The Accidental Detective

you’re willing to lose, the way you might decide how much you’re willing to pay to go to a sporting event. If you go home with a dollar more than you were willing to lose, you’ve won.”
    So now that Monaghan has held forth on compulsive gambling, adult diapers and, by implication, her own relief needs, could she share a few biographical details? The year she was born, for example?
    “No,” she says, with a breezy grin. “You’re a reporter, right? Look it up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you can’t track down something that basic, you’re probably not the right woman for the job.”
    Rumor has it that Monaghan loathes the press.
    “Rumor,” Monaghan says, “isn’t always wrong.”
B ALTIMORE B ORN , B RED AND B UTTERED
    S he has been called Baltimore’s best-known private detective, Baltimore’s hungriest private detective and, just once, Baltimore’s most eligible private detective. (Her father went behind her back and entered her into
Baltimore
magazine’s annual feature on the city’s “hot” singles.) But although her work and its consequences have often been featured in the news, Monaghan, a former reporter, has been surprisingly successful at keeping information about herself out of the public domain. At least until now. Oh yes, Ms. Monaghan, this reporter knows her way around public documents.
    Monaghan was born in St. Agnes Hospital, and while official documents disagree on the year, she’s undeniably a member of Generation X or Y, a post-boomer born to an unlikely duo who prove the old adage that opposites attract. Patrick Monaghan, described by his daughter as the world’s most taciturn Irishman, was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a crowded South Baltimore rowhouse and, later, the Charles Village area.
    Meanwhile, Judith Weinstein was the youngest of five from a well-to-do Northwest Baltimore family. She was just entering college when her father’s eponymous drugstore chain entered a messy and devastating bankruptcy. Monaghan and Weinstein met via local politics, working on Carlton R. Sickle’s failed 1966 bid for the Democratic nomination for governor. The couple remains active in politics; Monaghan remembers riding her tricycle around the old Stonewall Democratic Club as a five-year-old. Her father worked for years as a city liquor inspector, then began running his own club, the Point, which has thrived in an unlikely location on Franklintown Road. Her mother works for the National Security Agency and says she cannot divulge what she does.
    “I’m pretty sure she’s a secretary,” Monaghan says, “but for all I know she’s a jet-setting spy who manages to get home by five thirty every night and put supper on the table.”
    The family settled in Ten Hills on the city’s west side and Monaghan attended public schools, graduating from Western High School’s prestigious A-course and then attending Washington College in Chestertown, where she majored in English. By her testimony, she discovered two lifelong influences on the Eastern Shore—rowing and Whitney Talbot. A member of a very old, very rich and very connected Valley family, Talbot has a work ethic as fierce as the one instilled in Monaghan by her middle-class parents, and the two have long reveled in their competitive friendship.
    Upon graduation, Monaghan joined the
Star
as a general assignments reporter, while Talbot—who had transferred to Yale and majored in Japanese—landed a job on the
Beacon-Light
’s editorial pages. But Monaghan’s timing turned out to be less than felicitous—the
Star
folded before she was twenty-six, and the
Beacon-Light
declined to hire her. Cast adrift, she relied on the kindness of family members to help her make ends meet on her meager freelance salary. She lived in a cheap apartment above her aunt’s bookstore in Fells Point and relied on her uncle to throw her assignments for various state agencies. It was in Kitty Monaghan’s store, Women and Children First, that she met her current boyfriend, Edward “Crow” Ransome. When she was twenty-nine, she fell into PI work and likes to call herself the “accidental detective,” a riff on Anne Tyler’s
The Accidental Tourist.
    “Does anyone plan to become a private detective?” Monaghan asks. “It’s not a rhetorical question. I suppose somewhere there’s a little boy or girl dreaming of life as an investigator, but everyone I know seems to have done some other kind of work first. Lawyer, cop. All I