Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [87]
Tess mumbled, brought her legs close to her chest, using his jacket now as a blanket.
He didn’t know where he was, the rain a thick mist. Lost in his old hometown, streets gone. Yellow bulldozers parked haphazardly, oily balls of light, flames flapping in the wind, and he decided he’d go east, away from the warehouse and toward the harbor. Find Lombard and get Tess to bed. The Aquarium tomorrow, a drive over to the Peabody, and then Obrycki’s for lunch on the way home.
He stopped, using the sideview to see if he could turn around without winding up in the muck.
A man shouted loud, harsh, and he snapped back, startled.
Bursting from the darkness, a girl scrambled as she raced away, terror in her eyes. Naked above the waist, her blouse torn, she tried to hold her heavy breasts in her arms as she ran, her skirt ripped too, her olive skin glistening in the van’s harsh headlights.
And the shouting man drew toward the high beams. Pockmarked and stern, short-cropped curly hair and vacant, wide-set eyes, he tugged angrily at his slacks as he splashed through a puddle and another.
The girl hurried toward the old roundhouse, her face gripped by fear.
The man stopped, his shoes catching in the mire, and he looked directly into the van, raising his hand to block the beams.
Two fists clutching the wheel, his daughter asleep behind him, and he recognized the man.
Bigelow was his name, and he could tell Bigelow didn’t know whether to chase the girl into shadows or to come over to tell whoever was in the driver’s seat to go the fuck home, sealing his mouth forever along the way.
Walking relentlessly toward the van, Bigelow tucked in his shirt and did up his zipper.
He saw Bigelow eye the Massachusetts license plate.
“Dad?” Tess said, sitting now, rubbing off the sleep.
Reverse, a K-turn, and he roared away from the construction site, then said, “Let’s get out of the rain, esoro “ Juggled in the seat, she watched as he drove onto 395, exiting to use the pay phone at an Amoco station. Rape at the Camden Yards construction site, he reported. Look for the girl at the roundhouse.
Arthur Bigelow, he added, mimicking his father’s thick accent.
Half a mind to drive to 95 and head north, but their clothes were at the hotel, and Tess’s Barbies. His Jerwyn mouthpiece in a velvet pouch.
Bigelow saw him despite the blinding lights, and Bigelow had the letters and numbers on his rear plates.
He came back around on 395 and he was near the B& warehouse again, and there was the green Holiday Inn sign, where it had been all along.
Parked underground, and as he hoisted his drowsy daughter onto his shoulder, damp jacket and her diary tucked under his arm, he tried to remember when Bigelow went from the Baltimore City Jail to the Maryland State Pen. Figured maybe Bigelow was twenty years old by then, a man, since he was entering his junior year at Mount St. Joe’s High.
Even as a kid, Bigelow was a thug, a moron, and he had a mouth on him too, and he ran down the son of the fruit-stand man, a quiet boy who wasn’t quick to fight, the boy who now clutched his daughter, the elevator rattling as it rose.
His classmates, a loud, swaggering bunch, encouraged him to smash a two-by-four across the back of Bigelow’s head. But he found it easier to withdraw, spending late afternoons and early evenings alone in the tumbledown three-room flat off Slemmers Alley.
He took a job at age thirteen as a bus boy at Sabatino’s, offered as charity to his father who held off the Arabers from his shoebox store, doing his sums on the backs of brown paper bags, totaling the cost of a half-pound of this, a quarter-pound of that, knowing not a word of English save greetings and numbers. “Grazie, mille grazie,” his father would say, bowing his head, his brown chin dotted with prickly gray stubble, his vest pocket torn, his pencil a nub.
While his father worked seven days from dawn to dusk, he put in forty hours a week, and with his own money he bought a trumpet and paid for lessons. His father didn’t approve, and telling him his