Hardly Knew Her

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Harrison, about the mess I’ve gotten you into.” She had refused to sit in his chair, choosing to lean against the wall instead.

“Got myself into, truth be told. If I hadn’t thrown that soda can, none of this would have happened. I could have gone another forty years without anyone bothering me.”

“But you could go to prison.”

“Looks that way.” He was almost cheerful about it.

“You should get a lawyer, get that confession thrown out. Without it, they’ve got nothing.”

“They’ve got a closed case, that’s what they’ve got. A closed case. And maybe I’ll get probation.”

“It’s not a bad bet, but the stakes are awfully high. Even with a five-year sentence, you might die in prison.”

“Might not,” he said.

“Still, your sister seems pretty upset.”

“Oh, Mattie’s always getting upset about something. Our mother thought she was doing right by her, teaching her those Queen of Sheba ma

“She did seem…refined,” Tess said, thinking of the woman’s impeccable appearance and the way she loved to stress big words.

“She was raised to be a lady. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lady’s job. No shame in washing clothes, but no honor in it either, not for someone like Mattie. She should have stayed in school, become a teacher. But Mattie thought it would be easy to marry a man on the rise. She just didn’t figure that a man on the rise would want a woman on the rise, too, that the ma

“Being a teacher, you mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, his tone vague and faraway. “Yeah. She could have gone back, even after she dropped out, but she just stomped her feet and threw back that pretty head of hers. Threw back her pretty head and cried.”

“Threw back her pretty head and cried-why does that sound familiar?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Threw back her pretty head…I know that, but I can’t place it.”

“Couldn’t help you.” He began whistling a tune, “Begin the Beguine.”

“Mr. Harrison-you didn’t kill that man, did you?”

“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 mayo

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 Pe

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 Be

“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.”