Endangered Species (4 page)

“We were hoping to find something that would give us a lead,” Manuel explained.

“And did you?”

“No.”

Eli said something else, but I wasn't listening because I'd just seen what Manuel had been talking about. I crossed the room, stepping on Nestor's clothes as I went. Rewashing them should be the least of his problems.

“See, I told you,” Manuel said. He was right behind me. I could feel his breath on the side of my neck.

“Yes, you did.” For once, he hadn't been exaggerating.

Several large mason jars were sitting on top of Nestor's bookcase. In them floated what looked like a number of preserved biological specimens. I peered at the nearest jar. It had a baby bird with three wings in it. The one beside it sported a two-headed snake. Next to that was a claw from an unidentifiable animal. It was soft and white, the color long having been leached out by the chemical amniotic sac it was floating in. I repressed a shudder as I peered at the next specimen. It looked like an organ of some sort I decided I really didn't want to know where it came from as I picked up something brown and shriveled. On closer examination it turned out to be a dried lizard. I put it back down hastily.

“Maybe he's interested in biology,” I said, but even I didn't sound convincing to myself.

Manuel snorted again. “Yeah. Right. Biology, my ass. Gimme a break. What he's interested in is weird shit. That's why he couldn't get no one else to room with him. They'd take one look at what he got in this room of his and they'd be truckin' out the door.”

“Do you know where he got these specimens?” I asked as I thumbed through the CDs on the next shelf. Maybe I'd be able to use them as a means of tracing him. I found I was having a hard time not looking at the jars, even though I didn't want to. It's funny how compelling the grotesque always is.

“He said he just collected them here and there,” Eli replied.

That didn't help much, but in a pinch I was sure I'd be able to narrow his suppliers down. There was a biological supply house in Rochester. I could start there. If they hadn't sold him those specimens, they could probably tell me who would. Somehow I didn't think the list of people who handled freaks of nature would be very large.

Nestor kept his books on the bottom shelf. I squatted down and read the titles. He had a lot of books on natural history, books on electronics, a couple of books on chess, several on the Navy SEALS and other Special Ops units in Vietnam, all of Tolstoy's works, as well as those of Faulkner and the economist Adam Smith.

“I told you he was smart,” Eli said. “He was saving up to go to school for oceanography.”

“Why that?” I asked Eli as I straightened up.

“He said he liked the ocean because it was peaceful.”

Zsa Zsa jumped up on Nestor's bed, yawned, and flopped down, giving me her I-am-bored-so-hurry-up-and-finish look. I ignored her and glanced at my watch. It was ten-thirty. I still had plenty of time to get to George's. Which was good. I'd been late the last two times. He'd been pissed. Which had gotten me pissed. Sometimes relationships can be a real pain in the ass. “Where did you keep the suitcase Nestor took?”

“In my room,” Eli said. “Under my bed. I didn't keep my door locked,” he added. “I didn't think I needed to.”

Manuel confined his commentary to rolling his eyes.

A thought occurred to me. “Do you have a current phone bill?”

Eli looked sheepish. “Uh. We just got our phone reconnected a week ago. It's been out of service for the last couple of months. Nonpayment.”

So much for tracing Nestor through the calls he'd been making. “I don't suppose you have a picture of him or Adelina?”

Eli shook his head.

Why had I even asked? “Fine. In lieu of that, I want you and Manuel to write down everything you remember about him and her.”

“Like what?” Eli asked.

“Like whether Nestor drives. Whether he owns a car. What kind. Where he works. The kind of food he likes to eat. The names of his old girlfriends. The names of Adelina's friends. Where Adelina goes to school. Anything at all that you think would be helpful.”

Manuel and Eli were already arguing about what they should include in the list as they walked out the door. After they left, I sat down on Nestor's bed, lit a cigarette, and tried to empty my mind and think about what the room was telling me, beyond the fact, that is, that maybe Nestor had done too much acid. Instead I found my thoughts drifting back to my younger self, to the me who had looked at this house. How had I seen myself? Certainly not as a part-time private investigator or the proprietor of a pet store. More like a happily married mother and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

I curled a lock of hair around my finger. It was still long and red. My weight hadn't changed, either. I was still a size ten. I flicked the stub of my cigarette into an empty beer can sitting on the nightstand and walked over to the mirror hanging above the dresser. I tilted my head to the right and then to the left. I had wrinkles around my eyes now and my jawline was beginning to soften, but overall I'd held up rather well, if I did say so myself. If I put on some makeup and wore something other than jeans, tees, and flannel shirts I'd still be passable.

The thought should have made me happier than it did. Maybe it was the way the orange beef I'd eaten was rolling around in my stomach. After all, the Chinese say happiness begins with good digestion. I lit another cigarette and got up. The sooner I began, the sooner I'd get out of here. I started with the clothes lying on the floor of Nestor's closet.

It didn't take me long to go through them since there were only four pairs of pants and an old starter jacket. After I searched their pockets, getting a handful of lint for my trouble, I threw them back down and checked the drawers. They were empty, their contents having migrated to the floor. With the toe of one of my boots. I prodded the mismatched socks, raggedy boxers, and stained T-shirts heaped on the rug. The only thing they told me was that Nestor didn't use bleach with his laundry detergent.

I stuck my head out the door. “Did Nestor have a lot of clothes?” I asked.

“You got me,” Eli replied, his voice floating back to me from the living room.

I sat down on his bed and studied the top of his nightstand. An old Kodak, faded with age, was wedged underneath a lamp. I held it up to the light. It was a picture of a basset hound. “How about a dog?” I yelled out to Eli.

“If you're talking about the picture on the night table,” Eli replied, “that's Suli. He died about five years ago.”

I slipped it into my pocket anyway and opened his nightstand drawer. The smell of weed rose to greet me. But except for a few seeds scattered in the corners, the drawer was empty.

I pressed my finger down on one of the seeds. It stuck to my skin. I lifted my hand back up and contemplated the little seed. So many people rotting in jail because they possessed its progeny. I got up and walked into the living room.

“How heavy into dope was Nestor?” I asked Eli, showing him the seed on my finger.

“He smoked a joint now and then. That's all,” Manuel said, answering for Eli.

“You're sure of that?”

“Sure I'm sure.”

“Because I don't want to find I'm dealing with something other than what I signed on for.”

“You're not, Robin. I swear,” Eli said vouching for Manuel.

“I better not be,” I told them both. I'd listened to Manuel's oaths before. It wasn't that he lied. He didn't. He just left things out.

I went back into Nestor's room and checked out the only place I hadn't looked, under his bed. I sneezed as the dust from under the bed tickled my nose. Sweeping had not been one of Nestor's primary activities. A collection of socks had taken up residence, along with magazines, torn scraps of paper, dust bunnies, and some small black pellets. Probably mouse droppings. Perfect. The way my luck was running I'd probably get the Hanta virus from them and die.

I used a wire hanger that was lying on the ground to sweep everything out into the open. The socks needed to be washed. The magazines, dog-eared with use, were all Penthouses and Playboys, and the paper seemed to be of the junk mail persuasion. As I was getting up, my eyes fell on a torn envelope. Something was scribbled on the bottom in pencil.

I picked up the envelope with the tips of my fingers. The writing was smudged but decipherable. Phone numbers, three with an NYC exchange. They'd probably prove to be nothing, but at least it was a start. I turned the envelope over. The mailing address was ripped off, but the left-hand side still sported a local return address. Happy Trails. Sounded like a travel agency to me. One that specialized in dude ranches? I guess I'd find out when I called.

I was just heading out of Nestor's room when the phone rang.

“Answer it,” I could hear Manuel saying.

“No,” Eli replied.

“Then I will.”

“Don't get it.”

“It could be for me.”

The ringing stopped.

“Here,” Manuel said. “It's for you.”

There was a moment of silence, then Eli started to speak in a quavering voice. “I'm not trying to avoid you,” he was saying. “Yes. Yes. No. I don't have any news. Yes. I know what you said. Hey. I'm doing everything I can. I hired someone to find it.” There was a pause. “She's here now. You want to speak to her? I'm not sure she'd like that,” Eli stammered.

“Who wants to speak to me?” I asked as I came into the kitchen.

Eli licked his lips and held the receiver out to me. “The guy I told you about.” And he made a scissoring motion with his fingers.

I
cursed under my breath and slammed on the brakes as a car going up University Avenue sped through a red light. Didn't anyone in this town believe in traffic signals? I was pissed at Eli, I was pissed at Manuel, but more than anything, I was pissed at myself for having allowed Chapman to railroad me into meeting with him tonight, when I wanted to be with George.

“You want me to come down and cover you?” George had asked when I'd called to explain why I was going to be late coming over to his house after work.

“No. I'll be fine.”

“It'll just take me a minute to get my clothes on.”

“The meeting's in a public place.”

“So? You don't know what this guy is like. What happens if he forces you out of there?”

I lit another cigarette. “Why should he do something like that? All he wants to do is talk to me. Anyway, don't you have work to do? Aren't you supposed to be writing a paper or something?”

George sighed. “I'm always supposed to be writing a paper. That's what graduate students do. But what you're doing sounds more interesting than correcting tests.”

I smiled. “Once a cop, always a cop. What's the test on?”

“The French Revolution. You wouldn't believe what these kids don't know. Listen to this.” He paused for a minute while he looked for the paper. “ ‘The French Revolution took place in the early nineteen hundreds.' ” He groaned. “ ‘I think they should have used other means to resolve their differences. After all, violence never works.' Where do these people come from?”

“You were probably like that, too, when you were that age.”

“Oh, no, I wasn't.”

I closed my eyes. I could picture George sitting on the sofa, phone in hand. The TV would be on.
The New York Times
would be lying on the coffee table. One, not both, of the lamps on the end tables would be lit.

“Are you sure you don't want me to come down?” George asked again.

“I'm positive.”

“Come over when you're done. I want to talk to you about something.”

“What?”

He laughed. “That would be telling.”

I leaned against the wall. “Come on.”

“You'll like it,” he teased.

“Creep.” But it was too late. George had hung up.

I kept wondering what George wanted to speak to me about as I headed downtown. I had half a mind to turn around and go over there now, but I really couldn't. After all, I'd agreed to help Eli. I'd accepted his money. Now I wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Given that context, I couldn't say no to Chapman. I couldn't give up the opportunity to possibly negotiate a settlement on Eli's behalf or at least buy him some time, which would make my job a hell of a lot easier. The good part was the place Chapman had proposed wasn't over in some godforsaken part of town where I'd have to worry about getting out of my car, I thought as I made a left onto East Fayette. Interesting that it was the same place he and Eli had met in. Perhaps Chapman was a man of regular habits. I hoped so. It would make him easier to find if I needed to track him down.

Lefty's was housed in a run-down, narrow, three-story brick building that squatted between two alleys, on the ass side of Armory Square. I parked illegally across the street and Zsa Zsa and I went in. A red “e,” the only letter in the neon sign in the window still working, blinked a welcome. At eleven-thirty at night there were five people in the bar, and from the description Chapman had given of himself, he wasn't one of them.

I hoisted Zsa Zsa onto a stool and signaled to the bartender, who was watching a flickering black-and-white TV down at the far side of the bar. Rangy, gray-haired, with pockmarked skin and a scraggly ponytail running down the back of his neck, he looked as if he was counting the seconds till he could go home.

He took his time coming over. I had to call him twice to get his attention, and even when he did walk over he was still watching the TV out of the corner of his eye.

“I'll have a Rolling Rock,” I said when he was standing in front of me. “And a small plate.” He looked at me for the first time. “For her.” I pointed to Zsa Zsa. “So she can have a little beer, too.” And I handed him a ten.

He shrugged and walked away. I had a feeling I could have told him I was going to have sex with a doberman and a monkey on the bar and his response would have been the same.

“Do you know a guy named Chapman?” I asked when he returned.

“Never heard of him.” His eyes darted back to the TV as he put the beer and the saucer in front of me. The saucer had several small black spots on it.

I didn't say anything about it. I figured that since Zsa Zsa drank out of the toilet bowl her immune system was pretty strong.

“How about someone called Nestor Chang?”

“You some sort of cop?”

“No. Chang's my brother.”

He lifted his eyebrows up to his hairline to convey his disbelief. The gesture made the whites of his eyes glisten like the whites of two poached eggs. “You just said his last name is Chang.”

“He's my stepbrother.”

The bartender grinned, exposing a mouthful of bad teeth. “Of course he is.”

“What's the matter? You never heard of adoption?” I took a business card out of my wallet and slid it across the bar. He gave it a perfunctory glance.

“If you see him,” I told the bartender, “give me a call. It's a family thing. It'll be worth some money to you.”

“Will it now?” His hand hovered over the bar's surface. I guess he wanted to make sure I could see what he was doing, because he waited till he had my attention before he dropped my change down on top of a puddle of spilled beer.

“Sorry about that,” he said and moved away, leaving the card lying where it was.

“I can see you are.” I picked up the bills and glanced around for a napkin to blot them off with. Naturally there wasn't one. I used my jeans. I was going to wash them anyway.

No tip for you, buddy,
I thought as I put my money away. Okay. It was late. I was tired. So maybe I could have come up with a slightly better story, but mine hadn't been outside the realm of the credible. No. The guy was just a schmuck. If he hadn't wanted to answer me, he just had to turn and walk away. Instead he'd pretty much written up a large placard that said “I know Nestor Chang and I'm not going to tell you” and hung the damn thing around his chest. Why? Because he was stupid? Because he had a chip on his shoulder? The truth was, I was too tired to care. I flicked my lighter and watched the flame shoot up. After a few seconds the skin on my thumb began to prickle from the heat and I put the cap back down.

Of course, I could always ask Chapman when he showed up. If he showed up. It was looking more and more as if he wouldn't. I glanced at my watch. Chapman was ten minutes late already. I'd never met the man and already I hated him. If he hadn't arrived by the time I was done with my beer I was leaving. I poured a little into the saucer for Zsa Zsa, wiped the rim of the beer bottle off with my shirttail and took a sip. It wasn't great, but then, given the selection the bar had, it was probably one of the best of the bunch. I stamped my feet. It was cold in here. A draft from the inch space between the door and the floor eddied around the room, stirring up a fug of stale beer, old cigarette smoke, and dust.

I took another sip of beer, lit a cigarette, and studied my surroundings. The place looked as if it hadn't had a dust rag or a mop taken to it since it opened twenty years ago. The mirror tacked up on the wall behind the bar was filmed with a layer of grime, as were the mementos of a better time, faded photographs that had been stuck up at random on the wall of smiling, sunburned men in shorts holding up strings of fish. The red upholstery covering the bar stools was a patchwork of duct tape, the bar itself was a mass of nicks and scratches, and the linoleum on the floor had long since had its design ground out of it.

Lefty's only possible claim to fame was that it hadn't been turned into a fern bar yet, yet being the operative word. Ten years ago Armory Square had consisted of a handful of old warehouses, a few stores, and four or five bars attached to SRO housing. The bars had sported names like The Watering Hole, Joe's, and The Red Dog, and catered to a clientele that worked hard at staying as drunk as possible for as long as possible.

Then things began to change. As with most things, whether the change was for the better or not depended on your point of view. Now the area was awash in the detritus of yuppie life—art galleries, microbreweries, pricey pasta joints, Thai restaurants, French bistros, and nightclubs. Now the bars had names like Ciao Bella. College students trolled the streets and middle-management types ordered Scotches with pedigrees longer than those of most of the dogs I've owned.

Ten years ago, if you went into a bar and ordered something like an apricot wheat ale you'd have been thrown out on your ass. Of course, I reflected as I took a sip of my Rolling Rock, a beer I now remembered why I no longer drank, ten years ago good American beer was an oxymoron. If you cared at all, you drank German or English. I was thinking about that when someone tapped me on my shoulder.

I turned around. A man was standing behind me. “I'm Robert Chapman,” he said.

He wasn't what I'd expected. Even though he'd described himself on the phone, the picture of him I'd conjured up on the ride across town was a cross between Simon Legree and Charles Manson, but the man standing in front of me was strictly suburban. He could have been one of those guys you see out in the 'burbs mowing their lawn or washing their car on a Saturday morning.

I put him at about five years younger than me. He was medium build, medium eight He was wearing a ski parka, a green cotton turtleneck, and a pair of faded blue jeans. He had short, light-brown hair, brown eyes, and regular features.

Chapman held out his hand and we shook. His grasp was firm, his skin warm on my skin. He looked into my eyes and held my hand for just a fraction longer than necessary. Then he smiled, grinned really, and I could tell from the way he did that he knew that he had gotten to me, and that fact put me in an even worse mood than I was already in.

“Somehow I thought you'd be older,” he said as he sat down on the stool next to me. I could smell his cologne. It was something foresty.

“That's all right. I thought you'd be scummier.”

He laughed and pointed to Zsa Zsa. “She's yours, I take it?”

I nodded.

“I used to have a cocker when I was a kid. She loved bread. She'd sit in front of you and bark and bark until you gave her some. I was really broken up when she died.”

“What happened?”

“One of my neighbors poisoned her.” He waved his hand in the air. “But I'm sure you're not interested in my childhood. I'm sorry to drag you down here at this time of night.” His eyes really weren't bad at all, I was deciding when he said something that brought me up short. “I just thought since you're working for me, we ought to meet.”

“Excuse me?” I cocked my head. I was sure I hadn't heard him correctly. “Would you mind repeating that?”

He smiled again. His teeth were white and even. I noticed he had a dimple on his left side. Robin, this is not a nice man, I reminded myself. Ted Bundy looked like a sweetie, too.

“Well,” Chapman continued, as if what he was saying was the most logical thing in the world, “Eli is working for me, and since you're working for him, I figure that makes you part of the team.”

“Is this your version of the new math?” I looked at him incredulously. My thoughts of negotiating faded. This guy was playing by a set of rules they didn't teach at Harvard.

“On a temporary basis, of course.”

“I don't think so.”

“I see.” He folded his hands on the bar. They were large and well tended. The word capable came to mind. A few seconds later the bartender came over. Without being asked, he put some ice in a glass, took down a bottle of Jack Daniel's, poured out a shot, and put it in front of Chapman.

“Come here a lot, do you?” I observed.

“Once in a while.” He took a sip and made an appreciative sound with his lips. “Mick and I are old buddies, aren't we? We go back a long ways.”

Mick nodded and moved back down the bar.

“Did something happen to his vocal chords?”

Chapman shrugged. “He just doesn't like to talk much. Never has.” Chapman took another sip of his drink and put it back down. I stubbed my cigarette out on the side of my beer bottle and flicked the butt into it. My stomach was starting to bother me again.

I turned toward him. “What is it, exactly, that you want from me?”

“Like I said, I just like to meet the people I work with.”

“And like I said, I'm not working for you.”

He pursed his lips. “That's a pity, because I know in here”—and he hit his chest with his fist—“that we'd make a first-rate team. But you know what? One thing I've learned in this world in the time I've been in it is to never say never. Maybe in the future you will be. Everyone can use a little extra cash once in a while. And I'm always in the market for new couriers.” He took a pen, wrote something down on the paper napkin next to him, and pushed it toward me. “Here. It's my pager number. I'd like you to take it. That way you can tell me how things are progressing with the suitcase. Or maybe we could just meet for a drink. Or dinner. There's a nice little restaurant I know near Ithaca that I think you'd like.”