Errors (First Place Fiction‪)‬

My search for Billy Kapanka had led me as far west as Columbus, Ohio, where, until a few weeks before, he had worked in a Denny's as a fry cook and rented a furnished room. He had departed without leaving a forwarding address. I visited a warehouse in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I had heard that he had driven a forklift. No one there remembered him. Then I followed the trail eastward--and backward in time--to Jersey City, New Jersey, where, in the mid-1980s, Billy had rented another room, fathered a now-grown daughter, and spent 30 days in jail for being drunk and disorderly. By way of another old girlfriend, a second estranged daughter, and an employee of the New York City Child Support Enforcement Bureau, whom I had managed to convince that I was the ex-girlfriend's lawyer, 1 finally traced Billy to a decaying yellow brick structure euphemistically called the Cross Bronx Hotel. I thought it best to drop in unannounced. The lobby of the Cross Bronx Hotel was an airless, greenish room furnished with an end table, a table lamp, and a frayed brown and yellow sofa, above which hung an enlarged photograph of a pre-9/11 New York City skyline. A bulky air conditioner, set into the rear wall, wheezed mightily but provided little relief from the July heat. Behind the front desk sat a heavyset black woman with a mottled complexion and half-closed eyes. Dressed in purple spandex pants and a matching, though sweat-darkened, tank top, she was leafing through a magazine. When I asked for Billy's room number, she eyed me warily, tapping on the desk with her inch-long purple fingernails.