“I used to work for the CIA,” I said. “I quit a year ago.”
“They hire women?” Surprise on his face.
“Sometimes. People don’t expect us, so much.”
“They hire queers?”
I laughed. “Of course not.”
“Is that why they fired you?”
“They didn’t fire me, I quit. I did an operation in Argentina and got stranded, and they left me there.”
His eyebrows went up. “Argentina, last year? The coup?”
“In ’66, yeah. I was there doing surveillance. But then Onganía came in and they shut down the ports and I was stuck for a long time. After I finally got out—” Again I saw the inside of the Britten Norman airplane banking low over the Falkland Islands, the soccer field tilting wildly into view. “I got out on my own, came back here to New York, and quit.”
“They let you go?”
“I wasn’t so valuable.”
“And now you’re a private eye.”
“Well, that sounds kind of silly. An investigator, yes.”
“What were you doing in the Dominican Republic?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“Sure you can.”
I turned the spoon around in my cup. “Look, have you ever heard of a Dominican exile named El Jabalí?”
He crossed his arms. “I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“You really are an investigator. I’m sitting here in my apartment with a lady private eye.”
I disliked that.
“You don’t like that at all,” he said.
I tried to make my face more neutral. “Have you heard of him?”
“Yeah. He’s big time.”
“Well,” I said. “This big-time guy, if you were looking for him, where would you go?”
He thought it over. “I’d go up to the social clubs in Washington Heights. There are a lot of Dominican clubs up there now.”
“Members only?”
“No, you can pay fifty cents at the door and they’ll let you in. That’s where all the exiles hang out.”
I could make inquiries. There were a couple of Dominican girls I drank with the in Village sometimes. Maybe they could direct me. “Let’s say you’re Balaguer,” I said. I had a question I had been turning over in my mind.
He laughed. “Let’s say.”
“Let’s say you have a political enemy. People like him, they want him to run for president against you. He leaves the island and runs to New York.”
“All right.”
“Do you go after him?”
He thought about it. “Only if I’m really afraid of him.”
“But why? What can he do from New York?”
He laughed. “You said it yourself.”
“I did?”
“He can get to El Jabalí! He’s the power center of the Dominican exile. He’s connected on the island, in New York, and in Washington. His real name is Rosales, I think. Or Rosas? Something like that. He made his money in textiles. He had legitimacy.”
“He did?” I said. “What happened?”
“Trujillo pushed him out. Balaguer would worry about an enemy who wants to run for president and who reaches El Jabalí. I mean, think about the invasion in ’65. Think about the Bay of Pigs! The CIA can be very fickle in their affections. They’re with Balaguer now, but what if they had an alternative? If I’m Balaguer, I’m worried that if El Jabalí starts talking to his Washington contacts about my enemy and how popular he is on the island, the CIA will pick a new horse. People don’t love Balaguer and he knows it, the CIA knows it. What happened when the CIA stopped loving Trujillo? He was dead on the road out of Santo Domingo.”
“It was his own people who did that.”
“But they wouldn’t have done it if the CIA was still with him. The wind had changed.”
The pigeon at the window took wing and disappeared. There are some enemies you exile and some you keep close. Balaguer’s people had come for the boy because they knew his parents had come for him too. They must have been reading their letters, or paying off their staff. I thought of Octavio. When the Ibarras left the island, it would have been easy to guess they would come here.
“Why did the police pick you up?” Nick said.
I huffed. “One of the servants gave me up. He must have thought the police would be pleased with him. They all thought I was a spy.” I stared out the window at the side of the next building. The bricks at the top of the wall each had their own edge of clinging snow. “He must have sent my driver away. It was stupid of me to go there alone. To go there at all.” I had wanted to matter, I thought. That was the idiot root of the whole thing.
“Why’d you come when they called you?” I said.
“Well, you had left me that note.”
“Sure. But why did you come?”
He tilted his head. “Would you have come?”
I thought about it. “You had only just met me.”
“Would you have come, though?”
I imagined receiving a note like the one I had written. If I’m not back—
“You must have thought I would come,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t have left it.”
“Maybe I left it because I didn’t have any better ideas,” I said.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“It doesn’t usually pay, does it? Hoping someone will show up.”
“Is that what you’ve found?”
“That’s a different question.” I lifted the coffee cup, but it was empty. I pretended to drink from it anyway. Why?
“I just wanted to know,” he said. “Because it’s one of the more interesting things that’s ever happened to me, to be honest. I’ve been chewing it over.”
“Would a normal person have gone?” I said.
“Is neither of us normal?”
“The thing is,” I said, “I think a normal person would have gone.”
“But you just said it doesn’t usually pay.”
“Well—among people I’ve known, I guess.”
“Have they not been normal either?” he said.
I tried a joke. “It’s every man for himself around here.”
“I think you like to think you’re on your own and it’s a cold world, et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “It excuses some things.”
I could feel my face flush red. “Excuses what kind of things?”
“Being cold.”
I blinked. “You don’t know a thing about my life.”
“Every queer in New York has a sad story. Everyone’s been thrown away once or twice.” He looked placid. He leaned forward, saw my cup was empty, and filled it again.
“Thrown away,” I said.
“Sure. Family, friends, lovers. If you make it to thirty without having your heart broken a few times—”
“I haven’t made it to thirty yet.”
He laughed. “I hate to tell you, but I think you will. So you might want to make some friends.”
IV
MARCH 1968
NEW YORK
CHAPTER 20
Félix had been cut early for the night. The boss came and let him go at eight because the weather was so bad; sleet was nearly horizontal down the street in front and only two parties had been seated since seven. Félix had tried to argue because he wanted to stay long enough for his shift meal, but he couldn’t find the words to make his case. Sergei, the Russian cook, must have guessed, because he handed Félix a burger, made quickly at the back of the grill from the last bits of the lunch special, boxed up in waxed cardboard, with mashed potatoes scooped from the pot. Sergei hardly talked to anyone, but he always shared cigarettes and he was the best whistler in the kitchen, and if you guessed what song he was whistling, he would give you a nickel.
So Félix walked home at 8:15, gloveless, holding the box in front of him, warming his hands on it. No cars passed; only a bus, crawling at half speed. Some storefronts had low lights in them, but many were d
ark. He passed the jewelry store, where he always noticed the empty stands for necklaces and rings and the perforated cards for earrings, all of it stripped at closing time. In the late mornings, on his way into work, diamonds glittered there, and rubies, a shocking pink. In the window of a hardware store, work lights on clamps beamed down on a pyramid of silver paint cans.
Félix turned right, into the narrow dark street that led to the house. He was thinking that if he could fall asleep early then he wouldn’t mind the quiet of the house so much.
It was a steep climb and it warmed him up. When the house came into view, he saw that a few windows were lit; he began to hope that some other boys might be playing cards. Maybe they had also come home early. Some of them worked at another restaurant a few blocks away and were probably having the same kind of night he was.
His fingers were numb, and it was while he was fumbling with the door on the front porch that he heard the noise out of the darkness, the inquiring high note, and then felt the bump against his leg.
“Rubén?” he said, and again the bump, again the soft question.
The cat slept in Félix’s bed that night, and in the morning he left the animal curled on the fretful lump of Carmelo, who was sick and would probably not move from in front of the gas heater all day. Félix tore a stick of beef jerky into pieces and left it there for Rubén. He kept putting his hand on the cat’s head, his mysterious ears; he was so soft. Félix was late leaving for work and almost ran the last two blocks. The streets were blinding, every roof and twig coated in dripping ice. In his hurry to reach the door of the restaurant before his pay could be docked, he didn’t notice the woman in the blue coat sitting on the bench in front of the hardware store, smoking, or see her lift a camera and point its telescoping lens at him.
I was almost certain that it was him. I had spent the past four weeks up and down the Hudson Valley, calling every restaurant on the bus line that Félix had taken, asking for Bobby Candelario, giving his description, and had already spent a cold day waiting outside a steak house in Valhalla where the manager had said they had a Bobby but couldn’t say what his last name was. That Bobby, when I’d finally gotten a look at him, had been at least five years too old. But this Bobby in Peekskill was young, slight, and bore a resemblance to the photograph in the Saint Jerome file. The manager had called him Bobby Calendario, had said that his English wasn’t good. I took three pictures of the boy approaching, crossing the street in a rush against the light, pulling off his hat as he reached for the door of the restaurant. He had no gloves on. His coat was too big for him and he hadn’t bothered to button it; was it one of the hated green church coats the Saint Jerome boys wore? The glaring sunlight made it hard to tell the color. He disappeared through the brass front door of La Cucina, and I dropped my cigarette and walked back to my car. My toes had gone numb during the hour I had waited outside the restaurant for the start of the second shift. I was humming, buzzing. The whole day seemed to join me in cracking happily apart.
A second stop, in Oakwood. I parked in a lot near the river, at the end of a hiking trail that was barely marked. I had a map from the Parks Department, and had changed into sturdier shoes. The day had warmed enough to melt most of the ice off the trees, but clouds had rolled in during the afternoon, and the wind off the river chilled the woods. The trail was muddy and took a circuitous path upward, digging into the soft flank of the hill, switchbacking as it rose. I was out of breath climbing it, carrying a heavy rucksack I had brought from the car, and had to unwind my scarf and stop once or twice to rest. The damp in the air smelled like spring, despite the cold.
At the top of the hill, a hutch in a clearing contained a burnt-wood trail map. I took the path that went toward the cliffs, shifting under the weight of the bag. The ground sloped down, the path reinforced with wooden steps made from railroad ties, and then leveled out. The woods were quiet, gray and dun; here and there in the denuded undergrowth I caught glimpses of the surreptitious lives of teenagers, beer cans and candy bar wrappers, scraps of clothing and magazines. In the lee of a downed beech there was a blackened fire pit, filled with ice that had survived the morning.
The cliff came into view abruptly, screened by leafless young maples. I approached cautiously, aware of the slippery ground, feeling that the white sky over the Hudson was suddenly much closer than it had been before. At the edge, bare granite forced a break in the trees, and a view opened up: the immense river, the Palisades on the west side fringed with their own gray lace of woods, the stippled hills rolling southward on the east. I took a rope and my camera from the bag and tied the rope to the strap. The bag was old, and I had put bricks in it, wrapped in newspaper. I was not at all sure that it would achieve the effect I wanted. The muddy ground would help. Where it sloped away from my feet, I tied one end of the rope to a tree and pitched the bag forward with both hands. It dragged to a stop before it reached the edge of the cliff, but left a gratifying streak of bare earth through the wet leaves. I hauled it back and threw it again, and this time it went over, the cord snapping taut. I pulled it back up, hand over hand, and then picked my way carefully down the slope and broke off a few saplings, tore up a bittersweet vine. When I stood back, it looked all right. I circled around it, taking pictures with the heavy flash.
“Doesn’t it bother you that they’re here?” I said. We were in a place Gerry had chosen this time, a bright, buzzing restaurant where they would bring you a slice of cake if you claimed it was your birthday. Plate glass overlooked East Thirty-Third Street. The booths in front were filled with little girls in Sunday outfits.
Gerry shrugged, his most irritating gesture. “All right, I don’t like it much.”
“What about Galíndez?”
“Nobody was happy about Galíndez.”
“There are rules, aren’t there?”
He was drinking Earl Grey with milk. It was an awful day, the red lights of the avenue dimmed by freezing rain. He looked up at me. “What kind of question is that?”
“You don’t want to know who they are, these people who hired me?”
“Vera, we both know who they are.”
“I could get you something—a license plate, maybe. An address, if they’re sloppy.”
He was tired of this now, scanning the room for the waitress. “What would I do with it?”
“Let your bosses know, get a meritorious write-up, get them sent home.”
“Look, Vera, this is how it works,” he said. A dessert cart stuck with lit sparklers went by, and a table full of children let out a wail of delight. He leaned over his mug of tea. He looked tired around the eyes. “We go where we want, and we take our army if we feel like it, and they pretend it was their idea. And if they do a good enough job pretending, then they get to go where they want, too, but not in great numbers, and when we see them, we pretend not to.”
“That’s what intelligence is?”
“That’s what an alliance is,” he said.
I had been giving Mr. Ibarra bulletins by telephone every two weeks since I returned, telling long-winded stories with just enough progress in them to get to the next call. But now it was finally time to meet. I asked him to come to my office, and the two of them were there in the vestibule that afternoon, the old country doctor and his pin-curled wife.
“Mr. Ibarra,” I said, extending a hand.
“Miss Kelly,” he said.
“I’m glad you came,” I said, ushering them into the office. I waited until they were seated. “I’m sorry to say that I have terrible news.”
The wife blinked at me through thick glasses. Mr. Ibarra looked at her uncertainly, and then back at me.
“Your nephew drowned,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I just confirmed it yesterday.”
I took a malicious enjoyment in watching them struggle to react in the right way. Their surprise was genuine. It could almost have been shock. I switched on a lamp and spread the photographs of the cliffs across the desk, along with a sheaf of papers marked across the top w
ith OAKWOOD POLICE DEPARTMENT. “He was reported missing from foster care on November 9,” I said. “There was a search—they kept it very quiet. The police went up to a spot in the woods where the boys from Saint Jerome like to go, and they found this.” The photograph of the muddy streak through the leaves at the edge of the cliff, the broken saplings and vines. “The fall is forty feet.”
“He fell?” said the wife.
I nodded.
“Did anyone see?” said the husband.
“In the end two boys admitted they were there when it happened,” I said. I pushed two typed pages across to him. “Here are their sworn statements.”
I watched Mr. Ibarra read. After a long time he said, “He slipped.”
“It was raining,” I said.
Mrs. Ibarra’s face was crumpled in something that looked like confusion. She covered it with her handkerchief, and her shoulders began to shake. I wanted them both to dissolve like tissue paper. I wanted to walk out and close the door and let the whole building sink into Fifteenth Street behind me. And that was almost what was happening. If I concentrated hard enough, it felt like that. I kept my hands folded and watched Mr. Ibarra pretend to comfort his wife.
“Perhaps it would be better if his parents were dead,” Mr. Ibarra said suddenly. “Better dead than to hear this news.”
Maybe there was real feeling there—real antipathy. Something animating all this. But they were probably only professionals. “Some would say so,” I said.
“A nightmare,” Mrs. Ibarra said.
“I couldn’t give news like this without confirmation,” I said. “And I only got the last of the police reports yesterday. They take their time in Oakwood.”
“Poor child,” Mrs. Ibarra said. Her face was red, but dry.
“Better to remember him as he was,” I said.
“Did they find the body?” Mr. Ibarra said.
“No,” I said. “The river is very deep.”
I smoothed the missing child police report that I had taken from the St. Jerome’s file room. The other documents were good matches for it. I had paid my skilled friend in Flushing thirty-five dollars for the whole set. The rubber stamp that said OPD EVIDENCE, which I had applied across the backs of the photographs, had cost me eighty-five cents to have custom-made in a novelty shop on East Ninth Street.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 17