Hardly Knew Her

“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 thousand 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 du

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 i

“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 i

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.”