Mausoleum (11 page)

“What do mean?”

“He see you in Newbury, right?”

“Someone I met?”

“When you see a guy mowing lawns what do you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you see us, what do you say?”

“I say hello.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why do you say hello? Nobody says hello. You say hello.”

“Well, I suppose I assume you are country men—from the farms? Where people say hello.”

Henry's face closed up a bit. He hadn't the faintest idea what I was trying to say. So I said, “Why do I say hello? I think it must be lonely to be so far from home.”

Henry nodded and looked out the window. I cruised by the bus station and Henry spoke to people he knew without getting out of the car, holding up his crutches, breaking ice with them, then asking about Charlie Cubrero. It seemed that Henry's presence was giving me a trust pass. People who would not have spoken to me, spoke to us. Unfortunately nobody told us anything about Charlie. Though, from their anxious looks away, they knew that Immigration and the cops were hunting him.

Suddenly, two men we were talking to made a quick goodbye and hurried down the street to a big van that had just pulled up. “Work,” Henry explained and in seconds twelve men gathered around the vehicle. A pickup truck with a four-door passenger cab pulled up behind them. Before anyone could move, the van's doors burst open and out stormed six Federal agents, guns drawn. Four more pretend-contractors swarmed from the pickup.

“Drive!” yelled Henry.

I was already pulling a Uey. In the rearview mirror I saw Ecuadorians running from the Feds who were grabbing and cuffing them to street signs and lamp posts. A priest waded into the melee, signaling men to come with him. He got a bunch loaded into a little car and drove away before the Feds, who had their hands full, noticed.

“Out Reach Guy,” said Henry. “From the church.”

It was over in seconds. A Corrections bus with mesh windows swung around the corner. The prisoners were loaded. It drove away and then everything got quiet except for some women crying.

“ICE,” said Henry. “I heard they do that. Never seen it.”

***

We cruised another neighborhood, but the streets were empty, except for the occasional anxious woman on a cell phone. I asked Henry if he was hungry, and he answered like a man who definitely was and directed me to a convenience store that had a food counter and Formica tables in back. We were standing (Henry leaning on crutches and a pillar) at the counter perusing the menu, with Henry explaining dishes, when the place suddenly got very quiet.

I said, “Here we go again.”

The glass door swung inward and the bulky shadow behind it materialized into a beefy, overweight unpleasant-looking fellow with longish, greasy hair and a bad-tempered face. He could have been a disgruntled biker, but was more likely a plainclothes Immigration officer.

The people eating stopped eating. The people standing around waiting for food looked like they wished the guy was not between them and the door. The cook looked worried and the guy at the cash register looked sick with fear.

“Listen up! Who's seen Charlie Cubrero? You? No? What about you? Nobody seen him? All line up there! Get out your papers.”

Seeing a way to make friends in the immigrant community, I stepped past Henry and asked, “Are you an officer of the law?”

“Back off, Mister. Line up! Over there. Now. Now, now, now! Move!”

“Are you a peace officer?”

“I am warning you to back off, mister.”

“I am asking you one more time, are you a peace officer?”

He stopped shoving the Ecuadorians against the grocery shelves to shove me instead. I said, “Thank you, that's all I need to know,” and dipped a shoulder so he would think I was leading with my left. Orthodox stuff. A prize fighter would have handed me my head, but he didn't carry himself like one so I was guessing he was no more a prizefighter than a cop.

It did the job.

“Henry, please translate: ‘Anyone who wants to leave, now would be a good time.'”

Several barreled out the door before the fellow got up off the linoleum, pawing a gun from somewhere and a badge from somewhere else. Right on the prizefighter, wrong on the cop.

Chapter Eight

He yelled at me to lay on the floor.

I definitely did not want to lay on the floor. I looked around for a way out without making things more unpleasant than they had already become. All I could think of was to put both hands in the air and call loudly to the store clerk, “Would you please dial 911?” on the theory that the more cops present to witness his behavior, the less likely he was to avenge his civil rights by violating mine.

The clerk was terrified. One of the Ecuadorians reached for his cell. The man with the badge yelled not to move, but he was too busy concentrating on me to intimidate all of them; and the guy with the phone slipped out the door.

“On the floor! Now!”

Slowly, very slowly, I started toward the floor hoping that he was not the sort of officer to kick a man when he was down. His gun, I noticed, was shaking. It was an awful sight as he had a finger on the trigger. Stupid way to hold the only gun in a crowded room. I looked closer at his badge.

It was handsome gold circle of Art Deco sun rays set atop a bar with a four digit cutout number, a dead ringer for an NYPD detective badge, at a distance. The giveaway was the tiny red, white and blue enamel American flag where there should have been the seal the City of New York on a field of black.

“Connecticut,” I said, conversationally, as if he was not holding a shaky gun on me, “forbids police officers from moonlighting as bounty hunters. So you're not a cop. Bounty hunters are supposed to notify local police before making an arrest. But I don't see any local police. Nor are bounty hunters permitted to wear clothes or carry a badge suggesting that they are an agent of the state or federal government.”

“I am a licensed bail enforcement officer,” he said. “On the floor.”

“You can call yourself what you want, but you're acting like a bounty hunter out of bounds. So put your weapon away before somebody gets hurt.”

He didn't.

I said, “Or before the cops come along and take it away from you.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm a real estate agent.”

***

Bounty hunters, it turned out, were picking up extra income picking up illegal aliens who had been deported but had neglected to actually leave or sneaked back in. This was allowed in many states, including mine, but they did have to follow rules. Were he to bend them so sharply while apprehending a fugitive Greenwich hedge fund manager, he would find himself in hot water, boiled by the hedger's attorneys. But when it came to illegals from Ecuador, he could reasonably reason that if he dragged Charlie Cubrero in cuffs, an understaffed, overwhelmed Immigration Service might fork over the reward.

My standing in the convenience store would hinge on whatever personal contacts he had made among the various authorities. And, indeed, when two Danbury cops screeched up in their patrol cars, they did not appear pleased to make the gentleman's acquaintance. To be frank, they didn't look that pleased by me, either, nor struck with admiration for my PI license; but I at least was not carrying any weapons, which reduced me from potential threat to minor annoyance. The bounty hunter was carrying. But he was licensed to chase bail jumpers, and he was also licensed to carry the gun that he had managed to pocket before the cops walked in on him waving it around. It looked like a draw, with all but the most illegal free to leave the convenience shop. But then the Feds marched in.

I recognized the two I had seen outside the Yankee Drover. They hadn't seen me sitting inside the restaurant, of course. But they knew the bounty hunter. One said to him, “Hey, Al.”

The other said, “How you doing, Dude?”

“My Man,” said Al, cementing a warm relationship that probably centered around disappearing lunch checks.

“What's up?”

Al gave me a hard stare. But all he said was, “I got a tip Cubrero was hanging here.”

I gave Al a polite nod, relieved to learn that he was not as stupid as he had acted earlier. Or at least not about to waste hard-earned favors on the pleasure of giving me a hard time.

“You know you got blood on your lip?” asked one of the Feds.

“Cut myself trying to open a CD jewel case,” said Al, and I found myself starting to like him.

“That,” said the Fed, “is why everybody bought an iPod.” His partner and the younger Danbury cop nodded. The elder asked, “Who called in the 911?”

“Not me,” said Al.

The cops looked at me. “Beats me,” I said.

“Sir, may I see your cell?”

“Sure.”

He checked my number and handed it back. “Al?”

Al handed over his cell. So did everyone else in the shop, with the cheerfulness of people not worried since the guy who had stepped outside to make the call was by now stepping toward Bridgeport. Done with phones, the cops and Feds checked everyone's ID and eventually left with a guy who had wandered in with a driver's license that looked like something off a cereal box.

I said to Al, “Thanks for standing up.”

“Gotta tell you, Dude, I haven't been hit that hard since my old man caught me humping his girlfriend.”

That was a picture tough to contemplate, even subtracting twenty years from his greasy, beefy bad looks and assuming the girlfriend was drunk. I gave him my card. “Call if I can return the favor up my way.”

He read it and said, “Dude, you're in the boonies.”

“If you get a lead on Charlie Cubrero, I'll make it worth your while to talk to me first.”

“I don't get paid if I don't bring him in.”

“We pay cash on delivery in the boonies.” I could talk Tim Hall into turning Charlie over to the cops pro bono. But Al's money would have to be pried out of the parsimonious, not to say cheap, Cemetery Association. “We won't hassle you with paperwork. We won't even ask to see your license.”

He liked that. He gave me his card. Richard Albert Vetere. “You don't pronounce the last ‘e.' ‘It's V-Tear.' Like rip. But you can call me Al.”

His card said he worked for a Brooklyn-based Bail Bonds company called Out Now! At the bottom it read, “Big Al's Discrete Investigations.”

“You're a PI, too?”

“Starting up a little sideline,” he said. I didn't have the heart to ask if he meant to be discreet. We shook hands, and he left.

The cook meanwhile had spoken quietly to Henry. He wrapped a couple of sausage sandwiches in foil, poured us coffee in take out cups, and refused money. I tried to tip him and he refused that too. In the car, as we chewed sausage and drank coffee, I asked, “What was that about?”

“He thanks us.”

“For what?”

Henry smiled. “For punching out the bounty hunter.”

“What did he say to you.”

Henry looked away.

“Come on, he told you something. Can't you tell me?”

“Why you want to see Charlie?”

“I told you. I'm trying to help him. I'm hoping to get him a lawyer. If he surrenders to the cops with a lawyer he'll be treated better. Maybe get a fair hearing.” At least until Homeland Security got a hold of him.

“You really not a cop?”

“Did those cops treat me like a cop?”

Henry shrugged. “A trick?”

“Was punching that guy a trick?”

He shrugged again. “I saw you talking like buddies.”

“He understood it was business. Maybe I can help him one day. Maybe he can help me and get paid for it.” I put my hand on my heart. “Henry, I swear to you I will not do anything to hurt Charlie…What did the cook tell you about Charlie?”

Henry chewed awhile. “There's a guy in New Milford maybe knows where he is.”

***

We found Tony Gandara picking tomatoes in one of the last fields left on Route 7 where so many box stores and subdivisions had been built that they had to widen the road. It had taken awhile to get there. Widened or not, the road was packed with end of the day homeward bound commuters and the traffic was brutal. And it turned out that Tony, who was covered in dust and tired from a long, long day in the sun, did not actually know where Charlie was. But he did know the car he was driving. And as a car nut, he spoke enough automotive English to describe in detail a 1993 Acura Integra that had been customized to a fare thee well.

Tony named each detail in precise English, then demonstrated its function with body language. The “Ground Control Coil Over Suspension kit,” allowed the driver to spin adjustable springs by hand to raise or lower the ride height. The Street Glow under car lights floated the ride on a blue ocean at night. Projector headlights could illuminate the dark side of the moon. The “APR Performance Side View Mirror,” was the first performance side view mirror I had ever heard of. “Carbon Fiber Canards” threw me for a loop.

I knew ducks and I knew hoaxes and I knew a shade of blue, but I didn't know they went on cars. It took awhile for Tony and Henry to explain that canards reduced lifting of the front end by wind pressure. (Later, my OED informed me that they had originally been installed on airplanes.) He showed them to me. He had them on his car, which was a very-fancied up 1991 Integra. They looked like little wings on the front fenders. Charlie's vehicle, he informed us, also had “Wind Splitters,” a protruding flat surface at the lower edge of the front spoiler. His rear spoiler was a wing made of black anodized aluminum bolted to the trunk lid.

I shook my head.

“What's wrong?” asked Henry.

“No way Charlie's going to drive such a stand-out car when the cops are hunting him. They'll be all over it.”

Henry spoke Spanish to Tony. Tony said, “Not Charlie's.”

It seemed that Charlie had borrowed the hopped up coup from a cook in a Woodbury café who had gone home to visit his mother. And there was no way the cops could know that Charlie was driving it, Tony assured us. At least until the cops cuffed somebody on some unrelated felonious issue who asked, through a translator, “By the way, will you let me go if I tell you what car my old amigo Charlie Cubrero is driving?”

“So basically it looks like your car?” I was eyeballing it to commit to memory a vehicle that looked similar to many I had seen driven by young immigrants. From the side it showed a long nose, a short rear, and a short, chunky cockpit. The back was characterized by a fat, round single exhaust pipe and the spoiler elevated on twin stanchions. Head on, the sleek front resembled the snout of a crocodile pretending to sleep.

“Charlie's has carbon fiber canards. Mine aluminum.”

That would be very helpful information at sixty miles an hour. “Any other difference?”

“Charlie's is burnt.”

“Burnt?”

“How you say?” Tony turned to Henry and spoke Spanish.

Henry said, “Burnt orange color.”

I looked at him. “
Burnt orange
? How many of those are around?”

“I never seen one.”

Tony spoke again in Spanish and wiggled his fingers.

“What does he mean with the fingers?”

“Flame decals on the sides.”

It was a nice break. And having done all I could for the moment to find Charlie, I headed home to Newbury, my sights set on the gossiply-seduced brides of the Village Cemetery Association.