Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [10]
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.
When he’d been a student at Calvert College, Tom rented an apartment on Thames Street, right across from the pier on which he’d once been in Sea Scouts. Back then, he thought, as he parked his car on Aliceanna Street, Fell’s Point had symbolized freedom, sex, drugs (black hashish right off the ship and carried in a seaman’s trunk right into his apartment), and an endless party. Even the names of the bars had seemed so quaint and cool. Besides Bertha’s, there was The Horse You Came in On, and The Admiral’s Cup, and The Brass Monkey … The cobblestone streets, the arty girls from Maryland Institute, the student filmmakers, the folksingers, the occasional Goucher Girl in rebellion against her rich parents … God, it had been great back then … a place where every day seemed to have an unlimited possibility for surprise and romance.
Now, however, as Weeks walked the few blocks toward the bar, he was stunned by how small and seedy everything appeared. The ramshackle little bars with their neon lights looked tawdry and trashy. Dead End Ville. Drunken students wandered from bar to bar looking for girls and drugs, just as Weeks himself had years ago—but now, to his jaundiced eye, they seemed hapless and lame.
He walked by a man sitting in the gutter with a torn shirt and a bloody nose. Behind him a woman screamed, “If you weren’t such a pussy you’d go back in ’ere and kick his ass, Terry!” The beat man looked up wearily and said, “Fuck you, babe. Don’t try and promote that Who Struck John shit wif me.” Weeks looked down at the guy and realized he only in his early twenties. He felt that he could already see the downward trajectory of the boy’s life … a few years of stumbling about in Fell’s Point, perhaps pretending to be some kind of artist, then either jail, addiction, or worse.
That’s what had happened to most of his old pals. So many of them gone the way of drugs, like Mike who died from a hot shot in The Bottom, and Brad who had been killed by a head-on collision while driving on pills down to Ocean City.
It had been a mistake to come back here, Weeks thought. What could he possibly find but sadness? The old story of the middle-aged man who tries in vain to find the lost spirit of his youth in a place that’s forever changed. It was pathetic, ridiculous. What he should do is just turn around now, go back to his car, and forget this absurd quest. Head back out the 95 and dive into the safety of his king-sized bed at the Quality Inn. That’s exactly what he should do.
And yet, he found himself opening the thick wooden door at Bertha’s and going inside, looking for something he knew he could never find, but drawn on in spite of that. Or perhaps because of it. Weeks had always had a weakness for lost causes.
Ty sat at the bar drinking Wild Turkey and a pint of amber beer back. He wore a white scarf and a camel’s hair coat. He looked, Tommy thought, a little like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.
As Weeks sat down, Ty put his bony arm around his shoulders and smiled. “I’m glad you made it, Tommy. I thought you might blow me off.”
“No way,” Weeks said. “But I can’t stay too long. Gotta fly out tomorrow.”
“Whoa,” Ty said. “Got a big meeting in Hollyweird?”
“No, nothing like that. But I do have a couple of dead-lines.”
“Good old Tommy,” Ty said. “You always were an ace student. First kid in the class with his hand up.”
Weeks wanted to protest that this wasn’t so. He hated being thought of as a good little academic. After all, he was as much a hipster as any of them, wasn’t he? But perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps he’d only given the appearance of being a rebel, while being careful not to burn