Read Online Baltimore Noir by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online Page B

Street—and the “th” is pronounced. I wrote the story when they shut down the bubble machine—an exclusive, you could say.
    I accomplish three things in bars: consume quality adult beverages, bribe the jukebox, and form crushes. This Palm Sunday, I had planned to start my novel, but I got hung up again on the title—either Flight Risk Clumsy Heart, Save the Bows. Unable to commit, I channeled my creative thinking into imagining a dancer coming in from Larry Flynt’s Baltimore strip club. She would make herself at home in the John Wilkes Booth. She would tell me her name is Amber or Savannah or Misty and she has a boyfriend named Ronnie, and Ronnie initially was very cool about this stripping business because the money is extraordinary and she never kisses her customers or tells them her real name. She just takes the money over and over again. But then Ronnie, with his dumb-fuck mind, switches his thinking and thinks she owes him more. He just doesn’t know how to confess his loneliness, his jealousy. I could save her! You see why the novel writing is not going well. The jukebox carries Wilson Pickett, so I play “Mustang Sally” and “Funky Broadway” and order another Bass. But this is no novel; this is the truth. A woman does come in.
    “I’m Mel.”
    “I’m Michael.”
    “Hi, Mikey.”
    “No, it’s Michael.”
    So, she’s no Amber or Misty. I’m way off with the names. (Mel later tells me her boyfriend’s name is Steve. Go figure.) Mel says she quit her job today. She was working as a topless cleaning lady for a new company called Dirty Minds Not Houses! She had responded to an ad in the alternative weekly, City Paper, and was surprised to learn she could start that day. During a cursory employee orientation conducted via e-mail, she was told cleaning supplies would not be necessary but she would have to provide her own transportation. Her first job was out in the suburbs, one of the new Irish-themed developments along Padonia Road. Mel showed up at the Tullamore Townhouses with a half-dozen rags (her niece’s hand-me-down diapers), Pledge (with natural orange oil), and Windex. She’d be damned if she wouldn’t get some cleaning done, at least the windows. Maybe if he’s got a vacuum …
    No one was home. Or, no one answered the door, Mel says. Just a note was left: “Come back tonight after 11,” with one of those sideways smiley faces people use in e-mails.
    “I know, I know. It was stupid to even go. But I thought, hell, why not show some tit and make $75?” Mel says. “Yes, I know! Stupid.”
    Plus, you can’t do business in this world with people who make those smiley faces, we both agree.
    Melanie Rogers is twenty-two. Her hair is the color of a metallic brown Hot Wheels car I once owned—either my Camaro or Chaparral. She’s wearing brown corduroys with a wide black belt, but she’s missed a loop off the right hip. Mel has a man’s Timex watch, and some girls look good in men’s watches, they just do. She’s drinking Miller Light and starts a story somewhere in the middle.
    “I put one of them in a Victoria’s Secret box. Their boxes are so pretty.”
    Wilson Pickett is through. I need to hear the Stones, and fortunately the bubble-tube Wurlitzer jukebox maintains a disproportionate ratio of Stones-to-shit music. A dollar will buy me two plays, and I choose “Happy” and “Stop Breaking Down,” both off Exile on Main St
    “Tino died the next morning. So I put her and the Victoria’s Secret box in the freezer.”
    “Who?”
    “My stray cat. She had eight kittens in my basement. All white. I gave them all away except for Tino. The one in the freezer.”
    Behind the bar, I look at the skyline of Yukon Jack, Southern Comfort, Jack Daniel’s, Montezuma Triple Sec. Signs and bumper stickers garland the cash register: “Street Girls Bringing in Sailors Must Pay for Room in Advance,” and “Save the Ales,” and “If It Has Tires or Testicles, It’s Going to Give You