Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [23]
My newsletter salary is $950 a month, so I also offer my services at The Love Joint, an adult movie emporium on Broadway, walking distance to Casey’s. My employer, Mr. Harland Grimes, and I continue to differ on the artistic direction of the store; I believe Grace Kelly was the finest vision on film, but he stubbornly stocks the store with Paris Hilton home videos. Mr. Grimes often sports avocado-sized bruises on his upper arms. His forehead is large enough to accommodate a second face. Snap beans for legs, icebox chest. And he never wears socks, just old-lady-blue tennis shoes, just the three eyelets on each side.
I work weeknights, stacking Paris videos into attractive pyramids by the front door. My days are spent reporting newsletter stories, investigating the tattoo magazines in The Sound Garden record shop, and having the mussel chowder at Bertha’s. By 5 p.m. I’m in Casey’s, which is across from a toy store that once featured a bubble machine on the second floor. Bubbles would parachute and pop onto cobblestoned Thames Street—and the “th” is pronounced. I wrote the story when they shut down the bubble machine—an exclusive, you could say.
I accomplish three things in bars: consume quality adult beverages, bribe the jukebox, and form crushes. This Palm Sunday, I had planned to start my novel, but I got hung up again on the title—either Flight Risk Clumsy Heart, Save the Bows. Unable to commit, I channeled my creative thinking into imagining a dancer coming in from Larry Flynt’s Baltimore strip club. She would make herself at home in the John Wilkes Booth. She would tell me her name is Amber or Savannah or Misty and she has a boyfriend named Ronnie, and Ronnie initially was very cool about this stripping business because the money is extraordinary and she never kisses her customers or tells them her real name. She just takes the money over and over again. But then Ronnie, with his dumb-fuck mind, switches his thinking and thinks she owes him more. He just doesn’t know how to confess his loneliness, his jealousy. I could save her! You see why the novel writing is not going well. The jukebox carries Wilson Pickett, so I play “Mustang Sally” and “Funky Broadway” and order another Bass. But this is no novel; this is the truth. A woman does come in.
“I’m Mel.”
“I’m Michael.”
“Hi, Mikey.”
“No, it’s Michael.”
So, she’s no Amber or Misty. I’m way off with the names. (Mel later tells me her boyfriend’s name is Steve. Go figure.) Mel says she quit her job today. She was working as a topless cleaning lady for a new company called Dirty Minds Not Houses! She had responded to an ad in the alternative weekly, City Paper, and was surprised to learn she could start that day. During a cursory employee orientation conducted via e-mail, she was told cleaning supplies would not be necessary but she would have to provide her own transportation. Her first job was out in the suburbs, one of the new Irish-themed developments along Padonia Road. Mel showed up at the Tullamore Townhouses with a half-dozen rags (her niece’s hand-me-down diapers), Pledge (with natural orange oil), and Windex. She’d be damned if she wouldn’t get some cleaning done, at least the windows. Maybe if he’s got a vacuum …
No one was home. Or, no one answered the door, Mel says. Just a note was left: “Come back tonight after 11,” with one of those sideways smiley faces people use in e-mails.
“I know, I know. It was stupid to even go. But I thought, hell, why not show some tit and make $75?” Mel says. “Yes, I know! Stupid.”
Plus, you can’t do business in this world with people who make those smiley faces, we both agree.
Melanie Rogers is twenty-two. Her hair is the color of a metallic brown Hot Wheels car I once owned—either my Camaro or Chaparral. She’s wearing brown corduroys with a wide black belt, but she’s missed a loop off the right hip. Mel has a man’s Timex watch, and some girls look good in men’s watches, they just do. She’s drinking Miller Light and starts a story somewhere in the middle.
“I put one of them in a Victoria’s Secret box.