Baltimore Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2006 Laura Lippman

  Baltimore map by Sohrab Habibion

  ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07019-0

  ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-96-2

  ISBN-10: 1-888451-96-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934820

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Dublin Noir, edited by Ken Bruen

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  FORTHCOMING:

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obejas

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Edward Nawotka

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: THE WAY THINGS USED TO BE

  LAURA LIPPMAN Locust Point

  Easy As A-B-C

  ROBERT WARD Old Northwood

  Fat Chance

  JACK BLUDIS Pigtown

  Pigtown Will Shine Tonight

  ROB HIAASEN Fell’s Point

  Over My Dead Body

  RAFAEL ALVAREZ Highlandtown

  The Invisible Man

  PART II: THE WAY THINGS ARE

  DAVID SIMON Sandtown-Winchester

  Stainless Steel

  MARCIA TALLEY Little Italy

  Home Movies

  JOSEPH WALLACE Security Boulevard-Woodlawn

  Liminal

  LISA RESPERS FRANCE Howard Park

  Almost Missed It By a Hair

  CHARLIE STELLA Memorial Stadium

  Ode to the O’s

  SARAH WEINMAN Pikesville

  Don’t Walk in Front of Me

  PART III: THE WAY THINGS NEVER WERE

  DAN FESPERMAN Fells Point

  As Seen on TV

  TIM COCKEY Greenspring Valley

  The Haunting of Slink Ridgely

  JIM FUSILL Camden Yards

  The Homecoming

  BEN NEIHART Inner Harbor

  Frog Cycle

  SUJATA MASSEY Roland Park

  Goodwood Gardens

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  GREETINGS FROM CHARM CITY

  I belong here,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Baltimore, “where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is a really happy thought and not melancholy at all.”

  Fitzgerald was far from the first or last writer to feel a kinship with this mid-Atlantic city, although not all would have worded their sentiments as he did. Given that it was his wife’s psychiatric problems that drew him here, Fitzgerald, who belongs more to St. Paul than to Baltimore, can be forgiven his cynical view.

  As it happened, the couple ended up buried in suburban Rockville, Maryland, but Fitzgerald’s Baltimore roots went deeper than Zelda’s consultations with the city’s best psychiatrists. He was a descendant of Francis Scott Key, who penned our unsingable national anthem, a song that Baltimoreans defend only out of civic loyalty. We can’t sing it either, but we love to shout the “OHHHHHHHHHH” at baseball games, in celebration of our beloved Orioles. Which is odd because a ru Baltimorean, one who speaks in the local accent known as Bawlmerese, refers to the team as the Erioles, as surely as he calls a blaze a “far” and “warshes dishes in the zink.” (Baltimore joke: Why were the three wise men covered with ashes when they came to visit the Baby Jesus? Because they came from a far. Guess you had to be there. Correction: Guess you have to be here)

  Edgar Allan Poe lived here, got a boost to his literary ambitions by winning a prize here, and, far more famously, died here, creating twin mysteries—the truth of what happened to him in October 1849, and the identity of the “Poe Toaster,” who visits the original Poe gravesite on the writer’s birthday, January 19, leaving behind three red roses and a half-bottle of cognac.

  John Dos Passos passed time on the North Side, as did Gertrude Stein. (With Alice B. Toklas, of course.) Ogden Nash punned and rhymed here. Dorothy Parker’s ashes were kept in a file drawer here, but only because Baltimore is the national headquarters of the NAACP, which was willed her remains.

  H.L. Mencken avowed that he knew of no better place to live. Across Union Square from Mencken’s house, a boy named Russell Baker grew up. On nearby Stricker Street, Dashiell Hammett lived for a while as well, a trifecta of talent that should put Southwest Baltimore on any map of literary landmarks.

  As for Baltimore’s noir pedigree—it was here that Hammett worked as a Pinkerton agent, reporting to an office in the Continental building, a downtown high-rise that happened to feature a decorative motif of carved falcons. Painted gold now, but thought to be black in Hammett’s time. Am I claiming that the Maltese Falcon was born here? Prove that it wasn’t.

  Today, Baltimore is home to award-winning writers such as Anne Tyler, Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Dixon, and Taylor Branch. But perhaps one of the more interesting developments in Baltimore’s recent literary history is the large number of crime writers that have emerged—many of them from the daily newspaper, the Sun, and most of them represented in this volume. No one is sure why Sun writers so often turn to homicide, fictional and factual; the theories are speculative at best, if not downright libelous. But it happens that Sun reporters have won the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Nero Wolfe, Macavity, Shamus, Barry, John Creasey, and Steel Dagger awards for their novels and short stories. Very fitting for a newspaper where James M. Cain once worked.

  But then, to live in Baltimore—Bulletmore, Murderland, according to one famous piece of graffiti—is to be aware of killing; we have not enjoyed the sharp declines in homicide rates achieved by cities such as Boston and New York. We remain steadfastly in the top five, per capita, year in and year out. Statistically, two people died while I was working on this foreword.

  Baltimore also has an odd geographic distinction. It is one of only two major U.S. cities that lies in no county. (St. Louis is the other.) Landlocked on every side but one, which is water, it cannot expand or annex. Squeezed this way, it is a perfect setting for noir, which depends on an almost Darwinian desperation among its players.

  The Centers for Disease Control will tell you that Baltimore is the off-and-on capital of syphilis, but the true local malady is nostalgia, a romanticizing of our past that depends on much glossing and buffing, as if our history was just another set of marble steps to be cleaned. I have never forgotten listening to two colleagues at the Sun discuss the racism inherent in our celebration of the habits and attitudes of the Eastern European immigrants who helped to make Baltimore a great city. “Ask Thurgood Marshall how
fondly he remembers Baltimore,” one said of the late African-American Supreme Court justice, who grew up here. “Ask him if any waitresses every called him hon

  The writers in this collection eschew nostalgia without sacrificing affection. They confront the full irony that is Charm City, a place where you can go from the leafy beauty of the North Side neighborhoods to the gutted ghettos of the West Side in less than twenty minutes, then find your way to the revamped Inner Harbor in another ten. Homegrown Baltimore philosopher Virginia Baker once said: “If it ain’t right and it ain’t decent, stay the hell away from it.” Alas, Virginia. Baltimore’s no right. Fitzgerald’s claim aside, it’s hardly even polite anymore. But for a Baltimore writer, escape is the one concept where the imagination steadfastly fails. We belong here.

  Laura Lippman

  February 2006

  Baltimore, Maryland

  PART I

  The Way Things Used to Be

  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.”