Baltimore Noir (10 page)
But right now, with good dope and coke running wild in his head, Tate had other work at hand. Yes he did. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he found the rat bait and, from the wax-covered end table, a folded strip of cardboard. He found the first of the empty Black Diamond caps on the floor beside the table and opened it, staring at the space where heroin no longer was.
He would see Lorenzo tomorrow. Most definitely.
Corelli was on the B-of-I computer when he sensed Cabazes behind him.
“For a big man, you’re pretty quiet.”
“Graceful, like a cat.”
“I was thinking more like a ballet dancer or an interior decorator or some shit like that. Someone willing to embrace alternative lifestyles.”
Cabazes nodded at the screen and its display of a light sheet: White, male. Timonium address. A few misdemeanors and no open warrants.
“The fuck are you looking at?”
“Him. That’s the cocksucker fucking my wife.”
Cabazes frowned. “Lemme guess. You spent the whole day yesterday camped at Trina’s apartment so you could mark the new boyfriend.”
“Not the whole day, no.”
“Fuck, Tony. Grow the fuck up.”
“You see this guy? Look at this here. Driving under the influence, D-and-D, failure to obey. Guy’s an asshole. Look at this one from ’96 … solicitation for prostitution, sodomy …”
Corelli looked up at his sergeant, mock deadpan. “Guy’s a sodomite.”
“Who the fuck isn’t? By Maryland code, a blowjob is sodomy.”
“Seriously, you think I want a guy like this around my kids? You think Trina will want a guy like this around her kids once she knows?”
“Once she knows what? That her new honey once got DUIed? That once in 1996 he took a blowjob from some pro?”
“Right. I’m sure it was just the once.”
Corelli hit a button, sending the sheet to the printer on the other side of the admin office. Amid the staccato clatter, his sergeant looked at him for a long moment, then pulled up a chair and sat, leaning close.
“What concerns me here, Tony, is a certain lack of perspective on your part.”
“Lack of perspective?”
“How long since you and Trina split?”
“Twenty months.”
“Divorce is final, right?”
“Two years, she says.”
“Two years.”
“Yup.”
“Who you fucking now?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, who you fucking?”
“Arlene. The nurse from Sinai.” He paused, and when Cabazes waited him out, added: “Among a couple others.”
“A couple others. Tony, you been a whore as long as I’ve known you. You were a whore before you married Trina, you were a whore when you were with her, and with the possible exception of a week or so after she finally walked out, you’ve stayed a perfect whore. You’d fuck a rathole if it had carpeting around it.”
“So?”
“So you’re parked outside of Trina’s apartment waiting to see who comes out so you can play detective and decide why she isn’t right to sleep with whoever the fuck she wants. This is what you do.”
“This guy’s gonna be around my fucking kids.”
“You’re around your fucking kids, Tony. And I’ve known you to drive shitfaced. You’re around your kids and I’ve fuckin’ you take a pro’s blowjob once or twice.”
“When?”
“Boardman’s bachelor party. Remember?”
“Bachelor parties don’t count.”
Corelli got up, walked to the printer and pulled the sheet free.
“Leave it be, Tony. The problem isn’t this guy, and it sure as shit ain’t Trina.”
Corelli said nothing, folding the printout, tucking it inside his jacket.
“Anyway, I need a witness for a statement. Room two.”
“Yeah, what’d we catch?”
“Something a little lumpy. Thought it was a straight overdose, but now I got this little fuck in there putting himself in, calling it a hot shot.”
“Huh. No shit.”
Corelli followed his sergeant to the interrogation room.
“Rat bait, huh?”
The man nodded, then scratched himself.
“You loaded an empty with the rat bait and then he stole it from you and fired.”
The man began to cry. Corelli shot Cabazes a look.
“You’re saying you loaded the hot shot on purpose, and that when we tell the M.E. to test for strychnine, it’s gonna come back positive for that and negative for opiates.”
The man nodded again, then vomited. Corelli shot back in his chair, then followed Cabazes out of the The Box. They walked down the hallway for paper towels.
“The fuck kinda goof puts himself in for a hot shot?” Corelli said. “You keep your mouth shut, it’s the perfect murder. Nobody gives a fuck and no jury’s ever gonna believe it’s anything other than a fiend firing bad shit.”
“He says he can’t live with it,” Cabazes offered.
“Why the fuck not? Why’s he gotta bust our balls?”
They found towels in the men’s room, but no mop or pail in the utility closet. They went down to the fifth floor, then the fourth, before finding a janitor. Ten minutes later they were back upstairs, Cabazes heading for the interrogation room and Corelli short-stopping at the soda machine.
“Be there in a sec.”
He fed a dollar and banged for a diet drink before shouts from Cabazes brought him running around the corner. The Box door was open and his sergeant was wrapped around the little fuck’s waist, holding him. Corelli looked up to see the man’s leather belt tied around the ceiling brace, the other end around his neck.
“Get him offa there,” Cabazes grunted.
Standing on the table, Corelli fumbled for a few moments before finding and unfastening the buckle. The body flopped against Cabazes, then onto the table. Corelli jumped down and they loosened the other end of the belt. The dead man rewarded them with a cough, then a breath, then another cough. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in the same chair where they had left him, sipping water from a Styrofoam cup, one arm extended for a paramedic checking his blood pressure.
Cabazes was in the squad room calling the duty officer.
“I don’t get it,” Corelli said. “You hot shot a guy who stole from you and then you come in to confess. The fuck is up with that? You did what you had to.”
The man said nothing at first, then shook his head softly.
“He ain’t stole from me. Daymo wouldn’t steal.”
Corelli waited.
“The hot shot was for this motherfucker Lorenzo. He the one been taking my shit all the time, bangin’ me ’round for it. I loaded the shot for him. The boy …”
His voice trailed away. The paramedic finished, nodded to Corelli, and left.
“The boy was an accident,” Corelli said, finishing the thought.
The man was crying again. “He was living with me, you know? Ain’t had no place else to go, an’ I was lookin’ out for him. I was lookin’ out for him more than myself, you know? He ain’t got no mother or father to speak of, but I was kinda like a father with him. An’ he was starting to use a bit, you know? I seen it. I pulled him up when I seen it. An’ I wasn’t havin’ none of it, so we had gone back and forth on that.”
“So he snuck the hot shot from you without you knowing.”
The man nodded, tears streaming. He was angry now, his voice louder.
“I was actin’ all parental an’ shit, like I was responsible for that boy. Like I wasn’t who the fuck I been for twenty fuckin’ years, you know? Pretending to be something past a low-bottom dope fiend, but you know what? I a low-bottom dope fiend and I kilt that child. I did. So just lock my ass up an’ be done with this shit. Jus’ lock me the fuck up ’cause I am done pretending. I wadn’t no good for that child. I ain’t good for no one. So jus’ lock me up ’cause I’m responsible for this here.”
Corelli backed away, leaving the door open. The smell of vomit followed him into the hall, where he found Cabazes.
“Duty officer is on the way downtown. He wants a twenty-four on it.”
Corelli nodded toward The Box.
“Paramedic says he’s good to go.”
Cabazes nodded.
“So let him.”
“What?”
“After the duty officer gets his twenty-four, we let him go.”
“He’s giving himself up, we can make it a murder.”
“You let him go, it can stay an overdose and not even be a stat.”
“We could use the clearance.”
“Fuck the clearance. In this poor fuck’s head, he’s been tried, convicted and sentenced. The hot shot was for anoth asshole. The kid was an accident. This sadass motherfucker’s gonna live with more weight than we could ever give him.”
Cabazes stared at him for a moment, nodded, then headed down the hall.
Corelli walked into the coffee room, poured sludge from the bottom of a dying pot, then slumped at the corner desk. He stared out the window, watching people and cars negotiate the rush hour below. It was Friday and he thought about calling Trina, asking if she wanted to do something together with the kids this weekend. The zoo, maybe. But he thought on it a moment longer and couldn’t see it happening.
Reaching into his pocket, Corelli pulled out the printout and tossed it into the can with the Styrofoam and stirrers and coffee grounds.
“Fuck it,” he said to no one in particular.
P
arents: Please do not allow your children to sit, stand, or lean on the railing surrounding the seal pool.
Angie wasn’t counting, but she must have heard the announcement fifty times since she arrived more than two hours ago. The recording was grating on her nerves.
The sun had clocked around to the west, too, so her bench no longer sat in the shade of the National Aquarium, its hulk—all glass and Mondrian-style triangles—looming like the Matterhorn behind her. Sweat beaded uncomfortably along her hairline; it ran in rivulets between her breasts, soaking through the fabric of her Victoria’s Secret T-shirt bra.
Damn! Baltimore was hot in July.
Squinting through her Ray-Bans, Angie scanned the bustling Inner Harbor, searching for the sailboat, a Sabre 402 named
Windwalker.
To her right rose the honey-beige tower of Baltimore’s World Trade Center, and if she turned her head to the left—past the raked-back masts of the
USS Constellation,
past the red brick walls of the Maryland Science Center—the crimson neon of the Domino Sugars sign, five stories high, glowed like a beacon. Blue-canopied water taxis ferried visitors from the two pavilions that housed the shops and restaurants of Harborplace across the water to dine at the Rusty Scupper, or to points beyond, like the tourist-magnet neighborhoods of Little Italy and Fell’s Point.
But there was no sign of Jack or his boat.
Angie had visited the Sabre website, so she knew that a 402 cost almost a half a million dollars. Even a used model could set you back two hundred thou. But it wasn’t the price that impressed her; it was the fact that the boat had two separate cabins with doors. That locked. With any luck, though, she wouldn’t have to use them.
Angie yanked her cell phone out of its holster and checked to make sure she had her brother Johnny on quick dial, in case things turned sour. Then she punched in the number Jack had given her, but voicemail kicked in right away. Damn! Maybe he was out of signal range, or talking to someone else. She scowled at the phone.
Jack. Jack freaking Daniels!
Angie imagined her mother’s disapproving voice. “With a name like that, Ange,” she would have warned, shaking a finger, “he’s gotta be an axe murderer.”
Angie’d argue she found it hard to believe that anybody’d make up a name like Jack Daniels.
“You don’t know anything about the man!” her mother would say. “Safer to stay home.”
Once, Angie had hitchhiked from Baltimore to San Francisco and back, and lived to tell the tale. “Pure dumb luck,” her mother had scoffed, with emphasis on the dumb.
Angie’s mother had never approved of blind dates, either, so the idea that her only daughter planned to sail off with a guy after meeting him for the first time on the Internet would have sent her into cardiac arrest.
So Angie hadn’t told her.
“I’m taking a vacation, Mama,” she’d said. “Got a great rate out of Providence to BWI. I’ll visit Johnny in Baltimore, see how he’s doing at Harkins, then who knows? Florida, maybe.”
The Florida part was practically true. After Baltimore, Jack said he was planning to sail down the Intercoastal Waterway to Fort Lauderdale, then across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas.
On the bench next to her, Angie had a canvas tote with
Cruising World
stenciled on the side in blue letters. She rummaged inside and pulled out the ad that had been clipped and sent to her post office box in Providence, Rhode Island.
Energetic, forty-eight-year-old Italian American engineer with a comfortable, well-equipped two-cabin, two-head 40’sloop needs an adventurous, athletic female partner to island hop in the Bahamas, year round if possible. Safe sailor, good navigator, I dive, fish, cook, and clean. Healthy, intelligent, 5’11", 185, lots of salt and pepper hair. Previous female mate references available.
Angie had responded that she was an adventurous, freespirited young lady who wanted to sail where the weather is warm, the wind is steady, and the islands are beautiful. After a flurry of e-mails, they’d agreed to meet.
She hadn’t called his references.
Angie lived life on the edge.
Parents: Please do not allow your chil—
Someone pulled the plug on the recording, thank God. Angie joined the crowd around the outdoor pool as aquarium staff prepared to feed Ike and Lady, the gray seals who lived there. She rested her forearms against the railing and watched Ike flounder onto a rock, snap up the fish tossed his way, and honk appreciatively for the crowd.
When feeding time was over, Angie strolled along the seawall, past the grinning black hulk of the
USS Torsk
permanently tied up there, wondering where the hell Jack Daniels had gotten to. He was coming from Annapolis, he said, so she’d timed their meeting carefully, taking the crowds into consideration. Maybe Jack was already on island time.
So she wouldn’t mess up her cutoffs, Angie selected a relatively clean spot and sat down on the granite wall, her legs dangling over the water. Her feet ended in Docksiders. No one could say she didn’t dress like a sailor.
The water taxi came and went, its canopy flapping as it chugged through the still, humid air. Motorboats flitted about the harbor, weaving around the fleet of paddleboats that puttered around like ducklings. Sailboats bobbed quietly at anchor, suddenly swinging wide, facing into a puff of wind that rippled a path along the water.
“Stevie! Stay away from the water!” A woman’s voice, screeching. When Angie turned her head to check out the kid, she saw it: a Sabre motoring in under bare poles, its blue hull bright against the greenish-brown mound of Federal Hill. It would be ten, twenty minutes maybe, before the captain found a spot to anchor amid the sea of tethered vessels.
Angie extracted a digital camcorder, smaller than a paperback, from a plastic bag in her tote. She flipped it open and centered the sailboat in the viewfinder. She zoomed in, waited for the cam to focus. No mistake.
Windwalker
was stenciled in gold letters on its hull; an inflatable dinghy bounced along in its wake.
She panned aft to where the captain, his features indistinct in the shadow of a baseball cap, manned the helm, then forward along the life lines.
Well, that’s a surprise.
Jack Daniels had crew. A young man in chinos and a blue polo shirt stood on the bow, his foot resting lightly on the anchor chain as it screamed over the windlass and snaked into the water, pulled along by the weight of the anchor as it sank into the muck at the bottom of the Patapsco.
When the anchor was secure, the two men piled into the dinghy, cranked the outboard to life, and motored to the dock where they jostled for a spot, bouncing off the other inflatables like oversized inner tubes.
Through the viewfinder Angie watched the men disembark, watched the young guy shake Jack’s hand, watched as he seemed to be saying goodbye. Good, she thought. One less Y chromosome to worry about.
From behind the camera, Angie stared, comparing the man coming toward her to the photo from the e-mail attachment. The man in the photo had darker hair, a wider nose, a less prominent chin. Angie sat on the seawall, puzzled, her knees pulled up, hugging them, studying the man with the salt-and-pepper hair who
had
to be Jack from under the brim of her hat. Son of a bitch knew he was late, too, hustling along the pier, glancing at every female face, probably wondering if she’d given up on him. Let him sweat. Angie had the advantage, after all. She hadn’t sent Jack a picture—only a description. One couldn’t be too careful.
Jack reached the end of the pier and stopped to gaze out over the water, big hands hanging at his sides. She stuffed the videocam into her tote bag, stood, and followed.
“Jack?” she called, settling the strap of the tote comfortably against her shoulder.
He turned. His sunfrosted eyebrows lifted. “Mandy?”
“That’s me.” She smiled ruefully. The name sounded strange pinned on her, rather than on the drugged-out cousin to whom it actually belonged. Angie extended her hand, and he took two steps forward to take it.
“Shall we go somewhere to talk?” she asked, eager to get on with it.
Walking side-by-side, chatting casually, they crossed the brick-paved causeway to Barnes and Noble, the ho-hum of its chaindom somewhat mitigated by being sandwiched between its trendier cousins, the ESPN Zone and Hard Rock Cafe. Once inside, they wound through smokestacks tattooed with rivets, rode up the industrial-style escalators to Starbucks.
“My treat,” Jack said, and bought them each a mocha frappuccino.
“Do you want to see the boat now, before you make up your mind?” he asked, sitting down at the table opposite her.
“How about the other guy?” She jammed a straw into her drink.
“What other guy?”
“The guy I saw riding in on the dinghy.”
Jack actually blushed. “You must mean Tim. He works for the yacht broker.”
“Tim, then.”
“He installed a self-steerer in the Sabre. Wanted to make sure it worked.”
“Self-steering will come in handy on the ocean,” Angie commented, taking a sip from her mocha frappe. “So, tell me about the trip.”
While Jack extracted a map from his fanny pack and smoothed it out on the table, Angie studied his face. The eyes were right, and so were the ears, but the nose and chin bothered her. Plastic surgery? If so, the scars were hidden in the tiny creases of his well-tanned skin.
Jack anchored a corner of the map with his drink. His finger traced a line from the Abacos to Eleuthera, down the long Exumas chain to Great Exuma. Angie smiled and nodded and asked all the right questions—about sending and receiving mail, about satellite phones and how they’d divide up the duties and the costs—but knew it was time to move on.
She leaned over the map. “I’d like to see the boat now, Jack.”
His eyes, dark as cinnamon, locked on hers, and something went
ka-plump
in her chest. Goddamn. She hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.
Minutes later, opposite the aquarium, Angie held back. “Wait a minute!” she said, grabbing Jack by the arm and dragging him along. “You have to see the seals!” She led him to the seal pool, where they stood side-by-side, leaning against the railing, the crowds pressing in around them.
Ike and Lady eeled soundlessly through the water in their idyllic, 70,000-gallon world. Mounted on the railing was a sign—
Caution: Throwing coins or objects in the pool can kill the seals.
Well, not so idyllic, maybe.
They watched in companionable silence for a while, then Jack turned to face her.
“Mandy,” he said. His eyes seemed to drink her down. “This’ll probably not sit too well, but you could be the figurehead on my ship of life.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said, smiling.
“No,” he said. “Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“About the figurehead. I don’t think so …
Bill
“ Her voice dropped an octave on his name, like a late night DJ. Her smile evaporated and she waited, giving him time to let the significance of her words sink in.
“Shitfuckdamn.” He blinked slowly. “How the hell did you find me?”
“We’re betrayed by our buying habits, Jack. Take me, for example.” She plucked at the collar of her gauzy shirt. “If I wanted to disappear, I’d have to stop shopping at Chicos.”
Jack relaxed against the railing. Perhaps he was relieved. “So what gave away?”
“The West Marine catalog.”
“No way.” He actually grinned.
She slipped a hand into her tote, easing it down deep along the side. “I called their 800-number to complain that we hadn’t received our catalog since we moved, and were they still sending it to the Providence address.” She shrugged. “‘Oh, no,’ the woman told me, ‘it’s going to your new address in North Carolina.’” Angie smiled. “Of course she confirmed that for me.”
Jack laid a hand on her shoulder, and again she felt it, like a jolt of electricity straight to her heart. “But why you?” he asked.
“Not me,” she said, leaning closer, so close that her nose was filled with the Tide-washed freshness of his shirt. “It’s Michael Cirelli who’s looking for you. He wasn’t amused when you ratted. When your testimony sent his son to jail.” She paused. “It irks him that Danny’s cooling his heels at Lewisburg while you are …” Angie waved a hand in the direction of
Windwalker,
bobbing quietly at anchor in the harbor behind them. “Sailing off into the proverbial sunset.”
“I’d like to be sailing off with you,” Jack whispered.
She stood on tiptoe, her lips warm against his cheek. “I’m really sorry, Jack.”
The knife cool in her hand. Its blade, long and thin, penetrated his shirt and the skin of his chest, slipping cleanly between his ribs, piercing the left ventricle of his heart. Still leaning against the railing, Jack only looked surprised as she withdrew the knife and dropped it back into her tote. Jack slumped against her—another amorous couple enjoying the summer evening. Her lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “But if I’d sailed off with anybody, it would have been with you.”
With a fluid, practiced move, she lifted and pushed, gently tumbling him over the railing, onto the concrete skirt that surrounded the seal pool, where he lay still, one hand trailing in the water, his eyes wide, locked on hers. It would take several minutes for his heart to bleed out, flooding his chest cavity. Plenty of time for Jack to call out—
Help! Murder!
or even her name. But he lay quietly along the skirting, defeated, dying.
Lady surfaced, the water sleeking off her mottled fur. She snorted, her whiskers twitching curiously next to Jack’s hand. Bobbing, she studied the dying man with dark, sorrowful eyes.
“Sorry, Lady,” Angie whispered, thinking about the warning sign. Then, “Call 911!” she screamed. “He’s having a heart attack!”
In the subsequent confusion, she slipped away, weaving quietly through the crowd, moving confidently against the grain.
Near the causeway between the power plant and Baltimore’s Public Works Museum, the wig came off with the hat, in one quick swoop. By the time she crossed President Street, Angie had fluffed up her flyaway copper curls, and the disguise was tucked safely into the plastic bag that had once held her videocam.
