Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [27]
“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.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
BY RAFAEL ALVAREZ
Highlandtown
Crime 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