Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  He said, "You got some pair of balls, man. You got cojones, you know what I mean?" He cupped his groin with one hand like a baseball player adjusting his jock. "All the same," he said, "You don' wanna look for trouble."

  "What are you talking about?"

  He spread his hands. "What do I know? I'm Western Union, man. I bring the message, tha's all I do. Some chick gets herself iced in a hotel, man, is one thing, but who her friends are is another. Is not important, you know?"

  "Who's the message from?"

  He just looked at me.

  "How'd you know to find me at the meeting?"

  "Followed you in, followed you out." He chuckled. "That maricуn with the broken legs, that was too much, man. That was too much."

  Chapter 24

  Tuesday was largely devoted to a game of Follow the Fur.

  It started in that state that lies somewhere between dreaming and full consciousness. I'd awakened from a dream and dozed off again, and I found myself running a mental videotape of my meeting with Kim at Armstrong's. I began with a false memory, seeing her as she must have been when she arrived on the bus from Chicago, a cheap suitcase in one hand, a denim jacket tight on her shoulders. Then she was sitting at my table, her hand at her throat, light glinting off her ring while she toyed with the clasp at the throat of her fur jacket. She was telling me that it was ranch mink but she'd trade it for the denim jacket she'd come to town in.

  The whole sequence played itself off and my mind moved on to something else. I was back in that alley in Harlem, except now my assailant had help. Royal Waldron and the messenger from the night before were flanking him on either side. The conscious part of my mind tried to get them the hell out of there, perhaps to even the odds a little, and then a realization screamed at me and I tossed my legs over the side of my bed and sat up, the dream images all scurrying off into the corners of the mind where they live.

  It was a different jacket.

  I showered and shaved and got out of there. I cabbed first to Kim's building to check her closet yet again. The lapin coat, the dyed rabbit Chance had bought her, was not the garment I had seen in Armstrong's. It was longer, it was fuller, it didn't fasten with a clasp at the throat. It was not what she'd been wearing, not what she'd described as ranch mink and offered to trade for her old denim jacket.

  Nor was the jacket I remembered to be found anywhere else in the apartment.

  I took another cab to Midtown North. Durkin wasn't on duty. I got another cop to call him at home and finally got unofficial access to the file, and yes, the inventory of impounded articles found in the room at the Galaxy Downtowner included a fur jacket. I checked the photos in the file and couldn't find the jacket in any of them.

  A subway took me downtown to One Police Plaza, where I talked to some more people and waited while my request went through some channels and around others. I got to one office just after the guy I was supposed to see left for lunch. I had my meeting book with me, and it turned out there was a meeting less than a block away at St. Andrew's Church, so I killed an hour there. Afterward I got a sandwich at a deli and ate it standing up.

  I went back to One Police Plaza and finally got to examine the fur jacket Kim had had with her when she died. I couldn't have sworn it was the one I'd seen in Armstrong's but it seemed to match my memory. I ran my hand over the rich fur and tried to replay the tape that had run in my mind that morning. It all seemed to go together. This fur was the right length, the right color, and there was a clasp at the throat that her port-tipped fingers might have toyed with.

  The label sewn to the lining told me it was genuine ranch mink and that a furrier named Arvin Tannenbaum had made it.

  The Tannenbaum firm was on the third floor of a loft building on West Twenty-ninth, right in the heart of the fur district. It would have simplified things if I could have taken Kim's fur along, but NYPD cooperation, official or otherwise, only went so far. I described the jacket, which didn't help much, and I described Kim. A check of their sales records revealed the purchase of a mink jacket six weeks previously by Kim Dakkinen, and the sales slip led us to the right salesman and he remembered the sale.

  The salesman was round faced and balding, with watery blue eyes behind thick lenses. He said, "Tall girl, very pretty girl. You know, I read that name in the newspaper and it rang a bell but I couldn't think why. Terrible thing, such a pretty girl."

  She'd been with a gentleman, he recalled, and it was the gentleman who had paid for the coat. Paid cash for it, he remembered. And no, that wasn't so unusual, not in the fur business. They only did a small volume of retail sales and a lot of it was people in the garment trade or people who knew somebody in the trade, although of course anyone could walk in off the street and buy any garment in the place. But mostly it was cash because the customer didn't usually want to wait for his check to clear, and besides a fur was often a luxury gift for a luxury friend, so to speak, and the customer was happier if no record of the transaction existed. Thus payment in cash, thus the sales slip not in the buyer's name but in Miss Dakkinen's.

  The sale had come to just under twenty-five hundred dollars with the tax. A lot of cash to carry, but not unheard of. I'd been carrying almost that myself not too long ago.

  Could he describe the gentleman? The salesman sighed. It was much easier, he explained, to describe the lady. He could picture her now, those gold braids wrapped around her head, the piercing blue of her eyes. She'd tried on several jackets, she looked quite elegant in fur, but the man-

  Thirty-eight, forty years old, he supposed. Tall rather than short, as he remembered, but not tall as the girl had been tall.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I have a sense of him but I can't picture him. If he'd been wearing a fur I could tell you more than you'd want to know about it, but as it was-"

  "What was he wearing?"

  "A suit, I think, but I don't remember it. He was the type of man who'd wear a suit. I can't recall what he was wearing, though."

  "Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"

  "I might pass him on the street and not think twice."

  "Suppose he was pointed out to you."

  "Then I would probably recognize him, yes. You mean like a lineup? Yes, I suppose so."

  I told him he probably remembered more than he thought he did. I asked him the man's profession.

  "I don't even know his name. How would I know what he did for a living?"

  "Your impression," I said. "Was he an auto mechanic? A stockbroker? A rodeo performer?"

  "Oh," he said, and thought it over. "Maybe an accountant," he said.

  "An accountant?"

  "Something like that. A tax lawyer, an accountant. This is a game, I'm just guessing, you understand that-"

  "I understand. What nationality?"

  "American. What do you mean?"

  "English, Irish, Italian-"

  "Oh," he said. "I see, more of the game. I would say Jewish, I would say Italian, I would say dark, Mediterranean. Because she was so blonde, you know? A contrast. I don't know that he was dark, but there was a contrast. Could be Greek, could be Spanish."

  "Did he go to college?"

  "He didn't show me a diploma."

  "No, but he must have talked, to you or to her. Did he sound like college or did he sound like the streets?"

  "He didn't sound like the streets. He was a gentleman, an educated man."

  "Married?"

  "Not to her."

  "To anybody?"

  "Aren't they always? You're not married, you don't have to buy mink for your girlfriend. He probably bought another one for his wife, to keep her happy."

  "Was he wearing a wedding ring?"

  "I don't remember a ring." He touched his own gold band. "Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't recall a ring."

  He didn't recall much, and the impressions I'd pried out of him were suspect. They might have been valid, might as easily have grown out of an unconscious desire to supply me with the answers he thought I wanted. I
could have kept going- "All right, you don't remember his shoes, but what kind of shoes would a guy like him wear? Chukka boots? Penny loafers? Cordovans? Adidas? What?" But I'd reached and passed a point of diminishing returns. I thanked him and got out of there.

  There was a coffee shop on the building's first floor, just a long counter with stools and a takeout window. I sat over coffee and tried to assess what I had.

  She had a boyfriend. No question. Somebody bought her that jacket, counted out hundred dollar bills, kept his own name out of the transaction.

  Did the boyfriend have a machete? There was a question I hadn't asked the fur salesman. "All right, use your imagination. Picture this guy in a hotel room with the blonde. Let's say he wants to chop her. What does he use? An axe? A cavalry saber? A machete? Just give me your impression."

  Sure. He was an accountant, right? He'd probably use a pen. A Pilot Razor Point, deadly as a sword in the hands of a samurai. Zip zip, take that, you bitch.

  The coffee wasn't very good. I ordered a second cup anyway. I interlaced my fingers and looked down at my hands. That was the trouble, my fingers meshed well enough but nothing else did. What kind of accountant type went batshit with a machete? Granted, anyone could explode that way, but this had been a curiously planned explosion, the hotel room rented under a false name, the murder performed with no traces left of the murderer's identity.

  Did that sound like the same man who bought the fur?

  I sipped my coffee and decided it didn't. Nor did the picture I got of the boyfriend jibe with the message I'd been given after last night's meeting. The fellow in the lumber jacket had been muscle, pure and simple, even if he hadn't been called upon to do anything more with that muscle than flex it. Would a mild-mannered accountant command that sort of muscle?

  Not likely.

  Were the boyfriend and Charles Owen Jones one and the same? And why such an elaborate alias, middle name and all? People who used a surname like Smith or Jones for an alias usually picked Joe or John to go with it. Charles Owen Jones?

  Maybe his name was Charles Owens. Maybe he'd started to write that, then changed his mind in the nick of time and dropped the last letter of Owens, converting it to a middle name. Did that make sense?

  I decided that it didn't.

  The goddamned room clerk. It struck me that he hadn't been interrogated properly. Durkin had said he was in a fog, and evidently he was South American, possibly somewhat at a loss in English. But he'd have had to be reasonably fluent to get hired by a decent hotel for a position that put him in contact with the public. No, the problem was that nobody pushed him. If he'd been questioned the way I questioned the fur salesman, say, he'd have let go of something. Witnesses always remember more than they think they remember.

  The room clerk who checked in Charles Owen Jones was named Octavio Calderуn, and he'd worked last on Saturday when he was on the desk from four to midnight. Sunday afternoon he'd called in sick. There had been another call yesterday and a third call an hour or so before I got to the hotel and braced the assistant manager. Calderуn was still sick. He'd be out another day, maybe longer.

  I asked what was the matter with him. The assistant manager sighed and shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "It's hard to get a straight answer out of these people. When they want to turn evasive their grasp of the English language weakens considerably. They slip off into the convenient little world of No comprendo."

  "You mean you hire room clerks who can't speak English?"

  "No, no. Calderуn's fluent. Someone else called in for him." He shook his head again. "He's a very diffident young man, 'Tavio is. I suspect he reasoned that if he had a friend make the call, I couldn't intimidate him over the phone. The implication, of course, is that he's not hale and hearty enough to get from his bed to the phone. I gather he lives in some sort of rooming house with the telephone in the hallway. Someone with a much heavier Latin accent than 'Tavio made the call."

  "Did he call yesterday?"

  "Someone called for him."

  "The same person who called today?"

  "I'm sure I don't know. One Hispanic voice over the phone is rather like another. It was a male voice both times. I think it was the same voice, but I couldn't swear to it. What difference does it make?"

  None that I could think of. How about Sunday? Had Calderуn done his own telephoning then?

  "I wasn't here Sunday."

  "You have a phone number for him?"

  "It rings in the hall. I doubt that he'll come to the phone."

  "I'd like the number anyway."

  He gave it to me, along with an address on Barnett Avenue in Queens. I'd never heard of Barnett Avenue and I asked the assistant manager if he knew what part of Queens Calderуn lived in.

  "I don't know anything about Queens," he said. "You're not going out there, are you?" He made it sound as though I'd need a passport, and supplies of food and water. "Because I'm sure 'Tavio will be back on the job in a day or two."

  "What makes you so sure?"

  "It's a good job," he said. "He'll lose it if he's not back soon. And he must know that."

  "How's his absenteeism record?"

  "Excellent. And I'm sure his sickness is legitimate enough. Probably one of those viruses that runs its course in three days. There's a lot of that going around."

  I called Octavio Calderуn's number from a pay phone right there in the Galaxy lobby. It rang for a long time, nine or ten rings, before a woman answered it in Spanish. I asked for Octavio Calderуn.

  "No estб aquн;," she told me.

  I tried to form questions in Spanish. Es enfermo? Is he sick? I couldn't tell if I was making myself understood. Her replies were delivered in a Spanish that was very different in inflection from the Puerto Rican idiom I was used to hearing around New York, and when she tried to accommodate me in English her accent was heavy and her vocabulary inadequate. No estб aquн;, she kept saying, and it was the one thing she said that I understood with no difficulty. No estб aquн;. He is not here.

  I went back to my hotel. I had a pocket atlas for the five boroughs in my room and I looked up Barnett Avenue in the Queens index, turned to the appropriate page and hunted until I found it. It was in Woodside. I studied the map and wondered what a Hispanic rooming house was doing in an Irish neighborhood.

  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 Calderуn, 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 estб aquн;," 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 estб aquн; 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 estб aquн;. 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 Calderуn 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, Calderуn 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."