so much time, always telling the truth—”

  “And never worrying about anyone’s feelings,” Monaghan mutters.

  “Tess is still miffed because I’m the one who called her Baltimore’s hungriest detective, back when the Washington Post did that travel piece on her favorite haunts. She does like a good meal, but she wears her calories well. So, okay, here’s the unvarnished truth about Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan, aka Tesser, although Testy suits her better.”

  Talbot leans forward while Monaghan visibly steels herself.

  “She’s a good friend, utterly loyal. She lies as if it were her second language, but only when she has to. She’s smarter than anyone gives her credit for—including Tess herself. She’s brave. You know tho
se tiresome women who don’t have any female friends? I’m not one of those. I don’t have any friends, period. I don’t like people much. But I make an exception for Tess.”

  “With friends like these…” Monaghan shrugs. In the time it has taken Talbot to eat five lettuce leaves, Monaghan has polished off her chicken pita, but still seems hungry. “Vaccaro’s?” she suggests hopefully. “Berger cookies? Otterbein cookies? Something? Anything? I rowed this morning and I plan to run this afternoon. I’m almost certainly in caloric deficit.”

  Does she work out for her job? How much physical stamina is required? (And does she know that she won’t be able to eat like that forever?)

  “There’s actually very little physical activity involved in my work, and when there is—look, I’m five-foot-nine and my body fat is under twenty percent. I can run a mile in seven minutes and I could still compete in head races if I was that masochistic. And for all that, there’s not an able-bodied guy on the planet I could beat up. So, no, it’s not for work. It’s for peace of mind. Rowing clears my head in a way that nothing else does—alcohol, meditation, pot—”

  “Not that Tess has ever broken the drug laws of this country,” Talbot puts in.

  Monaghan sighs. “With every year, I become more law abiding. A business, a mortgage. I have things to lose. I want to be one of those people who lives untethered, with no material possessions.”

  “She talks a good talk,” Talbot says. “But you’ve seen the house, right? It’s filled with stuff. She’s put down roots—in Roland Park, of all places. You know what Tess is like? The ailanthus, the tree that grew in Brooklyn. Have you ever tried to get rid of one of those things? It’s darn near impossible. No one’s ever going to be able to yank Tess out of Baltimore soil.”

  “Now that’s a novel I do read every year,” Monaghan says. “An American classic, but not everyone agrees. Because it’s about a girl.”

  Talbot yawns daintily, bored. “I vote for Otterbein cookies. They have them at the Royal Farms over on Key Highway.”

  FAMILY TIES

  It is late afternoon at the Point and Crow Ransome—“No one calls me Ed or Edgar, ever,” he says, and it’s the only time he sounds annoyed—agrees to take a break and walk along Franklintown Road, where the trees are just beginning to turn gold and crimson.

  “I love Leakin Park,” he says of the vast wooded hills around him. The area is beautiful, but best known as the dumping ground of choice for Baltimore killers back in the day, a fact that Ransome seems unaware of. “I’m not a city kid by nature—I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia—and I like having a few rural-seeming corners in my life.”

  Will he stay in Baltimore, then?

  “It’s the only real condition of being with Tess. ‘Love me, love my city.’ She can’t live anywhere else. Truly, I think she wouldn’t be able to stay long anyplace that wasn’t Baltimore.”

  What is it about the private eye and her hometown?

  Relative to his girlfriend, Ransome is more thoughtful, less impulsive in his comments. “I think it’s an extension of her family. You know Tess’s family is far from perfect. Her uncle, Donald Weinstein, was involved in a political scandal. Her grandfather Weinstein—well, the less said about him, the better. Her uncle Spike, the Point’s original owner, served time, although I’ve never been clear on what he did. No one ever speaks of it, but it had to be a felony because he wasn’t allowed to have the liquor license in his own name. Anyway, she loves them all fiercely. Not in spite of what they’ve done, but because they are who they are, they’re family.

  “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 th
eir 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.