Had Calderón been a good tenant? Sí, an excellent tenant, but she had never had trouble with her tenants. She rented only to Colombians and Panamanians and Ecuadorians and never had trouble with any of them. Sometimes they had to move suddenly because of the Immigration Service. Perhaps that was why Calderón had left so abruptly. But that was not her business. Her business was cleaning his room and renting it to someone else.

Calderón wouldn’t have had trouble with Immigration, I knew. He wasn’t an illegal or he wouldn’t have been working at the Galaxy Downtowner. A big hotel wouldn’t employ an alien without a green card.

He’d had some other reason for leaving in a hurry.

I spent about an hour interviewing other tenants. The picture of Calderón that emerged didn’t help a bit. He was a quiet young man who kept to himself. His hours at work were such that he was likely to be out when the other tenants were at home. He did not, to anyone’s knowledge, have a girlfriend. In the eight months that he’d lived on Barnett Avenue, he had not had a visitor of either sex, nor had he had frequent phone calls. He’d lived elsewhere in New York before moving to Barnett Avenue, but no one knew his previous address or even if it had been in Queens.

Had he used drugs? Everyone I spoke to seemed quite shocked by the suggestion. I gathered that the fat little landlady ran a tight ship. Her tenants were all regularly employed and they led respectable lives. If Calderón smoked marijuana, one of them assured me, he certainly hadn’t done so in his room. Or the landlady would have detected the smell and he would have been asked to leave.

“Maybe he is homesick,” a dark-eyed young man suggested. “Maybe he is fly back to Cartagena.”

“Is that where he came from?”

“He is Colombian. I think he say Cartagena.”

So that was what I learned in an hour, that Octavio Calderón had come from Cartagena. And nobody was too certain of that, either.

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

I called Durkin from a Dunkin’ Donuts on Woodside Avenue. There was no booth, just a pay phone mounted on the wall. A few feet from me a couple of kids were playing one of those electronic games. Somebody else was listening to disco music on a satchel-sized portable radio. I cupped the telephone mouthpiece with my hand and told Durkin what I’d found out.

“I can put out a pickup order on him. Octavio Calderón, male Hispanic, early twenties. What is he, about five seven?”

“I never met him.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. I can check the hotel for a description. You sure he’s gone, Scudder? I talked to him just a couple of days ago.”

“Saturday night.”