Queens Noir (31 page)

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. There'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.

The customer makes a choice, pays for it, gets her receipt
and change, and heads out the door. The pharmacist's hands
are trembling slightly as he opens a drawer and pulls out a file
folder full of invoices and crumpled sheets of pink and yellow
paper. He goes through them one by one, wetting his fingers
for each sheet, trying to get a grip or else maybe buy the time
to come up with a plausible story. Another customer comes
in, but I don't take my eyes off the pharmacist for an instant.
Finally, he produces a coffee-stained job application form.

I grab it and smooth it out on the counter. Antonio Jose
de Sucre. Someone's got a sense of humor, because that name
belongs to the heroic general on Ecuador's five-sucre note.
Other warning signs that a legitimate employer should have
spotted include out-of-state references with no phone numbers and a list of previous jobs with companies that went out
of business years ago. But the price was right, I guess.

There's an address that's got to be a fake, and I wouldn't
put too much faith in the phone number either. "This number
any good?"

He's having trouble concentrating.

I repeat, "Did you ever call him at this number?"

"I guess I might have. I don't remember."

"Don't you remember anything? Because you're not getting rid of me until you give me something. You know that,
don't you?"

The woman gets in line behind me with a bag of cotton
balls and a bottle of baby shampoo. I think the shampoo is one
of the fakes. He says, "Let me take care of this customer first."
Buying more time, the bastard. When the woman's gone, he
says, "I just remembered-some of the cartons the medicine
came in might still be in the storage room."

Sounds almost too good to be true. I'll follow this guy, but
I'm not going to turn my back on him. I open my jacket so I
can get to my .38 revolver quickly as we go down the back
stairs to the storage room. Then we toss the place until we
find a couple of boxes with the Syndose logo on them. The
shipping labels have been torn in half. Another red flag. Who
gets a delivery and tears the shipping label in half? Not the
whole thing, just the return address.

"Tell me something. Did this guy have a tattoo of the Ecuadorian or Colombian flag on his left bicep?"

"I don't know."

"How could you not know?"

"It was Christmas and we couldn't afford to keep the
heat up high, so we were all wearing long-sleeved shirts and
sweaters."

"It seems like you can remember things if you try."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to send this guy to a place where he can't
choose his neighbors."

"I mean about me."

"That depends. Maybe we can swing a deal if you cooperate."

"I'm cooperating."

"Yeah? Well, I know another word for it."

The phone number's no longer in service, but a quick search
turns up the previous owner's name, Julio Cesar Gallegos,
which just might lead somewhere. A lot of career criminals
in my culture favor such grandiose names, as if they stand to
inherit the power of the name by sympathetic magic. The biggest one, of course, being Jesus. I mean, there are a lot of Muslims named Mohammed, but nobody names their kid Allah.

The name, it turns out, doesn't connect to an address in
any of the usual places-motor vehicle and property records,
bankruptcy court, government benefits-and I'm starting to
get a feeling about this guy. Seems like he only used the name
once to get the phone. Nobody makes themselves that invisible unless they're working hard at it, and the kind of swagger
he showed on the job doesn't sound like a timid illegal trying
to stay off the radar. I don't give the street gang theory much
credence. The pandillas are into curbside extortion, jacking
cars, and drug dealing. They might have a piece of the street
action on this, but staking out a one-month undercover in a local pharmacy seems a little beyond their scope. No disrespect.

But I figure if he is my guy, he's got to have had a brush
with the law at some point, even if it's just a speeding ticket.
I do a county-by-county search of the tri-state area and come
up with nothing. I finally catch a break and match his name
with an accident report that gives a recent address on Queens
Boulevard, a wide thoroughfare that more than seventy people have died trying to cross in the last ten years, giving it the
catchy nickname of the Boulevard of Death.

I call with a pretext about an insurance payment from the
accident, and a woman named Gloria confirms Gallegos's existence by telling me that he's not in right now. But people
will tell you anything if they think it'll lead to money, and
she practically offers to FedEx me a sample of his DNA. She
says he's watching the game in a bar a couple of blocks from
the stadium. She doesn't know the exact address, but it's under the elevated tracks, which means from what she's told me
that it's on Roosevelt Avenue east of 108th Street. I know the
place.

The setting sun paints the store windows with an orange glow
that transforms them into heavenly palaces for about a minute and a half. Dueling sound systems thump out bachatas
from storefronts and apartment windows, while men in sweatstained T-shirts hang out on the steps, laughing and enjoying
the end of another work day with bottles of cerveza Pilsener, a
taste of the old country. The hardware store owner is changing the numbers beneath Ray Ray's dark Dominican features
to include the results of today's game, showing that he's just
extended his hitting streak to twenty-three games, while the 7
train shakes the sidewalks as it thunders on toward Flushing.