They Thought He was Safe

by P. D. Workman

  As it was, he didn’t know where any of those names were going to lead or if any of them were going to be helpful. Other than to establish that there was still a lot of bullying and violence against the gay community, in spite of how it was supposed to be better for them now. He felt bad that there was still so much prejudice against gays. He remembered how careful he had been when he’d first met Pat, afraid of hurting his feelings—or worse, Mr. Peterson’s—with the wrong reaction or by saying something insensitive. They were two of the nicest, most stable people that he knew, and he could never understand how people could be so prejudiced. Maybe it was because Zachary had grown up in so many different homes, meeting people of many different races and persuasions. He’d learned that everybody was just an individual, and to judge them by the way that they behaved and treated others rather than by any preconceived notion.

  The address that Pat had given him was not in a nice area, which wasn’t a surprise. Where else could the illegals afford the rent? It wasn’t going to be a fancy neighborhood. Zachary drove around the block a couple of times getting the lay of the land before choosing where to park, a little distance away from the apartment, where it wasn’t quite so sketchy looking. Then he walked back to the apartment, eyes peeled for any gang activity or other hazards. Eventually, he stepped into the building.

  It was dim inside and he stood there blinking for a few minutes before his eyes adjusted to the lighting enough to go on. He didn’t want to be walking in blind. The apartment was on the third floor, and there was no evidence of an elevator, so he climbed the two flights of stairs and looked at the numbers on the doors. Most of the apartments didn’t have any numbers at all, so he counted them off and hoped he picked the right one. If he didn’t, he supposed the resident would point him in the right direction. What were they going to do, beat him up because he knocked on the wrong door?

  He knocked a couple of times before the door was answered. It was a short man with black hair and dark skin, Zachary guessed he could be Mexican or El Salvadoran or any one of a number of different nationalities. Zachary smiled and didn’t make any movements that might be taken as aggressive.

  “Hey,” he said. “Is this Jose’s place?”

  The man looked at him suspiciously, then shook his head. “Jose doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “So this is the right place. I wonder if I could come in and talk to you and any of the others who are around for just a few minutes. I’m trying to find out where he went.”

  The man shook his head and started to close the door. Zachary quickly stuck his foot in the crack to keep it from closing all the way. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to him. Once I know he’s okay, that’s it. I just want to make sure nothing happened to him.”

  “Nothing happen. He just go”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  The man looked at him, brows drawing down. “Why?”

  “Because he didn’t tell anyone where he was going. If he was going to go back to El Salvador or off to another job, he would have told his friends.”

  “No. He not tell anyone. He just go.”

  “I’ll just be a minute. Let me come in and have a look around, then I’ll go and I won’t bother you again. Are you Nando?”

  “No.”

  “Is Nando here?”

  The man looked over his shoulder. “Nando is out.”

  “When is he getting back?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You must know something. Is he at work? Or did he go out shopping or to eat?”

  “He just out. You go. You call him later.”

  “I need to talk to him. I’ll just wait here.” Zachary stubbornly didn’t pull his foot out of the doorway. What were they going to do? Call the police on him? They wouldn’t want anything to do with the cops. They wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves.

  The man stood there, dithering about what to do, his eyes going up and down the hallway as if worried that someone was going to happen by. Finally, shaking his head in frustration, he opened the door and allowed Zachary to step in.

  “Thank you,” Zachary said politely. He looked around the apartment.

  Detective Dougan had warned him that it would be crowded. He hadn’t been kidding. There was no living room furniture in the room Zachary walked into, just cots and mattresses with barely enough room to walk between them. Zachary tried not to give away his shock at the conditions. The place smelled like onions cooked on a hot plate, mixed with stale instant coffee and body odor. Even though it looked like they were careful not to leave garbage around the apartment, Zachary could see cockroaches creeping along the floorboards under the cots. Anyone who had a mattress right on the floor was taking the risk of having them crawl right across him. Zachary gave a little shudder. But he pasted a smile on his face and forged ahead.

  “Thanks for letting me in,” he said, as if it had been the man’s choice and he hadn’t just been forced into it. “So, where was Jose’s bed?”

  There were other men there, all more or less the same racial profile and body shape. All men who spent the day working hard, who slept and ate little. They watched him with suspicion that Zachary pretended not to notice.

  The man looked at him, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “Jose not here anymore.”

  “I know that. Which bed was his? Was he in here or one of the bedrooms?”

  “Who are you?” demanded one of the other men, older than the first, his face rounder as if he hadn’t missed quite as many meals.

  “My name is Zachary Goldman,” Zachary said, offering his hand. “Are you Nando?”

  The man nodded. He didn’t take Zachary’s hand. “And who is Zachary Goldman?”

  “I’m a friend of Pat Parker’s. Pat and Jose were friends, and Pat’s been worried about what happened to him, so I came by to see if I could find anything out.”

  “Pat,” Nando repeated.

  “Yes, did you ever meet Pat?”

  “No, I know Jose talked about a Pat.” Nando showed rotten teeth with a grimace that might have been an attempt at a smile. “Pat and Lauren, a couple of girls that he went out with sometimes.” He gave Zachary a wink. “I always thought he was doing pretty well to have two girls who would go out with him at the same time.”

  Zachary didn’t correct his misapprehension. Jose may have told him that he was going out with girls because he hadn’t been comfortable coming out about his status. If that was the case, it wouldn’t do Zachary any good to tell Nando that he’d been lied to. That would just make him resentful and he wouldn’t want to talk to Zachary or disclose anything else that he’d been told that might be a lie.

  “Pat is worried about Jose,” Zachary repeated. “Jose didn’t say where he was going, he just disappeared without telling anyone. Pat wants to make sure that he’s not hurt.”

  Nando shrugged his shoulders. “Jose goes where he goes. I don’t know where he went. Maybe he went home.”

  “He wouldn’t do that, would he? He needed to earn money here to send home to them. He wanted to take care of his family and maybe find a way for them to join him here someday, right?”

  Nando pursed his lips. He folded his arms in front of his chest. “You don’t know Jose.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me about him. Were you surprised when he left? Were you surprised that he didn’t tell you where he was going?”

  “No. People come, people go. Especially around here. Nobody stays forever.”

  “So you just came home from work one day, and all of his stuff was gone…?”

  Something changed in Nando’s eyes. He looked around the room as if he might have said something wrong, even though he hadn’t yet answered.

  “He did take his stuff with him, didn’t he?” Zachary prompted.

  “Who are you? Are you the one who sent that policeman around? We told the policeman; he took all of his stuff with him. Cleared everything out. There wasn’t anything of his left behind here.”

&nb
sp; “Oh.” Zachary considered that. He supposed that a place like that was probably similar to a foster home. Whatever you didn’t take with you when you left, everybody else took at the first opportunity. Zachary had been taken out of the Peterson’s home while he was at school. His social worker had packed his bag for him, but she hadn’t known to pack his camera. She hadn’t packed his meds either, but Zachary hadn’t been concerned about those. He had only been worried about his precious camera. Mr. Peterson had kept it safe for him until he was able to go back and get it. At any other foster home, that wouldn’t have happened. Whoever wanted the camera would have just taken it. “So what did he leave behind? Any personal papers?”

  Nando looked around the room, meeting the eyes of others of the roommates, all of them trying to communicate by facial expression and body language as to what he should say or do.

  “I don’t care if you’re using his things,” Zachary reassured them. “I’m not going to take away blankets or clothes or anything. I’m just wondering whether there was anything personal. Anything that you were surprised he’d left behind?”

  Nando scratched stubble on his jaw. “He didn’t leave anything.”

  “What? Money? A journal?”

  “He wouldn’t leave money!” One of the other men barked with laughter. “Nobody leaves money here. If you have money, you keep it with you. You wouldn’t leave it somewhere anybody else could find it.”

  “You don’t have lockers or drawers or anywhere secure where you can store your own things?”

  “Some people have a box,” Nando said. “But you don’t leave anything valuable here. If Immigration come one day… if you can’t come back because something happened. Anything important, you take it with you.”

  “So, what did Jose leave?”

  “He leave nothing,” Nando insisted again. But every time he insisted, Zachary was more convinced that he was lying. Jose had left something behind.

  Zachary took a slow look around the room. Then he headed toward the back hallway where the bedrooms were. Alarm showed in Nando’s face and several of the others’. Zachary kept going. As long as they weren’t physically stopping him, he was going to have a look around and find out what he could.

  There were two bedrooms, and they looked pretty much the same as the front room, with cots and mattresses taking up the majority of the space. There were a few boxes, as Nando had said. Little cardboard boxes and a few metal boxes like a business would use for petty cash. There were no dressers and no clothes hanging in the closets. Extra clothes were neatly folded on each of the beds. Maybe to be used as pillows during the night.

  There were no mattresses that were obviously unoccupied. Zachary looked at each bed carefully, analyzing whether there was anything out of place.

  “You can’t be in here,” Nando said more urgently from Zachary’s elbow.

  Zachary keyed in on his tone. “I won’t be long. Which bed was Jose’s when he was here?”

  “You can’t be in here.”

  “Is this where Jose was?”

  “He is gone.”

  Zachary took a slow walk around the room, watching Nando’s face for some change in expression. Like a game of hot and cold. Nando was trying not to tell him anything about where Jose’s bed had been, but he got more agitated as Zachary got close to it. Zachary bent down over one of the cots.

  “This one?”

  “No, you can’t touch other people’s things. It’s time for you to leave.”

  Zachary picked up the clothes and shook each piece of clothing out, one at a time. Nothing hiding there. No cash in the spare socks. Nothing left in the pockets of the owner’s pants. Zachary folded them again and put them down. He pulled back the blanket over the cot. Again, there didn’t seem to be anything hidden there. There was a thin mattress over the top surface of the cot, and Zachary peeled it back to have a look underneath. There wasn’t anything hidden under the mattress, but he could see a metal box underneath the cot. He got down on his knees to retrieve it and tried not to handle it any more than he had to, touching his fingertips to the corners in case there were other fingerprints that should be collected, such as Jose’s or those of someone else who lived in the little apartment. Maybe someone who had something to do with Jose’s disappearance.

  It didn’t have a lock, but it had a latch. Zachary flipped it up and opened the hinged lid. There were a few pictures, a little notepad, a piece of fabric that might have been a handkerchief. Zachary picked up the photos by the edges and studied them. A couple of young children, a woman in a flowered dress, smiling tiredly at the camera.

  “Is this Jose’s family?” Zachary asked.

  Nando stared at him sullenly.

  “That’s his family,” said another voice. Zachary turned to see a younger man in the doorway. He was maybe eighteen, no older than that. He had an easy smile and a friendly manner. “How did you know Jose?”

  Chapter Six

  “H

  ow did I know him?”

  A look of realization crossed over the young man’s face, but then was quickly gone. “My English is bad,” he said humbly. “How do you know him?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Zachary said, “looking into his disappearance.”

  The younger man looked at Nando and glanced around the room. “A private investigator?” the boy repeated with interest. “Like on TV?”

  “Yes, like on TV,” Zachary agreed. “And I’m going to find out what happened to him. What can you tell me about the day he disappeared?”

  Nando shook his head at the boy, warning him.

  “Why don’t we go out somewhere?” Zachary suggested. “We can go talk somewhere more private. I’ll take this,” he indicated the box to Nando, “and keep it safe. Then you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  The boy looked at Zachary and Nando uncertainly. He shrugged. “You want to buy me pizza?”

  Zachary couldn’t help laughing. “Of course, I’d be happy to buy you pizza.”

  He handled the box carefully, trying not to destroy any evidence. It had a handle on the top that he unfolded and hung on to with two fingers in an effort not to get more fingerprints on it. He and the boy walked back through the apartment and out the door. Nando didn’t follow or make any threats. Zachary breathed a sigh of relief when he was out of the oppressive atmosphere of the apartment. While no threats had been made, they had not wanted him there. If they had decided to gang up on him, he wouldn’t have been able to protect himself from all of them. As the apartment door shut behind them, he turned to the younger man.

  “I’m Zachary.”

  “Philippe. Nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you for letting me know about Jose’s box. I’m sure he would have wanted it to be taken care of.”

  Philippe looked sideways at him and didn’t comment.

  “How long has it been since you have seen Jose?”

  “A week. Maybe a little more. Hard to remember, I don’t keep track of him.”

  “No, of course not. You have a job and he has his and the two of you don’t have a lot of time to hang out together.”

  Philippe nodded his agreement. “The days run together… I can’t keep track.”

  “And Nando? He didn’t want you to talk about it?”

  Philippe laughed. “Nando doesn’t want me to talk about anything. He is always saying to keep my mouth shut. Don’t talk to anyone about anything. Don’t give them something to remember. Just keep your head down and don’t make waves.”

  “I guess he has lots of experience. But still… you can’t always live your life that way, hiding from everybody else.”

  “It’s not normal for me,” Philippe agreed. “I am a very friendly person; I like to talk to people. I like to have fun and have parties. Nando says none of that. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  “That would be very hard,” Zachary said encouragingly. Though personally, he would much rather be holed up in his apartment alone most of the time, not out par
tying or visiting. But Philippe was naturally gregarious and it would be difficult for him to live that way. “So were you and Jose good friends?”

  “We talked sometimes. He didn’t spend much time at the apartment. But when he was around, we would talk. He liked to talk to people too.”

  “He was good friends with a couple of friends of mine.”

  Philippe cast a sideways glance at Zachary. He was following Zachary’s lead back to where his car was parked, but didn’t ask where they were going.

  “What friends?” Philippe asked eventually.

  “Pat Parker and Lorne Peterson.”

  Philippe nodded slowly. He didn’t say anything to indicate whether he knew who they were or whether, like Nando, he thought they were girlfriends. Zachary decided to approach it from another direction.

  “Jose had family back home?”

  “Yes,” Philippe nodded eagerly. “You saw his picture. A very nice family.”

  “It must have been hard for him to be away from them.”

  “Of course. He loved his wife and children very much. But he couldn’t make the money they needed to survive in El Salvador. He came here to make a better life. They were supposed to follow him sometime.”

  “So when you didn’t see Jose, did you think he’d gone back to El Salvador?”

  “Back there? No, why would he go back? He needed to work here to support them.”

  “There wasn’t an emergency back home? They didn’t call him to say that he had to go back to see his family? Maybe one of his children was hurt or they were in some kind of danger?”

  “No. Nothing like that.” Jose shook his head, eyebrows drawing down. “Who told you that?”

  “The first thing everybody says is, ‘Maybe he went home.’”

  Philippe shook his head with certainty. “He would never go back.”

  “Not even to visit? Not even if something had happened to his children?”

  “If he went back, they would all be killed. He could never go back.”

  Zachary raised his brows. “He would be killed? By who?”