The Accidental Detective by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online Page A

ideas for Charlie, who was notoriously difficult to shop for. And as the accessories began to flow—golf books, golf-themed clothing, golf gloves, golf hats, golf highball glasses—Charlie inevitably learned quite a bit about golf. He watched tournaments on television and spoke knowingly of “Tiger” and “Singh,” as well as the quirks of certain U.S. Open courses. He began to think of himself as a golfer who simply didn’t golf. Which, as he gleaned from his friends who actually pursued the sport, might be the best of all possible worlds. Golf, they said, was their love and their obsession, and they all wished they had never taken it up.
    A T ANY RATE, THIS CONTINUED for two years and everyone—Charlie, Marla, and Sylvia, his former administrative assistant—was very happy with this arrangement. But then Sylvia announced she wanted to go from mistress to wife. And given that Sylvia was terrifyingly good at making her pronouncements into reality, this was a rather unsettling turn of events for Charlie. After all, she had been the one who had engineered the affair in the first place, and even come up with the golf alibi. As he had noted on her annual evaluation, Sylvia was very goal-oriented.
    “Look, I want to fuck you,” Sylvia had said out of the blue, about six months after she started working for him. Okay, not totally out of the blue. She had tried a few more subtle things—pressing her breasts against his arm when going over a document, touching his hand, asking him if he needed her to go with him to conferences, even volunteering to pay her own way when told there was no money in the budget for her to attend. “We could even share a room,” she said. It was when Charlie demurred at her offer that she said: “Look, I want to fuck you.”
    Charlie was fifty-eight at the time, married thirty-six years, and not quite at ease in the world. He remembered a time when nice girls didn’t—well, when they didn’t do it so easily and they certainly didn’t speak of it this way. Marla had been a nice girl, someone he met at college and courted according to the standards of the day, and while he remembered being wistful in the early days of his marriage, when everyone suddenly seemed to be having guilt-free sex all the time, AIDS had come along and he decided he was comfortable with his choices. Sure, he noticed pretty girls and thought about them, but he had never been jolted to act on those feelings. It seemed like a lot of trouble, frankly.
    “Well, um, we can’t,” he told Sylvia.
    “Why? Don’t you like me?”
    “Of course I like you, Sylvia, but you work for me. They have rules about that. Anita Hill and all.”
    “The point of an affair is that it’s carried on in secret.”
    “And the point of embezzlement is to get away with stealing money, but I wouldn’t put my job at risk that way. I plan to retire from this job in a few years.”
    “But you feel what I’m feeling, right? This incredible force between us?”
    “Sure.” It seemed only polite.
    “So if I find a job with one of our competitors, then there would be nothing to stop us, right? This is just about the sexual harassment rules?”
    “Sure,” he said, not thinking her serious. Then, just in case she was: “But you can’t take your Rolodex, you know. Company policy.”
    A month later, he was called for a reference on Sylvia and he gave her the good one she deserved, then took her out to lunch to wish her well. She put her hand on his arm.
    “So can we now?”
    “Can we what?”
    “Fuck?”
    “Oh.” He still wasn’t comfortable with that word. “Well, no. I mean, as of this moment, you’re still my employee. Technically. So, no.”
    “What about next week?”
    “Well, my calendar is pretty full—”
    “You don’t have anything on Thursday.” Sylvia did know his calendar.
    “That’s true.”
    “We can go to my apartment. It’s not far.”
    “You know, Sylvia, when you’re starting a new job, you really