Free Baltimore Noir by Laura Lippman

Trouble.” Lori Montgomery owns the bar and has been kissing off six-figure offers from the suits over at Harbor View Realty, which believes every old bar should be a new bar. Lori doesn’t want to go upscale. If she’s got to peel away like the Old Point Hotel and Lounge, then to hell, she says. She likes her French Tickler condom machine. She doesn’t want “No Limit Texas Holdem” tournaments; she wants her John Wilkes Booth. She stole the booth idea from Vesuvio’s, a beatnik bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Booth, after all, is a native son.
    Lori got married at Fort McHenry with a reception at the Clarence “Du” Burns Soccer Arena (it was one of my newsletter items), but I don’t know her status now. She’s Alison Krauss pretty. But Lori is old enough to be too old for me. I don’t want her to sell the bar. If I want upscale, I’ll drink in Annapolis.
    Tonight’s live band at Casey’s is Tongue Oil, a dog-eared local group known for its curious and ultimately unsatisfying version of “Stairway to Heaven.” I’d rather hear Mary Prankster—why can’t she drop by Casey’s?—when she headlines at Fletcher’s, and there’s Gina DeLuca Fridays at Leadbetter’s and Paul Wingo’s trio at Bertha’s. What I’m really thinking about is Mel’s frozen kitty. I tell Mel I want to see it. She smiles, takes her index finger, wets it with her studded, manta ray tongue, and mats down a twig in my eyebrow. Must have slept on it wrong. This is as close to foreplay as I’ve experienced in four months (no, six). Her face is nearby. Mel has an asterisk blood vessel under the iris of her left eye. I imagine someone hit her. “Are you all right?” I ask. The wrong answer is yes. I want her to be lonely and in danger. Lori slides over a bowl of oyster crackers. I question her timing sometimes.
    “Why do you want to see my kitty?” Mel doesn’t say it dirty.
    “I don’t know.” Liar boy.
    I squint to see what must be Steve, Mel’s boyfriend, hauling into the bar. I can tell a 33” waist a mile away. He’s got these meaty carpenter hands, too. A handsome fuck. Steve can’t bring himself to order a beer in this place, so he just hands Lori a business card. She doesn’t field it. Mel is still fiddling with my eyebrow, which hovers like some randy katydid.
    “Are we dating now?” I say.
    They say I woke up three minutes later, according to Mel’s Timex. I’m on a saggy sofa that has that sofa armpit smell. I was moved to Lori’s office, where a white kitten named Marble is playing footsies on my stomach. Christ, does everyone own a cat? I try to sit up but Ravens kicker Matt Stover apparently teed up my brain for a twenty-five-yard chip shot. Lori applies a heated washcloth on my forehead—I take back what I said about her being old. I called the cops on him, she says, the guy that’s with the realty company that wants me to sell. “Carpenter hands?” I say, somehow finding the strength to rename the prick. Mel closes in.
    “Carpenter hands,” she whispers, “prefers we not date.”
    Casey’s packs its urinals in ice. Lori says it’s been a tradition ever since her ex-husband’s grandfather opened the bar in 1927. The old man’s initialed whiskey flask still sits atop the cash register. His beat-up flute is still here, too. I’m here three weeks after boyfriend Steve thumped my head and after a particularly tense argument with Mr. Grimes over the appearance of twenty-five copies of Rear Window in the emporium. I had taken the initiative and ordered the shipment because the movie stars Grace Kelly. Mr. Grimes reacted—overreacted, I think—by charging me with a dull oyster knife. My life has become stressful. I don’t want any more intense excitement.
    “You’re too old for your age,” Lori says.
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning you like Grace Kelly and that Paul Desmond guy, whoever he is. You got old people tastes.”
    “Your bar is not exactly a youth