Baltimore Noir (19 page)
And he knew what was coming. He’d been there over and over again already.
“She’s got no self-regard, you know what I mean? Poor crazy kid. You just open yourself up for big-time trouble. She’s a sitting duck. I feel rotten about it.”
Slink attended Annie’s graduation. The day was steamy and thick. Everyone, the guests, the students, the faculty, were fanning themselves with their programs. The commencement speaker—a famous actor with an equally famous wife—urged the new graduates to “seize the day” and “to march to their own drum.” Annie squirmed in her folding chair and laughed derisively. She contorted the advice, and when she met the actor at a reception following the ceremony, she held firmly to his hand and leaned forward to whisper into his ear, “Seize the drum.”
Slink watched sadly as the two refreshed their drinks and sought a quiet corner to chat. Slink moved forward two months to watch the end of the affair, the famous wife arriving unexpectedly at their Manhattan apartment.
“Who the hell is
this
little thing?”
Annie was out on the sidewalk in under five minutes, still fumbling with the buttons on her blouse. Slink knew that her next three months would go poorly. She’d get no traction in Manhattan. The city spooked her. Her veneer of insular confidence shattered like a sheet of sugar candy. She never found her stride, and in early autumn she left her rent unpaid and took the subway to Penn Station and bought a one-way ticket back to Baltimore. She was crying quietly as she boarded the train. Slink also took the ride. He took it over and over and over again. Each time he knew there was no way to keep Annie from taking the seat next to the red-haired man but each time he tried anyway to will her to keep moving on to the next car.
The man’s name was Paul. The toothpick in his mouth wiggled as he turned and smiled at the pretty young woman. Each time she was slow to react, but each time, when she finally did, it was as if her face might crack into a hundred bits. Such a smile.
“Hi.” And she slid her small hand into his. Just handed it right over. Slink could’ve killed her.
No!
Paul Jacobs had blood on his hands. Slink went back a few years to Loch Raven Reservoir on a half-moon night in May, and there he was. Slink couldn’t stand to see the act—not after that first time—so he always arrived just when it was over. Clouds drifted swiftly past the moon, giving the scene a pulsing, blue-strobe effect. The trees, the rocks, the flat black water, the shovel. She was a Maryvale girl. Cindi Blake. Car broken down. Help from a passing stranger. The doors on auto-lock, controlled by the driver.
The grave wasn’t terribly deep. But deep enough to let a week go by before a couple of teenagers would happen on it. Cindi Blake’s photograph had led all the local newscasts the entire week. Her parents pleading for their daughter’s safe return. The police asking “for any information.” One of those ugly weeks, ending on an even uglier Thursday, when the newscasters looked balefully into the cameras and paused before announcing, “It’s over.”
He had charm, this Jacobs character. He had the gift of gab, the twinkle in the eye. Slink knew this type. The rough diamond.
And that was the thing.
Rough.
Annie got a little taste of it even before she married him. A backhand at the breakfast table, so fast it was a blur. No marks, and followed that time with apologies, then brooding, then calculated sheepishness, and finally the unchecked fawning. It had worked. She hadn’t broken off the engagement. The honeymoon in Bermuda was pretty nice, except for the few minor incidents. Paul charmed his way out of the misunderstanding with that one couple from Charlottesville, though his temper back in the hotel room wasn’t a pretty sight. Annie had never learned to swim very well, so she spent her beach time sitting on the pink sand trying not to compare herself to the others. She ran across a short piece in a magazine about the famous actor she’d spent time with in Manhattan. He was divorcing his famous wife. Annie felt like all that was a thousand lifetimes ago. She was amazed now to recall that she had done such a thing. She felt that those crazy brave days were over. Forever. She looked up from the magazine and stared out at the surf. Her voice was barely audible.
“Take me.”
And that evening, in the hotel bar, she watched her husband flirting with a systems analyst from London. She watched as the woman laughed and plucked the ubiquitous toothpick from Paul’s lips. Back in her room, Annie pulled Slink’s toothpick from her travel jewelry case and studied it for several long minutes. Slink was there, in the room. It broke his heart when Annie began to cry in great heaving sobs. It broke his heart even more when she stuck the tip of the old toothpick against her arm and pressed it hard against her skin, until the pucker point was bone white.
Slink shot himself forward to the 1984 Hunt Cup, right up to the fifth jump, as Bewley’s Hill cleared the fence with balletic grace. Such a horse. Slink thought he was one of the really great ones. He drifted over to the hill, the irony there that always tore him up. Cindi Blake’s parents and their friends enjoying their big picnic while not two blankets away, in low menacing tones, Paul Jacobs was reading his nervous wife the riot act for the unspeakable crime of spilling a smidgen of white wine on his shoe.
Slink hated it. If he’d had hands, he’d have wrapped them around that no good murderous neck.
But Jacobs would die soon enough.
By the time Annie hit twenty-seven, the same age as Slink had been when he’d been broadsided by the school bus, she felt as if she was already dead. She knew that Paul was making time with that realtor who had found them their small brick house just off Lake Avenue. The realtor was a big blonde, with the kind of perverse preppy allure that had always spoken to Paul. Annie picked the long white strands off Paul’s sweater as she folded it and stowed it in the dresser. Personally, she didn’t know how the realtor could stand him. There wasn’t much charm left as far as Annie could see and what little remained was increasingly edgy. Half the nights, Annie slept on the couch. Though maybe half of those half, he’d come out and pull her roughly by the arm back into the bedroom.
Leave him,
Slink would plead wordlessly.
Go. Scram. You don’t need to be doing this.
He revisited seven-year-old Annie. He watched himself leaning against the Brewster’s kitchen door, pushing his cap back on his head and chatting with Annie’s mother. He watched Annie sitting at the kitchen table in front of a cereal bowl, her legs dangling above the floor. He watched as he winked at her and as she giggled, the legs swinging faster, back and forth and back and forth …
Leave him. C’mon, kid. For Christ’s sake, I forgive you already, okay?
And finally, she did just that. She left him. Dead on the living room floor on a crisp October morning. He was wearing one of those sweaters with the blond hairs on it. And he was wearing a lump the size of a lacrosse ball on the back of his head. Annie had worried that the bottle would break, but it didn’t. He’d been down on one knee, tying his shoelace. She had no idea where the strength came from to swing the bottle with such force. At breakfast that morning, he had pointed out an article in the
Sun
It had to do with the tenth anniversary of the unsolved murder of Cindi Blake. Annie remembered the photograph of the girl from back when the murder had occurred. She’d been a senior herself. Same age as Cindi Blake.
“I did that,” Paul had said casually, poking his finger into the photograph. “I picked her up, beat her with a shovel, and buried her. Stupid-ass cops. It’s a piece of cake to kill someone in this country.”
Then he stuffed a toothpick into his mouth and gave her a big uncharming smile.
The bottle didn’t break. It landed with a satisfying
crack,
and Paul slumped to the floor. Annie stood over him and watched to see if he moved. He didn’t. But to be sure, she went into the kitchen and returned with the largest knife she could find and planted it directly between his shoulder blades. The strength in her arms weakened and she ended up placing her foot against the handle and shoving the knife the rest of the way in with her foot.
She went back into the kitchen and fetched the newspaper. She circled the article with a marker, then returned to the living room and dropped the paper on her dead husband. It fluttered down onto him like a sheet.
I
did that,” she said.
She left the house, wearing only a thin sweater for warmth. She picked her way through the woods to Lake Roland and down to the edge of the water. Finally, she stepped out of her shoes, then hugged herself tightly, watching a pair of mallards as they scuttled across the water. She felt enormously calm. Tranquil.
It was a stupid little life,
she thought.
It didn’t really work.
Annie dove awkwardly into the water and began paddling toward the middle of the lake. Slink was watching. As always, he could see that she was a lousy swimmer. In fact, she was no swimmer at all. It was a dog paddle, and a lousy dog paddle at that. Her arms lost their strength well before she even reached the middle of the lake. As always.
She paused. Her arms slapped the surface of the water a few times, and then she went under. Silence, and then one final splash as an arm groped from the water. It looked almost like she was waving. The arm disappeared and concentric circles grew from the spot, wider and wider, until they too were gone.
Slink bowed his head. A wind blew and the trees around the lake released their leaves. They cascaded down like a rain of canaries.
H
e felt his stomach clench as he approached the Fort McHenry Tunnel, and already he had a pounding headache, a growing tightness in his throat. But then Tess spotted the towering cranes in the harbor, said, “Giraffe skeletons,” and laughed aloud as flatbed containers swung across the graying sky. He saw her smile through the rearview mirror; sitting back there among the empty seats, she pointed east with the eraser end, amusing herself again, and then made a note in her diary, shaking her head, beaming.
As he packed the van, she asked if he’d show her where he grew up, where he went to school, where he took his trumpet lessons.
“Sure, sweetheart,” he said, wishing she hadn’t.
Six hours later, crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, he could feel the red brick closing around him, the dry dust of the bocce courts at St. Leo’s scratch-scratching his shoes, and he heard the murky water slapping Pier 5 at 4 a.m. as the Domino Sugars sign flickered across the harbor: a fourteen-year-old boy with his horn, Little Italy over his shoulder, and his father telling him there was nowhere to go, that he would never change.
Cars were backed up at the tunnel mouth.
Tess swung her bare feet in rhythm as she hummed and sketched, and he remembered her mother would do the same as she read a script, straddling the arm of their red love seat, iced tea on the table, a mint leaf.
He didn’t know if Tess thought her mother the ice-eyed murderer on TV’s
Spencer: For Hire
or the playful strawberry blonde in the photo he placed in a floral frame in her bedroom.
The photo was taken in Harvard Square the day he quit Berklee to follow her down. He wasn’t ready to play the New York clubs, and he’d already been shunned by Julliard, but she wanted Broadway and there was nothing he could do.
And then came the news, and Margaret Mary turned to fury, a relentless blame spout. Seven months later, only five pounds, six ounces, but otherwise fine. She insisted on Therese Ann, bitterly and without explanation. He shrugged, thinking Tess. Short for
tesoro
, his treasure.
Her figure returned in less than a year, and Margaret Mary bolted west. Her two-word exit line: “Keep her.”
He got the furniture too. Needing sanctuary, he loaded the van and went back to Boston, buoyed by his love for little Tess but certain one day she would leave too. A promise: For as long as he had her, they’d be together and he’d give her something they could always share. He couldn’t chance it’d only be music—Margaret Mary hated jazz, snickering at his tears when Miles played “Summer Nights”—so he brought his
esor
to Fenway Park. Baseball, and fathers and daughters, sprinkled throughout the stadium. Tess holding his hand, little steps, mustard on her dimpled chin.
At the end of each summer, they traveled south: Yankee Stadium, Shea, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and now they were going to see the Orioles at Memorial Stadium, Cal Ripken Jr. on his toes where Mark Belanger once roamed. Tess liked the O’s logo, the blackbird with the orange beak, the sly grin.
By the time they finished the new ballpark at Camden Yards, it’d be too late. She’d be a teenager, gone.
On went the dome light so Tess could keep sketching. He was going to mention he’d never been in the tunnel before, since it was built after he fled. But knowing Tess, she’d ask why he left and he couldn’t lie to her.
They beat the Brewers, but it’d started to rain in the fifth and the sparse crowd filed out early. He saw Tess yawn, and she was drawing in her diary, no longer keeping score. When Ripken popped to third to end the seventh, they packed up to go. A cold August night now, Tess in his denim jacket, O’s cap on the back of her head, her auburn ponytail draped over the black plastic band. Smiling, but she was dragging.
By the time he warmed up the van and headed south on Ellerslie, she was asleep, stretched across the seats, hands folded under the side of her head.
Mind wandering, listening to Chuck Thompson call the ninth, he missed Lombard, and then he was lost on the way back to a Holiday Inn standing less than two miles from his childhood home. A detour sign pulled him into the construction site for a ballpark where the B& train yard once stood: orange cones and wooden horses pressing him toward the long, narrow warehouse looking ghostly, hovering above a hole in the ground where the freight shed had been. Eutaw Street blocked off like they were going to make it disappear, and he muttered, “Where the hell …?”
Tess mumbled, brought her legs close to her chest, using his jacket now as a blanket.
He didn’t know where he was, the rain a thick mist. Lost in his old hometown, streets gone. Yellow bulldozers parked haphazardly, oily balls of light, flames flapping in the wind, and he decided he’d go east, away from the warehouse and toward the harbor. Find Lombard and get Tess to bed. The Aquarium tomorrow, a drive over to the Peabody, and then Obrycki’s for lunch on the way home.
He stopped, using the sideview to see if he could turn around without winding up in the muck.
A man shouted loud, harsh, and he snapped back, startled.
Bursting from the darkness, a girl scrambled as she raced away, terror in her eyes. Naked above the waist, her blouse torn, she tried to hold her heavy breasts in her arms as she ran, her skirt ripped too, her olive skin glistening in the van’s harsh headlights.
And the shouting man drew toward the high beams. Pockmarked and stern, short-cropped curly hair and vacant, wide-set eyes, he tugged angrily at his slacks as he splashed through a puddle and another.
The girl hurried toward the old roundhouse, her face gripped by fear.
The man stopped, his shoes catching in the mire, and he looked directly into the van, raising his hand to block the beams.
Two fists clutching the wheel, his daughter asleep behind him, and he recognized the man.
Bigelow was his name, and he could tell Bigelow didn’t know whether to chase the girl into shadows or to come over to tell whoever was in the driver’s seat to go the fuck home, sealing his mouth forever along the way.
Walking relentlessly toward the van, Bigelow tucked in his shirt and did up his zipper.
He saw Bigelow eye the Massachusetts license plate.
“Dad?” Tess said, sitting now, rubbing off the sleep.
Reverse, a K-turn, and he roared away from the construction site, then said, “Let’s get out of the rain,
esoro
“ Juggled in the seat, she watched as he drove onto 395, exiting to use the pay phone at an Amoco station. Rape at the Camden Yards construction site, he reported. Look for the girl at the roundhouse.
Arthur Bigelow, he added, mimicking his father’s thick accent.
Half a mind to drive to 95 and head north, but their clothes were at the hotel, and Tess’s Barbies. His Jerwyn mouthpiece in a velvet pouch.
Bigelow saw him despite the blinding lights, and Bigelow had the letters and numbers on his rear plates.
He came back around on 395 and he was near the B& warehouse again, and there was the green Holiday Inn sign, where it had been all along.
Parked underground, and as he hoisted his drowsy daughter onto his shoulder, damp jacket and her diary tucked under his arm, he tried to remember when Bigelow went from the Baltimore City Jail to the Maryland State Pen. Figured maybe Bigelow was twenty years old by then, a man, since he was entering his junior year at Mount St. Joe’s High.
Even as a kid, Bigelow was a thug, a moron, and he had a mouth on him too, and he ran down the son of the fruit-stand man, a quiet boy who wasn’t quick to fight, the boy who now clutched his daughter, the elevator rattling as it rose.
His classmates, a loud, swaggering bunch, encouraged him to smash a two-by-four across the back of Bigelow’s head. But he found it easier to withdraw, spending late afternoons and early evenings alone in the tumbledown three-room flat off Slemmers Alley.
He took a job at age thirteen as a bus boy at Sabatino’s, offered as charity to his father who held off the Arabers from his shoebox store, doing his sums on the backs of brown paper bags, totaling the cost of a half-pound of this, a quarter-pound of that, knowing not a word of English save greetings and numbers. “
Grazie, mille grazie,
” his father would say, bowing his head, his brown chin dotted with prickly gray stubble, his vest pocket torn, his pencil a nub.
While his father worked seven days from dawn to dusk, he put in forty hours a week, and with his own money he bought a trumpet and paid for lessons. His father didn’t approve, and telling him his teacher studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Music meant nothing. “
Stupido corno,
” his father muttered, his suspenders hanging loops at his sides.
“My teacher said I—”
“You can’t be like everybody else. No, not you, eh? With the goddamn trumpet. What’s wrong with you?” he spit, flinging his hand in the air. “And let me tell you, quiet boy, as for this teacher making miracles:
non ci sono angeli.
No angels? “Pop, I’m saying—”
Having made his point, the old man suddenly fell into his thoughts. He headed for his bedroom and, as if talking to himself, said, “Or maybe it’s too much, too rough. This kid, he don’t fight for nobody.” Patting his pockets for a tobacco plug, he added, “Trumpet. Bah.”
In his mind, there was a red-brick wall around Little Italy, high as the warehouse at Camden Yards, high as the moon. He felt it even when he was out on Pier 5, blowing flawless scales until dawn, the cops letting him be. Blue notes disappearing in the early morning haze, and he wished he could too.
Meanwhile, Bigelow: his face a sudden riot of pimples and pustules, and now the neighborhood girls found him repulsive too. He turned to cold stone, hooked up with a gang, worked his way up to armed robbery.
The elevator stopped hard, and the man flinched, remembering Bigelow had tried to rob the Colombo Bank with a face like that and no mask. Pistol-whipping plump Mrs. Ghiardini, who had two sons at St. Leo’s and a baby girl at home, their father a fireman killed tumbling off the back of the truck one snowy night. Fifteen, twenty years ago, said the guys at Sabatino’s, nodding knowingly, they would’ve taken care of it; the cops would’ve found Bigelow floating in the harbor, hands missing, his skull a jigsaw puzzle. But out of respect for his mother, born Ana Riccardi over on Eden Street …
“We home, Daddy?” Tess whispered as he opened the door.
“Close enough,
tesoro
“ he replied.
He set her on the bed, knelt to remove her sneakers. Her pajamas were in the drawer under the TV.
“I can brush my teeth better than you,” he said, trying to smile.
Waving off the nightly challenge, she offered her baby-soft cheek, then slithered under the covers, clothes and all.
Tess slept as if exhausted, unaware he was sitting on the bed across from hers, staring at her, reaching over now and then to stroke her hair. Tess, who resembled his mother as much as her own: olive hue, the round chin, deep brown eyes. His mother in the photo, him too. Easter Sunday, he’s five and she’ll be dead in three months.
“Your mother, she was some firecracker,” said one of the guys at Sabatino’s. “A temper?
Madonna mio
…”
Left unsaid: How did she wind up with a slug like that? Out of earshot, in the coffee shops off Broadway, actors, writers, producers said the same about Margaret Mary.
“Tess,” he cooed in the dark room, and he was thinking as his heart began to pound, and the headache again.
Bigelow could find him—a witness who could confirm the girl’s story of assault, of rape. And maybe Bigelow saw beyond the high beams and recognized the man behind the wheel, as the man had recognized him. The fruit-stand man’s son down from Massachusetts, the boy with the horn.
On his heels, running his hand across his forehead, he tried to envision the limits of Bigelow’s imagination, as if he could fathom a criminal mind.
He figured Bigelow, though full of bad intent, would do what was easiest first: return to Little Italy and see if the fruit-stand man still lived in the crumbling, graffiti-stained wood frame off Slemmers Alley.
He went to a chair by the window, and in the hotel room’s darkness a cold shiver swept over him, his stomach leaping to his throat.
Finding no satisfaction behind the rusted bars on the building’s windows, Bigelow would calculate: The fruit-stand man’s son had been lost in the construction site; his father dead, no doubt; a hotel near the yards, it being too late to drive home to Massachusetts.
Bigelow would find the van.
Tess slept serenely, a wry smile on her face.
He pulled back the heavy drapes. Looking through the rain, he saw the warehouse, pile drivers, excavators, remnants of the old roundhouse, and in his mind, the girl Bigelow had attacked, the panic in her eyes, desperation.
He stood and, as the drapes swung shut, he recalled a restaurant, its back to Slemmers Alley: Mo’s Fisherman’s Wharf, and maybe the staff was gone by 2 o’clock. The restaurants throughout Little Italy shutting down, Stiles Street empty, the alley also.
Bigelow would wait until then.
Looking at Tess.
Bigelow saw the little girl in the backseat, and she’s a witness too
He parked the van over on Aliceanna a block from the harbor, and he took out the old baseball bat he kept with a couple of tattered mitts under the rear seat. He headed north in the rain, fist wrapped around sullied tape above the crack in the handle.
When he turned the final corner, ready to enter the litter-strewn alley from the south end, he saw a figure.
Darting, he avoided a puddle and pressed himself into the shadows of a garage door and watched as Bigelow looked at the side of the tilted wood frame, stepping back, peering up, down.
He held back as Bigelow, frustrated, turned in the direction of Stiles.
Coming off the door, he shifted the cracked bat to his right hand.
Bigelow was maybe twenty feet away, easing toward a streetlight’s halo.