Queens Noir

by Robert Knightly

  "What can I do for you on this fine spring day, Mr. Anderson?"

  He snaps open his briefcase and pulls out a plastic bottle of dandruff shampoo with a blue-green label you can find in any drugstore in the northeast.

  "What's wrong with this?" he says, holding up the bottle.

  I check the label and tell him, "That used to be an eightounce size, and now you're selling six and a half ounces for the same price."

  He doesn't bite. He just places the plastic bottle on my desk and pulls a seemingly identical one out of his briefcase. "How about this one?"

  I study it for a moment, and it's obvious that the bluegreen color isn't as saturated as it should be, and the white lettering isn't perfectly aligned with the other colors on the label.

  "It's counterfeit," I announce.

  Cristina butts in. "What kind of dumbass would counter, feit shampoo? Ain't no money in that."

  I'm about to tell her to keep out of this, but Mr. Anderson beats me to it. He says, "Counterfeiting and product diversion cost my company several million dollars a year. The police just raided a store in Jackson Heights and seized 24,000 bottles of counterfeit shampoo. In one store. That's a tremendous economic loss."

  "To say nothing of the babies who get sick from diluted baby formula," I say.

  He smiles. "Mr. Davis told me that if anyone could find an illicit manufacturing operation in Corona, you could."

  "I'll take that as a compliment. What makes you think Corona's the place to start?"

  "Because the store owner in Jackson Heights gave the police an important clue. He said one of the suspects had dark hair, a gang tattoo, and listened to Spanish music."

  I wait for more. Nothing doing.

  "That's your clue?" I say, because I practically fit that description myself.

  "Well, no. Not just Spanish music, some special kind. It's in the report. It also said something about the tattoo indicating that he's Ecuadorian. Anyway, they figure he's a member of a street gang like the Latin Kings or MS-13."

  Wow, that's some terrific random profiling there, Mr. Anderson. But the rent's due, so I try to keep a placid surface. And tell him, "The Latin Kings are Puerto Rican, the Maras are Salvadoran, and they rarely let anybody else in. I don't know of any Ecuadorians who've jumped in with them, but you never know what could happen as the new generation gets Americanized. I'll check it out for you."

  He gives me the cocksure grin of a man who just bought exactly what he wanted, as always. But after we sign and file away our copies of the contracts, this glorified errand boy looks like he can't wait to bug out of the jungle before the headhunters get wind of his scent.

  I usually meet the reps from the big clients at the cushy offices of Davis & Brown in downtown Jamaica, but I was getting a weird vibe from this bunch so I just said screw it, I'll take their money, but I want this guy to come to me and have to drag his skinny white ass to the barrio. Let him feel what it's like to be a stranger, on alien turf. And I must say, I'm awful glad I did that.

  I start with the police reports of the big shampoo bust and other recent crimes relating to counterfeiting, product diversion, and the rest of the gray-goods racket covering the area between Elmhurst and Corona south of Roosevelt Avenue, and Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst north of Roosevelt. That's right, East Elmhurst is due north of Elmhurst. What do you expect from a borough where you have to know a different language on every block, where pigeons ride the A train to Rockaway Beach to scavenge from the garbage, where you know that Spider-Man lives at 20 Ingram Street in Forest Hills? No, really. He does.

  Most of the cases deal with pirating-unauthorized duplication of CDs, DVDs, and computer software-which are of no interest to my client. The counterfeiting is mostly luxury items like watches, perfume, and designer handbags peddled by West African immigrants on fold-up tables, and the occasional case of Mouton-Cadet with labels made on a laser printer that fool the eye but not the fingers (they lack the raised embossments). But five-and-dime products like shampoo and antibacterial soap? Not much. Time to check out the shelves at the local farmacias.

  Latinos take their music seriously, especially on Roosevelt Avenue east of 102nd Street. There's a music store on every other block, and the cars-from tricked-out pimpmobiles to bodyrot jobs with plastic wrap covering the gaping holes where the passenger windows should be-have top-of-the-line subwoofers pumping out bachata and merengue loud enough to compete with the 7 train roaring by overhead. And not one noise complaint is ever called in to the boys at the One-Ten. Though I do think that a spoiler on a battered Toyota Corolla is kind of pointless.

  The store owner in the police report described the sus- pect's nationality based on his choice of music and a tattoo of the Ecuadorian flag on his left bicep. But the only music style around here that is exclusively Ecuadorian is pasillo, which is too old-fashioned and sentimental for any self-respecting gangbanger to listen to. He probably meant reggaeton, the Spanish version of gangsta rap, which crosses ethnic borders in all directions, to the dismay of proud parents everywhere.

  And the flag is not a "gang" tattoo. Most people don't know the basic difference between the Colombian and Ecuadorian flags, which boldly fly yellow, blue, and red from second-floor windows and storefronts. (And to anyone who complains about Latinos in the U.S. flying the flags of their homelands, I dare you to go down Fifth Avenue on St. Pat's Day, or to Little Italy during the Feast of San Gennaro, and try to take down the flags. See what happens.)

  I stop by a few farmacias and botanicas and find a number of Syndose knock-offs, including a tube of minty toothpaste with the brand name Goldbloom misspelled Goldvloom, a mistake that only a Latino would make.

  The panaderia and ferreteria-that is, the bakery and hardware store-are displaying handmade posters of Ray Ray in his Newtown High uniform, with his full name, Raymundo Reyes, keeping track of his hitting streak, which after yesterday's ninth-inning blooper now stands at twenty-two games. Go, Ray Ray.

  We take our sports seriously too, although soccer's the favorite among Ecuadorians. It didn't get much press up here, but a coach back home was shot when he didn't select the ex-president's son for the Under-20 World Cup in Argentina. Yeah, in case I haven't mentioned it, Ecuador's major exports are bananas, cocoa, shrimp, and unstable politicians, which is why so many of its come here hoping to catch a piece of the American dream. And sports offers a way out for many, even if it remains a distant dream most of the time. Either way, the bright lights of Shea Stadium cast a long shadow over the neighborhood.

  Interviewing the store managers yields a range of responses. One Salvadoreno says the cops told him not to discuss the case without the state attorney general's consent, but he won't give me a name or a badge number, or sign a statement to that effect, even though I tell him it's a bunch of tonterias. You know, B.S., but even the legal immigrants don't want to tangle with the authorities when their citizenship applications are pending.

  Another place is staffed by sullen teenagers making minimum wage who don't seem to know anything but one-syllable words, and the next place has employed some fresh-off-theboats who are still having trouble telling the difference between five- and ten-dollar bills. Then I hit a place on 104th Street where the manager talks a Caribbean mile-a-minute about beisbol and the pride of Corona, but he clams up when I ask about the antibiotics in the faded yellow boxes.

  "How'd they get so faded? You leave them lying out in the sun?"

  Dead air.

  I make a show of flipping through my notes, writing a few things down very slowly.

  "They've just been on the shelf a long time," he says.

  "Then it's probably time to replace them," I say, picking up one of the boxes. The expiration date is two years down the road. I mention this. "They can't have been here that long."

  More silence.

  I like the silence. It tells me a lot. "I'll be back," I say.

  Next up is a drugstore run by a Colombiano whose attitude is: It's the same stuff for half
the price, so his customers buy it. What's the big deal?

  The next guy's a compatriots, a paisano, an Ecuatoriano like me, who turns into a walking attitude problem when he accuses me of helping the big gringo corporations protect their money instead of going after the real criminals, like the hijos de puta who charged a couple of hundred would-be immigrants $5,000 each for a boat ride to Florida, then left them flounder ing in rough seas about 200 miles from the coast of Mexico; or the sinverguenzas who hire day laborers and abandon them without pay in the middle of Nassau County because they can't go and complain to the Board of Labor; or the perros at the Hartley Hotel in midtown Manhattan who laid off onethird of their employees after 9/11 and told the rest of them to work double shifts if they wanted to keep their jobs, because business was bad. So they were just using 9/11 as an excuse to run the old speed-up.

  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 mami.

  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 to que paso," 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 its 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 pelicula 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 mami 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 deeppocketed clients, but I find it. Late last year, a sixteen-yearold 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. The
re'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?"

  "Jose."

  "I'm running out of patience here."

  "We all called him Jose."

  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.