“This man is trying to kill me!” I called out, and my eyes were filling with tears.
“Gotta take him to Southwestern,” Cooper said.
“He killed that girl in Pigtown!” I said, but the other door had already swung shut and nobody else heard.
Cooper was a lot bigger than I was and he was holding my arm tight as he tried to pull me away from the door. I was attempting to stand my ground, but he was dragging me.
“No!” I screamed. “Help! Murder!”
He slapped me across the face, but I did not stop shouting. Finally, he pulled the gun from his holster and pushed me against a wall. There was nobody around. I was sure he was going to kill me.
“I’ll be quiet,” I said.
“And act calm too,” he said through his teeth. I thought he was going to lead me to where the radio cars were parked, but instead he took me in the opposite direction. “You both did it, didn’t you?”
“Shut up,” he said, and he continued to push me along.
He was going to kill me and I had made it easier for him, I thought. I started to resist and he reached for his gun again.
“Hold it there,” someone said. It was Detective Kastel from the window of an old Plymouth coupe.
“Gotta take this kid to Southwestern,” Cooper said, and he slipped his revolver back into his holster.
“I’ll give you a lift,” Kastel offered.
“He’s trying to kill me,” I said.
“Sure he is,” Kastel replied and chuckled.
“He’s the accomplice in the Ludka case,” Cooper said.
“Sure he is,” Kastel said, with the same sarcasm. He was out of his car and he had his own revolver drawn. “Let the kid go.”
“Hagen told me this kid was with him,” Cooper said.
“I didn’t do it,” I said.
“Let him go,” Kastel said.
“These kids are full of lies.”
“I know.”
“Put that gun away,” Cooper said, but he had nothing to bargain with now that his own pistol was in the holster.
“It’s homicide, let’s go back into the station,” Kastel said. He was talking about the Central Station, now half a block away. I guess he was going to leave his car at the curb.
“He killed both of them,” I said, and Kastel started to chuckle.
“How about putting the gun away,” Cooper said again.
“Kid’s dangerous. You go on ahead with him.”
Cooper still had me by the arm and he was marching me back to the entrance at Central.
“You don’t need the gun with two of us watching him,” Cooper said.
“I know,” Kastel said, but he didn’t put his gun away.
In rapid succession, Cooper swung me around and pushed me into Kastel. He drew his own pistol and pulled me back. I was in worse shape now, because Cooper had his pistol and he was now using me as a shield.
“You back away, detective,” Cooper said.
Something about the way he said it made me think he was going to kill me and Kastel too. Kastel must have thought that as well, because he aimed his gun at Cooper’s head. Cooper could no longer afford to hold his own gun on me and he raised it-but he didn’t fire.
The flash of Kastel’s gun stung my face and blinded me for a moment. I heard the crack, but I heard no sound from Cooper or his gun. He squeezed my arm hard. I looked over my shoulder to see a bloody hole where his left eye had been. He was just standing there, holding his gun with one hand and my arm with the other.
I had no idea whether Cooper held me a few seconds or a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever before he finally released me and slumped sideways onto the sidewalk. His gun fell into the street.
I did not feel safe until Kastel checked his pulse and told me he was dead.
Apparently, my grandmother had finally figured out that I was looking for Kastel not to confess but to tell him who I thought had killed Birute. A friend who spoke English had found him at home. He was on his way to the Central Police Station when he saw Cooper Joseph Braddock, C.J. Braddock, Cooper the Cop, pulling me along the sidewalk.
He asked how I knew it was Cooper and I told him that Cooper always came down and asked questions but never came down after Birute Ludka’s murder. I explained that I didn’t go to Central first because I didn’t know homicide detectives worked out of there. It was why I called Southwestern in the first place, and accidentally got Cooper on the telephone.
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Detective Kastel said.
“No shit,” I answered, and my cheeks went straight to hot.
Kastel chuckled.
“You’d better take me home. My grandmother is probably worried about me.”
“I’ll tell her that you’re a hero.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I would be a bigger hero if I told the truth in the first place-but I might be dead.
OVER MY DEAD BODY BY ROB HIAASEN
Fell’s Point
In the John Wilkes Booth at Casey’s in Fell’s Point, I’m drinking Bass Ale on Palm Sunday afternoon. Above the booth, the April 15, 1865 front page of the New York Herald is preserved in a dime-store frame: a skinny black number separating at its corners. On the newspaper page, six leggy columns bring us the official dispatches on the “Death of the President.” Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m., which I did not know. “There is intense excitement here,” the paper reported. No intense excitement here today, but I have hope. Fell’s Point, once the major shipbuilding spoke of Baltimore, once a nest of sailors, once a place where Labradors could slurp a National Bohemian at the Full Moon Saloon, is now a gentrified waterfront community. At least the neighborhood has preserved, bless my home, its running battle with a roving apostrophe: Fells Point. Fell’s Point. I prefer an apostrophe since I’m the possessive type.
Bars along Thames and Fleet and Aliceanna Streets are selling for $1.5 million and $2.1 million, and even Alicia over at Birds of a Feather might sell her license to offer ninety brands of scotch; the knitting club obviously won’t be able to meet there anymore. The Whistling Oyster is still open, but I hear they were asking $800,000 for the property. The Dead End Saloon? $2.1 million. Even that hokey schooner, Nighthawk, skipped town-not that I ever wanted to sail on one its “Mystery!” cruises. See, the urbanites have arrived, the new immigrants. They leave flyers at The Daily Grind coffeehouse that read, “Dramatic Loft Space Available. 20 X 80. Many Goodies for the Self-Indulgent Urbanite.” Soon enough, they’ll be calling Fell’s Point “Inner Harbor East.” Even the panhandlers in Fell’s Point are upscale: they don’t directly ask for money; they remind you to use the central parking meters and please display the receipt on your dashboard.
Christina still waits in her window, though. Christina, a psychic advisor, must be sixty-eight now, but still waits to sell you a piece of your future. Bertha’s bar and her worldfamous bumper stickers are still here, and the immortalized The Horse You Came in On, and my favorite watering hole. Casey’s is two blocks down from the Recreation Pier, where they filmed the TV drama, Homicide. Baltimore’s amphibious Duck Tour grinds by, as tourists with duckbill-yellow quackers hope to witness a shooting or maybe just a chalk outline for old time’s sake. But all that’s left is a plaque: “In This Building from 1992-1999 a Group of Talented People Created a Television Legend-Homicide: Life on the Street.” The city wants to turn the pier into something called a boutique hotel, according to the community newsletter and my employer, the Fell’s Pointer
My name is Michael Flanagan: I’m twenty-three, collect snow globes, eat entire rolls of Butter Rum Lifesavers after lunch, had a girlfriend once who convinced me to paint my toenails cobalt; have promised myself to one day see Aruba; Sundays wreck me (I should be thinking hopefully of the week ahead, but my mood reverses itself: the dull bulk of the past pins me), and I think Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” might be better than Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Since last year, I have been a staff writer for the Fell’s Pointer, which firmly believes in an apostrophe. I write about bicycle master plans, the harbor’s garbage skimmers, and once I wrote a feature about Twiggy, a water-skiing squirrel that is pulled by a remote-controlled boat. My stories have also warned readers about leaving bricks on their property because they tend to be used as weapons during robbery attempts.