Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

Slink shot himself forward to the 1984 Hunt Cup, right up to the fifth jump, as Bewley’s Hill cleared the fence with balletic grace. Such a horse. Slink thought he was one of the really great ones. He drifted over to the hill, the irony there that always tore him up. Cindi Blake’s parents and their friends enjoying their big picnic while not two blankets away, in low menacing tones, Paul Jacobs was reading his nervous wife the riot act for the unspeakable crime of spilling a smidgen of white wine on his shoe.

Slink hated it. If he’d had hands, he’d have wrapped them around that no good murderous neck.

But Jacobs would die soon enough.

By the time Annie hit twenty-seven, the same age as Slink had been when he’d been broadsided by the school bus, she felt as if she was already dead. She knew that Paul was making time with that realtor who had found them their small brick house just off Lake Avenue. The realtor was a big blonde, with the kind of perverse preppy allure that had always spoken to Paul. Annie picked the long white strands off Paul’s sweater as she folded it and stowed it in the dresser. Personally, she didn’t know how the realtor could stand him. There wasn’t much charm left as far as Annie could see and what little remained was increasingly edgy. Half the nights, Annie slept on the couch. Though maybe half of those half, he’d come out and pull her roughly by the arm back into the bedroom.

Leave him, Slink would plead wordlessly. Go. Scram. You don’t need to be doing this.

He revisited seven-year-old Annie. He watched himself leaning against the Brewster’s kitchen door, pushing his cap back on his head and chatting with Annie’s mother. He watched Annie sitting at the kitchen table in front of a cereal bowl, her legs dangling above the floor. He watched as he winked at her and as she giggled, the legs swinging faster, back and forth and back and forth…

Leave him. C’mon, kid. For Christ’s sake, I forgive you already, okay?

And finally, she did just that. She left him. Dead on the living room floor on a crisp October morning. He was wearing one of those sweaters with the blond hairs on it. And he was wearing a lump the size of a lacrosse ball on the back of his head. Annie had worried that the bottle would break, but it didn’t. He’d been down on one knee, tying his shoelace. She had no idea where the strength came from to swing the bottle with such force. At breakfast that morning, he had pointed out an article in the Sun It had to do with the tenth anniversary of the unsolved murder of Cindi Blake. Annie remembered the photograph of the girl from back when the murder had occurred. She’d been a senior herself. Same age as Cindi Blake.

“I did that,” Paul had said casually, poking his finger into the photograph. “I picked her up, beat her with a shovel, and buried her. Stupid-ass cops. It’s a piece of cake to kill someone in this country.”

Then he stuffed a toothpick into his mouth and gave her a big uncharming smile.

The bottle didn’t break. It landed with a satisfying crack, and Paul slumped to the floor. Annie stood over him and watched to see if he moved. He didn’t. But to be sure, she went into the kitchen and returned with the largest knife she could find and planted it directly between his shoulder blades. The strength in her arms weakened and she ended up placing her foot against the handle and shoving the knife the rest of the way in with her foot.

She went back into the kitchen and fetched the newspaper. She circled the article with a marker, then returned to the living room and dropped the paper on her dead husband. It fluttered down onto him like a sheet.

I did that,” she said.

She left the house, wearing only a thin sweater for warmth. She picked her way through the woods to Lake Roland and down to the edge of the water. Finally, she stepped out of her shoes, then hugged herself tightly, watching a pair of mallards as they scuttled across the water. She felt enormously calm. Tranquil. It was a stupid little life, she thought. It didn’t really work.

Annie dove awkwardly into the water and began paddling toward the middle of the lake. Slink was watching. As always, he could see that she was a lousy swimmer. In fact, she was no swimmer at all. It was a dog paddle, and a lousy dog paddle at that. Her arms lost their strength well before she even reached the middle of the lake. As always.

She paused. Her arms slapped the surface of the water a few times, and then she went under. Silence, and then one final splash as an arm groped from the water. It looked almost like she was waving. The arm disappeared and concentric circles grew from the spot, wider and wider, until they too were gone.

Slink bowed his head. A wind blew and the trees around the lake released their leaves. They cascaded down like a rain of canaries.

Camden Yards

He felt his stomach clench as he approached the Fort McHenry Tunnel, and already he had a pounding headache, a growing tightness in his throat. But then Tess spotted the towering cranes in the harbor, said, “Giraffe skeletons,” and laughed aloud as flatbed containers swung across the graying sky. He saw her smile through the rearview mirror; sitting back there among the empty seats, she pointed east with the eraser end, amusing herself again, and then made a note in her diary, shaking her head, beaming.

As he packed the van, she asked if he’d show her where he grew up, where he went to school, where he took his trumpet lessons.

“Sure, sweetheart,” he said, wishing she hadn’t.

Six hours later, crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, he could feel the red brick closing around him, the dry dust of the bocce courts at St. Leo’s scratch-scratching his shoes, and he heard the murky water slapping Pier 5 at 4 a.m. as the Domino Sugars sign flickered across the harbor: a fourteen-year-old boy with his horn, Little Italy over his shoulder, and his father telling him there was nowhere to go, that he would never change.

Cars were backed up at the tunnel mouth.

Tess swung her bare feet in rhythm as she hummed and sketched, and he remembered her mother would do the same as she read a script, straddling the arm of their red love seat, iced tea on the table, a mint leaf.

He didn’t know if Tess thought her mother the ice-eyed murderer on TV’s Spencer: For Hire or the playful strawberry blonde in the photo he placed in a floral frame in her bedroom.

The photo was taken in Harvard Square the day he quit Berklee to follow her down. He wasn’t ready to play the New York clubs, and he’d already been shunned by Julliard, but she wanted Broadway and there was nothing he could do.

And then came the news, and Margaret Mary turned to fury, a relentless blame spout. Seven months later, only five pounds, six ounces, but otherwise fine. She insisted on Therese Ann, bitterly and without explanation. He shrugged, thinking Tess. Short for tesoro , his treasure.

Her figure returned in less than a year, and Margaret Mary bolted west. Her two-word exit line: “Keep her.”

He got the furniture too. Needing sanctuary, he loaded the van and went back to Boston, buoyed by his love for little Tess but certain one day she would leave too. A promise: For as long as he had her, they’d be together and he’d give her something they could always share. He couldn’t chance it’d only be music-Margaret Mary hated jazz, snickering at his tears when Miles played “Summer Nights”-so he brought his esor to Fenway Park. Baseball, and fathers and daughters, sprinkled throughout the stadium. Tess holding his hand, little steps, mustard on her dimpled chin.