Laura Lippman - The Sugar House

Brad rolled his eyes. “All lies, I’m betting. When Sukey tells a story in so much detail, it’s always lies. Why do you make things up, Sukey? What book did you get that from?”

Sukey’s eyes seemed on the verge of tearing up, but this was a girl with plenty of experience at stemming her own tears. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes very wide, and the film of tears receded. “I’m telling the truth this time. I do sometimes, you know. She said more stuff, too, stuff I wasn’t supposed to tell. She said she was a runaway. She had lived in a big mansion and gone to boarding schools. She said her father was the richest man in the world, and he was going to miss her like crazy.”

Even Tess could tell this part of the story wasn’t true. But she held up a hand before Brad started to berate Sukey again. “If I learn one new thing about a case, I’m doing well. You saw the woman I’m trying to identify, the two of you spoke. As far as I’m concerned, I owe you. Could I buy you that magazine you were reading, or one of the paperbacks in the rack? My way of saying thank you.”

Sukey sucked on her plump lower lip. “Can I have both?”

Brad looked ready to scold the girl again, but Tess’s laugh kept him from saying anything.

“Why not?”

Sukey picked out a Teen People and a thriller, something that was all Swiss numbered accounts and globetrotting psychopaths, with a lovely but lethal lady in pursuit. The cover showed a woman’s shapely legs, cut off at mid-thigh, a 9 mm dangling by her lace garter belt.

“This is sort of what your job is like, right?” Sukey asked, studying the cover.

“Sort of,” Tess said. “Although I tend to cover myself below the waist when I’m working.”

She didn’t have the heart to tell Sukey what her job was really like, how boring it could be, how routine. Tess was going to spend the rest of her day poring over phone books and CD-Rom telephone directories, looking for places with names like Domino’s, which should be called the Sugar House, unless it was the Gingerbread House, or a cake. It was her willingness to share details like this that had put Tess on the “do-not-call” list for every city school’s Career Day. She also didn’t see any point in mentioning that she was going to check to see if there had been an armored car robbery in Locust Point this morning.

The truth was, she couldn’t imagine any assignment more dangerous than being a teenage girl, at large in the land with an overripe body and a face full of yearning. Bring on the globetrotting psychopaths. They couldn’t be anywhere near as terrifying as adolescent boys.

SOME PEOPLE PANIC AT DECEMBER’S DARKNESS, DESPAIRING to see the sun go down before they leave work. But Tess had always found comfort in the shorter days. The winter months gave her permission to relax. It was pleasant, cozy even, to sit in her office and feel the shadows encroach around her and her computer screen. On this particular afternoon, the ebbing light was at least a sign of progress. The sun came up, the sun went down, and the only thing she knew was what she already knew: Jane Doe had a conversation with Sukey on the swings at Latrobe Park.

Unless she didn’t. Sukey wasn’t a liar, Tess realized. She wasn’t mean, she wanted nothing from her stories, except a little attention. The robbery tale even had a germ of truth in it. The desk sergeant at the Southern Precinct confirmed a bakery truck had hit a light pole in the neighborhood, and some kids had carried away cakes and pies before police arrived. Sukey had changed the bakery truck to an armored car, the sweets to money, thinking, in her innocence, to make the story better. Yet the truth was so much more entertaining. Tess had even phoned in the item to her Beacon-Light friend, Feeney, made an early Christmas present of this slam-dunk brite. No, Sukey was a fantasist, trying to make something out of the dreary reality of the life around her. Then why couldn’t she imagine a life for herself that would take her down Fort Avenue and out of Locust Point? Why was she cutting school and thinking her own future was limited to a job at the Sugar House?

A knock sounded on the door, slightly tentative. From the outside, the office probably looked dark. “Come in, it’s open,” Tess called out, turning on the desk lamp and feeling as if she had been caught doing something. What, she wasn’t sure.

Her father’s red head poked around the door, the way he had poked it into her bedroom all those years-unsure of his welcome, a little nervous about entering what he considered a feminine precinct.

“I can’t believe you don’t keep this locked,” he said. “You should have a buzzer system, throw the deadbolt the minute you come in.”

She usually did, but being scolded by her father made her feel contrary.

“I don’t worry too much. After all, I have this fine watch dog-” the greyhound, Esskay, unrolled stiffly from the sofa, did her salaam stretch, and presented herself to Patrick for the obligatory tribute she demanded from everyone who crossed the threshold.

“And a gun in my desk drawer.”

If Tess were in therapy, a psychiatrist probably could have spent many, many hours on the immense pleasure she took in brandishing her.38 Smith amp; Wesson at her father just then. But, really, the gesture said more about her relationship with her gun than it did about her relationship with her father. When she first opened the office, she had kept it in the wall safe. She had been literally gun shy, afraid of her own weapon. She soon found there was no percentage in having a permit to carry if she didn’t keep the gun close at hand. The fact of gun ownership didn’t intimidate anyone, she needed the weapon nearby.

Besides, she had fallen a little in love with her Smith amp; Wesson. It felt good in her hand and it was much more reliable than other tools of her trade-the cell phone, the computer, her instincts.

“Put that away,” her father said. “It’s not a toy.”

“No, but it looks like one, which is probably why kids are always picking them up. What brings you here?” she asked. It occurred to her that this was only his second visit to the office, the first being the “grand opening” where her mother had tried not to weep and Patrick had recommended burglar bars for all the windows.

“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, and she let the lie pass. She knew-and he knew that she knew-the East Side had never been his territory.

He glanced around her office, which she thought looked best in evening’s dim light. The walls, which probably had layers of lead paint beneath the eggshell white Tess had slapped on last summer, didn’t look as rough, the floors weren’t as noticeably wavy. “I keep hoping you’ll do well enough so you could afford a nice little office in one of those strip centers out York Road, or toward Ellicott City.”

“I could swing that, if I wanted to,” Tess said, her tone a little curt. Maybe she should have brandished her bank book at her father, instead of her gun. “But some of my clients couldn’t. I need to be near a bus line, or the Metro, limited as that is. Not everyone owns a car, you know.”

“But that’s not the kind of clientele you want,” her father said. “You want to be in a place where suburban ladies feel comfortable pulling up in their mini-vans.”

“The suburban ladies like this location just fine. It gives them a thrill, as if they were coming into the city to score crack. They already feel degraded, hiring a private detective, so they might as well get the full slumming experience. I think they’re disappointed that I don’t have my name on the door in gilt letters, and a secretary named Velma out front.”