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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 heated 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 at the racetracks in Delaware, the ones with slot machines, they 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 had 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 the questions she has posed. “That’s why he had the machines brought to him in a private room. Slots-what a wussy 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 at 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 row house 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 Carleton Sickles’s failed 1966 bid for the Democratic nomination for governor. The couple remain 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 5:30 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 Western High School ’s prestigious A-course and then attending Washington College in Chestertown, where she majored in English. By her testimony, she discovered two lifelong influences on the Eastern Shore -rowing and Whitney Talbot. A member of a very old, very rich, and very connected Valley family, Talbot has a work ethic as fierce as the one instilled in Monaghan by her middle-class parents, and the two have long reveled in their competitive friendship.

Upon graduation, Monaghan joined the Star as a general-assignments reporter, while Talbot-who had transferred to Yale and majored in Japanese-landed a job on the Beacon-Light’s editorial pages. But Monaghan’s timing turned out to be less than felicitous-the Star folded before she was twenty-six, and the Beacon-Light declined to hire her. Cast adrift, she relied on the kindness of family members to help her make ends meet on her meager freelance salary. She lived in a cheap apartment above her aunt’s bookstore in Fells Point and depended on her uncle to throw her assignments for various state agencies. It was in Kitty Monaghan’s store, Women and Children First, that she met her current boyfriend, Edward “Crow” Ransome. When she was twenty-nine, she fell into PI work; she likes to call herself the “accidental detective,” a riff on Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.

“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 on 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 cleaners 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 claims. “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, when 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 his bar. Ransome’s workday ended a mere four hours ago, at four a.m., while Monaghan’s day began at six a.m. with a workout at the local boathouse.

Monaghan and Ransome 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 veritable 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 reread the Alexandria Quartet every year.”

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

“Pretentious suggests pretending, trying to make others believe that you’re something 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 those 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 she 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 percentage of body fat is under twenty. 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 in any place 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 ’60s, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay and 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 Fell’s 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 of 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 of 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, 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’s identifying a Jane Doe homicide victim-and unraveling an unseemly web of favors that showed, once again, that 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 case work, it begins to seem as if almost all her jobs have been 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 full of 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 their 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-’90s, 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 228 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.

At the top, the reason for her rush becomes clear. The sun is just beginning to set, and the western sky is a brilliant rose shade that is kind to the city’s more ramshackle neighborhoods, while the eastern sky is an equally flattering inky blue. To the north, Penn Station is a bright white beacon dominated by the monstrous man-woman statue with its glowing purple heart. To the south, lights begin to come on along the waterfront. Monaghan points out the Continental Building on Calvert Street.

“Hammett worked there, as a Pinkerton. And the birds that are used as ornamentation, the falcons? They’re gold now, but it’s said they were black back in Hammett’s day, so we might be looking at the birthplace of the Maltese Falcon. Look to the southwest, toward Hollins Market, and you can see where Mencken lived, and Russell Baker. Anne Tylerville is out of sight, but you were there this morning, when you visited my home. That church, virtually at our feet? It’s where Francis Scott Key worshipped, while his descendant F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to drink at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere, only a few blocks to the north.”

She inhales deeply, a little raggedly; even Monaghan isn’t so fit that the climb has left her unaffected. She seems drunker now than she did at the bottom, giddy with emotion. She throws open her arms as if to embrace the whole city.

“I mean, really,” she says. “Why would anyone live anywhere else?”