Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Why did you go to all those places?”

“Because I wanted to. I’m a writer. And I make just enough money to live where I please and do as I please-as long as I don’t get too extravagant. I wanted to try island life because I remembered visiting Tangier when I was a boy. I didn’t count on Becca suddenly deciding she wanted to be an opera singer. If she gets much more serious, I suppose we’ll have to move again.”

His heart lurched, even as his mind raced through the calculation. He is a junior, seventeen. Becca is a year ahead of him in school. He knew she would go to the mainland at the end of this school year, that he would have to wait a year to follow her. But he counted on their having the next year. He’s not sure he could survive two years without her.

“And you could do that? Just pick up and go anywhere you want to go?”

“As long as it’s reasonable. New York is too expensive. Of course, Becca has her heart set on Juilliard. I keep telling her there are other good music schools. Peabody in Baltimore, for example. She’s got New York fever.”

No, she doesn’t, he wanted to say. She yearned to sing, yes. But she wanted to be with him too. They had spoken of it endlessly. She wouldn’t go to New York, not without him.

“And when I tell her I don’t think New York is going to work out, she says maybe she’ll run away, go to Italy or somewhere else in Europe.” Harry Harrison shook his head, sad and bewildered. “She’s always threatening to leave me if she doesn’t get her way. It’s hard for a man alone to raise a daughter. She seems to think it’s my fault her mother is dead. As if, having divorced her mother, I didn’t care when she died. But I did. And I didn’t want to be a single dad. Taking a four-year-old girl into my life wasn’t what I had planned, either. She says I drink too much. But alcohol is just… the lubricant. A writer has to shed his inhibitions, get naked. I have to enter a place where I don’t care what people think.”

He thought, Well, you’ve ended up in a place where people don’t care about you at all. If you knew what they thought of you, you’d probably never get a word on the page.

“I heard,” he said instead, “that you’re writing a book about us.”

“Who told you that?” Harrison’s voice wasn’t loud, but it was harder, and the sudden change scared him.

“I… I don’t know.” Big-mouth Aggie Winslip. “It’s just something I heard. Becca must have mentioned it.”

Harrison switched back to genial host. “She did? I didn’t even know Becca listened when I spoke about my work. She seems to find it boring. She calls me a cut-rate Michener. Becca’s a terrible snob, if you want to know the truth. Keeps talking about ”high art‘ and “low art.” With high art being whatever she likes-opera-and low art being everything else. I’ll tell you something about Becca.“ He leaned in to share his confidence, his breath sour with gin. ”She’s got the diva temperament, but I don’t think she’s got the acting chops to be a great singer of any range. She’ll have to play parts that are close enough to her own personality to get by. She’ll never sing Mimi, she’ll always be Musetta.“

“I… I’m not sure who they are.” This was true, despite Becca’s endless chatter about what she did and what she sang and what she was learning. When she spoke, it was often as if she were still singing in a foreign language. He was so caught up in joy he couldn’t hear the distinct sounds.

“You don’t need to know,” her father said, clapping him on the back. “Can I get you something?”

But he made his excuses and wandered out, still thinking about what kind of job would allow him to go wherever he wanted. Every job he knew was tethered to a place, whether it was waterman or C amp;P lineman or schoolteacher. He wanted a job that would allow him to go anywhere, because that’s what he would need to be with Becca.

Later, years later, he would find himself wondering if there was a different meaning to her father’s words. You don’t need to know. He thought Harry Harrison was being kind, saying these things were unimportant, they would not impede his love. Now he thinks that Harry Harrison assumed this was a high school romance, destined to fade.

This realization made him feel much less guilty about what he had taken from Harry Harrison-who had, it turned out, drunk himself to death in a fashion. When Becca disappeared, Harrison did too, and he spent the rest of his life in pursuit of his wayward daughter. Of course, he never found her. But liver cancer found him.

Everybody dies. He adjusts the pillow beneath his cheek, so he’s no longer pressing against one of the more wiry seams. His mother’s handiwork improved over the time she was making this pillow. As did his. He sighs, hollow from anticipation. Everybody dies.

It took one phone call the next day to determine that Michael Shaw’s partner was a real person, now living in California-and not particularly happy to have a stranger call him out of the blue and remind him that his lover was dead.

“Of course I live where I told the police I live,” he said when Tess explained, in a smooth-as-silk lie, that she was going over open case files for the Anne Arundel County police and needed to make sure he had provided a correct telephone number and address. “But what about the case? Have you made any headway?”

“We’re pursuing it with due vigilance.” She thought that was something a cop might say.

“Have you learned anything, anything at all? It’s been six months, and when I call your detectives they act as if I’m a gigantic pain. Are they ever going to make an arrest in Michael’s case? I understand that accidents happen, but a hit-and-run-a person should have the decency-you can’t know whether someone’s dead or not unless you stop-”

Shaw’s former lover began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said, and this was not a lie. “But we may have a break in the case soon.” She hoped that wasn’t a lie.

“I could have told you that the doctor’s boyfriend isn’t one of our guy’s personas,” Carl said when she hung up the phone. Esskay had allotted him a small portion of the office sofa.

“How so?”

“Our guy’s not queer.”

She gave him a look.

“Sorry. Gay, he’s not gay. He’d be appalled you even thought to check.”

“And how do you know that?”

He tapped his forehead. “I just do.”

“Uh-uh. You’re the one who said you didn’t want to get into that mind-hunter shit.”

“I’m just saying I know he’s not a-not gay.”

“It’s still a supposition. Let’s keep to facts. Here’s one: Michael Shaw’s partner, unlike the other boyfriends in our various cases, didn’t disappear off the face of the planet. Too bad. Shaw’s death would be a more obvious part of the overall pattern if he had. So what else do we know about Shaw?”

“He was a shrink.”

“Right. Is it possible our guy ever went to him?”

“Not of his own volition. He wouldn’t want to be in analysis.”

“What if it were court-ordered?” Tess couldn’t help thinking of her own situation. She reread the obituary in her file. Shaw had been a doctor in Hopkins’ famed sex clinic. Serial killing had a strong sexual component. If EAC-the shorthand she and Carl had started using for Eric-Alan-Charlie-had committed a lesser crime in yet another persona, he might have been ordered into therapy. But wouldn’t an arrest have outed his identity scheme?

Carl was on the same train of thought, even farther down the track. “We’ll never get the doctor’s client list,” he said. “It would be hard enough if we were real cops. As amateurs with no legal standing, there’s no way. Besides, why kill your shrink? He can’t tell your secrets to anyone.”