Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 54

And that's all there was.

'Entiende usted ahora? No est aqu.'

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

Caldern 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 Caldern 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 s.e.x, 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 Caldern smoked marijuana, one of them a.s.sured 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 Caldern had come from Cartagena. And n.o.body was too certain of that, either.

TWENTY-FIVE.

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 Caldern, 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.'

'Sat.u.r.day 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 Caldern Sat.u.r.day 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 bats.h.i.t and wipes out his family. Where are you calling from, it's noisy as h.e.l.l there?'

'A donut shop on Woodside Avenue.'

'Couldn't you find a nice quiet bowling alley? What's your guess on Caldern? 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 f.u.c.king people are on a plane to the islands once a month and they come back carrying two chickens and another f.u.c.king relative. Of course, my grandparents worked, maybe that's the difference. They didn't have welfare giving 'em a trip around the world.'

'Caldern worked.'

'Well, good for him, the little p.r.i.c.k. 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 c.o.c.kroaches. 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?'