Eight Million Ways to Die (29 page)

Barnett Avenue extended only ten or twelve blocks, running east from Forty-third Street and ending at Woodside Avenue. I had my choice of trains. I could take either the E or F on the Independent line or the IRT Flushing Line.

Assuming I wanted to go there at all.

I called again from my room. Once again the phone rang for a long time. This time a man answered it. I said, "Octavio Calderon, por favor."

"Momento," he said. Then there was a thumping sound, as if he let the receiver hang from its cord and it was knocking against the wall.

Then there was no sound at all except that of a radio in the background tuned to a Latin broadcast. I was thinking about hanging up by the time he came back on the line.

"No esta aqui;," he said, and rang off before I could say anything in any language.

I looked in the pocket atlas again and tried to think of a way to avoid a trip to Woodside. It was rush hour already. If I went now I'd have to stand up all the way out there. And what was I going to accomplish? I'd have a long ride jammed into a subway car like a sardine in a can so that someone could tell me No esta aqui; face to face.

What was the point? Either he was taking a drug-assisted vacation or he was really sick, and either way I didn't stand much chance of getting anything out of him. If I actually managed to run him down, I'd be rewarded with No lo se instead of No esta aqui;. I don't know, he's not here, I don't know, he's not here--

Shit.

Joe Durkin had done a follow-up interrogation of Calderon on Saturday night, around the time that I was passing the word to every snitch and hanger-on I could find. That same night I took a gun away from a mugger and Sunny Hendryx washed down a load of pills with vodka and orange juice.

The very next day, Calderon called in sick. And the day after that a man in a lumber jacket followed me in and out of an AA meeting and warned me off Kim Dakkinen's trail.

The phone rang. It was Chance. There'd been a message that he'd called, but evidently he'd decided not to wait for me to get back to him.

"Just checking," he said. "You getting anywhere?"

"I must be. Last night I got a warning."

"What kind of a warning?"

"A guy told me not to go looking for trouble."

"You sure it was about Kim?"

"I'm sure."

"You know the guy?"

"No."

"What are you fixing to do?"

I laughed. "I'm going to go looking for trouble," I said. "In Woodside."

"Woodside?"

"That's in Queens."

"I know where Woodside is, man. What's happening in Woodside?"

I decided I didn't want to get into it. "Probably nothing," I said,

"and I wish I could save myself the trip, but I can't. Kim had a boyfriend."

"In Woodside?"

"No, Woodside's something else. But it's definite she had a boyfriend. He bought her a mink jacket."

He sighed. "I told you about that. Dyed rabbit."

"I know about the dyed rabbit. It's in her closet."

"So?"

"She also had a short jacket, ranch mink. She was wearing it the first time I met her. She was also wearing it when she went to the Galaxy Downtowner and got killed. It's in a lockbox at One Police Plaza."

"What's it doin' there?"

"It's evidence."

"Of what?"

"Nobody knows. I got to it and I traced it and I talked to the man who sold it to her. She's the buyer of record, her name's on the sales slip, but there was a man with her and he counted out the money and paid for it."

"How much?"

"Twenty-five hundred."

He thought it over. "Maybe she held out," he said. "Be easy to do, couple hundred a week, you know they hold out from time to time. I wouldn'ta missed it."

"The man paid out the money, Chance."

"Maybe she gave it to him to pay with. Like a woman'll slip a man money for a restaurant check, so it don't look bad."

"How come you don't want it to be that she had a boyfriend?"

"Shit," he said. "I don't care about that. I want it to be whatever way it was. I just can't believe it, that's all."

I let it go.

"Could be a trick instead of a boyfriend. Sometimes a john wants to pretend like he's a special friend, he don't have to pay, so he wants to give presents instead of cash. Maybe he was just a john and she was like hustling him for the fur."

"Maybe."

"You think he was a boyfriend?"

"That's what I think, yes."

"And he killed her?"

"I don't know who killed her."

"And whoever killed her wants you to drop the whole thing."

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe the killing had nothing to do with the boyfriend. Maybe it was a psycho, the way the cops want to figure it, and maybe the boyfriend just doesn't want to get roped into any investigation."

"He wasn't in it and he wants to stay out of it. That what you mean?"

"Something like that."

"I don't know, man. Maybe you should let it go."

"Drop the investigation?"

"Maybe you should. A warning, shit, you don't want to get killed over it."

"No," I said. "I don't."

"What are you gonna do, then?"

"Right now I'm going to catch a train to Queens."

"To Woodside."

"Right."

"I could bring the car around. Drive you out there."

"I don't mind the subway."

"Be faster in the car. I could wear my little chauffeur's cap. You could sit in the back."

"Some other time."

"Suit yourself," he said. "Call me after, huh?"

"Sure."

I wound up taking the Flushing line to a stop at Roosevelt Avenue and Fifty-second Street. The train came up out of the ground after it left Manhattan. I almost missed my stop because it was hard to tell where I was. The station signs on the elevated platforms were so disfigured with graffiti that their messages were indecipherable.

A flight of steel steps led me back down to street level. I checked my pocket atlas, got my bearings, and set out for Barnett Avenue. I hadn't walked far before I managed to figure out what a Hispanic rooming house was doing in Woodside. The neighborhood wasn't Irish anymore. There were still a few places with names like the Emerald Tavern and the Shamrock scattered in the shadow of the El, but most of the signs were Spanish and most of the markets were bodegas now.

Posters in the window of the Tara Travel Agency offered charter flights to Bogota and Caracas.

Octavio Calderon's rooming house was a dark two-story frame house with a front porch. There were five or six plastic lawn chairs lined up on the porch, and an upended orange crate holding magazines and newspapers. The chairs were unoccupied, which wasn't surprising. It was a little chilly for porch sitting.

I rang the doorbell. Nothing happened. I heard conversation within, and several radios playing. I rang the bell again, and a middle-aged woman, short and very stout, came to the door and opened it. "Si;?"

she said, expectant.

"Octavio Calderon," I said.

"No esta aqui;."

She may have been the woman I spoke to the first time I called. It was hard to tell and I didn't care a whole lot. I stood there talking through the screen door, trying to make myself understood in a mixture of Spanish and English. After awhile she went away and came back with a tall hollow-cheeked man with a severely trimmed moustache. He spoke English, and I told him that I wanted to see Calderon's room.

But Calderon wasn't there, he told me.

"No me importa," I said. I wanted to see his room anyway. But there was nothing to see, he replied, mystified. Calderon was not there.

What was I to gain by seeing a room?

They weren't refusing to cooperate. They weren't even particularly reluctant to cooperate. They just couldn't see the point. When it became clear that the only way to get rid of me, or at least the easiest way, was to show me to Calderon's room, that was what they did. I followed the woman down a hallway and past a kitchen to a staircase. We climbed the stairs, walked the length of another hallway.

She opened a door without knocking on it, stood aside and gestured for me to enter.

There was a piece of linoleum on the floor, an old iron bedstead with the mattress stripped of linen, a chest of drawers in blonde maple, and a little writing table with a folding chair in front of it. A wing chair slipcovered in a floral print stood on the opposite side of the room near the window. There was a table lamp with a patterned paper shade on the chest of drawers, an overhead light fixture with two bare bulbs in the center of the ceiling.

And that's all there was.

"Entiende usted ahora? No esta aqui;."

I went through the room mechanically, automatically. It could hardly have been emptier. The small closet held nothing but a couple of wire hangers. The drawers in the blonde chest and the single drawer in the writing table were utterly empty. Their corners had been wiped clean.

With the hollow-cheeked man as interpreter, I managed to question the woman. She wasn't a mine of

information in any language. She didn't know when Calderon had left. Sunday or Monday, she believed.

Monday she had come into his room to clean it and discovered he had removed all his possessions, leaving nothing behind.

Understandably enough, she took this to mean that he was relinquishing the room.

Like all of her tenants, he had paid by the week. He'd had a couple of days left before his rent was due, but evidently he had had someplace else to go, and no, it was not remarkable that he had left without telling her. Tenants did that with some frequency, even when they were not behind in their rent. She and her daughter had given the room a good cleaning, and now it was ready to be rented to someone else. It would not be vacant long. Her rooms never stood vacant long.

Had Calderon been a good tenant? Si;, an excellent tenant, but she had never had trouble with her tenants. She rented only to Colombians and Panamanians and Ecuadorians and never had trouble with any of them. Sometimes they had to move suddenly because of the Immigration Service. Perhaps that was why Calderon had left so abruptly. But that was not her business. Her business was cleaning his room and renting it to someone else.

Calderon wouldn't have had trouble with Immigration, I knew. He wasn't an illegal or he wouldn't have been working at the Galaxy Downtowner. A big hotel wouldn't employ an alien without a green card.

He'd had some other reason for leaving in a hurry.

I spent about an hour interviewing other tenants. The picture of Calderon that emerged didn't help a bit.

He was a quiet young man who kept to himself. His hours at work were such that he was likely to be out when the other tenants were at home. He did not, to anyone's knowledge, have a girlfriend. In the eight months that he'd lived on Barnett Avenue, he had not had a visitor of either sex, nor had he had frequent phone calls. He'd lived elsewhere in New York before moving to Barnett Avenue, but no one knew his previous address or even if it had been in Queens.

Had he used drugs? Everyone I spoke to seemed quite shocked by the suggestion. I gathered that the fat little landlady ran a tight ship. Her tenants were all regularly employed and they led respectable lives. If Calderon smoked marijuana, one of them assured me, he certainly hadn't done so in his room. Or the landlady would have detected the smell and he would have been asked to leave.

"Maybe he is homesick," a dark-eyed young man suggested.

"Maybe he is fly back to Cartagena."

"Is that where he came from?"

"He is Colombian. I think he say Cartagena."

So that was what I learned in an hour, that Octavio Calderon had come from Cartagena. And nobody was too certain of that, either.

I called Durkin from a Dunkin' Donuts on Woodside Avenue.

There was no booth, just a pay phone mounted on the wall. A few feet from me a couple of kids were playing one of those electronic games.

Somebody else was listening to disco music on a satchel-sized portable radio. I cupped the telephone mouthpiece with my hand and told Durkin what I'd found out.

"I can put out a pickup order on him. Octavio Calderon, male Hispanic, early twenties. What is he, about five seven?"

"I never met him."

"That's right, you didn't. I can check the hotel for a description.

You sure he's gone, Scudder? I talked to him just a couple of days ago."

"Saturday night."

"I think that's right. Yeah, before the Hendryx suicide. Right."

"That's still a suicide?"

"Any reason why it shouldn't be?"

"None that I know of. You talked to Calderon Saturday night and that's the last anybody's seen of him."

"I have that effect on a lot of people."

"Something spooked him. You think it was you?"

He said something but I couldn't hear it over the din. I asked him to repeat it.

"I said he didn't seem to be paying that much attention. I thought he was stoned."

"The neighbors describe him as a pretty straight young man."

"Yeah, a nice quiet boy. The kind that goes batshit and wipes out his family. Where are you calling from, it's noisy as hell there?"

"A donut shop on Woodside Avenue."

"Couldn't you find a nice quiet bowling alley? What's your guess on Calderon? You figure he's dead?"

"He packed everything before he left his room. And somebody's been calling in sick for him. That sounds like a lot of trouble to go through if you're going to kill somebody."

"The calling in sounds like a way to give him a head start. Let him get a few extra miles before they start the bloodhounds."