The Finder

13

The Crown Royale Hotel on Park Avenue above Sixty-ninth Street requires many fresh sheets for its customers. And fresh pillowcases, towels, face towels, and tablecloths, to say nothing of table napkins starched to near rigidity. The hotel's laundry facility, a room nearly forty yards long two floors below street level, consumes tens of thousands of gallons of water a day, pallets of bleach and detergent. No working laundry, no happy hotel. The man who ran the Crown Royale laundry, Carlos Montoya, had, for a Mexican, lived in New York City a very long time. Long enough that his shiny black hair had become gray, that his face had sagged into a mask of tragic sensibility, and that he was a grandfather many times over. He appeared to all who might wonder to be a tired, industrious, law-abiding member of society who perhaps should lose forty or fifty pounds and consider having his shoes shined more often. A naturalized United States citizen, he paid his taxes, had a nice new car in his driveway in Queens, voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and was, by far, the most powerful Mexican crime boss in the city. Which is to say, not very powerful, if compared to the Italians, Chinese, Albanians, Vietnamese, or Russians, but not so bad compared to the Pakistanis, the Haitians, what was left of the Irish, and whatever the Muslims in Brooklyn were up to these days with their shops selling Islamic books, oils, clothing, foodstuffs, and everything else the FBI's informants kept buying from them. Nonetheless, Carlos's distribution network crossed all five boroughs, and with his connec tions in the hotel and restaurant business, he controlled most of the retail Mexican marijuana business in New York. He had dealers everywhere. And two of them were in trouble, being hassled by the police for the murders of two Mexican girls, murders they did not commit. Two very beautiful daughters of Mexico who were killed in a most disrespectful way. A murder a Mexican could not have committed. Not in Brooklyn, anyway.

Carlos's office, if it could be called that, was a cubicle at one end of the massive laundry room. It was here that he pondered his predicament, smoking a cigarette in violation of hotel policy. (He had no fear; he could not be fired, he knew.) The two boys, muscular and carrying faces of insolence, had been taken in for questioning by a Detective Blake of Brooklyn. Blake had developed their names within one day of the murders, which suggested that the Mexicans in that part of Brooklyn were having trouble keeping their mouths shut, or that Carlos's boys had a lot of enemies on the street, or, most unlikely, that Detective Blake was unusually effective. Carlos liked the idea that this detective might be working hard to solve the murders but not if it meant getting the false conviction of Carlos's boys. The two of them were guilty of muchas cosas, yes, but not of killing the two girls, both good hardworking girls from central Mexico who had fled north to the States to find jobs. He'd driven out to Marine Park and been told their story in the back of a pizza parlor that he partly owned-how they'd been smuggled through a Texas safe house, how they lived out in Brooklyn on Avenida U, drove a bad car, smoked a little of his producto, supplied for free by the boyfriends, kept a clean apartment. Carlos felt a kind of paternal responsibility for all the boys and girls coming to New York. They needed older Mexicans around to see how they could make it in America. He considered Mexico a lost and dying nation, but he knew Mexicans to be a beautiful people who were not understood by the rest of the world. He had read about Mexico's history and had actually purchased in an expensive Manhattan antiques shop a vintage map that showed Old Mexico, which stretched well into California, Arizona, and Texas. We were here before they were, he always said, and we will be here when they are gone. The disrespectful way the girls had been killed, asphyxiation by human excrement, made him burn with hatred.

But his immediate problem was his two caballos, who, he worried, would start cracking under the pressure of the detective's inquiries, perhaps choke out a few names they should not, especially his. And there was another thing: one of the busboys in the hotel's restaurant had a younger brother who worked in a sewage-service yard on the eastern edge of Brooklyn. Word had gotten around about the murders. The brother remembered seeing the two girls at a picnic in Marine Park. He had noticed that one of the trucks had discharged its contents into the yard's emergency overflow tank, which was large enough to hold two loads, then been hooked up to another truck and received its load directly. The second, now empty truck had then been refilled with the contents of the overflow tank. A most strange activity, the perceptive young man had noted. Why switch loads of shit from one truck to another, especially when it all went to the same place, the sewage treatment plant? It wasn't like the stuff was valuable. The first truck then went to the county sewerage facility and discharged its load. Very strange, said the kid, like they were playing three-card monte with loads of caca. That night, the same night the girls died, the second truck had left the yard late and been driven out to the east end of Long Island, to a dumpy little town called Riverhead, driven not on the Long Island Expressway, which was always monitored by Suffolk and Nassau county patrol cars, but along the rambling country roads stretching east-west on Long Island. A hundred-mile drive, comprende? The truck had discharged at a Suffolk County facility out there the next morning and then been driven to Queens, or maybe New Jersey, and had never returned to the yard in Marine Park. Vanished. The first truck was power washed inside and out, then returned to regular service.

Had the yard's owner been aware of all of this activity? Carlos wanted to know. Si, si. He told us to do it. Carlos had asked the young man to come to him, found him believable, even wrote down a few notes. "You must now forget all this," he said, "forget you told me." But then he grabbed the boy's hand. "If you see something more, you call me, yes?"

Detective Blake had asked a lot of questions but had not yet ar rested Carlos's dealers. Maybe he had other suspects. But to be safe, perhaps Carlos should send his boys on a little trip to California in the back of a laundry truck, tell them to stay away for a few months over the summer, go north, work the apple harvest in Washington. Don't tell me where you are, he'd say to them, don't call me, don't call anybody you know in Brooklyn. The boys wouldn't want to go, but they would. Of course their disappearance would appear to confirm their guilt. Which he didn't terribly mind, since they were hotheads who might eventually cause him trouble, anyway.

But if now he had a problem, he also had an opportunity. He took the service elevator to the nineteenth floor, had a quick word with the Mexican housekeeper counting out fancy little bottles of shampoo and bars of perfumed soap that the hotel guests threw by the handfuls into their suitcases, and then, using his hotel custodian's passkey, entered the room of a British Airways executive in the city on business at JFK International Airport. Carlos touched nothing, not the minibar, the nice clothes on the hangers, the fat wad of pounds and dollars on the dresser. You touch nothing, nothing touches you. Instead he picked up the phone to make a call, the cost of which would be buried in the airline executive's charges and perhaps look like a call to the airport. The hotel had almost three thousand phones, which were routed through four hundred lines by a computer on a next-free-line basis. Then the call was tagged with a dummy phone number so that people receiving the call who had caller ID could not get a number inside the hotel that they could call directly. If you called the dummy number you got a not-in-service message. (Very smart, these Indian phone guys, Mexicans should learn from them.) Carlos had thought this out long ago. The log matching the room phone to the trunk line was maintained in Bangalore by the hotel information services vendor. It would require a subpoena and weeks of digging to produce the actual room where any given call had been made from. Meanwhile, the guest who had used the room was long gone and would have to be located in order to be asked about the call that he didn't make. Meanwhile, too, the room would have been vacuumed and cleaned thoroughly fifty times. No fingerprints, mami! The room maids were instructed to wipe each phone once a day to control for germs that might cause an outbreak of sickness in the hotel-one of hotel management's nightmares.

He dialed the Brooklyn sewage service.

"I would like to speak with your owner, please." No trace of an accent, when he wanted. He'd learned by watching Lou Dobbs on CNN.

A minute passed.

"Yeah, who is this?"

"I am someone who knows you," said Carlos.

"Who?"

"I am very familiar with your business," he said.

"Oh?"

"I am very familiar with what you put in your overflow tank. What you put in and when you took it out."

"What d'you want?"

"I think you might know."

"Fuck off." The phone went dead.

Carlos called back. The man answered.

"Why do you hang up on a polite caller?" Carlos asked in his best CNN voice.

"You call back, I'm going to hunt you down and kill you," snarled the voice. "Then I'm going to rape your wife and children."

Now it was Carlos who hung up. I think I have a little project now, he told himself, savoring a nasty happiness in himself. Yes, I have a little game with a white man who kills Mexican girls.