Obedience (2 page)

She gave a bleak laugh. “I wish it were. But Andy Flanagan’s my half-brother. He was a gentle, timid kid. Back then. The war changed him. None of the family wants anything to do with him now.” Her eyes behind the big lenses pleaded up at him. “It’s why I came to you. Andy is all mouth. He wouldn’t kill anybody. At bottom he’s a coward.”

“He lost an arm in combat,” Dave said.

“And he has a purple heart to prove it.” She used that bleak laugh again, and bent to dig cigarettes and a green throwaway lighter from her bag. “But you can buy purple hearts at pawnshops.”

Dave went back to the stove, brought the coffeemaker to the table, and poured coffee into the mugs while she lit her cigarette. The smoke smelled good. He found his own cigarettes and lighter lying with his glasses on the folded copy of the morning
Times.
He frowned at the paper. He’d read only the entertainment section this morning, curious about a citywide music festival that yesterday had honored John Cage, whom he’d known long ago. He hadn’t read the news—not even the headlines. He picked up the cigarettes, went back to the table, sat down. “When did this killing happen?”

“A little before midnight.” She blew smoke away, tasted her coffee. “At the Old Fleet Marina.”

Dave stared, the flame of his lighter halfway to his cigarette. “A Vietnamese?”

“Le Van Minh. The man who owns the place.”

Dave lit the cigarette and put the lighter down. “I understood he hardly knew where it was.”

“If he didn’t,” she said, “Andy Flanagan told him.”

“Flanagan lives there? He’s one of the boat people?”

“The one making the most noise,” she said. “I don’t know that the rest of them agree—they’re an odd bunch—but he claims he’s their spokesman.”

“What did Flanagan do—telephone Le?”

“He wanted a summit meeting.” She drank some coffee, turned ash off her cigarette in a big, square clear-glass ashtray. “All he or any of them at the Old Fleet had seen were lawyers handing them vacate notices and deadlines. Andy wanted to talk to the man himself.” She gave her head a sorry shake. “He’d once told the others that if Le didn’t back down, he’d kill him. Whose country was this, anyway? What had we fought a war for—so a damn Slant could turn Americans out of their homes?”

“I’m surprised Le came. At night? Alone? It’s no place for a stranger—not as I remember it.”

“Especially not a well-dressed stranger,” she said, “driving a large, expensive car. But the lawyers weren’t with him. He didn’t call them. His son Hai wanted to drive him. But Le wouldn’t hear of it. And in a Vietnamese household, the father’s word is law.”

Dave nodded. “Filial piety,” he said. “Obedience. Did he and Flanagan meet?”

“Andy waited on his boat. The appointment was for eleven. And when Le hadn’t come on board by midnight, Andy went to ring him again. At the pay phone on the pier. And stumbled over his body.”

“Who called the police?”

“Andy, once he’d got over his shock. It’s the only defense he’s got. He knew he’d be arrested. But he phoned the police anyway.”

“What options did he have?” Dave said. “It would have been stupid to run.”

She took a last drag from her cigarette, snubbed it out, blew the smoke away, and gave him a grave and steady look. “Maybe not—not if you won’t help him.”

“I should have moved to a remote cottage on the Sussex downs and kept bees,” he said.

She frowned, tilted her head. “What?”

He sighed. “I’ll look into it.” Her face lit up, and he lifted a hand. “Abe Greenglass has been my lawyer for a lifetime. He’s gotten me out of some very serious scrapes and he’s never asked anything of me before, so I’ll look into this for you, but that’s all. I don’t promise to find anything. There may be nothing to find. Flanagan may be slyer than you think.”

She shook her head. “He’s a lot of things, but sly isn’t one of them. You’ll find something,” she said.

T
HE LONG, NARROW WOODEN
walkway creaked under him. A police officer had marked the splintery planks with an outline of Le Van Minh’s dead body. Below, in the water, floated yellow ribbon lettered
CRIME SCENE
…
BEYOND THIS
… A yellow-and black-striped sawhorse had fallen over. He looked up. Gulls circled lazily against a clear blue sky. He walked on. The pier swayed. The moored boats fitted no pattern. Among sleek cabin cruisers rocked wooden fishing boats with scaling paint, slim sailing craft with shredded tackle and heaps of mildewed nylon sailcloth, houseboats, kinds of boats he doubted anyone could put a name to.

Along the gangway, scabby steel poles held sagging power lines that stretched to the boats people lived on. He passed a boxy stucco building marked in fading paint
RESTROOMS
,
SHOWERS
, warped doors standing half open. A gull swung down and perched on a tilted television aerial atop one of the boats. On the rear deck of this one, a woman with a head of feathery gray hair washed clothes in a square plastic tub. The tub was red and stood on a bench, a box of soap powder and a white bottle of bleach beside it. The woman scrubbed bluejeans on a washboard. Jeans, shirts, underwear hung on a rope above the deck.

Dave called, “May I talk to you?”

She straightened stiffly, rubbed her lower back, winced at him in the noon sunglare off the water. Stocky, ruddy-faced, she was probably seventy. Her voice had a commanding ring to it. “You wait a few days, you can talk to our lawyer. None of us has anything to say to you.”

“I’m not from Mr. Le.” A gray plank lay across to the boat from the dock. He made to walk aboard.

“Just hold it right there.” Wiping her hands on her shirt, she came toward him along a paintless deck, a bulldog set to her jaw. “If you’re not from him, you’re from the developers, and if you’re not from them, you’re from the city council.” She halted a few feet from Dave. A yellow cat with white markings had been asleep on top of the boat’s wheelhouse. Now the cat jumped down and began circling her ankles, bumping, tail straight up. “Well, we’re taking up a collection—got nearly five hundred dollars now—to hire an attorney and fight all of you. Lawyers seem to be all anybody understands anymore.”

Dave took out the ostrich-hide folder that held his private investigator’s license, let it fall open, and held it out arm’s length so she could read it if she wanted to across the space of dark water that separated them. She blinked, squinted, shook her head.

“No use. Haven’t got my glasses. No point wearing them to wash clothes. They just get steamed up. Or else they fall off into the soapsuds.”

“My name is Brandstetter.” He slipped the folder back inside his jacket. “I’m working for the Public Defender handling Andy Flanagan’s case. Tracy Davis.”

This got her attention. She eyed him, head turned, wary. “Working how?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Ms. Davis doesn’t think Andy killed Le Van Minh. She’d like me to find out who did. What do you think?”

She snorted. “What all of us think. That Andy was a fall guy. He’d been raising hell about how they’re booting us out of here without a by-your-leave. He was a troublemaker. Powerful people don’t like poor people who stand up on their hind legs and fight back.”

Dave started to say, “I didn’t know anybody liked him,” and out in the harbor, beyond the ugly steel lattice-work of the Edward Otis bridge, a freighter blew its whistle, a deep, hoarse roar. The sound shook the place. When the echo died, Dave said, “If I come aboard, it will be easier to talk.” She hesitated and he gave her a smile and said, “I think you’ve got ideas on this that can help me. Help Andy.”

She nodded grudgingly. “All right, come on.” She turned and walked back aft past the superstructure to the bright tub on its bench. He crossed the plank, jumped down, followed her. He leaned back against a gunwale, and watched her bend over her wash again. She said, “They wouldn’t be so crude as to kill Andy outright, would they? A veteran with an arm shot off for his country?”

“So somebody murdered Le to frame him?” Dave said.

She lifted the soaking jeans out of the water, and squeezed suds out of them. She wrung them, grunting with the effort, stretched them flat on a wet patch of deck, took a green plastic garden hose, and sprayed them hard. She flapped them over, sprayed them hard again, turned off the hose, hung the jeans on the rope line, turned to face Dave.

“That’s what I think,” she said. “I may look crazy, but my brains still work. I taught school till they made me retire. I live on Social Security and a laughable pension. But I live by the ocean, which is what I longed to do all my life and never could.” She glanced around at the shabby hulks, the weathered oil derricks, the deserted factories. “It’s not Monte Carlo. But I like it, and I want to stay here till I die.”

Dave took out cigarettes and lighter, held them up, brows raised. She gave him a nod.

“Go ahead and smoke. I’m not one of those people who enjoys spoiling everybody else’s fun. Too much of that these days.” She turned back to start rubbing a soggy print dress on the washboard. Dave lit a cigarette. The sea breeze snatched the smoke. Grunting between the words, she said, “They claim it’s your health they’re interested in, but the truth is, they just want you to be miserable. It’s the only way some people can be happy. Like the ones that want me and the rest of us out of here.”

“How many of you are there?” Dave said.

“Ninety.” She began to wring the dress out. “On forty boats. Couples—old a lot of ’em. But there are youngsters, too, with babies and toddlers.” She flapped the dress down on the deck, turned on the hose and rinsed it the way she’d rinsed the jeans. The water ran into the scuppers. Over the hiss and splash of the hose, she went on talking. “You must be good at your work—the way you dress, that car you drive. I saw you park up there.” She jerked her head at the seawall.

“Was Le killed just so Andy would be arrested for his murder?” Dave said. “Or do you think whoever did it wanted Le out of the way too?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” She turned off the hose, threw it aside, peeled the dress off the curved deck planks, flapped it over the rope. “Le annoyed the developers and the politicians. He was slow to do what they wanted. He was supposed to have cleared us out of here months ago.” She lifted the washboard from the tub, leaned it against the bench and, getting red in the face, picked up the tub, hauled it to the rail, dumped the soapy water overboard. “That was why Andy thought maybe Le was worth talking to.”

“Even though he was Vietnamese?” Dave said.

“He didn’t like that, but what choice did he have?” She hung the tub on a spike in the wall of the cabin. Hands on hips, she regarded the wash on the line. “Well, that’s over for the week.” She gave a satisfied nod, turned to him, said, “You feel like iced tea?” She moved off. “Come on inside. Sun’s hot.”

She opened a little pair of slatted red doors and ducked down a narrow companionway. Dave tossed his cigarette into the water and dropped after her into a dim cabin with threadbare cushions on built-in benches, storage cabinets above, small stove and refrigerator in a corner. Old television set. Pots of geraniums. Books and magazines lay around. Framed photographs hung on the bulkheads, family, friends, a long-ago cocker spaniel. Small, tarnished trophies stood with bric-a-brac on shelves. He put on his glasses and read the engraving on a trophy. Her class had won a state-wide spelling bee in 1939.

The woodwork of the cabin was white with red trim. The white had gone yellow long ago, and the red had dulled and faded. Water lapped the wooden sides of the old craft. It rocked gently, so that the brass lamp overhead swung from its hook in a crossbeam. She told him to sit down, and she banged ice cubes out of a metal tray, dropped them into mismatched glasses, poured tea over them from a chilled glass pitcher with a nick in its rim. She handed him a glass and sat down opposite him.

“It’s sugared and lemoned to start with,” she said.

“Thanks.” Dave tasted it. The best that could be said for it was that it was cold and wet. “Killing sounds a little extreme to me as negotiating practice in a business deal. Framing a fractious tenant for murder isn’t common, either.”

“You’re the expert,” she said. “But feelings were raw around here, on both sides. Still are. Most of us simply have no place to go. The Old Fleet was a last refuge. We’re desperate. We’re digging in our heels. And sometimes men used to having their way lose patience.” She drank some of the tea and made a face. “Tastes stale, doesn’t it? I guess something in that icebox ought to be thrown out.”

“Tracy Davis says Andy has a short temper,” Dave said. “Why didn’t he do it?”

“He was a talker.” She snorted. “All noise. Nobody around here listened to him. We learned to get out of his way when we saw him coming.”

“Then how did he end up spokesman for all of you?”

She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “By default, mostly. Not many people like stepping out in front of the crowd.”

“You included, Ms.—?” He waited for her name.

“Potter,” she said. “Norma. No, not me included. You know that already.” Her smile was wry. “But I’m a woman and I’m old. Being either one in this, society is a handicap. And up against a gigantic land development outfit, backed up by a bunch of cold-hearted bureaucrats—no, no. We needed somebody with an advantage, a wounded veteran.”

“Willing to step out in front of the crowd,” Dave said. “Willing to talk.”

“Willing and eager.” She grimaced. “Nonstop. But we soon saw it wasn’t going to help. That’s why a few of us pushed for hiring a lawyer. It hurt Andy’s feelings, I guess. That was why he phoned Le on the quiet, and asked him to come down here and talk with him, thrash things out between them.”

“It never got to that,” Dave said, “if Flanagan’s telling the truth. He found Le dead on the dock.”

She shuddered. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” She turned her head to look out one of the small cabin windows. “You don’t like ugly things happening where you live. This was a peaceful, pleasant place. Out of the world’s way. Now … it makes you feel naked, vulnerable, nobody to protect you. All sole alone.” She turned back. “Makes you angry too, ready to shoot somebody, yourself. It’s a feeling I don’t like. It’s not civilized.”