The room clerk who checked in Charles Owen Jones was named Octavio Caldern, and he"d worked last on Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sistant manager. Caldern was still sick. He"d be out another day, maybe longer.
I asked what was the matter with him. The a.s.sistant 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. Caldern"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 Caldern 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 a.s.sistant manager if he knew what part of Queens Caldern 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 pa.s.sport, 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 Caldern"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 Caldern.
"No est aqu," 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 est aqu, she kept saying, and it was the one thing she said that I understood with no difficulty. No est aqu. 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.
a.s.suming 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 Caldern, 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 est aqu," 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 est aqu face to face. What was the point? Either he was taking a drug-a.s.sisted 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 est aqu. I don"t know, he"s not here, I don"t know, he"s not here -
s.h.i.t.
Joe Durkin had done a follow-up interrogation of Caldern on Sat.u.r.day night, around the time that I was pa.s.sing 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, Caldern 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."