now he could see all too well the hulk down there, shrouded, misshapen… Igor?… the living person he had tailed back to this “secret” place of his?… He felt himself sinking helplessly—too late to do anything about it!—into a sump of sheer guilt… He had “tailed” him, and that was the first step, wasn’t it! ::::::Please, Dios, let it be that he got drunk and fell down the stairs of his own accord… He was just a forger! He didn’t deserve to be struck dead! And I started it, and—wait a minute… what am I talking about? I didn’t tell Igor to start forging pictures… I didn’t tell him to aid and abet some outrageous Russian con man… I didn’t tell him to set up a secret studio in some Active Adults condo in Hallandale… I didn’t tell him to become an alcoholic and drink his vodaprikas all day long… I didn’t tell him to go to the Honey Pot and pay for whores.:::::: By and by, staring at the crumpled dead hulk of Igor, Nestor worked it out in his mind… He hadn’t created Igor and turned him over to a bunch of homicidal thugs… By and by he had absolved himself… without divine intervention, but Dios mío, all—
—all four cops in the courtyard were staring up at him as he had been staring down at the remains of Igor… a bunch of Anglos these Broward County cops were, too!… They’d be happy to turn him in. ::::::Am I getting paranoid?… But they are looking at me, just like the two at Igor’s door, right? I’m bailing!::::::
Nestor crouched again, but this time he made no pretense of being nonchalant. He scuttled to the elevator and went to the ground floor—halfway expecting Broward County cops to be waiting for him at the elevator door… He was getting jumpy, wasn’t he?!… He tried not to walk too fast toward the lot near the highway, where he had left the Camaro… and practically laid down rubber getting out of there. ::::::I don’t believe this! This is what it feels like to be a hunted man!::::::
Driving east on Hallandale Beach Boulevard toward Sunny Isles he began to pull himself together. ::::::Get home! That’s the main thing. Actually be there, in case they send somebody around to check.:::::: Nevertheless, he had to find a pay phone and make one call… now. If he used his iPhone, they’d know who he was and where he was in half a second… but where innanameadios was there a pay phone? It was as if pay phones had disappeared from the face of the earth… or Hallandale, whichever… Miles drifted by… His eyes searched every gasoline station, every shopping strip, every motel parking apron, every drive-through restaurant, the Broward County water authority grounds, even utterly hopeless cases… a little one-story store with cheap garden statuary all over the lawns, unicorns, bears—big ones—cherubs, elves, Abraham Lincoln, two Virgin Marys, a plaster flying fish, a plaster Indian with a plaster headdress—
Finally, some sort of nightclub by the side of the road… called Gogol’s… The parking lot was empty, but in the corner nearest the club—a pay phone. Thank God he had change. He had to call Information for the number of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office… and after more coins, they threw him in voice mail jail. The recorded voice of a woman said: “You have reached the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Please listen carefully. For emergencies, press zero-zero… to report non-emergency incidents, press two… for billing and accounting, press three… for human resources, press four”… until at last… a human voice: “Homicide. Lieutenant Canter.”
“Lieutenant,” said Nestor, “I have some good information for you. You have something to record this with?”
“Who’s calling?”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, all I can give you is the information, but it’s good information.”
A pause. “Okay… go ahead.”
“As soon as the ME gets there—” Uh-oh, “ME” sounded too cop-like. He rephrased it, “The medical examiner”—but that didn’t help much… still too much cop knowledge. By now the lieutenant must have pushed the rocker switch to the tape recorder—“After the medical examiner arrives and gets finished, you’ll be getting an ambulance with a corpse tagged”—he spoke very slowly—“Ni-co-lai Ko-pin-sky… Okay?… from the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults. His real name is I-gor Dru-ko-vich… Okay? He’s an artist with a telephone listing in Miami. He apparently broke his neck in a fall down a stairway. But the ME… uhh…”—oh, the hell with it… he just left it at ME—“shouldn’t