Detective

know. Her name’s Rosa. Only name I know.”
    “Where would I find this Rosa?”
    “She usually here.”
    “Well, she’s not here now.”
    “No?”
    “No. Where else might she be?”
    “She live around the corner.” He made a circular gesture indicating around and to the south. “On B.”
    “You know her address on Avenue B?”
    “No. Right around the corner. Over the candy store.”
    “Which candy store?”
    “Only one on the block.”
    “You seen her around here lately?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You seen Gutierrez around here lately?”
    Again. “I don’t know.”
    “O.K., look,” I said. “I’ll talk to this Rosa, but right now I’m talking to you. And I gotta tell you, I’m a little worried about Gutierrez. See, he got hurt in the fall, you know. Now, just between you and me, I talked to Gutierrez before and, I can tell, he takes a little drugs, you know?”
    He looked at me sideways. “No, I don’t know.”
    “Yeah, well I know. Look, I’m not worried about that. That’s none of my business. But here’s the thing. He’s hurt from the accident. He can’t move well. So maybe he takes a little drugs. Maybe he takes a little too much drugs, you know. He ought to get out of there and get help, but he’s hurt, he can’t move. So he just lies there. He can’t answer the door. He can’t answer the phone. He’s in trouble, but there’s nothing he can do.”
    The super was staring at me. “So?”
    “So he dies. I don’t get his signature, so the lawyer can’t sue. The lawyer can’t sue, so I don’t get paid.”
    “Too bad.”
    “And too bad for you. The cops wanna know what kind of a super you are, you let people take drugs and O.D. in their rooms, and lie around dead for days, and you don’t do nothing about it.”
    “Not my fault, some guy takes drugs.”
    “Yeah, but if you don’t help me, then I gotta go to the cops, tell ’em I think some guy O.D.’d and the super won’t do nothing. Then they come here and hassle you. If the guy’s dead, they hassle you a lot more.”
    The super had ceased to be my friend. “Why the hell you wanna do that?”
    “I don’t wanna do that. I’d hate like hell to do that. I just wanna get paid.”
    “So what you want?”
    “You’re the super. You got keys to all the rooms here. You go upstairs with me, we knock on his door. We get no answer, you open the door and we see if our friend is lying there and can’t get up.”
    “You kidding?”
    “Hey, I’m not a cop. I don’t give a shit if there’s a bunch of drugs up there. That’s none of my business. I just want to get paid.”
    “How I know you’re not a cop?”
    I had him. At least, I was pretty sure I had him. The thing is, I had never bribed anyone before, and I was somewhat hesitant about doing it, but that’s where I figured we’d gotten to. The way I figured it, the super didn’t care if I was a cop or not, or if Gutierrez was dead or not, or whether he opened the guy’s door or not. All it came down to now, assuming I’d read the situation correctly, was how much money it was going to take to get this basically lazy guy who just wanted to go back and watch TV to climb four flights of stairs in this stifling heat. If, of course, I was right.
    What made me hesitant, of course, was what if I was wrong? What if I pulled out a wad of money and, instead of taking it, the guy got offended and froze up on me? In that case I would feel like an asshole, and I wouldn’t know what to do next, which is a hell of a position for a private detective to find himself in.
    I needn’t have worried. My assessment was dead on. I opened the bidding at five dollars and closed it out at ten.
    Guillermo Gutierrez’s apartment was about what I expected. A dirty, ill-furnished, one-room apartment with a kitchen alcove and a small bath. I couldn’t help wondering why a guy who obviously moved huge quantities of drugs for exorbitant amounts of money would choose to live in squalor like this. The answer, of course, was obvious. He was investing all of his capital in his arm.
    I couldn’t search the apartment with the super there watching me like a hawk, so I didn’t find anything interesting, but I hadn’t expected to anyway. I just wanted a little confirmation. I found it on the floor just outside the door into the bathroom. A faint reddish tinge on the floorboards, which were cleaner there than anywhere else in the room, as if someone had made an effort to mop something up. I