Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  “You need help? I mean, you got any things you need carried in?” He indicated his parking cart. It had been in the Melville family for years, taken from a Giant Foods that wasn’t even in business anymore.

  “What’s the going rate?” the woman asked. Not the man. She seemed to be in charge.

  “Depends on what needs transporting,” Dontay said. After seeing how things had worked out with Uncle Marcus, he wanted to see what she would offer to pay before he named a price.

  “We have three large coolers.” She opened the back of the Escalade, showed them off. They looked brand new, the price tags still on their sides.

  “That’s a big job,” Dontay said. “They’ll be piled so high in my cart, I’ll have to go real slow so they don’t tumble.”

  “Twenty dollars?”

  Twice the going rate. But before he could nod, the woman quickly added.

  “Each, I mean. Per cooler.”

  “Sure.” He loaded them up, one on top of the other. “But you know I can only take you up to the gate. You got to get them to your seats by yourselves. How you going to do that?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said. The man had yet to say a word.

  The three coolers fit into the shopping cart, just, and rose so high that Dontay could not keep a quick pace. What did it matter? Sixty dollars, the equivalent of six trips. They must be rich people, the kind who brought champagne and—well, Dontay wasn’t clear on what else rich people ate. Steak, but you wouldn’t bring steak to the Preakness. Steak sandwiches, maybe.

  “You do this every year?” the woman asked.

  Usually, people walked ahead or behind, a little embarrassed by the transaction. But this woman kept abreast of him, her yellow high heels striking the ground with a loud clackety-clack, almost as loud as the wheels on the shopping cart.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You ever think about going to the race?”

  “No’m. I make too much money working it.” He wished he could take that back. It wasn’t good manners, much less good business to draw attention to how much a person was paying you. No one wanted to feel like a mark, Uncle Marcus always said.

  “Want me to place a bet for you?” she asked. She was white-white, her skin so fair it had a blue tint to it, with red hair like a blaze beneath her black straw hat.

  “Naw, that’s okay. I wouldn’t know what horse to bet for.”

  “The favorite in the Derby often comes through in the Preakness. That’s a safe bet.”

  Dontay liked talking to the woman, liked the way she treated him, but he couldn’t think of anything to say back. He tried nodding, as if he were very smart in the ways of the world, and all he did was hit a pothole, almost upset the whole load.

  “But you probably don’t like safe bets.” The woman laughed. “Me either.”

  The man, who was walking behind them, still hadn’t said anything.

  “I’m going to bet a long shot, a horse coming out of the twelfth gate. Know how I picked it?” She didn’t wait for Dontay to reply. “Horse bit his rider during a workout this week. Now that’s my kind of horse.”

  He finally had something to contribute. “What’s its name?”

  “Diablo del Valle. Devil of the Valley. It’s a local horse, too. That’s also in its favor. A local horse with a great name who bit his jockey. How can I lose?”

  “I don’t know,” Dontay said. “But based on what I see, a lot of people do.”

  She loved that, laughing long and hard. Dontay hadn’t been trying to be funny, but now he wished he might do it again.

  “I’ll probably be one of them,” the woman said. “But you know, I don’t gamble to win. The track is interactive entertainment, theater in which I hold a financial stake in the outcome. If I ever found myself too invested, I’d have to stop. Don’t you think? It’s awful to care too much about something. Anything.”

  Dontay wasn’t sure he followed that, but he nodded as if he did. He was wondering if the woman was cold, her shoulders and back as bare as they were. With her yellow dress with the black dots, yellow heels, and big black hat, she looked like something.

  “You’re a black-eyed Susan,” he said.

  She nodded, clearly pleased. “That I am. But they’re fake, you know.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The black-eyed Susans. They’re not in season until late August, so they buy these yellow daisies from South America and color the centers with a Magic Marker. Can you imagine?”

  “How much that pay?” It hadn’t occurred to Dontay that there was a single opportunity in Preakness that his family had missed. Coloring in flowers sounded easy, like something the twins could do.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not enough. Nothing is ever enough, is it? Doesn’t everyone want more?”

  The question seemed like a test. Did she think him ungrateful or greedy?

  “I’m fine, ma’am.”

  “Well, you’re a rare one.”

  They had reached the entrance to the grandstand, but to Dontay’s amazement, the woman didn’t stop there. “We’re in the infield,” she said. The infield? She was paying almost as much to bring her stuff as she was paying for the tickets. The infield was mud and trash. The woman would get messed up in the infield, where no one would care that she had taken the time to look like a flower. Dontay looked for the man, but he had disappeared.

  “You’ll just have to let this young man help me,” the woman told the ticket taker, but not in a bossy way. She had the ability to say things directly without sounding mean, as if it was just logical to do what she said.

  “Not unless he’s going to pay admission, too. And he can’t bring that shopping cart in.”

  She peeled more money from her wallet.

  “And ma’am?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to inspect them, make sure there’s no glass, nothing else that’s forbidden.” The Preakness ticket had a whole long list of things you couldn’t bring in and Dontay stuck close to his clients, in case they needed to send things back with him.

  “Why, they’re just sandwiches.” The woman opened the top cooler, pulled out a paper-wrapped sub. “Muffulettas. Muffies, we call them. We make them every year with that special tapenade from the Central Grocery down in New Orleans, so they’re practically authentic.”

  She unwrapped one. It was an okay sandwich, although a little strong smelling for Dontay. He didn’t much care for cheese.

  The man quickly looked inside each cooler, saw the array of wrapped subs, and waved her through.

  It took Dontay and the woman three trips to carry in all the coolers. It seemed like a math problem to him—how could they protect the unattended coolers at either end?—but the woman found a man at either end to keep watch. She had that way about her. They stacked each one just inside the entrance. The people around looked nasty to Dontay, and he worried about leaving the woman there, in her pretty dress.

  “Diablo del Valle,” she said, handing him four twenties. “You heard it here first.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “But that’s extra—”

  “I’ll lose more than that today. At least you’ll still have the money when all is said and done.”

  She took off her hat, fanned herself with it, and Dontay realized with a start that one of the shadows on her face was still there—a purplish bruise at the temple.

  He pushed the empty cart back quickly, flying along, wondering if he might catch one more trip, then wondering how it mattered. Eighty dollars! Still not enough for an iPod, not even when it was added to all he had already earned today. He wondered briefly if he had the discipline to save it all, but he knew he didn’t. The woman was right. Nothing was ever enough.

  Back at the house, the Escalade was gone. “Man came back and said he forgot something,” Uncle Marcus said. Dontay worried that something was wrong between the man and the woman, that he had abandoned her to the infield. He thought of her again in her yellow dress and high heels, her big black hat
—and that bruise, near her eye. He hoped the man was nice to her.

  THE DAY-AFTER CLEANUP STARTED at 9 A.M. sharp. Just the sight of the garbage took Dontay’s breath away, not to mention the smell. There was a reason this job paid, of course. But it seemed impossible that this patch of ground would ever be clean again. A bandanna around his face, Granny M’s kitchen gloves shielding his hands, he picked up cans and wrappers and cigarettes, examining the tickets he found along the way, comparing them to the results page in his back pocket. But he hadn’t noticed the three red-and-white coolers stacked in a column near the gates until another worker ran toward them, said, “These mine.”

  “How you figure?” Uncle Marcus asked.

  “Called ’em, didn’t I? They’re in good shape. Hell, they’re so new the price tags are still on them. I can use some coolers like that.”

  He opened the drain on the side and the water ran out, the ice long melted.

  “If there sodas in there, they still be cold,” one woman said hopefully. “You’d share those, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why not?” the man said, happy with his claim. He popped the lid—and started screaming. Well, not screaming, but kind of snorting and gagging, like it smelled real bad.

  Uncle Marcus tried to hold Dontay back, but he got pretty close. Overnight, the water had soaked through the paper-wrapped sandwiches, loosening the packaging, so the sandwiches floated free. Only a lot of them weren’t sandwiches. There were pieces of a person, cut into sub-size portions, cut so small that it was hard to see what some of them had been. Part of a forearm, he was pretty sure. A piece of leg.

  “Well, it’s definitely a dude,” said one kid who got even closer than Dontay did, and Dontay decided to take his word for it.

  Police came, sealed off that part of the infield, and tried to stop the cleanup for a while but saw how useless that would be. There weren’t enough officers in all of Baltimore to sift the debris of the infield, looking for clues. Besides, it wasn’t as if the crime had been committed there. The coolers were the only evidence. The coolers and the things within them.

  Dontay watched the police talking to grown-ups—the man who had claimed the coolers, folks from Pimlico, even Uncle Marcus. No one asked to talk to him, however. No one asked, even generally, if anyone had anything they wanted to volunteer. That didn’t play in Northwest Baltimore.

  Later, walking home, Uncle Marcus said: “Them coolers look familiar to you?”

  “Looked like every other Igloo. Nothing distinctive.”

  “Just that there were three and they was brand-new. Like—”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you thinking, Dontay?”

  He was thinking about the woman’s face beneath her hat, her observation that nothing was ever enough. She had a nice car, a wallet thick with money, a man who seemed to do her bidding. She was going to bet on a horse that bit its rider, the Devil of the Valley. She admired its spirit, but admitted it wouldn’t win in the end.

  “Doesn’t seem like any business of ours, does it?”

  “No, I s’pose not.”

  The Melvilles had Preakness coming and going. You could park your car on their lawn, buy a cold drink from them, get help ferrying your supplies into the track, and know that your vehicle would be safe no matter how long you stayed. Thirty dollars bought you true vigilance, as Uncle Marcus always said. Over the years, they built up a retinue of regulars, people who came back again and again. The woman in the hat, the woman with the Escalade—she wasn’t one of them.

  ROPA VIEJA

  The best Cuban restaurant in Baltimore is in Greektown. It has not occurred to the city’s natives to ponder this, and if an out-of-towner dares to inquire, a shrug is the politest possible reply he or she can expect.

  On the fourth day of August, one such native, Tess Monaghan, was a block away from this particular restaurant when she felt that first bead of sweat, the one she thought of as the scout, snaking a path between her breasts and past her sternum. Soon, others would follow, until her T-shirt was speckled with perspiration and the hair at her nape started to frizz. She wasn’t looking forward to this interview, but she was hoping it would last long enough for her Toyota’s air conditioner to get its charge back.

  The Cuban Restaurant. Local lore about the place—and it had all been dredged up again, as of late—held that another name had been stenciled over the door on the night of its grand opening many years ago. The Havana Rum Co.? Plantain Plantation? Something like that. Whatever the name, the Beacon-Light had gotten it wrong in the review and the owner had decided it would be easier to change the name than get a correction. It had, after all, been a favorable review, with raves for the food and the novel-for-Baltimore gas station setting. If the local paper said it was The Cuban Restaurant, it was willing to be just that, and the new name was hastily painted over the old.

  Live by publicity, die by publicity. That’s what Tess Monaghan wanted to stencil above her door.

  She slid her car into the empty space next to the old-fashioned gas pumps where attendants had so recently juggled a nightly crush of Mercedeses, Cadillacs, and Lincoln Navigators. Inside the cool dining room, a sullen bartender was wiping down a bar that showed no sign of having held a drink that day, and two dark-haired young waitresses stood near the coffeepot, examining their manicures and exchanging intelligence about hair removal. If Tess had been there for a meal, that conversation would have killed her usually unstoppable appetite.

  She found the owner, Herb Marquez, in an office behind the bar. The glass in front of him might have held springwater, or it might have been something else. Whatever the substance, the glass was clearly half empty in Marquez’s mournful eyes. His round face was as creased as a basset hound’s, his gloom as thick as incense. Even his mustache drooped.

  “You see that?” He waved a hand at the empty dining room.

  “I saw.”

  “A week ago, maybe—maybe—you could have gotten a table here at lunch if you were willing to wait twenty, thirty minutes. At night—two weeks to get a reservation, three on weekends. That may be common in New York, but not in Baltimore. I been in the restaurant business forty years—started as a busboy at O’Brycki’s, worked my way up, opened my own place, served the food my mama used to make, only better. And now it’s all over because people think I polished the most popular guy in Baltimore.”

  “Most popular?” Tess had a reflexive distaste for hyperbole. “Bandit Gonzales isn’t even the most beloved Oriole of all time. He’s just the flavor of the month.”

  An unfortunate choice of words. Herb Marquez winced, no doubt thinking about the flavors he had served Bandit Gonzales, that subtle blend of spices and beef that went into ropa vieja. Literally, “old clothes,” but these old clothes had been credited with making a new man out of the aging pitcher, having the greatest season of his life.

  Until last Sunday, when a sold-out crowd in Camden Yards—not to mention the millions of fans who had tuned into the Fox game of the week—had watched him throw three wobbly pitches to the first batter, fall to his knees, and give new meaning to the term “hurler.”

  “Well, I’d put him in the top three,” Marquez said. “After Cal Ripken and Brooks Robinson.”

  “No, you gotta put Boog Powell ahead of him, too. And Frank Robinson. Maybe that catcher, the one who led the crowd in ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy.’ Then there’s Jim Palmer and—”

  “Okay, fine, he ain’t even in the top five. But he was the only bright spot in the Orioles’ piss-poor lineup this season and he thinks, and everyone else thinks, that he spent twenty-four hours puking his guts out because of my goddamn food. It was in all the papers. It was on Baseball Tonight. Those late-night guys make jokes about my food. And now the guy’s talking lawsuit. I’m gonna be ruined.”

  He gave the last word its full Baltimore pronunciation, so it had three, maybe four syllables.

  “Do you have insurance?”

  “Yeah, sure, I’m so careful my liability
policies have liability policies.”

  “So you’re covered. Besides, I can’t see how Gonzales was damaged, other than by heaving so hard he broke a couple of blood vessels beneath his eyes. Those heal. Trust me.”

  “Yeah, but he was on the last year of a three-year contract and had an endorsement deal pending. Local, but still good, for some dealership. Now they don’t want him. The only endorsement Bandit could get is for Mylanta.”

  “That’s still your insurance company’s problem.”

  “Yeah, they’ll take care of their money,” Marquez said, “but me and my restaurant will be left for dead. I gotta prove this wasn’t my fault.”

  “How can I help you do that? I’m a private investigator, not a health inspector.”

  Herb Marquez walked over to the door and closed it.

  “I don’t trust no one, you understand? Not even people who worked for me for years. This is a jealous town and a jealous business. Someone wanted to hurt me, and they did it by pissing in Gonzales’s dinner.”

  Tess decided she was never going to eat out again as long as she lived.

  “Not literally,” Marquez added. “But someone doctored that dish. Forty people ate from that same pot Saturday night, and only one got sick. It’s not like I made him his own private batch.”

  “You told the press you did.”

  “Well, it sounded nice. I wanted him to feel special.”

  Tess had a hunch that a handsome thirty-five-year-old man who made $6 million a year for throwing a baseball 95 mph probably felt a little too special much of the time.

  “I pulled your inspections at the health department after you called me. You have had problems.”

  “Who hasn’t? But there’s a world of difference between getting caught with a line cook without a hairnet and serving someone rancid meat. If I had any of the original dish left, I could have had it tested, shown it was fine when it left here. But it was gone and the pot was washed long before he took the mound.”

  “Did he eat here or get takeout?”

  “We delivered it special to him, whenever he called. That’s why I wanted you. Your uncle says you do missing persons, right?”