The Accidental Detective

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 unselfconscious 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,