Authors: Rex Burns
Ashcroft waited for us in the offices of crimes against persons. A tall man with narrow, curving shoulders, he accepted the fact of private investigators but he didn’t relish it. “You gentlemen want to come this way?”
We followed him past the night clerk and into offices filled with two rows of metal desks. They were empty, the night shift already on the streets. Ashcroft, saying nothing, gestured for me and Bunch to find empty chairs.
“You gentlemen want to see the John Doe files, that right?”
“That’s right.” Bunch ignored the chairs and sat on one of the glass-topped desks. “How do you like the new chief, Ashcroft?”
The homicide detective glanced up from the file drawer. “Fine. I’m sure he’ll be a fine chief. You gentlemen got a description of your missing person?”
Bunch sighed—so much for old times and small talk—and nodded. “Hispanic male, medium height, slender build, twenty-six years old. Has a four-inch scar on the inside of his left forearm. Probably wearing a work shirt and blue jeans.” He handed the detective a tinted photograph of a young man smiling whitely at the camera. A scrawl in a lower corner read, “
A mi tia con amor
. Nestor.”
He hefted a pile of manila folders from the drawer and set them on a desk. “Here’s the Hispanic John Does. The photograph probably won’t help much—most of these were pretty messed up by the time we found them.”
“Right.” Bunch divided the stack into two piles and shoved one my way. The photograph in the first file showed a nude man lying face up on a gurney, suspended in a darkness that the flashbulb did not pierce. Puncture wounds made dark blotches in the paleness of his stomach, and part of his neck gaped open and glistened wetly in the flash. The face, distorted yet empty, showed lividity marks as well as the slightly double chin of a man older and heavier than Nestor. I turned to the next file.
It took a while; there were a lot of photographs and—as Ashcroft said—some of the faces pictured had lost a lot of detail. I was half aware of the silence of the large office, a silence intensified by the tiny buzzing of fluorescent lights and then broken by the occasional jangle of a telephone. Once in a while, another detective walked between the rows of desks and eyed us with brief curiosity before talking with Ashcroft. From down the hall, the quack of the duty clerk’s television set made a constant background murmur. Bunch was more practiced at this type of identification, and he finished first. Ashcroft, trailing a telephone wire, talked to someone about an investigation and refiled the cases as we finished.
“What about the metro and state lists?” Bunch asked.
Still talking on the telephone, Ashcroft nodded and pulled more manila folders from a rack to lay on the desk. These were verbal descriptions rather than photographs. Filed chronologically, the lists covered unidentified bodies found in the cities and municipalities that surrounded Denver, as well as elsewhere in the state and region. We turned up two whose descriptions and probable dates of death matched Nestor’s, one over in Alamosa and one north of Denver in Weld County.
“You gentlemen have any success?” Ashcroft finally hung up the telephone.
“A couple possibles.”
“Yeah?” The detective looked over my shoulder. Then he grunted, disappointed that the possibles weren’t from his case load. He gathered up the scattered folders and refiled them, then walked us back through the offices to the elevators. It was less courtesy than security, but now that we were leaving, he felt friendly enough to attempt a smile and some light banter. “You gentlemen can have the missing persons jobs. They’re nothing but headaches—a big waste of time.”
“That’s what I keep telling Bunch.”
A
TELEPHONE CALL
saved the long drive to Alamosa; their John Doe had been identified and claimed by relatives from California. The other was in the county hospital’s morgue at Brighton, an hour’s ride north of downtown. It was also an hour’s ride back.
This time Bunch drove his Bronco. “You didn’t have to come along, you know.” He poked buttons on the radio, looking for his favorite country and western station.
“Somebody has to keep you out of trouble. You can’t do it yourself.”
The unidentified body was Hispanic and looked about the same age as Nestor. But the description had failed to mention that the deceased was missing his left eye and ear. “Hell, we didn’t know,” shrugged the sheriff’s deputy who had led us toward the body. “He got killed in a fight. It wasn’t until after the autopsy we found out they were missing before he was beat up.”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Bunch, “you can see how old the scars are—the goddamn things are healed!”
The officer’s neck grew red and he glared up at Bunch. “You know this greaser or not? If not, quit wasting my goddamn time!”
“We wouldn’t have wasted our own goddamn time if you knew your goddamn job.”
“Come on, Bunch. Let’s not waste any more goddamn time.”
The officer yanked the rubber sheet over the victim’s face. “Fucking rent-a-cops!”
“This is what the taxpayers get for their money? Jesus, no wonder private enterprise is taking over.”
Now the big man swerved the Bronco out of 1-70 traffic onto the York Street ramp. The black of prairie surrounding Brighton had given way to clusters of lights that marked shopping centers and malls and finally became the steady flicker of city-glow. But here, beneath the elevated freeway and its concrete sky, the lights were dim and distant, and the brightest of them came from the modest neon of an occasional neighborhood bar. Interspersed among the black emptiness of fenced storage yards, a few small houses showed some life after dark. But most of the area had been cut up for commercial use, and the shops were closed for the day: salvage, electrical repair, automobile painting, generator rebuilding. It was one of those old, dying neighborhoods whose residential role had been sold out to industry, and what houses were left for people to live in were ill kept, grimy, and forlorn.
“There it is—that two-story on the corner.” I pointed toward the narrow frame house whose lapped siding was punctured by two rows of windows.
“Looks like an army barracks.”
Mrs. Gutierrez had reluctantly given Bunch her relative’s address. It was, she said, a place where a lot of her countrymen roomed, because the owner, Senora Chiquichano, was Salvadoran and the refugees felt more comfortable with their own people.
“By refugees, she means illegals?”
Bunch shrugged. “That’s my guess.”
We looked at the gabled end of the building. A tiny covered porch marked the entry, and four windows—two up and two down—were the only relief in the end wall’s blankness. The patch of lawn had long ago surrendered to bare dirt. A few scraps of paper rolled in the night wind across a sparkle of broken glass to catch on a sagging and well-used tricycle. From somewhere in the swaybacked building came the wail of a baby, and through another thin wall we heard the inevitable chatter of a television with its canned laughter and bouncy, happy advertisements. The torn screen door hung half open into a hallway smelling of urine, and the light from a dim bulb at the far end showed a row of doors leading away beneath stairs that lifted into the shadows of the second floor.
“You want to take the upstairs?” Bunch jerked a thumb upward. “I think I’m too heavy. I might fall through.”
It wasn’t that farfetched: I felt the floor joists tremble and quiver as I climbed the creaky stairs. At the first door, my knocking was followed by a tense hush. Then a voice asked, “
Quién es?
” and I sensed a figure hovering behind the gritty wood.
“I’m looking for Mr. Calamaro, please.”
“
No hay
.” Then in half-English, “
No es
any Calamaro
aquí
.”
“He’s a man who lives downstairs. Room four. No soy la policia, no soy la migra. Abierte, por favor. Es muy importante.”
Whether or not he believed I wasn’t the police or immigration, he was curious. A lock rattled, and the door opened the length of a chain to show the dark eye and pockmarked flesh of a man somewhere in his late twenties. Despite his youth, he looked as if he had been working since he could walk. At his knee, another brown eye peered upward, this one above the smooth, round cheek of a child.
“The man is missing. Disappeared. His aunt, Senora Gutierrez, asked me to look for him. Do you know Mr. Calamaro?”
“A little bit. No much.”
“Can you tell me when you saw him last?”
“Maybe last week. Two weeks. I don’t know.”
“Did he seem worried?
Aprensivo?
”
“
No sé
. We no talk much, you know.”
“Aren’t you from El Salvador too?”
“No!” A flash of anxiety crossed the eye, and the door wavered.
“Wait!” I shoved one of Kirk and Associates’ business cards through the closing slit. “If you see Calamaro or hear anything about him, please call. It won’t get you in trouble—I’m not the police.” The door shut, leaving a tiny corner of white cardboard trembling against the paintless wood.
From the hallway below came the brief rumble of Bunch’s voice and short silences marking the timid responses to his questions. Then a rattle of knuckles on the next door. I figured he was having the same luck I was.
Some doors wouldn’t open, some did. But the answer was the same: No one knew much about anything. I left a trail of business cards and met Bunch in the sour-smelling hallway downstairs, where he picked the rusty lock on number four. For such a large man—ex-professional football player, ex-cop—he had surprisingly nimble fingers, and in the occasional lock-picking races that we staged to pass long days in the silent office, he usually won.
The door cracked open and we found the light switch. A single unshaded bulb lit up a cubicle filled mostly by a sagging double bed without a headboard. A closet had been added to one corner of the room, built of ill-fitted boards and closed with a grimy curtain dangling from a shower rod. A chest of drawers, scarred and with some of the glass pulls missing, took up most of the remaining space. In the other corner, a small stand made of an apple crate held a washbasin, a glass that sported a toothbrush, and a brightly flowered towel—Calamaro’s purchase, most likely. On the shelf below sat a cracked glass pitcher with a smiling Kool-Aid face frosted on it.
Bunch looked in the closest. I looked under the bed and pulled out a scuffed suitcase whose cardboard corners had frayed.
“A couple shirts, a couple pairs of pants. Nothing in the pockets.”
“Suitcase is empty.”
Bunch began going through the lower drawers of the chest. I looked through the pair of uppers.
It didn’t take either of us long. “Find anything?” he asked.
“Some socks, a few bandannas. Some papers.”
“Jesus—chartreuse socks?”
I glanced around the room. The dominating color of the thin walls was weary brown, and even the ceiling, once white, had leached to a dead gray. “Maybe it was his way of fighting back.”
“Man, if this place is better than what he left in El Salvador … .”
I spread out the small pile of papers I had found in a corner of the drawer. One was a letter in Spanish, difficult to read because of the formal ornateness of the penmanship, but signed, in a different and less florid hand, “Maria Cristina.” His pay stubs for the last six weeks had been carefully stacked, and additions and subtractions in pencil marked the blank spaces on the slips. The patient’s copy of a health claim form from Warner Memorial Hospital dated four weeks ago, a smudged calling card from Friendly Used Cars, a wallet-sized calendar with days carefully x’d off, a gas station map of Denver and Colorado, an RTD flier with bus schedules and routes, a worn deck of cards.
“What’s the last day crossed off?” Bunch asked.
“Monday, two weeks ago.”
“So he didn’t come back Tuesday night.”
That fit with the possible time of his disappearance. “Unless he crossed them off before he left in the morning.”
Bunch shook his head. “His boss said he punched in and out on both Monday and Tuesday.”
The medical form was a list of the standard-fee codes for various blocks of services. The referring doctor was number 139, the patient was number 3006188, the services provided were numbers 85031,83002, and 84550—all of which supported the trend toward more personal relationships between doctor and patient. One item without a code number was checked with ballpoint pen: Pus-Wound-Lesion. Most of the numbers referred to tests of body fluids, especially blood.
“Did his boss say anything about a visit to the hospital?”
Bunch was looking over my shoulder. “No. Why?”
I pointed to the date on the form. “It’s a weekday a month ago. He’d have taken time off from work.”
“Good, Dev—I wondered if you’d spot that. I may make a detective of you yet.”
“Right. Thanks.” We took a last look around the small room, aware of the voices—human and electronic—on the other side of the thin partitions that had been tacked up to make Nestor’s cubicle. As Bunch said, it was hard to imagine that El Salvador was worse. He relocked the door, and I led across the square of dirt toward the Bronco.
“Ssssst.”
“What’d you say, Dev?”
“Wasn’t me.” We paused, waiting for the sound to come again.
“
Señores, por favor
.” From a corner of the building where the shadows lay deepest, a blurred face leaned toward us. “Please, misters.”
“What’s your problem?” asked Bunch.
He was slender and work-stunted, and his face was creased with worry. “Is true you are no policeman?”
“Yeah,” said Bunch. “That’s true. You’re the guy from room eight, right?”
“
Sí
.
YOU
look for Senor Calamaro?”
“You know where he’s at?”
“No, senor, I’m sorry.” He listened, glancing back over his shoulder for sounds beneath the steady rush of traffic off the nearby elevated freeway.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You are no the police?”
I handed him a card. “Detectivos privados. We’re looking … buscamos solamente Señor Calamaro.”
The Spanish relaxed him a bit, and he said something too rapidly for me to understand.