Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  She didn’t bother to ask which uncle, just nodded. She had nine, all capable of volunteering her for this kind of favor.

  “I had a busboy, Armando Rivera. Dominican. He claimed to play baseball there, I don’t know, but I do know he was crazy for the game. Plays in Patterson Park every chance he gets. He begged me to let him take the food to Bandit. So I let him.”

  “Every time?”

  Marquez nodded. “Locally. When he was on the road, we shipped it to him. I’m guessin’ Armando delivered the food at least six times. You see, the first time he came in, it was coincidental-like, the night before opening day, and he was homesick for the food he grew up with in Miami—”

  “I know, I know.” Tess wanted to make the rotating wrist movement that a television director uses to get someone to speed up. The story had been repeated a dozen times in the media in the past week alone.

  “And he pitched a shutout, so he decided to eat it every night before a start,” Marquez continued. “And he told reporters about it, and people started coming because they thought ropa vieja was the fuckin’ fountain of youth, capable of rebuilding a guy’s arm. And now he thinks it ruined him. But it wasn’t my food. It was the busboy.”

  “Armando Rivera. Do you have an address for him? A phone?”

  “He didn’t have a phone.”

  “Okay, but he had to provide an address, for the W-2. Right?”

  Marquez dropped his head, a dog prepared for a scolding. “He didn’t exactly work on the books. The restaurant business has its own version of don’t ask, don’t tell. Armando said he lost his green card. I paid him in cash, he did his job, he was a good worker. That is, he was a good worker until he walked out of here Saturday night with Bandit’s food and disappeared.”

  “So, no address, no phone, no known associated. How do I find him?”

  “Hell, I don’t know—that’s why I hired you. He lived in East Baltimore, played ball in Patterson Park. Short guy, strong looking, very dark skin.”

  “Gee, I guess there aren’t too many Latinos in Baltimore who fit that description.” Tess sighed. It was going to be like looking for a needle in the haystack. No—more like a single grain of cayenne in ropa vieja.

  TESS COULD WALK TO PATTERSON PARK from her office, so she leashed her greyhound, Esskay, and headed over there at sunset. It was still uncomfortably muggy, and she couldn’t believe anyone would be playing baseball, yet a game was under way, with more than enough men to field two teams.

  And they were all Latino. Tess had noticed that Central and South Americans were slowly moving into the neighborhood. The first sign had been the restaurants, Mexican and Guatemalan and Salvadoran, then the combination tienda-farmacia-video stores. Spanish could be heard in city streets now, although Tess’s high school studies had not equipped her to follow the conversations.

  Still, to see twenty, thirty men in one spot, calling to one another in a language and jargon that was not hers, was extraordinary.

  Stodgy Baltimore was capable of changing, after all, and not always for the worse.

  The players wore street clothes and their gloves were as worn as their faces, which ran the gamut from pale beige to black-coffee dark. They were good, too, better than the overcompetitive corporate types that Tess had glimpsed at company softball games. Their lives were hard, but that only increased their capacity for joy. They played because it was fun, because they were adept at it. She watched the softball soar to the outfield again and again, where it was almost always caught. Muchacho, muchacho, muchacho. The center fielder had an amazing arm, capable of throwing out a runner who tried to score from third on a long fly ball. And all the players were fast, wiry and quick, drunk as six-year-olds on their own daring.

  When the center fielder himself was called out at third trying to stretch a double, the players quarreled furiously, and a fistfight seemed imminent, but the players quickly backed down.

  Dusk and the last out came almost simultaneously and the men gathered around a cooler filled with Carling Black Label. It wasn’t legal to drink in the park, but Tess couldn’t imagine the Southeast cop who would bust them. She sauntered over, suddenly aware that there were no other women here, not even as fans. The men watched her and the greyhound approach, and she decided that she would not have any problem engaging them.

  Getting them to speak truthfully, about the subject she wanted to discuss—that was another matter.

  “Habla inglés?” she asked.

  All of them nodded, but only one spoke. “Sí,” said the center fielder, a broad-shouldered young man in a striped T-shirt and denim work pants. “I mean—yes, yes, I speak English.”

  “You play here regularly?”

  “Yesssssss.” His face closed off and Tess realized that a strange woman, asking questions, was not going to inspire confidence.

  “I have an uncle who owns a couple of restaurants nearby and he’s looking for workers. He’s in a hurry to find people. He wanted me to spread the word, then interview people at my office tomorrow. It’s only a few blocks from here, and I’ll be there nine to five.”

  “We got jobs,” the spokesman said. “And not just in restaurants. I’m a—” He groped for the word in English. “I make cars.”

  “Well, maybe some of you want better jobs, or different ones. Or maybe you know people who are having trouble finding work—for whatever reason. My uncle’s very…relaxed about stuff. Here’s my card, just in case.”

  The card was neutral, giving nothing away about her real profession, just a name and number. The center fielder took it noncommittally, holding it by a corner as if he planned to throw it down the moment she left. But Tess saw some bright, interested eyes in the group.

  “Hey, lady,” the spokesman said as she began to walk away.

  “Yes?” She couldn’t believe that she was getting results so swiftly.

  “If your uncle plans on cooking tu perro, your dog, he better put some meat on it first. You—you’re fine.”

  Even the men’s laughter sounded foreign to her ears—not mean or cruel, just different.

  THE NEXT DAY, SHE KEPT her office hours as promised, although she wasn’t surprised when no one showed up. She filled the time by reading everything she could find about Bandit’s bout of turista. Herb Marquez thought this was all about him, but wasn’t it also possible that someone had targeted Bandit? But she was stunned by the sheer volume of baseball information on the Internet. She wandered from site to site, taking strange detours through stats and newspaper columns, ending up in an area earmarked for “roto,” which she thought was short for rotator cuff injuries. It turned out to be one of several sites devoted to rotisserie baseball, a fantasy league. Overwhelmed, she called her father, the biggest baseball fan she knew.

  “You’re working for Bandit Gonzales?” He couldn’t have been happier if she had called to announce that she was going to marry, move to the suburbs, have two children, and buy a minivan.

  “Not exactly,” Tess said. “But I need to understand why someone might have wanted to make him sick last week.”

  “Well, a real fan would have made the owner sick, but it’s not all bad for the Orioles, Bandit getting the heaves.”

  “How can that be good for the fans?”

  “Because it happened July thirtieth.”

  His expectant silence told Tess that this should be fraught with meaning. But if a daughter can’t be ignorant in front of her father, what’s the point of having parents?

  “And…?”

  Mock-patient sigh. “July thirty-first is the trade deadline.”

  “Let me repeat. And?”

  “Jesus, don’t you read the sports section? July thirty-first is the last day to make trades without putting guys on waivers. A team like the Orioles, who’s going nowhere, tends to dump the talent. The Mets—” Her father, as was his habit, appeared to spit after saying that team’s name; 1969 had been very hard on him. “The Mets were going to take Bandit to shore up their pitching. I gotta admit,
the thought of it just about killed me.”

  “So is he going to the Mets?”

  “Jesus, the least you could do is listen to Oriole Baseball on ’BAL. The Mets decided to pick up some kid from the Rangers. Maybe they would have gone that way no matter what. Maybe not.”

  “Dad, I know you were joking about poisoning Bandit’s food”—Tess hoped he was joking—“but could someone have done it? Who benefited? The Orioles, as you said, wanted to dump him. So who gained when he didn’t go?”

  “The Atlanta Braves.”

  “Seriously, Dad.”

  “I was being serious.” He sounded a little hurt.

  “What about Bandit?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is there any reason he might not want to be traded?”

  “You’re the private detective. Ask him.”

  “Right, I’ll just go over to where Bandit Gonzales lives and say, ‘Hey, did you make yourself puke?’”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Her father suddenly sounded urgent. “But before you ask him that, would you get him to sign a baseball for me?”

  THE PROBLEM WITH LOOKING for something is that you tend to find it.

  Once Tess fixated on the idea that Bandit Gonzales might have doctored his own food, she kept discovering all sorts of reasons why he might have done just that. A property search brought up property in the so-called Valley, not far from where Ripken lived. Gonzales had taken out various permits and a behemoth of a house was under construction. At the state office building, Tess found the paperwork showing that Gonzales had recently incorporated. A check of the newspaper archives pulled up various interviews in which Gonzales mulled his post-baseball future. He had started a charity and seemed knowledgeable about local real estate.

  Oh, and he wanted to open a restaurant. He had even registered a name with the state—Bandit’s Cuba Café.

  BANDIT LIVED AT HARBOR COURT, a luxury hotel-condo just a few blocks from Camden Yards. His corner unit had a water view from its main rooms but paid respect to Bandit’s employers with a sliver of ballpark visible from the master bath. Tess knew this because she faked a need for the bathroom upon arriving, then quickly scanned Bandit’s medicine cabinet for ipecac or anything that could have produced vomiting on demand. She didn’t find anything, but that didn’t persuade her that she was wrong in her suspicions. She went back to the living room, where a bemused Bandit was waiting. Well, waiting wasn’t exactly the right word. He was sliding back and forth on an ergometer, a piece of workout equipment that Tess knew all too well. A sweep rower in college, she still worked out on an erg, and a proper erg workout pushed you to the point where you didn’t need bad meat to throw up.

  “You said you were from the health department?” Bandit had no trace of an accent; his family had escaped to Miami before he was born.

  “Not exactly. But I am looking into your…incident.”

  Bandit didn’t look embarrassed. Then again, athletes gave interviews naked, so maybe getting sick in front of others wasn’t such a big deal. He slid back and forth on the erg, up and back, up and back.

  “So who do you work for?” he asked after a few more slides.

  “Do you know,” Tess sidestepped, “that Johns Hopkins is doing all this research in new viruses? We’re talking parasites, microbes, the kind of things you used to have to travel to get.”

  He stopped moving on the erg, his complexion taking on a decidedly greenish cast. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “How can you know if you have one?”

  “Dunno.” Tess shrugged.

  “But you work for Hopkins.”

  “I didn’t say that.” She hadn’t.

  “Still, you’re looking for this thing, this bug. You think I might have it?”

  Another shrug.

  “Jesus fucking Joseph and Mary.” He bent forward, his head in his hands. He was a good-looking man by almost anyone’s standards, with bright brown eyes and glossy blue-black hair. His heavily muscled legs and arms were the color of flan. He was a young man by the world’s standards, but his sport considered him old, and this fact seemed to be rubbing off on him. His face was lined from years in the sun and his hair was thinning at the crown.

  “Did you do it yourself,” Tess asked, “or did you have help?”

  He lifted his face from his hands. “Why would I give myself a parasite?”

  “I don’t think you intended to do that. But I think you asked someone to help you last weekend because you didn’t want to leave a city where you had finally put down some roots.”

  “Huh?”

  “Or maybe it’s as simple as your desire to open a restaurant that will rival the one you helped to make famous. I can see that. Why should someone else get rich because you eat his food? If someone’s going to make money off of you, it should be you, right?”

  Bandit began to massage his left arm, rubbing it with the unself-conscious gesture that Tess had noticed in athletes and dancers. They lived so far inside their bodies that they saw them as separate entities.

  “You don’t know much about baseball, do you?”

  “I know enough.”

  “What’s enough?”

  “I know that the Orioles won the World Series in 1966, 1971, and 1983. I know that the American League has the DH. And I can almost explain the infield fly rule.”

  Now Bandit was working his knees, rubbing one, then the other. They made disturbing popping sounds, but Bandit didn’t seem to notice. He could have been a guy tinkering on a car in his driveway.

  “Well, here’s the business of baseball. I was going to be sent to New York, in exchange for prospects. But the Mets probably wouldn’t have kept me past this season, and my agent let the Orioles know I’d come back for one more season, no hard feelings. It could have been a good deal for everyone. Now I’m tainted as that meat that Herb sent over. Look, I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but it happened. He’s accountable.”

  “Could it have been anything else? What else did you eat that day?”

  “Nothing but dry cereal because I felt pretty punky when I got up that morning. I shouldn’t have tried to start.”

  It was Tess’s practice to give out as little information as possible, but she needed to dish if she was going to prod Bandit into providing anything useful. “Herb thinks the delivery guy did it, on his own.”

  Bandit rolled his shoulders in a large, looping shrug. “Then he shouldn’t have used someone new. Manny was a good guy. I signed a ball for him, chatted with him in Spanish.”

  “Someone new?”

  “Yeah, and he was kind of a jerk. His attitude came in the door about three feet in front of him, then he treated it like a social call, as if I should offer him a beer, ask him to sit down and take a load off. He acted like…he owned me. I thought he might be a little retarded.”

  “Retarded.”

  He mistook her echo for a rebuke. “Oh yeah, you’re not supposed to say that anymore. I mean, he was over forty and he was a delivery boy. That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? And he wouldn’t shut up. I just wanted to eat my dinner and go to bed.”

  “I assume this building has a video system, for security?”

  Another Bandit-style shrug, only forward this time.

  “I dunno. Why? You think he spit in my meat on the elevator or something?”

  Tess was going to be a vegetarian before this was over.

  “Do people sign in? Do they have to give their tag numbers, or just their names?”

  “The doorman would know, I guess.” She started moving toward the door. “Hey, don’t you want a photo or something?”

  “Maybe for my dad. His name is Pat.”

  He walked over to the sleek, modern desk, which didn’t look as if it got much use, and extracted a glossy photo from a folder. “Nothing for you?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  Bandit gave her a quizzical look. “If I told you I had an ERA under four, would that impress you?”

  “No, but
I would pretend it did.”

  THE DOORMAN PROVED to be a nosy little gossip. Tess wouldn’t want to live next door to him, but she wished every investigation yielded such helpful busybodies. He not only remembered the motormouth delivery “boy,” but he remembered his car.

  “A dark green Porsche 911, fairly new.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Why would I make that up? Guy got out in a rush, handed me his keys like he thought I was the fuckin’ valet. I told him to go up and I’d watch his precious wheels. He even had vanity plates—‘ICU.’”

  “As in ‘Intensive Care Unit’?”

  “Could be. Although, in my experience, the doctors drive Jags while the lawyers who sue them pick Porsches. Hey, do you know the difference between a porcupine and a Porsche?”

  “Yes,” Tess said, refusing to indulge the doorman’s lawyer joke, on the grounds that it was too easy.

  Everything was too easy. She ran the plates, found they belonged to Dr. Scott Russell, who kept an office in a nearby professional building. Too easy, she repeated when she drove to the address and saw the Porsche parked outside. Too easy, she thought as she sat in the waiting room and pretended to read People, watching the white-jacketed doctor come and go, chatting rapidly to his patients. He had a smug arrogance that seemed normal in a doctor, but how would it go over in a delivery boy? A motormouth, the doorman had said. As if he were on a social call, Bandit had said. The doctor may have dressed up like a delivery boy, but he hadn’t been prepared to act like one.

  The only surprise was that he wasn’t a surgeon or a gastroenterologist, but an ophthalmologist specializing in LASIK. ICU—now she got it. And wished she hadn’t. But his practice, billed as Visualize Liberation, was clearly thriving. He presided over a half-dozen surgeries while she waited. It was easy to keep count, because each operation was simulcast on a screen in the waiting room, much to Tess’s discomfort.

  By 2:45 P.M., the last patient had been ushered out. The receptionist glanced curiously at Tess.

  “Do you have an appointment?”