This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
© 2011 Akashic Books
Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple
Pittsburgh map by Aaron Petrovich
ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-93-0
eISBN-13: 978-1-617750-42-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939107
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:
Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman
Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina
Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane
Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan
Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin
Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin
Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth
edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock
Cape Cod Noir, edited by David L. Ulin
Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack
Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaëlis
D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos
D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos
Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney
Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking
Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen
Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat
Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas
Indian Country Noir, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez
Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler
Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce
London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth
Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & Johnny Byrd
Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton
Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton
Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block
Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block
Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II
Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford
Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen
New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith
Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips
Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson
Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano
Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin
Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell
Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly
Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,
Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven
Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski
San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart
San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis
San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis
Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert
Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore
Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason
Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz
Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman
FORTHCOMING:
Bogotá Noir (Colombia), edited by Andrea Montejo
Jerusalem Noir, edited by Sayed Kashua
Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani
Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones
Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala
New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates
St. Petersburg Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen
Staten Island Noir, edited by Patricia Smith
Venice Noir (Italy), edited by Maxim Jakubowski
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART I: PRIME REAL ESTATE
LILA SHAARA Forest Hills
Atom Smasher
TERRANCE HAYES East Liberty
Still Air
STEWART O’NAN Bloomfield
Duplex
PART II: THREE RIVERS
NANCY MARTIN Highland Park
Pray for Rain
PAUL LEE Carrick
A Minor Extinction
K.C. CONSTANTINE McKees Rocks
When Johnny Came Shuffling Home
PART III: UNIVERSITIES, PARKS, RECREATION
KATHLEEN GEORGE Schenley Farms
Intruder
REBECCA DRAKE Fox Chapel
Loaded
CARLOS ANTONIO DELGADO Morningside
Far Beneath
PART IV: NEIGHBORS WHO CARE
HILARY MASTERS Mexican War Streets
At the Buena Vista
KATHRYN MILLER HAINES Wilkinsburg
Homecoming
AUBREY HIRSCH Squirrel Hill
Cheater
TOM LIPINSKI Lawrenceville
Key Drop
REGINALD MCKNIGHT Homewood
Overheard
About the Contributors
INTRODUCTION
PRIVATE MORALITIES, PRIVATE LAW
In 1996, my husband and I were on sabbatical leaves in the south of France. And the Steelers were playing in the Superbowl. How could we miss that? I located a bar in Monaco called Le Texan. Unfortunately, the Steelers were playing the Dallas Cowboys that time around, so when we got to the bar, the place was filled with braying people in Stetsons. One drunk man stood up and said, “Did anyone ever hear of anything good coming out of Pittsburgh?” The place was too noisy for him to hear me answer.
It was a should-have-won/could-have-won loss.
Not everybody in Pittsburgh is sports crazy, but most are. Scratch a Pittsburgher and you will hear about Bill Mazeroski’s home run that won the 1960 World Series, the catch known as “the immaculate reception” by Steeler Franco Harris, the amazing year of 1979 when the Pirates won the World Series and the Steelers won the Superbowl. The Pirates, the Steelers, and the Penguins play out our personal dramas. Didn’t look possible and then he did it. Or: That show of anger was the thing that turned it around. Or: All in their hands and they got too confident. Sports provides all kinds of possible narratives. And the best one keeps being the story of the impossible, the story of the underdog fighting back and winning.
Pittsburgh has its own story: It was built around three rivers, became a thriving center for the manufacture of steel, and attracted many immigrants to work the mills. Clashes between owners and laborers are part of its history, perhaps most notably the Homestead Steel Strike in which workers fought back when their wages were cut. It didn’t work. Management won. The Carnegies, the Fricks, the Mellons lived here and spun gold. Italians, Czechs, Poles, and others sought solace in neighborhoods that were like villages within the city. The neighborhoods still carry the marks of their founding in the churches, bars, and restaurants that survive. There is Italian Bloomfield and the eponymous Polish Hill.
When the steel business faltered and died, “the smoky city” reinvented itself as a white-collar urban site, fueled by its thriving universities. It had been a place so dark with pollution in the steel days that men carried clean shirts with them to work in order to change during the day. Now you can see the hills, the riv
ers, the rhythmic skyline—and as the cameras are fond of displaying at sports events, the city is now glittering and beautiful.
Anybody moving to Pittsburgh learns pretty quickly that it boasts affordable prime real estate, three beautiful rivers, parks and monuments, a flourishing university and cultural life, major medical centers, and tight neighborhoods. It’s been named more than once the most livable city in America. Young people who have grown up here get antsy, though, and move away. New residents who come in for a job or a school, surprised by what they find, often decide to stay. Former residents feel tugs of longing and move back. (Contributor Stewart O’Nan has moved back; contributor Hilary Masters is one of the people who discovered the city and stayed.)
What is Pittsburgh to noir and noir to Pittsburgh? We certainly have our rough streets and grisly murders. But dark crime stories depend on something in addition to killing. The best examples of the genre revolve around private moralities and private law; they are the stories of people pushing against real or imagined oppression. In Pittsburgh Noir, as in most of the novels and films that gave the genre its name, the real story is the dark underbelly of existence, the fear and guilt and rebellion and denial in regular people: the woman buying groceries, the man grilling hot dogs. Their secret lives.
I’d like to thank Mary Alice Gorman of Pittsburgh’s Mystery Lovers Bookstore for spurring me to jump into this project. And I’d like to thank the contributors who’ve joined me.
I’ve snagged a story from the legendary (and anonymous, Pynchon-style) K.C. Constantine, as well as from Shamus Award winner Tom Lipinski and the multiple award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, who shows he can do fiction too. I invited esteemed fiction writers Stewart O’Nan, Hilary Masters, and Reginald McKnight to turn to crime, and they did so with distinctive voices and dark humor. No Pittsburgh collection would be complete without Lila Shaara, Rebecca Drake, Nancy Martin, and Kathryn Miller Haines, all publishing mysteries regularly to critical acclaim. Three stories come from exciting new voices who push the boundaries of the genre: Paul Lee, Carlos Antonio Delgado, and Aubrey Hirsch.
We’ll take you to Bloomfield, the Mexican War Streets, Forest Hills, Fox Chapel, Schenley Farms, Carrick, McKees Rocks, Highland Park (a little-known unofficial marina), Wilkinsburg, East Liberty, Morningside, Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, and Homewood.
Here’s to the black and gold; to the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio; to Jonas Salk and Thomas Starzl; to Primanti’s sandwiches and churches that sell pierogies; to all and everything that makes up the ’burgh.
Kathleen George
Pittsburgh, PA
March 2011
PART I
PRIME REAL ESTATE
ATOM SMASHER
BY LILA SHAARA
Forest Hills
You grew up next to a what?” the sweaty girl said. Hot was supposed to be synonymous with sexy, he thought, all that imagery of damp flesh and body heat. She looked damp all right, but on her it just looked like she’d smell bad if you got too close. Her hair was big and her accent jarring; he’d been living in Atlanta for seven years, ever since college. He’d grown used to soft Southern consonants and slippery vowels. The sharp angles of Pittsburghese grated on him now, along with her sweat-darkened tank top and spiky, lacquer-hardened hair. The air inside the bar was so steamy he thought he might faint. He imagined he looked as though he’d just come out of a hot tub himself.
“An atom smasher,” he said. “It was built even before the atom bomb. They were smashing atoms together before they even knew that they could blow up the world that way.”
“Huh,” she replied, and he could tell that she didn’t believe him; people seldom did when he told them this bit about his past, but he expected more from a local.
He said, “You can see it from Ardmore Boulevard. It looks like an upside-down teardrop.”
She looked interested. “You mean the big metal ice-cream cone?”
“Exactly.”
“Wow,” she said. “I’ve seen it my whole life, and didn’t know that that was what an atom smasher looks like. Growing up next to that, you’re lucky to be alive.”
Ronnie hadn’t expected her to want to have sex with him, and he was sad to find that it was in a way a relief. He had just moved back home, and amid the shame of it all was the practical problem of having nowhere to bring women. But he’d only been back a month, and though he’d gone several times to a bar that had been good to him in the past, he hadn’t had to solve this particular problem as yet. He was not quite drunk when he returned to the house that was now partly his again. It was quiet; his parents were asleep. Thank God, he thought, and got a beer from the refrigerator.
He went upstairs to what used to be his bedroom; his parents had turned it into an upstairs den, with a large TV, a couch, and a small refrigerator. His father called it his “man cave,” and he hadn’t wanted to return it to his son. Now Ronnie was sleeping in a semifinished room in the attic, which was hot despite the window air conditioner, but he couldn’t bear the thought of living in the guest room, which had wallpaper covered in ducks. The best thing about the conversion was a deck built off the second-floor room that hung high above the backyard. Ronnie went out the sliding glass door, and eased himself into one of his mother’s old patio chairs, the kind with fat, if slightly mildewed, cushions. After a minute he got up again and brought some matches from the kitchen, and then lit two giant citronella candles that sat on the wide wooden railing. The mosquitoes here weren’t as big as the ones in Atlanta, no matter what the locals wanted to believe, but they were bad enough when they were hungry.
He could see the silhouette of the atom smasher in the low horizon, unmistakable even in the gentle red light given off from the city center, eight miles away. He’d never heard it called the more modern term: particle accelerator. Compared to the ones they built now, it was minuscule. But he’d always been told that it was the first one ever made, and so it had an excuse for being a nuclear pipsqueak. Even so, the metal icecream cone was six stories high; it sat on top of a large, ugly bunker of a building constructed out of concrete and corrugated steel. The whole structure covered over an acre of land, the cracked and weedy parking lot surrounding it covering at least two more. The orange paint flaked off in handfuls, and there were few windows; it looked like the setting for a bad postapocalyptic film. Yet Westinghouse had tucked it away in this residential enclave, presumably so that many of its employees could live nearby and walk to work. Fortunately, the topography of his home town meant that he couldn’t see the ugly bunker from the deck, only the metal dome itself.
Forest Hills was aptly named; virtually every backyard was a slope in one direction or another. His parents’ house poked out of the hillside like a shelf fungus on a locust tree. The ancient Westinghouse complex lay off to his left, only four lots away. The old-fashioned Westinghouse tinker toy W painted on its side was eye level. He’d actually thought about taking the sweaty girl from the bar there after all this time. He’d already forgotten her name, and he’d never been attracted to her, other than in the basest, most pragmatic way, an opportunity, even if it wasn’t particularly appealing. Man, he thought, it’s been a long time since I’ve done it there. Remembering that none of the girls had been over seventeen, he thought, it was statutory rape, and I was too stupid to even know it. Maybe some of the girls’ luck did rub off on me, since I never got caught.
In high school he’d been well-liked and thought handsome by enough girls that it had become accepted as fact by everyone else. But he hadn’t been a star in sports or in anything else, and so his professional success had made coming home to his tenth reunion a pleasure. He still looked good, had a pretty wife and a career that many of his former classmates envied. He’d loved saying, “I’m a sports writer,” over and over between sips of warm beer. “For the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Had to move to the Sun Belt, but I’m still a Steelers fan.” It had gone over so well that his dreams had rung with the social success of it for weeks.<
br />
But four years later, the wife was gone, as was the job—the price of being in a junior position in a downsizing industry. He still had a friend or two, though fewer than he thought. Print journalism is dead anyway, they all said. Do online stuff, they said. As though it were that simple; as though that was the way to get rich. But his boss had said, “Sorry, Ronnie, but you’re not that good. My advice? Find a different line of work.”
He’d received a mailing about the fifteenth reunion. The irony of not having to travel this time did not make him smile. Now he stared at the atom smasher and thought, this time maybe I can get it to work for me.
His mother said, “What a blessing that the sun’s out,” for the fifth time, as she pulled a five-pound package of hamburger meat from the refrigerator. It had rained for the last three days. Now the sky was empty of everything but a hot, white sun, the blue around it hard, like thick glass. It made Ronnie’s head hurt to look at it; he’d been at the bar again the night before, and he had a hangover. It hadn’t even been worth it; the available women had been either unattractive or uninterested. Now he followed his mother’s orders, and spent the morning setting up chairs in the backyard and helping her shape the loose, wet meat into patties. At noon, she released him, saying, “Just don’t make a mess anywhere.”
He pulled a can of soda from the refrigerator and went upstairs to the second-floor deck. He sat, popped the can, and looked at the atom smasher, hanging above the trees beyond the yard. It looked like a huge, fat metal teardrop that was going the wrong way. Like a giant cried while standing on his head, he thought. Maybe I can get a job as a poet. Then he almost smiled, thinking, there’s one of the few jobs that probably pays less than a newspaperman. He took a drink; it was too sweet. Root beer. He hadn’t noticed what he’d taken from the kitchen. His mother always had a large stockpile of soda in case they had company, and today they were expecting a lot of it. She bought the stuff by the case, store brands that came in all the basic flavors: cola, ginger ale, root beer, grape, and orange. He wondered how they got away with using words that designated actual fruits. Orange was a color too, of course. But, he thought, the words are always followed by the microscopic amendment, flavored drink. Root beer used to be the boiled and carbonated syrup of the sassafras root. He knew because his Uncle Lou had made some when he was a kid. It tasted alcoholic to him then. Knowing his Uncle Lou, it probably had been fermented. The stuff in the can was mostly corn syrup and some unknowable chemicals that tap-danced on your taste buds and some sort of dye the color of shit. He drained the rest of the can. He thought, maybe I could get a job as a taste tester for crappy cola.
Pittsburgh Noir Page 1