The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  Dontay was a Melville and all the Melvilles were industrious by nature. True, some had focused their energies on less legal businesses, which is why the number of the people in the house tended to fluctuate. They were at the high end right now, with Uncle Stevie home from Hagerstown and Delia’s twins staying with them, while Delia was spending time on the West Side, in that place that Granny M called “thereabouts.” When’s our mama coming? the twins asked late at night, when they were sleepy and forgetful. Where’s our mama? “Thereabouts,” Granny M said. “She’ll be coming home shortly.” Granny M pledged that her house was open to all her children and her children’s children and, when the time came, and it was coming, her children’s children’s children, but she had rules. Church was optional if you were over twelve. Sobriety was not. That’s why she had squashed Uncle Marcus’s plan to buy some cheap tallboys, layer them beneath the bottled waters and sodas, in case some folks had second thoughts about paying track prices for beer or decided they hadn’t brought enough beer of their own.

  THE TRACK DIDN’T OPEN ITS DOORS until nine, but the Melvilles’ Preakness Day started at 7 A.M., with Uncle Marcus and Ronnie Moe, a shirttail relation, taking the two cars over to the Wabash metro stop, then cabbing back before traffic started peaking. Weather for Preakness was seldom fine—either it fell short of its potential and ended up rainy and cool or it overshot spring altogether, delivering a full-blown Baltimore scorcher with air that felt like feathers. Today was a chilly one, and Dontay was on a roll, ferrying coolers faster than he ever had before, his money piling up in the Tupperware container that Granny M had marked with his name. He would have liked to keep his bills in his pocket, a fat roll to stroke from time to time, but he knew better. Even with the streets crowded as they were today, with uniformed police officers everywhere, the bigger boys, the lazy ones who didn’t like to extend themselves, wouldn’t hesitate to knock him down and take his money.

  In his head, he tried to add up what he had made so far. Granny M took a cut for the collection plate, but he’d still have enough for the new version of Grand Theft Auto. Or should he buy some new Nikes? But Granny M would buy him shoes, no matter how much she bitched and moaned and threatened to get him no-brands at the outlets. Beneath her complaints, she knew that shoes mattered. Even when Uncle Marcus was a kid, so long ago that there weren’t any Nikes, just Keds and Jack Purcell’s, it had been death to come to school in no-brands. Fishheads, they called them then. Granny M wouldn’t do that to him, as long as he passed all his classes, which he had more than done. Dontay not only had almost all B’s going into the final grading period, his stock-picking club had come in third in the state for all middle schools. And Dontay deserved most of the credit for that because he had said they should buy Apple before Christmas, then drop it quick, all those people buying iPods and shit.

  An iPod—now wouldn’t that be something to have, although the Melvilles had only one computer and it was hard to get any time on it, even for homework. Plus, the big kids in the neighborhood knew to look for those white wires, and they would smack a man down for them, then kick him harder if it turned out to be some knockoff player. He counted up in his head again, but naw, he was nowhere close. And here it was going on 3 P.M., the meaty part of the day gone. Unless he found a winning ticket at the cleanup, he wasn’t going to be buying anything like that. His own CD player, though. That was within reach.

  The big race was only ninety minutes away and the neighborhood had pretty much gone quiet when a man and a woman in a huge-ass Escalade inquired about the final space at the Melvilles’, which had opened up unexpectedly after some couple had a fight earlier in the afternoon. That was what Dontay thought had happened, at least. He had escorted two people in, a man and a woman, and the woman had shown up not even an hour later, so anxious to get away that she had shot the car right over the curb, no thought to the shocks. The Melvilles were wondering what would happen at day’s end, when the man returned for the car that wasn’t there. Maybe they could offer to take him home, undercut the local cabbies.

  “How much to park here?” asked this latecomer, the woman behind the wheel of the Escalade.

  Uncle Marcus hesitated. This late in the day, she might expect a discount. Before he could answer, she jumped in: “Forty dollars?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Back it in.”

  “I admit I can’t maneuver this thing into such a tight space,” she said. “It’s new and I’m still not used to it. Would you do it for me?”

  She hopped out and let Uncle Marcus take her place, her dude still sitting stone-faced in the passenger seat. Dontay thought that was cold, making a man look weak that way, but the man in the Escalade didn’t seem to notice. Uncle Marcus showed off a little, whipping the SUV back into the space and cutting it a lot closer than he should have, but he pulled it off. The woman counted two twenties into his hand, then added a ten.

  “For the extra service,” she said. Her man didn’t say anything.

  Oh, how Dontay prayed they would have a cooler, but they didn’t look to be cooler people. She looked like a grandstand type—polkadotted halter dress, big hat and dark glasses, high-heeled shoes in the same yellow as the background of her dress. The man had a blazer and a tie and light-colored pants. Those types usually didn’t have coolers. In fact, those types didn’t usually park in the yards, but it was late. Maybe the lots at the track were full.

  Still, it never hurt to ask.

  “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 thre
e 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.