Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [22]
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Detective Kastel said.
“No shit,” I answered, and my cheeks went straight to hot.
Kastel chuckled.
“You’d better take me home. My grandmother is probably worried about me.”
“I’ll tell her that you’re a hero.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I would be a bigger hero if I told the truth in the first place—but I might be dead.
OVER MY DEAD BODY
BY ROB HIAASEN
Fell’s Point
In the John Wilkes Booth at Casey’s in Fell’s Point, I’m drinking Bass Ale on Palm Sunday afternoon. Above the booth, the April 15, 1865 front page of the New York Herald is preserved in a dime-store frame: a skinny black number separating at its corners. On the newspaper page, six leggy columns bring us the official dispatches on the “Death of the President.” Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m., which I did not know. “There is intense excitement here,” the paper reported. No intense excitement here today, but I have hope. Fell’s Point, once the major shipbuilding spoke of Baltimore, once a nest of sailors, once a place where Labradors could slurp a National Bohemian at the Full Moon Saloon, is now a gentrified waterfront community. At least the neighborhood has preserved, bless my home, its running battle with a roving apostrophe: Fells Point. Fell’s Point. I prefer an apostrophe since I’m the possessive type.
Bars along Thames and Fleet and Aliceanna Streets are selling for $1.5 million and $2.1 million, and even Alicia over at Birds of a Feather might sell her license to offer ninety brands of scotch; the knitting club obviously won’t be able to meet there anymore. The Whistling Oyster is still open, but I hear they were asking $800,000 for the property. The Dead End Saloon? $2.1 million. Even that hokey schooner, Nighthawk, skipped town—not that I ever wanted to sail on one its “Mystery!” cruises. See, the urbanites have arrived, the new immigrants. They leave flyers at The Daily Grind coffeehouse that read, “Dramatic Loft Space Available. 20 X 80. Many Goodies for the Self-Indulgent Urbanite.” Soon enough, they’ll be calling Fell’s Point “Inner Harbor East.” Even the panhandlers in Fell’s Point are upscale: they don’t directly ask for money; they remind you to use the central parking meters and please display the receipt on your dashboard.
Christina still waits in her window, though. Christina, a psychic advisor, must be sixty-eight now, but still waits to sell you a piece of your future. Bertha’s bar and her worldfamous bumper stickers are still here, and the immortalized The Horse You Came in On, and my favorite watering hole. Casey’s is two blocks down from the Recreation Pier, where they filmed the TV drama, Homicide. Baltimore’s amphibious Duck Tour grinds by, as tourists with duckbill-yellow quackers hope to witness a shooting or maybe just a chalk outline for old time’s sake. But all that’s left is a plaque: “In This Building from 1992–1999 a Group of Talented People Created a Television Legend—Homicide: Life on the Street.” The city wants to turn the pier into something called a boutique hotel, according to the community newsletter and my employer, the Fell’s Pointer
My name is Michael Flanagan: I’m twenty-three, collect snow globes, eat entire rolls of Butter Rum Lifesavers after lunch, had a girlfriend once who convinced me to paint my toenails cobalt; have promised myself to one day see Aruba; Sundays wreck me (I should be thinking hopefully of the week ahead, but my mood reverses itself: the dull bulk of the past pins me), and I think Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” might be better than Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Since last year, I have been a staff writer for the Fell’s Pointer, which firmly believes in an apostrophe. I write about bicycle master plans, the harbor’s garbage skimmers, and once I wrote a feature about Twiggy, a water-skiing squirrel that is pulled by a remote-controlled boat. My stories have also warned readers about leaving bricks on their property because they tend to be used as weapons during