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"Maybe you should A warning, shit, you don't want to get killed over it"

"No," I said "I don't"

"What are you gonna do, then?"

"Right now I' to catch a train to Queens"

"To Woodside"

"Right"

"I could bring the car around Drive you out there"

"I don't mind the subway"

"Be faster in the car I could wear my little chauffeur's cap You could sit in the back"

"Some other time"

"Suit yourself," he said "Call me after, huh?"

"Sure"

I wound up taking the Flushing line to a stop at Roosevelt Avenue and Fifty-second Street The train caround after it left Manhattan I almost missed my stop because it was hard to tell where I was The station signs on the elevated platfores were indecipherable

A flight of steel steps led ot s, and set out for Barnett Avenue I hadn't walked far before Iin Woodside The neighborhood wasn't Irish anymore There were still a few places with names like the Emerald Tavern and the Shans were Spanish and as now Posters in theof the Tara Travel Agency offered charter flights to Bogotб and Caracas

Octavio Calderуn's roo house was a dark two-story frame house with a front porch There were five or six plastic lawn chairs lined up on the porch, and an upended orange crate holding azines and newspapers The chairs were unoccupied, which wasn't surprising It was a little chilly for porch sitting

I rang the doorbell Nothing happened I heard conversation within, and several radios playing I rang the bell again, and a ed woman, short and very stout, came to the door and opened it "Sн;?" she said, expectant

"Octavio Calderуn," I said

"No estб aquн;"

She may have been the woman I spoke to the first time I called It was hard to tell and I didn't care a whole lot I stood there talking through the screen door, trying to lish After awhile she went away and came back with a tall hollow-cheeked lish, and I told him that I wanted to see Calderуn's room

But Calderуn wasn't there, he told me

"No me importa," I said I wanted to see his roo to see, he replied, ain by seeing a roo to cooperate They weren't even particularly reluctant to cooperate They just couldn't see the point When it becaet rid of me, or at least the easiest as to show me to Calderуn's room, that hat they did I followed the woman down a hallway and past a kitchen to a staircase We clith of another hallway She opened a door without knocking on it, stood aside and gestured for me to enter

There was a piece of linoleum on the floor, an old iron bedstead with the mattress stripped of linen, a chest of drawers in blondechair in front of it A wing chair slipcovered in a floral print stood on the opposite side of the room near theThere was a table lamp with a patterned paper shade on the chest of drawers, an overhead light fixture with two bare bulbs in the center of the ceiling

And that's all there was

"Entiende usted ahora? No estб aquн;"

I went through the room mechanically, automatically It could hardly have been e but a couple of wire hangers The drawers in the blonde chest and the single drawer in the writing table were utterly empty Their corners had been wiped clean

With the hollow-cheeked ed to question the woe She didn't knohen Calderуn had left Sunday or Monday, she believed Monday she had come into his room to clean it and discovered he had re behind Understandably enough, she took this tothe room Like all of her tenants, he had paid by the week He'd had a couple of days left before his rent was due, but evidently he had had soo, and no, it was not re her Tenants did that with some frequency, even when they were not behind in their rent She and her daughter had given the roo, and noas ready to be rented to so Her rooood tenant? Sн;, 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 theration Service Perhaps that hy Calderуn had left so abruptly But that was not her business Her business was cleaning his roo it to someone else

Calderуn wouldn't have had trouble with Ial or he wouldn't have been working at the Galaxy Doner A big hotel wouldn't ereen card

He'd had so in a hurry

I spent about an hour interviewing other tenants The picture of Calderуn that e man who kept to himself His hours at ere such that he was likely to be out when the other tenants were at hoirlfriend 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 beforeto 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 seeathered that the fat little landlady ran a tight ship Her tenants were all regularly employed and they led respectable lives If Calderуn 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 hoested "Maybe he is fly back to Cartagena"

"Is that where he caena"