Hardly Knew Her

EASY AS A-B-C

Another house collapsed today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest comes pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef, or carve master bath suites in the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate-boom. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, seeing what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books-anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake, because it could kill people, literally. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time. Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging on how handy he was.

The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill, before my time, flattened out for a while in the nineties, and now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill, and into Riverside Park and all the way down Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away the various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. She was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.

My mother sold the house for $75,000. That was a dozen years ago and boy, did we think we had put one over on the buyers. Seventy-five thousand! For a house on Decatur Street in Locust Point. And all cash for my mom, because it had been paid off forever. We went to Hausner’s the night of the closing, toasted our good fortune. The old German restaurant was still open then, crammed with all that art and junk. We had veal and strawberry pie and top-shelf liquor and toasted Grandfather for leaving us such a windfall.

So imagine how I felt when I got a referral for a complete redo at my grandparents’ old address and the real estate guy tells me: “She got it for only $225,000, so she’s willing to put another $100,000 in it and I bet she won’t bat an eyelash if the work goes up to $150,000.”

“Huh” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.

“The first thing I want to do is get a parking pad back here,” my client said, sweeping a hand over what was an overgrown patch of weeds, the chain-link fence sagging around it. “I’ve been told that will increase the value of the property by $10,000, $20,000.”

“You a flipper?” I asked. More and more amateurs were getting into real estate, feeling that the stock market wasn’t for them. They were the worst of all possible worlds, panicking at every penny over the original estimate, riding my ass. You want to flip property for profit, you need to be able to do the work yourself. Or buy and hold. This woman didn’t look like the patient type.

“No, I plan to live here. In fact, I hope to move in as quickly as possible, so time is more important to me than money. I was told you’re fast.”

“I don’t waste time, but I don’t cut corners,” I said. “Mainly, I just try to make my customers happy.”

She tilted her head up. It was the practiced look of a woman who had been looking at men from under her eyelashes for much of her life, sure they would be charmed. And, okay, I was. Dark hair, cut in one of those casual, disarrayed styles, darker eyes that made me think of kalamata olives, which isn’t particularly romantic, I guess. But I really like kalamata olives. With her fair skin, it was a terrific contrast.

“I’m sure you’ll make me very happy” was all she said.

I GUESS HERE IS WHERE I should mention that I’m married going on eighteen years, and pretty happily, too. I realize it’s a hard concept to grasp, especially for a lot of women, but you can be perfectly happy, still in love with your wife, maybe more in love with your wife than you’ve ever been, but it’s eighteen years and a young, firm-fleshed woman looks up at you through her eyelashes and it’s not a crime to think: I like that. Not: I’d like to hit that, which I hear the young guys on my crews say. Just: I like that, that’s nice, if life were different, I’d make time for that. But I was married, with two kids and a sweet wife, Angeline, who’d only put on a few pounds and still kept her hair blond and long, and was pretty appreciative of the life my work had built for the two of us. So I had no agenda. I was just weak.

But part of Deirdre’s allure was how much she professed to love the very things whose destruction she was presiding over, even before I told her that the house had belonged to my grandparents. She exclaimed over the wallpaper in their bedroom, a pattern of yellow roses, even as it was steamed off the walls. She ran a hand lovingly over the banister, worn smooth by my younger hands, not to mention my butt a time or two. The next day it was gone, yanked from its moorings by my workers. She all but composed an ode to the black-and-white tile in the single full bath, but that didn’t stop her from meeting with Charles Tile Co. and choosing a Tuscany-themed medley for what was to become the master bath suite. (“Medley” was their word, not mine.)

She had said she wanted it fast, which made me ache a little, because the faster it went, the sooner I would be out of her world. But it turned out she didn’t care about speed so much once we got the house to the point where she could live among the ongoing work-and once her end-of-the-day inspections culminated with the two of us in her raw, unfinished bedroom. She was wilder than I had expected, pushing to do things that Angeline would never have tolerated, much less asked for. In some part of my mind, I knew her abandon came from the fact that she never lost sight of the endpoint. The work would be concluded and this would conclude, too. Which was what I wanted as well, I guess. I had no desire to leave Angeline or cause my kids any grief. Deirdre and I were scrupulous about keeping our secret, and not even my longtime guys, the ones who knew me best, guessed anything was up. To them, I bitched about her as much as I did any client, maybe a little more. “Moldings?” my carpenter would ask. “Now she wants moldings?” And I would roll my eyes and shrug, say: “Women.”

“Moldings?” Deirdre asked.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “No charge. But I saw you look at them.”

And so it was with the appliances, the countertops, the triple-pane windows. I bought what she wanted, billed for what she could afford. Somehow, in my mind, it was as if I had sold the house for $225,000, as if all that profit had gone to me, instead of the speculator who had bought the house from my mother and then just left it alone to ripen. Over time, I probably put $10,000 of my own money into those improvements, even accounting for my discounts on material. Some men give women roses and jewelry. I gave Deirdre a marble bathroom and a beautiful old mantel for the living room fireplace, which I restored to the wood-burning hearth it had never been. My grandparents had had one of those old gas-fired logs, but Deirdre said they were tacky and I suppose she was right.

Go figure-I’ve never had a job with fewer complications. The weather held, there were no surprises buried within the old house. “A deck,” I said. “You’ll want a rooftop deck to watch the fireworks.” And not just any deck, of course. I built it myself, using teak and copper accents, helped her shop for the proper furniture, outdoor hardy but still feminine, with curvy lines and that verdigris patina she loved so much. I showed her how to cultivate herbs and perennials in pots, but not the usual wooden casks. No, these were iron, to match the décor. If I had to put a name to her style, I guess I’d say Nouvelle New Orleans-flowery, but not overly so, with genuine nineteenth-century pieces balanced by contemporary ones. I guess her taste was good. She certainly thought so and told me often enough. “If only I had the pocketbook to keep up with my taste,” she would say with a sigh and another one of those sidelong glances, and the next thing I knew I’d be installing some wall sconce she simply had to have.

One twilight-we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home-she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry. A brick foundry, a place where men like my dad had once earned decent wages, and now it housed this chichi restaurant, a gallery, a health club, and a spa. The old P amp;G plant became something called Tide Point, which was supposed to be some high-tech mecca, and they’re building condos on the grain piers. The only real jobs left in Locust Point are at Domino Sugar and Phillips, where the red neon crab still clambers up and down the smokestack.

“Nice,” I said, although in truth I don’t care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.

“Viognier,” she said. “Twenty-six dollars a bottle.”

“You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer.”

“You can’t drink bourbon with dinner,” she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. “Besides, wine can be an investment. And it’s cheaper by the case. I’d like to get into that, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled.”

“Your basement would work.”

And that’s how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost. It didn’t require excavating the basement, luckily, although I was forever bumping my head on the ceiling when I straightened up to my full height. But I’m six-three and she was just a little thing, no more than five-two, barely a hundred pounds. I used to carry her to bed and, well, show her other ways I could manipulate her weight. She liked me to sit her on the marble counter in her master bath, far forward on the edge, so I was supporting most of her weight. Because of the way the mirrors were positioned, we could both watch and it was a dizzying infinity, our eyes locked into our own eyes and into each other’s. I know guys who call a sink fuck the old American Standard, but I never thought of it that way. For one thing, there wasn’t a single American Standard piece in the bathroom. And the toilet was a Canadian model, smuggled in, so she could have the bigger tank that had been outlawed in the interest of water conservation. Her shower was powerful, too, a stinging force that I came to know well, scrubbing up afterward.

The wine cellar gave me another month-putting down a floor, smoothing and painting the old plaster walls. My grandparents had used the basement for storage and us cousins had played hide-and-seek in the dark, a made-up version that was particularly thrilling, where you moved silently, trying to get close enough to grab the ones in hiding, then rushing back to the stairs, which were the home-free base. As it sometimes happens, the basement seemed larger when it was full of my grandparents’ junk. Painted and pared down, it was so small. But it was big enough to hold the requisite refrigeration unit and the custom-made shelves, a beautiful burled walnut, for the wines she bought.

I was done. There was not another improvement I could make to the house, so changed now it was as if my family and its history had been erased. Deirdre and I had been hurtling toward this day for months and now it was here. I had to move on to other projects, ones where I would make money. Besides, people were beginning to wonder. I wasn’t around the other jobs as much, but I also wasn’t pulling in the kind of money that would help placate Angeline over the crazy hours I was working. Time to end it.

Our last night, I stopped at the foundry, spent almost forty bucks on a bottle of wine that the young girl in the store swore by. Cake-bread, the guy’s real name. White, too, because I knew Deirdre loved white wines.

“Chardonnay,” she said.

“I noticed you liked whites.”

“But not chardonnay so much. I’m an ABC girl-anything but chardonnay. Dennis says chardonnay is banal.”

“Dennis?”

She didn’t answer. And she was supposed to answer, supposed to say: Oh, you know, that faggot from my wine-tasting class, the one who smells like he wears strawberry perfume. Or: That irritating guy in my office. Or even: A neighbor, a creep. He scares me. Would you still come around, from time to time, just to check up on me? She didn’t say any of those things.

Instead, she said: “We were never going to be a regular thing, my love.”

Right. I knew that. I was the one with the wife and the house and the two kids. I was the one who had everything to lose. I was the one who was glad to be getting out, before it could all catch up with me. I was the one who was careful not to use the word “love,” not even in the lighthearted way she had just used it. Sarcastic, almost. It made me think that it wasn’t my marital status so much that had closed off that possibility for us, but something even more entrenched. I was no different from the wallpaper, the banister, the garden. I had to be removed for the house to be truly hers.

My grandmother’s parents had thought she was too good for my grandfather. They were Irish, shipworkers who had gotten the hell out of Locust Point and moved uptown, to Charles Village, where the houses were much bigger. They looked down on my grandfather just because he was where they once were. It killed them, the idea that their precious youngest daughter might move back to the neighborhood and live with an Italian, to boot. Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. If there’s not somebody below you, how do you know you’ve traveled any distance at all in your life? For my dad’s generation, it was all about the blacks. I’m not saying it was right, just that it was, and it hung on because it was such a stark, visible difference. And now the rules have changed again, and it’s the young people with money and ambition who are buying the houses in Locust Point and the people in places like Linthicum and Catonsville and Arbutus are the ones to be pitied and condescended to. It’s hard to keep up.

My hand curled tight around the neck of the wine bottle. But I placed it gently in its berth in the special refrigerator, as if I were putting a newborn back in its bed.

“One last time?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said.

She clearly was thinking it would be the bed, romantic and final, but I opted for the bathroom, wanting to see her from all angles. Wanting her to see, to witness, to remember how broad my shoulders were, how white and small she looked when I was holding her. When I moved my hands from her hips to her head, she thought I was trying to position her mouth on mine. It took her a second to realize that my hands were on her throat, not her head, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. She fought back, if you could call it that, but all her hands could find was marble, smooth and immutable. Yeah, that’s another word I know. Immutable. She may have landed a few scratches, but a man in my line of work gets banged up all the time. No one would notice a beaded scab on the back of my hand, or even on my cheek.

I put her body in a trash bag, covering it with lime left over from a landscaping job. Luckily, she hadn’t been so crazed that she wanted a fireplace in the basement, so all I had to do was pull down the fake front I had placed over the old hearth down there, then brick her in, replace the fake front.

Her computer was on, as always, her e-mail account open because she used cable for her Internet, a system I had installed. I read a few of her sent messages, just to make sure I aped her style, then sent one to an office address, explaining the family emergency that would take me out of town for a few days. Then I sent one to “Dennis,” angry and hate-filled, accusing him of all kinds of things. Finally, I cleaned the house best I could, especially the bathroom, although I didn’t feel I had to be too conscientious. I was the contractor. Of course my fingerprints would be around.

Weeks later, when she was missing and increasingly presumed dead according to the articles I read in the Sunpapers, I sent a bill for the things that I had done at cost, marked it “Third and Final Notice” in large red letters, as if I didn’t even know what was going on. She was just an address to me. Her parents paid it, even apologized for their daughter being so irresponsible, buying all this stuff she couldn’t afford. I told them I understood, having my own college-age kids and all. I said I was so sorry for what had happened and that I hoped they found her soon. I do feel sorry for them. They can’t begin to cover the monthly payments on the place, so it’s headed toward foreclosure. The bank will make a nice profit, as long as the agents gloss over the reason for the sale; people don’t like a house with even the hint of a sordid history.

And I’m glad now that I put in the wine cellar. Makes it less likely that the new owner will want to dig out the basement, risk its collapse, and the discovery of what will one day be a little bag of bones, nothing more.

BLACK-EYED SUSAN

The Melville family had Preakness coming and going, as Dontay’s Granny M liked to say. From their rowhouse south of Pimlico, the loose assemblage of three generations-sometimes as many as twelve people in the three-bedroom house, never fewer than eight-squeezed every coin they could from the third Saturday in May, and they were always looking for new ways. Revenue streams, as Dontay had learned to call them in Pimlico Middle’s stock-picking club. Last year, for example, the Melvilles had tried a barbecue stand, selling racegoers hamburgers and hot dogs, but the city health people had shut them down before noon. So they were going to try bottled water this year, maybe some sodas, although sly-like, because they could bust you for not charging sales tax, too. They had considered salted nuts, but that was more of a Camden Yards thing. People going to the track didn’t seem to want nuts as much, not even pistachios. Candy melted no matter how cool the day, and it was hard to be competitive on chips unless you went off-brand, and Baltimore was an Utz city.

Parking was the big moneymaker, anyway. Over the years, the Melvilles had figured they could make exactly six spaces in their front yard, plus two in the driveway. They charged $30 a spot, which was a fair price, close as they were to the entrance, and that $30 included true vigilance, as Uncle Marcus liked to say to the people who tried to negotiate. These days, most of their business was repeat customers, old-timers who had figured out that the houses south of the racetrack were much closer to the entrance than the places on the other side of Northern Parkway. The first-timers, now they were a little nervous about coming south of the track, but once they made that long, long trek back to the Northern Parkway side, they started looking south.

So, eight vehicles times thirty-that was $240. But they weren’t done yet. All the young ones ran shopping carts, not just for the Melvilles’ own parkers but for the on-the-street ones who couldn’t make it the whole way with their coolers and grocery sacks. Dontay and his cousins couldn’t charge as much as the north side boys, given the shorter distance, but they made more trips, so it came out about the same. Most of the folks gave you at least ten dollars to haul a cooler, although there was always some woe-is-me motherfucker-that’s what Uncle Marcus called them, outside Granny M’s hearing-who tried to find a reason to short you at the gate.

The money didn’t end just because the race did. On the day after Preakness, the older Melvilles all signed up for cleanup duty in the infield, and there wasn’t a year that went by that someone didn’t find a winning ticket in the debris. Never anything huge, but often good for twenty bucks or so. People got drunk, threw the wrong tickets down. You just had to keep the Sunpapers in your back pocket, familiarize yourself with the race results. This was going to be Dontay’s first year on cleanup, and he couldn’t help hoping that he would find a winning ticket. His uncle had lied about his age to get him a spot on the crew, so he’d make the minimum wage up front. But the draw was what you might find-not just tickets, but perfectly good cartons of soda and beer, maybe even jewelry and wallets without ID.

But Preakness itself was the best day, the biggest haul. The night before, Dontay oiled his cart’s wheels and polished his pitch. There was a right way to do it, bold but not too much so. People didn’t like to feel hustled. He also pondered the downside to Preakness: no one needed the carts to carry stuff away because the coolers were always empty by day’s end, light enough for the weakest, most sissified men to heave onto their shoulders or drag on the pavement behind them. Which was a shame, because people were looser by the end of the day, wavy with liquor and their winnings. Dontay was still thinking on how to develop a service that people needed when the race was over. The main thing everyone wanted was a fast getaway, another virtue of the Melvilles’ location, which had several ways out of the neighborhood. What would people pay to ride a helicopter, though? There had to be other possibilities. Dontay thought on it. Besides, more and more people were bringing in wheeled coolers, a troubling development.

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-polka-dotted 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 three 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.

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 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?”

“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 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 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 shoeshine 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.

“You are so going to file charges against this asshole,” she said.

“Well, I’m going to file charges against him, then,” he brayed, unrepentant. “He started the whole thing.”

The patrol cop was in his mid-thirties, a seasoned officer who had broken up his share of fights, although probably not in this neighborhood. “If anyone’s adamant about filing a report, it can be done, but it will involve about four hours down at the district.”

That dimmed everyone’s enthusiasm, even Whitney’s.

“Good,” the cop said. “I’ll just take the bare details and let everyone go.”

The laundry truck moved, the valet parking attendants regained their usual efficiency, and the crowd moved on, more anxious about their destinations than this bit of street theater. The shoeshine man started to walk away, but the cop motioned for him to stay, taking names and calling them in, along with DOBs. “Just routine,” he told Tess, but his expression soon changed in a way that indicated the matter was anything but routine. He walked away from them, out of earshot, clicking the two-way on his shoulder on and off.

“You can go,” he said to Whitney and Tess upon returning. “But I gotta take him in. There’s a warrant.”

“Him?” Whitney asked hopefully, jerking her chin at Weejun.

“No, him.” The cop looked genuinely regretful. “Could be a mix-up, could be someone else using his name and DOB, but I still have take him downtown.”

“What’s the warrant for?” Tess asked.

“Murder, if you really want to know.”

Weejun looked at once gleeful and frightened, as if he were wondering just who he had challenged in this fight. It would make quite a brag around the country club, Tess thought. He’d probably be telling his buddies he had taken on a homicidal maniac and won.

Yet the shoeshine man was utterly composed. He did not protest his innocence or insist that it was all a mistake, things that even a guilty man might have said under the circumstances. He simply sighed, cast his eyes toward the sky as if asking a quick favor from his deity of choice, then said: “I’d like to gather up my things, if I could.”

“IT’S THE DAMNEDEST THING, TESS. He couldn’t confess fast enough. Didn’t want a lawyer, didn’t ask any questions, just sat down and began talking.”

Homicide detective Martin Tull, Tess’s only real friend in the Baltimore Police Department, had caught the shoeshine man’s case simply by answering the phone when the patrol cop called him about the warrant. He should have been thrilled-it was an easy stat, about as easy as they come. No matter how old the case, it counted toward the current year’s total of solved homicides.

“It’s a little too easy,” Tull said, sitting with Tess on a bench near one of their favorite coffeehouses, watching the water taxis zip back and forth across the Inner Harbor.

“Everyone gets lucky, even you,” Tess said. “It’s all too credible that the warrant was lost all these years. What I don’t get is how it was found.”

“Department got some grant for computer work. Isn’t that great? There’s not enough money to make sure DNA samples are stored safely, but some think tank gave us money so college students can spend all summer keystroking data. The guy moved about two weeks after the murder, before he was named in the warrant. Moved all of five miles, from West Baltimore to the county, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who left a forwarding address. Or the cop on the case was a bonehead. At any rate, he’s gone forty years, wanted for murder, and if he hadn’t been in that fight night before last, he might’ve gone another forty.”

“Did he even know there was a warrant on him?”

“Oh yeah. He knew exactly why he was there. Story came out of him as if he had been rehearsing it for years. Kept saying, Yep, I did it, no doubt about it. You do what you have to do, officer. So we charged him, the judge put a hundred thousand dollars’ bail on him, a bail bondsman put up ten thousand dollars, and he went home.”

“I guess someone who’s lived at the same address for thirty-nine years isn’t considered a flight risk.”

“Flight risk? I think if I had left this guy in the room with all our opened files, he would have confessed to every homicide in Baltimore. I have never seen someone so eager to confess to a crime. I almost think he wants to go to jail.”

“Maybe he’s convinced that a city jury won’t lock him up, or that he can get a plea. How did the victim die?”

“Blunt force trauma in a burglary. There’s no physical evidence and the warrant was sworn out on the basis of an eyewitness who’s been dead for ten years.”

“So you probably couldn’t get a conviction at all if it went to trial.”

“Nope. That’s what makes it so odd. Even if the witness were alive, she’d be almost ninety by now, pretty easy to break down on the stand.”

“What’s the file say?”

“Neighbor lady said she saw William Harrison leave the premises, acting strangely. She knew the guy because he did odd jobs in the neighborhood, even worked for her on occasion, but there was no reason for him to be at the victim’s house so late at night.”

“Good luck recovering the evidence from Evidence Control.”

“Would you believe they still had the weapon? The guy’s head was bashed in with an iron. But that’s all I got. If the guy hadn’t confessed, if he had stonewalled me or gotten with a lawyer, I wouldn’t have anything.”

“So what do you want me to tell you? I never met this man before we became impromptu tag-team wrestlers. He seemed pretty meek to me, but who knows what he was like forty years ago? Maybe he’s just a guy with a conscience who’s been waiting all these years to see if someone’s going to catch up with him.”

Tull shook his head. “One thing. He didn’t know what the murder weapon was. Said he forgot.”

“Well, forty years. It’s possible.”

“Maybe.” Tull, who had already finished his coffee, reached for Tess’s absentmindedly, grimacing when he realized it was a latte. Caffeine was his fuel, his vice of choice, and he didn’t like it diluted in any way.

“Take the easy stat, Martin. Guy’s named in a warrant and he said he did it. He does have a temper, I saw that much. Last night it was a soda can. Forty years ago, it very well could have been an iron.”

“I’ve got a conscience, too, you know.” Tull looked offended.

Tess realized that it wasn’t something she knew that had prompted Tull to call her up, but something he wanted her to do. Yet Tull would not ask her directly because then he would be in her debt. He was a man, after all. But if she volunteered to do what he seemed to want, he would honor her next favor, and Tess was frequently in need of favors.

“I’ll talk to him. See if he’ll open up to his tag-team partner.”

Tull didn’t even so much as nod to acknowledge the offer. It was as if Tess’s acquiescence were a belch, or something else that wouldn’t be commented on in polite company.

THE SHOESHINE MAN-William Harrison, Tess reminded herself, she had a name for him now-lived in a neat bungalow just over the line in what was known as the Woodlawn section of Baltimore County. Forty years ago, Mr. Harrison would have been one of its first black residents and he would have been denied entrance to the amusement park only a few blocks from his house. Now the neighborhood was more black than white, but still middle-class.

A tiny woman answered the door to Mr. Harrison’s bungalow, her eyes bright and curious.

“Mrs. Harrison?”

“Miss.” There was a note of reprimand for Tess’s assumption.

“My name is Tess Monaghan. I met your brother two nights ago in the, um, fracas.”

“Oh, he felt so bad about that. He said it was shameful, how the only person who wanted to help him was a girl. He found it appalling.”

She drew out the syllables of the last word as if it gave her some special pleasure.

“It was so unfair what happened to him. And then this mix-up with the warrant…”

The bright catlike eyes narrowed a bit. “What do you mean by ‘mix-up’?”

“Mr. Harrison just doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who could kill someone.”

“Well, he says he was.” Spoken matter-of-factly, as if the topic were the weather or something else of little consequence. “I knew nothing about it, of course. The warrant or the murder.”

“Of course,” Tess agreed. This woman did not look like someone who had been burdened with a loved one’s secret for four decades. Where her brother was stooped and grave, she had the regal posture of a short woman intent on using every inch given her. But there was something blithe, almost gleeful, beneath her dignity. Did she not like her brother?

“It was silly of William”-she stretched the name out, giving it a grand, growling pronunciation, Will-yum-“to tell his story and sign the statement, without even talking to a lawyer. I told him to wait, to see what they said, but he wouldn’t.”

“But if you knew nothing about it…”

“Nothing about it until two nights ago,” Miss Harrison clarified. That was the word that popped into Tess’s head, “clarified,” and she wondered at it. Clarifications were what people made when things weren’t quite right.

“And were you shocked?”

“Oh, he had a temper when he was young. Anything was possible.”

“Is your brother at home?”

“He’s at work. We still have to eat, you know.” Now she sounded almost angry. “He didn’t think of that, did he, when he decided to be so noble. I told him, this house may be paid off, but we still have to eat and buy gas for my car. Did you know they cut your Social Security off when you go to prison?”

Tess did not. She had relatives who were far from pure, but they had managed to avoid doing time. So far.

“Well,” Miss Harrison said, “they do. But Will-yum didn’t think of that, did he? Men are funny that way. They’re so determined to be gallant”-again, the word was spoken with great pleasure, the tone of a child trying to be grand-“that they don’t think things through. He may feel better, but what about me?”

“Do you have no income, then?”

“I worked as a laundress. You don’t get a pension for being a laundress. My brother, however, was a custodian for Social Security, right here in Woodlawn.”

“I thought he shined shoes.”

“Yes, now.” Miss Harrison was growing annoyed with Tess. “But not always. William was enterprising, even as a young man. He worked as a custodian at Social Security, which is why he has Social Security. But he took on odd jobs, shined shoes. He hates to be idle. He won’t like prison, no matter what he thinks.”

“He did odd jobs for the man he killed, right?”

“Some. Not many. Really, hardly any at all. They barely knew each other.”

Miss Harrison seemed to think this mitigated the crime somehow, that the superficiality of the relationship excused her brother’s deed.

“Police always thought it was a burglary?” Tess hoped her tone would invite a confidence, or at least another clarification.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. That, too. Things were taken. Everyone knew that.”

“So you were familiar with the case, but not your brother’s connection to it?”

“Well, I knew the man. Maurice Dickman. We lived in the neighborhood, after all. And people talked, of course. It was a big deal, murder, forty years ago. Not the happenstance that it’s become. But he was a showy man. He thought awfully well of himself, because he had money and a business. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made such a spectacle of himself and then no one would have tried to steal from him. You know what the Bible says, about the rich man and the camel and the eye of the needle? It’s true, you know. Not always, but often enough.”

“Why did your brother burglarize his home? Was that something else he did to supplement his paycheck? Is that something he still does?”

“My brother,” Miss Harrison said, drawing herself up so she gained yet another inch, “is not a thief.”

“But-”

“I don’t like talking to you,” she said abruptly. “I thought you were on our side, but I see now I was foolish. I know what happened. You called the police. You talked about pressing charges. If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened. You’re a terrible person. Forty years, and trouble never came for us, and then you undid everything. You have brought us nothing but grief, which we can ill afford.”

She stamped her feet, an impressive gesture, small though they were. Stamped her feet and went back inside the house, taking a moment to latch the screen behind her, as if Tess’s manners were so suspect that she might try to follow where she clearly wasn’t wanted.

THE SHOESHINE MAN DID WORK at Penn Station, after all, stationed in front of the old-fashioned wooden seats that always made Tess cringe a bit. There was something about one man perched above another that didn’t sit quite right with her, especially when the other man was bent over the enthroned one’s shoes.

Then again, pedicures probably looked pretty demeaning, too, depending on one’s perspective.

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Harrison, about the mess I’ve gotten you into.” She had refused to sit in his chair, choosing to lean against the wall instead.

“Got myself into, truth be told. If I hadn’t thrown that soda can, none of this would have happened. I could have gone another forty years without anyone bothering me.”

“But you could go to prison.”

“Looks that way.” He was almost cheerful about it.

“You should get a lawyer, get that confession thrown out. Without it, they’ve got nothing.”

“They’ve got a closed case, that’s what they’ve got. A closed case. And maybe I’ll get probation.”

“It’s not a bad bet, but the stakes are awfully high. Even with a five-year sentence, you might die in prison.”

“Might not,” he said.

“Still, your sister seems pretty upset.”

“Oh, Mattie’s always getting upset about something. Our mother thought she was doing right by her, teaching her those Queen of Sheba manners, but all she did was make her perpetually disappointed. Now if Mattie had been born just a decade later, she might have had a different life. But she wasn’t, and I wasn’t, and that’s that.”

“She did seem…refined,” Tess said, thinking of the woman’s impeccable appearance and the way she loved to stress big words.

“She was raised to be a lady. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lady’s job. No shame in washing clothes, but no honor in it either, not for someone like Mattie. She should have stayed in school, become a teacher. But Mattie thought it would be easy to marry a man on the rise. She just didn’t figure that a man on the rise would want a woman on the rise, too, that the manners and the looks wouldn’t be enough. A man on the rise doesn’t want a woman to get out of his bed and then wash his sheets, not unless she’s already his wife. Mattie should never have dropped out of school. It was a shame, what she gave up.”

“Being a teacher, you mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, his tone vague and faraway. “Yeah. She could have gone back, even after she dropped out, but she just stomped her feet and threw back that pretty head of hers. Threw back her pretty head and cried.”

“Threw back her pretty head and cried-why does that sound familiar?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Threw back her pretty head…I know that, but I can’t place it.”

“Couldn’t help you.” He began whistling a tune, “Begin the Beguine.”

“Mr. Harrison-you didn’t kill that man, did you?”

“Well, now I say I did, and why would anyone want to argue with me? And I was seen coming from his house that night, sure as anything. That neighbor, Edna Buford, she didn’t miss a trick on that block.”

“What did you hit him with?”

“An iron,” he said triumphantly. “An iron!”

“You didn’t know that two days ago.”

“I was nervous.”

“You were anything but, from what I hear.”

“I’m an old man. I don’t always remember what I should.”

“So it was an iron?”

“Definitely, one of those old-fashioned ones, cast iron. The kind you had to heat.”

“The kind,” Tess said, “that a man’s laundress might use.”

“Mebbe. Does it really matter? Does any of this really matter? If it did, would they have taken forty years to find me? I’ll tell you this much-if Maurice Dickman had been a white man, I bet I wouldn’t have been walking around all this time. He wasn’t a nice man, Mr. Dickman, but the police didn’t know that. For all they knew, he was a good citizen. A man was killed and nobody cared. Except Edna Buford, peeking through her curtains. They should have found me long ago. Know something else?”

“What?” Tess leaned forward, assuming a confession was about to be made.

“I did put the mayonnaise on that man’s shoe. It had been a light day here, and I wanted to pick up a few extra dollars on my way home. I’m usually better about picking my marks, though. I won’t make that mistake again.”

A LAWYER OF TESS’S ACQUAINTANCE, Tyner Gray, asked that the court throw out the charges against William Harrison on the grounds that his confession was coerced. A plea bargain was offered instead-five years’ probation. “I told you so,” Mr. Harrison chortled to Tess, gloating a little at his prescience.

“Lifted up her pretty head and cried,” Tess said.

“What?”

“That’s the line I thought you were quoting. You said ‘threw,’ but the line was ‘lifted.’ I had to feed it through Google a few different ways to nail it, but I did. ‘Miss Otis Regrets.’ It’s about a woman who kills her lover and is then hanged on the gallows.”

“Computers are interesting,” Mr. Harrison said.

“What did you really want? Were you still trying to protect your sister, as you’ve protected her all these years? Or were you just trying to get away from her for a while?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Mattie did no wrong in our mother’s eyes. My mother loved that girl and I loved for my mother to be happy.”

So Martin Tull got his stat and a more or less clean conscience. Miss Harrison got her protective older brother back, along with his Social Security checks.

And Tess got an offer of free shoeshines for life, whenever she was passing through Penn Station. She politely declined Mr. Harrison’s gesture. After all, he had already spent forty years at the feet of a woman who didn’t know how to show gratitude.

THE ACCIDENTAL DETECTIVE

by Laura Lippman

Special to the Beacon-Light

BALTIMORE -Tess Monaghan spends a lot of time thinking about what she calls the relief problem. Not relief to foreign hot spots, although she can become quickly vociferous on almost any political subject you wish to discuss. No, Monaghan, perhaps Baltimore ’s best-known private investigator, thinks a lot about what we’ll call feminine relief.

“If you’re a guy on surveillance, you have a lot more options,” she says, sitting in her Butchers Hill office on a recent fall morning and flipping through one of the catalogs that cater to the special needs of investigators and private security firms. Much of this high-tech gadgetry holds little interest for Monaghan, who admits to mild Luddite tendencies. That said, she’s so paranoid about caller ID that she uses two cell phones-one for outgoing calls, one for incoming.

“Do you know that the tracks in Delaware, the ones with slot machines, find dozens of adult diapers in the trash every day?” she asks suddenly. “Think about it. There are people who are so crazed for slots that they wear Depends, lest they have to give up a ‘hot’ machine. Do you think Bill Bennett wore Depends?” Monaghan, who assumes that others can follow her often jumpy train of thought, has moved on to the former secretary of education, reported to have an almost pathological addiction to slot machines, even as he made millions advocating family values.

“No, no, no,” she decides, not waiting for answers to any of the questions she has posed. “That’s why he had the machines brought to him in a private room. Slots-what a pussy way to lose money. Give me the track every time. Horse plus human plus variable track conditions equals a highly satisfying form of interactive entertainment. With gambling, that’s the only way to stay sane. You have to think of it as going to a Broadway show in which you have a vested interest in the outcome. Set aside how much you’re willing to lose, the way you might decide how much you’re willing to pay to go to a sporting event. If you go home with a dollar more than you were willing to lose, you’ve won.”

So now that Monaghan has held forth on compulsive gambling, adult diapers and, by implication, her own relief needs, could she share a few biographical details? The year she was born, for example?

“No,” she says, with a breezy grin. “You’re a reporter, right? Look it up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. If you can’t track down something that basic, you’re probably not the right woman for the job.”

Rumor has it that Monaghan loathes the press.

“Rumor,” Monaghan says, “isn’t always wrong.”

BALTIMORE BORN, BRED AND BUTTERED

She has been called Baltimore ’s best-known private detective, Baltimore ’s hungriest private detective and, just once, Baltimore ’s most eligible private detective. (Her father went behind her back and entered her into Baltimore magazine’s annual feature on the city’s “hot” singles.) But although her work and its consequences have often been featured in the news, Monaghan, a former reporter, has been surprisingly successful at keeping information about herself out of the public domain. At least until now. Oh yes, Ms. Monaghan, this reporter knows her way around public documents.

Monaghan was born in St. Agnes Hospital, and while official documents disagree on the year, she’s undeniably a member of Generation X or Y, a post-boomer born to an unlikely duo who prove the old adage that opposites attract. Patrick Monaghan, described by his daughter as the world’s most taciturn Irishman, was the oldest of seven children. He grew up in a crowded South Baltimore rowhouse and, later, the Charles Village area.

Meanwhile, Judith Weinstein was the youngest of five from a well-to-do Northwest Baltimore family. She was just entering college when her father’s eponymous drugstore chain entered a messy and devastating bankruptcy. Monaghan and Weinstein met via local politics, working on Carlton R. Sickle’s failed 1966 bid for the Democratic nomination for governor. The couple remains active in politics; Monaghan remembers riding her tricycle around the old Stonewall Democratic Club as a five-year-old. Her father worked for years as a city liquor inspector, then began running his own club, the Point, which has thrived in an unlikely location on Franklintown Road. Her mother works for the National Security Agency and says she cannot divulge what she does.

“I’m pretty sure she’s a secretary,” Monaghan says, “but for all I know she’s a jet-setting spy who manages to get home by five thirty every night and put supper on the table.”

The family settled in Ten Hills on the city’s west side and Monaghan attended public schools, graduating from Western High School ’s prestigious A-course and then attending Washington College in Chestertown, where she majored in English. By her testimony, she discovered two lifelong influences on the Eastern Shore -rowing and Whitney Talbot. A member of a very old, very rich and very connected Valley family, Talbot has a work ethic as fierce as the one instilled in Monaghan by her middle-class parents, and the two have long reveled in their competitive friendship.

Upon graduation, Monaghan joined the Star as a general assignments reporter, while Talbot-who had transferred to Yale and majored in Japanese-landed a job on the Beacon-Light’s editorial pages. But Monaghan’s timing turned out to be less than felicitous-the Star folded before she was twenty-six, and the Beacon-Light declined to hire her. Cast adrift, she relied on the kindness of family members to help her make ends meet on her meager freelance salary. She lived in a cheap apartment above her aunt’s bookstore in Fells Point and relied on her uncle to throw her assignments for various state agencies. It was in Kitty Monaghan’s store, Women and Children First, that she met her current boyfriend, Edward “Crow” Ransome. When she was twenty-nine, she fell into PI work and likes to call herself the “accidental detective,” a riff on Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.

“Does anyone plan to become a private detective?” Monaghan asks. “It’s not a rhetorical question. I suppose somewhere there’s a little boy or girl dreaming of life as an investigator, but everyone I know seems to have done some other kind of work first. Lawyer, cop. All I know is I did a favor for a friend, botched it royally, and then tried to help his lawyer get him out of the mess I created. When it was over, the lawyer pressed me to work for him as an investigator, then pushed me out of the nest and all but forced me to open my own agency.”

That lawyer, Tyner Gray, would end up marrying Tess’s aunt Kitty. Monaghan pretends to be horrified by this development but seems to have genuine affection for the man who has mentored her since she was in her late twenties.

Her agency, Keys Investigation Inc., is technically co-owned by Edward Keys, a retired Baltimore police detective who seems to spend most of his time in Fenwick Island, Delaware. (Asked to comment for this story, Keys declined repeatedly and would not respond to rumors that he has, in fact, met Monaghan in the flesh only once.) Monaghan appears to be the sole employee on the premises of the onetime dry cleaner’s that serves as her office, although she jokes that there are two part-time workers “who have agreed to accept their compensation in dog biscuits.” Those would be Esskay, a retired racing greyhound named for her love of Baltimore ’s best-known sausage, and Miata, a docile Doberman with infallible instincts about people. “If she had growled at you, I wouldn’t have let you over the threshold,” Monaghan says. “I’ve learned the hard way to trust Miata.”

The office is filled with Baltimore-bilia-the old “Time for a Haircut” clock from a Woodlawn barbershop and several Esskay tins. “People give them to me,” Monaghan says. “I’m not prone to collecting things.”

Has anyone ever commented on the irony that Monaghan, who sits beneath that “Time for a Haircut” clock, once had a most untimely haircut, in which a serial killer sliced off her signature braid? Monaghan shot the man in self-defense, but not before he killed a former transportation cop with whom she was working.

“I don’t talk about that,” she says. “I understand you have to ask about it. I was a reporter, and I’d have asked about it, too. But it’s something I never discuss.”

Okay, so life and death have been shot down as topics. What would she prefer to talk about?

“Do you think the Orioles are ever going to get it together? One World Series in my lifetime. It’s so depressing.”

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Monaghan lives in a renovated cottage on a hidden street alongside Stony Run Park in the prestigious Roland Park neighborhood. That’s how she puts it, her voice curlicued with sarcasm: “Welcome to the prestigious Roland Park neighborhood.” The house continues the rather whimsical decorating themes of her office, with a large neon sign that reads “Human Hair.” What is it with Monaghan and hair?

“You’re a little overanalytical,” she counters. “One of the liabilities of modern times is that everyone thinks they’re fluent in Freudian theory, and they throw the terms around so casually. I don’t have much use for psychiatry.”

Has she ever been in therapy?

“Once,” she admits promptly. “Court-ordered. You know what, though? I’d like to reverse myself. In general, I don’t have much use for psychiatry and I thought it was bulls-t when they put me in anger management. But it did help, just not in the way it was intended.”

How so?

“It’s not important,” she says, reaching for her right knee, a strange nervous tic that has popped up before. “Let’s just say that it doesn’t hurt sometimes to be a little angry.”

Monaghan is speaking in low tones, trying not to awaken her boyfriend. Six years her junior, Ransome works for Monaghan’s father, scouting the musical acts that appear at the father’s bar. Ransome’s workday ended a mere four hours ago, at 4 A.M., while Monaghan’s day began at 6 A.M. with a workout at the local boathouse.

Monaghan and Ransom have been a couple, on and off, for more than four years. Do they plan to marry?

“You know what? You and my mom should get together. You’d really hit it off. She asks me that every day. Ready to experience the exciting life of a private detective?” She draws out the syllables in “exciting” with the same sarcasm she used for “prestigious.”

What’s her destination this morning?

“The most wonderful place on earth-the Clarence Mitchell Jr. Courthouse.”

And, truth be told, the courthouse does seem to be a kind of fairyland to Monaghan, who stalks its halls and disappears into various records rooms, greeting many clerks by name. But wouldn’t it be more efficient to work from her office? Isn’t most of the information online?

“Some,” says Monaghan, who also relies on an online network of female investigators from across the country. “Not all. And there’s a serendipity to real life that the Internet can’t duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the book you were looking for, and it’s that book that changes your life. Google’s great, but it’s no substitute for getting out and talking to people. Plus, the courthouse is only a block from Cypriana. So whenever I come here, I can reward myself with a celebratory chicken pita with extra feta cheese.”

Isn’t 11:30 a little early for lunch?

“I’ve been up since six! Besides, you want to get there before the judges release the various juries for their lunch break.”

A TREE GROWS IN BALTIMORE

Whitney Talbot strides into Cypriana with the authority of a health inspector on a follow-up visit. Her green eyes cut across the small restaurant with laserlike intensity.

“She’s the opposite of Browning’s duchess,” Monaghan whispers. “Her looks go everywhere, but she dislikes whatever she sees.”

“I heard that,” Talbot says, even as she places her order. “And I like Cypriana just fine. It’s the clientele that worries me. I saw the mayor in here just last week. How am I supposed to digest lunch under those circumstances?”

She settles at our table with an enormous Greek salad, which she proceeds to eat leaf by leaf, without dressing. “Whitney’s not anorexic,” Monaghan assures me. “Her taste buds were simply destroyed by old WASP cooking.”

“I prefer to get my calories through gin,” Talbot says primly. “Now what do you want to know about Tess? I know everything-EVERYTHING. I know when she lost her virginity. I know the strange ritualistic way she eats Peanut M amp;M’s. I know that she rereads Marjorie Morningstar every year-”

“I do not,” Monaghan objects, outraged only by the last assertion.

“-and cries over it, too. I re-read the Alexandria Quartet every year.”

“Because you’re so f--ing pretentious.”

“‘Pretentious’ suggests pretending, trying to make others believe that you’re something that you’re not. There’s not a pretentious bone in my body.”

“There’s nothing but bones in your body, you fatless wench.”

Perhaps it would be better if Talbot were interviewed separately, out of Monaghan’s hearing?

“Why?” Talbot wonders. “It’s not as if I could be any more candid. My first name should have been Cassandra. I’m a truth-teller from way back. It saves so much time, always telling the truth-”

“And never worrying about anyone’s feelings,” Monaghan mutters.

“Tess is still miffed because I’m the one who called her Baltimore ’s hungriest detective, back when the Washington Post did that travel piece on her favorite haunts. She does like a good meal, but she wears her calories well. So, okay, here’s the unvarnished truth about Theresa Esther Weinstein Monaghan, aka Tesser, although Testy suits her better.”

Talbot leans forward while Monaghan visibly steels herself.

“She’s a good friend, utterly loyal. She lies as if it were her second language, but only when she has to. She’s smarter than anyone gives her credit for-including Tess herself. She’s brave. You know those tiresome women who don’t have any female friends? I’m not one of those. I don’t have any friends, period. I don’t like people much. But I make an exception for Tess.”

“With friends like these…” Monaghan shrugs. In the time it has taken Talbot to eat five lettuce leaves, Monaghan has polished off her chicken pita, but still seems hungry. “Vaccaro’s?” she suggests hopefully. “Berger cookies? Otterbein cookies? Something? Anything? I rowed this morning and I plan to run this afternoon. I’m almost certainly in caloric deficit.”

Does she work out for her job? How much physical stamina is required? (And does she know that she won’t be able to eat like that forever?)

“There’s actually very little physical activity involved in my work, and when there is-look, I’m five-foot-nine and my body fat is under twenty percent. I can run a mile in seven minutes and I could still compete in head races if I was that masochistic. And for all that, there’s not an able-bodied guy on the planet I could beat up. So, no, it’s not for work. It’s for peace of mind. Rowing clears my head in a way that nothing else does-alcohol, meditation, pot-”

“Not that Tess has ever broken the drug laws of this country,” Talbot puts in.

Monaghan sighs. “With every year, I become more law abiding. A business, a mortgage. I have things to lose. I want to be one of those people who lives untethered, with no material possessions.”

“She talks a good talk,” Talbot says. “But you’ve seen the house, right? It’s filled with stuff. She’s put down roots-in Roland Park, of all places. You know what Tess is like? The ailanthus, the tree that grew in Brooklyn. Have you ever tried to get rid of one of those things? It’s darn near impossible. No one’s ever going to be able to yank Tess out of Baltimore soil.”

“Now that’s a novel I do read every year,” Monaghan says. “An American classic, but not everyone agrees. Because it’s about a girl.”

Talbot yawns daintily, bored. “I vote for Otterbein cookies. They have them at the Royal Farms over on Key Highway.”

FAMILY TIES

It is late afternoon at the Point and Crow Ransome-“No one calls me Ed or Edgar, ever,” he says, and it’s the only time he sounds annoyed-agrees to take a break and walk along Franklintown Road, where the trees are just beginning to turn gold and crimson.

“I love Leakin Park,” he says of the vast wooded hills around him. The area is beautiful, but best known as the dumping ground of choice for Baltimore killers back in the day, a fact that Ransome seems unaware of. “I’m not a city kid by nature-I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia -and I like having a few rural-seeming corners in my life.”

Will he stay in Baltimore, then?

“It’s the only real condition of being with Tess. ‘Love me, love my city.’ She can’t live anywhere else. Truly, I think she wouldn’t be able to stay long anyplace that wasn’t Baltimore.”

What is it about the private eye and her hometown?

Relative to his girlfriend, Ransome is more thoughtful, less impulsive in his comments. “I think it’s an extension of her family. You know Tess’s family is far from perfect. Her uncle, Donald Weinstein, was involved in a political scandal. Her grandfather Weinstein-well, the less said about him, the better. Her uncle Spike, the Point’s original owner, served time, although I’ve never been clear on what he did. No one ever speaks of it, but it had to be a felony because he wasn’t allowed to have the liquor license in his own name. Anyway, she loves them all fiercely. Not in spite of what they’ve done, but because they are who they are, they’re family.

“I think she feels the same way about Baltimore. It’s imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It’s not all marble steps and waitresses calling you ‘hon,’ you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

“The bottom line,” Ransome says, turning around to head back to the Point, “is that Tess really can’t handle change. When I first knew her, she had been eating the same thing for breakfast at Jimmy’s in Fells Point for something like two years straight. Oh, she will change, but it’s very abrupt and inexplicable, and the new regimen will simply supplant the old one. When she crosses the threshold to our neighborhood coffeehouse, they start fixing her latte before she gets to the cash register. She’s that predictable.

“Truthfully, I keep worrying that I’ll wake up one morning and I’ll no longer be one of Tess’s ruts.”

But Ransome’s smile belies his words. He clearly feels no anxiety about his relationship with Monaghan, whatever its ups and downs in the past. What about marriage or children?

Unlike Monaghan, he doesn’t sidestep the question. “If children, then marriage. But if children-could Tess continue to do what she does, the way she does it? The risks she takes, her impulsiveness. All of that would have to change. I don’t want her on surveillance with our baby in the car seat, or taking the child on her Dumpster diving escapades. I’m well suited to be a stay-at-home father, but that doesn’t mean I’ll give Tess carte blanche to do whatever she wants, professionally.”

Is he signaling, ever so subtly, an end to Monaghan’s involvement in Keys Investigations?

“Everything comes to an end,” he says. “When you’ve had near-death experiences, as Tess and I both have, that’s more than a pat saying or a cliché.”

Yes, about those near-death experiences-but here, Ransome proves as guarded as his girlfriend.

“She doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it. But I’ll tell you this much-when she reaches for her knee? She’s thinking about it. She has a scar there, from where she fell on a piece of broken glass the night she was almost killed. Sometimes I think the memory lives in that scar.”

NOT A LONE WOLF

The private detective has been a sturdy archetype in American pop culture for sixty-plus years, and it’s hard not to harbor romantic notions about Monaghan. But she is quick to point out that she has little in common with the characters created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and not just because Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are fictional.

“I’m not a loner, far from it. I live with someone, I have friends. I have so much family it’s almost embarrassing at times. My father was one of seven, my mother one of five. I was an only child, but I was never a lonely one. In fact, most of my clients are referrals from people I know.” A rueful smile. “That’s made for some interesting times.”

A favor for her father, in fact, led to Monaghan identifying a Jane Doe homicide victim-and unraveling an unseemly web of favors that showed, once again, Maryland is always in the forefront when it comes to political scandals. Her uncle Donald asked her to find the missing family of furrier Mark Rubin. And it was Talbot who, inadvertently, gave Monaghan the assignment that almost led to her death. Once one pores over Monaghan’s casework, it begins to seem as if almost all her jobs are generated by nepotism.

“Whew,” she says. “Strong word. A loaded word, very much a pejorative. How did you get your job?” When no answer is forthcoming, she goes on: “How does anyone get anywhere, get anything in this world? I got into Washington College on my own merits, I guess, but otherwise I’ve needed family and friends. Not to pull me through or cover for me, but to help me here and there. Is that wrong? Does it undercut what I have done?”

Then what’s her greatest solo accomplishment? What can she take credit for?

Monaghan waits a long time before answering. We are in the Brass Elephant, her favorite bar, and she is nursing a martini-gin, not vodka, to which she objects on principle. Monaghan is filled with such idiosyncratic principles. She won’t drink National Bohemian since the brewery pulled up stakes in Baltimore. She says Matthew’s serves the best pizza in town, but confesses that her favorite is Al Pacino’s. She doesn’t like women who walk to work in athletic shoes or people who let their dogs run off lead as a sneaky way to avoid cleaning up after them. She hates the Mets even though she wasn’t alive for the indignity of 1969 and has a hard time rooting for the Ravens because of “bad karma.” (Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell brought the team here in the mid-nineties and, although the NFL made sure Cleveland kept its name and records-a concession not made to Baltimore when the Colts decamped for Indianapolis -it still bothers Monaghan.)

“I’ve managed, more or less, to live according to what I think is right. Not always-I can be unkind. I’ve indulged in gossip, which should be one of the seven deadly sins. I’m quick to anger, although seldom on my own behalf. Overall, though, I’m not a bad person. I’m a good friend, a decent daughter, and a not-too-infuriating girlfriend.”

She slaps her empty glass on the counter and says: “Look at the time. We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Just follow me.”

She runs out of the bar, down the Brass Elephant’s elegant staircase and into Charles Street, heading south at an impressive clip. In a few blocks, she mounts the steps to the Washington Monument, throwing a few dollars into the honor box at its foot.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she exhorts. “It’s only two hundred and twenty-eight steps.”

So this is the run that Monaghan planned to take this evening. The narrow, winding stairwell is claustrophobically close and smells strongly of ammonia, not the best fragrance on top of a gin martini, but Monaghan’s pace and footing seem unaffected by her cocktail hour. She jogs briskly, insistent that everyone keep up.

At the top, the reason for her rush becomes explicable. The sun is just beginning to set and the western sky is a brilliant rose shade that is kind to the city’s more ramshackle neighborhoods, while the eastern sky is an equally flattering inky blue. To the north, Penn Station is a bright white beacon dominated by the monstrous man-woman statue with its glowing purple heart. To the south, lights begin to come on along the waterfront. Monaghan points out the Continental Building on Calvert Street.

“Hammett worked there, as a Pinkerton. And the birds that are used as ornamentation, the falcons? They’re gold now, but it’s said they were black back in Hammett’s day, so we might be the birthplace of the Maltese Falcon. Look to the southwest, toward Hollins Market, and you can also see where Mencken lived, and Russell Baker. Anne Tylerville is out of sight, but you were there this morning, when you visited my home. That church, virtually at our feet? It’s where Francis Scott Key worshipped, while his descendant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, liked to drink at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere, only a few blocks to the north.”

She inhales deeply, a little raggedly; even Monaghan isn’t so fit that the climb has left her unaffected. She seems drunker now than she did at the bottom, giddy with emotion. She throws open her arms as if to embrace the whole city.

“I mean, really,” she says. “Why would anyone live anywhere else?”