Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

Other spirits appeared to Slink and he spent time-whatever that was-with them. He still went to Pimlico to watch the races, only now, if he wanted, he could ride with the jockeys as they lumbered into the homestretch. And now, of course, he knew the winners. For what it mattered. He kicked around the long-gone fish market at Market and Pratt, where he had ventured sometimes as a kid. The fishmongers in their high rubber boots shot their hoses right through him and had no idea. Even dead, the smell of the place was still rank and briny. Slink and another dead crony took in some shows at the Two O’clock Club, but Slink had found Blaze’s act a little too agitating, even in his dreamy dead state. That became his joke. “I ain’t dead yet.” And he’d laugh. But he’d also feel an uncommon warmth in the area of his heart and he discovered that what he was was sad. Being dead brought with it a melancholy streak that was brand new to Slink, something he hadn’t experienced much in his living days. It wasn’t bad feeling necessarily. The feeling made him thoughtful. Reflective. Gave him something to chew on. Threw a new light on things. Slink meandered into the tiny backstage dressing room at the Two O’clock and watched Blaze playing mother to a tearful dancer, and he was so filled with sadness and joy he didn’t know what to do with himself.

“This dead thing,” he said to one of his cronies, “it’s really something, isn’t it? I had no idea.”

And he kept his eye on Annie Brewster. That move with the gloves and the flower at his funeral, that stuck with him. He worried about her. A month after his funeral, Slink had watched Annie in her bedroom, jabbing his toothpick against her thighs over and over, just to make it hurt. She was a peculiar kid, cracked odd jokes at odd times, didn’t harvest much in the way of close friends. Her teachers called her “artistic” when they weren’t calling her “problematic.” Annie liked to spend time alone. She read depressing books, she liked to draw, she liked to get into fights with boys. Slink drifted forward to when Annie was sixteen and watched her almost get into some serious trouble with the Burton boy. It was one thing when they were both eleven and pudgy Ted Burton had a loyal puppy crush on her. Then, Annie’s little cruelties didn’t hit home so much. But later, Annie carelessly plucked a ripe nerve in the hulking boy and he nearly pinched her arms off shaking her the way he did.

Slink worried.

“I feel responsible,” Slink told another dead person as they were looking in on the incredible 1958 Colts-Giants game. “She blames herself for my death. You can see it, it’s really screwed her up. That’s not a healthy girl there. It’s like I’m haunting her or something.”

Slink checked things out in Annie’s sophomore year at Bennington. It was none of his business, he knew, if she was sleeping with her roommate’s boyfriend. But he also knew-he’d seen-how she would willfully misplay the affair when it came to light in the spring and earn herself a half-dozen solid enemies. Or the following year, when she would nearly cause her faculty adviser to be tossed out of the school.

And he knew what was coming. He’d been there over and over again already.

“She’s got no self-regard, you know what I mean? Poor crazy kid. You just open yourself up for big-time trouble. She’s a sitting duck. I feel rotten about it.”

Slink attended Annie’s graduation. The day was steamy and thick. Everyone, the guests, the students, the faculty, were fanning themselves with their programs. The commencement speaker-a famous actor with an equally famous wife-urged the new graduates to “seize the day” and “to march to their own drum.” Annie squirmed in her folding chair and laughed derisively. She contorted the advice, and when she met the actor at a reception following the ceremony, she held firmly to his hand and leaned forward to whisper into his ear, “Seize the drum.”

Slink watched sadly as the two refreshed their drinks and sought a quiet corner to chat. Slink moved forward two months to watch the end of the affair, the famous wife arriving unexpectedly at their Manhattan apartment.

“Who the hell is this little thing?”

Annie was out on the sidewalk in under five minutes, still fumbling with the buttons on her blouse. Slink knew that her next three months would go poorly. She’d get no traction in Manhattan. The city spooked her. Her veneer of insular confidence shattered like a sheet of sugar candy. She never found her stride, and in early autumn she left her rent unpaid and took the subway to Penn Station and bought a one-way ticket back to Baltimore. She was crying quietly as she boarded the train. Slink also took the ride. He took it over and over and over again. Each time he knew there was no way to keep Annie from taking the seat next to the red-haired man but each time he tried anyway to will her to keep moving on to the next car.

The man’s name was Paul. The toothpick in his mouth wiggled as he turned and smiled at the pretty young woman. Each time she was slow to react, but each time, when she finally did, it was as if her face might crack into a hundred bits. Such a smile.

“Hi.” And she slid her small hand into his. Just handed it right over. Slink could’ve killed her.

No!

Paul Jacobs had blood on his hands. Slink went back a few years to Loch Raven Reservoir on a half-moon night in May, and there he was. Slink couldn’t stand to see the act-not after that first time-so he always arrived just when it was over. Clouds drifted swiftly past the moon, giving the scene a pulsing, blue-strobe effect. The trees, the rocks, the flat black water, the shovel. She was a Maryvale girl. Cindi Blake. Car broken down. Help from a passing stranger. The doors on auto-lock, controlled by the driver.

The grave wasn’t terribly deep. But deep enough to let a week go by before a couple of teenagers would happen on it. Cindi Blake’s photograph had led all the local newscasts the entire week. Her parents pleading for their daughter’s safe return. The police asking “for any information.” One of those ugly weeks, ending on an even uglier Thursday, when the newscasters looked balefully into the cameras and paused before announcing, “It’s over.”

He had charm, this Jacobs character. He had the gift of gab, the twinkle in the eye. Slink knew this type. The rough diamond.

And that was the thing. Rough. Annie got a little taste of it even before she married him. A backhand at the breakfast table, so fast it was a blur. No marks, and followed that time with apologies, then brooding, then calculated sheepishness, and finally the unchecked fawning. It had worked. She hadn’t broken off the engagement. The honeymoon in Bermuda was pretty nice, except for the few minor incidents. Paul charmed his way out of the misunderstanding with that one couple from Charlottesville, though his temper back in the hotel room wasn’t a pretty sight. Annie had never learned to swim very well, so she spent her beach time sitting on the pink sand trying not to compare herself to the others. She ran across a short piece in a magazine about the famous actor she’d spent time with in Manhattan. He was divorcing his famous wife. Annie felt like all that was a thousand lifetimes ago. She was amazed now to recall that she had done such a thing. She felt that those crazy brave days were over. Forever. She looked up from the magazine and stared out at the surf. Her voice was barely audible.

“Take me.”

And that evening, in the hotel bar, she watched her husband flirting with a systems analyst from London. She watched as the woman laughed and plucked the ubiquitous toothpick from Paul’s lips. Back in her room, Annie pulled Slink’s toothpick from her travel jewelry case and studied it for several long minutes. Slink was there, in the room. It broke his heart when Annie began to cry in great heaving sobs. It broke his heart even more when she stuck the tip of the old toothpick against her arm and pressed it hard against her skin, until the pucker point was bone white.