Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

“Close enough, tesoro “ he replied.

He set her on the bed, knelt to remove her sneakers. Her pajamas were in the drawer under the TV.

“I can brush my teeth better than you,” he said, trying to smile.

Waving off the nightly challenge, she offered her baby-soft cheek, then slithered under the covers, clothes and all.

Tess slept as if exhausted, unaware he was sitting on the bed across from hers, staring at her, reaching over now and then to stroke her hair. Tess, who resembled his mother as much as her own: olive hue, the round chin, deep brown eyes. His mother in the photo, him too. Easter Sunday, he’s five and she’ll be dead in three months.

“Your mother, she was some firecracker,” said one of the guys at Sabatino’s. “A temper? Madonna mio …”

Left unsaid: How did she wind up with a slug like that? Out of earshot, in the coffee shops off Broadway, actors, writers, producers said the same about Margaret Mary.

“Tess,” he cooed in the dark room, and he was thinking as his heart began to pound, and the headache again.

Bigelow could find him-a witness who could confirm the girl’s story of assault, of rape. And maybe Bigelow saw beyond the high beams and recognized the man behind the wheel, as the man had recognized him. The fruit-stand man’s son down from Massachusetts, the boy with the horn.

On his heels, running his hand across his forehead, he tried to envision the limits of Bigelow’s imagination, as if he could fathom a criminal mind.

He figured Bigelow, though full of bad intent, would do what was easiest first: return to Little Italy and see if the fruit-stand man still lived in the crumbling, graffiti-stained wood frame off Slemmers Alley.

He went to a chair by the window, and in the hotel room’s darkness a cold shiver swept over him, his stomach leaping to his throat.

Finding no satisfaction behind the rusted bars on the building’s windows, Bigelow would calculate: The fruit-stand man’s son had been lost in the construction site; his father dead, no doubt; a hotel near the yards, it being too late to drive home to Massachusetts.

Bigelow would find the van.

Tess slept serenely, a wry smile on her face.

He pulled back the heavy drapes. Looking through the rain, he saw the warehouse, pile drivers, excavators, remnants of the old roundhouse, and in his mind, the girl Bigelow had attacked, the panic in her eyes, desperation.

He stood and, as the drapes swung shut, he recalled a restaurant, its back to Slemmers Alley: Mo’s Fisherman’s Wharf, and maybe the staff was gone by 2 o’clock. The restaurants throughout Little Italy shutting down, Stiles Street empty, the alley also.

Bigelow would wait until then.

Looking at Tess.

Bigelow saw the little girl in the backseat, and she’s a witness too

He parked the van over on Aliceanna a block from the harbor, and he took out the old baseball bat he kept with a couple of tattered mitts under the rear seat. He headed north in the rain, fist wrapped around sullied tape above the crack in the handle.

When he turned the final corner, ready to enter the litter-strewn alley from the south end, he saw a figure.

Darting, he avoided a puddle and pressed himself into the shadows of a garage door and watched as Bigelow looked at the side of the tilted wood frame, stepping back, peering up, down.

He held back as Bigelow, frustrated, turned in the direction of Stiles.

Coming off the door, he shifted the cracked bat to his right hand.

Bigelow was maybe twenty feet away, easing toward a streetlight’s halo.

On Stiles Street now, Bigelow went wide eyed suddenly, retreating, raising his hands.

Three men marched at him, scowling, shoulders hunched, and Bigelow protested. “Hold on, fellas,” he said. “Hey, hold-”

With startling quickness, one of the dark-haired men brought a tire iron onto Bigelow’s head.

Bigelow mewed, staggered, and then issued a sickening gurgle as he fell to his knees.

Another blow, equally efficient, and he heard Bigelow groan.

Bat in hand, he ran forward and, bursting among the men, he slammed Bigelow, cracking him hard across the back of his head, sending him face first onto the wet sidewalk.

The men stomped Bigelow, swearing in Italian.

“My sister,” said the heavyset one, “my kid sister. Son of a bitch.”

Bigelow tried to roll into a ball.

Tess’s father raised the bat and smashed him again, and then again.

And again. And again.

Panting hard, his chest heaving, he looked down, tears mingling with the rain on his face.

Bigelow’s blood spread across the concrete.

He heard the thin, beak-nosed man to his left grunt as he drove his foot into the beaten man’s ribs.

Lisa. Lisa Ghiardini,” the thin man said. “First the mother, then you rape the daughter!”

The girl he’d seen running through the yards was the daughter of the woman Bigelow had pistol-whipped at the Colombo Bank. A girl from the neighborhood.

He staggered back, the bloody bat dangling from his fingers.

As two thin men continued to pound Bigelow, the stout Ghiardini looked up.

“Pete?” he said, gulping air, steam rising from the top of his head. “Pete Sangiovese?”

The two other men stopped for a moment, and Bigelow let out a low groan.

“Pete,” Ghiardini said, gesturing with a meaty hand, “over here. You want another shot? Come on. Take another shot.”

He turned, trotting along the alley. Running. Eager to disappear.

The bat went in the river at Fell’s Point, sinking beneath Styrofoam cups, condoms, and bobbing pop bottles. Before returning to the van, he ran his hands through a puddle, washing away Bigelow’s blood.

He drove quickly back to the hotel, knowing he’d done what he’d had to.

Tess was sleeping, purring gently, and the bathroom light was still on.

The note he’d attached to the mirror above the sink was still there: “I’ll be right back. Brush your beautiful teeth!”

Her pink toothbrush was dry.

He showered, and planned to wash his shirt and jeans in the hotel’s basement laundry room. He’d have to get new running shoes: Bigelow’s blood soaked through the gray laces, clung to the soles.

Putting on his pajama bottoms, he sat on the bed next to his daughter and he stared at her.

For as long as he had her, they’d be together. He would not let her feel alone.

His eyes moistened as he studied her sweet smile, heartshaped lips, long eyelashes; contentment…

No angels?

How could his father have been so wrong?

Inner Harbor

Cell Scope is a science education park that sits like some new blown-up nanotech herpes sore on the lip of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s a massive glass-and-steel base topped with a billowing white roof. Tonight it’s all lit up: holograms, fireworks, lasers, an immense smoke-pot that puffs DNA helixes into the air. Just off Pratt, on the torch-lit front esplanade, a four-girl Cirque du Soleil spinoff band plays whale-call jazz, and it actually sounds haunting, not phony. CEOs from New York and California, Maryland biotech investors, Japanese boys, a couple dozen news cameras, and, lucky me, fifty or sixty print reporters swarm through the mammoth glass doors for tonight’s big opening of Frog Cycle, the demented new exhibit I’m supposed to be promoting.

Or, I should say, Frog Cycle in the Kel-Shor Virtual Pond. Seriously, if Kel-Shor’s paying $4.5 million, I can spew the full name.

And to be truthful, I should state for the record that I am promoting the frogs, no mordant “supposed to be” bullshit.

But you know what? Pushing through the crowd, angling my way inside the main hall, circulating, I’m a redundant publicist. The frogs sell themselves. They’re not just a perfect example of Cell Scope’s mission, the translation of bone-dry sci-tech jargon into lip-smacking juicy lovely-bones show biz; no, they’re wicked, they’re wrong, they’re the end of the world as far as I’m concerned. And this morning, on the test run, they malfunctioned.