Baltimore Noir (3 page)
I was done. There was not another improvement I could make to the house, so changed now it was as if my family and its history had been erased. Deirdre and I had been hurtling toward this day for months and now it was here. I had to move on to other projects, ones where I would make money. Besides, people were beginning to wonder. I wasn’t around the other jobs as much, and I also wasn’t pulling in the kind of money that would help placate Angeline over the crazy hours I was working. Time to end it.
Our last night, I stopped at the foundry, spent almost forty bucks on a bottle of wine that the young girl in the store swore by. Cakebread, the guy’s real name. White, too, because I knew Deirdre loved white wines.
“Chardonnay,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“I noticed you liked whites.”
“But not Chardonnay so much. I’m an ABC girl—Anything But Chardonnay. Dennis says Chardonnay is banal.”
“Dennis?”
She didn’t answer. And she was supposed to answer, supposed to say:
Oh, you know, that faggot from my wine-tasting class, the one who smells like he wears strawberry perfume.
Or:
That irritating guy in my office.
Or even:
A neighbor, a creep. He scares me. Would you still come around, from time to time, just to check up on me?
She didn’t say any of those things.
She said: “We were never going to be a regular thing, my love.”
Right. I knew that. I was the one with the wife and the house and the two kids. I was the one who had everything to lose. I was the one who was glad to be getting out, before it could all catch up with me. I was the one who was careful not to use the word love, not even in the lighthearted way she had just used it. Sarcastic, almost. It made me think that it wasn’t my marital status so much that had closed off that possibility for us, but something even more entrenched. I was no different from the wallpaper, the banister, the garden. I had to be removed for the house to be truly hers.
My grandmother’s parents had thought she was too good for my grandfather. They were Irish, shipworkers who had gotten the hell out of Locust Point and moved uptown, to Charles Village, where the houses were much bigger. They looked down on my grandfather just because he was where they once were. It killed them, the idea that their precious youngest daughter might move back to the neighborhood and live with an Italian, to boot. Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. If there’s not somebody below you, how do you know you’ve traveled any distance at all in your life? For my dad’s generation, it was all about the blacks. I’m not saying it was right, just that it was, and it hung on because it was such a stark, visible difference. And now the rules have changed again, and it’s the young people with money and ambition who are buying the houses in Locust Point, and the people in places like Linthicum and Catonsville and Arbutus are the ones to be pitied and condescended to. It’s hard to keep up.
My hand curled tight around the neck of the wine bottle. But I placed it in its berth in the special refrigerator, gently, as if I were putting a newborn back in its bed.
“One last time?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said.
She clearly was thinking it would be the bed, romantic and final, but I opted for the bathroom, wanting to see her from all angles. Wanting her to see me, to witness, to remember how broad my shoulders are, how white and small she looked when I was holding her against my chest.
When I moved my hands from her hips to her head, she thought I was trying to position her mouth on mine. It took her a second to realize that my hands were on her throat, not her head, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She fought back, if you could call it that, but all her hands could find was marble, smooth and immutable. Yeah, that’s another word I know. Immutable. She may have landed a few scratches, but a man in my work gets banged up all the time. No one would notice a beaded scab on the back of my hand, or even on my cheek.
I put her body in a trash bag, covering it with lime leftover from a landscaping job. Luckily, she hadn’t been so crazed that she wanted a fireplace in the basement, so all I had to do was pull down the fake front I had placed over the old hearth, then brick her in, replace the fake front. It wasn’t planned, not a moment of it, but when it happened, I knew what to do, as surely as I know what to do when a floor isn’t level or a soffit needs to be closed up so birds can’t get in.
Her computer was on, as always, her e-mail account open because she used cable for her Internet, a system I had installed. I read a few of her sent messages, just to make sure I aped her style, then typed one to an office address, explaining the family emergency that would take me out of town for a few days. Then I sent one to “Dennis,” angry and hate-filled, accusing him of all kinds of things, telling him not to call or write. Finally, I cleaned the house best I could, especially the bathroom, although I didn’t feel I had to be too conscientious. I was the contractor. Of course my fingerprints would be around. The last thing I did was grab that bottle of Chardonnay, took it home to Angeline, who liked it just fine, although she would have fainted if she knew what it cost.
Weeks later, when Deirdre was officially missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the
Sunpapers
, I sent a bill for the projects that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t know what was going on. She was just an address to me, one of a half-dozen open accounts. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having kids of my own, Joseph Jr. getting ready for college next year. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.
And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement. Which means there’s less chance of a collapse, and less likelihood that they’ll ever find that little bag of bones in the hearth.
T
homas Weeks, a screenwriter of some renown, had last been to his hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, two years ago, for his father’s burial. Now he was back again, to visit his ailing and cantankerous mother, Flo, a resident of Pinecrest Retirement Community. The visit had not gone well. His mother had once been a complex and interesting person but had in the past ten years committed herself to being a cartoon version of herself. Now she played a fat, bitter, and foul-mouthed woman, the kind of person who scuttled all friendships and lived in a sordid fantasy of her own violated innocence. As Weeks presented her with an assortment of new mystery novels he thought she might enjoy, she screamed obscenities at her only son, craning her neck out of her pink terry cloth bathrobe, like a puffed-up cobra on Animal Planet.
“Don’t try to bribe me with your shitass books,” she hissed. “You left me here to die while you went out ’ere … to Hollywood, sucking up to all the producers and them other whores.”
For his part, Weeks said nothing. Armed with years of psychotherapy, and the latest SSRIs, he merely gave her a weak smile and laid the books on the edge of a table, which held her collection of porcelain cats.
His mother stared at him through her small darting eyes and shook her head as she launched into her next solilo-quy.
“Yeah, you think I don’t know what’s up, but I do, Mister Hollywood. You come back when I’m half-dead to appease your conscience. And to keep yourself in line for my money when I’m gone. Well, buddy boy, I have amassed over $400,000, but you might not get a cent of it. Yeah, you think you can lord it over me alla time and then show up and do your Prince Charming routine for a couple of days and I’ll forgive you for leaving me here to die. Well, you just might have another thing coming, mister!”
There was a voice inside of Weeks that screamed,
“Fuck you, you horrible old bitch!”
but he managed to put it down. His shrink, Dr. Jerry Leamer, had drilled him in healthy avoidance tactics.
“Don’t let her get to you,” tan and cool Doc Jerry said. “Take her to public places, movies, restaurants, where she can’t open up on you.”
“Would you like to go to the movies, Mother?” Weeks asked. He thought for a second that his voice sounded remarkably similar to Tony Perkins’s in
Psycho
She looked at him and made an animal sound of disgust—
Errrrahhhhgh
—but then nodded her head. “Yeah, all right. Anything to get the fuck out of here.”
Though it was far from fun, Weeks silently congratulated himself on managing his mother’s terrifying mood swings. Maybe he was even getting good at this coming-home stuff. Once he had helped her into his rented car, he popped another half a Paxil, and by the time they had arrived at the White Marsh Mall his head was as pleasantly empty as a Kenny G. solo.
The movie was a Richard Gere vehicle called
Shall We Dance?
Gere pranced through it, romancing Jennifer Lopez, blinking his eyes to convey emotional growth. Flo loved it. Her furious face turned soft and her wrinkles smoothed out. Watching her in the dark, Weeks suddenly felt a secret childish love for her. He impulsively wished he could chuck his Hollywood career and move home. After all, some of what she’d said was true … he
had
turned his back on his homeys and gone for the brass ring, and many of the producers and actors he knew in Los Angeles blowhards and frauds. Maybe he could buy a small house here and come back more often, help her to calm down. That was what a good son should do, he thought, staring at Gere’s perfect hair. Then, only seconds later, he ripped the notion from his mind. What the fuck was he thinking? She was insane, and the old hardassed town would crush him, as it had crushed the hopes of most of his boyhood pals.
Halfway through the insipid movie, Weeks felt a wave of nausea overtake him. The smell of burned popcorn, the stale air in the theater, his mother’s cheap drugstore perfume … all conspired to turn his stomach, and a flash of bile came up in the back of his throat. Christ, he thought, Baltimore was a crab cake filled with poison.
He wasn’t used to so many emotions anymore. In Los Angeles he faked his way through both meetings and friendships, pretending to have passion for things he had no interest in, pretending to be intimate with people he barely knew. The City of Angels was famously superficial, of course, but there was charm to living without the baggage of tortured involvements. Indeed, coming back to his hometown, with its solid brick rowhouses and old-school loyalties, made Weeks feel that the weight of history had pinned him to the mat, like a dead insect.
He slid by his mother in the row and headed out to the men’s room, his head awash in psychotropic drugs and sentiment, his insides tied up in an old familiar guilt. He walked down the wide hallway and staggered into the bathroom, suddenly feeling faint.
As he stood in front of the urinal taking a piss, he saw visions of himself at Orioles games, rooting for the Ravens, maybe playing cocktail piano in some little bar. This was his hometown, after all, and though he had run from it like a man escaping the death house, he had never quite forgotten it. Never forgotten the neighborhoods where people actually knew each other, going to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandparents on both sides of the family, loving all of them. And the friendships, the fierceness of them, the loyalty and dearness of old friends, came storming back to him.
While he pissed, he lay his head against the cool tile wall and felt a great mass of confusion swing through him.
“Holy shit,” said a rough voice behind him.
Weeks zipped up his pants and turned around. There, standing and smiling at him, was none other than Tyler Edwards, a guy he’d grown up with thirty years ago. A sandyhaired, freckle-faced kid, Tyler had been a minor devil in Tom’s personal history. They’d both grown up in rough old Govans, gone all through school together. Tyler was a brilliant but maniacal child … a boy who once broke off every aerial on every car as they walked ten blocks from their homes to the Guilford Bowling Alley.
In the ’70s Tyler had become a serious drug dealer for a while, then a golf pro at the Maryland Country Club. Sometime in the ’80s Tyler had gone to prison down the Cut at Jessups. Word came back that he had killed a man in self-defense down there but bribed his way out of being prosecuted for it. Weeks tended to believe the story. If anybody could get away with murder, it was charming, demented Tyler.
“Tommy Weeks,” Tyler said. “The kid who conquered Hollywood.”
“Hey Ty,” Weeks said. Though he had always felt a mixture of excitement and dread around Tyler, he now felt a rush of affection for the sick old hustler.
Tyler’s left eyebrow moved up and down like a puppet’s, and his smile revealed a map of wrinkles on his face. But even so there was the same impish mischief in his large, buggy eyes, a promise of malevolent fun.
“Out here to see your dear old mom, hey?”
“Yeah,” Tom replied. “And she’s dearer than ever.”
“Yes indeed,” Tyler said. “Nothing like the old homestead. The smell of fresh hard crabs, snowballs in the alley, and Mommy’s tender kisses.”
“Stop before I puke,” Tommy said, laughing.
“Well, I suppose you’re tied up, which is a shame and a pity, because I’m heading downtown to the fabulous Bertha’s Mussels and I’d love to carry you along with me.”
“Sorry,” Tom said, “but I’m not free for another few hours.”
Tyler smiled and put his hand under his chin, a real-life parody of
The Thinker.
“Tell you what. I have a few morbid duties to perform. Why don’t I do them now and meet you down there at say, 8 o clock?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’m really tired and I’ve got to get my mother to bed.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun to get out and about. You really need to make this trip, Tom. Get in touch with your old hometown-self, so to speak.”
Weeks could feel something inside of himself pulling him toward Tyler. Unlike Tom’s fake bad-boy friends in Hollywood, Tyler was always an inspired imp. A night with him might be terrifying but at least it would be real. And wasn’t that the reason he came back to Baltimore now and again? To experience something he couldn’t buy or fake his way out of?
“Fuck it,” Tom said. “I’m on. See you at 8, Ty.”
“Attaboy,” Tyler said. “I promise you something special. You’ll see.”
After the movie, Tom took Flo out for a drink at a mall bar called The Firehouse. It was loud and brash and filled with obese guys with scraggly facial hair and plaid shirts, which they wore hanging outside of their pants. Their girlfriends and wives wore bright red lipstick and dyed their beehive hair in primary colors.
“I hate it here,” his mother said. “I always hated this side of town anyway. Parkville, the Belair Road. Buncha hairhoppers and rednecks. Christ, I’d rather live over in the Northwest with the Jews. ’Cept the Jews don’t live there no more. Now it’s all the so-called black nations.”
Weeks liked to think he was up on the latest demographics in Baltimore, but he was shocked when he heard the Jews had moved away from Northwest.
“Where
do
the Jews live these days, Mom?”
“Further out, hon,” his mother said. “I heard from Harvene that the Jews have just about taken over Pennsylvania. They nearly run the Amish out. Of course, as soon as they left Pikesville, the jungle bunnies moved right in and had about ten million kids, and started killing each other over drugs at the drop of a hat.”
Weeks shut his eyes and imagined blacks all over Baltimore, dropping their funky baseball hats and firing 9’s at each other. The hats floated down like leaves, followed by their wiry, blood-soaked bodies.
“What kind of drink do you want, Mother?”
“Vodka,” she shot back. “And not that cheap well shit either. I want Grey fucking Goose.”
“Good for you,” Weeks said, as he watched three fat men in Ravens T-shirts roll by. They were all singing along with George Thorogood’s version of “Bad to the Bone.” Weeks felt an intense jealousy for their innocent belligerence. When was the last time he had sung anything with his pals? That was easy, 1968. The year the singing stopped.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Flo said, with a mischievous grin on her face. “I get good and drunk, then you can drop me off back at the goddamned prison camp and go see one of your old girlfriends.”
“I haven’t got any girlfriends, old or otherwise, in Baltimore anymore.”
“Bullshit,” his mother said as the waitress approached. “You’ve always had girlfriends everywhere you go. Girls made fools of themselves for you, because they don’t know what a rotten bastard you really are.”
She laughed and looked up at the waitress, who wore two-inch false eyelashes and enough rouge to make her look like a clown in drag.
“Gimme the Goose,” Flo said. “A double. And keep ’em coming. My big shot son is here and he can afford it.”
The waitress looked at Weeks, and when she smiled she showed about a half-inch of gum.
“Your mother is soooo cute,” she said.
“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Mom’s a living doll.”
By the time Weeks carried the drunken, cursing Flo up to her apartment, he had a screaming headache and a pain in his chest. He thought about popping another blood pressure pill, but they tended to wear him out and he still had to drive all the way downtown to see Ty.
Fuck it, he thought, as he gently lay his mother down in her bed and kissed her sweating forehead. Maybe he didn’t really need to see Ty after all.
And yet there was something about meeting the old convict that was impossible to resist.
He was about to leave his mother’s side when she reached out a bony hand and grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” she said. “You can fool those pinheads out in California but you can’t fool me. You know what you did the first two months of your life?”
“No,” Tom said, feeling dizzy again. “What?”
“You wet the bed every night. Every damned night. And it wasn’t your father who came in and cleaned you up and walked you around when you were screaming. It was me, your horrible old mother. The one you hate so much.”
Weeks felt something cracking inside of him. Like his bones, his heart. All of it cracking and falling into splinters.
“I gotta go, Mom.”
“Well, you have a good time,” she said as she shut her eyes. “Have a few laughs with your girlfriend. Tell her what an old fool your mom is, asshole.”
Weeks pulled his wrist out of her grasp and made his way out of her apartment. When he got outside it was snowing and he stood there for a minute, letting the flakes come down on him, hoping somehow they might make him feel light and white and clean. Like when he was a kid.
But the snow-magic didn’t work anymore. All he felt was soggy, middle-aged, and cold.
