Baltimore Noir (9 page)
“You eat that stuff?”
“Hell no,” said Little Leini. “I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but they ain’t fooling me.”
Not at all.
What remains of George tries to visit the graves of those he’d loved as best he could—a stone honoring the valor of the 29th Division, the tombs of a half-dozen others—and is turned back.
Yet it easily reaches the growling appetites of a couple whose fidelity to one another, something he knew but could never prove, had vexed him for decades.
Sliding up the side of the Salvage House and into the third-floor room where Orlo’s father had died, the vapor threw a tiny monkey wrench into every timepiece on the wall, guaranteeing that, for one night at least, the junkman and his slut will not be in sync.
Creeping away, it hovers above a patch of burnt dirt where Leini’s guardians once ran a moneymaker known as Ralph’s Lunch.
“It will be yours, George,” they’d told him, laying out the deal less than twenty-four hours after catching their young charge parading through the streets in a junk wagon.
The ghost snakes through the exhaust pipes of buses parked near the house where George was absent more than he was home, crosses the street, and hovers before the window of a kitchen where a low blue flame kept a pot of water bubbling around the scalded head of a pig.
Leini’s window looks down on row after row of pale green transit buses that have ferried her to many a meal across the arc of her heroic adultery.
The No. 23 to Irvington, where the junkman had openminded friends among the Xaverian missionaries who ran the orphanage at Transfiguration High; the No. 4 down to the scrap yards of Turner’s Station, which might as well have been Mississippi, entire fields of junk where Orlo commanded the respect of men who’d been born to it; and the No. 14 south to the strawberry patches of Anne Arundel County.
All behind Leini as she climbs the stairs and turns the key.
“The house was cold and empty,” she said. “I turned the heat up, checked the pot, and put water on for tea.”
“What about George … wanting to apologize?”
“It passed,” she said, the electric Magic Chef clock on the face of the stove humming close to the hour. “I kept my coat on and tried to read.”
“What?” I asked, making up questions now just to spend more time with her.
“Se-fah-rye-des,” she said, handing me a small green book with his name on it. “He just won the Nobel.”
“For?”
“Poetry,” she said. “Seferiades believes it begins in our breath.”
Old friend, what are you looking for? It is time to say our few words for tomorrow the soul sets sail …
The kettle whistled and she set the book aside, something rare and delicious about to take shape beneath her hands.
“I use every part of the pig but the squeal,” she said. “The recipe even sounds like a song.”
“How so?”
“When you skim away the fat from the broth, you’re not supposed to get rid of all of it. It says to leave ‘a little of the nicest.’”
“A little?”
“Of the nicest.”
Leini didn’t expect to get it all done right away. It was a recipe that required patience, and in the morning she’d listen to the bells of St. Nicholas and take her time picking through the bones, chopping the ears as fine as rice. Using some of the greasy broth to help bind the dish, she’d mix in black vinegar and broken peppercorns, pack the devil into a mold shaped like the head of a tusked boar, dust it with paprika, and slide the treat behind George’s beer at the back of the fridge to gel.
“We take turns trying to surprise each other with something special,” she said, imagining the pink treat sliced thin across hunks of black rye, moist enough to spare the condiment. She tries to picture the afternoon it might have garnished; which bus would have taken her there.
Near the stove, she reached through the thick mist of clove and onion and sea salt for a mug above the sink; pours the water, dunks the bag. Standing at the darkened window with tea between her hands, she lets the heat seep into her palms and considers her aging face reflected in the glass.
Neither poet nor teacher nor librarian, as she’d once hoped. Not so much a storyteller as one about whom stories are told.
Or much of anything—though it is said she is pretty good with a sewing machine—but a stubborn gourmand with a sandwich to spare and secrets leeching into the cobblestones of a city desperate to keep pace with progress.
“I never tried, really tried … to reverse the hesitation of my misery,” she whispered to the glass. “I always took the other way around.”
And with that thought, the window shattered and she was thrown across the room, hard against the wall.
“Can you describe who did it?”
“Something yanked me out of my coat like a shot from a sling,” she said, nodding to the wall behind me. “You can see the tea stained the wallpaper … It was midnight, they started shooting guns on the street.”
“Something?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wincing as she tried to itch her swollen nose, moving a tissue toward the cuts and bruises on her face and then pulling it away. “When I looked up, the pig head was dancing around the room like it was on stilts. It leered at me. I thought …”
“Oh brother,” I mumbled, and she was quiet.
“I thought it was going to rape me.”
Struggling to her swollen knees, spine throbbing, Leini crawled toward the stove, raised herself up on it, and grabbed a wooden spoon for protection.
She did not hear the New Year arrive, the clang of the pie plates and bark of the air horns down on the avenue; did not see the pot that flew across the room to crack her brow.
Blinded by the flow of blood, she falls backward, landing in a hot puddle of souse juice on the linoleum, flecks of flesh and boogers of fat soaking through her dress, sticking to her legs.
Did someone fire a gun through the window?
Some drunk on the street hurl a cast-iron pot at her?
The junkman gone beserk?
“Tell me,” I said. “I’ll find who did this to you.”
Bleeding, confused, and afraid, she was somehow calm enough to think that George would understand this. He saw things sometimes. Swore that he did. But she didn’t call out for George.
“I’m frightened,” she cried. “
Ya-ya,
I’m frightened.”
All of the heat in the house rushed out through the broken window and Leini is cold again, freezing; the skull of the pig resting against the soaked hem of her black dress, a hole the size of a half-dollar behind a wilted ear.
She kicks it away and is alone again; the phantom swirling down the drain in the sink to the bowels of the city; making its way down the storm drains with lost balls and bags of shit before falling into the harbor from the Fallsway; settling into the sleek bed of chrome and magnesium on the bottom of the Patapsco to be held there forever.
“You didn’t call the police?”
“No.”
“An ambulance?”
“No.”
“You …”
“Got to my feet and started cleaning myself up.”
I closed my notebook and told her she could come down to the morgue to see the body if she wanted, but only if she wanted.
We had plenty of other ways to deal with it if she didn’t.
BY
D
AVID
S
IMON
Sandtown-Winchester
H
e fought the dragging wheel all the way across Saratoga, then down through the park on St. Paul and over to the viaduct. Rush-hour traffic played around him, the people in the cars seeing him but pretending not.
The boy trailed a few steps behind, lost in a daydream, tossing off some freestyle, trying for some flow. Boy thought he had something with his rhymes, but Tate, being so much older, couldn’t really say one way or the other.
“Ain’t no one ’bout a song no mo’?” he asked.
The boy smiled. It was a thing between them.
“Singin’ an’ shit, you know. Key of whatevah.”
“Nigga, please.” The boy shook his head, as if Tate were beyond hope. “’Cause you old school, I gotta be?”
Tate leaned into the cart, fighting the wheel. The boy followed, still in his flow until Tate made a point of throwing out a loud line or two of back-in-the-day sanctified music.
“Oh happy day …”
“Country-ass songs,” the boy said. “Please.”
Halfway across the viaduct, the bad wheel flopped left, pulling the cart off the sidewalk, hanging it on the edge, spilling some of the aluminum strips onto the asphalt. A parcel delivery truck in the close lane had to slow and wait for them to set things right. The deliveryman stayed off his horn, patient enough, but from the cars behind came all kinda noise.
“Lean down on that side,” Tate told the boy.
“Huh?”
“Naw, put weight on it an’ I’ll lift.”
The boy stared at him as more car horns sounded.
“Stand on the motherfuckin’ shoppin’ cart. Lean on that bitch.”
Daymo got it, finally, putting his weight on the front corner of the cart. He was sixteen and maybe 5’9", but built solid, a boy who would tend toward weight if he didn’t start adding some inches. He also began wheezing from the asthma. But with the boy standing on the cart, leaning toward center, there was enough counterweight to right themselves on the sidewalk.
Traffic moved again as Tate grabbed the fallen strips of aluminum, tossing them back in the cart. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then stole a look at the boy, who turned away, wounded.
Tate had raised his voice. Cursed, too.
“Didn’t mean to yell. I was feelin’ pressed, you know, with cars an’ such.”
The boy nodded, wheezing.
“We cool?”
“It’s all good.”
They rolled down Orleans in silence, crossing near the hospital and then down Monument to the metal yard. Tate tried to get Daymo to throw out more rhymes, but the boy kept inside himself.
“At least forty here, maybe fifty if that door be stainless steel, which I believe it is.”
The boy said nothing and ten more minutes passed. By the time they reached the scales, Tate felt his heart would break from the silence.
The aluminum window strips brought twenty-six dollars, steel belts from a couple radials another six, but the man at the scales said the broken half a door from a warehouse locker was lead, not steel. Bulk metal, meaning only four for all that weight.
“Naw,” Tate told him, “that’s stainless right there.”
“Shit no. Do it look stainless?”
“Yeah, it do. Dirty from the pile where I found it is all.”
“Bulk weight,” the man said wearily, and Tate snatched the last singles, feeling punked, especially in front of the boy. He walked away calling the metal man everything but a child of God.
“Thirty-six. Ain’t bad for the first run of the day.”
The sound of the boy’s voice took the anger from Tate. He stopped and pulled the cash from his pocket, counting out eighteen and handing it to Daymo, who looked at the bills, then back at Tate.
“You need twenty to get out of the gate, right?” the boy said.
Tate said nothing and grabbed the empty cart, rattling away from the scales with the boy trailing.
“Ain’t you need one-and-one to start?”
Tate shook his head. Dope alone would get him right; he could wait on the coke until the next run. “Fair is fair,” he told the boy.
“You can have the twenty, man. I make due with the rest.”
Tate looked at Daymo, suddenly proud of the moment.
“We partners, ain’t we?”
The boy nodded, still wheezing, coming abreast on the other side of the cart. The sun was high now and they rattled down Monument Street feeling the summer day.
“Even split. Always.”
Corelli had no patience for this anymore. He had to admit that much. When he was younger, he could wait the wait, sitting in whatever shithole where he was needed, staying awake with black coffee and AM radio. Once, when he worked narcotics, he stayed put in the Amtrak garage for thirty hours, watching a rental car until a mule returned from a New York run.
He fucking
made
that case. Yes he did. Hickham had come out on midnight shift to relieve him, but Corelli was young then and wanted to show the senior guys in the squad a little something extra.
“I’m spelling you,” Hickham had said. “You can still catch last call.”
“Fuck it. I’m good.”
Corelli tossed the line away like it was nothing to sit in a fucking car for a day and a night and more. He could still see the look on Hickham’s face, that fat fuck.
“You wanna sit some more?”
“I said I’m good.”
Corelli thought he’d made a point until he got back to the squad office the following afternoon to learn Hickham had pronounced him an idiot. The fuck kind of braindead goof won’t take relief after twenty hours in a parking garage?
“Proud to know you, kid,” Hickham had said, the sarcasm thick. And the rest of those guys just laughed. Never mind that it was him who eyeballed the mule. Never mind that the case went forward because of it. The joke was on him.
His radio crackled and he recognized the voice.
“Seventy-four ten to KGA. Lateral with seventy-four twenty-one.”
“Seventy-four twenty-one?” the dispatcher repeated.
Corelli reached for the radio, keyed the mike, and answered: “Seventy-four twenty-one. I’m on.”
“Seventy-four twenty-one, go to three for a lateral.”
He flipped channels to hear his sergeant asking what the hell he was doing all afternoon. He answered dryly that he was busy with police work, that he was out in the streets of Baltimore defending persons and property from all threats foreign and domestic. His sergeant, equally dry, remarked on the weakness of the lie.
“Couldn’t you just tell me you’re drinking at some bar?” Cabazes mused, indifferent to whoever was listening on channel three. “Then I’d know you respect me enough to lie properly and respectfully.”
“I’m at Kavanagh’s on my sixth Jameson. Feel better?”
“No, actually. Now, because of that admission, I have to believe you are standing in your soiled underwear in a North Philadelphia cathouse.”
Corelli laughed, as much at the word
cathouse
as at his sergeant’s wit. Cabazes was good with fucking words and Corelli so amused, he nearly missed the white guy in the seersucker coming down the apartment steps. He keyed the radio mike again, even as he watched the son-of-a-fuckingbitch cross the parking lot, headed toward the Beemer, sure enough. He knew it would be the Beemer.
Lawyer, maybe. Or something like a lawyer.
“What do you need, Ray?” he asked his sergeant, releasing the mike.
As he wrote the Beemer’s tag, he listened to Cabazes tell him that Lehmann’s squad was short a man for the midnight shift, that he could work a double and clock overtime if he wanted.
“I’m good with it. No problem.”
The Beemer rolled past him on the way out of the lot. Glimpsed through a windshield, Lawyer Boy looked younger than he expected. Baby-faced even.
“Seriously, Tony, what’re you doing out there all the damn day?”
“Police work.”
In the pause that followed, he could hear wheels turning in his sergeant’s head. “All right,” Cabazes said finally, “I’ll see you when I see you.”
Tate stayed off Division Street, even though the crew on the Gold Street corners was said to have the best coke. He copped instead at Baker and Stricker from some young boys selling black-top vials.
There was no sense going on the other side of the avenue. Or so he told himself until he was halfway down the gulley on Riggs, moving fast, hungry to get the shit home and fire up.
“Where you been at, nigger?”
Tate startled at the voice. Not here on Riggs. Not again.
“I said, where the fuck you been at?”
Tate tried to cross and join the street parade around Riggs and Calhoun, where the Black Diamond crew was working double-seal bags. But Lorenzo followed him, cutting the angle, grabbing him by the throat and forcing him into the wall of the cut-rate. A tout, watching from the other corner, laughed.
“I’m up on Division Street waitin’, and where the fuck is you?” Lorenzo was in his pockets now, rooting around, finding nothing. “The fuck’s it at? Huh? Where the fuck it be?”
Lorenzo pulled out Tate’s shirt, grabbed his dip, then reached down for his socks. Tate tried to run, but Lorenzo snatched him by the hair and threw a hard right, bouncing Tate off the wall. The blood felt warm and metallic in his mouth, and when he finally found some balance, Tate realized that Lorenzo had the dope and coke both: two small zip bags of Mass Destruction and a red-top of good coke; all of it had been curled in the top of Tate’s left sock.
“This some low shit,” he managed.
But Lorenzo was already walking away, laughing. The whole corner—touts, runners, fiends—was tripping on the spectacle. At Mount Street, Lorenzo turned back before crossing and shouted, “Catch ya later.”
Tate gathered himself, wiping blood on his sleeve. Four times in two weeks, and there was no sign Lorenzo was getting tired of the game. Four times he had his shit taken. On Monday alone, it was eight black-tops—a bulk-buy to celebrate the money from the copper rainspouts from that warehouse roof.
“Why you his bitch like that?”
It was the tout, all of fifteen years old, signifying, trying to have more fun with it. Tate turned, started back across the street, and then saw the boy at the mouth of the alley, staring. Tate looked away, then started down Riggs. The boy followed, catching him at Fulton.
“’Sup.”
“Ain’t much,” said Tate. Maybe he didn’t see. Maybe he got there after.
“Yeah?”
“Banged up my face a bit.”
“I seen.”
Walking away, Tate felt shame washing over him. But the boy followed silently for several blocks, until they were passing the corner at Edmondson and Brice.
“Lorenzo jus’ an asshole,” Daymo finally offered.
Tate gave nothing back, pointing instead to the Edmondson crew. “How ’bout you let me hold ten till tomorrow? First run of the day, I get even with you.”
The boy shrugged. “Ain’t got ten.”
“You ain’t got ten dollars? How the fuck not? I gave you thirty-five at them scales not two hours past.”
The boy shrugged again. Tate looked at him for a moment.
“What was you doing on Riggs?”
“Huh?”
“What was you doing on Riggs, comin’ out the alley?”
“Wadn’t doin’ shit.”
Tate grabbed Daymo’s wrist and spun him, pulling the boy’s arm behind his back and feeling the pockets of his denims. Right as rain.
“Get off. Get the fuck off me.”
But Tate had them out already, three gel-caps of Black Diamond. The boy looked away, hurt and angry both.
“The fuck is this here? You ain’t shootin’ this shit, I know.”
“Jus’ a snort now an’ then.”
Tate looked at the boy and waited. Nothing else was offered, and so, pocketing the caps, he filled the silence with his own words, the softest he could find.
“This shit ain’t for you, Daymo. It ain’t. You think about what it is you really want an’ where you want to be at, an’ then you take a look at my sorry ass.”
The boy did.
“It ain’t for you.”
Tate turned and crossed Edmondson. The boy didn’t follow.
“So he go an’ steal from you,” Daymo shouted, “an’ you steal from me!”
Tate stopped and wheeled. “I’m holdin’ thirty of yours. You gonna see that money first run tomorrow. My word.”
He turned and walked down Monroe without looking back, knowing in his heart that Daymo understood, that he had heard his words as truth. And later that night, when the boy came up the stairs of the vacant building where they were laying up, he said nothing further, just nodded quickly to Tate, then undressed and crawled onto his bedroll. The boy knew Tate would have his thirty after the first run. And he knew Tate was real about him not getting high, about the right and wrong of it all.
At the end of summer, Tate told himself, he would find a way to get Daymo back in school somehow, maybe even walk him up to Harlem Park and talk to the people there. Get him some school clothes and a book bag, even.
He had run through his own family years ago, burning them out one after the next, using them all to keep chasing. Shit, he had done a lot to be ashamed about. But he had never lied to Daymo, never cheated him. Not ever. And the boy knew how he felt, though nothing was ever said in all the time they had run together, the boy looking for meal money and finding Tate at the scales one winter afternoon.
“I can work for it if you need help.”
“Where you live at?” Tate had asked.
The boy shrugged.
“You ain’t got peoples?”
“Had me in a group home.”
Tate waited.
“I ain’t going back there ever.”
Tate nodded at that, asking no more questions, and it was the boy himself who pressed it: “Copper worth more than the rest, ain’t it? I know where we can snatch some copper pipe for real.”
And each day since, with the boy and Tate sharing everything.
Long after midnight, Tate fired the last speedball after the boy’s wheeze got regular and turned to a light snore. Child can’t shake that asthma at night, he thought sadly, telling himself that after a couple runs tomorrow, if Daymo was still struggling, they would run down to the university clinic, get some free medicines.
