We headed over to Taylor’s 5000, a bar a few blocks away that’s been in Curtis Bay since the ’60s. Matt gave his card and his filmmaker spiel to the wizened 70-something in the camo jacket and Orioles cap behind the bar. “We were just around the corner at that trucking company,” Matt told him.
“Oh, that place?” His face lit up. “Them guys were crooks,” he said in a trademark Baltimore accent. “You’d take your truck in for an oil change and it would come back missing an engine. One of them partners hanged himself last year,” he added.
I asked him what happened to the other one.
Nobody really knows, he said. “His partner knocked him off. People say they took ’is body down the road to Valley Protein. Ground the bastard up!”
The cabbage soup here is famous. Matt and I sat under the faded Ravens pennants and photos of John Wayne and ordered some. Wordless, we exchanged glances at the gnarled shreds of fatty meat, murky and motionless in the bottoms of our bowls.