We should have flown to Memphis and rented a car, but Zeke, for all his world traveling, hated to fly, so we drove the seven hours to Bartlett, Tennessee. We were just east of Greenville, Texas when he brought up something that had been troubling me as well.
"Does the story about how Bobby Velasquez was killed ring true to you?" he asked.
Two years earlier, Bobby had been in the Army, stationed in Washington, DC. He went out for a run one night and was never seen again. The police found his wallet a few days later; the cash was gone, but his military ID and some credit cards were left, and it was covered with blood that they confirmed was his. They never found the body.
"It should, but it doesn't."
"That's how I felt. What bothers you about it?"
"The wallet is the main thing. I never took a wallet with me on a run when I was in the service, and still don't. I just took my keys, an ID, and maybe a few bucks just in case."
"That's the part that intrigued me, too," he said.
"And if he was wearing Army-issue PT shorts which, unless they've changed the design, have only a only a small pocket on the inside front, big enough for a key and an ID card, but not much else. He would have had to hold the wallet while he ran."
"Maybe that's why he got mugged."
"Most muggers don't hide the body if they kill someone, and definitely not so well that it's never found. But the wallet had no chance of not being found."
"And with his blood and plenty of other identification left in it."
"Yeah," I said. We drove on to the Arkansas border in silence, both of us mulling over what this could mean.
We pulled into Bartlett at around 3:30 in the afternoon. We timed it so we would arrive after kids got out of school, hoping we would find more neighbors at home. Fall was approaching, and unlike Texas, Tennessee truly had a fall; the leaves were just beginning to turn. In Texas it went from 100 degrees to freezing in about a week.
We found the address on Birch Street with no problem. It was an old house, built sometime in the 1930's, that had been converted into a four-plex. I loved old houses like this, and it made me want to leave my loft apartment and move to where homes had character. But now was not the time to be comparing the pluses and minuses of architectural styles.
The apartment building was much like the rest of the neighborhood, not exactly decaying, but certainly in decline, as if whatever progress was being made in the rest of the town had bypassed this area completely. We knocked on the door of apartment 3, which was answered by a young Nigerian woman; several small children pressed their faces through the cracked door. She didn't know anyone named Oscar Velasquez she said, or a Bobby Velasquez when I offered up his name as a shot in the dark. In fact the place had been empty when she moved in.
We then knocked on number 1, and this time the door was opened by a young man who appeared to be a student. Zeke and I introduced ourselves, and he invited us in.
"Have you lived here long?" I asked.
"About three years. I'm doing post-graduate work at the University of Memphis."
"Did you know this guy? He lived next door maybe six months." I showed him an old picture of Oscar Velasquez.
"Sure," he answered. "That's Oscar Velasquez. This picture's pretty old, and he looks different now, but I'm sure that's him. I knew him sort of casually; he spent a lot of time at the University Library, researching some old murder."
Now two people, the clerk in Tallahassee and this guy, were claiming that Oscar was not dead.
"Do you remember when he moved out?" Zeke asked.
"I guess it was around March. I was taking midterms and it was just before Spring Break. I asked him to go to Florida with me and some friends, and he said he would. Then I came home from class one day and he was gone."
"When was Smith killed?" Zeke asked me.
"March 14th," I answered.
The kid looked at us with a mix of concern and curiosity.
"Was Oscar involved in a killing?" he asked.
"That's what we're trying to find out. You don't by any chance have a more recent picture of him, do you? Even a group picture from when you hung out together? As you said, the one we have is pretty old."
"Let me check," he said. He went to his desk and rummaged trough the drawers for a while. He returned with a picture and handed it to me; Zeke looked over my shoulder. The picture was of a group of guys sitting around a table, playing cards and drinking beer.
"Is this him," I asked, pointing to one of the men.
"Yeah," he said. "That's Oscar. Like I said, he looks a little different than in the picture you showed me."
He was right; Oscar did look different. There was something about the eyes that was familiar to me, maybe from back in my memory of that day in Bolivia. But it wasn't Oscar's eyes I was seeing. They were similar, eerily similar, but not the same. Because the man in the picture wasn't Oscar Velasquez; it was his son Bobby, two years after he had supposedly been killed. Zeke looked at me, but said nothing.
"Mind if we take this?" I asked. He shook his head. "Thanks."
We turned to leave, and a thought struck me.
"Did Oscar walk with a limp?" I asked, turning back to him as I reached the door.
"Not usually," he answered. "Just for the last couple weeks before he left. We were playing basketball at the gym and he sprained his knee. The last time I saw him the limp was barely noticeable. Why do you ask?"
"Just following up on something someone else saw," I said. We thanked him for his time and went back to the car.
We talked to several other people in the neighborhood and got the same response from the few that remembered him. He said his name was Oscar Velasquez, he was a quiet guy who spent a lot of time at the library, and he moved in March. One neighbor nailed down the exact date for us.
"I do remember," she told us as we stood in her driveway, the setting sun casting shadows from the trees across us. "He was packing his car, and said he was leaving. I was carrying in a cake for my son's birthday party, and Oscar wished him a happy birthday."
"And what day was that?"
"A Saturday, March 15th."
So he stayed one more day after killing Leroy Smith, and then was gone. And unless I was very wrong, at this moment he was somewhere in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, looking for me. He had missed me once, but I doubted that would happen again.
From "God, Guns, and the Perfect Chicken-Fried Steak"