Queens Noir (30 page)

That night we climb up onto the roof so Felipe can look at
the glittering crown of Shea Stadium on the horizon.

"Yo, Filomena," he says. "I hear los Mets are gonna put
their game on real thick this year."

"They definitely have a shot at it."

"Remember the subway series when that cabron de Yanqui
Clemens threw the broken bat at Piazza?"

"Sure."

"Freddie got some tickets for me and Ray Ray. We was in
the upper deck, the three of its doing mad daps all around."
He points at the bright lights as if the exact spot is marked
for all time, which I suppose it is, in a way. I know what he's
thinking, but he says it anyway. "Some day Ray Ray gonna be
playing center field out there."

The next morning, I'm training my new part-time office assistant, a tanned and freckle-faced sophomore at Queens College named Cristina Gonzalez. They're putting her through the
wringer at that school, making her take two semesters of Composition, which is encouraging since half the college kids I see
lie to me on their resumes and think they can get away with
writing crapola like, My mother's a strong women and roll model
for all American's, which doesn't look too good in a report.

The last applicant didn't mention his credit card scam
and drug convictions when I asked him if there was anything
unusual in his past that I should know about. When I caught
it on a routine background check, he said, "Hey, in my neighborhood, that's nothing unusual."

"You mean, I beat out a convicted felon for this job?" says
Cristina. "Gee, thanks."

It's hard to find good help for $6.50 an hour, which is all I
can afford to pay. But striking out on your own is risky at my
age, and I wouldn't even be able to pay that much if my former bosses at Davis & Brown Investigations didn't toss a few
heavy bones my way, continuing a long-standing American
business practice of subcontracting out to cheap immigrant
labor like me.

So I'm sitting in my eight-by-fourteen storefront office, directly beneath the flight path of every other jet approaching
LaGuardia Airport, trying to debug the Hebrew font we installed for a case involving an Orthodox congregation in Kew
Gardens Hills. The font's right-to-left coding has defeated the
security protocols and migrated to some of the neighboring
programs, causing system commands to come up randomly in
Hebrew.

Oy vey, couldn't it have at least been Yiddish?

I look up as a man in a light gray business suit who I've
been expecting knocks on the glass. I buzz the door open for
the junior executive, who looks like he's worried about contracting malaria through the soles of his wingtips from walking
on these cracked sidewalks.

"Miss Buscarella?" he says.

"Close enough. It's Buscarsela."

He doesn't seem to be listening as he sits in a chair that
was once bright orange and hands me his card, which says his
name is E Scott Anderson, and his title is Assistant Director
of Product Security for the Syndose Corporation.

"What can I do for you on this fine spring day, Mr. Anderson?"

He snaps open his briefcase and pulls out a plastic bottle
of dandruff shampoo with a blue-green label you can find in
any drugstore in the northeast.

"What's wrong with this?" he says, holding up the bottle.

I check the label and tell him, "That used to be an eightounce size, and now you're selling six and a half ounces for the
same price."

He doesn't bite. He just places the plastic bottle on my
desk and pulls a seemingly identical one out of his briefcase.
"How about this one?"

I study it for a moment, and it's obvious that the bluegreen color isn't as saturated as it should be, and the white
lettering isn't perfectly aligned with the other colors on the
label.

"It's counterfeit," I announce.

Cristina butts in. "What kind of dumbass would counter,
feit shampoo? Ain't no money in that."

I'm about to tell her to keep out of this, but Mr. Anderson
beats me to it. He says, "Counterfeiting and product diversion
cost my company several million dollars a year. The police just
raided a store in Jackson Heights and seized 24,000 bottles of
counterfeit shampoo. In one store. That's a tremendous economic loss."

"To say nothing of the babies who get sick from diluted
baby formula," I say.

He smiles. "Mr. Davis told me that if anyone could find an
illicit manufacturing operation in Corona, you could."

"I'll take that as a compliment. What makes you think
Corona's the place to start?"

"Because the store owner in Jackson Heights gave the police an important clue. He said one of the suspects had dark
hair, a gang tattoo, and listened to Spanish music."

I wait for more. Nothing doing.

"That's your clue?" I say, because I practically fit that description myself.

"Well, no. Not just Spanish music, some special kind. It's
in the report. It also said something about the tattoo indicating that he's Ecuadorian. Anyway, they figure he's a member
of a street gang like the Latin Kings or MS-13."

Wow, that's some terrific random profiling there, Mr. Anderson. But the rent's due, so I try to keep a placid surface.
And tell him, "The Latin Kings are Puerto Rican, the Maras
are Salvadoran, and they rarely let anybody else in. I don't
know of any Ecuadorians who've jumped in with them, but
you never know what could happen as the new generation
gets Americanized. I'll check it out for you."

He gives me the cocksure grin of a man who just bought
exactly what he wanted, as always. But after we sign and file
away our copies of the contracts, this glorified errand boy
looks like he can't wait to bug out of the jungle before the
headhunters get wind of his scent.

I usually meet the reps from the big clients at the cushy
offices of Davis & Brown in downtown Jamaica, but I was
getting a weird vibe from this bunch so I just said screw it, I'll
take their money, but I want this guy to come to me and have
to drag his skinny white ass to the barrio. Let him feel what it's
like to be a stranger, on alien turf. And I must say, I'm awful
glad I did that.

I start with the police reports of the big shampoo bust and
other recent crimes relating to counterfeiting, product diversion, and the rest of the gray-goods racket covering the area
between Elmhurst and Corona south of Roosevelt Avenue,
and Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst north of Roosevelt.
That's right, East Elmhurst is due north of Elmhurst. What do
you expect from a borough where you have to know a different language on every block, where pigeons ride the A train to Rockaway Beach to scavenge from the garbage, where you
know that Spider-Man lives at 20 Ingram Street in Forest
Hills? No, really. He does.

Most of the cases deal with pirating-unauthorized duplication of CDs, DVDs, and computer software-which are of
no interest to my client. The counterfeiting is mostly luxury
items like watches, perfume, and designer handbags peddled
by West African immigrants on fold-up tables, and the occasional case of Mouton-Cadet with labels made on a laser
printer that fool the eye but not the fingers (they lack the
raised embossments). But five-and-dime products like shampoo and antibacterial soap? Not much. Time to check out the
shelves at the local farmacias.

Latinos take their music seriously, especially on Roosevelt Avenue east of 102nd Street. There's a music store on every other
block, and the cars-from tricked-out pimpmobiles to bodyrot jobs with plastic wrap covering the gaping holes where
the passenger windows should be-have top-of-the-line subwoofers pumping out bachata and merengue loud enough to
compete with the 7 train roaring by overhead. And not one
noise complaint is ever called in to the boys at the One-Ten.
Though I do think that a spoiler on a battered Toyota Corolla
is kind of pointless.

The store owner in the police report described the sus-
pect's nationality based on his choice of music and a tattoo of
the Ecuadorian flag on his left bicep. But the only music style
around here that is exclusively Ecuadorian is pasillo, which
is too old-fashioned and sentimental for any self-respecting
gangbanger to listen to. He probably meant reggaeton, the
Spanish version of gangsta rap, which crosses ethnic borders
in all directions, to the dismay of proud parents everywhere.

And the flag is not a "gang" tattoo. Most people don't
know the basic difference between the Colombian and Ecuadorian flags, which boldly fly yellow, blue, and red from
second-floor windows and storefronts. (And to anyone who
complains about Latinos in the U.S. flying the flags of their
homelands, I dare you to go down Fifth Avenue on St. Pat's
Day, or to Little Italy during the Feast of San Gennaro, and try
to take down the flags. See what happens.)

I stop by a few farmacias and botanicas and find a number
of Syndose knock-offs, including a tube of minty toothpaste
with the brand name Goldbloom misspelled Goldvloom, a mistake that only a Latino would make.

The panaderia and ferreteria-that is, the bakery and
hardware store-are displaying handmade posters of Ray Ray
in his Newtown High uniform, with his full name, Raymundo
Reyes, keeping track of his hitting streak, which after yesterday's ninth-inning blooper now stands at twenty-two games.
Go, Ray Ray.

We take our sports seriously too, although soccer's the favorite among Ecuadorians. It didn't get much press up here,
but a coach back home was shot when he didn't select the
ex-president's son for the Under-20 World Cup in Argentina.
Yeah, in case I haven't mentioned it, Ecuador's major exports
are bananas, cocoa, shrimp, and unstable politicians, which is
why so many of its come here hoping to catch a piece of the
American dream. And sports offers a way out for many, even
if it remains a distant dream most of the time. Either way,
the bright lights of Shea Stadium cast a long shadow over the
neighborhood.

Interviewing the store managers yields a range of responses.
One Salvadoreno says the cops told him not to discuss the case
without the state attorney general's consent, but he won't give me a name or a badge number, or sign a statement to that
effect, even though I tell him it's a bunch of tonterias. You know,
B.S., but even the legal immigrants don't want to tangle with
the authorities when their citizenship applications are pending.

Another place is staffed by sullen teenagers making minimum wage who don't seem to know anything but one-syllable
words, and the next place has employed some fresh-off-theboats who are still having trouble telling the difference between five- and ten-dollar bills. Then I hit a place on 104th
Street where the manager talks a Caribbean mile-a-minute
about beisbol and the pride of Corona, but he clams up when I
ask about the antibiotics in the faded yellow boxes.

"How'd they get so faded? You leave them lying out in the
sun?"

Dead air.

I make a show of flipping through my notes, writing a few
things down very slowly.

"They've just been on the shelf a long time," he says.

"Then it's probably time to replace them," I say, picking
up one of the boxes. The expiration date is two years down the
road. I mention this. "They can't have been here that long."

More silence.

I like the silence. It tells me a lot. "I'll be back," I say.

Next up is a drugstore run by a Colombiano whose attitude
is: It's the same stuff for half the price, so his customers buy it.
What's the big deal?

The next guy's a compatriots, a paisano, an Ecuatoriano like
me, who turns into a walking attitude problem when he accuses me of helping the big gringo corporations protect their
money instead of going after the real criminals, like the hijos de
puta who charged a couple of hundred would-be immigrants
$5,000 each for a boat ride to Florida, then left them flounder ing in rough seas about 200 miles from the coast of Mexico;
or the sinverguenzas who hire day laborers and abandon them
without pay in the middle of Nassau County because they
can't go and complain to the Board of Labor; or the perros at
the Hartley Hotel in midtown Manhattan who laid off onethird of their employees after 9/11 and told the rest of them to
work double shifts if they wanted to keep their jobs, because
business was bad. So they were just using 9/11 as an excuse to
run the old speed-up.

A ring on my cell phone interrupts this tirade. It's Felipe,
and he must be in big trouble if he's calling me instead of his
mami.

His school is only a few blocks away, so I can fit it in. I
head over on foot, crossing under the El tracks as the train
rattles by, thinking about the changing seasons, time passing,
and my own parental obligations. Yeah, my generation was
supposed to be different. I never thought that my daughter
would be growing up in an era when rock stars are dying of old
age, or that I would come to know the joys of having a teenage
daughter who goes from manic to suicidal on an hourly basis.
It all started a few years ago when she was in eighth grade. We
had ten minutes to get to some school function, and Antonia
was in the bathroom putting on makeup. I asked her, "Do you
want to take anything to eat? Some fruit? A sandwich?"

"No."

"No?"

"I don't have time," she replied, in that universally adolescent don't-you-know-anything whine that drives parents up
the wall. And I knew right then that my daughter had reached
the age where makeup is more important than food. God help
me. And after all these years, I can still recite Green Eggs and
Ham word-for-freaking-word.