"Hardly Knew Her" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lippman Laura)

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.