Parts Unknown

by Rex Burns

  “Did his boss say anything about a visit to the hospital?”

  Bunch was looking over my shoulder. “No. Why?”

  I pointed to the date on the form. “It’s a weekday a month ago. He’d have taken time off from work.”

  “Good, Dev—I wondered if you’d spot that. I may make a detective of you yet.”

  “Right. Thanks.” We took a last look around the small room, aware of the voices—human and electronic—on the other side of the thin partitions that had been tacked up to make Nestor’s cubicle. As Bunch said, it was hard to imagine that El Salvador was worse. He relocked the door, and I led across the square of dirt toward the Bronco.

  “Ssssst.”

  “What’d you say, Dev?”

  “Wasn’t me.” We paused, waiting for the sound to come again.

  “Señores, por favor.” From a corner of the building where the shadows lay deepest, a blurred face leaned toward us. “Please, misters.”

  “What’s your problem?” asked Bunch.

  He was slender and work-stunted, and his face was creased with worry. “Is true you are no policeman?”

  “Yeah,” said Bunch. “That’s true. You’re the guy from room eight, right?”

  “Sí. YOU look for Senor Calamaro?”

  “You know where he’s at?”

  “No, senor, I’m sorry.” He listened, glancing back over his shoulder for sounds beneath the steady rush of traffic off the nearby elevated freeway.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You are no the police?”

  I handed him a card. “Detectivos privados. We’re looking … buscamos solamente Señor Calamaro.”

  The Spanish relaxed him a bit, and he said something too rapidly for me to understand.

  “A little slower, please.”

  “Can you help me too? Es mi esposa. My wife.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No, señor. Desaparecida—gone.”

  On the other side of the apartment wall, a television voice blared out and was cut quickly. The man’s eyes widened and he sank back into the shadows, a dim outline against the pale boards.

  “We’ll drive around the block,” said Bunch. “Meet us on the corner.”

  I repeated the words in Spanish, and the man nodded and glided out of sight. A few minutes later, the headlights picked him up perched on the old redstone curb. A lifted hand shielded his eyes from the glare. He slid quickly into the rider’s seat.

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked.

  “La patrona.” He took a deep breath and groped in a shirt pocket to offer a pack of cigarettes. We declined, and he put them away without lighting up. “She don’t like it that we talk to Anglos.”

  “Go ahead and smoke if you want.” Bunch steered the Bronco to a stretch of empty street and pulled over in the shadows of a high, wooden fence.

  “Thank you.” A match flared for an instant, bringing the sharp worry lines of the man’s face out of the darkness. “Mi esposa—my wife—she is gone. I don’t know where. I come home from work, she is gone. Nobody knows where. Desaparecida.”

  “Did she leave you?” asked Bunch. “Run away?”

  “Oh no, senor! Where she go? To who?” He drew deeply on the cigarette cupped in his palm and sighed a cloud of smoke out the window. “We are illegals. All of us. Where can we go?”

  “Did she go south? Home?” I asked.

  “No, senor. We don’t have the money for that. She don’t want to go back anyway. She likes the States.” He added politely, “We all like the States.”

  “So you didn’t check with the police?”

  “No. If I go to the police … .” He shrugged. “But she is gone. I don’t know what to do—who to talk to. I told la patrona. She say she look, but nothing. Nowhere—no one. My wife!” The voice caught and stifled itself, embarrassed to show emotion.

  After a moment, I asked, “Was she sick? Enferma?”

  “Fué embarazada.” He saw my puzzlement. “Embarazada.” His hands made a swelling motion in front of his stomach. “Niño—baby.”

  “Pregnant,” I told Bunch.

  “You keep her barefoot in winter too?” he asked.

  “Cómo?”

  “Nada,” I said. “How many months?”

  “Siete. Seven.”

  “The landlady—did she ask at the hospitals?”

  “Sí. Everywhere. Nothing.”

  “Ask him if he’s got a photograph of her,” said Bunch.

  He replied before I could speak. “Fotografía? Sí.” Fumbling quickly in his wallet, he handed us a small tinted school picture. A girl who looked about sixteen smiled widely at the camera, her eyes large and dark with the excitement of being photographed.

  “When was this taken?”

  “Eighteen months ago. Before we start north.”

  “Did you talk to the neighbors around here? Los vecinos? Ask them if they saw anything?”

  La patrona, sí. Yo, no. She don’t like for us to talk to nobody.” The thin shoulders bobbed again. “La migra.”

  Bunch sighed, not without satisfaction. “How much you going to charge this guy, Dev?”

  I sighed too. “The same rate Mrs. Gutierrez is paying—call it twofers.”

  We spent a few more minutes getting names and dates clear. He was Felix Frentanes and his wife was Serafina. She had disappeared six weeks ago Thursday, and the last trace anyone had of her was when the woman across the hall in number seven saw her headed for the corner market with an empty shopping bag. Felix had waited for more information, growing distraught as the night passed, until he had taken a chance on his landlady’s displeasure and asked the shop owner if he knew anything. But the owner said no—he didn’t even remember waiting on her the day before.

  “What apartment does the landlady live in?”

  “No here.” His hand flapped vaguely at the surrounding dark. “Somewhere else. She comes Saturdays. To get los paychecks.”

  “The paychecks?”

  “She makes the … cambio.”

  “Cash? She cashes the paychecks?”

  “Sí.” Another shrug. “Without the identification cards … .” The worried look came back. “You no talk to her, yes? You no tell her I talk to you, please?”

  “Okay by me,” said Bunch. “But we got to talk to the people in the apartment.”

  I explained to him that we couldn’t do much without asking people questions. Then, resigned, he nodded. “Will they tell la patrona we’re asking about your wife?” I added.

  A tilt of the head that meant probably. Most of the people in the apartment wouldn’t tell, he said. But a few—those who got something extra from the woman—acted as her eyes and ears and told on those who disobeyed la patrona’s rules. She would hear of it sooner or later. But he was more worried about his wife than about any punishment from la patrona. That was why he had dared to talk to us in the first place. Seven—eight months pregnant, now. No English, no money, no relatives, no friends. And, in this alien and frightening city, adrift somewhere. Or worse. And for her, as for him and the others like him, there was no appeal to the law. He was right to be worried.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE TELEPHONE ANSWERING machine’s light was winking red when I arrived at the office in the morning, and the message was a welcome one for a change: “This is Allen Schute with Security Underwriters in New York. I have a job for you if you can handle it. Would you please give me a call before noon your time?”

  I dialed the area code and local numbers Schute had recited—a Murray Hill exchange, meaning midtown Manhattan—and worked my way past a receptionist and a personal secretary to the man himself. I hadn’t done any jobs for Security before, but I’d heard of them: a big underwriter who, for a percentage of the moneys saved, would determine if an injury claim was false. And apparently they’d heard of us; Schute wondered if Kirk and Associates could take an assignment on short notice. I allowed as we might.

  “We’ve received a tip about a cla
imant in a motorcycle accident who’s just moved to the Denver area. We’d like to clean this one up as soon as possible—we’re facing a statute of limitations on it.”

  I said fine and we settled on the fee schedule, and Schute gave me the particulars. One William “Billy” Taylor, who claimed permanently debilitating leg and back injuries as the result of a car-motorcycle collision, had recently left the metropolis of T’s Corner, Virginia, and moved to the Denver area. He was supposed to be looking for work as a roofer.

  “With a bad leg and back?”

  “That’s what we hear from his ex-girlfriend. She’s the one who tipped us off that he submitted a false claim. Now, she may or may not be telling the truth; they had a big fight and she ended up in the hospital, I understand, with a few broken bones and a craving for revenge. But we did have our doctors look at him following the accident, and they suspected then that he was faking it. But you know about back injuries—they can’t be determined with any accuracy, so we went ahead and settled out of court. Christ, the way juries are making awards nowadays, we were afraid to take it to court. Which he knew, of course.”

  “Do you have a local address?”

  Schute gave me all the information he had, which wasn’t that much. Taylor’s mailing address was a rural route near Erie, Colorado, a small town about forty miles north of Denver. His ex-girlfriend said he was staying with some motorcycle buddies there. Schute read off a list of Taylor’s known acquaintances in the Denver area and mentioned Ace Roofing as a possible source of information. “Apparently it’s run by a buddy of Taylor’s who moved out there a couple years ago. After he got off parole.”

  “What was he busted for?”

  “Moonshining. No big thing among local law enforcement in that corner of the state. But the feds get pretty excited about it.”

  “Do you have a description of Taylor?”

  He did, and was delighted to learn my office had a fax machine. A few minutes later, the machine murmured and then beeped the arrival of a three-page police file, which noted that Taylor—thirty-two years old, five eleven, one eighty-five, black hair and blue eyes—was affiliated with a group whose interest in motorcycles was not solely recreational. In fact, it edged into the criminal. Fortunately, I didn’t have to arrest the guy; all I had to do was photograph him on the job or on his motorcycle, thereby demonstrating his ability to lead a normal life. But to do that, I had to find him.

  Erie, Colorado, was named after Erie, Pennsylvania, because of the coal mines that meandered under the surrounding prairies. The seams had played out decades ago, and except for the name of a bar and a handful of relics in local museums, there was no reference to mining anymore, and no one made their living at it. I cruised down the cracked and ragged pavement of the town’s single main street: A small pizza restaurant, a fast-food drive-in, a liquor store, and four or five bars. The rest of the town’s income came from highway maintenance work, school teaching, and, especially, jobs outside the community.

  Aside from a few kids riding bicycles up and down the lone stretch of lumpy pavement, the town seemed deserted. Over many large store windows boards warped from long weathering, and rock facings whose stains hadn’t been blasted for years said the town was a quiet eddy out of the mainstream of progress and development. The dirt streets wandering off between houses implied that was the way the residents liked it. Maybe they had found a set of values different from that of hustling, hungry Boulder just across the county line; then again, maybe they hadn’t. Most of the homes were small bungalows huddled under large cottonwoods, but here and there newer apartments ruptured the tree line, stark and boxy and hinted of pending change.

  At the north end of the street, I found the post office. It was the newest structure in town and looked like the central warehouse of a lumberyard, with its low-pitched roof, wide eaves, and freshly stained boards. The woman behind the counter scratched a pencil in her heavily dyed black hair and said, “Just a minute,” when I showed her Taylor’s address and asked where it was. She came back with a county map glued to a square of cardboard and covered with plastic film.

  “Here we are.” A smudge of ballpoint ink was “here.” Her finger traced a line of road. “You go down Briggs—that’s right out front there. Where it turns east, go down to County Road Five and turn south maybe half a mile. You’ll see the mailbox on your left—says ‘Wilcox,’ but they’re the original owners. Don’t live there now.”

  “Do you know Mr. Taylor?”

  The blue-black hair shook no. “Only people I see regular are those with boxes or who use general delivery.”

  I thanked her and followed the ragged and lumpy asphalt strip around to the graveled county road. A thin haze of dust hung over the glare of dirt and stone to powder the weeds that filled the roadside ditches. Treeless land rolled gently toward the horizons. Here and there were patches of dark green corn or silage crops watered from narrow irrigation ditches, the glint of aluminum siphons leading off between rows from the water running down the concrete slit. But for the most part, the land was brown and dry and empty of everything except an occasional wire fence that swung past like a long pendulum anchored to some point at the edge of sky. To the west, ranges of mountain, blurry with dust and heat, lifted abruptly from the yellow of prairie to the blue and gray of icy rock. Already, clumps of white clouds rose like billows of smoke from behind the farthest peaks, and by early afternoon they would build into towering thunderheads that would sail, stately and slow, toward Kansas. That was the rain promised by Uncle Wyn’s arthritis, and if the prairie was lucky, a curtain of water from the dark bottom of one of those swelling columns would sweep across the cracked and gaping clay. Aside from a white-chested hawk that hung wagging above a gentle rise of land, I was the only thing moving in the shallow bowl formed by the grassy ridges.

  The mailbox, anchored in a rusty milk can, had the route number nailed to the upright and the name Wilcox painted in faded red on the metal. Beneath it dangled an orange newspaper box labeled “Times-Call.” A two-rut road led across a narrow cattle guard and wound over a knoll to make a pair of dimples in its crest of tall, dry grass. I pulled the rented Subaru onto the weedy shoulder and walked up the lane. The heavy sun pressed down on the tawny swell of earth, and the grass sang with the high-pitched keen of insects.

  From the ridge, the ruts led down into the next shallow valley toward a cluster of dull tin roofs surrounded by a small stand of cottonwood trees. I squatted in the high grass, using binoculars to study the farmyard and buildings. The house itself was a roofed basement whose walls lifted about four feet above the earth. It was the kind that people built to get started, moving into the basement and planning—if the floods didn’t wash away the crops or the drought blow them away—to eventually add a main floor and then maybe a second one, and to rise in the world with the house.

  Apparently, things worked out for the original owners only enough to justify a peaked roof over the basement and a porch lined with rusty metal chairs in the shape of seashells. Close to the house, a blue pickup truck sat in the shade of one of the trees, and as I watched, a large German shepherd plodded listlessly toward the house and disappeared under the porch. Beneath another tree were the shadows of motorcycles, possibly four or five. From this distance, they looked heavy and fast and had the bulk of Harleys. On a rise beyond the broken-down corral, the wide dish of a satellite receiver aimed into the hot sky. Surrounding the little island of trees and roofs, the dry prairie stretched bare and vacant. It was a lousy place to live if you wanted rich, green fields and neighbors close enough to visit. But it was fine if you were afraid someone might want to sneak up on you. And a hard one for surveillance if you were the sneakee. I shot half a dozen pictures with the telephoto just to prove to myself I’d been here, and then crept back over the ridge and down to my car.

  Driving the dirt section roads that carved the county into large squares, I circled the farm looking for alternate approaches. To the north, a tall radio tower flashed
its warning strobes every few seconds to fend off low-flying airplanes, and farther east—too distant to be heard—I glimpsed the rectangles of semi trucks gliding up a rise on I-25. After a while, I swung that way and joined the river of traffic back toward Denver, mulling over the problem of surveillance.

  I reached the office after lunch. Bunch was in the small cubicle that served as workshop and storage room for his electronic equipment, and he told me he was sketching out a closed-circuit loop system for the Hally Corporation. “That’s what they decided on, so what the hell. It’s their loss.”

  It was what we were afraid of—quick work and low profit. “How big’s the plant?”

  “Just one building. I’ll draw up some options, show them the different degrees of protection. But don’t be too cut up if they stick with the cheapie.” He finished rolling a spool of sensor tape. “What’s with the new insurance job?”

  I told him about Taylor and the farm, and he nodded glumly. “More squat-and-peek work.” Then he perked up. “But, hey, what do you say we try a night gig? That way we can check out the infrared gear. From what you say, it’ll be harder than hell to eyeball the place during the day, anyway.”

  It was as good a plan as any, and it was nice to see him finally eager to do some insurance work. I handed him the list of Taylor’s known associates. “See what you can find out from Dave Miller on these people. My guess is some of them have local records.”

  Bunch glanced over the names and grunted. Dave Miller, of DPD’s vice and narcotics section, was Bunch’s contact in the police by virtue of being his ex-partner. Miller would do favors for me, but not as readily as he did for Bunch.

  “Did you talk to Nestor’s co-workers?”

  Bunch nodded; he’d been busy while I was up in Erie. “They didn’t tell me much more than we already knew. He showed up on Tuesday, worked all day, didn’t show up Wednesday.”

  “He was seen leaving the plant?”

  “At four thirty-seven.”

  “Somebody timed him?”