Free Laura Lippman by Tess Monaghan 05 - The Sugar House (v5) Page B

on his face, while he’s looking at his enchilada.”
    “Maybe she’s in love and he’s not.”
    “That wouldn’t cancel out my thesis.”
    “What’s the point of cheating on your wife if it’s not for love?”
    Tess couldn’t decide if she found this sentiment reassuring or unnerving, coming from her father.
    “None, I guess,” she said, although she didn’t believe it. In fact, it was her contention that most people who cheated, men and women, were concerned with anything but love. She had slept with another woman’s man out of childish self-pity. Of course, that was before her conversion to monogamy.
    “You never told me how your work for Ruthie is going, anyway.”
    From adultery to Ruthie. Tess didn’t even want to contemplate that connection in her father’s mind.
    “It’s not. I had one little lead, but it hasn’t gone anywhere. A kid down in Locust Point—a girl who may or may not be a pathological liar—told me she talked to the girl and she said she had worked at a place with a name like Domino’s, a place that might as well be called the Sugar House. I spent the afternoon calling every Domino pizza takeout in the city, along with sundry plumbing supply companies, candy shops, taverns, and anything in the Yellow Pages that began DOM. No one remembers a girl who dropped out of sight a year ago, but then, who would?”
    “You worked the phone book?
    “What else is there?”
    “Well, if it’s a city bar, it might be Domino’s on the application, just a blank storefront on the street, and no phone listing at all. You ever see those weird little places, the ones that look like someone’s house except for a neon Bar sign in the window? They have names, but they’re not written down anywhere. Except on the applications. Or they might have one name on the sign, another on the application. Sugar House-Domino’s. It’s a long shot, but if you want to come in and look at the files, they’re public information.”
    “But if it’s not a bar…”
    “Then you’ve lost about twenty minutes out of your life. And it’s all on the clock, right? You’re getting paid, what do you care?”
    The fajitas arrived. They always reminded Tess of a magic act, the way smoke poured from the hot skillet as the meat sizzled. Once the waiter was gone, Patrick looked helplessly at the little dishes arrayed in front of him, the basket of flour tortillas.
    “How do I do this, anyway?” he asked Tess.
    “You must be the last person in America to eat a fajita,” Tess said, showing him how to assemble the skirt steak, pico de gallo , and guacamole in a tortilla, feeling a surge of affection. She had a sudden image of sitting opposite her father in some nursing home, pouring his Sanka and cutting his meat. It was unbearably sad to think of him that way. She was glad her father was still young, that those days were far away. She liked the relative irresponsibility of being a daughter.
    “Yeah, I may never have eaten a fajita—” Patrick hit the j hard, “but there’s plenty of other things I’ve done.”
    She decided not to ask for details. Maybe she didn’t want to know everything about her parents after all.

chapter
7

    H ER FATHER’S IDEA OF CHECKING THE BAR FILES WAS AS good as any she had, which was to say not very. Certainly, it didn’t seem particularly urgent when Tess rose the next morning, not as urgent as her desire for a specific kind of rush, a rush found only in one place. She hurried Esskay through their morning walk, then headed to a small, perfectly kept rowhouse not even 500 feet from where she lived.
    “I need a Laylah fix,” she told Jackie Weir when she answered the lacquered goldenrod door on Shakespeare Street. “Has she eaten breakfast yet? May I take her to Jimmy’s with me?”
    “She’s not eaten breakfast, but that’s not my fault,” Jackie said drily. “The kitchen is knee-deep in Cheerios and bananas. Please take her with you. Keep her for a little while, why don’t