Baltimore Noir (18 page)
The menu baffled him. Too many choices across too many groups of food. He was about to settle for a burger when the word “scrapple” caught his eye. Hadn’t someone ordered that once on the show? Bayliss? Meldrick Lewis? Or maybe Crosetti, the one who offed himself? Whoever it was, Branko had to try some. He even liked the name: scrapple, like a piece of food that had been in a fight. He had no idea what it was made of, and was too embarrassed to ask, although he knew enough to say “Over easy” when the waitress asked how he wanted his eggs.
A steaming platter arrived in what seemed like only seconds, and by process of elimination he determined that the scrapple was the crispy brown wedge next to the home fries. It looked like a flattened croquette. He took a bite, and appalled. Inside was gray mush, liverish and creepy. He wanted to spit it out, but didn’t know who might be watching. Besides, if it was good enough for Detective Meldrick Lewis, then Branko could tough it out.
Later, mopping the last of the egg yolk with toast, he got up the nerve to ask the waitress the question that had been on his mind since he came through the door.
“Tell me, please,” he said, painfully conscious of his heavy accent. “The
Homicide
TV show. They come here still for the filming?”
The two men on the other side of the table smiled and shook their heads.
“Oh, hon, that’s dead and gone,” the waitress said.
“Dead?”
“Years ago. Packed up and left.”
Then she disappeared, off in a flash with her order pad, oblivious to the desolation in her wake.
“Got canceled,” said one of the men, perhaps sensing Branko’s disappointment. “Long time ago.”
Canceled. Dead
Fatal words, leaving him as shattered as if a gunshot had just torn through his chest. He had never expected to hear such words associated with his favorite show, not even one called
Homicide
. No wonder the city had looked so wrong from the air. He should have taken it as a sign, an omen.
His feelings of utter defeat must have showed, even through the icy film of those eyes, because the guy next to him spoke up again, in a tone that suggested the man was trying to cheer him up.
“They did make a movie, though, a few years back.”
“Yeah,” his companion offered, finding the Samaritan spirit contagious. “A good one. And now they got this other show,
The Wire.”
“The Wire?”
Branko could barely speak. Worse, he still tasted scrapple on his breath.
“It’s another crime show.”
“Here?” A glimmer of hope. “Filmed in Baltimore?” In his accent it came out as “Balty-more.”
“Sure. Gotta have HBO, though. And shit, cable’s forty-five a month as it is.”
The two men began griping about cable service, and Branko quickly lost the thread, so he rose, still too stunned to even say goodbye. But by the time he was out the door he was trying to take hope in a new possibility. Somewhere in town, he supposed, men and women were yet huddled over cigarettes and beer, dreaming up plots for made-up cops and killers, even if it was a different show with a different name. With luck he would still be able to offer a winner for their consideration. It wasn’t what he had planned on, it wasn’t
the dream,
but it was a chance.
There was still a job to do, however, and now it was after dark, and after 7. Dusko Jevic awaited him at Flip’s.
It was only five blocks away, and he was there in a few minutes. A banner outside advertised something called
“Natty Bohs in a can”
for a dollar apiece. The way his budget was dwindling, that sounded like a smart choice, even if it involved one of those sweet drinks that came with a paper umbrella.
It turned out to be a beer—weak and watery lager, but beer nonetheless—and Branko downed his in a flash while wondering where Dusko might be. Maybe it was the fellow’s day off, or he had quit. If he didn’t show up in the next hour, Branko would ask for him, risky or not. In two days he’d be out of the country, so what would it matter?
Then he got lucky. Just after the barmaid took his order for a second Natty Boh, she turned and shouted into the back, “Hey, Douche, how ’bout bringin’ up a new case?”
And just like that, there he was in the doorway behind the bar, an apparition in black, grim and nodding, then grunting as he slammed not just one but two cases of beer into a big fridge.
“Thanks, Douche.”
Dusko said nothing. Just nodded again and set off for the back. To get to it you had to be behind the bar. Branko wondered how he was going to do that. He fingered the gun in his jacket, just to make sure it was ready.
A few minutes later he got another break. The barmaid hailed some friends as they came through the front door. Then, perhaps because it wasn’t yet crowded, she delivered Branko’s second beer and walked out from behind the bar to chat with them, at a table next to an automatic bowling machine across the room. Now was his chance. He dropped from the stool and slipped through the opening, which she hadn’t closed behind her, then darted through the back doorway. There were no shouts in his wake, so apparently no one had noticed. He opened a second door down a small hallway, and Dusko looked up suddenly from a small crate where he sat watching a baseball game on a black-and-white television.
“You are a baseball fan?” Dusko asked, a quizzical look on his face. “You wish to know the score?” Then a change came over his face, as if Dusko had recognized something from home in Branko’s eyes, or perhaps in the black leather jacket with too many silver buckles. He stood slowly, and his next words were in their native tongue.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
Branko pulled out the Glock.
“Marko Krulic sent me.” He nodded toward the rear door. “Let’s go.”
Dusko backed toward the exit, not taking his eyes off Branko as he fumbled with the dead bolt and chain. The door creaked open to the night. Still no pursuit or noise from behind, although Branko didn’t dare risk a glance in that direction.
“Outside,” he said.
Dusko stepped into a tiny alley, barely lit, but kept a hand on the door frame.
“Let go of that. Move it.”
Then something stirred in the darkness, startling Branko. It was a rat, he saw now, a huge one scuttling toward a hole in the concrete. But it provided just enough of a distraction for Dusko to lunge for the Glock, his hand striking Branko’s just as Branko squeezed the trigger. In the tight space of the alley the shot sounded like a small, sharp explosion. The gun clattered to the pavement. Branko reached quickly to pick it up, but Dusko kicked it with a huge grunt, then shouldered past him as Branko lunged across the alley to retrieve it. Got it. But by the time he turned, Dusko was slamming home the dead bolt, safely back inside.
Branko felt like an idiot and began to worry as he heard shouts inside, a real commotion. He looked around for an escape, but just ahead the narrow alley was blocked by a small fence running from ground to rooftop. He went the opposite direction, and the alley turned one way, then the other, before reaching a cinderblock wall topped by chain link and two strips of barbed wire. Branko climbed to the top of the blocks, then jumped, catching a sleeve on the wire, tearing leather and feeling something rake his hand on the way across. He landed awkwardly in a parking lot filled with forklifts, then had to climb a second fence, more carefully this time, before he was back onto Aliceanna, about half a block east of Flip’s. He didn’t dare head in that direction, so he ran east, then turned left on Washington Street before slowing to a brisk walk. No sense attracting unnecessary attention. His heart drummed. He couldn’t believe he’d let Dusko slip away, and so easily. Now he’d have to replan everything, and the man would be on his guard.
Branko needed to get back to his car, so he headed west on Fleet Street, averting his face as he crossed Wolfe in case anyone was on the lookout down at Flip’s. Once safely across he felt better. Then he began wishing he had the rest of that second Natty Boh. Watery or not, he needed a beer in the worst way.
A few blocks later he was calmer, perhaps because he had yet to hear a police siren. What Branko didn’t know was that the police were the last people Dusko would have called. For one thing, his green card was expired. For another, he too had old friends from the old country who would be happy to lend a hand.
In any case, Branko’s wandering as he tried to get his bearings—it was too dark to get out his map—had put him within sight of a bar on Ann Street. It was called the Wharf Rat, a promising name even if it briefly reminded him of his embarrassment back at Flip’s. A second beer would be all he needed to settle down. Then he would check the map and make his way back to the car.
The beer here was better, but it was $4 a pop. Another major dent in his stash.
“You should get that looked at,” the waitress said, and for the first time Branko noticed an ugly cut on his left hand, already crusting over with darkened blood.
“Yes,” he said, “you are right. I caught it in my car door.”
No sooner had he drained his glass than he had company—two rangy fellows, also in black leather jackets. Branko experienced a moment of recognition, much as Dusko had earlier, before one of them said in their native tongue, “Come with us.”
He reached for his jacket pocket, but a huge hand stopped him, while a second hand reached inside to retrieve the Glock. So much for self-defense. He figured he had better act quickly, while there were still other people around. So, just as the fellow was pocketing the gun, Branko bolted.
He barely eluded their grasp in his sprint for the door. He bowled over an entering couple, then managed to slip out just as the door was closing, heading left down the cobblestoned street. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the two men were only ten yards behind. He expected gunshots at any moment. The waterfront was dead ahead, and he dered if he was going to have to leap into the harbor. He n’t a good swimmer, and the water hadn’t looked like the sort you’d want to swim in. Footsteps pounded behind him, loud slaps on the stones, but still no shots. Nearing the end of the block, he was relieved to see a cross street going in both directions along the wharf.
But it was the sight to his right that suddenly seemed to make all the difference. He recognized it instantly. In fact, he would have known it anywhere, in any context, but especially here in Balty-more—the hulking brick building with grand arched windows and five fat marble columns aligned across the second-story façade, the blue and white lampposts out front flanking the marble steps of the entrance. And now, as his racing footsteps and rising spirits led him closer, he could make out the black and gold lettering on the plate glass above the door:
“Baltimore City Police.”
No wonder his pursuers hadn’t fired shots. They’d been practically standing in the cops’ backyard. Branko ran harder even as his sense of relief grew. How appropriate that some desk sergeant would now be his salvation. Sure, he had botched the commission, but that too might sell as a script: the hapless hit man, so far from home, saved by the homicide squad, then sent home amid gales of affectionate laughter and promises that he would be a good boy from now on.
He still heard footsteps, but they’d be giving up soon. They wouldn’t dare pursue him inside, although it certainly was curious how dark the building seemed. Not at all the vibrant sort of place it was on television. And you would have thought a policeman or two would be in sight by now.
It wasn’t until Branko reached the top steps and found the doors locked that he realized his mistake. He shook the handles in vain, peering inside. Empty. Dark. Probably had been since the show left town. Wallpaper peeling in great shards, the floor in ruins. A pigeon strutted into view from the shadows, shitting as it walked.
But even as his assailants reached him, and even as they spun him round by the shoulder and sank a cold barrel into the flesh of his scrapple-filled stomach, Branko couldn’t resist a last fleeting vision of what this might all look like on film—camera dollying high for a downward shot of his darkened head and frightened face, the Balkan hit man with the tables turned, yet still with stars in his eyes.
I
t wasn’t simply that the ghost of Slink Ridgely couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Annie Brewster’s marriage to the red-haired man. It was more than that. Much more. Slink knew. Of course he did. Ghosts know. Slink watched the ceremony mainly from the area of the empty choir stalls at Saint David’s, where he could best see Annie’s nervous and hopeful face. He watched the strong freckled fingers take hold of Annie’s shaky hand and work the ring onto her finger. Coming in close, he saw the mean truth in the man’s eyes. Annie’s truth, he already knew. He’d known it for quite a while now.
Doomed,
he said to himself.
Doomed, doomed, doomed, doomed …
Slink’s real name had been Edward. “Little Eddie,” up until he was around five, when he had landed in Johns Hopkins Hospital for a fairly nasty appendectomy and had received not one, not two, but three Slinkies as get-well gifts. Little Eddie was nuts for his Slinkies.
Shing, shing, shing,
he undulated them from hand to hand for hours at a time, one eye trained on the black-and-white television in the corner, for he was nuts about television as well. Hands-down favorite?
The Early Riser.
It was Little Eddie’s dream to grow up and get a job like the Early Riser, a janitor in a darkened TV studio who said, “
Pssst, come over here,
” to the camera first thing in the morning before anyone else had arrived for work, and then put cartoons on for the kids at home to watch.
It didn’t work out that way of course. There such job, except for the one guy who already had it, and of course he wasn’t a real janitor, he was the station’s weather guy wearing fake dusty clothes and a large fake bottle-brush mustache. Instead, Little Eddie grew up to be a milkman for Cloverland Dairy. Though by then he wasn’t Little Eddie anymore, nor Edward, nor Ed, and not even Slinky, which was what the large nurse with the nose mole had taken to calling him during his five days at Hopkins and which Little Eddie’s mother had picked up on. By the time he hit his tenth birthday, the diminutive had dropped away and he was Slink Ridgely, right up until his twenty-seventh year and the school bus/milk truck collision at the intersection of Caves Road and Garrison Forest Road. Slink’s tombstone read
Edward Charles Ridgely.
The first time Slink saw it he’d scoffed, “Right. Who the hell is
he?
Strange day for Slink, that first day of being dead and buried. He logged ten straight hours hovering in one spot—directly in front of his tombstone—and just thinking. Unusual for a guy like Slink Ridgely, who had been a bobber and a weaver, always on the go, go, go.
Slink had loved his job. Four hours sleep was generally all he had needed, so rising and shining at 4 in the morning to start his route had been no big deal. He’d slide behind the wheel of his trusty Olds 98 with a cup of coffee in one hand and a Chesterfield dangling from his lips and be halfway to the dairy before the first light of day cracked the horizon. Skinny as a post, Slink would slip into his white delivery suit in the company locker room, lower his hat carefully over his precious wavy hair, then give a poke to the underside of the brim, easing the cap back on his head just so. Loading the truck took about twenty minutes, then a quick pop into the office to tell pale Sally a racy joke and have her straighten his bow tie for him, then he was ready to roll. The company frowned on its drivers smoking while on their routes, which is why Slink’s customers grew to know him as the skinny milkman with the rakish grin and the ever-present toothpick.
Housewives left instructions in the milk box.
Extra gallon of chocolate milk, please. Two dozen eggs next time. When are you getting the sugar donuts in again?
Slink was shown the tooth knocked out in football, the newest edition to the family, he heard vacation plans, the great news about the new job. He caught the sometimes whiff of bourbon on Ellen Matthews’s breath, he got the updates on Hal Fenwick’s slow cancerous march to the grave. “Christ,” he used to say to the boys at the Pimlico clubhouse, “There’s this couple on my route. The Burtons? Damn marriage is coming apart right in front of my eyes. Personally, I think the guy is a jerk. Gotta say, I side with wifey on this one.”
Slink’s luck with the horses wasn’t all that great. He had about a half-dozen different systems for picking them, and they all pretty much stank. He ran feverish formulas on his racing form with his No. 2 pencil. You’d have thought he was splitting the atom. “Got it! High Commander to place. Hundred clams.” And High Commander would proceed to prance crookedly around the track like a lame Chinaman pulling a rickshaw. Afternoon regulars at Pimlico were accustomed to the sight of the skinny wavy-haired guy with the ripped bits of his losing tickets raining down on him like confetti.
But generally speaking, Slink enjoyed himself. He could never quite get a gal to hang on his arm for very long—which would have been nice—but he knew she was out there somewhere. Just a matter of time. Meanwhile he ran with a pretty fun crowd, had himself a nice collection of swizzle sticks. Holly’s Cocktail Lounge. The Chanticleer. The Blue Mirror. True, there were a few “debt sweat” episodes here and there—once he was mildly roughed up out back of the Belvedere, just as a friendly reminder—but on the whole, Slink was considered good people, looking to harm no one. If it’s true that he never met a mirror he didn’t like, well, there have been far more serious faults in far more flawed people.
Slink never had sex with a regular customer. Not even Ellen Matthews, despite the sometimes sloppy fall of her bathrobe. There
had
been one occasion. Sort of. Ginny Curry’s sister visiting from Morgantown. But that hadn’t been on the job. Just pure coincidence. The two had struck up a conversation at Sweeney’s Bar, sparring good-naturedly over the bitters-to-sugar ratio of old-fashioneds, and ended up on Slink’s red plaid blanket in the backseat of his Olds, parked up near Memorial Stadium. It was several mornings later that Slink spied the same woman sitting at the kitchen table with the Curry twins as he was dropping off milk and butter and eggs and cheese. Pure coincidence. Slink grinned and saluted the woman with his toothpick just as she’d turned in her chair and spotted him through the crack of the kitchen door, her red mouth forming a perfect
O
And then Slink died.
Technically, it was the fault of the Brewster’s frisky Chesapeake Bay retriever, Sandy. And also a nameless squirrel. Sandy had been accompanying the children on their way to the school bus stop when she suddenly took off after the squirrel that was crossing directly in front of Slink Ridgely’s milk truck. Slink spun the wheel, but by mistake he slammed down on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. The square truck broke through the picket fence of crabby Gus Fulton’s place, bounced across a corner of the yard (the perfect pile of raked yellow leaves going up like an explosion), and toppled over sideways at the roadside ditch just as the school bus was coming down that steep part of Caves Road way … too … damned … fast.
The milk truck was lying half on and half off the road. After the collision, it lay completely on the road, twice spun and partially crushed. Bottles of white milk and chocolate milk trundled along the pavement like errant bowling pins. As the crowd gathered, no one noticed the Brewster dog at the edge of Gus Fulton’s yard, happily lapping up milk and pebbles.
The kids in the bus were fine. Frightened out of their wits, but fine. The driver of the school bus suffered a bloody nose. But Slink Ridgely was dead. Crushed ribs. Broken neck. His arms were snaked so thoroughly through the spokes of the steering wheel that it was like solving a puzzle trying to get him freed up and out of the truck.
Seven-year-old Annie Brewster felt horrible. She’d been the one holding Sandy’s leash on the way to the bus stop, but she hadn’t held it tightly enough when the squirrel darted out from the trees.
Now I’ve killed a man,
she thought.
I don’t deserve to live
Children think this way. She stood saucereyed, staring at the dead milkman, while anguish planted itself deep, deep in her belly. He’d been at their house just fifteen minutes ago. He’d brought those sugar donuts. She remembered the toothpick the milkman was always chewing on. She remembered how he always tilted his cap back whenever he talked to her mom. That very morning he had turned to her—to Annie—and winked at her. And now he
dead
She felt her tiny heart being slipped into a box and the flaps being folded closed. She spotted something on the road and she reached down and picked it up. It was a toothpick, slightly gnawed on one end. She put it in her pocket and made a vow to keep it forever.
Slink saw all of this from his new vantage point. The dead one. He watched as his body was pulled from the truck and set down on Gus Fulton’s grass. He watched as the children were ushered off the bus, and he joined in the sense of relief that they all seemed fine. His eyes rolled as he spotted Ellen Matthews making her way down the street in her robe and worn fluffy slippers. The woman’s gait listed somewhat, and Slink worried that when her feet stopped moving she’d topple forward onto the pavement. But she didn’t. She came to an unstable stop some ten feet from Slink’s body, then folded her hands together and muttered a tearful prayer into the autumn air.
The funeral was held at Druid Ridge Cemetery three days later. Slink’s cronies were there. Pale Sally presented the wreath from Cloverland. A few of the drivers banded together to wear their uniforms to the grave site, which Slink thought was pretty classy. It was a beautiful crisp autumn day. Yellow leaves fell from the trees, cascading down like a rain of canaries. Slink watched the proceedings from several dozen angles, one of the many benefits of being dead that he was already catching on to. He was especially touched when little Annie Brewster, who had insisted to her parents in a foot-stomping fit that she be allowed to attend, stepped forward to add a single rose to the flowers already atop the casket. Annie hesitated after carefully placing the rose, then removed her black wool gloves and set them, palms down,
next to the flower. She stepped back between her parents and thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There, in the left pocket, she fiddled with Slink’s toothpick as the color began to rise into her frowning face.
Her parents were already worried.
Slink took to his new condition like a kid to a sliding board. No problem. Being dead—he discovered—was a lot like dreaming. Or, for that matter, like the feeling that comes from a bellyful of old-fashioneds. The altered state. The affairs of the living were a lot more comical and nonsensical from the perspective of being dead, much the way dreams are freakish and pointless to the living. Tit for tat, figured Slink. And time—he also discovered—was completely irrelevant. The school bus had hit him twenty years ago, the school bus had hit him yesterday. No real difference. The borders between today and yesteryear were completely blurred and he could move back and forth at will. Studebakers and bigfinned Chevrolets in the Memorial Stadium parking lot? That would be Jim Gentile on first and the amazing Luis Aparicio filling the hole at short. The Light Rail pulling into the Camden Yards station? That would be the whole new set of over-priced bums.
Other spirits appeared to Slink and he spent time—whatever that was—with them. He still went to Pimlico to watch the races, only now, if he wanted, he could ride with the jockeys as they lumbered into the homestretch. And now, of course, he knew the winners. For what it mattered. He kicked around the long-gone fish market at Market and Pratt, where he had ventured sometimes as a kid. The fishmongers in their high rubber boots shot their hoses right through him and had no idea. Even dead, the smell of the place was still rank and briny. Slink and another dead crony took in some shows at the Two O’clock Club, but Slink had found Blaze’s act a little too agitating, even in his dreamy dead state. That became his joke. “I ain’t dead yet.” And he’d laugh. But he’d also feel an uncommon warmth in the area of his heart and he discovered that what he was was sad. Being dead brought with it a melancholy streak that was brand new to Slink, something he hadn’t experienced much in his living days. It wasn’t
bad
feeling necessarily. The feeling made him thoughtful. Reflective. Gave him something to chew on. Threw a new light on things. Slink meandered into the tiny backstage dressing room at the Two O’clock and watched Blaze playing mother to a tearful dancer, and he was so filled with sadness and joy he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“This dead thing,” he said to one of his cronies, “it’s really something, isn’t it? I had no idea.”
And he kept his eye on Annie Brewster. That move with the gloves and the flower at his funeral, that stuck with him. He worried about her. A month after his funeral, Slink had watched Annie in her bedroom, jabbing his toothpick against her thighs over and over, just to make it hurt. She was a peculiar kid, cracked odd jokes at odd times, didn’t harvest much in the way of close friends. Her teachers called her “artistic” when they weren’t calling her “problematic.” Annie liked to spend time alone. She read depressing books, she liked to draw, she liked to get into fights with boys. Slink drifted forward to when Annie was sixteen and watched her almost get into some serious trouble with the Burton boy. It was one thing when they were both eleven and pudgy Ted Burton had a loyal puppy crush on her. Then, Annie’s little cruelties didn’t hit home so much. But later, Annie carelessly plucked a ripe nerve in the hulking boy and he nearly pinched her arms off shaking her the way he did.
Slink worried.
“I feel responsible,” Slink told another dead person as they were looking in on the incredible 1958 Colts-Giants game. “She blames herself for my death. You can see it, it’s really screwed her up. That’s not a healthy girl there. It’s like I’m haunting her or something.”
Slink checked things out in Annie’s sophomore year at Bennington. It was none of his business, he knew, if she was sleeping with her roommate’s boyfriend. But he also knew—he’d seen—how she would willfully misplay the affair when it came to light in the spring and earn herself a half-dozen solid enemies. Or the following year, when she would nearly cause her faculty adviser to be tossed out of the school.
