The Troubleshooters by Tabaré Alvarez	Table of Contents part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5
part 4 of 5

He looked. What struck him first was that, to his great relief, there was no one in the room. The second discrete impression, unavoidable, was the sheer amount of clutter in the room. He turned back to Mrs. Medina, brought her inside, and closed the door slowly, gingerly, behind them, wary of the hinges, but they did not creak.

The room was so cluttered there was barely enough space for Dutch and Mrs. Medina. They stood by the door, close to each other.

For a moment, Dutch tried to picture having to get all this downstairs and into his truck. The mere thought exhausted him, and he would have sat down if there had been room enough. “I’m glad this isn’t a move.”

There were shelves that rose all the way to the ceiling. There were boxes, the kind copier paper comes in, stacked atop one another. There were piles of newsprint, grey and pink, like the ones in Miss Potter’s apartment. There were trash bags, some black, some clear, scattered all over the room. Arranged on the shelves were neat little baskets, sorted by content: one full of batteries, one full of lint, one full of light bulbs (some of them slightly blackened), one full of what looked like chicken bones, one full of sea shells, and a jar full of pennies.

There were also odd random objects tucked into any available space, at any angle: a hat stand, a rubber duck, a wire-mesh tombola for drawing lottery or bingo numbers, a marionette, a single two-tone shoe, a bird’s nest, an anvil, a spool of thread, an old rotary phone, a rocking chair, a candle, a remote control, and a boomerang.

Mrs. Medina began brushing down the front of Dutch’s shirt, which had picked up dirt in the crawlspace. She turned him around and did his back.

When she had finished, he said, “You didn’t get any on you?” She shook her head. He shrugged. “Oh, wait,” he said, “you might have some in the back of the hips here, let me see—”

For the second time, she gave his shoulder a quick slap. Then her face changed, and he followed her line of sight: she was looking at two clear plastic bags, one of them — a cold stone dropped in his stomach — filled with dark hair, the other filled with fingernail and toenail clippings. The hair was short, black, curled, and very shiny. The nail clippings, packed tight in that bag, resembled sharp half-moons of bone.

“This is the part in the movie where we all wonder why the protagonist doesn’t just call someone.” She took out her cell phone.

Dutch nodded.

She called the Mayor and told him the situation: that, through a linen closet, they had found a hidden passageway into a second apartment that was dark and full of junk, including human hair and nail clippings, and that promised to be very creepy in every way.

She covered the tiny mouthpiece. “He’s asking me if I’m high,” she whispered.

Dutch made spinning motions with his index fingers, nodded, and mouthed the word Later.

“Later,” she said, and Dutch gave a slight jump. But she had done it on purpose: she was just hanging up, albeit more youthfully than their demographic might normally do so.

Dutch checked his pockets: just keys, wallet, and cell phone, nothing they could use now. His key ring had a bottle opener — that was the closest thing to a weapon. Maybe he could take the boomerang or the hat stand. “What did he say?”

Mrs. Medina waved her hand dismissively. “His head is elsewhere at the moment. He just kept going on about pressure systems.”

The question, of course, was whether there was any urgency: if they believed Miss Potter to be either safe or, alternately, dead, there was nothing to be gained by hurrying. Dutch cleared his throat. “I think we should call the police.”

Mrs. Medina glanced down at the clear plastic bags, kneaded her forehead with her knuckles, and then turned away so she was facing Dutch’s chest. She was stamping her feet, but slowly and without making noise. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand next to this hair.” She did the last word in a funny voice that did not seem entirely of her choosing.

So it was the bag of hair, rather than the old lady’s well-being, that finally moved them to leave the room. Dutch turned the light off first so his eyes would adjust to the darkness, then opened the door again carefully and peered up and down the dark corridor. He could still hear the rain and wind outside; it certainly sounded like a hurricane.

The light bulb he had just turned off was ticking almost imperceptibly above the cluttered room. Beyond that and the thumping of his heart and the noise of his own breathing, he could hear nothing, not even Mrs. Medina, who stood close enough behind him that he could feel the warmth. Okay, he said to himself. Okay. But the thought slipped in uninvited: This is where I die.

He was walking down the dark corridor. Every few steps, Mrs. Medina would rest her fingers on his back, as though to confirm that they both still existed. This time he saw no lights up ahead. It was hard to conceive of it, but it was the middle of the afternoon; normally, there would have been bright sunlight outside at this hour. It didn’t seem possible. In here, it seemed like permanent night.

He couldn’t even imagine — not really; not vividly enough to make it seem likely — coming upon a window that opened to the outside. This was a cave, deep in the bowels of the earth, that saw neither sunlight nor fresh air, and whose pack-rat dweller hoarded little shiny things from the outside, and never, ever threw anything away. Alternately in Dutch’s mind, he was Golem, he was the Mole Man, he was a Morlock, he was Ted Levine’s human-skin seamstress in The Silence of the Lambs with that impossibly deep, rumbly voice.

A cold draft blew down the hallway, chilling Dutch’s spine, and he was glad Mrs. Medina’s hand hadn’t been there, on his back, at just that moment.

The draft had wafted in a new smell, and Dutch tensed, but then his mind told him to relax: the smell was familiar and comforting, the smell of a kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.

“It’s oregano,” Mrs. Medina whispered behind him.

There was another doorway up ahead, unlit this time; Dutch grew bold and quickly covered the distance, until he was in position for another sideways inching of a single eye. But now there was an undertone, something beneath the oregano, and without fully knowing what he was doing, he gave Mrs. Medina the forearm signal, Hang back, and he ducked inside the dark room.

As quickly as he could without making noise, he closed the door and fumbled for the light switch. A hollowness in his stomach told him that he already knew what he would find.

His fingers found the switch, and with a loud click the light came on. This room, too, had been filled with clutter. Shelves. Boxes. Bags. Piles of newsprint. Loose items fit into whatever free space remained. At his feet, though, lay not a stack of magazines but a human body, wrapped in what appeared to be plastic wrap and sprinkled in oregano.

Through the clear plastic he could see the face, the nose slightly bent by the wrapping, the bulging eyes open and cloudy, the mouth slightly agape, the skin wrinkled and pale, almost blue. The late Miss Potter. His hand came up to cover his nose and mouth: despite the oregano, it was clear decomposition had begun.

Mrs. Medina was out in the hallway, alone, in the dark; breathing through his mouth, and as little as possible, he turned off the light, opened the door just wide enough, and wriggled out of the room.

Officially, he had known Mrs. Medina for fifteen years, the fifteen years he’d been working for the Mayor, but in truth they’d just met today: in the last few hours, they had exchanged more words than in the past decade and a half combined. He didn’t know her, but he didn’t want to lie; she wasn’t someone you lied to. If she screamed, though...

She took hold of his forearm with both of her hands. She had short fingernails, but even so they were digging into his skin. Her eyes, which had stayed here in the darkness, right now could probably see much better than his. He knew she was staring down the corridor, but still he saw nothing. He blinked, willing it to happen more quickly, the adjustment of his eyes, but before anything else, blind still, he heard it, the sound of footfalls approaching.

They were not hurried steps, a detail which gave him hope. He and Mrs. Medina were, after all, protected by the darkness as well. Maybe Dutch would recover in time, maybe his eyesight would adjust before this person noticed...

A switch flipped, and a light in the hallway came on. About ten steps away, a short man, five-foot-nothing at the most, was standing with his hand in the air, his fingers still touching the light switch. He was thin, with squinty eyes and closely shorn hair. The man tilted his head as though listening for something, narrowed his eyes in their direction, and then proceeded forward toward them at his same unhurried pace.

Dutch had frozen in place. Mrs. Medina was tapping him on the shoulder. Dutch didn’t turn around; he wanted to keep his eyes on the man. Mrs. Medina’s hand came up to Dutch’s face and touched his eyes.

Later, she would explain that she had been trying to communicate that the man had poor vision and hadn’t spotted them yet. Mrs. Medina touched her fingers to Dutch’s eyelids and squeezed them together lightly. Dutch squinted to see if something would happen, but nothing did.

Mrs. Medina stood behind him and wrapped her arms around him. He felt himself shift into as wide a stance as he was capable of, placing his feet far apart, throwing back his shoulders, sticking out his chest — not that any of that would help if the man pulled out a gun. He patted the back of her hand, but she shook him off. She hugged him, then pointed at the man, then hugged Dutch again, a pretty tight squeeze, a bear hug.

Dutch stepped forward and felt Mrs. Medina’s arms slip off him. He bent his knees a little, leaned forward, and charged toward the man. It took maybe ten steps, and the man had time enough to register a noise and look up, and then Dutch closed his arms just below the man’s shoulders, pinning his arms.

Having gotten a sense of the man’s weight, of how light he was, Dutch yanked him up off the floor and held him there in the air. The man was now kicking back at Dutch’s shins with his heels, which caused Dutch considerable pain: he had always had tender shins. It was a warm pain that pulsed and traveled up and down his legs. Mrs. Medina sprang forward, squeezed past them, and ran off in the direction the man had come.

The man was now trying to strike with the back of his head, but first contact with Dutch’s chin quickly put an end to that experiment. So he went back to the shins. Dutch didn’t want to squeeze any harder because he’d heard stories of broken ribs puncturing a person’s lungs — old wives’ tales, probably, but he didn’t want to risk it.

He didn’t know what he had expected — mothballs, mold, old sweat — but the man he was holding smelled of regular soap and shaving cream. Dutch tried asking him questions, but all the man did was squirm and kick him in the shins; he didn’t even yell or curse.

The minutes ticked by. Dutch was now humming — he had made no conscious decision; it had just happened — and either the humming was having a calming effect on the man, or he had tired himself out, or maybe he was pooling his strength for one big effort at escaping.

It seemed incredible to Dutch that a person could grow used to doing something so strange: bear-hugging a man who had possibly snuck into an old lady’s apartment through the linen closet to stack it full of newspapers because his own apartment was already full; but Dutch had certainly been regaining his ease when Mrs. Medina finally came back to the room and told him the police were on their way. The super was waiting for them and would walk them up to the right apartment.

The man, whose name was Ignacio Smith, never did explain anything or utter many words of any sort, but the sequence of events that Mrs. Medina would eventually accept as most probable was the following: As Ignacio began running out of space, he began exploring the limits of his apartment. He found the access to the passageway and, one day, chanced upon what turned out to be Miss Potter’s linen closet.

He would have realized he had entered another apartment, an occupied one, but, to him, a mostly empty one, something that he could annex to his own. He might have started visiting it at night, while Miss Potter slept. One night he found she had simply died in her sleep.

Here Dutch had made an objection: there was no way Ignacio had carried Miss Potter’s body through the narrow crawlspace. Mrs. Medina speculated that he had, in fact, in the middle of the night, taken her out her own front door, dragging her body on the bedsheet. He had re-entered his apartment, with Miss Potter’s body, through his front door.

The nickname the newspapers gave him was the Pack Rat. From what the Mayor told them, his lawyer wanted to seek an insanity defense centered on Ignacio’s compulsive hoarding, but in the end they copped a plea, and Ignacio was sent to prison for check forgery, trespassing, and transporting a dead body.

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Proceed to part 5...

Copyright © 2009 by Tabaré Alvarez