Baltimore Noir

Before I could ask anything more, a pair of police detectives walked in and I suppressed a groan. Did I mention that Baltimore was small?

“Jordan,” my sister said with that girl-don’t-give-me-nomess tone I knew all too well. “Can you excuse us please?”

I know, I know-what are the odds of my sister catching the body at my convention? Actually, in Baltimore, about one-in-five. Census says 600,000-plus in the city proper, over a million in the metro area, but I swear there are only sixty, seventy-five people tops, and I know them all. So, anyway, my good luck, right? Wrong.

You would think my sister Euphrates and I would be closer despite the fifteen-year age difference. She knew the agony of being saddled with a name that elicited guffaws and corny jokes, even though she had used her middle name, Patricia, ever since she was a teenager. But we couldn’t be more different. At 5 9” she was way taller than me, and where I could pinch way more than an inch, she was thin and muscular. I was a glam girl who loved the latest hairstyles and fashions and she looked like she had been wearing the same outfit since 1991, though the colors rotated among blue, black, and army-green.

But our differences went more than skin deep. She’s always been as straitlaced as they come and more of a second mother to me than an older sister. As my mama liked to say, “Euphrates don’t stand for no types of nonsense,” and that’s probably what drew her to the police force straight out of high school. When she made detective, she was the youngest African-American woman in the history of the department.

But the wildest thing she ever did was marry a white Jewish guy and set up house in a semi-Orthodox neighborhood in Pikesville where they were raising my gorgeous niece and nephew. While I considered myself a bit of a free spirit, my sister never met a rule she didn’t like. Sometimes it seemed like she would purposely set out to do the exact opposite of what I did. If I went right, she went left. Even though she opted for a career just like I did, she still managed to get her Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice by going to school at night, and I knew she was disappointed that I didn’t go to college. It was as if she thought everything I did or didn’t do was personally directed at her. I felt the same about her too, some days. I was convinced that she kept her hair cut short in a natural as a direct slap at me as a stylist. Like she would much rather go to a barber shop than have her own sister do her hair.

Now her partner, Ahmad Johansen, was another story. I had long ago decided that Ahmad was my soul mate, though he has been a bit slower at coming to that realization. Ahmad means “greatly praised” in Arabic, and Detective Johansen had a lot to be praised for. Six-foot-two, chiseled physique with cafe au lait skin, gray eyes, and a voice that rivaled Barry White, the man was the epitome of fine but carried himself in such a way that you knew he had no idea why women had a tendency to stop and stare at him when he walked by. He was as easygoing as my sister was stiff. They made quite a team.

After a few minutes, the office door opened and my sister and Ahmad came out. “U”, as I liked to call her to remind her that someone hadn’t forgotten where she came from, motioned to a uniformed officer further up the hallway. He looked all of twenty years old and scrambled to do my sister’s bidding.

“We are going to transport the witness to the station to take a formal statement,” she told the cadet. “Until then, make sure no one talks to her.”

She looked right at me when she said that, then added: “Jordan, where can we chat?”

We walked down the corridor into another meeting space, this one small, and probably more importantly to my sister, unoccupied. U motioned for me to sit in one of the chairs, but I chose to lean against the meeting table instead. No way was she going to make me feel like a suspect by towering over me during questioning.

“So,” my sister said, “what do you know?”

“I know that Miles is laying dead in a box full of hair. Other than that, you probably know more than I do.”

“I doubt that, Jordan. You looked like you were deep in conversation with the witness when we arrived.”

“Said witness has a name,” I replied, crossing my arms. “All Diana said was that she was going to get some hair for her boss and that’s when she found Miles. If I knew more, I’d tell you more.”

“Look, Jordy,” my sister said, reverting to my childhood nickname, “we may need your help with this one. You know all the players here and I suspect that this thing with Miles was personal. The uniforms say he still has his wallet on him so we can rule out robbery. And besides, it would be more likely that we would be dealing with a pickpocket with a crowd this size than a robber who would take the chance on knifing someone in a convention center filled with people. Plus, he was stabbed with a pair of scissors that had some type of ivory inlay on the handles. Very high-end. Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt Miles?”

“I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the man could be a jerk,” I said. “He was a massive womanizer to start. And seeing as how he had poached clientele from just about every stylist in B-more, anyone here could have had a motive.”

“That’s why we need you to help us narrow down the field,” my sister said. “You are always up in everybody’s business so I’m sure you know if he’s been having problems with anyone lately.”

“First of all, I dislike the implication that I am nosy,” I sniffed. “It’s not my fault that people confide in me. I just have an air of trustworthiness that I exude.”

Ahmad stifled a laugh. I tried to give him my best dirty look, but was distracted by his gorgeousness.

“It might help if I could see the body,” I said, tapping my cheek as if I was speculating about something.

“Jordan,” my sister practically yelled, “this is not an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I am not going to have you traipsing all over a murder scene!”

“Look,” I huffed, “do you want my help or not? I promise I won’t go running through the blood and mess up your precious forensics. Maybe I’ll recognize the murder weapon or see something that might be out of the ordinary. I helped plan this whole event, in case you have forgotten!”

“Jordan might have a point,” Ahmad piped in. “She can’t do much damage if we are right there with her.”

I looked at him with a combination of gratitude for recognizing the value of my insight and irritation for his insinuation that I needed to be baby-sat.

“Let’s go,” my sister said, turning quickly and practically barreling out of the room.

Downstairs had turned into a bit of a madhouse with police swarming the area and everyone craning to see what was happening. Some young women I recognized as His and Hairs employees were crying and comforting each other near the three booths that had been set up to showcase designs from the salon. My sister flashed her badge to clear a path for us and we stepped gingerly around the dividers that had been shielding Miles’s corpse from view.

I’d seen him looking better. His face had already taken on that ashen look of the dearly departed, and a small trickle of blood appeared to be coming out of the corner of his mouth. Or it could have been a strand of hair, as he was laying on a pack of “Ridiculously Red, Number 38.” A police photographer was snapping away, periodically pushing the bottom of his Baltimore City Police Department jacket to the side to avoid the zipper as he crawled around and laid flat to get multiple angles. Miles was on his stomach, head turned to the side, his hands on either side of his head, as if he had tripped and was trying to soften his fall.

Most of the plastic packets of hair had been cleared from on top of him and I could make out the black crocheted sweater he was wearing over a T-shirt, and the handle of the scissors was sticking out through one of the holes near his left shoulder blade. Those sweaters had been the bane of the planning committee’s existence because Miles insisted that the center be kept well air-conditioned so he wouldn’t swelter. Not much of a problem, except that it was unseasonably cool outside even for a Baltimore April and many of the models were running around wearing next to nothing other than tons of hair. Maybe, I thought, one of them wigged out and killed him. The old “I-murdered-because-my-brain-froze” defense. Johnnie Cochran, may he rest in peace, could have taken that on.

“See anything out of the ordinary?” Ahmad asked.

“Well, he’s dead all right.”

“Other than that, Columbo.”

“It’s hard to tell,” I said. “Maybe if I could get a little closer look.” There was something about Miles’s sweater that seemed off. Were those holes part of the design, or had they opened up in a struggle?

“Forget about it, Jordan,” Ahmad said. “I’m surprised your sister even let you get this close.”

That’s when I realized that U was no longer with us. I stepped around the divider and caught a glimpse of her through the crowd about ten feet away talking to C.P. Murray, hairdresser and drama king extraordinaire. No one knows what the initials C.P. are short for, but my theory is that it stands for “Chile, please” because that’s what I feel like saying every time he opens his mouth. Forty-five if he was a day, but he claimed he hadn’t crested thirty