The Accidental Detective

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.
    T HE 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
    T he best Cuban restaurant in Baltimore is in Greektown. It has not occurred to the city’s natives to