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.
14
Okay, so I panicked, thought Jin Li as she waited for the ferry. I never should have hidden in that old building downtown. She wore big sunglasses and a Yankees cap pulled low, on the assumption there were security cameras in the terminal. Well, she had been scared. Instead, she should have first done exactly what she had just accomplished the previous night, which was to rent a room and private bath in Harlem from an old black woman named Norma Powell who owned a five-story brownstone carved up into a boardinghouse. Jin Li's room was just large enough for a bed, a dresser, and a wall mirror. The paint was no good and a mold stain that looked like Australia stretched across the ceiling. But the room had a good door made of real wood and a brass dead-bolt lock. But even better was the fact that Norma Powell's middle-aged son sat in the front room all day watching television. He appeared to live in the front room, in fact. He weighed perhaps four hundred pounds, more than half of that fat, but he projected a kind of elephantine protectiveness toward his mother that Jin Li found reassuring. Anyone breaking into the house would have to get by or over him. On the other hand Jin Li didn't really like Harlem, which was also her way of admitting that she felt uncomfortable in a black neighborhood, but that was its advantage. Harlem wasn't where you'd first look for a Chinese woman.
Jin Li had said that she was a Korean exchange student at Columbia University, an explanation that had seemed unnecessary to the widow Powell as soon as she counted Jin Li's cash: $300, per week, payable every Monday morning, put your envelope in my mailbox, honey, and no gentlemen callers after seven p.m. or it's out you go. But Norma Powell did want the phone number of the previous landlord, so she could follow up and confirm that Jin Li had been a good tenant. Fine, whatever, as she'd heard the American teenagers say; feeling only somewhat sly, she gave Norma her own phone number in her office in CorpServe's Red Hook building. If she really bothered to call, Norma would find this number useless, since it had no greeting on it and after three rings automatically kicked over to a fax machine-set that way so Chen could send her written information that avoided the Internet. As for her name, Jin Li had actually given her real one, since it matched her forms of identification, but said her hometown was Seoul, South Korea, where her father worked in a Kia Motors factory. It was both amusing and a little disgusting that she was pretending to be a Korean, especially since her name was in no way Korean sounding, but Norma Powell didn't know that. Anyway, there was an American phrase for this she liked: Ya do what ya gotta do. That's me, Jin Li thought, I'm doing what I gotta do. She had unpacked her meager belongings from her suitcase and taken a very nice long hot bath in her bathroom, attended by three cockroaches. They didn't bother her; in Shanghai their building had been infested with Asian water bugs, which were much worse. She'd scrubbed her face and later done her nails and altogether felt a lot more determined about everything. Maybe the police had caught
