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?”
“José.”
“I’m running out of patience here.”
“We all called him José.”
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 José 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 Jesús. 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 sweat-stained 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.