Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

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."

"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.