The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Okay. I finally read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I had avoided it, maybe because it was so trendy, but too many people had liked it and I was stuck in the airport anyway so I gave it a try. I loved it and I want to recommend it to all my followers out there who can tolerate a few graphic portrayals of his subject matter, the abuse of women. If I had to guess I’d say that the abuse of women is a personal issue for the author, Stieg Larsson. It’s an easy read, well paced with multiple layers to the plot. I liked that his title character was not his main character, but in the end had the strongest voice. She is my favorite character. Lisbeth Salander, the dragon tattoo character, is undoubtedly an abuse survivor herself but her abuse is never mentioned. I know she is a survivor because of how she reacts to things. She doesn’t put much faith in a society that has more rules to punish abusers after they abuse than to protect their victims in the first place. I can picture her response to a bleeding heart who expressed sympathy for an abuser because of their own childhood abuse. “A lot of women have been abused without becoming abusers themselves and it is an insult to them for this abuser to use it for sympathy. When we know who an abuser is the only person we should be concerned about is his next victim.” At least that’s what I want her to say.

My father

For all of my childhood my father was a functioning alcoholic. I didn’t learn what that phrase meant until I was older but that is what he was. He was a salesman and he was gone a lot. My mother said he could charm the money off of anyone. I think she liked that he made a lot of money. She probably liked that he was charming too. He was very charming, and generous, and playful, and funny. When he was in a good mood he was everything you wanted a father to be. You just couldn’t depend on his being in a good mood. It wasn’t that he was ever mean or irritable when he was in a bad mood. He was never mean or irritable, ever. When he wasn’t in a good mood he would simply be gone. It wouldn’t matter if you needed him or if he had promised you something, he wouldn’t be there. By the time I was ten I didn’t trust him anymore. Kevin was six so he still believed all the excuses when Dad’s promises were broken. Mom seemed to be okay with it too. In fact Mom was the one who made the excuses for him. When I’d watch Kevin wait at the window for his father to show up I’d tell him that “If Dad’s late it means he forgot.” She’d tell me not to be so “sour” and then she’d make up some story about Dad working so hard or having such a hard job. And maybe she was right, maybe I was sour, but I couldn’t help seeing what I saw, knowing what I knew. I know he knew that I had turned sour towards him and sometimes I wonder if that made it worse when things got really bad.
Everything changed the day he killed that little girl with his car. He was in Philadelphia and he was supposed to be picking someone up in front his hotel. Dad didn’t know the man he was picking up but he had a description so he was driving slowly and looking out the drivers’ window. No one had an explanation for why that little girl was just standing in the street but the witnesses said she froze. She was eight. Her name was Martha. My father never saw her. He didn’t know that he had hit her until it was over. I can’t imagine what that memory feels like to him. Mom and I went to the hearing but Kevin stayed in Johnson City with our grandparents. Dad's lawyer thought it would look better for him if his family were there. So I got to hear it all. I heard about his blood alcohol level, which was just barely legal but close enough to be mentioned. They asked about his drinking and I got to hear him lie. Martha's mother was at the hearing and I got to hear her sobbing. And then when it was all over I got to hear what she called him, what she screamed at him as we left the courthouse. I don’t know what that memory feels like to him either, but I know what it feels like to me. After that he stopped being a functioning alcoholic. He was just an alcoholic. Six months later he was unemployed. And six months after that he and mom got divorced. She was no longer making excuses for him.

Natasha McMorales, Private Investigator

This is the story about how I got the name Natasha McMorales: My name is really Natalie Miriam Moreland but almost everyone calls me Nattie. I am a Private Investigator, a PI, and I have my own agency in Bristol, Tennessee. I never really thought about being a PI as a career but after I quit college I needed a job and Hiram hired me as a receptionist/office manager. Hiram encouraged me to get my PI license because he thought I was good at getting people to tell me things. And I’m thankful that he saw this gift because I didn’t see it. Hiram had to retire after he had a heart attack but I still needed a job so he let me keep working under his agency license. The sign on the door read:

HIRAM MORELAND DETECTIVE AGENCY
NATALIE M. MORLAND

When I went to Nashville to get the license that allows me to have my own agency, my brother, Kevin, was supposed to change the sign. He has my old job of receptionist/office manager. I wanted the sign to read:

NATALIE M. MORELAND
PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS

But instead of hiring a sign painter like he was told Kevin took it upon himself to scrape the old sign himself and in typical Kevin fashion he did it a little at a time so there came a time when the door looked like this:

NATA M MOR

I don’t know why Kevin didn’t scrape everything off all at once but that’s not his style. And it would not have been a problem except that Kevin was approached in the parking lot by a potential client who was looking for a PI with a European sensitivity. In typical Kevin fashion he had a moment of creative brilliance (or lunacy) and came up with a name that landed what would eventually be the first big case of my new agency. The name has been and continues to be both a blessing and a curse. The sign on my door now reads:

NATASHA McMORALES
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Everyone can . . .

I was on another all-nighter and passed the time by thinking about my bests. It’s a pass-the-time strategy that I got from reading Robert Parker detective novels. Spencer, Parker detective and my alter-ego, would imagine variations of all-star baseball teams like an all-star team of only baseball players he had seen with his father or of Irish decent. I come from a long line of Cub fan so I don’t know anything about baseball but I have my own version, which is to imagine my top ten lists of various things. Last night it was the best breakfasts I have ever had. So here is the most recent entry to the best breakfasts list (most of the best breakfasts were in Tuscany):

It was about four months ago and it was a great breakfast for three reasons. The first reason is that it was at the Sunny Side Up Grill and the food was great. I had scrambled eggs with shredded Swiss cheese and hot sauce with sides of wheat toast, sausage patties, and home fried potatoes. They have the best coffee in town and the refills are free. The second reason it was such a good breakfast was that I met Debbie then. She was a classmate of Kevin’s so she was four years behind me, but that age difference, which had been so important then, was not important now. Debbie is now one of my closest friends and I adore her two year old twins, Matilda and Abraham.

Lastly, it was at this breakfast that Debbie told me the quint-essential story about my brother. As the story goes their fifth grade teacher was on a tirade about the “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” The phrase was offensive to her and she told her class that the phrase should be, “those who do, do.” In typical Kevin fashion Kevin told her that, “everyone can do-do.”

Sometimes I hate my job

Sometimes I hate my job. I’m a private investigator. I know that’s a strange job for a woman but it’s my job and I’m good at it. Sometime I might write about how I came to be a PI, but not today. Usually I like my job, but today I hate it. Today I finished a contract with Mrs. Jane (I changed her name to protect the innocent…and by that I mean to protect me against a lawsuit). Mrs. Jane hired me to find out if her husband was having an affair. While he told Mrs. Jane he was enjoying a golf weekend with his buddies once a month, Mr. Jane was enjoying Mrs. Gray. It was a simple PI investigation and I had a photocopy of the hotel registry and several pictures of Mrs. Gray and him leaving their hotel room in different outfits. While I waited in the foyer with the evidence, Mrs. Jane told Mr. Jane about her suspicion. Her plan was to give him a chance to confess the truth. If he had fessed up and agreed to end the affair she would agree to do whatever it took to restore her marriage. But if he held on to his lie she was going to bring me in, present him with the evidence, and then tell him to leave. Well, I sat there for close to forty-five minutes before that door opened and the whole time I sat there I prayed for him. I prayed that he would tell the truth. I wanted him to tell the truth because that is what Mrs. Jane wanted and I figured that if she was still willing to save her marriage it was probably worth saving. I sent my will for him to tell the truth through that closed door because other than cheating he could be one of the good guys. I may be the most naive PI that ever lived but I believe everyone should get more than one chance. So I wanted Mr. Jane to get the chance that Mrs. Jane wanted to give him. Every five minutes I would pace, stare at the door, and pray for Mr. Jane. I meant, with all my heart, every prayer I sent. At one point I remember wondering if Mr. Jane would appreciate the prayers and support he was getting from such an unlikely source as the PI who found him out. Then I remembered the York's who just a few weeks ago saw me at Manna Bagel one morning and told me how thankful they were that Mrs. York’s affair was discovered because it forced them to make some decisions that they had avoided for years. They looked so happy, so together. I wanted the Gray's to have what the York's had. So I continued to pray for Mr. Jane to tell the truth. And then I heard someone take the door handle. I watched it open expecting to see Mrs. Jane smiling. Surely they had worked it out after that much time. But it was not Mrs. Jane. It was Mr. Jane. And he was not smiling as he stormed through the foyer. He stopped in front of me where I sat and sneered at me. I slid my right hand around to my side so I could get at the gun holstered at the small of my back. But he didn’t come any closer. “How do you live with yourself?” he fumed just before he spit on me. I just sat there for I don’t know how long, with his spit on my jacket, and watched the man I had prayed for the past forty-five minutes kick open his front door and leave. And all I could think was, “sometimes I hate my job.”