Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

“That’s usually what happens when you find a dead body,” I told her, trying to reach through the others to grasp hold of her arm. “You have had quite a shock. Let’s find you someplace to sit down and relax.”

“Suppose she don’t want to go with you.” A glowering young man whom I hadn’t noticed had his arm firmly wrapped around her waist. “Do you have some identification or something?”

“I’m not the police. I’m Jordan Rivers and I’m in charge of publicity here. I’m not going to take your friend far, just to an office on the next floor to get her away from the crowd. Security is having enough trouble keeping people away from the body, and in a minute they are going to figure that getting the details from the person who found the body might be the next best thing. Now, sweetie, what’s your name?”

“It’s okay, Chris,” she hiccupped in the direction of her protector, before turning to address me. “I’m Diana. I’m a wash girl at Divas Salon and I had just went to get some hair for my boss when-”

“No need to explain it all right now,” I said, aware of how gossip would sweep through this crowd. “Let’s go find you a chair and get you a glass of water or maybe some tea.”

Like a child trying not to lose a parent in a crowd, she reached out and grabbed hold of the back of my suit jacket. I guess I was about to find out how “wrinkle-free” my linen suit actually was. I guided her through the maze of people to the elevator and up to the third-floor meeting room used as our nerve center for the event. Along the way, I stopped to ask a security guard to send the police up as soon as they arrived. Several of my colleagues tried to catch my eye and some even called out my name but I kept moving, concentrating on trying to radiate serenity to Diana who had the back of my jacket balled up in a death grip. I shooed a few people from the room and grabbed a bottle of water for Diana out of the mini fridge in the corner as she dropped limply onto the beige couch that dominated one wall. I pulled a rolling chair from the conference table in the center of the room and turned it so I sat facing her.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Is there anyone I should call for you?”

“I should call my mom and tell her what happened,” she said. “Shoot! I left my purse downstairs, and my cell phone and everything is in it.”

“Don’t worry about it. Your friends will watch out for your stuff, I am sure. And in a minute this place will be crawling with Baltimore’s finest and I doubt that thieves will be making off with much today. So why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“I was washing hair for Cindy. I’m in cosmetology school and I work for her at Divas. A lot of us like to work the hair shows because you can make extra money and pick up some tips. I want to have my own salon someday. Anyway, Cindy had run out of hair and asked me to go get some more. I couldn’t find the color she needed in the top of the box and so I kept digging, and that’s when I felt something hard. I pulled my hand out and it was sticky. I realized that it was blood and I started pulling hair out of the box, and that’s when I saw him. I just started screaming and I couldn’t even talk. It was awful.”

“How was he laying?”

“He was on his stomach,” she said, before covering her hands with her face as if trying to blot out the memory. “He had a pair of scissors sticking out of his back.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if to warm her body. I sympathized with her, having found my beloved Aunt Tilly’s body. And while her death hadn’t been a violent one, I knew the shock which accompanied seeing the shell of a person after the spirit had fled. It was a sight that could chill you.

Before I could ask anything more, a pair of police detectives walked in and I suppressed a groan. Did I mention that Baltimore was small?

“Jordan,” my sister said with that girl-don’t-give-me-nomess tone I knew all too well. “Can you excuse us please?”

I know, I know-what are the odds of my sister catching the body at my convention? Actually, in Baltimore, about one-in-five. Census says 600,000-plus in the city proper, over a million in the metro area, but I swear there are only sixty, seventy-five people tops, and I know them all. So, anyway, my good luck, right? Wrong.

You would think my sister Euphrates and I would be closer despite the fifteen-year age difference. She knew the agony of being saddled with a name that elicited guffaws and corny jokes, even though she had used her middle name, Patricia, ever since she was a teenager. But we couldn’t be more different. At 5 9” she was way taller than me, and where I could pinch way more than an inch, she was thin and muscular. I was a glam girl who loved the latest hairstyles and fashions and she looked like she had been wearing the same outfit since 1991, though the colors rotated among blue, black, and army-green.

But our differences went more than skin deep. She’s always been as straitlaced as they come and more of a second mother to me than an older sister. As my mama liked to say, “Euphrates don’t stand for no types of nonsense,” and that’s probably what drew her to the police force straight out of high school. When she made detective, she was the youngest African-American woman in the history of the department.

But the wildest thing she ever did was marry a white Jewish guy and set up house in a semi-Orthodox neighborhood in Pikesville where they were raising my gorgeous niece and nephew. While I considered myself a bit of a free spirit, my sister never met a rule she didn’t like. Sometimes it seemed like she would purposely set out to do the exact opposite of what I did. If I went right, she went left. Even though she opted for a career just like I did, she still managed to get her Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice by going to school at night, and I knew she was disappointed that I didn’t go to college. It was as if she thought everything I did or didn’t do was personally directed at her. I felt the same about her too, some days. I was convinced that she kept her hair cut short in a natural as a direct slap at me as a stylist. Like she would much rather go to a barber shop than have her own sister do her hair.

Now her partner, Ahmad Johansen, was another story. I had long ago decided that Ahmad was my soul mate, though he has been a bit slower at coming to that realization. Ahmad means “greatly praised” in Arabic, and Detective Johansen had a lot to be praised for. Six-foot-two, chiseled physique with café au lait skin, gray eyes, and a voice that rivaled Barry White, the man was the epitome of fine but carried himself in such a way that you knew he had no idea why women had a tendency to stop and stare at him when he walked by. He was as easygoing as my sister was stiff. They made quite a team.

After a few minutes, the office door opened and my sister and Ahmad came out. “U”, as I liked to call her to remind her that someone hadn’t forgotten where she came from, motioned to a uniformed officer further up the hallway. He looked all of twenty years old and scrambled to do my sister’s bidding.

“We are going to transport the witness to the station to take a formal statement,” she told the cadet. “Until then, make sure no one talks to her.”

She looked right at me when she said that, then added: “Jordan, where can we chat?”

We walked down the corridor into another meeting space, this one small, and probably more importantly to my sister, unoccupied. U motioned for me to sit in one of the chairs, but I chose to lean against the meeting table instead. No way was she going to make me feel like a suspect by towering over me during questioning.

“So,” my sister said, “what do you know?”