The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  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?”

  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 Balt
imore 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.