Baltimore Noir by Laura Lippman

walked fast,” she said. “When I hit Pratt Street I stopped to catch my breath, sorry I didn’t hop that bus. My knees were aching. Not a cab in sight.”
    She stopped to watch a couple of tugboats nudge a Norwegian ship up against Pier 5 and moved on, pushing east against a cutting wind, head down, making time.
    “I was hoping to catch George before he shipped out and tell him I was sorry.”
    “For what?”
    “For everything.”
    Between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy, where organ grinders once kept their hairy beggars in an alley of sheds called Monkey Row, Leini turned toward a rough warren of warehouses and machine shops where heavy springs are forged and hawser line is coiled to the rafters.
    A saloon on every corner; pig feet on every bar; a story in every jar.
    Leini had not known guilt—pure, inexplicable guilt—since the son she’d conceived with George the week of their marriage was gunned down in the surf of Omaha Beach with the Maryland 29th. The city sparkles cold on a clear night and she remembers how she once navigated its odd turns with ease when summoned by Orlo to assignation.
    Walk to the end of Aliceanna Street till you see the side entrance to Maryland Chief … Yeah, the packing house … They’ll be tomato trucks crowding both sides of the street, you’ll hear crickets. It’s Bawlmer City but them ’mater trucks is loaded up with crickets. Wink at the watchman and he’ll point you toward Kai Hansen’s Wildflower docked out back.
    She passed an arching sally port—one of those narrow brick tunnels that separate the older rowhouses—and remembered, as she peeped into one on an especially derelict block, the room of velvet that Orlo had built for them over the summer of ’29, a room of skylights where they’d consummated an affair begun before her marriage.
    “Looking down that airy way, I started counting up all the lies I’d told and they rattled in my head like nickels in a bucket.”
    When I told her I wasn’t a priest she just kept on talking, a truck whose breaks had given out.
    “Then I was in Zeppie’s.”
    “Zeppie’s?”
    “Thames and Ann.”
    Zeppie’s was a neighborhood tavern where stevedores and deckhands started the day with boiled eggs, raw eggs, egg sandwiches, a shot, and a beer; a Polack gin mill that made a mint on work gloves and sold soup and sandwiches to laborers who settled their tabs with stolen hams and transistor radios.
    “George went there sometimes,” she said. “I wanted to have a drink with him. That’s something I’d never done.”
    “But he was already …”
    “Every now and then you could talk to George.”
    Zeppie’s was stag, the only broads you’d find there were Sissy Z. behind the bar, wives looking for their husband’s pay, and the busted onions upon whom that hard-earned cash was spilled.
    “I found a table in a corner where I didn’t think anyone would pay much attention.”
    Someone did. A tugboat captain who’d just tied up over at the Recreation Pier looked through the crowd and saw Leini and nothing else. He was clean shaven—he’d just washed up on the boat and changed out of his work clothes—handsome and more than a couple years younger than her.
    “He asked if he could sit down and then he was sitting down,” she said. “When I told him I was leaving, he turned to get me a beer and I was gone.”
    Out the door and pushing home again, remembering not that she had betrayed George a million times but Orlo only once. It was getting late. There was a pig’s head on the stove to deal with.
    “I still had the willies, only worse,” she said.
    Some kind of stick in her back.
    Denied passage with the clouds on its way out of this world, the condemned soul of George A. Papageorgious coursed along the crumbling curbs of Baltimore.
    From the Lorraine Tavern, where Orlo saw a morgue wagon as he worried his own way home, the ghost hugged the mossy seawall of the harbor, knocked a beer into the lap of a dapper