Eight Million Ways to Die

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."



"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?"