Obedience (8 page)

Dave took a deep breath, and jounced the old car down into the yard. He parked it beside the van, got out, closed the door. It was pitch-dark. Cecil was good at remembering to turn on the ground lights. So somebody else had switched them off. He had expected that someone else—just not so soon. He smiled sourly to himself. It damned well was time he quit. The spring in his step wasn’t all he’d lost. The spring in his brain had snapped. A simple phone call could have warned Cecil away, and he hadn’t made that call—it simply hadn’t crossed his mind. He touched his side. His gun. He’d left it at Mel’s. And simply forgotten. Wonderful. Grimly, he crunched over the uneven bricks, rounded the shingled side of the front building, walked into the courtyard where the big oak loomed.

Beyond it the windows of the rear building showed light. Dimly. Through closed curtains. The lantern over the door was dark. He had been surprised there once before. Just a couple of years back. Lurkers had knocked him on the skull while he was pushing his key into the lock. He winced, remembering how his head had ached afterwards. He peered around him, stepped to the slatted bench that circled the thick trunk of the oak. Plants sat there in plastic pots. He picked one up, and lofted it across the courtyard. It struck the door with a thump.

The door burst open, a rectangle of yellow lamplight fell onto the bricks, and a slim little man in black jumped out, and crouched in the light, an Uzi in his delicate hands. His doll face scowled.
Pretty as poison.
He aimed the gun rigidly at Dave. Dave held up his hands. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’m unarmed. I live here.” The youngster came out of his crouch, Dave walked toward him. The doll-boy jerked the gun to point Dave at the door. Dave passed him, and walked into the house, the guard behind him, poking his spine with the nose of the Uzi. Dave looked for Cecil, didn’t see him. He saw a squat, middle-aged Asian in a dark pin-striped suit, who got up out of one of the leather wing chairs that flanked the fireplace.

Dave asked him, “Where is Cecil Harris?”

“Asleep.” The man jerked his head to indicate the loft. The lamplight slid off his greased hair. He came toward Dave with a hand held out. He had a good tailor. A correct inch of shirt cuff showed from under his jacket sleeve. “My name is Don Pham, Mr. Brandstetter.” The voice was deep, rough, the accent unmistakable, but the inflection American.

Dave didn’t shake the hand. “What have you done to him?” He started for the raw pine stairs to the loft.

Pham caught his arm. “Don’t worry. He’s all right. He was very tired. That was easy to see. When we arrived, he got excited.” Pham smiled tenderly. “We gave him something to calm him down. He’ll be fine in the morning.”

“If you’ve hurt him—” Dave began.

Pham tilted a face pitted with smallpox scars. He said, “What reason would I have to hurt him?” He glanced up at the loft again, and his expression made Dave a little sick. Pham asked, “Have I overlooked something?”

“It’s late, and I’m tired myself.” Dave moved toward the bar. “If this is going to take long, I need a drink.”

Pham followed him, the doll-boy close behind. “Have a drink, by all means,” Pham said. He watched Dave find the Glenlivet bottle, a glass, ice cubes. He waited while Dave poured whiskey into the glass, corked the bottle, set it back. “No, thanks,” he said with heavy sarcasm, “I don’t use it,”

Dave only grunted. He started to leave the bar, and Pham reached into a pocket and drew out a paper. Dave knew that paper. His hand went toward his own pocket, then stopped. Someone had bumped into him at the last club. A pickpocket, right? Right. Pham’s mouth twitched. He opened the paper and flattened it on the bar.

“San Pedro County,” he read aloud, “Office of the Public Defender. Tracy Davis.” He blinked at Dave. “How did you come to have this list? What interest does the Public Defender have in Vietnamese gambling clubs?”

Dave shrugged. “I’m just a hired hand. The Public Defender wanted me to visit those places, I visited them.” He sketched a smile. “Investigators gather facts. Lawyers put the facts to work. You’ll have to ask the lawyers.”

“I don’t think so,” Pham said. “After I was handed this list tonight, I made a phone call to a—friend in the police department. Tracy Davis has been assigned the case of the man accused of the murder of an important member of the Vietnamese community—Le Van Minh. She’s trying to shift the blame from her client to one of us. True or false?”

Dave drank from his glass. “Why would she do that?”

“Why would you eat lunch at Hoang Pho?”

“Four wealthy Vietnamese were murdered there, and it’s near the Old Fleet Marina, where Le was killed.” Dave wanted a cigarette. He’d smoked the pack he’d taken with him. He bent to get a fresh one from under the bar, and the doll-boy made a sound in his throat and stepped close. Dave held up the cigarette pack. The boy glowered. Dave opened the pack, got a cigarette, and lit it. Pham was watching him. Dave said, “I’m not comfortable with coincidences. They always start me looking for the real story.”

Pham smiled. “Not just another story? Ms. Davis wants her client freed. Isn’t that why she’s paying you?”

Dave read his watch. Cotton’s DC-10 was thirty-two thousand feet above the black and slumbering Mississippi River by now. He drank from his glass again, and jerked his chin at the bodyguard. “What if I told you that a witness saw two men like your dainty friend here running away from the Old Fleet Marina at the time Le was murdered?”

Pham stared at him without expression. He seemed not to breathe for a minute. He chose his words carefully. “I would say that the witness misunderstood what he saw.”

Now it was Dave’s turn to stare, his turn to measure his words. “You mean that they were in fact there? But not to kill Le? Is that what I’m to understand?”

“You are to understand,” Pham said, “that they did not kill Le Van Minh. On that you have my word.”

“I take the word of people I’ve learned to trust,” Dave said. “I don’t even know you, Mr. Don.”

The smile was crooked and came and went quickly. “My family name is Pham. I have Americanized the order of my names, and dropped the middle one. So, I’m Mr. Pham, but call me Don—I like the name Don, don’t you? So American.”

“You’re in the gambling business,” Dave said.

“And the prostitution business.” Pham nodded. “And the protection business, and the drug business.” He gave a short, sharp laugh. “No, I’m not incriminating myself. I checked this room for electronic listening devices. There aren’t any. And your only witness is asleep.”

“The crime business, then,” Dave said.

Pham inclined his head slightly. “And the crime business is a watchful business, Mr. Brandstetter. I have to know what’s going on at all times, in all places. If I get careless, I could end up like Mr. Le.”

“Who was not in the crime business?”

Pham laughed. “Quite the reverse. An upright man. An old-fashioned man. A man of conscience.”

Dave studied him. “Which made him your enemy, right?”

“Don’t be a slave to logic, Mr. Brandstetter.” Pham turned and walked away. The bodyguard stayed put, pointing his Uzi at Dave. Pham called, “I and mine had nothing to do with the death of Le Van Minh. Don’t waste your time on us. Look into the Le family.” He opened the front door. “A wealthy household, Mr. Brandstetter, but a very unhappy one. Old Vietnamese ways clashing with new Western ones.” He went out into the dark. The doll-boy, running backwards on silent feet, followed him, and slammed the door.

“Cecil?” Dave ran for the stairs to the loft.

C
ECIL MOVED ANGRILY, YANKING
clothes from the hospital room closet. Wire coat hangers flew. His long fingers groped for the ties down the back of the short, starchy garment they’d put on him at four in the morning. By Dave’s watch, it was five past eleven, now. The hospital bed coat flapped across the room. Cecil jerked into jockey shorts, a T-shirt. “There were two,” he said to Dave. “Two. It took two of them to pin me down.”

“All right,” Dave said mildly, “there were two. I didn’t mean to insult you. I only saw one. The other one must have been out in the car and I missed him.”

“Two of the little creeps.” Cecil sat in a chair by a tall window, and pulled on socks. “Jumped me in the dark. Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go home,” Dave said.

“Hell, how could you know?” Cecil was one leg into his trousers. When Dave had found him lying face down across the wide bed on the loft, those trousers had been dragged down to his knees. Pham and company had stuck him in the butt with a hypodermic. The empty, throw-away syringe lay on the pine chest of drawers. When he’d got Cecil to the UCLA emergency room, they’d told him the injection was morphine. Cecil was staring at him now. “You didn’t know, did you?”

“My whole point in going to those clubs,” Dave said, “was to get them to surface, whoever they were. No, I didn’t know—not that it would happen so soon. All the same, I ought to have called you at work.”

Cecil gave a dry laugh. “That way I could have brought a camera crew.” He kicked the other leg into the trousers, fastened the waist button, buckled the belt. He picked up his jacket, untangled it from its hanger. He came to Dave, put arms around him, and a kiss on his mouth. He smiled. “Hey, it’s not you I’m mad at.” He shrugged into the jacket. “It’s how I didn’t handle it. How they humiliated me.”

“They had guns,” Dave said. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”

Cecil grunted, glanced at the room, the unfinished meal on its tray on a swing table over the bed. “Let’s get out of here.” He yanked open the door and barged, long legged, down the busy corridor. Nurses dodged. Interns with clipboards flattened themselves against walls. A green-clad orderly dropped his mop. Dave half expected Cecil to leap over a lavender-haired lady in a wheelchair. “Why did you bring me here, anyway? Not a thing in the world the matter with me.”

“You were limp and cold,” Dave said, “and I could hardly hear you breathe.” Trying to keep pace with him, Dave remembered the lifetime of cigarettes he’d smoked—right now, his own breathing was doubtful. “Pham is no doctor. He could have overdosed you. I figured I could bring you here, or wait and call the undertaker—right?”

“It’s cool.” Cecil worked up a smile. Elevator doors opened. Worried-looking families carrying bouquets and new teddy bears crowded out. Cecil and Dave stepped into air damp with the smell of flowers. The elevator doors closed. Cecil pressed a button. “You forget it, I’ll forget it.”

“Two things I’ll be happy to remember,” Dave said. “First, Pham hasn’t made Cotton Simes as a witness, and second he doesn’t connect you to Cotton Simes. At least I don’t think so.”

“Did his doll-boys kill Le?” Cecil asked.

“He says not.” The elevator stopped, the doors opened, they stepped into a lobby teeming with the bandaged and bewildered. “I’ll check you out.” Dave started for the desk.

Cecil caught his arm, shook his head, urged Dave toward the glass entry doors. “They’ll phone when they discover my empty bed. That will be time enough.” He pushed out into sunshine, heat, the rustle of wind in trees. “Meanwhile, it will add some excitement to their dull routine.” He drew air in gratefully, and skittered like a kid down broad steps. Dave followed slowly, groggy for lack of sleep. Cecil spun around in the lane, arms held out, grinning. “Man, it is so great to be out of there. Nothing I hate worse than hospitals.” He gave a shiver. “They keep reminding me of those times when it was you in the bed, and me sitting all night beside you, wondering if you’d live or die.” He took Dave’s arm and they climbed the gritty steps of gloomy parking levels. In the Valiant, rolling back down to earth, he added, “What happened to your promise to quit?”

“I couldn’t get the twenty-two out of my mind.” Dave waited for slow traffic to pass, then swung onto a curving lane, over-arched by three branches, and headed off the campus. “The twenty-two makes me think Pham could just possibly be telling the truth. That someone else killed Le.”

“Which brings you back to Andy Flanagan?” Cecil said.

“If he owned a twenty-two pistol, the police can’t find it. Not on his boat, not underwater.” At a stoplight, Dave lit a cigarette. “Which of them there did own a twenty-two pistol? A retired schoolteacher on a pitiful pension living out her sunset years at the Old Fleet, with no place else to go? A young man almost destroyed by bungling doctors and usurious hospitals? With a wife and baby and hardly enough strength to breathe in and out, let alone start over again?” Dave turned the rattly car up Laurel Canyon. “A once famous jazz singer nobody gives a damn for anymore? Even if she can sell the
Starlady
—after that money’s gone, then what?”

Cecil stared at him. “You talking about Lindy Willard?”

“What I’m talking about is that I’ve only interviewed three or four of the boaties.”

Cecil nodded. “Which leaves eighty-six to go.”

“That’s a lot of bunks and lockers to search,” Dave said.

“I’d call that a good reason to quit,” Cecil said,

Dave swung the Valiant, rattling and complaining, into the broad, clean-swept driveway of Kevin Nakamura’s tree-shaded stone and glass service station. He switched off the engine, twisted out the cigarette, stumbled out of the car.

Nakamura, in crisp suntans, came bowlegged and grinning across the tarmac. His eyes very nearly disappeared when he smiled. “What are you? Fed up with the jalopy?” He held out the small cowhide case of the Jaguar’s keys.

“I’ll take those,” Cecil said, and Nakamura tossed them to him over the top of the Valiant. Cecil loped away and out of sight behind shiny clean service bays. “You look beat,” Nakamura said. “Everything okay?”

“It will be when I’ve had twelve hours sleep.” Nakamura laughed and wagged his head. “You’ll never retire. You like playing cops and robbers too much.”

“I’m too old for it.” Dave touched the Valiant with his shoe. “Get rid of this. I won’t be needing it again.”

Nakamura’s eyebrows went up. “You sure?”

Dave nodded wearily. “Give whatever you get for it to your favorite charity.”

“That’s me,” Nakamura said.