The Horse You Came in On Page 21

  “How good is Baltimore’s chance?”

  “Very. Not, though, as good as a lot of people want to believe. It’s really complicated. A lot of money’s involved, and, naturally, the city has to have a stadium.”

  “You’ve got a new one.”

  “Camden Yards is for the Orioles. Just for baseball. Oh, what a stadium that is! I go down there just to sit and look at it. But we’ve still got Memorial Stadium, so that’s no problem. Baltimore will likely be one of the three, but it’s the first two that count, and it’s my bet Charlotte will head the list. That’s in North Carolina,” he added helpfully. “And then there are all the wheels within wheels: the various people and groups who want to buy and manage a team and who have to convince the NFL they’re the ones that can do it. People and groups with money and clout have been popping up, dropping out, forming, re-forming for years here. Financiers, hoteliers—even authors. Tom Clancy’s one of them.”

  “The writer?” When Muldare nodded, Jury said, “But surely you’re talking about millions.”

  “A lot of millions. Clancy has money, but not that kind. What he’s got is marquee value. Like Barry Levinson. You know, the movie guy. The director. Trouble there is Levinson doesn’t have the controlling interest in his particular group. Then there’s me—” in mock self-congratulation, Muldare inclined his head, smiling—“who also paid my one hundred thousand to get my foot in the door.”

  Ellen had said Muldare was rich. That rich? Jury’s surprise showed in his face.

  “Well, I’ve got backers, too. Yeah, I might be able to raise one or two hundred million, but then there’s money to buy the players and so forth. What I’m doing right now is trying to buy the name back. The Colts name. If Isray will sell it. I need to do something, oh—” he squinted upwards, still turning, turning the football between his fingers—“glittery, something stagy, something—Hollywood. You know?” He let the football drop softly in his lap as he drew a banner-like stripe in the air.

  Jury smiled. “Marquee value.”

  “You bet,” said Muldare. “Thing is, if you were an owner, if you were sitting around the table with the other owners, who’d you rather chew the rag with? Clancy, Hollywood, or just some tweedy teacher type—a Colts devotee, sure, but still . . . ?” He shrugged, tossed the ball up, caught it.

  And in his mind, ran it, Jury imagined. Marquee value. Jury frowned slightly as he studied the rim of light around the bookcase, then the shelves themselves, crammed with souvenirs of old games—miniature helmets, a couple of scruffy-looking pigskins, pens, ticket stubs, photos.

  And he wondered: just how much marquee value would Edgar Allan Poe have?

  He wondered this as Muldare’s football got him right in the stomach. “Uh!”

  “Reflexes—reflexes, Superintendent.” Pat Muldare grinned.

  25

  It took some convincing to get Hughie to disgorge Melrose into Cider Alley, not because its prospect was somewhat dim and more than a little scruffy, but because it was so near the new ballpark. Camden Yards, home to the Baltimore Orioles, was a must-see on Hughie’s tour list, second only to the Baltimore Aquarium. That Melrose would be stepping out of his cab within breathing distance of this spanking-new stadium and not into its glorious environs was something that left Hughie speechless—and that was saying a great deal. The cab did speed off, but only with a promise from Melrose that the tour would continue later.

  Cider Alley was just what its name suggested, a short and narrow street, little more than a passage, connecting Eutaw and Paca streets. There was nothing here by way of commerce that Melrose could see, except for what appeared to be the rear of what might have been a bar or a club, through the glass doors of which a handful of people came and went. Further along, past several dark doorways, Melrose saw a small band of people, these appearing to be permanent residents of Cider Alley. Three men were smoking and tilting bottles in brown sacks to their lips; a fourth was warming his hands over the low flames of an oil drum. Melrose approached them, thereby igniting a thirst for charitable contributions that matched the thirst for hard drink. One and all they asked for a variety of handouts, ranging from a quarter (that ubiquitous quarter) to, after they had a better chance to inspect his clothes and up the ante, a dollar. Melrose was pleased to oblige and offered even more in return for information. He had often remarked that money could open mouths, eyes, and, occasionally, even hearts.

  “Hey, m’mahn!” retorted the black man in mirror sunglasses. “You ain’t the police, is you? We got the fuckin’ po-lice up the ass.”

  “It’s been my experience police don’t offer money in exchange for information. They just shoot you.”

  A round of ribald laughter, and a fat man said, “It’s about John-Joy, ain’t it? They come round here asking questions after John-Joy got his-self smoked.”

  “Yes. It’s a personal, not a police, matter.”

  “You fambly? Always said he had fambly,” said the androgynous mass of rags by the oil drum who Melrose had taken for a man and who turned out to be female, or at least Melrose thought so.

  “Did he, then?” Doesn’t everyone, more or less?

  “John-Joy, he was on and on about his people,” said another black man, leaning against the wall. “ ‘I got the doin’s!’ John-Joy say. ‘I got the doin’s!’ ” And here he slapped at the area of his heart.

  Melrose frowned. “ ‘The doin’s’? What did he mean by that, do you think?”

  The black shrugged, lifted his pint bottle, and, seeing that the line was dangerously low, shook it just a bit for their visitor’s inspection. Melrose said he would be happy to buy him a drink and pressed a note into his hand. “That there,” said the man, hooking his thumb over his shoulder, indicating, apparently, a wire basket on wheels that Melrose thought might be the sort one pushes around in the enormous supermarkets of this country, supermarkets like small cities. It was piled high with the detritus of life on the streets.

  The black man nodded and said, “Them’s the doin’s, we reckon.” He smiled broadly.

  The “doings” consisted of a couple of blankets, a bundle of old clothes, shopping bags full of cast-off items probably garnered from rubbish bins, like the quarter-full green carton of Cascade dishwashing powder. Also books, and Melrose found that a little odd, given the man’s position. And papers. “Why didn’t the police take possession of these?”

  “Dint know about it, mahn. Wouldn’ta cared if they did. John-Joy, he a street dude, mahn.”

  “But they did question you, didn’t they?” Melrose picked up one of the volumes, stained and fox-marked—an account of the Civil War, it appeared to be. Then there were pamphlets, notebooks, old ledgers, one of which looked like it might have come out of the St. James Hotel with its list of names.

  The black man snorted. “They don’t pay no attention to us, mahn. Ast us did we see anythin’, hear anythin’. I say, ‘Yeah, mahn, we see the moon, we hear the rain.’ ”

  Melrose smiled. “Good answer. What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “No, I don’ mind. Estes. Easy, they call me. I’m Jamaican, mahn.”

  “Well, besides the moon and the rain, did you see anything, Estes? Or any of you?”

  “Only me and Carl was here. Twyla was gone.” He nodded towards the woman. “So was Bernard.” Nod towards the fat man wearing a poncho. Estes shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Hmm. Where did they find him?” Melrose looked down the alley.

  “Other end,” said Estes. “You want I show you?”

  The others clearly suspected that more money was about to change hands and started arguing with Easy that they knew just as much as he did about John-Joy. They were not to be left out of this scheme and trotted along to the other end.

  Estes, with very colorful language, described the scene as he saw it in his mind’s eye. John-Joy trundling his cart along, a figure creeping out of the shadows, and then—here Estes crossed his hands in front of his neck and made
a pulling motion.

  In a voice so irate it was a squeal, the woman objected: “Hell, you don’t know that any more’n I do. You wasn’t here—you just makin’ it up.” She turned to Melrose with her own superior knowledge. “You ask Milos—Milos, he says he found him.”

  “That is fuckin’ insane, Twyla. Milos is blind and deaf, so how the hell he’d know?”

  “Milos?” Melrose feigned ignorance.

  “Blind man hangs out over to Howard Street near some shop named . . . New somethin’, . . . I can’t remember.” Estes turned to Twyla and continued: “The cops found his body.”

  Twyla looked disgruntled and mashed her gums around, but she couldn’t deny the truth of this.

  Melrose dispensed another round of bills and they all moved, as a mass, back up the alley to the oil drum. Melrose wanted that market cart.

  He asked, warming his own hands over the drum in a rush of camaraderie, “Who owns the doin’s now—everyone?” He looked around at the four faces, the bare or half-mittened hands fixed above the oil drum, the cheeks of the woman actually rosy in the firelight.

  Estes looked a question at the others. None of them laid claim to the doin’s, which surprised Melrose. He thought they’d fight over the basket. But perhaps their instinct was that this recent swelling of their ranks meant a fair shake, that he had behaved very well towards them and, with his Old World savvy and, of course, his bankroll, might deliver them from their predicament of Who Owns the Doin’s.

  Melrose enjoyed thinking this, at least. “Would you be willing to sell the cart—” Melrose nodded toward the wire basket—“for, say, a hundred dollars?”

  Their mouths dropped open.

  Since no one immediately took him up on it, perhaps he should raise the price. After all he hadn’t rooted right down to the bottom. Maybe there was a baby in there. “Two hundred?”

  But Estes was suspicious. “Hell you want that junk for? Some valuables in there?”

  “Not that I know of. You’re welcome to go through it if you like before I take it. That is, of course, if you’re all willing to sell it. But I’ll tell you why I want it: only because it might offer up some clue as to why the man was murdered, that’s all.”

  “Two hunnert, huh? Two hunnert?” The fat man was busy with a mental arithmetic that was getting the better of him. He scratched his grizzled hair and pulled at a ragged ear in concentration.

  “Fifty apiece,” said Melrose, helping him.

  The bargain was struck and Melrose peeled off four fifties, to their delight, since that meant no haggling over who’d get the bills changed or hold the money. Each got a fifty.

  “Tell me something: did John-Joy have any particular friends—I mean, besides this Milos person and yourselves—in whom he might have confided?”

  “Confided what? John-Joy went along chantin’ all the time, mister. Just went round chantin’ worse’n a bunch of Democrats with rubber checks. He kept on sayin’ he was to be rich one day, real rich, soon as he got him a lawyer. ‘I got the doin’s! I got the doin’s!’ My, that man could be an aggravation.”

  “Didn’t he ever explain what he meant by that?”

  Estes said, helpfully, “Tell you what, mahn. He say he got a friend name of Wes over to the shelter, that big shelter called Cloudcover over on Fayette. Mighta had other friends over there, too. John-Joy used to stay there nights when he had the money.”

  “Well, thanks very much. I might stop back to talk a little more, if you don’t mind.”

  They certainly didn’t.

  • • •

  Melrose stopped on the other side of Harborplace and got out his guide. They’d told him it wasn’t too far, and he hoped his Cider Alley cohorts weren’t like Brits giving directions: Oh, just go to the top of the street, there, love, and then walk along a bit, and after a little while you’ll see Acacia Cottage (or wherever you were looking for and would likely never find)—and then you walk to the top of the street and keep on walking (for days and days, it usually seemed), and next thing you’re in Edinburgh. . . .

  He’d been trundling the cart before him for blocks, sorry now he’d dismissed Hughie, but not wanting to hop in a strange cab with his grocery cart and ask to be taken to a shelter.

  For one thing, he wasn’t dressed for it.

  He looked down at his cashmere topcoat, his Liberty silk scarf, and frowned. On top of the pile of stuff in the cart was a heavy old coat, a sort of salt-and-pepper wool with big black buttons that wouldn’t, of course, fit, but that was hardly the point. He removed and folded up his topcoat and put on the black one. The arms were too short and the shoulders drooped off his shoulders and he wondered what gorilla it had originally been tailored for.

  He also removed his calfskin gloves and dug around for the dark brown mittens he’d seen in there. There was a cap, too, with ear flaps. He put that on his head. On top of the pile was a plastic cup shaped like Mickey Mouse, the inside of which he inspected. As he looked over the top of the metal rubbish bin on which he was resting his Strangers’ Guide, he saw two children, tongues sculpting their soft chocolate cones, staring at him.

  The mother, who had apparently just walked on up the street without them, as if they were leftover children (“I have more at home, you see”), realized her error and rushed back and started carting them off, one hand on each shoulder. Then she saw what they’d been staring at (Melrose Plant), cocked her head, and started rooting in a bag slung over her frontage.

  She walked over and put two quarters in his Mickey Mouse cup.

  He didn’t really see much to choose between the woman and himself, since she looked like a swamp thing in her outsized jungle-green jacket and all sorts of sweaters and thick gloves and mile-long scarf drawn around and around her neck and up over her mouth.

  Nevertheless, he thanked her, and the little family moved away, the girl not forgetting to look back over her shoulder and stick out her tongue.

  Melrose sighed and consulted the Strangers’ Guide. He couldn’t even find Fells Point. Unfortunately, the Strangers had decided to have lunch in Little Italy, and then to double back to Harborplace, which was no help to him at all.

  He crossed over Farragut, walked along with his cart past steaming manhole covers, traceries of mist rising from them and disbursing into the outer air. They made him think of Victorian London, he wasn’t sure why—the ground mist and fog, probably. He walked on, wishing he’d purchased a more detailed map when he’d had the opportunity. He turned a corner that looked familiar and went shoving along for four blocks before he realized it wasn’t familiar at all. He was terrible about directions; whenever anyone told him to walk east or south they might just as well have said to walk straight up into the sky. The buildings here were a trifle shabby, housing on their corners small businesses such as convenience stores, jewellers behind furious-looking black grates, and PayLess everything: PayLess Shoes; PayLess Appliances; PayLess Drugs, travel, mattresses.

  And then he stopped.

  Here it was, a huge old building with a little brass plaque: CLOUDCOVER HOUSE.

  26

  Melrose could not say that he was exactly hailed by the people on the steps, but he was examined and silently greeted with a nod of the head here, a gesture of the hand there. In and out of its doors a number of people—black, white, possibly Puerto Rican (Melrose lived an insular life)—hung about Cloudcover House, hands shoved in trouser pockets, breath pluming the air. As he stood uncertainly with his burden of rags and books, two of them stopped their conversation and gave what he interpreted as a welcoming smile. Hell’s bells, why not? He advanced up the steps and, not wanting to appear too uncertain as to how to proceed, simply shoved his wire cart with a great deal of difficulty up several steps, stopping to lift it in front, until one of the two came along to take over the lifting job. Melrose thanked him very much when they got to the top. He shoved open the big door.

  Inside was a long hall, at the near end of which was a sort of bullpen-like area, with
a counter. A woman with heavy body and heavy features, a down-turned mouth as if she’d seen too many days of catering for the homeless and had grown less charitable withal, looked at him with a show of indifference. Probably a volunteer, probably unpaid or paid very little; but, really, they could have hired someone with a bit more bounce to cheer up such as he. He felt quite wan as he signed the book, and when she asked for the two dollars, he wondered how the devil he was to skim two bills from his weighty money clip. He mumbled something deliberately incomprehensible as he started searching around through his pile of junk. He kept on mumbling and muttering until she lost patience and turned away, back to the working circle inside the hemmed-in area. In this way he was able to whip out a wad of notes and slip off what he hoped were two singles and not two hundreds and then stuff them into one of the pockets of his cashmere topcoat. The money over here was the devil of a problem; all the same size. He smiled as he waited for the woman to turn back to him, thinking of the boy Alex Holdsworth and the trouble he’d had to go to to fleece his poker-playing friends because the trick required bills of all one size. He chuckled. There was a kid he hadn’t minded knowing. He wondered if he’d run into him again since Lady Cray—

  “. . . got all day!”

  He realized he’d been standing there with a stupid smile on his face. He handed over the two dollars and she directed him to a room, informing him that he wouldn’t be able to use it until seven p.m. that night. Melrose started to push his cart along, then stopped and said, “Pardon me, but do you know someone here named Wes?”

  “I ain’t the Yellow Pages.”

  “No. Sorry.” He pushed off.

  There were four beds, each with thin but very clean sheets and a mouse-colored blanket rolled up at the bottom. On one of the beds near the wall sat an elderly, emaciated-looking man, sitting and staring at the wall. His lips moved steadily. Perhaps a prayer, thought Melrose.