The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  “We don’t sneak around anywhere.”

  “Exactly. For two years, you’ve been coming over here, having your fun, but what’s in it for me? We never go anywhere outside this apartment, I don’t even get to go to lunch with you, or celebrate my birthday. I want to marry you, Charlie.”

  “You do?”

  “I looooooooooooove you.” Sylvia, who clearly was not going to finish tending to him, threw herself across her side of the bed and began to cry.

  “You do?” Charlie rather liked their current arrangement, and given that Sylvia had more or less engineered it, he had assumed it was as she wanted it.

  “Of course. I want you to leave Marla and marry me.”

  “But I don’t—” He had started to say he didn’t want to leave Marla and marry Sylvia, but he realized this was probably not tactful. “I just don’t know how to tell Marla. It will break her heart. We’ve been together thirty-eight years.”

  “I’ve given it some thought.” Her tears had dried with suspicious speed. “You have to choose. For the next month, I’m not going to see you at all. In fact, I’m not going to see you again until you tell Marla what we have.”

  “Okay.” Charlie laid back and waited for Sylvia to continue.

  “Starting now, Charlie.”

  “Now? I mean, I’m already here. Why not Saturday?”

  “Now.”

  Two days later, as Charlie was puttering around the house, wondering what to do with himself, Marla asked: “Aren’t you going to play golf ?”

  “What?” Then he remembered. “Oh, yeah. I guess so.” He put on his golf gear, gathered up his clubs, and headed out. But to where? How should he kill the next five hours? He started to go to the movies, but he passed the club on his way out to the multiplex and thought that it looked almost fun. He pulled in and inquired about getting a lesson. It was harder than it looked, but not impossible, and the pro said the advantage of being a beginner was that he had no bad habits.

  “You’re awfully tan,” Marla said, two weeks later.

  “Am I?” He looked at his arms, which were reddish-brown, while his upper arms were still ghostly white. “You know, I changed suntan lotion. I was using a really high SPF, it kept out all the rays.”

  “When I paid the credit card bill, I noticed you were spending a lot more money at the country club. Are you sneaking in extra games?”

  “I’m playing faster,” he said, “so I have time to have drinks at the bar, or even a meal. In fact, I might start going out on Sundays, too. Would you mind?”

  “Oh, I’ve been a golf widow all this time,” Marla said. “What’s another day? As long”—she smiled playfully—“as long as it’s really golf and not another woman.”

  Charlie was stung by Marla’s joke. He had always been a faithful husband. That is, he had been a faithful husband for thirty-six years, and then there had been an interruption, one of relatively short duration given the length of their marriage, and now he was faithful again, so it seemed unfair for Marla to tease him this way.

  “Well, if you want to come along and take a lesson yourself, you’re welcome to. You might enjoy it.”

  “But you always said golf was a terribly jealous mistress, that you wouldn’t advise anyone you know taking it up because it gets such a horrible hold on you.”

  “Did I? Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  MARLA CAME TO THE CLUB the next day. She had a surprising aptitude for golf and it gave her extra confidence to see that Charlie was not much better than she, despite his two years of experience. She liked the club, too, although she was puzzled that Charlie didn’t seem to know many people. “I kind of keep to myself,” he said.

  The month passed quickly, so quickly and pleasantly that he found himself surprised when Sylvia called.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well?” he echoed.

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Her? Oh, Marla. No. No. I just couldn’t.”

  “If you don’t tell her, you’ll never see me again.”

  “I guess that’s only fair.”

  “What?” Sylvia’s voice, never her best asset, screeched perilously high.

  “I accept your conditions. I can’t leave Marla, and therefore I can’t see you.” Really, he thought, when would he have time? He was playing so much golf now, and while Marla seldom came to the club on Thursdays, she accompanied him on Saturdays and Sundays.

  “But you love me.”

  “Yes, but Marla is the mother of my children.”

  “Who are now grown and living in other cities and barely remember to call you except on your birthday.”

  “And she’s a fifty-seven-year-old woman. It would be rather mean, just throwing her out in the world at this age, never having worked and all. Plus, a divorce would bankrupt me.”

  “A passion like ours is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

  “It is?”

  “What?” she screeched again.

  “I mean, it is. We have known a great passion. But that’s precisely because we haven’t been married. Marriage is different, Sylvia. You’ll just have to take my word on that.”

  This apparently was the wrong thing to say, as she began to sob in earnest. “But I would be married to you. And I love you. I can’t live without you.”

  “Oh, I’m not much of a catch. Really. You’ll get over it.”

  “I’m almost forty! I’ve sacrificed two crucial years, being with you on your terms.”

  Charlie thought that was unfair, since the terms had been Sylvia’s from the start. But all he said was: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lead you on. And I won’t anymore.”

  He thought that would end matters, but Sylvia was a remarkably focused woman. She continued to call—the office, not his home, which indicated to Charlie that she was not yet ready to wreak the havoc she was threatening. So Marla remained oblivious and their golf continued to improve, but his assistant was beginning to suspect what was up and he knew he had to figure out a way to make it end. But given that he wasn’t the one who had made it start, he didn’t see how he could.

  ON THURSDAY, JUST AS HE WAS getting ready to leave the office for what was now his weekly midday nine, Sylvia called again, crying and threatening to hurt herself.

  “I was just on my way out,” he said.

  “Where do you have to go?”

  “Golf,” he said.

  “Oh, I see.” Her laugh was brittle. “So you have someone new already. Your current assistant? I guess your principles have fallen a notch.”

  “No, I really play golf now.”

  “Charlie, I’m not your wife. Your stupid lie won’t work on me. It’s not even your lie, remember?”

  “No, no, there’s no one else. I’ve, well, reformed! It’s like a penance to me. I’ve chosen my loveless marriage and golf over the great passion of my life. It’s the right thing to do.”

  He thought she would find this suitably romantic, but it only seemed to enrage her more.

  “I’m going to go over to your house and tell Marla that you’re cheating.”

  “Don’t do that, Sylvia. It’s not even true.”

  “You cheated with me, didn’t you? And a tiger doesn’t change his stripes.”

  Charlie wanted to say that he was not so much a tiger as a house cat who had been captured by a petulant child. True, it had been hard to break with Sylvia once things had started. She was very good at a lot of things that Marla seldom did and never conducted with enthusiasm. But it had not been his idea. And, confronted with an ultimatum, he had honored her condition. He hadn’t tried to have it both ways. He was beginning to think Sylvia was unreliable.

  “Meet me at my apartment right now, or I’ll call Marla.”

  He did, and it was a dreary time, all tears and screaming and no attentions paid to him whatsoever, not even after he held her and stroked her hair and said he did love her.

  “You should be getting back to work,” he said at last, hoping to f
ind any excuse to stop holding her.

  She shook her head. “My position was eliminated two weeks ago. I’m out of work.”

  “Is that why you’re so desperate to get married?”

  She wailed like a banshee, not that he really knew what a banshee sounded like. Something scary and shrill. “No. I love you, Charlie. I want to be your wife for that reason alone. But the last month, with all this going on, I haven’t been at my best, and they had a bad quarter, so I was a sitting duck. In a sense, I’ve lost my job because of you, Charlie. I’m unemployed and I’m alone. I’ve hit rock bottom.”

  “You could always come back to the company. You left on good terms and I’d give you a strong reference.”

  “But then we couldn’t be together.”

  “Yes.” He was not so clever that he had thought of this in advance, but now he saw it would solve everything.

  “And that’s the one thing I could never bear.”

  Charlie, his hand on her hair, looked out the window. It was such a beautiful day, a little cooler than usual, but still sunny. If he left now—but, no, he would have to go back to the office. He wouldn’t get to play golf at all today.

  “Who is she, Charlie?”

  “Who?”

  “The other woman.”

  “There is no other woman.”

  “Stop lying, or I really will go to Marla. I’ll drive over there right now, while you’re at work. After all, I don’t have a job to go to.”

  She was crazy, she was bluffing. She was so crazy that even if she wasn’t bluffing, he could probably persuade Marla that she was a lunatic. After all, what proof did she have? He had never allowed the use of any camera, digital or video, although Sylvia had suggested it from time to time. There were no e-mails. He never called her. And he was careful to leave his DNA, as he thought of it, only in the appropriate places, although this included some places that Marla believed inappropriate. He had learned much from the former president and the various television shows on crime scene investigations.

  “Look, if it’s money you need—”

  “I don’t want money! I want you!”

  And so it began all over again, the crying and the wailing, only this time there was no calming her. She was obsessed with the identity of his new mistress, adamant that he tell her everything, enraged by his insistence that he really did play golf in his spare time. Finally, he thought to take her down to the garage beneath her apartment and show her the clubs in the trunk of his car.

  “So what?” she said. “You always carried your clubs.”

  “But I know what they are now,” he said, removing a driver. “See this one, it’s—”

  “I know what’s going on and I’m done, I tell you. The minute you leave here, I’m going to go upstairs and call Marla. It’s her or me. Stop fucking with me, Charlie.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t use that word, Sylvia. It’s coarse.”

  “Oh, you don’t like hearing it, but you sure like doing it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking!”

  She stood in front of him, hands on her hips. Over the course of their two-year affair she had not become particularly more attractive, although she had learned to use a depilatory on her upper lip. What would happen if she went to Marla? She would probably stay with him, but it would be dreary, with counseling and recriminations. And they really were happier than ever, united by their love of golf, comfortable in their routines. He couldn’t bear to see it end.

  “I can’t have that, Sylvia. I just can’t.”

  “Then choose.”

  “I already have.”

  No, he didn’t hit her with the driver. He wouldn’t have risked it for one thing, having learned that it was rare to have a club that felt so right in one’s grip and also having absorbed a little superstition about the game. Also, there would have been blood, and it was impossible to clean every trace of blood from one’s trunk, according to those television shows. Instead, he pushed her, gently but firmly, and she fell back into the trunk, which he closed and latched. He then drove back to the office, parking in a remote place where Sylvia’s thumping, which was growing fainter, would not draw any attention. At home that night, he ate dinner with Marla, marveling over the Greg Norman shiraz that she served with the salmon. “Do you hear something out in the garage?” she asked at one point. “A knocking noise?”

  “No,” he said.

  It was Marla’s book club night and after she left, he went out to the garage and circled his car for a few minutes, thinking. Ultimately, he figured out how to attach a garden hose from the exhaust through a cracked window and into the backseat, where he pressed it into the crevice of the seat, which could be released to create a larger carrying space, like a hatchback, but only from within the car proper. Sylvia’s voice was weaker, but still edged with fury. He ignored her. Marla was always gone for at least three hours on book club night and he figured that would be long enough.

  IT WOULD BE SEVERAL WEEKS before Sylvia Nichols’s body was found in a patch of wilderness near a state park. While clearly a murder, it was considered a baffling case from the beginning. How had a woman been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, then dumped at so remote a site? Why had she been killed? Homicide police, noting the large volume of calls from her home phone to Charlie’s work number, questioned him, of course, but he was able to say with complete sincerity that she was a former employee who was keen to get a job back since being let go, and he hadn’t been able to help her despite her increasing hysteria. DNA evidence indicated she had not had sex of any sort in the hours before her death. Credit card slips bore out the fact that Charlie was a regular at the local country club, and his other hours were accounted for. Even Marla laughed at the idea of her husband having an affair, saying he was far too busy with golf to have time for another woman.

  “Although I’m the one who broke ninety first,” she said. “Which is funny, given that Charlie has a two-year head start on me.”

  “It’s a terrible mistress, golf,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t play, but they say it’s the worst you can have,” the homicide detective said.

  “Just about,” Charlie said.

  MY BABY WALKS THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE

  EASY AS A-B-C

  Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef, or carve master bath suites in the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate—boom. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

  It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, seeing what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books—anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake, because it could kill people, literally. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time. Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done
some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging on how handy he was.

  The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill, before my time, flattened out for a while in the nineties, and now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill, and into Riverside Park and all the way down Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away the various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. She was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.

  My mother sold the house for $75,000. That was a dozen years ago and boy, did we think we had put one over on the buyers. Seventy-five thousand! For a house on Decatur Street in Locust Point. And all cash for my mom, because it had been paid off forever. We went to Hausner’s the night of the closing, toasted our good fortune. The old German restaurant was still open then, crammed with all that art and junk. We had veal and strawberry pie and top-shelf liquor and toasted Grandfather for leaving us such a windfall.

  So imagine how I felt when I got a referral for a complete redo at my grandparents’ old address and the real estate guy tells me: “She got it for only $225,000, so she’s willing to put another $100,000 in it and I bet she won’t bat an eyelash if the work goes up to $150,000.”

  “Huh” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.