The Accidental Detective

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