Baltimore Noir (8 page)
“Don’t tell anyone,” she says. “So, what are you going to do, Michael?”
“Do?”
“Yeah, what are you going to about your porno job? What are you going to do about Mel? Or that boyfriend? He knocked you on your ass, and he wants Casey’s, he wants my bar. What are you going to do? What are going to do? … Speak up, Michael.”
I have to work Independence Day, but it will be my last day at The Love Joint. “Mr. Grimes, I resign my position effective immediately,” I announce, as he tapes a sign to the side of the cash register:
“We cannot sell waterpipes anymore. You must ask for tobacco pipes.”
Quitting is my strongest career decision yet; two years—where does the time go?—is long enough in the adult store business. A pristine shipment of new Pamela videos has put Grimes in a docile, nostalgic mood. He’s even adopted four white kittens from somewhere. He’s wearing his blue tennis shoes.
“You talking to yourself again, son?” Grimes says.
“I said I resign immediately.”
“Then we should discuss your severance.”
One of the white kittens tumbles into the Pamela Anderson video box display, detonating the man’s pyramid. It’s a staggering architectural loss, but Grimes just smiles, quite the foreign expression on him. The front door opens and it’s no customer. I don’t understand the presence of Carpenter Hands nor do I appreciate this unsettling interruption. Hadn’t I just officially resigned?
“Hey, Mikey.”
“It’s
Michael.”
“I’m sure it is,” Carpenter Hands says, moving behind the counter. “Mikey, you need to talk to your friend at Casey’s. You need, as an objective newsletter reporter, to explain to Ms. Montgomery the practical benefits of selling her bar. I’ve tried but, frankly, she does not trust me.”
“Fuck yourself.”
“Well-spoken, and it’s not an entirely unattractive suggestion,” he says. “But, as you well know, I’m fucking Mel.”
Grimes burps a laugh (coughing
something
up), then starts to rebuild the Pamela pyramid to far greater heights. He says something about wanting to expand the operation, make a move to Thames Street.
“You’re not going to interfere, are you, son?” Grimes asks.
I scoop up ten copies of
Rear Window
as severance before leaving my job at the emporium.
“She’ll sell,” Carpenter Hands says.
“Over my dead body.”
I walk out, past the Broadway Market and Crabby Dick’s and toward my favorite Fell’s Point bar. I’ve always wanted to say “over my dead body,” but I now feel under some sort of obligation. I stand at the railing by the water taxi landing and stare at the brown harbor water. It’s high tide, the trash is out. The Moran tugboats, with their Goodyear tire whiskers, are all tucked in for the night alongside the Recreation Pier. The briny wind, the drinking people, the subterranean sin—Fell’s Point is feeling and looking one quarter French Quarter. Inside Casey’s, I hear Tongue Oil close its first set with Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song.” Lori’s six, seven customers are speechless, immobilized. One might be weeping.
“Ah, the unbridled power of rock
and
roll,” I tell Lori.
“Why no, that’s just my shitty house band.”
“I quit my job at the emporium.”
“I like that decision,” Lori says. “Work here. Help me find good music. Please, help me find good music. You heard what they did to ‘The Immigrant Song.’ Michael, musicians will listen to you—you’re old.”
When Lori gives you a Bass Ale on a
New Yorker
coaster, when Lori uses your full first name, when Lori offers you a job working with Lori, you don’t need a day to think about it. She tells me to start immediately by advising the management (i.e., drummer) of Tongue Oil that a second set and any future first sets will no longer be necessary. During the transitional period, I insert a pressed dollar into the jukebox to hear Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and “She’s the One.” Lori reimburses me for the money, a gesture far more intimate and sweeter than having your eyebrow groped. I know she’s scared to sell, scared not to sell, scared of him. And who knows what happened to Carpenter Hands’s girlfriend? Maybe Mel has given topless cleaning another chance; she just needed the right boss.
“Lori?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-one. Now help me close up.”
The
Fell’s Pointer
office is on the second floor of a Fell Street rowhouse. Barry Levinson filmed a scene from
Diner
here, but there’s no plaque commemorating the moment. It’s the second Friday in August. I’m using one of the office’s three Dell PCs to do my listings: The Fell’s Point Antique Dealers’ Association, the Fell’s Point Citizens on Patrol, and the Fell’s Point Homeowners’ Association all have meetings coming up. I also need to remind readers again to have their recyclables out by 7 a.m. on collection days.
But I don’t feel like reporting. I’m exhausted from a late night. I met someone and we ended up drinking, then arguing. He drank way too much, and I don’t know if he ever got home. His girlfriend showed up and that was stressful. I left them at the Rec Pier, him still talking his shit. He was one of these cocky dudes—you know, the kind who thinks he owns the place, the kind who would never buy a beer at Casey’s. Anyway, the night ended poorly.
We have the windows open in the office because it’s so damn steamy. We first heard the sirens at 8 a.m. and now the Baltimore City Police, three patrol cars, are at the Rec Pier. EMT people are here, too. Traffic is stopped, even the Duck Tour had to somehow brake.
“Go see what that’s about,” my editor says. Paulette means well, but she knows how I feel about covering news. News is stressful. It lacks jazz. “Go,” Paulette says. It’s a short walk along Thames. It’s ninety minutes past low tide but the harbor water is still receded and it’s shallow enough to see dismembered crabs swaying in the flotsam. At the water taxi landing, a city garbage skimmer has anchored—its chop-sticked wings have locked and apparently stalled on a particularly bulky piece of trash. I’m supposed to be asking questions and taking notes, but I just watch. Albert, my old friend from Casey’s urinal, finds me in the crowd. He’s back in town and back on the Duck Tour. We both watch as police in gloves peel seaweed, tree branches, Doritos bags,
City Paper
s and four dead gulls off what now appears to be a collected body. The garbage skimmer’s conveyor belt holds up the waterlogged mass like some Middle River kid showing off a record rockfish.
“Low tide! You were right!” Albert says, zooming his digital camera. “You think the Duck boat can get in the water so I can have a better look?” It’s a fair question.
“I’d ask.”
At the office, I tell Paulette it was nothing, just another body, maybe a suicide or an accident—some drunk guy from last night toppling into the harbor, getting hooked under a bulkhead. “A mystery,” I say. She says to get a name, which I do three hours later from the PIO at the police department. My reporting day is through. I walk to my other job at Casey’s. Lori says she has a present for me: Us3’s rap version of “Cantaloupe Island.” Their 1994 version, “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” is better than the original, she says. Maybe. Either way, I want her.
“I have something for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You know that body the skimmer choked on today? It was a Steven J. Marsh, thirty-four, of Canton, a commercial real estate agent with Harbor View Realty. Our close friend.”
“Carpenter Hands,” Lori says.
“You don’t have to sell.”
“Michael, I was thinking. I mean, $800,000. We could go somewhere. Aruba. Someplace?” Lori lifts my sleeve over my Timex, a gift from a new friend. She suggests we close early to discuss current events. I tell her I have nothing further to report. I feel I have done enough for us both, and I feel about as happy as a man melting ice. Lori puts Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” on the jukebox, then Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar.” I’m thinking we might not need a house band.
She brings out two
New Yorker
coasters.
We’re so upscale.
C
rime in Baltimore was brutal but old-fashioned in those days, before the riots and all the goddamn dope. I blame those longhaired fairies from England.
All of ’em.
I had that detail too, standing guard outside Suite 1013 of the Holiday Inn on Lombard Street after they played the Civic Center; all them young girls running in and out, doing Christ knows what when they should have been home in bed with their parents
Brass said: Long as nobody gets killed, let it go. So I let it go.
That Holiday Inn was the first hotel built here after the war. Got a whole lot of attention ’cause the restaurant on the roof spun around while you ate, the full 360. By the time you were done with the crab cakes and started in on your ice cream, you’d get the whole panorama, from Beth Steel to Memorial Stadium.
Hotel’s still there, but the restaurant don’t revolve no more. Or serve crab imperial. Civic Center’s named for some bank and we
average
right near three hundred murders a year. Even one of them Beatles caught a bullet. For nothing. Every now and then I hear one of their songs in the supermarket or in the car and it don’t sound half bad.
A radio still seems like more of a miracle to me than television, especially when Krupa is coming out of it. I keep it on the AM when I’m down here in the den with the knotty-pine and my citations on the wall, and when the end of the year rolls around, I pull a file or two that walked out of headquarters with me and chew on the ones I can’t forget.
Like this one.
She said that she and her “friend” were sitting on a bench at the corner of Light and Redwood Streets late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve, “just passing time,” when the call came into the Central District.
Answered all my questions and some I didn’t ask; told it better than I’m telling you, so I let her talk.
“We’d just found a bench to sit on when the sun went down,” she said in the kitchen of her row-house apartment up near City Hospital; two black eyes, a broken nose, and a lump on her head the size of a quail egg. A bench somewhere once or twice a week, she said, “to watch the day die.”
Gray sky bruising to violet, factory lights sparkling in harbor oil, as they nibbled some bread and cheese; the city waiting on the last party of the year.
Pitiful? What are
you
doing on New Year’s Eve?
The guy’s name was Orlo, a junk collector from the Clinton Street wharves. What he was to her is hard to say, although I could guess. His story checked out. Lucky man, as far as that goes.
“He was peeling an orange,” she said, “and the spray chafed his hands.”
Chafed … who talks like that anymore?
I guess it was a little picnic on the bench. They weren’t waiting for a bus, just sitting down. Gave her age as fifty-four—you could have fooled me, even with the beating she took—and said the junk man was “going on sixty-six …”
“Orlo Pound?”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Why would he be?”
“Am I?”
“Not that I can see. Except, you know, the reason I’m here.”
“It was cold,” she said, “so I’d eat a little cheese and put my hands back in my coat.”
“Anyone speak to you?”
“Nobody pays attention. People got their own problems.”
Headed to their own midnight truths.
They sat and watched people come and go from the Southern Hotel across the street. It had been important once, back in the railroad days, but not anymore. The only thing that revolved was the front door.
Something about the hotel bothered her.
“They were bringing cakes into the hotel and each cake had a big number on it—one followed by nine followed by six followed by four,” she said. “Do you remember back in Prohibition when the Southern had orchestras playing jazz on the roof?”
“Before my time, ma’am.”
“I begged him to take me dancing there.”
“Mr. Papageorgious?”
“Orlo.”
“Yesterday you wanted to dance?”
“No,” she said, an edge to it. “Back when they had orchestras on the roof.”
“Did he take you?”
“One day I will,
he said.
One of these days.
Then the Depression hit and nobody was going anywhere.”
“When was the last time you saw your husband?”
“Yesterday morning. He was going down to the hall to wait on a ship.”
“On New Year’s Eve?”
“On the way out, he stuck his nose in the pot,” and she pointed to a dented stew pot on the drain board next to the sink.
“And?”
“And he didn’t like what he saw.”
What George Papageorgious saw was awful.
It seems that our Mystery Woman had been up cooking before dawn, and when her old man rolled out of the house, he stepped into a kitchen steamed up with garlic and salt and …
“Clove,” she said, “I had it on the back burner. Out of the way.”
The poor son of a bitch lifts the lid and puts his face to the bubbling water. It don’t smell half-bad to him, I guess, so he gets a little closer, shooing away the steam with his hand.
When it clears …
“Christ, that’s all he was yapping about,” said the bartender at the Lorraine Tavern, not five blocks from the bus stop where his wife was having her little picnic. “‘Crock of shit—milk blue.’ A broken record: ‘Crock of shit—milk blue …’”
“What?”
“The eyes. The boiled-up eyes of the pig staring at him from the pot.”
The Lorraine was on the first floor of the Seafarers Union hall over on Gay Street; between the Great White Way bowling alley and “Your Old Friend Simon Harris” Sporting Goods. All three businesses catered to seamen.
Witnesses said that George had been drinking at the bar since it opened at 6 a.m. and let more than one ship go without throwing in for a job.
“Guess his old lady was making up a batch of head cheese,” said the barkeep. “Man, the way he run it down, we could’ve fixed up a shitload of it ourselves. Didn’t have the heart to tell him you’re supposed to throw the eyes away.”
They said the Greek put away eight or nine shots of vodka and got uglier with each one; shouting questions that didn’t make any sense.
“How long?” he bellowed. “How long that goddamn pig in my face?”
Scalded pink snout; pale, sunken eyes; a gun on the bar.
“Everyone’s edging out the side door and I told him to put it away. ‘Look pal,’ I says, ‘a sugar ship’s gonna tie up Locust Point in a couple hours. Ain’t nobody gonna put in for it on New Year’s Eve. Why don’t you run upstairs and grab it?’”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said George, bringing the barrel to his eye.
And I got a cuckold face-down in the sawdust of the Lorraine Tavern with a hole in the back of his head the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.
“When the bread and cheese was gone, we sipped hot tea from a thermos and Orlo asked if I knew how his father died.”
“Did you?”
The lovers had shared a long string of delicacies and deceit from the moment the frustrated teenager carried a bowl of steaming pig feet to the King of the Junkmen in her family’s diner nearly forty years ago. All that time together—a day here, half a day there—and still their tongues searched out every pebble of cartilage of their mythology.
Leini did not know how Orlo’s father had died.
“They had him up on the third floor, eaten up with cancer and crying for his mother,” he told her. “I was hiding in the hallway and saw him point to the window and say his dead brother was perched on the sill outside. They told me to go outside and play.”
When Eleini Leftafkis was a child of nine on the island of Samos, her parents shipped her to a couple with a prosperous diner at the end of Clinton Street, crying farewell with every intention of following just as soon as they could.
“Before you know it,” said her
mintera
“Lickety-split,” said her
pateras,
practicing his English.
“We love you,” sobbed her
ya-ya
And they meant it.
Today, all she knows about the deaths of her grandmother and her parents arrived in envelopes bordered in black, first one and then another. She has never seen their graves.
“A bus stopped in front of us but no one got on and no one got off,” said Leini, complaining about the fumes, saying how she missed the streetcars. “The driver couldn’t get the doors closed, like something was forcing them open. He’d yank the lever and they’d bounce back. He tried to force them but they just hung open.”
Staring into the space between, Leini saw herself on the altar of the Orthodox church, barely eighteen years old, saying yes to the man who’d been selected for her and “I’ll see you soon” to the man she loved.
I’ll do this, she’d told herself, the heart of her absent mother beating in her ears, I’ll do what they want and God will give me a life I can bear.
“Orlo wanted me to ride the bus home but the driver kept banging the doors, and before I could get on, a hinge snapped. The sound it made. Awful. It gave me a chill. It was twenty-nine degrees outside. So I started walking. The cold had worked its way inside the sleeves of my coat, right up to my collarbone. I just wanted to get away.”
She asked if she were guilty of anything and I told her the question was irrelevant.
“Well I am,” she said.
Orlo watched Leini hurry away but did not chase after her.
You cannot play the games this woman has played all her life—from the time she was traded to a barren couple in America for a couple dozen sewing machines—and be skittish.
Prim, perhaps; the world loves a mask.
But not skittish.
The bus and its broken doors had spooked her more than anything she could remember; more afraid, she said, than the heaving voyage that brought her over as a kid.
I took her story down like a court reporter, page after stenographic page of minutia that had nothing to do with the case.
“I walked fast,” she said. “When I hit Pratt Street I stopped to catch my breath, sorry I didn’t hop that bus. My knees were aching. Not a cab in sight.”
She stopped to watch a couple of tugboats nudge a Norwegian ship up against Pier 5 and moved on, pushing east against a cutting wind, head down, making time.
“I was hoping to catch George before he shipped out and tell him I was sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy, where organ grinders once kept their hairy beggars in an alley of sheds called Monkey Row, Leini turned toward a rough warren of warehouses and machine shops where heavy springs are forged and hawser line is coiled to the rafters.
A saloon on every corner; pig feet on every bar; a story in every jar.
Leini had not known guilt—pure, inexplicable guilt—since the son she’d conceived with George the week of their marriage was gunned down in the surf of Omaha Beach with the Maryland 29th. The city sparkles cold on a clear night and she remembers how she once navigated its odd turns with ease when summoned by Orlo to assignation.
Walk to the end of Aliceanna Street till you see the side entrance to Maryland Chief … Yeah, the packing house … They’ll be tomato trucks crowding both sides of the street, you’ll hear crickets. It’s Bawlmer City but them ’mater trucks is loaded up with crickets. Wink at the watchman and he’ll point you toward Kai Hansen’s
Wildflower
docked out back.
She passed an arching sally port—one of those narrow brick tunnels that separate the older rowhouses—and remembered, as she peeped into one on an especially derelict block, the room of velvet that Orlo had built for them over the summer of ’29, a room of skylights where they’d consummated an affair begun before her marriage.
“Looking down that airy way, I started counting up all the lies I’d told and they rattled in my head like nickels in a bucket.”
When I told her I wasn’t a priest she just kept on talking, a truck whose breaks had given out.
“Then I was in Zeppie’s.”
“Zeppie’s?”
“Thames and Ann.”
Zeppie’s was a neighborhood tavern where stevedores and deckhands started the day with boiled eggs, raw eggs, egg sandwiches, a shot, and a beer; a Polack gin mill that made a mint on work gloves and sold soup and sandwiches to laborers who settled their tabs with stolen hams and transistor radios.
“George went there sometimes,” she said. “I wanted to have a drink with him. That’s something I’d never done.”
“But he was already …”
“Every now and then you could talk to George.”
Zeppie’s was stag, the only broads you’d find there were Sissy Z. behind the bar, wives looking for their husband’s pay, and the busted onions upon whom that hard-earned cash was spilled.
“I found a table in a corner where I didn’t think anyone would pay much attention.”
Someone did. A tugboat captain who’d just tied up over at the Recreation Pier looked through the crowd and saw Leini and nothing else. He was clean shaven—he’d just washed up on the boat and changed out of his work clothes—handsome and more than a couple years younger than her.
“He asked if he could sit down and then he was sitting down,” she said. “When I told him I was leaving, he turned to get me a beer and I was gone.”
Out the door and pushing home again, remembering not that she had betrayed George a million times but Orlo only once. It was getting late. There was a pig’s head on the stove to deal with.
“I still had the willies, only worse,” she said.
Some kind of stick in her back.
Denied passage with the clouds on its way out of this world, the condemned soul of George A. Papageorgious coursed along the crumbling curbs of Baltimore.
From the Lorraine Tavern, where Orlo saw a morgue wagon as he worried his own way home, the ghost hugged the mossy seawall of the harbor, knocked a beer into the lap of a dapper tugboat captain who thought he’d gotten lucky, and bent the tines of his daughter’s tongue as she put the family’s business in the street.
“It was the eyes that got me,” said Little Leini, sneaking out to a New Year’s party with a girl she thinks is her friend. “Like a couple of loogies hocked on the sidewalk.”