The Accidental Detective and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  “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 unselfconscious 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?”

  “No, but I need to speak to Dr. Russell.”

  “It’s almost three P.M. He doesn’t see anyone after three, not on Wednesdays.”

  “He can see just me now, or meet with me and the Baltimore city police later.”

  “But it’s three P.M. and it’s Wednesday.”

  “So?”

  “That’s trade deadline. The last girl who interrupted him on a Wednesday afternoon got fired.”

  “Luckily, I don’t work for him.”

  Tess walked past the receptionist, assuming someone would try to stop her. But the receptionist sat frozen at her desk, face stricken, as if Tess were heading into the lion’s den.

  Dr. Russell was on the phone, a hands-free headset, his back to her as he leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the windowsill.

  “—no, no, Delino is healthy, I swear. You always think I got inside information because I’m a doctor, but all I know is eyes, not backs. I want to trade him because I don’t need run production as much as I need pitching, so I’m unwilling to give you him for a closer. Look, you’re not even in the hunt for one of the top four slots. It’s bad sportsmanship to refuse a good trade just because you don’t want me to take first place.”

  “Hey,” Tess called out. “ICU. Get it?”

  When he turned around, his narrow, foxy features were contorted with rage. “I am BUSY,” he said. “I know everyone wants to consult with me, but the other doctors here are quite competent to do the intake interviews.”

  “I’ve got twenty-twenty vision,” Tess said. “So does the doorman who saw you and your car at Harbor Court when you delivered food to Bandit Gonzales. Here’s a tip—the next time you attempt a felony, don’t use a Porsche with vanity tags.”

  “I’ll call you back,” he said into the headset. “But think about Delino, okay?” Then to Tess: “Felony? He didn’t get that sick. I love Bandit Gonzales and would never hurt him. I’m counting on another win from him in his next start.”

  “You love Bandit Gonzales so much you poisoned him?”

  “It’s August and I’m in first place by only three points. There’s five t
housand dollars at stake. But also a principle.”

  In fact, five thousand dollars was what Visualize Liberation charged for one of its higher-end surgeries, a procedure that took almost fifteen minutes to perform.

  “First place?”

  “In roto. Rotisserie baseball. I’ve been in the No Lives League for almost fifteen years and never won. Never even finished in the money. Bandit Gonzales was going to help me change that. I picked him up cheap, in the draft. It was genius on my part, genius. But if he goes to the Mets …” He was getting visibly agitated, shaking and sweating, swinging his arms.

  “But it’s a fantasy league. You’d still have him, right?”

  “We’re an American League–only roto. When our players go to the National League, they might as well have died or quit baseball.” He jumped up, began pacing around his desk. “You see? If they traded him to the Mariners, I’d be fine. But they were talking about the Mets, the Mets, the fuckin’ Mets. I’ve hated the Mets since 1969 and they’re still finding ways to screw me.”

  He was now hopping around the room, Rumpelstiltskin in his final rage, and Tess wondered if he would fly apart. But all he did was bang his knee on his desk, which made him curse more.

  “How much did you pay Armando Rivera to let you deliver the food?”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  “So if you win roto, you’ll only be up three thousand.”

  “It’s not about the money,” he said. “I’ve never won. This was supposed to be my year.”

  “And if you’re arrested for a felony—and what you did to Bandit constitutes felonious assault—would you be disqualified?”

  Russell looked thoughtful. “I dunno. I think it’s all just part of being a good negotiator. That trade I was about to make, when you came in? I was lying my ass off. I do know the team doctor and he told me Delino is headed for the DL. But I had to make the trade by three, so you screwed me out of that.”

  A WEEK LATER, TESS WENT back to the baseball diamond in Patterson Park, where the same group of men were playing their nightly game. The weather wasn’t any cooler, but it held a promise of fall and the men seemed to have extra energy.

  Between innings, she waved to the center fielder she remembered from the last time. He loped over warily.

  “What’s the score?”

  “Quatro-tres,” he said. “Four-three. But I plan to make a home run in my next bat. Maybe I will call it, like Babe Ruth.”

  “I’m looking for a man named Armando Rivera—to tell him some good news, news he’ll want to hear. You know him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, if you see him, tell him that Herb Marquez is cool with him, now that the guy has been forced to confess. The thing is, Marquez doesn’t know that Rivera got paid to let the other man make the delivery. He thinks it was an honest mistake, that Rivera just wanted to go home early that night. And the guy who did it, he decided that any discussion of money would just make it look even more deliberate. He was keen to make a plea, put this behind him. Plus, despite having twenty-twenty vision, he doesn’t really see other people so well. He couldn’t pick Armando Rivera out of a lineup.”

  “It’s an interesting story,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  He walked to the on-deck circle, picked up a bat, and began swinging it.

  “By the way,” Tess said, “what did you do with the two thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am a mechanic.”

  “Okay, you’re a mechanic. But remember, it’s only a game.”

  “At least I play the game,” he said. “I don’t move men around on paper and call that baseball.”

  He jogged to home plate with a springy, athletic stride that Tess envied. The days were getting shorter, losing a few minutes of light every day. They would be lucky to get nine innings in tonight.

  THE SHOESHINE MAN’S REGRETS

  Bruno Magli?”

  “Uh-uh. Bally.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Some kids get flash cards of farm animals when they’re little. I think my mom showed me pictures of footwear cut from magazines. After all, she couldn’t have her only daughter bringing home someone who wore white patent loafers, even in the official season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Speaking of which—there’s a full Towson.”

  “Wow—white shoes and white belt and white tie, and ten miles south of his natural habitat, the Baltimore County courthouse. I thought the full Towson was on the endangered clothing list.”

  “Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.”

  Tess Monaghan and Whitney Talbot were standing outside the Brass Elephant on a soft June evening, studying the people ahead of them in the valet parking line. A laundry truck had blocked the driveway to the restaurant’s lot, disrupting the usually smooth operation, so the restaurant’s patrons were milling about, many agitated. There was muttered talk of symphony tickets and the Oriole game and the Herzog retrospective at the Charles Theater.

  But Tess and Whitney, mellowed by martinis, eggplant appetizers, and the perfect weather, had no particular place to go and no great urgency about getting there. They had started cataloging the clothes and accessories of those around them only because Tess had confided to Whitney that she was trying to sharpen her powers of observation. It was a reasonable exercise in self-improvement for a private detective—and a great sport for someone as congenitally catty as Whitney.

  The two friends were inventorying another man’s loafers—Florsheim, Tess thought, but Whitney said good old-fashioned Weejuns—when they noticed a glop of white on one toe. And then, as if by magic, a shoeshine man materialized at the Weejun wearer’s elbow.

  “You got something there, mister. Want me to give you a quick shine?”

  Tess, still caught up in her game of cataloging, saw that the shoeshine man was old, but then, all shoeshine men seemed old these days. She often wondered where the next generation of shoeshine men would come from, if they were also on the verge of extinction, like the Towson types who sported white belts with white shoes. This man was thin, with a slight stoop to his shoulders and a tremble in his limbs, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped close. He must be on his way home from the train station or the Belvedere Hotel, Tess decided, heading toward a bus stop on one of the major east-west streets farther south, near the city’s center.

  “What the—?” Mr. Weejun was short and compact, with a yellow polo shirt tucked into lime-green trousers. A golfer, Tess decided, noticing his florid face and sunburned bald spot. She was not happy to see him waiting for a car, given how many drinks he had tossed back in the Brass Elephant’s Tusk Lounge. He was one of the people who kept braying about his Oriole tickets.

  Now he extended his left foot, pointing his toe in a way that reminded Tess of the dancing hippos in Fantasia, and stared at the white smear on his shoe in anger and dismay.

  “You bastard,” he said to the shoeshine man. “How did you get that shit on my shoe?”

  “I didn’t do anything, sir. I was just passing by, and I saw that your shoe was dirty. Maybe you tracked in something in the restaurant.”

  “It’s some sort of scam, isn’t it?” The man appealed to the restless crowd, glad for any distraction at this point. “Anyone see how this guy got this crap on my shoe?”

  “He didn’t,” Whitney said, her voice cutting the air with her usual conviction. “It was on your shoe when you came out of the restaurant.”

  It wasn’t what Mr. Weejun wanted to hear, so he ignored her.

  “Yeah, you can clean my shoe,” he told the old man. “Just don’t expect a tip.”

  The shoeshine man sat down his box and went to work quickly. “Mayonnaise,” he said, sponging the mass from the shoe with a cloth. “Or salad dressing. Something like that.”

  “I guess you’d know,” Weejun said. “Since you put it there.”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  The s
hoeshine man was putting the finishing touches on the man’s second shoe when the valet pulled up in a Humvee. Taxicab yellow, Tess observed, still playing the game. Save the Bay license plates and a sticker that announced the man as the member of an exclusive downtown health club.

  “Five dollars,” the shoeshine man said, and Weejun pulled out a five with great ostentation—then handed it to the valet. “No rewards for scammers,” he said with great satisfaction. But when he glanced around, apparently expecting some sort of affirmation for his boorishness, all he saw were shocked and disapproving faces.

  With the curious logic of the disgraced, Weejun upped the ante, kicking the man’s shoeshine kit so its contents spilled across the sidewalk. He then hopped into his Humvee, gunning the motor, although the effect of a quick getaway was somewhat spoiled by the fact that his emergency brake was on. The Humvee bucked, then shot forward with a squeal.

  As the shoeshine man’s hands reached for the spilled contents of his box, Tess saw him pick up a discarded soda can and throw it at the fender of the Humvee. It bounced off with a hollow, harmless sound, but the car stopped with a great squealing of brakes and Weejun emerged, spoiling for a fight. He threw himself on the shoeshine man.

  But the older man was no patsy. He grabbed his empty box, landing it in his attacker’s stomach with a solid, satisfying smack. Tess waited for someone, anyone, to do something, but no one moved. Reluctantly she waded in, tossing her cell phone to Whitney. Longtime friends who had once synched their movements in a women’s four on the rowing team at Washington College, the two could still think in synch when necessary. Whitney called 911 while Tess grabbed Weejun by the collar and uttered a piercing scream as close to his ear as possible. “Stop it, asshole. The cops are coming.”

  The man nodded, seemed to compose himself—then charged the shoeshine man again. Tess tried to hold him back by the belt, and he turned back, swinging out wildly, hitting her in the chin. Sad to say, this physical contact galvanized the crowd in a way that his attack on an elderly black man had not. By the time the blue-and-whites rolled up, the valet parkers were holding Weejun and Whitney was examining the fast-developing bruise on Tess’s jaw with great satisfaction.