“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 ingles?” she asked.
All of them nodded, but only one spoke. “Si,” 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.
