A ring on my cell phone interrupts this tirade. It’s Felipe, and he must be in big trouble if he’s calling me instead of his mamí.
His school is only a few blocks away, so I can fit it in. I head over on foot, crossing under the El tracks as the train rattles by, thinking about the changing seasons, time passing, and my own parental obligations. Yeah, my generation was supposed to be different. I never thought that my daughter would be growing up in an era when rock stars are dying of old age, or that I would come to know the joys of having a teenage daughter who goes from manic to suicidal on an hourly basis. It all started a few years ago when she was in eighth grade. We had ten minutes to get to some school function, and Antonia was in the bathroom putting on makeup. I asked her, “Do you want to take anything to eat? Some fruit? A sandwich?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t have time,” she replied, in that universally adolescent don’t-you-know-anything whine that drives parents up the wall. And I knew right then that my daughter had reached the age where makeup is more important than food. God help me. And after all these years, I can still recite Green Eggs and Ham word-for-freaking-word.
* * *
Every school cafeteria in the country smells the same, a uniquely American blend of rotten apples and plastic, evaporating floor cleaner, ripening half-pint cartons of milk, and other food garbage. No wonder the kids all live on chips and soda.
The halls are filled with thirteen-year-olds plugged into the current fashion of low-slung jeans and hip-hugging thongs. I never thought I’d use this expression, but in my day, it took some work to see a girl’s panties. Now it’s pretty much on display, and all I can say is that, fortunately, pimples and braces are God’s way of saying you’re not ready for sex.
And you know you’re in a public institution when you pass a classroom with a sign taped to the blackboard saying, Do Not Tape Anything to This Blackboard, which is clearly a test of the logical skills needed to survive in the absurd bureaucracies of the information age.
Felipe is sitting by himself in a tiny interrogation room in the assistant principal’s office.
“Are you his guardian?” asks the secretary, whose plastic ID plate says her name is Evelyn Cabezas.
“I’m the person he called.”
“Do you know why he’s here?”
“No, but I’d like to hear it from him first.”
She makes me sit across from Felipe like a court-appointed lawyer with a three-time loser, then she leans on the doorframe with her arms crossed.
“Dime lo que pasó,” I say.
Ms. Cabezas interrupts. “I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to speak Spanish to the kids inside the building.”
“Why not?”
“The principal sent out a memo saying that the under- achieving students bring our test scores down and we’ll lose funding. So, no Spanish. English only.”
“What about the parents who don’t know enough English?”
“Hey, I just do what they tell me, like when they had us opening the mail with rubber gloves during that whole anthrax scare.”
I don’t push it. I just ask what happened.
“I didn’t have my homework,” he says.
“You didn’t call me in here for that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the third time this week.”
“And now you’re in trouble. Tell me why.”
“I got mugged.”
“Mugged? A couple of hard cases said, ‘Forget the cash, we want the English homework’? Try again.”
Same sentence, he just changes a crucial verb: “Okay. I didn’t do my homework.”
“Why the hell not?”
He gets all tight-lipped, like he’s taken a vow of silence, but I’m not the one looking at serious detention time, so I just sit there letting the emptiness fill the silence until he says, “Ray Ray and his crew was hanging with his primo who works at the gas station, gearing up for some mad viernes loco action.”
He means those crazy Fridays near the end of the school year when kids push their parents’ tolerance to the limit.
“You know Ray Ray, he got that pretty-boy face, always looking all ghetto fabulous. He’d go up to Deirdre, the boss, and just put his game on her fat, ugly self. Yo, we be doin’ some crazy stuff.”
“Keep talking.”
“Man, we be a-capellin’ and buggin’ out. He had us laughing up a lung, smoking the sheba with his primo.”
“You were smoking in a gas station, pendejo? Let me get this straight. You went out and partied with your friends the night of your brother’s funeral?”
“Well, Ray Ray had a game that day. And we always party after a game.”
“So it’s sort of like a tradition.”
“Don’t tell my mom, okay?”
“Don’t put me in that position.”
“I mean, this is like confession, right?”
“Go on.”
“Ain’t that what Jesus said?”
“I’m thinking Jesus would be kicking your ass right about now.”
“It don’t say that in the Bible.”
“Sure it does. Check out chapter forty-one, verse three: And thou shalt kick the asses of all those that offend thee. So what did you do next?”
He tells me they went on a shoplifting spree and got away with a few bags of chocolate chip cookies, a six-pack of Bud Light, and a couple of sixteen-ounce bottles of Coke, which proves what a bunch of idiots they are. I mean, if you’re going to boost the merchandise, at least grab something worth stealing.
So he didn’t do his homework because he was busy emulating Ray Ray, and he doesn’t want to roll over on his cousin and—at this point—his primary male role model. What am I supposed to say? Some platitudinous crap he won’t listen to? Still, it falls to me to be el malo de la película and teach him a life lesson. So I tell him, “Listen chico, you better not do anything that freaking stupid ever again. And if you’re going to hang out with older kids, you better make damn sure you do your homework first, you hear me? . . . I asked if you heard me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“Good, because you’ve still got a lot to learn, hijito, and dropping out of high school is a joke in a world that has no sense of humor, unless you’ve got some rich celebrities in the family I don’t know about. You think the cops are going to give you some special treatment when you screw up? Let you off with a warning?”
“Hey, you got Ray Ray off.”
“Is that a reason to start a Juvenile Offender record? ’Cause maybe the judge won’t be so kind-hearted next time. And I’m going to give your mamí the same message. After that, it’s up to her. I’ve got my own kid to raise.”
I’ve also got to have a little chat with the pride of Corona.
* * *
But all that has to wait. Something was clearly hinky about the pharmacy with the faded-yellow antibiotics. It takes a couple hours of expensive online searching, billable to my deep-pocketed clients, but I find it. Late last year, a sixteen-year-old boy died of septicemia—a galloping blood infection that rode right over the diluted antibiotics the curandera bought for him. At first, the cops thought it was a drug overdose, but the autopsy didn’t turn up any known street drugs in his system. By all accounts, he was a good kid who studied hard, kept his grades up, and made the varsity wrestling team. He lived about three blocks from the pharmacy. There’s no visible connection, but a dead teenager gives me all the motivation I need to stop playing nice and kick it up a notch or two. This goes way beyond watered-down baby formula.
The victim’s name was Edison Narvaez, which sure sounds Ecuadorian. His parents found him in his bedroom. He had already turned blue. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. My heart goes out to them for having to come face-to-face with every parent’s worst nightmare. It’s a professional hazard, I guess. I feel the urge to pull the plug on all the technology, stop traffic, and run
home to hug my daughter for the rest of the afternoon.
But I have to swallow my maternal instincts and check the police report first.
It’s impossible to find out what the victim’s parents actually said, because the detectives didn’t know any Spanish, and the report isn’t even signed. I could talk to the Narvaez family myself, though I wouldn’t want to put them through that unless it’s absolutely necessary.
But I do know someone else I can lean on.
* * *
“Where’d you get this?” I say, holding the yellow box under the pharmacist’s nose.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I mean, a guy who worked here during the holiday season handled it, but he was gone by the end of December.”
“He only worked here for one month?”
“Yeah.”
“And you let him handle bulk orders of prescription medicine?” I’m not letting him get an inch of breathing room.
“He said he had a source, and the price was right.”
“What was his name?”
“José.”
“I’m running out of patience here.”
“We all called him José.”
I turn on my patented X-ray eyes and burn a hole clean through the back of his head into the wall behind him. “Do you have a pay stub?” I suggest.
“We paid him in cash.”
“Of course you did. Did he fill out a job application? A health care plan? Anything with a name and address?”
A customer comes in and starts browsing around the lip glosses, which breaks my hold on him for a moment. So I use the opportunity to dig out the camera and snap a bunch of time-stamped photos of the counterfeit merchandise in close-up, medium, and a really nice wide-angle shot with him in the background. Then I take out a couple of quart-sized Ziplocs, double-bag a handful of the fake medicine as evidence, and stuff it in my bag.
The customer makes a choice, pays for it, gets her receipt and change, and heads out the door. The pharmacist’s hands are trembling slightly as he opens a drawer and pulls out a file folder full of invoices and crumpled sheets of pink and yellow paper. He goes through them one by one, wetting his fingers for each sheet, trying to get a grip or else maybe buy the time to come up with a plausible story. Another customer comes in, but I don’t take my eyes off the pharmacist for an instant. Finally, he produces a coffee-stained job application form.
I grab it and smooth it out on the counter. Antonio José de Sucre. Someone’s got a sense of humor, because that name belongs to the heroic general on Ecuador’s five-sucre note. Other warning signs that a legitimate employer should have spotted include out-of-state references with no phone numbers and a list of previous jobs with companies that went out of business years ago. But the price was right, I guess.
There’s an address that’s got to be a fake, and I wouldn’t put too much faith in the phone number either. “This number any good?”
He’s having trouble concentrating.
I repeat, “Did you ever call him at this number?”
“I guess I might have. I don’t remember.”
“Don’t you remember anything? Because you’re not getting rid of me until you give me something. You know that, don’t you?”
The woman gets in line behind me with a bag of cotton balls and a bottle of baby shampoo. I think the shampoo is one of the fakes. He says, “Let me take care of this customer first.” Buying more time, the bastard. When the woman’s gone, he says, “I just remembered—some of the cartons the medicine came in might still be in the storage room.”
Sounds almost too good to be true. I’ll follow this guy, but I’m not going to turn my back on him. I open my jacket so I can get to my .38 revolver quickly as we go down the back stairs to the storage room. Then we toss the place until we find a couple of boxes with the Syndose logo on them. The shipping labels have been torn in half. Another red flag. Who gets a delivery and tears the shipping label in half? Not the whole thing, just the return address.
“Tell me something. Did this guy have a tattoo of the Ecuadorian or Colombian flag on his left bicep?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“It was Christmas and we couldn’t afford to keep the heat up high, so we were all wearing long-sleeved shirts and sweaters.”
“It seems like you can remember things if you try.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to send this guy to a place where he can’t choose his neighbors.”
“I mean about me.”
“That depends. Maybe we can swing a deal if you cooperate.”
“I’m cooperating.”
“Yeah? Well, I know another word for it.”
* * *
The phone number’s no longer in service, but a quick search turns up the previous owner’s name, Julio Cesar Gallegos, which just might lead somewhere. A lot of career criminals in my culture favor such grandiose names, as if they stand to inherit the power of the name by sympathetic magic. The biggest one, of course, being Jesús. I mean, there are a lot of Muslims named Mohammed, but nobody names their kid Allah.
The name, it turns out, doesn’t connect to an address in any of the usual places—motor vehicle and property records, bankruptcy court, government benefits—and I’m starting to get a feeling about this guy. Seems like he only used the name once to get the phone. Nobody makes themselves that invisible unless they’re working hard at it, and the kind of swagger he showed on the job doesn’t sound like a timid illegal trying to stay off the radar. I don’t give the street gang theory much credence. The pandillas are into curbside extortion, jacking cars, and drug dealing. They might have a piece of the street action on this, but staking out a one-month undercover in a local pharmacy seems a little beyond their scope. No disrespect.
But I figure if he is my guy, he’s got to have had a brush with the law at some point, even if it’s just a speeding ticket. I do a county-by-county search of the tri-state area and come up with nothing. I finally catch a break and match his name with an accident report that gives a recent address on Queens Boulevard, a wide thoroughfare that more than seventy people have died trying to cross in the last ten years, giving it the catchy nickname of the Boulevard of Death.
I call with a pretext about an insurance payment from the accident, and a woman named Gloria confirms Gallegos’s existence by telling me that he’s not in right now. But people will tell you anything if they think it’ll lead to money, and she practically offers to FedEx me a sample of his DNA. She says he’s watching the game in a bar a couple of blocks from the stadium. She doesn’t know the exact address, but it’s under the elevated tracks, which means from what she’s told me that it’s on Roosevelt Avenue east of 108th Street. I know the place.
* * *
The setting sun paints the store windows with an orange glow that transforms them into heavenly palaces for about a minute and a half. Dueling sound systems thump out bachatas from storefronts and apartment windows, while men in sweat-stained T-shirts hang out on the steps, laughing and enjoying the end of another work day with bottles of cerveza Pilsener, a taste of the old country. The hardware store owner is changing the numbers beneath Ray Ray’s dark Dominican features to include the results of today’s game, showing that he’s just extended his hitting streak to twenty-three games, while the 7 train shakes the sidewalks as it thunders on toward Flushing.
The big blue-and-orange Mets banner tells me I’m in the right place, and only one of the guys hunched over the bar matches the description I extracted from the fast-talking pharmacist. There’s a spot next to him, opposite the big color TV. I slide onto the empty stool as the Mets take on their archrivals, the Atlanta Braves. Glavine’s on the mound, facing his old teammates. Top of the third, one out, no one on. Both teams scoreless.
The bartender comes over and asks me what I’ll have.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
&n
bsp; “You gotta have something if you’re gonna sit here.”
“Oh, I’ve got to pay rent, huh? Okay, I’ll have a seltzer with a twist.”
He doesn’t try to hide his annoyance with me for ordering something so girly-girly and cheap, and unlikely to result in a big tip. I keep a close watch to make sure that’s all he’s giving me, and leave a few extra bills on the bar.
The batter pops up to center field, and Beltran gets under it with plenty of time.
“Así se hace!” says my neighbor.
“Vamos Carlosito!” I chime in.
He looks at me. I toast him with my seltzer. He returns the salute with his beer.
“Do I know you?” he asks.
“You’ve probably seen me around. I think I’ve seen you around too. How’s it going?”
“Me? Just trying to get through the day.”
“It’s good to set realistic goals.”
Díaz comes up for Atlanta. He takes a few practice swings, then gets into his stance. Glavine throws low and inside. Ball one.
“So, a qué te dedicas?”
He says, “Oh, this and that. Y tú?”
“I’ve got my own business.”
“Uh-huh. Doing what?”
“I’m a private contractor.”
Glavine shakes his head. Lo Duca spreads three fingers and taps them against his right thigh, pinky extended. Glavine takes his time, then fans the guy with a devastating curveball.
“Yeah!” My guy pumps his fist in the air, and his T-shirt sleeve slides halfway down his bicep. I gently slide it the rest of the way. No tattoo.
New York City Noir Page 104
