Baltimore Noir

EASY AS A-B-C BY LAURA LIPPMAN

Locust Point

Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef. It’s not enough to carve master bath suites from the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, sending a river of mud into the alley, then putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate by even an inch-boom You destroy the foundation of the house. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, learning what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of a water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books-anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake because it could kill people, literally kill them. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging about how handy he was. The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill twenty-five years ago, before my time, flattened out for a while in the ’90s, but now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill and into Riverside Park and all the way up Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their narrow double bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. Mee-maw was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.

My mother sold the house for $75,000. That was a dozen years ago and boy did we think we had put one over on the buyers. Seventy-five thousand! For a house on Decatur Street in Locust Point. And all cash for my mom, because it had been paid off forever. We went to Hausner’s the night of the closing, toasted our good fortune. The old German restaurant was still open then, crammed with all that art and junk. We had veal and strawberry pie and top-shelf liquor and toasted grandfather for leaving us such a windfall.

So imagine how I felt when I got a referral for a complete redo at my grandparents’ old address and the real estate guy tells me: “She got it for only $225,000, so she’s willing to put another hundred thousand in it and I bet she won’t bat an eyelash if the work goes up to $150,000.”

“Huh,” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.

“The first thing I want to do is get a parking pad back here,” my client said, sweeping a hand over what was now an overgrown patch of weeds, the chain-link fence sagging around it. “I’ve been told that will increase the value of the property ten, twenty thousand.”

“You a flipper?” I asked. More and more amateurs were getting into real estate, feeling that the stock market wasn’t for them. They were the worst of all possible worlds, panicking at every penny over the original estimate, riding my ass. You want to flip property for profit, you need to be able to do the work yourself. Or buy and hold. This woman didn’t look like the patient type. She was young, dressed to the nines, picking her way through the weeds in the most impractical boots I’d ever seen.

“No, I plan to live here. In fact, I hope to move in as quickly as possible, so time is more important to me than money. I was told you’re fast.”

“I don’t waste time, but I don’t cut corners,” I said. “Mainly, I just try to make my customers happy.”

She tilted her head, gazing at me through naturally thick and black eyelashes. It was the practiced look of a woman who had been looking at men from under her eyelashes for much of her life, sure they would be charmed. And, okay, I was. Dark hair, cut in one of those casual, disarrayed styles, darker eyes that made me think of kalamata olives, which isn’t particularly romantic, I guess. But I really like kalamata olives. With her fair skin, it was a terrific contrast.

“I’m sure you’ll make me very happy,” was all she said.

I guess here is where I should mention that I’m married, going on eighteen years and pretty happily, too. I realize it’s a hard concept to grasp, especially for a lot of women, that you can be perfectly happy, still in love with your wife, maybe more in love with your wife than you’ve ever been, but it’s been eighteen years and a young, firm-fleshed woman looks up at you through her eyelashes and it’s not a crime to think: I like that Not: I’d like to hit that, which I hear the young guys on my crews say. Just: I like that, that’s nice, if life were different I’d make time for that. But I had two kids and a sweet wife, Angeline, who’d only put on a few pounds and still kept her hair blond and long, and was pretty appreciative of the life my work had built for the two of us. So I had no agenda, no scheme going in. I was just weak.

But part of Deirdre’s allure was how much she professed to love the very things whose destruction she was presiding over, even before I told her that the house had belonged to my grandparents. She exclaimed over the wallpaper in their bedroom, a pattern of tiny yellow roses, even as it was steamed off the walls. She ran a hand lovingly over the banister, worn smooth by my younger hands, not to mention my butt a time or two. The next day it was gone, yanked from its moorings by my workers. She all but composed an ode to the black-and-white tile in the single full bath, but that didn’t stop her from meeting with Charles Tile Co. and choosing a Tuscany-themed medley for what was to become the master bath suite. (Medley was their word, not mine. I just put the stuff in.)

She had said she wanted the job fast, which made me ache a little, because the faster it went, the sooner I would be out of her world. But it turned out she didn’t care about speed so much once we got the house to the point where she could live among the ongoing work-and once her end-of the-day inspections culminated with the two of us in her raw, unfinished bedroom. She was wilder than I had expected, pushing to do things that Angeline would never have tolerated, much less asked for. In some part of my mind, I knew her abandon came from the fact that she never lost sight of the endpoint. The work would be concluded and this would conclude, too. Which was what I wanted as well, I guess. I had no desire to leave Angeline or cause my kids any grief. Deirdre and I were scrupulous about keeping our secret, and not even my longtime guys, the ones who knew me best, guessed anything was up. To them, I bitched about her as much as I did any client, maybe a little more.

“Moldings?” my carpenter would ask. “Now she wants moldings?” And I would roll my eyes and shrug, say: “Women.”

“Moldings?” she asked when I proposed them.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “No charge. But I saw you look at them.”

And so it was with the appliances, the countertops, the triple-pane windows. I bought what she wanted, billed for what she could afford. Somehow, in my mind, it was as if I had sold the house for $225,000, as if all that profit had gone to me, instead of the speculator who had bought the house from my mother and then just left it alone to ripen. Over time, I probably put ten thousand of my own money into those improvements, even accounting for my discounts on material and my time, which was free. Some men give women roses and jewelry. I gave Deirdre a marble bathroom and a beautiful old mantle for the living room fireplace, which I restored to the wood-burning hearth it had never been. My grandparents had one of those old gas-fired logs, but Deirdre said they were tacky and I suppose she was right.

Go figure-I’ve never had a job with fewer complications. The weather held, there were no surprises buried within the old house, which was sound as a dollar. “A deck,” I said. “You’ll want a rooftop deck to watch the fireworks.” And not just any deck, of course. I built it myself, using teak and copper accents, helped her shop for the proper furniture, outdoor hardy but still feminine, with curvy lines and that verdi gris patina she loved so much. I showed her how to cultivate herbs and perennials in pots, but not the usual wooden casks. No, these were iron, to match the décor. If I had to put a name to her style, I guess I’d say Nouvelle New Orleans-flowery, but not overly so, with genuine nineteenth-century pieces balanced by contemporary ones. I guess her taste was good. She certainly thought so and told me often enough.

“If only I had the pocketbook to keep up with my taste,” she would say with a sigh and another one of those sidelong glances, and the next thing I knew I’d be installing some wall sconce she simply had to have.

One twilight-we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home-she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry. A brick foundry, a place where men like my dad had once earned decent wages, and now it housed this chichi restaurant, a gallery, a health club, and a spa. It’s happening all over Locust Point. The old P &G plant is now something called Tide Point, which was supposed to be some high-tech mecca, and they’re building condos on the old grain piers. The only real jobs left in Locust Point are at Domino and Phillips, where the red neon crab still clambers up and down the smokestack.

“Nice,” I said, although in truth I don’t care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.

“Vigonier,” she said. “Twenty-six dollars a bottle.”

“You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer.”

“You can’t drink bourbon with dinner,” she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. “Besides, wine can be an investment. And it’s cheaper by the case. I’d like to get into that, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled.”

“Your basement would work.”

And that’s how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost. It didn’t require excavating the basement, luckily, although I was forever bumping my head on the ceiling when I straightened up to my full height. But I’m 6’3” and she was just a little thing, no more than 5’2", barely one hundred pounds. I used to carry her to bed and, well, show her other ways I could manipulate her weight. She liked me to sit her on the marble counter in her master bath, far forward on the edge, so I was supporting most of her weight. Because of the way the mirrors were positioned, we could both watch, and it was a dizzying infinity, our eyes locked into our own eyes and into each other’s. I know guys who call a sink fuck the old American Standard, but I never thought of it that way. For one thing, there wasn’t a single American Standard piece in the bathroom. And the toilet was a Canadian model, smuggled in so she could have the bigger tank that had been outlawed in interest of water conservation. Her shower was powerful, too, a stinging force that I came to know well, scrubbing up afterwards so Angeline couldn’t smell where I had been.

The wine cellar gave me another month-putting down a floor, smoothing and painting the old plaster walls. My grandparents had used the basement for storage and us cousins had played hide-and-seek in the dark, a made-up version that was particularly thrilling, one where you moved silently, trying to get close enough to grab the others in hiding, then rushing back to the stairs, which were the home-free base. As it sometimes happens, the basement seemed larger when it was full of my grandparents’ junk. Painted and pared down, it was so small. But it was big enough to hold the requisite refrigeration unit and the custom-made shelves, a beautiful burled walnut, for the wines she bought on the advice of the guy teaching the course.

I was done. There was not another improvement I could make to the house, so changed now it was as if my family and its history had been erased. Deirdre and I had been hurtling toward this day for months and now it was here. I had to move on to other projects, ones where I would make money. Besides, people were beginning to wonder. I wasn’t around the other jobs as much, and I also wasn’t pulling in the kind of money that would help placate Angeline over the crazy hours I was working. Time to end it.

Our last night, I stopped at the foundry, spent almost forty bucks on a bottle of wine that the young girl in the store swore by. Cakebread, the guy’s real name. White, too, because I knew Deirdre loved white wines.

“Chardonnay,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“I noticed you liked whites.”

“But not Chardonnay so much. I’m an ABC girl-Anything But Chardonnay. Dennis says Chardonnay is banal.”

“Dennis?”

She didn’t answer. And she was supposed to answer, supposed to say: Oh, you know, that faggot from my wine-tasting class, the one who smells like he wears strawberry perfume. Or: That irritating guy in my office. Or even: A neighbor, a creep. He scares me. Would you still come around, from time to time, just to check up on me? She didn’t say any of those things.

She said: “We were never going to be a regular thing, my love.”

Right. I knew that. I was the one with the wife and the house and the two kids. I was the one who had everything to lose. I was the one who was glad to be getting out, before it could all catch up with me. I was the one who was careful not to use the word love, not even in the lighthearted way she had just used it. Sarcastic, almost. It made me think that it wasn’t my marital status so much that had closed off that possibility for us, but something even more entrenched. I was no different from the wallpaper, the banister, the garden. I had to be removed for the house to be truly hers.

My grandmother’s parents had thought she was too good for my grandfather. They were Irish, shipworkers who had gotten the hell out of Locust Point and moved uptown, to Charles Village, where the houses were much bigger. They looked down on my grandfather just because he was where they once were. It killed them, the idea that their precious youngest daughter might move back to the neighborhood and live with an Italian, to boot. Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. If there’s not somebody below you, how do you know you’ve traveled any distance at all in your life? For my dad’s generation, it was all about the blacks. I’m not saying it was right, just that it was, and it hung on because it was such a stark, visible difference. And now the rules have changed again, and it’s the young people with money and ambition who are buying the houses in Locust Point, and the people in places like Linthicum and Catonsville and Arbutus are the ones to be pitied and condescended to. It’s hard to keep up.

My hand curled tight around the neck of the wine bottle. But I placed it in its berth in the special refrigerator, gently, as if I were putting a newborn back in its bed.

“One last time?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said.

She clearly was thinking it would be the bed, romantic and final, but I opted for the bathroom, wanting to see her from all angles. Wanting her to see me, to witness, to remember how broad my shoulders are, how white and small she looked when I was holding her against my chest.

When I moved my hands from her hips to her head, she thought I was trying to position her mouth on mine. It took her a second to realize that my hands were on her throat, not her head, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She fought back, if you could call it that, but all her hands could find was marble, smooth and immutable. Yeah, that’s another word I know. Immutable. She may have landed a few scratches, but a man in my work gets banged up all the time. No one would notice a beaded scab on the back of my hand, or even on my cheek.

I put her body in a trash bag, covering it with lime leftover from a landscaping job. Luckily, she hadn’t been so crazed that she wanted a fireplace in the basement, so all I had to do was pull down the fake front I had placed over the old hearth, then brick her in, replace the fake front. It wasn’t planned, not a moment of it, but when it happened, I knew what to do, as surely as I know what to do when a floor isn’t level or a soffit needs to be closed up so birds can’t get in.

Her computer was on, as always, her e-mail account open because she used cable for her Internet, a system I had installed. I read a few of her sent messages, just to make sure I aped her style, then typed one to an office address, explaining the family emergency that would take me out of town for a few days. Then I sent one to “Dennis,” angry and hate-filled, accusing him of all kinds of things, telling him not to call or write. Finally, I cleaned the house best I could, especially the bathroom, although I didn’t feel I had to be too conscientious. I was the contractor. Of course my fingerprints would be around. The last thing I did was grab that bottle of Chardonnay, took it home to Angeline, who liked it just fine, although she would have fainted if she knew what it cost.

Weeks later, when Deirdre was officially missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the Sunpapers, I sent a bill for the projects that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t know what was going on. She was just an address to me, one of a half-dozen open accounts. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having kids of my own, Joseph Jr. getting ready for college next year. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.

And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement. Which means there’s less chance of a collapse, and less likelihood that they’ll ever find that little bag of bones in the hearth.

FAT CHANCE BY ROBERT WARD

Old Northwood

Thomas Weeks, a screenwriter of some renown, had last been to his hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, two years ago, for his father’s burial. Now he was back again, to visit his ailing and cantankerous mother, Flo, a resident of Pinecrest Retirement Community. The visit had not gone well. His mother had once been a complex and interesting person but had in the past ten years committed herself to being a cartoon version of herself. Now she played a fat, bitter, and foul-mouthed woman, the kind of person who scuttled all friendships and lived in a sordid fantasy of her own violated innocence. As Weeks presented her with an assortment of new mystery novels he thought she might enjoy, she screamed obscenities at her only son, craning her neck out of her pink terry cloth bathrobe, like a puffed-up cobra on Animal Planet.

“Don’t try to bribe me with your shitass books,” she hissed. “You left me here to die while you went out ’ere… to Hollywood, sucking up to all the producers and them other whores.”

For his part, Weeks said nothing. Armed with years of psychotherapy, and the latest SSRIs, he merely gave her a weak smile and laid the books on the edge of a table, which held her collection of porcelain cats.

His mother stared at him through her small darting eyes and shook her head as she launched into her next solilo-quy.

“Yeah, you think I don’t know what’s up, but I do, Mister Hollywood. You come back when I’m half-dead to appease your conscience. And to keep yourself in line for my money when I’m gone. Well, buddy boy, I have amassed over $400,000, but you might not get a cent of it. Yeah, you think you can lord it over me alla time and then show up and do your Prince Charming routine for a couple of days and I’ll forgive you for leaving me here to die. Well, you just might have another thing coming, mister!”

There was a voice inside of Weeks that screamed, “Fuck you, you horrible old bitch!” but he managed to put it down. His shrink, Dr. Jerry Leamer, had drilled him in healthy avoidance tactics.

“Don’t let her get to you,” tan and cool Doc Jerry said. “Take her to public places, movies, restaurants, where she can’t open up on you.”

“Would you like to go to the movies, Mother?” Weeks asked. He thought for a second that his voice sounded remarkably similar to Tony Perkins’s in Psycho

She looked at him and made an animal sound of disgust-Errrrahhhhgh-but then nodded her head. “Yeah, all right. Anything to get the fuck out of here.”

Though it was far from fun, Weeks silently congratulated himself on managing his mother’s terrifying mood swings. Maybe he was even getting good at this coming-home stuff. Once he had helped her into his rented car, he popped another half a Paxil, and by the time they had arrived at the White Marsh Mall his head was as pleasantly empty as a Kenny G. solo.

The movie was a Richard Gere vehicle called Shall We Dance? Gere pranced through it, romancing Jennifer Lopez, blinking his eyes to convey emotional growth. Flo loved it. Her furious face turned soft and her wrinkles smoothed out. Watching her in the dark, Weeks suddenly felt a secret childish love for her. He impulsively wished he could chuck his Hollywood career and move home. After all, some of what she’d said was true… he had turned his back on his homeys and gone for the brass ring, and many of the producers and actors he knew in Los Angeles blowhards and frauds. Maybe he could buy a small house here and come back more often, help her to calm down. That was what a good son should do, he thought, staring at Gere’s perfect hair. Then, only seconds later, he ripped the notion from his mind. What the fuck was he thinking? She was insane, and the old hardassed town would crush him, as it had crushed the hopes of most of his boyhood pals.

Halfway through the insipid movie, Weeks felt a wave of nausea overtake him. The smell of burned popcorn, the stale air in the theater, his mother’s cheap drugstore perfume… all conspired to turn his stomach, and a flash of bile came up in the back of his throat. Christ, he thought, Baltimore was a crab cake filled with poison.

He wasn’t used to so many emotions anymore. In Los Angeles he faked his way through both meetings and friendships, pretending to have passion for things he had no interest in, pretending to be intimate with people he barely knew. The City of Angels was famously superficial, of course, but there was charm to living without the baggage of tortured involvements. Indeed, coming back to his hometown, with its solid brick rowhouses and old-school loyalties, made Weeks feel that the weight of history had pinned him to the mat, like a dead insect.

He slid by his mother in the row and headed out to the men’s room, his head awash in psychotropic drugs and sentiment, his insides tied up in an old familiar guilt. He walked down the wide hallway and staggered into the bathroom, suddenly feeling faint.

As he stood in front of the urinal taking a piss, he saw visions of himself at Orioles games, rooting for the Ravens, maybe playing cocktail piano in some little bar. This was his hometown, after all, and though he had run from it like a man escaping the death house, he had never quite forgotten it. Never forgotten the neighborhoods where people actually knew each other, going to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandparents on both sides of the family, loving all of them. And the friendships, the fierceness of them, the loyalty and dearness of old friends, came storming back to him.

While he pissed, he lay his head against the cool tile wall and felt a great mass of confusion swing through him.

“Holy shit,” said a rough voice behind him.

Weeks zipped up his pants and turned around. There, standing and smiling at him, was none other than Tyler Edwards, a guy he’d grown up with thirty years ago. A sandyhaired, freckle-faced kid, Tyler had been a minor devil in Tom’s personal history. They’d both grown up in rough old Govans, gone all through school together. Tyler was a brilliant but maniacal child… a boy who once broke off every aerial on every car as they walked ten blocks from their homes to the Guilford Bowling Alley.

In the ’70s Tyler had become a serious drug dealer for a while, then a golf pro at the Maryland Country Club. Sometime in the ’80s Tyler had gone to prison down the Cut at Jessups. Word came back that he had killed a man in self-defense down there but bribed his way out of being prosecuted for it. Weeks tended to believe the story. If anybody could get away with murder, it was charming, demented Tyler.

“Tommy Weeks,” Tyler said. “The kid who conquered Hollywood.”

“Hey Ty,” Weeks said. Though he had always felt a mixture of excitement and dread around Tyler, he now felt a rush of affection for the sick old hustler.

Tyler’s left eyebrow moved up and down like a puppet’s, and his smile revealed a map of wrinkles on his face. But even so there was the same impish mischief in his large, buggy eyes, a promise of malevolent fun.

“Out here to see your dear old mom, hey?”

“Yeah,” Tom replied. “And she’s dearer than ever.”

“Yes indeed,” Tyler said. “Nothing like the old homestead. The smell of fresh hard crabs, snowballs in the alley, and Mommy’s tender kisses.”

“Stop before I puke,” Tommy said, laughing.

“Well, I suppose you’re tied up, which is a shame and a pity, because I’m heading downtown to the fabulous Bertha’s Mussels and I’d love to carry you along with me.”

“Sorry,” Tom said, “but I’m not free for another few hours.”

Tyler smiled and put his hand under his chin, a real-life parody of The Thinker. “Tell you what. I have a few morbid duties to perform. Why don’t I do them now and meet you down there at say, 8 o clock?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’m really tired and I’ve got to get my mother to bed.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun to get out and about. You really need to make this trip, Tom. Get in touch with your old hometown-self, so to speak.”

Weeks could feel something inside of himself pulling him toward Tyler. Unlike Tom’s fake bad-boy friends in Hollywood, Tyler was always an inspired imp. A night with him might be terrifying but at least it would be real. And wasn’t that the reason he came back to Baltimore now and again? To experience something he couldn’t buy or fake his way out of?

“Fuck it,” Tom said. “I’m on. See you at 8, Ty.”

“Attaboy,” Tyler said. “I promise you something special. You’ll see.”

After the movie, Tom took Flo out for a drink at a mall bar called The Firehouse. It was loud and brash and filled with obese guys with scraggly facial hair and plaid shirts, which they wore hanging outside of their pants. Their girlfriends and wives wore bright red lipstick and dyed their beehive hair in primary colors.

“I hate it here,” his mother said. “I always hated this side of town anyway. Parkville, the Belair Road. Buncha hairhoppers and rednecks. Christ, I’d rather live over in the Northwest with the Jews. ’Cept the Jews don’t live there no more. Now it’s all the so-called black nations.”

Weeks liked to think he was up on the latest demographics in Baltimore, but he was shocked when he heard the Jews had moved away from Northwest.

“Where do the Jews live these days, Mom?”

“Further out, hon,” his mother said. “I heard from Harvene that the Jews have just about taken over Pennsylvania. They nearly run the Amish out. Of course, as soon as they left Pikesville, the jungle bunnies moved right in and had about ten million kids, and started killing each other over drugs at the drop of a hat.”

Weeks shut his eyes and imagined blacks all over Baltimore, dropping their funky baseball hats and firing 9’s at each other. The hats floated down like leaves, followed by their wiry, blood-soaked bodies.

“What kind of drink do you want, Mother?”

“Vodka,” she shot back. “And not that cheap well shit either. I want Grey fucking Goose.”

“Good for you,” Weeks said, as he watched three fat men in Ravens T-shirts roll by. They were all singing along with George Thorogood’s version of “Bad to the Bone.” Weeks felt an intense jealousy for their innocent belligerence. When was the last time he had sung anything with his pals? That was easy, 1968. The year the singing stopped.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Flo said, with a mischievous grin on her face. “I get good and drunk, then you can drop me off back at the goddamned prison camp and go see one of your old girlfriends.”

“I haven’t got any girlfriends, old or otherwise, in Baltimore anymore.”

“Bullshit,” his mother said as the waitress approached. “You’ve always had girlfriends everywhere you go. Girls made fools of themselves for you, because they don’t know what a rotten bastard you really are.”

She laughed and looked up at the waitress, who wore two-inch false eyelashes and enough rouge to make her look like a clown in drag.

“Gimme the Goose,” Flo said. “A double. And keep ’em coming. My big shot son is here and he can afford it.”

The waitress looked at Weeks, and when she smiled she showed about a half-inch of gum.

“Your mother is soooo cute,” she said.

“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Mom’s a living doll.”

By the time Weeks carried the drunken, cursing Flo up to her apartment, he had a screaming headache and a pain in his chest. He thought about popping another blood pressure pill, but they tended to wear him out and he still had to drive all the way downtown to see Ty.

Fuck it, he thought, as he gently lay his mother down in her bed and kissed her sweating forehead. Maybe he didn’t really need to see Ty after all.

And yet there was something about meeting the old convict that was impossible to resist.

He was about to leave his mother’s side when she reached out a bony hand and grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” she said. “You can fool those pinheads out in California but you can’t fool me. You know what you did the first two months of your life?”

“No,” Tom said, feeling dizzy again. “What?”

“You wet the bed every night. Every damned night. And it wasn’t your father who came in and cleaned you up and walked you around when you were screaming. It was me, your horrible old mother. The one you hate so much.”

Weeks felt something cracking inside of him. Like his bones, his heart. All of it cracking and falling into splinters.

“I gotta go, Mom.”

“Well, you have a good time,” she said as she shut her eyes. “Have a few laughs with your girlfriend. Tell her what an old fool your mom is, asshole.”

Weeks pulled his wrist out of her grasp and made his way out of her apartment. When he got outside it was snowing and he stood there for a minute, letting the flakes come down on him, hoping somehow they might make him feel light and white and clean. Like when he was a kid.

But the snow-magic didn’t work anymore. All he felt was soggy, middle-aged, and cold.

When he’d been a student at Calvert College, Tom rented an apartment on Thames Street, right across from the pier on which he’d once been in Sea Scouts. Back then, he thought, as he parked his car on Aliceanna Street, Fell’s Point had symbolized freedom, sex, drugs (black hashish right off the ship and carried in a seaman’s trunk right into his apartment), and an endless party. Even the names of the bars had seemed so quaint and cool. Besides Bertha’s, there was The Horse You Came in On, and The Admiral’s Cup, and The Brass Monkey… The cobblestone streets, the arty girls from Maryland Institute, the student filmmakers, the folksingers, the occasional Goucher Girl in rebellion against her rich parents… God, it had been great back then… a place where every day seemed to have an unlimited possibility for surprise and romance.

Now, however, as Weeks walked the few blocks toward the bar, he was stunned by how small and seedy everything appeared. The ramshackle little bars with their neon lights looked tawdry and trashy. Dead End Ville. Drunken students wandered from bar to bar looking for girls and drugs, just as Weeks himself had years ago-but now, to his jaundiced eye, they seemed hapless and lame.

He walked by a man sitting in the gutter with a torn shirt and a bloody nose. Behind him a woman screamed, “If you weren’t such a pussy you’d go back in ’ere and kick his ass, Terry!” The beat man looked up wearily and said, “Fuck you, babe. Don’t try and promote that Who Struck John shit wif me.” Weeks looked down at the guy and realized he only in his early twenties. He felt that he could already see the downward trajectory of the boy’s life… a few years of stumbling about in Fell’s Point, perhaps pretending to be some kind of artist, then either jail, addiction, or worse.

That’s what had happened to most of his old pals. So many of them gone the way of drugs, like Mike who died from a hot shot in The Bottom, and Brad who had been killed by a head-on collision while driving on pills down to Ocean City.

It had been a mistake to come back here, Weeks thought. What could he possibly find but sadness? The old story of the middle-aged man who tries in vain to find the lost spirit of his youth in a place that’s forever changed. It was pathetic, ridiculous. What he should do is just turn around now, go back to his car, and forget this absurd quest. Head back out the 95 and dive into the safety of his king-sized bed at the Quality Inn. That’s exactly what he should do.

And yet, he found himself opening the thick wooden door at Bertha’s and going inside, looking for something he knew he could never find, but drawn on in spite of that. Or perhaps because of it. Weeks had always had a weakness for lost causes.

Ty sat at the bar drinking Wild Turkey and a pint of amber beer back. He wore a white scarf and a camel’s hair coat. He looked, Tommy thought, a little like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.

As Weeks sat down, Ty put his bony arm around his shoulders and smiled. “I’m glad you made it, Tommy. I thought you might blow me off.”

“No way,” Weeks said. “But I can’t stay too long. Gotta fly out tomorrow.”

“Whoa,” Ty said. “Got a big meeting in Hollyweird?”

“No, nothing like that. But I do have a couple of dead-lines.”

“Good old Tommy,” Ty said. “You always were an ace student. First kid in the class with his hand up.”

Weeks wanted to protest that this wasn’t so. He hated being thought of as a good little academic. After all, he was as much a hipster as any of them, wasn’t he? But perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps he’d only given the appearance of being a rebel, while being careful not to burn too many bridges. The thought that he was playacting a badass used to torture him as a kid. He suddenly hated Ty for reminding him of his youthful cowardice, but his old friend was smiling at him with what seemed like real affection.

“What are you drinking?” Ty asked.

“Jack Daniel’s,” Tommy said. In Los Angeles these days he mostly drank juices or fizzy water. But here in Charm City a man still had to drink hard whiskey.

“Jack it is,” Ty said. “You look good for your age, Tommy. California must agree with you.”

“It’s all right. I’ve been doing fine.”

“Oh, come on,” Ty said. “I’ve read all about you in the Sun, and I’ve seen your movies. You specialize in action stuff. Tough guys.”

Tom felt his face redden. “Yeah, well… that’s how I got pigeonholed. Just The Business.”

“Sure,” Ty said. “I understand. But some of the old crowd might not get that. I’ve talked to guys who… actually think you’re representing yourself as a tough guy.”

Tommy winced. This was getting to be a drag. “Not me. I’m just a humble scribe doing a job of work.” He took his shot of Jack from the barmaid and downed it. It burned his throat and he had to repress a cough.

“Yeah, well that’s what I told them,” Ty said, looking at his watch. “Funny thing, out there you’re pigeonholed as a tough guy, and back here as an academic kind of dude. The many lives of Tommy Weeks.”

Tom signaled to order a second drink. “Who’s been saying that kind of lame shit about me?”

“Just some jerks,” Ty said. “Mouse Wiskowski and Bobby Hamm.”

Tom felt a sudden rush of sadness. Though he hadn’t seen either of them in twenty years, he hated the fact that they thought him a phony. In a weird way it mattered more to him what they thought about him than anyone he’d met in Los Angeles.

Now Ty reached over and massaged his stiff neck muscles. “You’re getting all tense back there,” he said. “I should never have mentioned it. Those guys don’t matter at all. I can tell you one person who’s said nothing but nice things about you. Ruth Anne. Those guys start in with their ‘He’s gone Hollywood’ crap, Ruth Anne takes up for you every time.”

“Is that right?” Tom said, taking another hit of the Jack Daniel’s. He tried to keep his voice level, as if this information was of no more interest than an Orioles score, but his breathlessness betrayed him.

As as kid, Ruth Anne had lived around the corner from him on Craig Avenue. Black-haired and green-eyed, she’d been the neighborhood darling before she became the homecoming queen at the University of Maryland. Every boy who ever met her fell madly in love with her, and Tom was no exception. But he had never gotten beyond “friend” status before. Now, even after all these years, the thought that she might actually think of him at all, much less argue among the old timers that he was still a true blue Baltimore guy (even if it wasn’t really true), cheered him up immeasurably.

“You still see her?” he asked now, not even trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Sure I do,” Ty said. “She just recently came back to the old neighborhood. Lives only a few blocks away from me over on Chateau Avenue.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not,” Ty said. “Been through a lot of tough stuff, kiddo. Got divorced and ended up limping back to town. But she still looks great.”

“She does?” He knew that he sounded like the hopelessly smitten teenager he’d once been, but after his third Jack Daniel’s he didn’t care.

Ty smiled and rubbed his shoulders again.

“I promised you a surprise, old buddy, and that’s it. Ruth Anne’s having a party tonight and she absolutely insisted you come.”

“Hey, that’s great,” Tommy said. His head was spinning and he suddenly felt another rush of pure affection for Ty. Why had he been so worried about meeting Ty? It was crazy, really, his old paranoia still informing his life. Why, Ty was an adult now, and so was he. They could be friends, without all the old one-upsman bullshit.

Ty looked at his Cartier watch and squeezed the back of Tom’s neck again.

“Hey, the party’s already started. Let’s get over there before all the food’s gone.”

“Great,” Tom said, feeling about fifteen years old. “That’s just great, Ty. Wow, Ruth Anne. I can’t believe it.”

They drove across Kirk Avenue, past City, Tommy’s old high school. He remembered hanging out there on the stone wall outside the school, listening to the black guys singing acappella harmonies, and knowing even then that nothing would sound purer or better than that, no matter where he went or how long he lived. And he’d been right, nothing ever had. They drove by a hair salon at Kirk and 33rd Street, the place that had once been Doc’s Drugstore where he’d hung out with the City guys, eyeing the Eastern girls, of which Ruth Anne was number one. If he could have talked to her, he felt now, maybe his whole life would have been different. Maybe he would have married her and stayed in town and had four or five kids, and been happy and satisfied with a normal job and taking care of his family. Maybe his mother wouldn’t be so angry with him for leaving her behind.

They drove down Loch Raven Boulevard, then down the Alameda, and he suddenly felt that maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he and Ruth Anne would see one another and they would instantly understand that they were meant to be together. Maybe he’d invite her out to Los Angeles, and after a few visits she’d move out there with him but they’d keep a place here in town, too.

That was crazy, but why not? It happened all the time, didn’t it? Old acquaintances meet and fall head over heels in love, and after all he wasn’t the scared little kid from Govans anymore. No, he was a successful screenwriter, knew all the stars, all the directors. God, a guy like him was a catch for her… and yet it didn’t feel that way. Thinking of her, he still felt scared, breathless, unsure of himself. He didn’t want to come off like a Hollywood phony, dropping names, but he didn’t want to miss the chance to impress her either.

Let her know that he was the new Tommy Weeks now, not some goof who mumbled into his SpaghettiOs, like he used to back in junior high school whenever she came around…

He looked up and noticed that they were heading right down Winston Avenue, his old street. The single Victorian houses flashed by, old man Greengrass’s place, the balding old coot who never let them come into his yard to retrieve their pinkies, and there was the little store that Pop Ikehorn used to own. Right there on the corner at Craig and Winston, where he used to buy sodas and horror comics, and hang out with his little friends, Danny and David Snyder, and Eddie Richardson… and… then Ty was pulling over, parking his Mercedes.

There was someone huge standing on the corner, a guy at least six-foot-five, but he was cloaked in shadow.

“What’s up?” Tom said, looking across the seat at Ty. “I thought we were going around the corner to Chateau.”

“We are,” Ty said. “But I’d be a poor host dragging you out for just one surprise. Hop out. There’s an old pal of yours standing right there. He wants to welcome you back.”

Ty raised his left eyebrow and looked exactly like a demon, Tom thought. In spite of his best efforts to hop gamely out and face this unexpected visitor, Tom found his stomach jumping with butterflies. Who the hell could it be standing there on that corner at 10:30 in the cold?

He took a step toward the huge hulking figure, and then, even before the guy lit a cigarette revealing his long, haggard face, he knew.

The man was none other than Crazy Louis Wetzel, and the shock of seeing him here, right here where it had happened so long ago, made Tom break out in an icy sweat.

“Hey, look who it ain’t,” Wetzel said, spraying some spittle in Tom’s direction.

He smiled a weird, gap-toothed grin at Tom, and reached out to shake hands. Tom hesitated. He didn’t want to shake this jerk’s hand. He had spent years in therapy because of him, and now the guy was offering him his hand in a gesture of friendship? Fuck that.

And yet, if he refused to shake hands with him, then Wetzel would know how much pain he’d caused Tom, which would make him happy, the sadistic son of a bitch. More than anything he didn’t want to make Louis Wetzel happy.

So he reached out and took the big man’s hand.

“Good to see you, Tommyboy,” Wetzel said, taking it and holding on.

“Yeah,” Tom replied. “How you doing, Louie?” Why the fuck wouldn’t he let go?

“Great. ’Cept for my back. Had an accident downa Point… I worked at Bethlehem for years. Was working inna rod factory and shit got overheated and jumped on me. Got third-degree burns on my legs, and when I fell down I fucked up my back.”

“That’s too bad,” Tom said. Good, he thought, may it hurt you every day for the rest of your sick fucking life, you piece of shit. He finally managed to extricate himself from Wetzel’s grasp.

“That must seriously limit your mobility,” Ty said, leaning on the hood of someone’s ’76 Caddy.

“Nah,” Louis said, glaring at Ty, as though he’d been cursed out. “Not that bad at all. I could still take you, buddy.”

“Don’t doubt it at all, Lou,” Ty said.

“’Course, if I had a way wif words, like Tommyboy here, I could write me some movies and make a ton of money. ’Cause you guys know I got the fucking stories.”

“No doubt,” Ty said. “Let’s hear one. Just for old time’s sake.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting along?” Tom said. He tried not to look at Louis as he spoke, but glancing down at the street was even worse. For just below him was the sewer grate, rusted, ancient… Was it possibly the same grate from twenty-five years ago? Sure it was… Nothing stayed the same except the sewers in Baltimore.

“What’s a matter?” Louis said. “You don’t wanna hear my story, Tom? You only listen to stories now if they pay you, is that it?”

“No, that’s not it.” Tom felt the weight of Louis’s reptilian gaze glowering down at him, but in spite of it, he felt angry now. He really wasn’t the helpless kid he’d been back then, with a father who didn’t speak to him and an insane mother. Hanging out in bars as he had for so many years, he’d had more than his share of fights, physical as well as verbal. Indeed, the only place he felt really helpless was when he was back home… Baltimore was like some great behemoth that he could never quite slay.

“What is it then?” Louis said.

Tommy found himself smiling at Louis, and sticking his own face in the big man’s chest.

“It’s you, Lou. I know what story you want to tell. But I don’t want to hear it.”

Wetzel laughed and glowered down at him. “Yeah? What story is that?”

“You wanna tell the one about how you stuck me in the sewer when I was eight years old. How you stepped on my fingers when I tried to push the grate up, and how you found a rat and threw him down there on top of me. And then left me down there for four fucking hours.”

Louis looked taken aback. He wasn’t used to such impudence from his victims.

“Well, the thing is, Tommy,” Louis started, suddenly grabbing Tom by the neck and squeezing, “the story ain’t done yet. See, in the earlier version you got away, ’cause Herbert Snyder happened to be home on leave from the navy and the shithead let you out. But this time you stay down there for good, you rich little Hollywood cocksucker.”

The pain in Tommy’s neck was unbearable. He managed a weak swing, clipping Louis on the side of the head, which accomplished nothing but further infuriated the big man.

“Down we go,” Louis said.

He pushed Tommy to his knees, and just for a second Tommy had the optimistic thought that Louis would have to pull off the sewer grate to stuff him inside, and during that interval maybe he could-if he could get his breath-run away.

But now he saw what he should have known all along. The grate had been pulled aside already. Jesus, this had been Ty’s plan the whole time.

“Down we go, asshole,” Louis said. “Just like days of yore.”

Tommy couldn’t stand it… being thrown into the same hole by the same lunatic bully he’d encountered as a child. He gasped, and bright lights glittered in his eyes. There was only one thing he could do, but if it didn’t work it might cost him his life. But why not? He’d rather be dead than go through the sewer treatment again.

Tommy shot out his fist and punched Louis Wetzel in the balls. The big man screeched and let go of his death grip on Tommy’s neck. His hand came down to his crotch but Tom hit him again, and the tormentor fell to his knees. Tommy had no idea what to do next… Panicky, he punched him in the face, and then took several pokes at Louis’s eyes.

From behind him he heard a cheer. “Brilliant,” Ty said.

“Fucking brilliant.”

Tom looked up and saw Ty’s happy, demonic smile framed by the moon.

“You really showed me something there,” Ty said.

Then he raised his arm and pounded Louis on the head with a crowbar. Tommy heard Wetzel’s skull crack, and saw blood drip down his ears.

“And one for good luck,” Ty said. He waved the crowbar over his head and brought it down again on Louis’s huge head.

The big man made a horrible gasp and fell off the curb, his head and shoulders dangling in the sewer.

Ty laughed and kicked him the rest of the way in. “Here we go, Tom,” he said, in a jovial way. “Give me a little hand with the grate, hey, pal?”

Tommy stood up, rubbing his neck, which was raw and throbbing with pain. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Well, duh,” Ty said.

“Is he… dead?” Tom asked.

“Oh, I imagine so. You can’t really live all that long without a brain, and I expect what’s left of Lou’s is a pile of jelly by now.”

They put the grate in place, then sat on the edge of the sewer, Tommy gasping for breath and both of them looking down every so often to see if Louis was going to make some kind of horror movie comeback.

“Why… why’d you do this?” Tom said.

Ty lit a Camel and smoked in a satisfied way.

“You’re gonna get a kick out of this,” he said, offering a cigarette to Tom, who took him up on it.

“I am?”

“Yeah, you are. See this whole thing started with your mother.”

“Bullshit,” Tom said, accepting a light from Ty.

“I swear,” Ty said. “See, these days I’m a physical therapist. I work over at Pinecrest, and about a week ago I get a call to go up to apartment 354, and who’s there? None other than your lovely mom, Go-Go Flo, as we call her, ’cause she’s always up to something. Hugely popular in the dining hall. Anyway, we get to talking about you and she told me you’re a big shot now and hardly ever talk to her, and after I’m working on her back awhile, she says to me, ‘We oughta take Tommy downa peg.’ So we cooked up this little trick to, you know, scare you a little. Just a gag. Believe me, I never expected Louis to go that far. I think when you told him you didn’t want to hear his story… well, that sent him around the old twist.”

“Jesus, Ty,” Tom said. “You and my mom cooked this whole sick thing up?”

“Sure did. I followed you to the theater. If you hadn’t come out soon, I was going to go in and get you, but your mother was right. She said you always go to the bathroom at least once in every movie. Sometimes two times.”

Tom felt himself blush. The enormity of it was too much for him. “The old witch,” he said. “And the Ruth Anne thing…”

“That was her idea, too. She said she knew you were in love with her when you were a kid, but she never thought the girl was good enough for you, so she told Ruth Anne to buzz off and keep away from you.”

“What?” Tom said. “She did what?”

“Yeah, Ruth Anne always liked you but your mother pushed her away. Anyway, she knew you’d come with me if I said Ruth Anne was having a party. Your mother is wild. She’s so imaginative. Man, she’d make a great con artist.”

“Yeah.” Tom suddenly felt like he was going to puke. But he had to fight it back. It just wouldn’t do to puke on a dead man’s body stuck beneath him in the sewer.

“Well, I guess we ought to be getting back home,” Ty said. “That’s enough fun for one night, huh?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tom said. “But Ty, I mean… what’s going to happen when the cops find Louis’s body?”

“In this neighborhood? Nothing. They find five or six bodies a week around here. Gangs, drugs, home invasions. This is Baltimore, son. And Louis was a scumbag. Hey, we just did Charm City a favor. Don’t you worry your Hollywood head about it, pal. They only catch killers in the movies.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Listen, Ruth Anne? Do you really know where she is?”

“As a matter of fact I do. She’s living downtown. I wrote her name and number on a piece of paper for you. The part I told you about her divorce, coming home? That was the real deal. And she does want to see you.”

“No shit?” Tom said, as they drove away from the moonlit sewer.

“No shit,” Ty echoed, turning down the Alameda and stepping hard on the gas. “But if I were you, Tom, this time I wouldn’t say a word about it to your mom. She’ll try to sabotage it again. She’s the kind of old lady that wants you all to herself, you know?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, suddenly flooded with a terrifying euphoria. “You got a point there, Ty. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to be seeing my mother anymore. Ever.”

“Now wait. You can’t turn your back on your moms. You know that.”

“Why, because she’s my mother?” Tom said. “Big fucking deal.”

“No, not because she’s your mother,” Ty answered, laughing. “Because she’s such a unique kinda monster. I mean, nobody could resist a monster like that.”

Tom found himself laughing along in spite of himself. “Well, I’m going to try. I really am.”

“Fat fucking chance,” Ty said. “Fat fucking chance.”

They drove on through the night. Tom looked up at the sky, hoping for some kind of cosmic release. But the stars looked like a patch of teenage acne and the moon was large and bloated, just like Flo’s demented face.

PIGTOWN WILL SHINE TONIGHT BY JACK BLUDIS

Pigtown

Everything had gone up in price since World War II ended the year before. Coddies were a nickel, so were the big, sour pickled onions. Cigarettes cost two for a nickel, but only in the little store across the street from the Carroll Park playground could you buy them by the stick.

I gnawed the first layer of the pickled onion and made a sour face.

“You been here long enough,” Mr. Butler said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I didn’t want to leave the store because Knucks was still on the corner smoking one of the cigarettes he had just pinched.

I was what the neighbors called “a good kid.” For a few pennies or a nickel I would go to the store for them. From old people I wouldn’t even take that. It was the way my mother taught me before she died.

Birute Ludka, the D.P. girl, was coming around the corner from Herkermer Street, watching her feet go one in front of the other and holding her arms under her breasts so they wouldn’t bounce. I watched, but I tried not to think about her breasts because I didn’t want to tell it in confession. The “e” end of Birute’s name had a tough “eh” sound. Most people couldn’t pronounce it, so they called her Ludka.

“Hello,” she said to me.

I said, “Hi,” and stepped out of the way so she could go into the store. She wore her skirt shorter than the other girls. She was growing so fast that her clothes didn’t fit her. She went to one of the Catholic schools, Fourteen Holy Martyrs, on the other side of the B &O tracks. She didn’t go to St. Alphonsus, the Lithuanian school where I went, even though she had come over from Lithuania.

“What are you, some kind of Romeo?” Knucks said.

“What do you mean?”

“‘Hello?’ ‘Hi?’” He mocked both of us with his exaggerated tones. “I’d sure like to get into that,” he added.

He was a big guy who was always beating up other kids. His real name was Billy Hagen, and he lived just on the other side of the B &O bridge. They called it Pigtown up there too.

“How about you?” Knucks said.

“How about me, what?”

“Would you like to screw her?”

“Yeah,” I said in self-defense, though I was embarrassed to say it.

“What’s D.P. mean anyways?” Knucks asked.

“Displaced Person. It means her family got away from the Nazis and came to America.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen or fourteen.” I was guessing that she was my age. She was tall. She might have been older than that, but I didn’t think so because she was still in grammar school.

“Old enough to bleed,” Knucks said, then grinned.

The last part of it was usually “old enough to butcher.” I was not sure what that meant, but some of the older guys always said it about younger girls.

“When she comes out, you grab her and I’ll feel her up.”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“Chicken.”

“Yeah, I’m chicken,” I said, and I left the corner. It was getting dark and my grandmother wanted me home.

“Buack, buack, buack,” he called after me, making the chicken sound from some gang movie. He called out the same sound, only louder, as I approached Cooper the Cop, who was standing on the corner of Bayard and Herkermer, swinging his club. His regular beat was on the other side of the tracks where Knucks lived and Birute went to school, but he spent a lot of time down on Bayard Street with us.

“What’s that noise all about?” Cooper asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

I looked back and saw Birute coming down the steps from Butler’s with an ice-cream cone. Knucks was saying something to her and she smiled. Then he started to follow her.

I turned the corner toward my grandmother’s house, which was across from the coal yard.

I thought about what Knucks said about getting into Ludka. I knew the dirtier words for that. I even knew the word intercourse I thought about it a lot but I figured I was too young for that. So was Birute. You were supposed to be married before you did that.

I stood on my grandmother’s scrubbed marble steps waiting for Ludka to turn the corner and come down so I could say hello again and see her smile. It was out of the way to her house, but it was the way she always came.

She didn’t come that time, and not ever again.

I had trouble sleeping that night because I was thinking about Birute and about what Knucks had said about her. She was pretty, beautiful maybe, but not like a movie star because she didn’t wear makeup. I wouldn’t mind having a girlfriend like her, but after “Buack, buack, buack,” what chance did I have? Maybe she didn’t come down Herkermer Street because she was embarrassed to know me.

In the middle of the night, I heard a police siren and the dogs in the backyards started to bark. They did that two or three times a week, usually when somebody walked down the alley.

I had a dream about Birute Ludka and me doing what Knucks said. When I awoke, I changed my jockey shorts and hoped my grandmother would wash them without seeing the stains.

On the way to school, a couple of girls on the trackless trolley were talking about a D.P. girl who was killed in the Carroll Park playground.

“What D.P. girl?” I asked.

“The tall one that lives on Carey Street,” one of them said. They were both wearing the white Seton High uniforms that made them look like nurses or waitresses.

“Birute?”

“No. Ludka something.”

My face went hot. She couldn’t be dead. But I thought about the police car in the middle of the night and the dogs barking.

“You know her?” one of the Seton girls asked.

“No,” I said. I had said hello to her, but I didn’t really know her.

I guess because she was Lithuanian, there was some talk in school about the murder. I didn’t join in, but I paid attention. One of the nuns asked me if I knew her since she lived in my neighborhood. I said that I didn’t. I was scared because of my dream, but also because of what Knucks had said: “Old enough to bleed.” I didn’t think that “old enough to butcher” meant murder though.

When I got off the No. 27 coming home, I walked up Carey Street and saw Knucks was sitting on a set of steps. As I approached, he got up. Then he walked along with me. “You didn’t see me talking to her,” he said.

“No,” I said. I did see him, though, and I saw him start to follow her.

“Keep it that way.”

“Sure,” I said. I turned at the corner and he walked up Carey Street toward the bridge.

I wondered what that was all about. It didn’t make sense until the police came to my grandmother’s door and asked to talk to me.

One was a police detective named Kastel. When my grandmother came downstairs, he talked to her in Lithuanian much better than I could. I had never seen him before, but the uniformed policeman with him was Girardi, who walked the neighborhood beat.

“Did you know Birute Ludka?” Kastel asked. He pronounced Birute better than anybody I had ever heard except my grandmother.

“Not very well,” I said.

My grandmother was wringing her hands in her handkerchief while Detective Kastel asked me questions. From time to time, he would explain something to her in Lithuanian. She understood some English but she could not speak it.

“But you knew her?”

“I always said hello.”

“Did you talk to her yesterday?”

“Just to say hello.” I was nervous as I answered his questions about where and when. I was particularly nervous when he asked if my name was Walter.

“Who was with you when you saw her?”

“Nobody,” I said. “I was just coming out of the store and she was going in.”

I didn’t want to talk about Knucks, but Cooper the Cop knew about it. I wanted to correct myself, but I didn’t. I could be in trouble for that, but if I told, I could be in bigger trouble with Knucks. Cooper would probably tell them anyway.

“You didn’t see her after that?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“And nobody was with you?”

“No,” I said. Old enough to bleed.

“I thought I saw you talking to some other boys on the corner,” Girardi said.

“No, sir,” I said. I knew he was fishing because I had only talked to Knucks. I would stick to my story unless Cooper, who was on the other corner, confronted me later.

“You hear anything about her?” Detective Kastel asked.

“On the No. 27 this morning. Some girls were saying she was murdered.”

“And raped,” Officer Girardi almost yelled at me.

“I didn’t hear about that,” I said. I wasn’t even sure what rape meant. I would look it up in the dictionary later.

“Did you see her last night?” Kastel said.

“No, sir.”

“Mister Butler says you left just before she came into his store.”

“I did,” I said. “It’s when I said hello.”

“Then what did you do?” Kastel asked.

“I went home.”

“You weren’t planning anything?” Girardi said.

“Nothing,” I said. Old enough to butcher.

Detective Kastel talked about me to my grandmother in Lithuanian and my grandmother started to cry. I didn’t understand much of what they said because they were talking too fast. I did hear my grandmother say “Vladas” several times, which was Lithuanian for Walter.

After Kastel left, my grandmother talked to me in Lithuanian. I spoke back to her in English. We spoke slowly and we understood a lot of what we said, but neither of us could speak the other’s language very well.

I just kept saying no when she asked if I knew anything about Birute. From time to time she would say, “Dieva mano, Dieva mano “ spread her hands, and look up. It meant, “My God, my God.” I never could figure out if it was an actual prayer or just some kind of cursing.

My grandfather came home later and she started the Dieva mano’s all over again. He didn’t understand English, so didn’t talk much, but she explained to him about Birute Ludka.

I did all of my homework and looked up the word rape in the dictionary. I was afraid to go out. I just stayed home and listened to the radio, but I did not pay much attention to it. I was thinking about Birute in my dream. It had nothing to do with murder but it was kind of like rape, because she never said anything. She just said, “Hello,” like yesterday, and we did that thing, and she looked up at me with no expression on her face.

It felt good, but I felt rotten too, because she didn’t smile.

We did not get the newspaper at my house so I read the Evening Sun at a friend’s house to learn more about what happened.

“You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?” my friend’s father asked.

“Me?”

“You seem to be reading about it a lot.”

“It happened in our playground,” I said. I decided I would not read his paper anymore.

I wanted to go to the funeral home to see her laid out, but I thought about murderers returning to the scene of the crime and I did not want anyone to think that I might be a killer.

The next day, I bought the Baltimore News-Post from the American Store on Washington Boulevard, where the trackless trolley stopped on my way home from school. The paper said that the police found her buried in the sandbox in the playground at about the same time her mother reported her missing. Whoever did it had covered her up in a hurry, the paper said.

Officer Girardi spotted me coming home with the newspaper.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why you getting the paper? Your grandmother don’t know English.”

“Movies,” I said, thinking fast. “It tells what’s playing at the movies. I always go on Saturdays. That’s tomorrow.”

“Where’s your mother and father?” he asked. My grandmother had explained that to Detective Kastel, but maybe Kastel didn’t tell Girardi.

“My mother’s dead. My father’s working out of town.”

“Where’s out of town?”

“Out west someplace,” I said, but the truth was that I didn’t know where my father was. My mother died while he was overseas and I only saw him for a couple of months after the war. He didn’t want to hang around. He always said I reminded him too much of my mother.

“Did he know the Ludka girl?”

“My father?”

“Who’re we talking about?”

“He left us before she moved into the neighborhood.”

I don’t know why I said left us instead of went out west to work

I found out later that day that Kastel and another policeman had interrogated my other grandmother about my father until she cried. I spent time with my father’s side of the family only on holidays like Christmas and Easter and sometimes Thanksgiving.

“You saw the girl just before she was murdered,” Mr. Butler said when I went to the store. I had been there maybe a dozen times since the murder, but he had never talked about it. Now, it was like he was accusing me of something.

“You saw her last,” I said.

“You were on the sidewalk. I saw you.”

“I was gone before she came out,” I said.

“That guy called Knucks was with you, wasn’t he? The one who steals cigarettes.”

“I went home,” I said.

“They asked a lot of questions about you.”

He was getting tough with me, and I decided to get tough back. “They asked me a lot of questions about you too,” I said, though I was lying.

“Me?”

“Yeah. You.”

“Why were they asking about me?”

I lied and now he had me cornered. “How should I know? Why would they ask about me?”

“Because she said she liked you.”

“She said that?”

“She said you were a nice boy-not like the others.”

That made me feel good, but it also made me want to cry. I gritted my teeth. “Give me a pickled onion?”

“Sour?”

“You know the kind I like.”

There were only three in the big jar and he had to poke around with the tongs before he got the smallest one.

“Were you with the guys that raped her?” he asked.

“What guys?”

“You know.”

He was referring to Knucks but I didn’t know who else, and I didn’t say anything.

“Nah, a pussy like you wouldn’t hang with them.”

When I left the store, I started toward Herkermer Street. Knucks came across from the playground where Ludka was murdered and walked along with me.

“They talk to you yet? Did you give ’em my name?”

“For what?”

“What did they ask you about?”

“They asked if I knew her and I said I didn’t.”

“Did you tell ’em we were talking about her?”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“So you lied to ’em. Keep it up,” he said.

He ran across the street to the lot that ran alongside the coal yard and up toward the railroad tracks. It was the short way to his house from here. I was always afraid of him, but I wasn’t the only one.

I was on my way to my grandmother’s house when Officer Girardi called after me.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and stopped.

“What did he want?” He must have seen us talking.

“Wanted to borrow a nickel. I didn’t have one.”

“Not even for him?”

“No, sir.”

“Mr. Butler says he saw you two talking to her the day they got her.”

“We didn’t talk. I just said hello. I was on my way home.”

“But Knucks was outside with you?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “No, sir.”

“Knucks says you were talking about banging her.”

“Me?”

“That’s what he says.”

I figured he might be trying to trick me, so I said, “I didn’t even talk to him.”

It seemed like everybody was ganging up on me: Knucks, Mr. Butler, the police. Even my grandmother was starting to ask a lot of questions.

“She was a good looking girl, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Beat your meat over her?”

I felt my cheeks go hot again. I knew what that meant, but I never did it because every time I tried, it hurt.

“No, sir.”

“Come on, tell me about Knucks.”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

Girardi had his back to the coal yard. I saw Knucks standing on the railroad tracks where the cars dumped the coal, and I figured I was in trouble no matter what I said.

“Did he tell you he was gonna do it?” Girardi asked.

“He didn’t tell me nothin’,” I said. I turned away from him and started to walk toward my house. He came after me, grabbed my arm, and turned me around.

“If we don’t get him, we’re gonna get you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For raping and killing the Ludka girl.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“You ever hear about being an accessory?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means you’re lying to protect a pal.”

“He’s no pal of mine.”

“I guess not. Because he’s trying to pin it all on you.”

Knucks was still up on the railroad tracks watching us, and I couldn’t keep from glancing at him. Girardi turned to see where I was looking, but Knucks had disappeared.

“What were you looking at?”

“Nothin’.”

“You see him up there? He trying to intimidate you?”

“I gotta go home.”

“Think about what I said and tell the truth next time.”

I kept walking and he didn’t come after me.

A few nights later, I was in my room trying to do my homework. Some guys were singing and it was echoing down the alley:

Pigtown will shine tonight,

Pigtown will shine.

Pigtown will shine tonight,

All down the line

I never quite understood why Pigtown would shine, but I didn’t understand a lot of things. It distracted me so I didn’t have to think of Birute, but I was having trouble doing my homework. Then somebody banged hard on my front door.

“I’ll get it,” I told my grandmother and grandfather, who were already in bed. My grandfather worked two jobs and I hardly ever saw him.

“What did you tell him?” Knucks said.

“Nothing, but he was asking about you.”

“What about me?”

I told him that Girardi wanted me to say that me and him talked about Birute. “But he almost saw you watching from the coal yard.”

“Only almost?”

“He turned around and you were gone,” I said.

“They took me in and talked to me all night. I didn’t tell them a thing about you, except that you walked past me outside the store. So don’t you tell them anything else.”

Knucks jumped off the steps and ran up the street.

My grandmother called down the stairs in Lithuanian and asked who was at the door.

“A friend of mine,” I said in English. “I told him I couldn’t come out.”

By the time I was back upstairs, the boys down the alley had stopped singing. I didn’t even want to go back to my homework. The last part of it was to look up words in the dictionary. While I was at it, I looked up rape again. I did not do that to Birute, even in my dream.

I had trouble sleeping because I was thinking about my mother, who was dead, and about my father, who was gone. I thought about my grandmother and grandfather. Mixed in with all of it was what Knucks had said about Birute Ludka being old enough to bleed and what had happened to her later that night.

When I finally managed to sleep, I had nightmares about Birute. She was coming up from out of the sandbox and she was pointing at me, accusing. Her face was smashed, her hair was crusted with wet sand, and her clothes were torn, especially her skirt. Everything was in black-and-white except that she was bleeding bright red blood from everyplace.

“I didn’t do anything,” I told her.

“You dreamed about me,” she said.

Even in this ugly dream, I remembered how real the first dream had been. I hadn’t forced myself on her because she didn’t try to stop me from doing it. It was not in a sandbox, it was on a bed.

“But I didn’t fuck you, Knucks did.” I never said that word when I was awake-I never even thought it. I said it in a dream, but even in the dream it seemed wrong.

“You too,” she said.

“Only in the dream.”

“It’s just as bad,” she said.

I woke up sweating and scared. I didn’t rape her and I didn’t kill her. I only said hello to her that day. I had lied to the police by not telling them about Knucks. I wondered if the lie was a mortal or venial sin.

I hadn’t been to confession since before the murder.

“They got your pal,” Mr. Butler said a couple of days later. He wore a kind of delirious smile.

“What do you mean?”

“That Knucks kid. They got him sticking up a grocery store out Wilkins Avenue. He tried to shoot it out with a cop and that was it.”

He showed me the headline in the News-Post: “Sandbox Killer in Deathbed Confession.” A caption below it read, “Accomplice Sought.”

“You’re next,” he said.

What if Knucks said that I was with him? I had seen things like that happen in the movies and heard about them on my radio stories. The cops told lies about what people said so they could get other people to confess.

“Not me,” I said.

“Paper says he had somebody with him. My guess is it was you.”

“Not me,” I said, but I bought the paper.

Apparently, Knucks was trying to rob a grocery store and an Officer C. J. Braddock caught him in the act. When he tried to run, the officer shot him and took a deathbed confession. William R. Hagen, also known as Knucks, died before he reached the hospital.

I decided not to tell my grandmother and grandfather about Knucks. I was afraid I would confuse them with the details and they would think I was in on it.

That night I dreamed I was with Birute again, and Cooper the Cop caught us in the sandbox. I was saying, “No, no, no, I didn’t do it,” and my grandmother woke me up. I sat straight up in my bed. I was sweating even though it was a cool night.

I thought about the dream all day, and I was still thinking about it when I came home from school. I started to think about other things that happened and I was scared.

The next day was another Saturday, but I knew that cops worked swing shift. They worked every day of the week but at different times. I thought it was dangerous to go up to the Southwest police station on Calhoun Street, because it was on the other side of the B & tracks. We did not have a telephone in our house, so I used a pay phone and asked to speak to Detective Kastel.

“He works out of Homicide. Who is this?” When I recognized the voice, I got scared and hung up.

I asked my grandmother if she had the number Detective Kastel gave her, and she went wide-eyed.

“I need it for something,” I said.

“No,” she replied in English.

“I think I know something,” I said.

She told me in Lithuanian that Knucks was dead. She didn’t use his name, though, and I figured she must have been talking to one of her Lithuanian friends about the murder-maybe Birute’s mother.

“Please, can I have the number?”

The way she tried to hide it from me made me think that she suspected I was going to confess.

“I need it,” I said, but she would not give it to me. She kept saying no in English and telling me that I didn’t have anything to do with it, but that part was in Lithuanian.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said, but she still would not give me the number.

Finally, I took the trolley downtown. Instead of transferring, I walked along Fayette Street all the way to the Central Police Station. When I found the right door to go in, Cooper the Cop was standing there in uniform.

“Where you going?” he asked.

I did not want to tell him, but I was stuck-I mean, really stuck.

I had been putting things together. Cooper going toward the store when Birute came out. Cooper was always friendly with everybody and always pumping about crimes, but he disappeared from the neighborhood after the murder and didn’t pump anybody about anything.

Apparently, he never said a thing about me and the “Buack, buack, buack” business or about me and Knucks on the corner. We never knew his full name. We just called him Cooper or Cooper the Cop. The officer who killed Knucks was C.J. Braddock. I did not know for sure what the C stood for, but I was betting it was “Cooper.”

“Come with me,” Cooper said, and he took my arm.

“No.” I resisted because he was trying to take me away from the station.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. Two other officers were approaching the door.

“No!”

“Now,” Cooper said.

“This man is trying to kill me!” I called out, and my eyes were filling with tears.

“Gotta take him to Southwestern,” Cooper said.

“He killed that girl in Pigtown!” I said, but the other door had already swung shut and nobody else heard.

Cooper was a lot bigger than I was and he was holding my arm tight as he tried to pull me away from the door. I was attempting to stand my ground, but he was dragging me.

“No!” I screamed. “Help! Murder!”

He slapped me across the face, but I did not stop shouting. Finally, he pulled the gun from his holster and pushed me against a wall. There was nobody around. I was sure he was going to kill me.

“I’ll be quiet,” I said.

“And act calm too,” he said through his teeth. I thought he was going to lead me to where the radio cars were parked, but instead he took me in the opposite direction. “You both did it, didn’t you?”

“Shut up,” he said, and he continued to push me along.

He was going to kill me and I had made it easier for him, I thought. I started to resist and he reached for his gun again.

“Hold it there,” someone said. It was Detective Kastel from the window of an old Plymouth coupe.

“Gotta take this kid to Southwestern,” Cooper said, and he slipped his revolver back into his holster.

“I’ll give you a lift,” Kastel offered.

“He’s trying to kill me,” I said.

“Sure he is,” Kastel replied and chuckled.

“He’s the accomplice in the Ludka case,” Cooper said.

“Sure he is,” Kastel said, with the same sarcasm. He was out of his car and he had his own revolver drawn. “Let the kid go.”

“Hagen told me this kid was with him,” Cooper said.

“I didn’t do it,” I said.

“Let him go,” Kastel said.

“These kids are full of lies.”

“I know.”

“Put that gun away,” Cooper said, but he had nothing to bargain with now that his own pistol was in the holster.

“It’s homicide, let’s go back into the station,” Kastel said. He was talking about the Central Station, now half a block away. I guess he was going to leave his car at the curb.

“He killed both of them,” I said, and Kastel started to chuckle.

“How about putting the gun away,” Cooper said again.

“Kid’s dangerous. You go on ahead with him.”

Cooper still had me by the arm and he was marching me back to the entrance at Central.

“You don’t need the gun with two of us watching him,” Cooper said.

“I know,” Kastel said, but he didn’t put his gun away.

In rapid succession, Cooper swung me around and pushed me into Kastel. He drew his own pistol and pulled me back. I was in worse shape now, because Cooper had his pistol and he was now using me as a shield.

“You back away, detective,” Cooper said.

Something about the way he said it made me think he was going to kill me and Kastel too. Kastel must have thought that as well, because he aimed his gun at Cooper’s head. Cooper could no longer afford to hold his own gun on me and he raised it-but he didn’t fire.

The flash of Kastel’s gun stung my face and blinded me for a moment. I heard the crack, but I heard no sound from Cooper or his gun. He squeezed my arm hard. I looked over my shoulder to see a bloody hole where his left eye had been. He was just standing there, holding his gun with one hand and my arm with the other.

I had no idea whether Cooper held me a few seconds or a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever before he finally released me and slumped sideways onto the sidewalk. His gun fell into the street.

I did not feel safe until Kastel checked his pulse and told me he was dead.

Apparently, my grandmother had finally figured out that I was looking for Kastel not to confess but to tell him who I thought had killed Birute. A friend who spoke English had found him at home. He was on his way to the Central Police Station when he saw Cooper Joseph Braddock, C.J. Braddock, Cooper the Cop, pulling me along the sidewalk.

He asked how I knew it was Cooper and I told him that Cooper always came down and asked questions but never came down after Birute Ludka’s murder. I explained that I didn’t go to Central first because I didn’t know homicide detectives worked out of there. It was why I called Southwestern in the first place, and accidentally got Cooper on the telephone.

“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 robbery attempts.

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. Their boxes are so pretty.”

Wilson Pickett is through. I need to hear the Stones, and fortunately the bubble-tube Wurlitzer jukebox maintains a disproportionate ratio of Stones-to-shit music. A dollar will buy me two plays, and I choose “Happy” and “Stop Breaking Down,” both off Exile on Main St

“Tino died the next morning. So I put her and the Victoria’s Secret box in the freezer.”

“Who?”

“My stray cat. She had eight kittens in my basement. All white. I gave them all away except for Tino. The one in the freezer.”

Behind the bar, I look at the skyline of Yukon Jack, Southern Comfort, Jack Daniel’s, Montezuma Triple Sec. Signs and bumper stickers garland the cash register: “Street Girls Bringing in Sailors Must Pay for Room in Advance,” and “Save the Ales,” and “If It Has Tires or Testicles, It’s Going to Give You Trouble.” Lori Montgomery owns the bar and has been kissing off six-figure offers from the suits over at Harbor View Realty, which believes every old bar should be a new bar. Lori doesn’t want to go upscale. If she’s got to peel away like the Old Point Hotel and Lounge, then to hell, she says. She likes her French Tickler condom machine. She doesn’t want “No Limit Texas Holdem” tournaments; she wants her John Wilkes Booth. She stole the booth idea from Vesuvio’s, a beatnik bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Booth, after all, is a native son.

Lori got married at Fort McHenry with a reception at the Clarence “Du” Burns Soccer Arena (it was one of my newsletter items), but I don’t know her status now. She’s Alison Krauss pretty. But Lori is old enough to be too old for me. I don’t want her to sell the bar. If I want upscale, I’ll drink in Annapolis.

Tonight’s live band at Casey’s is Tongue Oil, a dog-eared local group known for its curious and ultimately unsatisfying version of “Stairway to Heaven.” I’d rather hear Mary Prankster-why can’t she drop by Casey’s?-when she headlines at Fletcher’s, and there’s Gina DeLuca Fridays at Leadbetter’s and Paul Wingo’s trio at Bertha’s. What I’m really thinking about is Mel’s frozen kitty. I tell Mel I want to see it. She smiles, takes her index finger, wets it with her studded, manta ray tongue, and mats down a twig in my eyebrow. Must have slept on it wrong. This is as close to foreplay as I’ve experienced in four months (no, six). Her face is nearby. Mel has an asterisk blood vessel under the iris of her left eye. I imagine someone hit her. “Are you all right?” I ask. The wrong answer is yes. I want her to be lonely and in danger. Lori slides over a bowl of oyster crackers. I question her timing sometimes.

“Why do you want to see my kitty?” Mel doesn’t say it dirty.

“I don’t know.” Liar boy.

I squint to see what must be Steve, Mel’s boyfriend, hauling into the bar. I can tell a 33” waist a mile away. He’s got these meaty carpenter hands, too. A handsome fuck. Steve can’t bring himself to order a beer in this place, so he just hands Lori a business card. She doesn’t field it. Mel is still fiddling with my eyebrow, which hovers like some randy katydid.

“Are we dating now?” I say.

They say I woke up three minutes later, according to Mel’s Timex. I’m on a saggy sofa that has that sofa armpit smell. I was moved to Lori’s office, where a white kitten named Marble is playing footsies on my stomach. Christ, does everyone own a cat? I try to sit up but Ravens kicker Matt Stover apparently teed up my brain for a twenty-five-yard chip shot. Lori applies a heated washcloth on my forehead-I take back what I said about her being old. I called the cops on him, she says, the guy that’s with the realty company that wants me to sell. “Carpenter hands?” I say, somehow finding the strength to rename the prick. Mel closes in.

“Carpenter hands,” she whispers, “prefers we not date.”

Casey’s packs its urinals in ice. Lori says it’s been a tradition ever since her ex-husband’s grandfather opened the bar in 1927. The old man’s initialed whiskey flask still sits atop the cash register. His beat-up flute is still here, too. I’m here three weeks after boyfriend Steve thumped my head and after a particularly tense argument with Mr. Grimes over the appearance of twenty-five copies of Rear Window in the emporium. I had taken the initiative and ordered the shipment because the movie stars Grace Kelly. Mr. Grimes reacted-overreacted, I think-by charging me with a dull oyster knife. My life has become stressful. I don’t want any more intense excitement.

“You’re too old for your age,” Lori says.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you like Grace Kelly and that Paul Desmond guy, whoever he is. You got old people tastes.”

“Your bar is not exactly a youth magnet.”

“You’re here,” she says. She is not being mean.

I go to take a leak in the industrial-strength urinals, where a lumpy tourist in an oversized Black Do sweatshirt says out of the corner of his mouth: “I don’t know why they put ice in the urinals, but it’s fun to make it melt.” One day there won’t be a place in Fell’s Point where you can melt ice-the bubble machine is gone, after all-and I appreciate these facts, but I need to think about changing jobs, think about, I don’t know, doing something. My fellow pisser introduces himself as Albert. I have never met an Albert, but he makes a perfect Albert and he seems perfectly happy melting ice. He’s back from the Duck Tour and visibly disappointed his group didn’t see a homicide.

“Don’t feel bad. It’s just not a good time of year,” I say to Albert. “When the weather gets warmer you might get lucky. And if you can be exceptionally patient, you might see one of the city’s garbage skimmers scoop up a body with the rest of the floating trash.”

Albert stops melting ice.

“You mean those funny-looking boats with the conveyor belt and wings? They drag up bodies? What’s a good time to that?

“Low tide is good, trash heads in at low tide.”

Albert’s spirits improve, and I can’t help hoping that one day the Duck Tour won’t let him down. Listen, the man passionately wants a CSI: Baltimore; he believes that much in Charm City.

Albert leaves Casey’s. I don’t.

“So, Lori, you going to sell?”

“Over my dead body,” she says, planting a Bass Ale for

New Yorker cartoon coaster. She bought a dozen, mostly dog cartoons. She just has the one coaster out, reserved for me.

“Pretty upscale, ma’am.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” she says. “So, what are you going to do, Michael?”

“Do?”

“Yeah, what are you going to about your porno job? What are you going to do about Mel? Or that boyfriend? He knocked you on your ass, and he wants Casey’s, he wants my bar. What are you going to do? What are going to do?… Speak up, Michael.”

I have to work Independence Day, but it will be my last day at The Love Joint. “Mr. Grimes, I resign my position effective immediately,” I announce, as he tapes a sign to the side of the cash register: “We cannot sell waterpipes anymore. You must ask for tobacco pipes.” Quitting is my strongest career decision yet; two years-where does the time go?-is long enough in the adult store business. A pristine shipment of new Pamela videos has put Grimes in a docile, nostalgic mood. He’s even adopted four white kittens from somewhere. He’s wearing his blue tennis shoes.

“You talking to yourself again, son?” Grimes says.

“I said I resign immediately.”

“Then we should discuss your severance.”

One of the white kittens tumbles into the Pamela Anderson video box display, detonating the man’s pyramid. It’s a staggering architectural loss, but Grimes just smiles, quite the foreign expression on him. The front door opens and it’s no customer. I don’t understand the presence of Carpenter Hands nor do I appreciate this unsettling interruption. Hadn’t I just officially resigned?

“Hey, Mikey.”

“It’s Michael.”

“I’m sure it is,” Carpenter Hands says, moving behind the counter. “Mikey, you need to talk to your friend at Casey’s. You need, as an objective newsletter reporter, to explain to Ms. Montgomery the practical benefits of selling her bar. I’ve tried but, frankly, she does not trust me.”

“Fuck yourself.”

“Well-spoken, and it’s not an entirely unattractive suggestion,” he says. “But, as you well know, I’m fucking Mel.”

Grimes burps a laugh (coughing something up), then starts to rebuild the Pamela pyramid to far greater heights. He says something about wanting to expand the operation, make a move to Thames Street.

“You’re not going to interfere, are you, son?” Grimes asks.

I scoop up ten copies of Rear Window as severance before leaving my job at the emporium.

“She’ll sell,” Carpenter Hands says.

“Over my dead body.”

I walk out, past the Broadway Market and Crabby Dick’s and toward my favorite Fell’s Point bar. I’ve always wanted to say “over my dead body,” but I now feel under some sort of obligation. I stand at the railing by the water taxi landing and stare at the brown harbor water. It’s high tide, the trash is out. The Moran tugboats, with their Goodyear tire whiskers, are all tucked in for the night alongside the Recreation Pier. The briny wind, the drinking people, the subterranean sin-Fell’s Point is feeling and looking one quarter French Quarter. Inside Casey’s, I hear Tongue Oil close its first set with Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song.” Lori’s six, seven customers are speechless, immobilized. One might be weeping.

“Ah, the unbridled power of rock and roll,” I tell Lori.

“Why no, that’s just my shitty house band.”

“I quit my job at the emporium.”

“I like that decision,” Lori says. “Work here. Help me find good music. Please, help me find good music. You heard what they did to ‘The Immigrant Song.’ Michael, musicians will listen to you-you’re old.”

When Lori gives you a Bass Ale on a New Yorker coaster, when Lori uses your full first name, when Lori offers you a job working with Lori, you don’t need a day to think about it. She tells me to start immediately by advising the management (i.e., drummer) of Tongue Oil that a second set and any future first sets will no longer be necessary. During the transitional period, I insert a pressed dollar into the jukebox to hear Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and “She’s the One.” Lori reimburses me for the money, a gesture far more intimate and sweeter than having your eyebrow groped. I know she’s scared to sell, scared not to sell, scared of him. And who knows what happened to Carpenter Hands’s girlfriend? Maybe Mel has given topless cleaning another chance; she just needed the right boss.

“Lori?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-one. Now help me close up.”

The Fell’s Pointer office is on the second floor of a Fell Street rowhouse. Barry Levinson filmed a scene from Diner here, but there’s no plaque commemorating the moment. It’s the second Friday in August. I’m using one of the office’s three Dell PCs to do my listings: The Fell’s Point Antique Dealers’ Association, the Fell’s Point Citizens on Patrol, and the Fell’s Point Homeowners’ Association all have meetings coming up. I also need to remind readers again to have their recyclables out by 7 a.m. on collection days.

But I don’t feel like reporting. I’m exhausted from a late night. I met someone and we ended up drinking, then arguing. He drank way too much, and I don’t know if he ever got home. His girlfriend showed up and that was stressful. I left them at the Rec Pier, him still talking his shit. He was one of these cocky dudes-you know, the kind who thinks he owns the place, the kind who would never buy a beer at Casey’s. Anyway, the night ended poorly.

We have the windows open in the office because it’s so damn steamy. We first heard the sirens at 8 a.m. and now the Baltimore City Police, three patrol cars, are at the Rec Pier. EMT people are here, too. Traffic is stopped, even the Duck Tour had to somehow brake.

“Go see what that’s about,” my editor says. Paulette means well, but she knows how I feel about covering news. News is stressful. It lacks jazz. “Go,” Paulette says. It’s a short walk along Thames. It’s ninety minutes past low tide but the harbor water is still receded and it’s shallow enough to see dismembered crabs swaying in the flotsam. At the water taxi landing, a city garbage skimmer has anchored-its chop-sticked wings have locked and apparently stalled on a particularly bulky piece of trash. I’m supposed to be asking questions and taking notes, but I just watch. Albert, my old friend from Casey’s urinal, finds me in the crowd. He’s back in town and back on the Duck Tour. We both watch as police in gloves peel seaweed, tree branches, Doritos bags, City Papers and four dead gulls off what now appears to be a collected body. The garbage skimmer’s conveyor belt holds up the waterlogged mass like some Middle River kid showing off a record rockfish.

“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 of a quail egg. A bench somewhere once or twice a week, she said, “to watch the day die.”

Gray sky bruising to violet, factory lights sparkling in harbor oil, as they nibbled some bread and cheese; the city waiting on the last party of the year.

Pitiful? What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?

The guy’s name was Orlo, a junk collector from the Clinton Street wharves. What he was to her is hard to say, although I could guess. His story checked out. Lucky man, as far as that goes.

“He was peeling an orange,” she said, “and the spray chafed his hands.”

Chafed… who talks like that anymore?

I guess it was a little picnic on the bench. They weren’t waiting for a bus, just sitting down. Gave her age as fifty-four-you could have fooled me, even with the beating she took-and said the junk man was “going on sixty-six…”

“Orlo Pound?”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Why would he be?”

“Am I?”

“Not that I can see. Except, you know, the reason I’m here.”

“It was cold,” she said, “so I’d eat a little cheese and put my hands back in my coat.”

“Anyone speak to you?”

“Nobody pays attention. People got their own problems.”

Headed to their own midnight truths.

They sat and watched people come and go from the Southern Hotel across the street. It had been important once, back in the railroad days, but not anymore. The only thing that revolved was the front door.

Something about the hotel bothered her.

“They were bringing cakes into the hotel and each cake had a big number on it-one followed by nine followed by six followed by four,” she said. “Do you remember back in Prohibition when the Southern had orchestras playing jazz on the roof?”

“Before my time, ma’am.”

“I begged him to take me dancing there.”

“Mr. Papageorgious?”

“Orlo.”

“Yesterday you wanted to dance?”

“No,” she said, an edge to it. “Back when they had orchestras on the roof.”

“Did he take you?”

“One day I will, he said. One of these days. Then the Depression hit and nobody was going anywhere.”

“When was the last time you saw your husband?”

“Yesterday morning. He was going down to the hall to wait on a ship.”

“On New Year’s Eve?”

“On the way out, he stuck his nose in the pot,” and she pointed to a dented stew pot on the drain board next to the sink.

“And?”

“And he didn’t like what he saw.”

What George Papageorgious saw was awful.

It seems that our Mystery Woman had been up cooking before dawn, and when her old man rolled out of the house, he stepped into a kitchen steamed up with garlic and salt and…

“Clove,” she said, “I had it on the back burner. Out of the way.”

The poor son of a bitch lifts the lid and puts his face to the bubbling water. It don’t smell half-bad to him, I guess, so he gets a little closer, shooing away the steam with his hand.

When it clears…

“Christ, that’s all he was yapping about,” said the bartender at the Lorraine Tavern, not five blocks from the bus stop where his wife was having her little picnic. “‘Crock of shit-milk blue.’ A broken record: ‘Crock of shit-milk blue…’”

“What?”

“The eyes. The boiled-up eyes of the pig staring at him from the pot.”

The Lorraine was on the first floor of the Seafarers Union hall over on Gay Street; between the Great White Way bowling alley and “Your Old Friend Simon Harris” Sporting Goods. All three businesses catered to seamen.

Witnesses said that George had been drinking at the bar since it opened at 6 a.m. and let more than one ship go without throwing in for a job.

“Guess his old lady was making up a batch of head cheese,” said the barkeep. “Man, the way he run it down, we could’ve fixed up a shitload of it ourselves. Didn’t have the heart to tell him you’re supposed to throw the eyes away.”

They said the Greek put away eight or nine shots of vodka and got uglier with each one; shouting questions that didn’t make any sense.

“How long?” he bellowed. “How long that goddamn pig in my face?”

Scalded pink snout; pale, sunken eyes; a gun on the bar.

“Everyone’s edging out the side door and I told him to put it away. ‘Look pal,’ I says, ‘a sugar ship’s gonna tie up Locust Point in a couple hours. Ain’t nobody gonna put in for it on New Year’s Eve. Why don’t you run upstairs and grab it?’”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said George, bringing the barrel to his eye.

And I got a cuckold face-down in the sawdust of the Lorraine Tavern with a hole in the back of his head the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.

“When the bread and cheese was gone, we sipped hot tea from a thermos and Orlo asked if I knew how his father died.”

“Did you?”

The lovers had shared a long string of delicacies and deceit from the moment the frustrated teenager carried a bowl of steaming pig feet to the King of the Junkmen in her family’s diner nearly forty years ago. All that time together-a day here, half a day there-and still their tongues searched out every pebble of cartilage of their mythology.

Leini did not know how Orlo’s father had died.

“They had him up on the third floor, eaten up with cancer and crying for his mother,” he told her. “I was hiding in the hallway and saw him point to the window and say his dead brother was perched on the sill outside. They told me to go outside and play.”

When Eleini Leftafkis was a child of nine on the island of Samos, her parents shipped her to a couple with a prosperous diner at the end of Clinton Street, crying farewell with every intention of following just as soon as they could.

“Before you know it,” said her mintera

“Lickety-split,” said her pateras, practicing his English.

“We love you,” sobbed her ya-ya

And they meant it.

Today, all she knows about the deaths of her grandmother and her parents arrived in envelopes bordered in black, first one and then another. She has never seen their graves.

“A bus stopped in front of us but no one got on and no one got off,” said Leini, complaining about the fumes, saying how she missed the streetcars. “The driver couldn’t get the doors closed, like something was forcing them open. He’d yank the lever and they’d bounce back. He tried to force them but they just hung open.”

Staring into the space between, Leini saw herself on the altar of the Orthodox church, barely eighteen years old, saying yes to the man who’d been selected for her and “I’ll see you soon” to the man she loved.

I’ll do this, she’d told herself, the heart of her absent mother beating in her ears, I’ll do what they want and God will give me a life I can bear.

“Orlo wanted me to ride the bus home but the driver kept banging the doors, and before I could get on, a hinge snapped. The sound it made. Awful. It gave me a chill. It was twenty-nine degrees outside. So I started walking. The cold had worked its way inside the sleeves of my coat, right up to my collarbone. I just wanted to get away.”

She asked if she were guilty of anything and I told her the question was irrelevant.

“Well I am,” she said.

Orlo watched Leini hurry away but did not chase after her.

You cannot play the games this woman has played all her life-from the time she was traded to a barren couple in America for a couple dozen sewing machines-and be skittish.

Prim, perhaps; the world loves a mask.

But not skittish.

The bus and its broken doors had spooked her more than anything she could remember; more afraid, she said, than the heaving voyage that brought her over as a kid.

I took her story down like a court reporter, page after stenographic page of minutia that had nothing to do with the case.

“I walked fast,” she said. “When I hit Pratt Street I stopped to catch my breath, sorry I didn’t hop that bus. My knees were aching. Not a cab in sight.”

She stopped to watch a couple of tugboats nudge a Norwegian ship up against Pier 5 and moved on, pushing east against a cutting wind, head down, making time.

“I was hoping to catch George before he shipped out and tell him I was sorry.”

“For what?”

“For everything.”

Between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy, where organ grinders once kept their hairy beggars in an alley of sheds called Monkey Row, Leini turned toward a rough warren of warehouses and machine shops where heavy springs are forged and hawser line is coiled to the rafters.

A saloon on every corner; pig feet on every bar; a story in every jar.

Leini had not known guilt-pure, inexplicable guilt-since the son she’d conceived with George the week of their marriage was gunned down in the surf of Omaha Beach with the Maryland 29th. The city sparkles cold on a clear night and she remembers how she once navigated its odd turns with ease when summoned by Orlo to assignation.

Walk to the end of Aliceanna Street till you see the side entrance to Maryland Chief… Yeah, the packing house… They’ll be tomato trucks crowding both sides of the street, you’ll hear crickets. It’s Bawlmer City but them ’mater trucks is loaded up with crickets. Wink at the watchman and he’ll point you toward Kai Hansen’s Wildflower docked out back.

She passed an arching sally port-one of those narrow brick tunnels that separate the older rowhouses-and remembered, as she peeped into one on an especially derelict block, the room of velvet that Orlo had built for them over the summer of ’29, a room of skylights where they’d consummated an affair begun before her marriage.

“Looking down that airy way, I started counting up all the lies I’d told and they rattled in my head like nickels in a bucket.”

When I told her I wasn’t a priest she just kept on talking, a truck whose breaks had given out.

“Then I was in Zeppie’s.”

“Zeppie’s?”

“Thames and Ann.”

Zeppie’s was a neighborhood tavern where stevedores and deckhands started the day with boiled eggs, raw eggs, egg sandwiches, a shot, and a beer; a Polack gin mill that made a mint on work gloves and sold soup and sandwiches to laborers who settled their tabs with stolen hams and transistor radios.

“George went there sometimes,” she said. “I wanted to have a drink with him. That’s something I’d never done.”

“But he was already…”

“Every now and then you could talk to George.”

Zeppie’s was stag, the only broads you’d find there were Sissy Z. behind the bar, wives looking for their husband’s pay, and the busted onions upon whom that hard-earned cash was spilled.

“I found a table in a corner where I didn’t think anyone would pay much attention.”

Someone did. A tugboat captain who’d just tied up over at the Recreation Pier looked through the crowd and saw Leini and nothing else. He was clean shaven-he’d just washed up on the boat and changed out of his work clothes-handsome and more than a couple years younger than her.

“He asked if he could sit down and then he was sitting down,” she said. “When I told him I was leaving, he turned to get me a beer and I was gone.”

Out the door and pushing home again, remembering not that she had betrayed George a million times but Orlo only once. It was getting late. There was a pig’s head on the stove to deal with.

“I still had the willies, only worse,” she said.

Some kind of stick in her back.

Denied passage with the clouds on its way out of this world, the condemned soul of George A. Papageorgious coursed along the crumbling curbs of Baltimore.

From the Lorraine Tavern, where Orlo saw a morgue wagon as he worried his own way home, the ghost hugged the mossy seawall of the harbor, knocked a beer into the lap of a dapper tugboat captain who thought he’d gotten lucky, and bent the tines of his daughter’s tongue as she put the family’s business in the street.

“It was the eyes that got me,” said Little Leini, sneaking out to a New Year’s party with a girl she thinks is her friend. “Like a couple of loogies hocked on the sidewalk.”

“You eat that stuff?”

“Hell no,” said Little Leini. “I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but they ain’t fooling me.”

Not at all.

What remains of George tries to visit the graves of those he’d loved as best he could-a stone honoring the valor of the 29th Division, the tombs of a half-dozen others-and is turned back.

Yet it easily reaches the growling appetites of a couple whose fidelity to one another, something he knew but could never prove, had vexed him for decades.

Sliding up the side of the Salvage House and into the third-floor room where Orlo’s father had died, the vapor threw a tiny monkey wrench into every timepiece on the wall, guaranteeing that, for one night at least, the junkman and his slut will not be in sync.

Creeping away, it hovers above a patch of burnt dirt where Leini’s guardians once ran a moneymaker known as Ralph’s Lunch.

“It will be yours, George,” they’d told him, laying out the deal less than twenty-four hours after catching their young charge parading through the streets in a junk wagon.

The ghost snakes through the exhaust pipes of buses parked near the house where George was absent more than he was home, crosses the street, and hovers before the window of a kitchen where a low blue flame kept a pot of water bubbling around the scalded head of a pig.

Leini’s window looks down on row after row of pale green transit buses that have ferried her to many a meal across the arc of her heroic adultery.

The No. 23 to Irvington, where the junkman had openminded friends among the Xaverian missionaries who ran the orphanage at Transfiguration High; the No. 4 down to the scrap yards of Turner’s Station, which might as well have been Mississippi, entire fields of junk where Orlo commanded the respect of men who’d been born to it; and the No. 14 south to the strawberry patches of Anne Arundel County.

All behind Leini as she climbs the stairs and turns the key.

“The house was cold and empty,” she said. “I turned the heat up, checked the pot, and put water on for tea.”

“What about George… wanting to apologize?”

“It passed,” she said, the electric Magic Chef clock on the face of the stove humming close to the hour. “I kept my coat on and tried to read.”

“What?” I asked, making up questions now just to spend more time with her.

“Se-fah-rye-des,” she said, handing me a small green book with his name on it. “He just won the Nobel.”

“For?”

“Poetry,” she said. “Seferiades believes it begins in our breath.”

Old friend, what are you looking for? It is time to say our few words for tomorrow the soul sets sail…

The kettle whistled and she set the book aside, something rare and delicious about to take shape beneath her hands.

“I use every part of the pig but the squeal,” she said. “The recipe even sounds like a song.”

“How so?”

“When you skim away the fat from the broth, you’re not supposed to get rid of all of it. It says to leave ‘a little of the nicest.’”

“A little?”

“Of the nicest.”

Leini didn’t expect to get it all done right away. It was a recipe that required patience, and in the morning she’d listen to the bells of St. Nicholas and take her time picking through the bones, chopping the ears as fine as rice. Using some of the greasy broth to help bind the dish, she’d mix in black vinegar and broken peppercorns, pack the devil into a mold shaped like the head of a tusked boar, dust it with paprika, and slide the treat behind George’s beer at the back of the fridge to gel.

“We take turns trying to surprise each other with something special,” she said, imagining the pink treat sliced thin across hunks of black rye, moist enough to spare the condiment. She tries to picture the afternoon it might have garnished; which bus would have taken her there.

Near the stove, she reached through the thick mist of clove and onion and sea salt for a mug above the sink; pours the water, dunks the bag. Standing at the darkened window with tea between her hands, she lets the heat seep into her palms and considers her aging face reflected in the glass.

Neither poet nor teacher nor librarian, as she’d once hoped. Not so much a storyteller as one about whom stories are told.

Or much of anything-though it is said she is pretty good with a sewing machine-but a stubborn gourmand with a sandwich to spare and secrets leeching into the cobblestones of a city desperate to keep pace with progress.

“I never tried, really tried… to reverse the hesitation of my misery,” she whispered to the glass. “I always took the other way around.”

And with that thought, the window shattered and she was thrown across the room, hard against the wall.

“Can you describe who did it?”

“Something yanked me out of my coat like a shot from a sling,” she said, nodding to the wall behind me. “You can see the tea stained the wallpaper… It was midnight, they started shooting guns on the street.”

“Something?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wincing as she tried to itch her swollen nose, moving a tissue toward the cuts and bruises on her face and then pulling it away. “When I looked up, the pig head was dancing around the room like it was on stilts. It leered at me. I thought…”

“Oh brother,” I mumbled, and she was quiet.

“I thought it was going to rape me.”

Struggling to her swollen knees, spine throbbing, Leini crawled toward the stove, raised herself up on it, and grabbed a wooden spoon for protection.

She did not hear the New Year arrive, the clang of the pie plates and bark of the air horns down on the avenue; did not see the pot that flew across the room to crack her brow.

Blinded by the flow of blood, she falls backward, landing in a hot puddle of souse juice on the linoleum, flecks of flesh and boogers of fat soaking through her dress, sticking to her legs.

Did someone fire a gun through the window?

Some drunk on the street hurl a cast-iron pot at her?

The junkman gone beserk?

“Tell me,” I said. “I’ll find who did this to you.”

Bleeding, confused, and afraid, she was somehow calm enough to think that George would understand this. He saw things sometimes. Swore that he did. But she didn’t call out for George.

“I’m frightened,” she cried. “Ya-ya, I’m frightened.”

All of the heat in the house rushed out through the broken window and Leini is cold again, freezing; the skull of the pig resting against the soaked hem of her black dress, a hole the size of a half-dollar behind a wilted ear.

She kicks it away and is alone again; the phantom swirling down the drain in the sink to the bowels of the city; making its way down the storm drains with lost balls and bags of shit before falling into the harbor from the Fallsway; settling into the sleek bed of chrome and magnesium on the bottom of the Patapsco to be held there forever.

“You didn’t call the police?”

“No.”

“An ambulance?”

“No.”

“You…”

“Got to my feet and started cleaning myself up.”

I closed my notebook and told her she could come down to the morgue to see the body if she wanted, but only if she wanted.

We had plenty of other ways to deal with it if she didn’t.