Coyote (12 page)

“I'll level with you,” he said. “What we think is going on is this: We think this Manuela Estefan was involved in some very heavy-duty stuff. Fingering folks.”

“Fingering?”

“She moves around a lot. And where she moves, folks die.”

“You're gonna have to tell me more than that.”

“She was from El Salvador.”

“Yeah.” I wished he'd hurry. My head was pounding harder.

“A lot of political folks coming from El Salvador, seeking asylum and all that good stuff.”

“Not that you guys let them in.”

“A lot of the claims are frivolous,” he said.

“Frivolous. I like that word. Frivolous, as in I'm starving to death where I live?”

“You can't get political asylum for starvation. And I don't want to argue with you. I shouldn't even be telling you this—”

“Wait up. Are you saying that Manuela, whoever she is, was pointing out people for Salvadoran death-squad hits?”

“You know what a coyote is?”

“I assume you're not talking about the animal,” I said.

“A sort of animal,” he continued with distaste. “A coyote is a guide, somebody who takes illegals' money and lies to them about how easy it is to get into the country, and takes a group up here, sometimes with false papers, sometimes with nothing, and strands them someplace. A few fall between the cracks, get into the country and manage to stay, but most get caught and deported.”

“So?” I said.

“We've heard rumors about a female coyote named Manuela Estefan. She knows where a lot of political people wound up, what cities they're in, what contacts they've made. And, word is, she's selling that information to the highest bidder. And believe me, the INS is never the highest bidder.”

I remembered Mooney's warning about death squads. I considered my Manuela, my client with the cheap shoes, the work-worn hands, and the hundred-dollar bills. I tried to imagine her as this coyote, this predator. It turned the whole picture upside down. True, my client may have lied about her name, but lying about a name doesn't rate as a mortal sin. It's not in the same league as pointing out victims to assassins.

Maybe my client was one of “Manuela's” victims, a political refugee fingered by her former guide.

“Is the Manuela with the card, this coyote Manuela, still alive?” I asked.

“We don't know,” the INS man said, “but I'm concerned—we're concerned about this ad you put in the paper.”

I'd forgotten about the ad. I kept that carefully off my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I placed that while she—while my client—was alive.”

“I know you didn't realize what you were letting yourself in for,” he said, “but you've gotta back off. These guys the Estefan woman's playing with are not nice people. We've been trying to round 'em up for years now. They kill folks. Don't think twice about it.”

“Is that why you're following me?”

“Don't you see, dammit, if somebody's following you, we need to know about it, because somebody might think this damn woman told you something that's going to help us.”

“Then by sitting here with me, out in the open, you're setting me up, right?”

“Shit,” he said. “Is everything an argument with you? Setting you up? You're doing a hell of a job by yourself, taking out an ad in the paper.”

I gave up on my nose and pressed the towel to my head. “What do you want?”

“If you hear from anybody who says they want to chat with you about Manuela, you call me, okay? Not after you meet them, because there may not be any afterward, but before you meet. And I'll go with you.” He handed over a card. “This number ought to get me anytime.”

“Why don't you just follow me around?”

“It's not my style,” he said angrily. “Look, you want to target yourself, you go ahead.” His voice softened abruptly. “But I'd hate for anything to happen to a lady with hair the color of yours, you know. I hardly ever see hair that color.”

“They let Jamieson work the men and you work the women?”

“Usually.” He smiled with just the right amount of self-deprecation. “They slipped up with Jamieson earlier. Didn't know you were gonna be you.”

“And now you know.”

The Southern accent got heavier. “Ma'am, it'll be a pleasure keeping an eye on you.”

“Don't count on it,” I said.

He reached over and put his hand on my arm, just below the elbow. “Get some ice on that nose, take two aspirin, and lie down,” he said. “Call me in the morning?”

Somehow I fumbled the locks and got in the house. As I slammed the door the headache throbbed into full flower, and pain washed over me, leaving me momentarily weak, clinging to the banister. Where he'd touched it, my arm felt hot.

17

Sunday passed. That's the best I can say for it. I spent it with my nose packed in ice, downing aspirin every four hours. My nose didn't swell much, but my head felt like a balloon. Monday morning I decided I'd live.

Rupert Murdoch likes to call the site of his publishing empire One Herald Square, but it's plain old 300 Harrison Avenue to me, one more impossible place to park. Exasperated after a ten-minute search, I plunked the Toyota in a loading zone and prayed the visit to the classified ads department wouldn't take long.

Imagine my delight as I stood and tapped a foot and waited till my presence was acknowledged by a teenybop secretary puffing on a cigarette, adjusting a high heel, and chatting on the phone as if she had no intention of ever signing off. She seemed hyperactive, maybe on speed, with her jaw, hands, feet, and hips in overdrive. I almost developed a tic waiting for her to get off the phone.

At least I wouldn't have to look for parking near the
Globe
building too. I'd phoned. They hadn't received any responses to my ad. The
Herald
had one.

She finally said farewell and teetered in my direction. Some women can't walk in heels and shouldn't try. They look so goddamned vulnerable. If I were a purse snatcher, I'd go after ladies in five-inch spikes. I gave her the box number from my ad and she pulled one lone envelope out of a wooden grid. It didn't have a stamp on it.

“Somebody bring this in?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she said. It was an automated response. If I'd asked her the time, the day of the week, her mother's maiden name, she'd have mumbled “I dunno” in syllables of sheer indifference. She had the glazed look of a late-night partygoer.

I took a twenty out of my wallet. Enough to pay for a manicure for her blood-red talons. Her eyes got interested. “Were you here when this came in?” I asked, holding up the envelope and keeping my fingers firmly on the twenty.

“Oooh,” she said with a quick grin, “might have been.”

“‘Might have been' isn't good enough,” I said.

“What if I said a Spanish lady brought it in, kind of dumpy, maybe twenty, wearing a flower-print dress?”

“I'd say you keep your eyes open.”

“Got to do something to keep from catching brain death in this place,” she said with a sniff. Maybe the bash last night had included a little powder snorting. I wondered if the lady had gone home to change or come straight to work from the party. Her purple satin tank top and short black skirt weren't really suited to office air-conditioning. I couldn't tell if her eye makeup was badly smudged or meant to be that way.

“When did the lady bring it by?”

“She was waiting when I opened up at nine. She didn't speak good English, but she had the paper and she pointed to the ad, so I got the box number and stuck it in. I didn't get her fingerprints or anything.”

If she didn't speak English, I wondered how she'd read the ad in the first place.

“Notice anything else? Jewelry? Hair?”

“It was early, you know. Real early,” the secretary said with a yawn.

The phone rang and the young woman cursed. I gave her the twenty and my card.

“If you remember anything else—”

“Don't count on it,” she said, one hand on the phone.

“What's your name?”

“Helen,” she said. “Like Troy.”

She still hadn't picked up the phone when I left. I wondered if she would.

I didn't read the note until I was back in my car. Once behind the wheel, I slit the envelope with a nail file and pulled out a sheet of unremarkable white paper. Three words, that's all. In pencil, written by a shaky hand, or a hand tracing unfamiliar letters: Hunneman Pillow Factory.

I let out my breath and realized I'd been holding it. I punched on the tape deck and smothered a laugh. That happens to me a lot. I'm expecting a note that says “Meet me under the Harvard Bridge at midnight” and instead I get one directing me to a pillow factory.

18

A pillow factory. I imagined clouds of white goose down. Just thinking about pillow factories made me sleepy, so I kept careful watch in my rearview mirror. Nobody tailed me to the corner drugstore, where I checked out Hunneman Pillows in the phone booth Yellow Pages. I scratched down the Brighton address on the back of an envelope. Nobody tailed me from the drugstore to Cambridge Street.

I turned the volume up on the tape deck and sang along with Chris Smither on “Love You Like a Man.” Bonnie Raitt covers it, but I have a fondness for the original raunchy version.

Those men you been seein' got their balls up on the shelf,

You know they can never love you, babe,

They can't even love themselves.

If you need someone who can, I could be your lover man,

You better believe me when I tell you,

I could love you like a man.

The lyrics made me think about the INS guy, not Walter Jamieson, the shriveled-up rat, but the second guy, Harry Clinton, the one with the eyes and the shoulders.

Uh-huh, I thought, checking around for a white Aries. Sam Gianelli's been in Italy a damn long time. And what's he been doing in those Turin hotel rooms with the big canopied beds? Dreaming of me?

Mississippi John Hurt sings my all-time favorite blues rhyme.

Red rooster say: Cock-a-doodle-do,

Richland woman say: Any dude'll do.

I'm not like that Richland woman, I told myself virtuously. But Harry Clinton was on my mind.

Hunneman Pillows was located off North Beacon Street in between a plumbing-supply shop and a going-out-of-business shoe-factory outlet. As far as I can figure, North Beacon Street has no relationship to Beacon Street at all and is just called that to throw new cabbies off the scent.

Veteran jockey that I am, I wasn't fooled.

The Hunneman factory seemed to be an unmarked brick square with patches of boarded-up window and an air of desertion. It was plunked next to a slab of pot-holed cement that could have been a parking lot or an auto junkyard. It didn't have any neat yellow lines delineating spaces, but it did have lots of junky cars. I found most of an empty slot for my Toyota, squeezing between a rusted Oldsmobile and a maroon Chevy with a battered left rear fender. I took in a deep breath and eased my body out the door with maybe a quarter inch to spare. If I'd been wearing looser jeans, I'd never have made it.

The white Aries wasn't in the lot.

Hunneman didn't exactly advertise its presence. There was no sign over the door, no billboard. I checked the address I'd scrawled on the envelope. Without it, I'd have driven right by. With it, I wondered if the factory had closed down and moved out.

I leaned against the hood of an old Ford wagon, pulled Harry Clinton's card out of my pocket, and stared at the phone number until it blurred before my eyes.

I figured I should call Mooney. And Harry Clinton. I got back in my car and sat, ignition keys weighing down my hand.

Mooney was pursuing some wacko serial killer. I realized I had trouble believing in his existence. Oh, I'm not naïve, I know the goons are out there. I read about them in the papers like everybody else, glued to the print by the horror, unable to look away. But I don't see them here, in my city. Despite the Boston Strangler, I think of them as California crazies, Texas loners. Far away. Other.

I wasn't concerned with a serial killer. I was concerned with a woman who'd worn a filigree ring, who'd paid me five hundred dollars to get her a green card that didn't even belong to her.

Why?

I tried to make my client's visit fit with Harry Clinton's theory. If my Manuela was searching for his Manuela, the turncoat coyote, could that make my Manuela a member of a so-called death squad? If so, why the hell had she turned up dead herself?

I decided not to call Clinton. Still, I wasn't ready to rush the factory's front door and demand to see Manuela Estefan.

I checked out my nose in the rearview mirror. It was tender to the touch but not broken, I thought. There was some bruising high on my right cheek.

Damn. I could sit here all day watching my cheek turn color or I could stop dithering and check out a goddamn lead. I slid out of the car and walked resolutely toward the factory.

I gave a door a push. I wasn't sure if it was the front door, the back door, the servants' entrance, or what. Locked. There was a doorbell to the right of the brass handle. I pushed it, and after a three-minute wait during which I pounded on the metal surface, a buzzer buzzed. The lock clicked open and I breezed on through.

Noise, light—and different, thicker air. Those were the things that got to me, even in the vestibule. The lighting was awful, dim flickering fluorescents. The noise, a conveyor-belt-type racheting, was worse. And the air—I clamped my mouth shut, but then I had to breathe through my nose and smell the damp burned-rubbery aroma. I opened my mouth and thought maybe this was what New Yorkers talked about when they mentioned air you could taste, what L.A. dwellers dealt with when the air turned to yellow smog.