Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [16]
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Chicken.”
“Yeah, I’m chicken,” I said, and I left the corner. It was getting dark and my grandmother wanted me home.
“Buack, buack, buack,” he called after me, making the chicken sound from some gang movie. He called out the same sound, only louder, as I approached Cooper the Cop, who was standing on the corner of Bayard and Herkermer, swinging his club. His regular beat was on the other side of the tracks where Knucks lived and Birute went to school, but he spent a lot of time down on Bayard Street with us.
“What’s that noise all about?” Cooper asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
I looked back and saw Birute coming down the steps from Butler’s with an ice-cream cone. Knucks was saying something to her and she smiled. Then he started to follow her.
I turned the corner toward my grandmother’s house, which was across from the coal yard.
I thought about what Knucks said about getting into Ludka. I knew the dirtier words for that. I even knew the word intercourse I thought about it a lot but I figured I was too young for that. So was Birute. You were supposed to be married before you did that.
I stood on my grandmother’s scrubbed marble steps waiting for Ludka to turn the corner and come down so I could say hello again and see her smile. It was out of the way to her house, but it was the way she always came.
She didn’t come that time, and not ever again.
I had trouble sleeping that night because I was thinking about Birute and about what Knucks had said about her. She was pretty, beautiful maybe, but not like a movie star because she didn’t wear makeup. I wouldn’t mind having a girlfriend like her, but after “Buack, buack, buack,” what chance did I have? Maybe she didn’t come down Herkermer Street because she was embarrassed to know me.
In the middle of the night, I heard a police siren and the dogs in the backyards started to bark. They did that two or three times a week, usually when somebody walked down the alley.
I had a dream about Birute Ludka and me doing what Knucks said. When I awoke, I changed my jockey shorts and hoped my grandmother would wash them without seeing the stains.
On the way to school, a couple of girls on the trackless trolley were talking about a D.P. girl who was killed in the Carroll Park playground.
“What D.P. girl?” I asked.
“The tall one that lives on Carey Street,” one of them said. They were both wearing the white Seton High uniforms that made them look like nurses or waitresses.
“Birute?”
“No. Ludka something.”
My face went hot. She couldn’t be dead. But I thought about the police car in the middle of the night and the dogs barking.
“You know her?” one of the Seton girls asked.
“No,” I said. I had said hello to her, but I didn’t really know her.
I guess because she was Lithuanian, there was some talk in school about the murder. I didn’t join in, but I paid attention. One of the nuns asked me if I knew her since she lived in my neighborhood. I said that I didn’t. I was scared because of my dream, but also because of what Knucks had said: “Old enough to bleed.” I didn’t think that “old enough to butcher” meant murder though.
When I got off the No. 27 coming home, I walked up Carey Street and saw Knucks was sitting on a set of steps. As I approached, he got up. Then he walked along with me. “You didn’t see me talking to her,” he said.
“No,” I said. I did see him, though, and I saw him start to follow her.
“Keep it that way.”
“Sure,” I said. I turned at the corner and he walked up Carey Street toward the bridge.
I wondered what that was all about. It didn’t make sense until the police came to my grandmother’s door and asked to talk to me.
One was a police detective named Kastel. When my grandmother came downstairs, he talked to her in Lithuanian much better than I could. I had never seen him before, but the uniformed policeman with him was Girardi, who walked the neighborhood beat.
“Did you know Birute Ludka?” Kastel asked. He pronounced Birute better than anybody I had ever heard except my grandmother.
“Not very