Laura Lippman (2 page)

T
ess Monaghan hated surveillance work, something of a problem for someone who made her living as a private investigator. Do what you love and you’ll love what you do, they told her. Well, she loved everything else about her job. Loved being her own boss, loved being her only employee. She was even starting to love her gun, which she knew was kind of creepy. Unfortunately, surveillance work was a private investigator’s bread-and-butter, and she loathed every minute of it, especially in the cause of romantic disputes. Besides, it was just so passive. All her life, she had hated waiting for things to happen. She yearned to be an instigator. Yet here she was again, slouched down in the front seat of her car, camera ready to document someone else’s bad behavior.

She stared at the faded plaster king who welcomed guests to the Enchanted Castle Motor Court on Route 40. Time had not been kind to him—his purple coat had whitish spots that made it appear as if it were moth-eaten, his face was pitted, and one eye had faded away, so his once-genial smile was now more of a leer. Still, he made her feel nostalgic, for Maryland’s past and for her own. There was a time, almost in her memory, when Route 40 was the major east-west highway across the state of Maryland and these kinds of campy stucco cottages had beckoned to travelers with neon promises of air-cooled rooms and fresh pies in the diner.

As for Tess, she had lost her own virginity in this particular motor court, at the allegedly sweet age of sixteen. The wine had been sweet at least. Mogen David, hijacked from her Gramma Weinstein’s Seder almost two months earlier, because teenage Tess had been methodical about her bad behavior. The younger version was always plotting, looking ahead to the night when she could just get it over with—first drunk, first dope, first sex—mark another milestone on her path to adulthood. Why had she been in such a hurry? She couldn’t even remember now. Anyway, it hadn’t been bad, it hadn’t been good. In fact, it wasn’t unlike her early rowing practices. Sore muscles you didn’t even know you had on the day after. But it got better, and she got better at it. Just like rowing.

This was the part she remembered the best: The motor court’s diner had still been open then and afterwards she had blueberry pie, hot, with vanilla ice cream, the chubby king smiling benignly at her through the glass. That had been just perfect. To this day, blueberry pie made her blush. Now the diner was just a rusting aluminum shell. Despite the reputation fostered by the film
Diner
, Baltimore had a severe diner deficit, if you didn’t count the modern, ersatz ones, and Tess sure didn’t. “Where have you gone, Barry Levinson?” she sang softly to herself. “Charm City lifts its hungry eyes to you.” No more diners, no more tin men. No Johnny U’s Golden Arm, no Gino’s, no Hot Shoppes Jr.’s, no Little Taverns.

Great, her litany of fast-food ghosts had made her hungry. And her right leg was cramping up. She eased the driver’s seat back, tried to massage her hamstring, but a twelve-year-old Toyota Corolla just didn’t afford much room when you were five-foot-nine and most of it was inseam. Damn, she hated surveillance work. She tried to make it a rule not to take such assignments, but principles had to be suspended sometimes in light of certain economic realities. Or, in this case, when a certain friend had promised her services without asking first.

At least the client was a woman. She was a sexist about this, no other word. But in her experience, cuckolded men tended toward violence against others, and she didn’t want that on her conscience. Women were masochists, dangers to themselves. Usually. Tess looked at this it way: Four thousand years after the Greeks, Medea would still be front-page news, while feckless Jason wouldn’t even rate a question in
Cosmo’s
Agony column.

Not that women’s cases weren’t lose-lose propositions in their own way. If you didn’t get the goods on hubby, some women didn’t want to pay for the time put in, they didn’t get that a job had been done, even if it had yielded no results. These were the kind of women who tipped poorly in restaurants, on the theory that they provided food service all the time without compensation.

But if you
did
turn over a discreet set of photographs of hubby leaving, say, a motor court on Route 40, a redhead giantess in tow, the kill-the-messenger syndrome kicked in—literally. One cheated-on wife had aimed her neat little Papagallo pump at Tess’s shin. Tess had counted to ten, left the suburban palace that was about to loom large in the divorce case, and discreetly let all the air out of the tires on the woman’s Jeep Cherokee.

So she charged more now. She told would-be clients it was because surveillance work was a bore, which was true, but it was really the aftermath she hated, the moment of truth, which was anything but boring. “Excuse me, ma’am, while you’re weeping and thinking about the implications of this information for your twenty-year marriage and your two children, could I trouble you to write me a check?” Tess had started taking much bigger retainers and sending refunds. Easier on everyone.

Unfortunately, this particular wastrel-husband had eaten through the retainer in the first week, without actually doing anything. A nervous type, he cruised the city’s best-known prostitution strips, window-shopping, beginning negotiations, then breaking them off at the last minute. Tess had taken a few photographs of women bent toward his car on long, skinny legs, but such photos paid no premiums in divorce court. He could always claim to be asking for directions.

Today, however, he had finally settled on a tall redhead with a towering beehive and the knotted calf muscles that come from years of wearing spike heels. A real Amazon, even alongside Tess’s Amazonian proportions. He probably thought a hooker with some meat on her bones was less likely to be a junkie. Or maybe he went in for kinkier stuff, which required a woman with those cut biceps and triceps.

They had gone in about five minutes ago. Because she had followed Mr. Nervous at a particularly careful distance, Tess hadn’t been able to take a photo of the happy couple on their way into the honeymoon suite, and she didn’t do in flagrante—that was just too gross. But she’d get them on the way out. Which would be—she checked her watch—ten, fifteen minutes at the most? He didn’t look like the kind who would set any records for stamina. He had been saving up for this too long to draw it out.

Still, Tess was unprepared when the door was flung open at what her datebook notes would later establish was the seven-minute mark. As she fumbled for her camera, she saw a flash of red—the hooker’s hair—followed by a gray blur, Mr. Nervous, who threw himself on top of the fake hair as if it were a fumbled football in the end zone.

The hooker stalked out, still fully attired, in a tight red leather-look dress and matching shoes. The real hair was short and wispy, a dark brown color only a shade deeper than Tess’s. It wasn’t a bad cut, but something about it struck Tess as not quite right. No, it probably just looked funny because it was matted down with sweat.

“You better give that back to me,” the hooker told Mr. Nervous.

“When you give me my money back, you freak,” he said, scrambling to his feet and running toward his car, trying to hold onto the wig even as he dug for his keys.

The hooker was fast. With a few quick strides, she had crossed the patch of gravel parking lot and leaped on the man’s back, teeth sinking into his ear as if it were a pastry. He screamed, falling to the ground, where the two began rolling back and forth like two kids scuffling on the playground. Tess felt as if she had seen this before. She had. It was the great ladies room fight from
The Valley of the Dolls
, only this time hairless Helen Lawson was kicking Neely O’Hara’s big, flabby butt.

“You’ll pay for my wig, too, see if you don’t,” the hooker said, still perched on his back, frisking the john’s pockets as he twisted beneath her. One of her high heels fell off and became an impromptu weapon, perfect for jabbing into the small of his back. Moaning, Mr. Nervous clutched the wig to his chest with both hands and curled up in a tight ball. In his gray suit, rolling back and forth, he reminded Tess of the potato bugs she had tortured in her youth.

“That wig cost more than the trick,” the hooker screamed. She must have been telling the truth, for she seemed reluctant to grab it and end up in a tug-of war with the man. Instead she just kept swinging her red high heel at his back and head.

“Fuckin’ freak,” Mr. Nervous rasped out. “Give me back my forty dollars and I’ll give you your wig.”

“Hey, I
earned
that forty dollars,” the hooker replied. She had crawled away from him and seemed to be looking for an opportunity to land a quick kick in his crotch but the man stayed curled up in his potato bug position.

“Don’t remind me! Don’t remind me!” He was hysterical, his voice a high-pitched scream.

Just as Tess was beginning to wonder if she was obligated to intervene—she was still a little fuzzy on the ethics of private investigation, if any—the manager of the motor court ran out and threw a small bucket of ice at the two, as if they were dogs in heat. The man gasped and relaxed his grip just long enough for the hooker to grab the wig.

“This is a respectable place,” the manager said. “You got the wrong end of Route 40, you wanna be carrying on like this.”

“I wanted a woman,” her client’s husband moaned, facedown in the leaves, covering his head, although the blows had stopped. “All I wanted was a woman. Is that so much to ask?”

The prostitute stood, extending one leg and then the other to check the fishnet stockings for runs, assuming a flamingo posture to slip the literal stiletto heel back on, then pulling the wig over her—no, his—wispy brown hair.

“In that case, honey, you should’ve picked someone without an Adam’s apple,” the rechristened redhead said, pulling up his dress to show off black lace panties, the sleek line disturbed by a kind of asymmetry never seen in a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Another Kodak moment. Tess clicked away, hoping her body wasn’t shaking so hard from suppressed laughter that the photos would end up out of focus.
The Valley of the Dolls meets The Crying Game
in the parking lot of the Enchanted Castle Motor Court.

She put her car into gear and headed back into the city, still thinking about blueberry pie. A little farther up Route 40, she considered stopping at the Double-T Diner, but she realized the pie she wanted was somewhere else. Back at the motor court, almost fourteen years in the past, and forever out of reach.

“No more adultery patrol,” she said, sitting across from Tyner Gray, the lawyer who had pushed and prodded her into this line of work, then took credit for every good thing that had happened to her as a result. Time for him to start shouldering a little blame as well. “It’s too demeaning. I’d rather go through someone’s garbage.”

“Don’t be hyperbolic, Tess,” Tyner said, writing out a check in his large, fancy script. Technically, all of Tess’s clients worked through Tyner, assuring them confidentiality. But this particular wronged spouse had been the daughter of his college roommate, so Tyner was going to break the news, play show-and-tell with the photos. There was some small comfort in that.

“You forget I’ve really gone through garbage, looking for those telltale credit card receipts. I was Dumpster diving just last weekend, on a fraud case. Remember, the pierogi dispute in Highlandtown? A little spoiled food, some coffee grounds, but it’s not so bad if you wear good rubber gloves. It’s better than watching some stupid john wrestling with a tranvestite hooker.”

Tyner pushed away from his desk and rolled his wheelchair across the office, storing the ledger on a low shelf by the door. Everything was low here—shelves, file cabinets, tables—and so streamlined that it appeared as if Tyner hadn’t finished moving in. Visitors mistook the look for minimalism. They didn’t stop to think that rugs caught beneath one’s wheels or that antique furniture was little more than an obstacle course of sharp, unforgiving corners. Which was the intended effect: Tyner didn’t want people to stop to think about his wheelchair. Now in his sixties, he had been a paraplegic for more than two-thirds of his life, struck by a car not long after winning an Olympic medal for rowing.

“At least you don’t have to tell Myra’s father that his son-in-law not only tried to cheat on his daughter, but proved to be exceptionally bad at it. All too characteristic. Richard’s a fuck-up, even when it comes to fucking up. I was there when Myra brought him home twenty years ago and I never liked him. But you can’t give friends advice about love.”

“Really? You butt into my love life all the time.”

Tyner grinned wickedly. “You, my dear, have a sex life. There’s a difference. Not that you’ve had even that as of late. Speaking of which—” He rolled back to his desk. “This came for you yesterday. Postmarked Texas.”

The envelope Tyner held toward her could not have been plainer. White, the kind with a blue-plaid lining that hid its contents. Suitable for sending checks or other things of value.

Or things you just don’t want anyone else to see.

“Aren’t there something like twelve million people in Texas?” she said, hoping she sounded nonchalant, even as she held her hands behind her back, staring warily at the envelope.

“Closer to nineteen million. You know exactly one of them, however. Right?”

“That I know of.”

She took the envelope from him. The address had been typed, the stamp was generic, a waving flag. She would have expected something more whimsical. The series with the old bluesmen, or perhaps a cartoon character. She turned it over, held it up to the light. Whatever was inside was feather-light. The postal system suddenly seemed miraculous to her. Imagine moving something so delicate across thousands of miles, for less than the cost of a candy bar.

“Why did it come here, instead of my office?” she asked, in no hurry to open it, although she wasn’t sure why.

“You’ve been in Butchers Hill less than six months,” Tyner said. “You weren’t there before…well, before.”