Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  Pittsburgh scores on the television over his right shoulder. He is drinking Guinness, so I am too, but I have a hard time getting it down. I look around at the few college girls with their pastel drinks in plastic cups.

  He tells me he was married once.

  “Didn’t like it?”

  He shakes his head.

  The Guinness is starting to settle in my stomach and flutter to my brain.

  He tells me his name is Rick.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” I say, drawing out the L so he’ll think about my tongue.

  The music from the juke box is so loud I can’t feel my heartbeat over the bass line.

  He tells me I have beautiful eyes.

  “Rick,” I ask, leaning in a little, “are you hitting on me?”

  The barstools are too high and my feet are dangling a couple of inches above the floor. It makes me feel silly and I’m anxious to get out of here, but he orders us another round.

  He asks what we should drink to.

  I raise my plastic cup: “Marriage.”

  And we drink.

  Two hours, three pints of Guinness, sixteen jam band songs, a short uphill walk, and two flights of stairs later, he’s fumbling with the keys to his place and I’m squeezing his ass through his work pants. I hear the lock click and help him turn the doorknob. As soon as we get inside, he backs me up against the wall and slips his hand between my legs. The faded blue color of the room reminds me of the backgrounds on Saturday-morning cartoon shows. In my head, the Looney Tunes theme song is the soundtrack to the rest of the evening.

  When I wake up, Rick is walking out the door. I dress quickly and follow him from a safe distance. I don’t know where we’re walking to, but on the way there I slip on my ring and start to think about our wedding. At first I can’t decide where we had it, or how many bridesmaids there were. But the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes in my mind: Rick’s spontaneous wide-eyed proposal, our rehearsal dinner on Mount Washington, how mad I was when he dropped his wedding ring in the drain and lost it, how he’d never suspect any infidelity on my part, how we’re so in love.

  This is my second husband, Rick. The green toothbrush in my bathroom is Rick’s. I like the sound of it already. Rick steps into a dry cleaner’s on Forbes. When thirty minutes go by and he still hasn’t emerged with a couple of shrink-wrapped shirts or an off-season jacket, I copy the address into my date book, labeling it, Rick’s job. I walk down the street quickly. I have work to do. I have a whole life to create and only twelve hours to do it in. I have to hurry if I’m going to be at the bar by nine.

  KEY DROP

  BY TOM LIPINSKI

  Lawrenceville

  The uphill turn at Butler and 44th Street is a tight one. The sudden and steep incline is further complicated by an already thin roadway that is parked solid at both curbs, holding the overflow from the shops on Butler—shops that change hands from convenience stores, pizza shops, barbers, and on to simple and inviting coffee spots with each pass.

  Dorsey maneuvered the old Buick through the intersection, taking care with the long front grille and bumper, hoping not to sideswipe a car parked at the corner, then squeezed the accelerator, prepping the engine for the climb. He kept an eye out for a parking spot but found none, only open spaces reserved with kitchen table chairs planted at the curb, so pulled to his right into a church lot. The church was a dark and imposing brick and Dorsey recalled his last few visits to 44th, reminding himself that it was a Polish congregation. Now what the hell was the name of that burned-up painting of the Madonna they had hanging in there?

  He climbed out of the car, stretched himself to his full six feet plus, and caught a touch of summer breeze. After waiting for traffic to pass, he hustled across the street to a line of row houses with minute front yards enclosed in black wroughtiron fencing. As Dorsey undid the gate latch the front door swung open and emitted an airborne wave of gray and sudsy wash water.

  “The hell is that?” Dorsey retreated to the edge of the sidewalk. “Hell of a greeting. Ask me to stop by, make it sound important, and then this.”

  “Just finished the hall floor,” Mrs. Leneski told him, walking down her front stoop, metal slop bucket in her hand. She’s old, Dorsey reminded himself, man is she old. Gracing the far end of her eighties, Mrs. Leneski flirted with five feet of height, apparently so frail that a light rain could wash her, and the last of her gray hair pulled tight to the skull, down the street. She had on a sleeveless housedress that came to the midcalf and did nothing to hide the dark electronic ring that encircled her right ankle.

  “Should’ve never shot that guy,” Dorsey said, looking toward her feet. “Lucky this is all they did to you, even at your age.”

  “I asked you to do it,” Mrs. Leneski replied, turning over her bucket and draining the last of the water. Her voice held the last traces of a childhood spent in Eastern Europe. “Right in that kitchen, over coffee. You said no. And you had enough good reasons to do it too. So, that left me.”

  Determined not to go over old and painful ground once again, Dorsey asked how she was getting along. “Tak sobie, so-so. Thing on my ankle gives me a rash. Thank God they still make the Noxzema cream.”

  Dorsey gave her a soft grin. “So, are you asking me in? Maybe some coffee?” He stepped through the gate and took the bucket from her hand. “Want to tell me what this is about? Why you asked me over?”

  “Sure, sure, down to business,” Mrs. Leneski said, turning to go into the house. “Mr. Detective wants to know about the case. Still call it that?’

  “Sometimes,” Dorsey said, trailing behind her. “What’s on your mind?”

  Mrs. Leneski stopped at the threshold and turned. “First, you take me shopping. I need a few things.”

  “They let you go out?” Dorsey asked. “Somebody you have to call first? Maybe the probation office?”

  Dorsey was watching her shake her head when he noticed something on the street had caught her eye. He turned and scanned the street, the only thing moving was an immaculate black Cadillac heading up the street.

  “You see that? The undertaker?” Mrs. Leneski asked, looking up at Dorsey. “He steals.”

  “What do you mean, he steals?”

  “You know, he’s an undertaker,” she told him. “Shoes, socks, sometimes even suits. You think anybody really goes into the ground with a new pair of shoes on their feet?”

  Standing behind the shopping cart in the produce section, Dorsey watched the old woman examine cabbage head after cabbage head, and recounted to himself the story behind this cockeyed friendship. She hires you, a few years back when no one was sending you work, to find her missing granddaughter. “She’s with them junkies in the park,” she had told him. She had been close, the girl was on the far side of a wrecked fence that separated the park from a cemetery. Four feet down and no marker except for a plain of broken beer and wine bottles to cover some tracks. You found her all right, and you found out who killed her. “But I can’t prove it,” you had told her, “not enough for the DA or the cops.” “So,” Mrs. Leneski had said, “then you kill him for me. I’ll give you a bonus.” But you just shook your head and left the house, and left the woman to do the killing herself. And with some back door legal tricks, an eighty-some-year-old gets house arrest and a metal band on her ankle for a killing.

  Four heads proved good enough to make it into the cart and Dorsey asked how many people she was cooking for. “Somebody will show up,” she told him. “They always do when I make halupki.”

  “Polish hand grenades?”

  “Irish wise-ass,” Mrs. Leneski said, and pulled on the front of the cart, directing him to the checkout lanes. “Ziggy gets the meat for me down The Strip. And a few other things. He’ll be by later.”

  Dorsey began angling the cart toward a checkout line but Mrs. Leneski took hold of the front and dragged him into another aisle. “Not her,” she said, indicating a young girl behind a register. “She cheats people, charges double on
things like meat sometimes. She has something going with the manager, they’re in it together.”

  “Not hot enough, not yet, for iced tea,” Mrs. Leneski said, putting a cup of coffee on the Formica tabletop in front of Dorsey. They were in her kitchen now and despite a thorough going over, Dorsey could find nothing that had changed since his last visit. Refrigerator and oven still the same off-white, the sink a stand-alone with plumbing exposed. Except for a few newly acquired blemishes, even the coffee cups looked the same. Dorsey hoped her problems had changed.

  He took a sip of unusually strong coffee. “So,” he said, lowering the cup to the table. “Time to tell me why I’m here. Must have someone else to take you shopping.”

  Mrs. Leneski took a seat across the table from him. “You remember last time, last time you met my Catherine?”

  Dorsey remembered. “Met her just the once. And she wasn’t doing so well. I met her up the street at the old hospital. She was in the east wing, the psych ward?”

  She had been in her midforties then, and detoxing for the third time. Dorsey recalled the incoherent voice that could barely recall she had a daughter of her own. The one you found dead. “She clean these days?” Dorsey asked.

  “So they say,” Mrs. Leneski said. “In a way, I guess. She’s on her own, has a little place about ten blocks over on Carnegie Street, the other ward. And she’s got this job, but it’s a job with bad people, I think.”

  Dorsey sipped at his coffee. “What kind of work? For who?”

  “One of them new places, the new ones along Butler Street, you’ve seen them. All those coffee shops, they make little sandwiches and crap for lunch, try to sell the art right off the walls? She’s at one of them near 37th Street across from where the Catholic high school was.”

  “That I remember,” Dorsey said, recalling a visit there while searching for the granddaughter. Girls in uniform trying to slip things past nuns in habits. “Thought those sorts of places were popular around here now.”

  “Some are, I guess,” Mrs. Leneski said, dismissing the idea with a wave of her hand. “She works for one of the Predic family, he owns the place where she makes the sandwiches, waits on the table. The Predics, the whole family is no good.”

  “Do they steal like the undertaker or cheat like the checkout girl at the supermarket?” Dorsey asked from behind his raised coffee cup. “Sorry, it had to be asked.”

  Mrs. Leneski left her chair and went to the sink, turning her back to him. “She’s old and she’s crazy, that’s what you think. Like I think people are all out to get me.” She turned to face him. “I just know things, things and people. They’re up to something at that place Catherine works. Damned Predics. I’d go there myself and find out but I have this thing on my ankle. So you have to go.”

  * * *

  So you have to go, Dorsey reminded himself, cruising across Carnegie Street, checking for the address on the slip of paper Mrs. Leneski had given him. Thirty years you’ve been out of the army, and you’re still intimidated by anything that sounds like a direct order. “And another thing, she only lives thirteen blocks from work, and she takes the bus along Butler. Thirteen blocks and she pays bus fare, can’t walk to work. Wastes her money. You find out what’s going on at that place and get her out of there.”

  Dorsey moved along Carnegie in the Buick, the brown brick of the homes and front porches giving away to the red brick of St. Kieran’s Church. Just past the rectory, he pulled to the curb and killed the engine, focusing his attention on the house bearing the address he was looking for, apparently transformed from a one-family residence into two apartments. Dorsey checked out the second-story windows where Catherine was said to live. Windows closed and curtains drawn despite the afternoon warmth, the place was unremarkable and Dorsey considered putting in some surveillance time but decided against it. It’ll get you nowhere, he thought, best that could happen is you fall into a nap and end up with a sore lower back. Better to get some questions answered first. He twisted the ignition key, rolled over the engine, and proceeded a few more blocks and through one last intersection. At the corner was a low-slung building fronted by a large yard done over in cement and brick, the local AOH club, the only marker a small sign tacked above the front door. A buzzer and card slot was mounted next to the doorjamb and Dorsey depressed the button. The door was opened by a short man wearing a bartender’s double-wrapped apron.

  “Lookin’ for Danny?”

  Dorsey said that he was and the man waved him into a small vestibule followed by a wide barroom with tables and matching chairs scattered across the floor. “Danny,” the bartender called to a far corner. “Guy here for you.”

  At the corner table was a thin, older man dressed in gray work pants and a sport shirt, paging his way through the newspaper. On the tabletop was a can of ginger ale, a glass with cracked ice, and a freshly opened pack of Chesterfields. When the man raised his head of white hair, Dorsey saw the blue eyes and lean good features of the Sullivan clan, his mother’s people. The slow grin reminded Dorsey that this was one of the few who had managed to hold onto his original teeth.

  “How’s things, Uncle Danny?”

  “Calling me uncle, huh?” the man joked. “You must be in some kind of trouble. Better sit down and tell me.”

  “Trouble? I imagine so,” Dorsey said, taking the seat across the table. “Just not sure what kind it might be.” Dorsey motioned at the Chesterfields. “Thought you gave them up.”

  “I don’t smoke ’em,” Uncle Danny answered, pulling one from the pack. “Don’t even light them up. Just gives me something to do with my hands. I still have to pay for ’em, but I save money on the matches.” He toyed with the smoke for a moment. “Always good to see you, don’t get me wrong, but something must’ve brought you over here.”

  “Had to take an old lady cabbage shopping.” Dorsey waived down the bartender, ordered two more ginger ales, and brought his uncle up to date on his afternoon.

  Uncle Danny toyed with a Chesterfield. “Between 36th and 37th? Right on Butler?” He laughed for a moment. “Might be the old whorehouse.”

  “There was a whorehouse there?”

  “Not much of one,” he told Dorsey, “not that I was ever in there, let’s get that straight. But you’re saying this shop is just across Butler from the old high school?”

  Dorsey said that it was.

  Uncle Danny laughed. “That’s who told me about it, the kids at the school. Some of my neighbors’ kids went to school there, and kids, they pick up on everything. From what they tell me, they’d be in algebra or typing class, look out the window across the street, and they’d see some guy ringing the bell at a door. Not the storefront door, but the one next to it that leads to the apartments on the second floor, know what I mean?”

  Dorsey sipped at the ginger ale and nodded for his uncle to go on.

  “Anyways,” Uncle Danny said, “nobody answers the door but a window on the second floor opens up and a woman kind of a pokes her head out. From what I hear she was stripped to her bra, in good weather. If she recognizes the guy she sends down the door key on a cord, the guy unlocks the door and goes inside. Then the woman in the window yanks up the cord and key and they’re off to the races.”

  “Can’t imagine Catherine being able to make a living that way,” Dorsey told him. “Haven’t seen her in more than few years, but still.”

  “In that business, the level of the clientele determines the level of the talent.” Uncle Danny set down the unlit smoke. “There’re sad old men and horny boys that ain’t so choosey.”

  “I just don’t see it,” Dorsey said, shaking his head. “Tell me about these people, the Predics.”

  It was Uncle Danny’s turn to shake his head. “Some families, I just don’t know, the kids are wild. Can’t say it was the parents, the old man had a nice business doing cement work, and the mother was okay. Kids were another story. Maybe it’s the house they live in, as if the walls tell them to be nuts. All the boys, and there was a slew
of them, they start out at the Catholic school, and by sixth grade they are tossed out to the public school. And high school, don’t even give it a thought. So, some dope and drink and then vandalism. And then burglary when they finally figure out that if you don’t just destroy property, but instead haul it away and sell it to someone, you can actually make some money.”

  “Anything recent?”

  “I’m sure there is, but I haven’t heard of it,” Uncle Danny said. “And if one of them has a lunchroom, he’s selling more than whole wheat sandwiches and sprout salads.”

  Dorsey thanked his uncle and got to his feet, heading for the door.

  “Better wait a second,” Uncle Danny called out, stopping him. “If this Predic boy is the one I’m thinking of, the two of you have an acquaintance in common.”

  Dorsey turned. “How’s that?”

  “The big ape you had trouble with a few years back, the one everyone calls Outlaw? He’s close with the sons. Remember him, right?”

  “I remember.”

  “You should—last time you shot him in the foot,” Uncle Danny said. “If you get the chance, do us all a favor and shoot him in the other foot.”

  By quarter past nine, the key had made four trips from the second-floor window, attached to green electric wire and let out by Catherine Leneski. Dorsey was sure of it, despite the gray in her hair and the sag of her chin. While he watched there had been two couples with children in strollers, one young fellow carrying a toddler, and a young girl chasing a three-year-old. Each had knocked at the door, the window had been raised, and the key dangled. Each had gone inside for a short bit and then left, none with children.

  Dorsey was across Butler, relaxing behind the steering wheel of the Buick. Traffic had been sporadic for the most part, punctuated by the passing of trailer trucks that used every inch of the street, causing Dorsey to wince each time one moved along. Part of the morning had been spent in front of a computer screen, confirming that Anthony Predic had purchased the building two years earlier at a rock-bottom price. The previous owner had been a shoemaker with his shop on the first floor. Dorsey wondered if the shoemaker had known what was going on upstairs all those years. He also wondered if the trick with the key had been on the deed. Now, across the street, when the trucks gave him a break, he watched a young man wash the storefront window of what was now The Boilermaker Lunchbox. From his vantage point, Dorsey could see a long serving counter with restored swivel stools, several large and well-shined coffee urns, and a line of booths at the far wall.