The Chesapeake Hotel, a dusty, brown-brick structure that stood a couple of blocks to the southeast of Baltimore's Penn Station, had a gabled roof, large frosted windows, and few other residents during my month-long stay. Far more common were the whores and their clients—the former skeletal and hollow-eyed, with needle tracks lining their arms and legs; the latter an even more forlorn lot, most seemingly born before God invented dust—who used the rooms by the hour.