Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

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.

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 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.