Eight Million Ways To Die

I sipped my coffee and decided it didn't. Nor did the picture I got of the boyfriend jibe with the message I'd been given after last night's meeting. The fellow in the lumber jacket had been muscle, pure and simple, even if he hadn't been called upon to do anything more with that muscle than flex it. Would a mild-mannered accountant command that sort of muscle?

Not likely.

Were the boyfriend and Charles Owen Jones one and the same?

And why such an elaborate alias, middle name and all? People who used a surname like Smith or Jones for an alias usually picked Joe or John to go with it. Charles Owen Jones?

Maybe his name was Charles Owens. Maybe he'd started to write that, then changed his mind in the nick of time and dropped the last letter of Owens, converting it to a middle name. Did that make sense?

I decided that it didn't.

The goddamned room clerk. It struck me that he hadn't been interrogated properly. Durkin had said he was in a fog, and evidently he was South American, possibly somewhat at a loss in English. But he'd have had to be reasonably fluent to get hired by a decent hotel for a position that put him in contact with the public. No, the problem was that nobody pushed him. If he'd been questioned the way I questioned the fur salesman, say, he'd have let go of something. Witnesses always remember more than they think they remember.

The room clerk who checked in Charles Owen Jones was named Octavio Calderón, and he'd worked last on Saturday 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 assistant manager. Calderón was still sick. He'd be out another day, maybe longer.

I asked what was the matter with him. The assistant 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. Calderón'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 Calderón 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 assistant manager if he knew what part of Queens Calderón 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 passport, 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 Calderón'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 Calderón.

"No está aquí;," 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 está aquí;, she kept saying, and it was the one thing she said that I understood with no difficulty. No está aquí;. 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.