Veterans Day (ePub)

Mary Jane Morris practices her trade in Washington D.C. Margaret Truman wrote a series of murder mysteries set there, and it was a good choice because it is one of the most interesting and contradictory places in the world. At its center is the Mall with the White House and Congress, museums, monuments and cherry blossoms on the banks of the Potomac. Filling downtown are lawyers and lobbyists, media outlets, theaters, universities and national nonprofits, the Pentagon, and Arlington Cemetery. 176 embassies line Massachusetts Avenue, and the beltway is filled with Suburbs house immigrants from El Salvador and Ethiopia and the descendants of African slaves, but also government contracting firms making billions and imitation European country estates costing millions. It is a volatile mix of corruption, drug trafficking, spying, murderous jealous spouses, terrorist violence, and a hundred ingenious forms of corruption. Detective Morris is not lacking for work.

Being an aggressive private investigator in Washington D.C. doesn't win you many friends, and being a woman makes it worse. I imagine her sitting in the dark waiting for the men who where coming to kill her and writing her own obituary. It's the kind of thing would do and might go something like this. Mary Jane Morris was thirty-eight years old. Disillusioned with lawyering, she became a private investigator. She was a good friend and a bad enemy, and had a fair amount of courage and some talent in reading people and solving mysteries. She loved her dogs, kayaking, single-malt scotch, her beat up Land Rover and her house by the river filled with old things, and her handsome doctor boyfriend Giuseppe Romolo. She hated people who victimize the vulnerable, and sometimes went outside of the law to see that they were punished. Mary Jane died while investigating her partner's death and a conspiracy to cheat veterans of their medical care and benefits.