Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [55]
“Don’t worry about it. Your friends will watch out for your stuff, I am sure. And in a minute this place will be crawling with Baltimore’s finest and I doubt that thieves will be making off with much today. So why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I was washing hair for Cindy. I’m in cosmetology school and I work for her at Divas. A lot of us like to work the hair shows because you can make extra money and pick up some tips. I want to have my own salon someday. Anyway, Cindy had run out of hair and asked me to go get some more. I couldn’t find the color she needed in the top of the box and so I kept digging, and that’s when I felt something hard. I pulled my hand out and it was sticky. I realized that it was blood and I started pulling hair out of the box, and that’s when I saw him. I just started screaming and I couldn’t even talk. It was awful.”
“How was he laying?”
“He was on his stomach,” she said, before covering her hands with her face as if trying to blot out the memory. “He had a pair of scissors sticking out of his back.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if to warm her body. I sympathized with her, having found my beloved Aunt Tilly’s body. And while her death hadn’t been a violent one, I knew the shock which accompanied seeing the shell of a person after the spirit had fled. It was a sight that could chill you.
Before I could ask anything more, a pair of police detectives walked in and I suppressed a groan. Did I mention that Baltimore was small?
“Jordan,” my sister said with that girl-don’t-give-me-nomess tone I knew all too well. “Can you excuse us please?”
I know, I know—what are the odds of my sister catching the body at my convention? Actually, in Baltimore, about one-in-five. Census says 600,000-plus in the city proper, over a million in the metro area, but I swear there are only sixty, seventy-five people tops, and I know them all. So, anyway, my good luck, right? Wrong.
You would think my sister Euphrates and I would be closer despite the fifteen-year age difference. She knew the agony of being saddled with a name that elicited guffaws and corny jokes, even though she had used her middle name, Patricia, ever since she was a teenager. But we couldn’t be more different. At 5 9” she was way taller than me, and where I could pinch way more than an inch, she was thin and muscular. I was a glam girl who loved the latest hairstyles and fashions and she looked like she had been wearing the same outfit since 1991, though the colors rotated among blue, black, and army-green.
But our differences went more than skin deep. She’s always been as straitlaced as they come and more of a second mother to me than an older sister. As my mama liked to say, “Euphrates don’t stand for no types of nonsense,” and that’s probably what drew her to the police force straight out of high school. When she made detective, she was the youngest African-American woman in the history of the department.
But the wildest thing she ever did was marry a white Jewish guy and set up house in a semi-Orthodox neighborhood in Pikesville where they were raising my gorgeous niece and nephew. While I considered myself a bit of a free spirit, my sister never met a rule she didn’t like. Sometimes it seemed like she would purposely set out to do the exact opposite of what I did. If I went right, she went left. Even though she opted for a career just like I did, she still managed to get her Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice by going to school at night, and I knew she was disappointed that I didn’t go to college. It was as if she thought everything I did or didn’t do was personally directed at her. I felt the same about her too, some days. I was convinced that she kept her hair cut short in a natural as a direct slap at me as a stylist. Like she would much rather go to a barber shop than have her own sister do her hair.
Now her partner, Ahmad Johansen, was another story. I had long ago decided that Ahmad was my soul mate, though he has been a bit slower at coming to that realization. Ahmad means “greatly