The Accidental Detective and other stories: Short Story Collection

The Accidental Detective and other stories: Short Story Collection
Laura Lippman

Nine deliciously dark, funny and twisted short stories from one of America’s top crime writers.EXCLUSIVE EBOOK EDITION ALSO INCLUDES A FREE EXTRACT FROM LAURA’S FORTHCOMING NOVEL THE INNOCENTS.If you haven’t discovered Laura Lippman yet, delve into these nine ingenious tales and read an exclusive extract from Laura’s latest novel The Innocents.Within this collection, Laura Lippman takes us from Dublin in ‘Honor Bar’ to Washington D.C. in ‘ARM and the Woman’ and to New Orleans in ‘Pony Girl.’ Other higlights include a rare interview with Tess (of Laura’ popular Tess Monaghan series) in ‘The Accidental Detective.’Sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous and always filled with shocking twists and turns, expect the unexpected…If you enjoy this collection, why not try ‘Femme Fatale and other stories’. Also available now as an exclusive ebook short story collection.

Laura Lippman

The Accidental Detective

and other stories

Table of Contents

Title Page (#u2516b448-d065-5288-ae47-1190c148003d)

Other Cities, Not my own (#u9ee3507e-ec6d-5da0-8d1a-fbefc0512242)

Pony Girl (#uda971cb8-173a-5cb2-bbd1-1813dffa3a8c)

Arm and the Woman (#uc222dc75-47de-514b-ae85-3374e144e202)

Honor Bar (#uc49086d2-7050-5eee-91ac-05c04280ba2c)

A Good Fuck Spoiled (#litres_trial_promo)

My Baby Walks the Streets of Baltimore (#litres_trial_promo)

Easy as A-B-C (#litres_trial_promo)

Black-Eyed Susan (#litres_trial_promo)

Ropa Vieja (#litres_trial_promo)

The Shoeshine Man’s Regrets (#litres_trial_promo)

The Accidental Detective (#litres_trial_promo)

Read on for an exclusive extract from Laura Lippman’s forthcoming novel The Innocents. (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Laura Lippman (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

OTHER CITIES, NOT MY OWN

PONY GIRL

She was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided—days, weeks, maybe even months ago—that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to the interstate and Ernie K-Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play. There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Café Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years—I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen—I’d seen only one more disturbing sight on a Mardi Gras day and that was a white boy who took a Magic Marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a Magic Marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.

The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered, that we had to hold tight to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their homework and listen to their mamas. Once upon a time, the skeletons were fierce, coming in with old bones from the butcher’s shop, shaking the bloody hanks at sleeping children. Man, you do that to one of these kids today, he’s as like to come up with a gun, blow the skeleton back into the grave. Legends lose their steam, like everything else. What scared people once won’t scare them now.

Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne-colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so … disrupting. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white-and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and—this was what made me fear for her—a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced. Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed there, dancing into the night.

Back in school, when they lectured us on the straight and narrow, they told us that rape is a crime of violence. They told us that a woman isn’t looking for something just because she goes out in high heels and a halter and a skirt that barely covers her. Or in a champagne-colored body stocking with a tail affixed. They told us that rape has nothing to do with sex. But sitting in Ernie K-Doe’s, drinking a Heineken, I couldn’t help but wonder if rape started as sex and then moved to violence when sex was denied. Look at me, look at me, look at me, the tail seemed to sing as it twitched back and forth. Yet Pony Girl’s downcast eyes, refusing to make eye contact even with her dancing partner, a plump cowgirl in a big red hat, sent a different message. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. You do that to a dog with a steak, he bites you, and nobody says that’s the dog’s fault.

Yeah, I wanted her as much as anyone there. But I feared for her even more than I wanted her, saw where the night was going and wished I could protect her. Where she was from, she was probably used to getting away with such behavior. Maybe she would get away with it here, too, if only because she was such an obvious outsider. Not a capital-T tourist, not some college girl from Tallahassee or Birmingham who had gotten tired of showing her titties on Bourbon Street and needed a new thrill. But a tourist in these parts, the kind of girl who was so full of herself that she thought she always controlled things. She was counting on folks to be rational, which was a pretty big count on Mardi Gras day. People do odd things, especially when they’s masked.

I saw a man I knew only as Big Roy cross the threshold. Like most of us, he hadn’t bothered with a costume, but he could have come as a frog without much trouble. He had the face for it—pop eyes, wide, flat mouth. Big Roy was almost as wide as he was tall, but he wasn’t fat. I saw him looking at Pony Girl, long and hard, and I decided I had to make my move. At worst, I was out for myself, trying to get close to her. But I was being a gentleman, too, looking out for her. You can be both. I know what was in my heart that day, and while it wasn’t all-over pure, it was something better than most men would have offered her.

“Who you s’posed to be?” I asked, after dancing awhile with her and her friend. I made a point of making it a threesome, of joining them, as opposed to trying to separate them from each other. That put them at ease, made them like me.

“A horse,” she said. “Duh.”

“Just any horse? Or a certain one?”

She smiled. “In fact, I am a particular horse. I’m Misty of Chincoteague.”

“Misty of where?”

“It’s an island off Virginia,” she was shouting in my ear, her breath warm and moist. “There are wild ponies, and every summer, the volunteer firemen herd them together and cross them over to the mainland, where they’re auctioned off.”

“That where you from?”

“Chincoteague?”

“Virginia.”

“My family is from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But I’m from here. I go to Tulane.”

The reference to college should have made me feel a little out of my league, or was supposed to, but somehow it made me feel bolder. “Going to college don’t you make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an oven can call itself a biscuit.”

“I love it here,” she said, throwing open her arms. Her breasts were small, but they were there, round little handfuls. “I’m never going to leave.”

“Ernie K-Doe’s?” I asked, as if I didn’t know what she meant.

“Yes,” she said, playing along. “I’m going to live here forever. I’m going to dance until I drop dead, like the girl in the red shoes.”

“Red shoes? You wearing cowboy boots.”

She and her friend laughed, and I knew it was at my expense, but it wasn’t a mean laughter. Not yet. They danced and they danced, and I began to think that she had been telling a literal truth, that she planned to dance until she expired. I offered her cool drinks, beers and sodas, but she shook her head; I asked if she wanted to go for a walk, but she just twirled away from me. To be truthful, she was wearing me out. But I was scared to leave her side because whenever I glanced in the corner, there was Big Roy, his pop eyes fixed on her, almost yellow in the dying light. I may have been a skinny nineteen-year-old in blue jeans and a Sean John T-shirt—this was back when Sean John was at its height—but I was her self-appointed knight. And even though she acted as if she didn’t need me, I knew she did.

Eventually she started to tire, fanning her face with her hands, overheated from the dancing and, I think, all those eyes trained on her. That Mardi Gras was cool and overcast, and even with the crush of bodies in Ernie K-Doe’s, it wasn’t particularly warm. But her cheeks were bright red, rosy, and there were patches of sweat forming on her leotard—two little stripes beneath her barely-there breasts, a dot below her tail and who knows where else.

Was she stupid and innocent, or stupid and knowing? That is, did she realize the effect she was having and think she could control it, or did she honestly not know? In my heart of hearts, I knew she was not an innocent girl, but I wanted to see her that way because that can be excused.

Seeing her steps slow, anticipating that she would need a drink now, Big Roy pressed up, dancing in a way that only a feared man could get away with, a sad little hopping affair. Not all black men can dance, but the ones who can’t usually know better than to try. Yet no one in this crowd would dare make fun of Big Roy, no matter how silly he looked.