Blood Lake (53 page)

I've got to expand my client base of paying customers because I do a lot of
pro bono
work, which makes me pretty popular around here, but I do so damn much of it I ought to be able to deduct half the people in the
barrio
as dependents.

My part-time assistant shows up around 10:00
A.M.
I buzz her in and she flings open the door, jingling the bells left over from when this place was a knick-knack shop. The bells are kind of unnecessary at this point, but I never got around to taking them down and now I'm so used to them I guess they're here to stay, which is about as permanent as anything gets in my life these days.

My assistant's name is Cristina González, and she's a sophomore at Queens College with a faceful of cinnamon-colored freckles that glow with a youthful perkiness that just about makes up for her slowly developing office skills. But she had a fun weekend, going to the mixed-marriage wedding of her friends Jenn and Russell. I ask how that went, and she says that the whole Jewish-Catholic thing was okay, but the rivalry between the
Star Wars
crowd and the medieval role players nearly started a riot.

Kids today. Tsk tsk.

In my day, the Trekkies would have kicked their collective asses.

But it just goes to show how Queens is a place that welcomes strangers of all kinds, although sometimes I think the motto over the golden door should be,
We've been fucked for 400 years. Now it's your turn
. Because every wave of incoming refugees brings a new set of problems, a new set of clients and some new vocabulary. Besides
latinos
, I've worked for Croatians, Albanians, Indians, Pakistanis, Russians, and enough Orthodox Jews to bring my Yiddish up to about a hundred words, which came in handy one time when I had to stop a court-appointed defense attorney from presenting a Hebrew document in court that he had reproduced
backwards
until we corrected it.

Then there are the lonely old people who just call up every now and then to chat about their troubles. The private eye thing's a tough job, ministering to all those different people, but it still beats swinging I-beams around on a windy scaffolding, or running out the clock in some ratty cubicle, spinning my wheels and generating buckets of mindless flak for the six-figure-earning bastards three floors above.

Right now I'm busy with some routine forensic accounting (a skill I picked up at the PI firm of Davis and Brown), cross-checking binders full of invoices for anomalies, so I let Cristina set the radio to her favorite
rock latina
. It helps blocks out the other distractions.

That is, until they take an ad break, and suddenly the volume gets amped up and they start blasting some annoying infomercial about the latest in high-tech kitchen gadgetry—a computerized refrigerator that links to all your other appliances from a nerve center in the fridge. Why would you need an air traffic control center in your icebox? Because, the pitchman says, “The refrigerator is the first place you go in the morning and the last place you go at night.”

Uh, no. Sorry to spoil your party, but the fridge is
not
the first place I go in the morning. That honor is held by another location in the apartment.

Just as Cristina is turning down the radio, a man in a dark blue uniform appears outside the glass door, sucking the last
drag from his cigarette. When the smoke clears, I recognize him as Harvey Limón, a security guard at the high school, and for a moment I think maybe something's happened to my daughter and I can't seem to hit the buzzer quickly enough.

But he comes in clutching an old-style audio cassette and says, “Filomena, you've got to listen to this and tell me if it's true.”

He hands me the cassette. It's a battered old thing made of cheap, brown plastic, with room for about ten minutes of content, maximum.
Gee, it's been a long time since I've seen one of these, old timer
.

“And where did this tape come from?”

“I recorded it this morning on my answering machine.”

“You still use a
tape
machine?”

“
Claro que sí
. It still works,” he says, making me feel slightly ashamed for letting a phrase slip out that's so at odds with the traditional ways of the
campesinos
and their divine gift of being able to preserve the working life of expensive mechanical objects almost indefinitely.

Harvey left his hometown in El Salvador back in the 1980s, around the time the death rate started to outstrip the birth rate. He saw so much carnage that he can't even look at blood today. He once told me how the peasants used to give the soldiers water with finely ground glass in it to kill them in slow agony, and he absolutely can't understand why the rival Central American gangs roaming around the school just can't get along with each other.

I shrug and pop the cassette into one of the tape recorders I use for formal interviews. I press play and listen to a decade's worth of hiss and dropouts, followed by an authoritative voice announcing that this message is for Mr. Harvard Limón, and that the Board of Elections is calling to inform him that since he is not properly registered to vote, he may be arrested if he shows up at his usual polling place.

I should tell you that Harvey is one of five children whose naive and trusting parents thought that naming their kids after famous American universities would help them get
U.S. visas quicker. His brothers Yale and Princeton did okay with their names, but his sister, University of Texas at Dallas, wasn't as lucky.

I tell him not to worry, it's a bunch of
mierda encima de más mierda
. They're just trying to scare him away from the polls.

Of course, this type of voter intimidation is one of the reasons he left El Salvador in the first place.

The irony is not lost on either of us.

And if we don't exactly have roving death squads up here, that's just a testament to the efficiency of our methods. Though I wouldn't try telling that to Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell.

“I'm being dissed,” he says.

“You think? I mean, I agree that they disrespect you, but—”

“No, not disrespect. That other ‘dis' word.”

“Disturbed?”

“No, that's not it.”

“Distracted?”

“No.”

It takes me a moment.

“Disenfranchised.”

“That's it.”

“Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we?” I say, gathering up my coat and scarf.

“You know I can't afford to hire you.”

I wave off his concerns. “Who said anything about hiring me? It's time for you and me to go vote. Crissy, watch the store 'til I get back.”

I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

—President George W. Bush

First we go to the address scribbled on my napkin, which turns out to be a vacant lot with a couple of broken street-lights overhead. So we head to the school, where it looks like
business as usual. Volunteers are handing out fliers next to the
POLLING PLACE
signs posted about a hundred feet on either side of the front entrance. A homeless guy wearing clothes that seem to be made of strips of dried seaweed hands me a flier and a sample ballot with a thick black arrow pointing to Vivian Sánchez's name on Row A.

Long lines because of too few machines in the poorer neighborhoods? Maybe in Ohio, baby. Thank God the city still uses those reliable old clunkers that look like they belong on the set of some grade-Z mad scientist movie from the 1950s—solid metal booths with heavy levers that Iron Mike Tyson couldn't bend out of shape. None of this plastic touch-screen nonsense for us, none of those tricked-out video poker machines that swallow whole towns without a trace. No, we do election fraud the old-fashioned way.

We only have to wait a few minutes, but Harvey can't help being nervous about getting into trouble with the law, and he's seriously itching for a fix of his nicotine habit.

“They should let you smoke in here,” he says, drumming his fingers on a rolled-up copy of the propositions on today's ballot. “Instead of banning smoking, they should just install brand-new ventilation systems in all public places.”

“Come on, Harvey. This is New York. We can't even keep the firehouses open.”

I get the next available booth, but once I'm inside with the curtain closed, I find that the party machine's candidate, James

A. Rickman Jr., is on Row A, and that the challenger, Vivian Sánchez, is on Row B. So either the sample ballot was wrong or else it was deliberately misleading. And I'm leaning towards the latter, since the other flier in my hand suggests that Kwesi Mfume, former president of the NAACP, endorses Rickman over Sánchez, and I know there's no way in hell that he did that.

And when I pull the master lever and jerk open the curtain, I learn that Harvey's been purged from the list of registered voters. The flustered poll worker, a middle-aged black woman, explains that he must have the same name as a convicted felon.

“Hold on,” I say. “You're telling me there's another guy in Queens named
Harvard Limón
who's a convicted felon? You've got to be kidding me.”

“
¿Qué hago ahora?
” says Harvey.

“Can he fill out a provisional ballot?”

“Not if he isn't properly registered.”

“I've got to get back to work,” says Harvey. “They only gave me an hour off.”

I look at the poll worker, pleading for a favor.

“It'll take a lot longer than an hour to resolve this mess,” she says. “Probably take a few weeks.”

Back outside, I march straight up to the homeless guy, grab some of his fliers and scrutinize them for any signs of where they were printed. Of course, there are none. When I ask why he's doing this, he says he's getting fifty bucks for the job.

“Who's paying you?”

“Some dude I never seen before.”

“He paid you up front?”

“You shittin' me? Half now, half when the job's done. Now get out the way, I got work to do.”

“When's he coming back with the rest?”

“The polls close at nine, sistah.”

One of the fliers says that the party machine-supported candidates are promising to cut taxes and increase emergency spending to stimulate the economy. And where is the new revenue supposed to come from? I guess they've decided to give the old “pot of gold” strategy a try (although the party faithful prefer to call it the “rainbow” strategy): Apparently, a special congressional subcommittee is planning to monitor national weather patterns in order to locate the pots of gold that lie at the end of every rainbow in the country. Oh, and while we're at it, we'll have to round up all the undocumented leprechauns and render them unto the Faerie Queen of the enchanted castle of Avalon for safekeeping.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair promises to support the project.

I walk a couple of blocks out of my way so I can stop by the offices of a nonprofit voter protection agency called
GetOffYourAssAndGetaMoveOn.org
or something like that. The building's leaky roof is being held in place by what looks like forty yards of extra-wide duct tape. It happens to be right next to a bar serving the cops of the 110th Precinct, and just for the record, no car parked in front of that bar has ever gotten a ticket in the history of Western civilization.

Once inside, I check the water-stained ceiling tiles to see if they're about to cave in on me. When I'm satisfied that the ceiling might hold out a few minutes longer, I step around a big plastic bucket that's got five inches of standing water in it and a collection of nickels and pennies on the bottom that people have tossed in, transforming this mundane industrial plastic object into a wishing well of sorts. It's a pretty far cry from the sacred lakes where the ancient Celts once sacrificed barges full of precious metals to satisfy their capricious gods, but clearly the spirit lives on.