Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  "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 Bogotб and Caracas.

  Octavio Calderуn'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. "Sн;?" she said, expectant.

  "Octavio Calderуn," I said.

  "No estб aquн;."

  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 Calderуn's room.

  But Calderуn 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. Calderуn 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 Calderуn'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 estб aquн;."

  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 Calderуn 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 Calderуn been a good tenant? Sн;, 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 Calderуn had left so abruptly. But that was not her business. Her business was cleaning his room and renting it to someone else.

  Calderуn 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 Calderуn 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 Calderуn 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 Calderуn had come from Cartagena. And nobody was too certain of that, either.

  Chapter 25

  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 on
e 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 Calderуn, 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 Calderуn 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 Calderуn? 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."

  "That's what I was thinking."

  "Maybe he went home," Durkin said. "They go home all the time, you know. It's a new world these days. My grandparents came over here, they never saw Ireland again outside of the annual calendar from Treaty Stone Wines Liquors. These fucking people are on a plane to the islands once a month and they come back carrying two chickens and another fucking relative. Of course, my grandparents worked, maybe that's the difference. They didn't have welfare giving 'em a trip around the world."

  "Calderуn worked."

  "Well, good for him, the little prick. Maybe what I'll check is the flights out of Kennedy the past three days. Where's he from?"

  "Somebody said Cartagena."

  "What's that, a city? Or is it one of those islands?"

  "I think it's a city. And it's in either Panama or Colombia or Ecuador or she wouldn't have rented him a room. I think it's Colombia."

  "The gem of the ocean. The calling in fits if he went home. He had somebody phone for him so the job'd be there when he gets back. He can't call up every afternoon from Cartagena."

  "Why'd he clear out of the room?"

  "Maybe he didn't like it there. Maybe the exterminator came and knocked off all his pet cockroaches. Maybe he owed rent and he was skipping."

  "She said no. He was paid up through the week."

  He was silent a moment. Then, reluctantly, he said, "Somebody spooked him and he ran."

  "It looks that way, doesn't it?"

  "I'm afraid it does. I don't think he left the city, either. I think he moved a subway stop away, picked himself a new name, and checked into another furnished room. There's something like half a million illegals in the five boroughs. He doesn't have to be Houdini to hide where we're not gonna find him."

  "You could get lucky."

  "Always a chance. I'll check the morgue first, and then the airlines. We'll stand the best chance if he's dead or out of the country." He laughed, and I asked what was so funny. "If he's dead or out of the country," he said, "he's not gonna be a whole lot of good to us, is he?"

  The train back to Manhattan was one of the worst, its interior vandalized beyond recognition. I sat in a corner and tried to fight off a wave of despair. My life was an ice floe that had broken up at sea, with the different chunks floating off in different directions. Nothing was ever going to come together, in this case or out of it. Everything was senseless, pointless, and hopeless.

  Nobody's going to buy me emeralds. Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.

  All the good times are gone.

  Eight million ways to die, and among them there's a wide variety suitable for the do-it-yourselfer. For all that was wrong with the subways, they still did the job when you threw yourself in front of them. And the city has no end of bridges and high windows, and stores stay open twenty-four hours a day selling razor blades and clothesline and pills.

  I had a.32 in my dresser drawer, and my hotel room window was far enough from the pavement to make death a certainty. But I've never tried that sort of thing, and I've somehow always known I never will. I'm either too scared or too stubborn, or perhaps my particular despair is never as unequivocal as I think it is. Something seems to keep me going.

  Of course all bets were off if I drank. I'd heard a man at a meeting who told of coming out of a blackout on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was over the railing and he had one foot in space when he came to. He retrieved the foot, climbed back over the railing, and got the hell out of there.

  Suppose he'd come to a second later, with both feet in the air.

  If I drank I'd feel better.

  I couldn't get the thought out of my head. The worst of it was that I knew it was true. I felt horrible, and if I had a drink the feeling would go away. I'd regret it in the long run, I'd feel as bad and worse again in the long run, but so what? In the long run we're all dead.

  I remembered something I'd heard at a meeting. Mary, one of the regulars at St. Paul's, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I'd heard her qualify once, and evidently she'd been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom.

  One night, speaking from the floor, she'd said, "You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don't have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that's not true. Bad feelings won't kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won't."

  The train plunged into the tunnel. As it dropped below ground level all the lights went out for a moment. Then they came back on again. I could hear Mary, pronouncing each word very precisely. I could see her, her fine-boned hands resting one on top of the other in her lap as she spoke.

  Funny what comes to mind.

  When I emerged from the subway station at Columbus Circle I still wanted a drink. I walked past a couple of bars and went to my meeting.

  The speaker was a big beefy Irishman from Bay Ridge. He looked like a cop, and it turned out he'd been one, retiring after twenty years and currently supplementing his city pension as a security guard. Alcohol never interfered with his job or his marriage, but after a certain number of years it began to get to him physically. His capacity decreased, his hangovers worsened, and a doctor told him his liver was enlarged.

  "He told me the booze was threatening my life," he said. "Well, I wasn't some derelict, I wasn't some degenerate drunk, I wasn't some guy who had to drink to get rid of the blues. I was just your normal happy-go-lucky guy who liked a shot an' a beer after work and a six-pack in front of the television set. So if it's gonna kill me, the hell with it, right? I walked out of that doctor's office and resolved to stop drinking. And eight years later that's just what I did."

  A drunk kept interrupting the qualification. He was a well-dressed man and he didn't seem to want to make trouble. He just seemed incapable of listening quietly, and after his fifth or sixth outburst a couple of members escorted him out and the meeting went on.

  I thought how I'd come to the meeting myself in blackout. God, had I been like that?

  I couldn't keep my mind on what I was hearing. I thought about Octavio Calderуn and I thought about Sunny Hendryx an
d I thought how little I'd accomplished. I'd been just a little bit out of synch from the very beginning. I could have seen Sunny before she killed herself. She might have done it anyway, I wasn't going to carry the weight for her self-destruction, but I could have learned something from her first.

  And I could have talked to Calderуn before he did his disappearing act. I'd asked for him on my first visit to the hotel, then forgot about him when he proved temporarily unavailable. Maybe I couldn't have gotten anything out of him, but at least I might have sensed that he was holding something back. But it didn't occur to me to pursue him until he'd already checked out and headed for the woods.

  My timing was terrible. I was always a day late and a dollar short, and it struck me that it wasn't just this one case. It was the story of my life.

  Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.

  During the discussion, a woman named Grace got a round of applause when she said it was her second anniversary. I clapped for her, and when the applause died down I counted up and realized today was my seventh day. If I went to bed sober, I'd have seven days.

  How far did I get before my last drink? Eight days?

  Maybe I could break that record. Or maybe I couldn't, maybe I'd drink tomorrow.

  Not tonight, though. I was all right for tonight. I didn't feel any better than I'd felt before the meeting. My opinion of myself was certainly no higher. All the numbers on the scorecard were the same, but earlier they'd added up to a drink and now they didn't.

  I didn't know why that was. But I knew I was safe.

  Chapter 26

  There was a message at the desk to call Danny Boy Bell. I dialed the number on the slip and the man who answered said, "Poogan's Pub." I asked for Danny Boy and waited until he came on the line.

  He said, "Matt, I think you should come up and let me buy you a ginger ale. That's what I think you should do."

  "Now?"

  "What better time?"

  I was almost out of the door when I turned, went upstairs, and got the.32 out of my dresser. I didn't really think Danny Boy would set me up but I didn't want to bet my life that he wouldn't. Either way, you never knew who might be drinking in Poogan's.