“I think that’s right. Yeah, before the Hendryx suicide. Right.”

“That’s still a suicide?”

“Any reason why it shouldn’t be?”

“None that I know of. You talked to Calderón Saturday night and that’s the last anybody’s seen of him.”

“I have that effect on a lot of people.”

“Something spooked him. You think it was you?”

He said something but I couldn’t hear it over the din. I asked him to repeat it.

“I said he didn’t seem to be paying that much attention. I thought he was stoned.”

“The neighbors describe him as a pretty straight young man.”

“Yeah, a nice quiet boy. The kind that goes batshit and wipes out his family. Where are you calling from, it’s noisy as hell there?”

“A donut shop on Woodside Avenue.”

“Couldn’t you find a nice quiet bowling alley? What’s your guess on Calderón? You figure he’s dead?”

“He packed everything before he left his room. And somebody’s been calling in sick for him. That sounds like a lot of trouble to go through if you’re going to kill somebody.”

“The calling in sounds like a way to give him a head start. Let him get a few extra miles before they start the bloodhounds.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Maybe he went home,” Durkin said. “They go home all the time, you know. It’s a new world these days. My grandparents came over here, they never saw Ireland again outside of the annual calendar from Treaty Stone Wines & Liquors. These fucking people are on a plane to the islands once a month and they come back carrying two chickens and another fucking relative. Of course, my grandparents worked, maybe that’s the difference. They didn’t have welfare giving ’em a trip around the world.”

“Calderón worked.”

“Well, good for him, the little prick. Maybe what I’ll check is the flights out of Kennedy the past three days. Where’s he from?”

“Somebody said Cartagena.”

“What’s that, a city? Or is it one of those islands?”

“I think it’s a city. And it’s in either Panama or Colombia or Ecuador or she wouldn’t have rented him a room. I think it’s Colombia.”

“The gem of the ocean. The calling in fits if he went home. He had somebody phone for him so the job’d be there when he gets back. He can’t call up every afternoon from Cartagena.”

“Why’d he clear out of the room?”

“Maybe he didn’t like it there. Maybe the exterminator came and knocked off all his pet cockroaches. Maybe he owed rent and he was skipping.”

“She said no. He was paid up through the week.”

He was silent a moment. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Somebody spooked him and he ran.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”