The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volume 1-4 (141 page)

He shifted his eyes, and they shone like shards of obsidian. “And where does that responsibility end?”

“It doesn’t.” We stood there, the echo of my voice coming back at us from the empty street, louder than I’d intended. “It doesn’t ever end. Ever.” I spoke softly now. “As long as he’s in my county, he’s my responsibility, and that puts me in line with a lot of other people who might consider leaving a seven-foot sociopath in a culvert under the highway a serious dereliction of duty.”

“So, you are going to keep him incarcerated for the common good?”

“Until I can find somewhere for him to go, yes.” I started to walk around him and then stopped. “Henry, I can’t let him continue to live under the highway. It’s not humane.”

“Neither is keeping him caged like an animal.”

I took another breath, this one even hotter than the ones before, and held it for a moment. “I am aware of that.” I continued on a few steps before turning and looking back at him. "What?”

He stood there for a moment and studied me. “I know you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” He didn’t move. “What?”

“I know that the real reason you are holding Virgil is in an attempt to fix his life, and that is beyond your abilities. You look at him and see experiences and directions similar to yours, but badly taken.” He walked toward me. “You cannot correct the path he has chosen; it is his path. The only thing you can do is not punish him for something he has not done.”

“I’m not looking to punish him, Henry, but there’s got to be something better for the man than living under I-25.”

His face remained impassive as he answered. “Perhaps, but that is something for him to discover, not for you to give him.”

We walked along. “Well, maybe I can help.”

The Bear smiled. “I know. This is not the first set of moccasins in which you have walked.”

14

The Bear stood up from his hunter’s crouch where he’d been studying the motorcycle tracks. “They are the same.”

I took the key I’d gotten from the office and unlocked the door to room number 5 and ducked under the SHERIFF’S LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape we’d festooned across the door. At the front desk, I had asked the girl who had one headphone in her ear if she’d heard any motorcycles this morning, but she’d said no.

I asked her if she usually wore both headphones while cleaning.

She said yes, she did.

I asked her if she’d cleaned Tuyen’s room this morning.

She said that she would have cleaned the room, but that he hadn’t been around and they never entered a room without the occupant’s expressed permission.

I asked her if she was kidding.

She said she wasn’t.

I asked about the previous night, but she said that they pretty much closed up at nine and always left a number that would reach the owners if there were any problems, that they lived only three-quarters of a mile away.

I told her she could put the other headphone back in now.

* * *

I had turned Bill McDermott and his crew loose. I figured that the more important crime scene was the Dietz barn and that Henry and I could go over Tuyen’s room as a preliminary before calling in the cavalry.

The place was as I’d left it hours before. There was a large bloodstain at the foot of the bed, a smaller one further in, and an intermittent trail that led to the adjoining room and bathroom.

I turned and looked at Henry, who was still standing in the doorway. “If you came through that door and someone was waiting to hit you, where would they stand?”

He looked around the entryway and to his right. “Behind the door.”

“Okay, you want to come in and close that?” He did as requested and then joined me in looking at the distance from the door to the first bloodstain. “What’d he do, jump when he got hit?”

“Perhaps the assailant waited until he was farther inside?”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. I mean, if you were planning on getting somebody, would you wait until he closed the door and took three or four steps before you hit him? Especially someone as physically capable as Tuyen?”

“So, you think he knew him?”

I walked toward the bed and kneeled beside the larger of the two stains. “I didn’t get much out of him, but he said that someone had struck him from behind, that he had hit the ground, started to get up, failed, and then hit the floor again.”

Henry stood by the dresser. “That would explain the first pool of blood, and then he tries to get up and falls where the smaller one is. Did he say he was unconscious before you got there?”

"Off and on.”

He squatted down beside me. “Where was the wound?”

“Right side of the head and toward the back, just at the crown.”

“Just one?”

“I’m not sure.”

Henry looked back toward the door. “Is it possible that he was struck once, and then, when he started to rise, the assailant hit him again? That would explain the two stains.”

“It’s possible.” I studied the spread that had been flung back from the corner of the bed, revealing the end of the angle-iron bed rail and the corner of the mattress, stained with blood.

Henry studied the corner of the bed frame. “So he was struck and then hit the corner?”

“Maybe.”

The Cheyenne Nation studied me. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I want to talk to Tuyen.” I stood and noticed that the metal case that was in Tuyen’s car was on the dresser. “Under the strictest sense of the law, I’m not really supposed to be going through his personal items.”

“No.”

I walked over to the bureau and flipped the leather-wrapped handle. “He didn’t say anything about missing his wallet and nothing else in the room seems disturbed, which leads me to believe that it wasn’t a robbery attempt.” I nudged the corner of the case with my finger. “Heavy; possibly a computer. If I was going to steal something in this room, I think I’d start with this.”

“Yes.”

"That makes this a suspicious item.”

"Yes.”

“And as a duly appointed law-enforcement official, it would be my responsibility to open it.”

“Yes.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“Yes?”

“It’s locked.”

With a sigh of exasperation, Henry slid the case toward him and flipped it up, looking at the four-digit combination. He paused for a moment and then rolled the thumbwheels until it read 1975. “Fall of Saigon.”

Click.

 

 

I heard the safety go off but wasn’t sure where. The bouncer still stood in front of us, big, too big to be Vietnamese—probably Samoan. Our noses were about six inches apart—I was a couple of inches taller, but he probably had me by a good forty pounds. The really disconcerting part was that he was the one wearing a cowboy hat.

Baranski held his badge over my shoulder into the giant’s face. “Look, Babu, Criminal Investigation Detachment. We’re on a homicide investigation.”

That much was true.

“We’re working with your own ARVN intelligence sector...”

Not particularly true.

"... And if you don’t step aside, I’m going to tell USMC specialist Longmire here to drag you over to the Long Bin stockade and specialize in stomping a puddle in your chest and walkin’ the motherfucker dry.”

Hopefully true.

He didn’t move, but after a few seconds, he turned toward a slick-looking little fellow standing to the side, who disappeared behind the giant and then reappeared. He nodded his head, and the bouncer slipped to the left. I took a step forward but kept my face to him as Baranski and Mendoza passed behind me.

“Fuck you, son-of-bitch.”

I slowly smiled my best Powder River grin, the one that would’ve made Owen Wister proud. “Smile when you call me that.”

Western Town’s theme was western, but whose was anybody’s guess. The ubiquitous dancing girls wore white go-go cowgirl boots and either cheap costume cowboy hats or multicolored war bonnets, the kind that came from the Woolworth’s back home. In the dim light, I could see the walls were raggedly festooned with western movie posters that were hand-painted with Vietnamese print or maybe Japanese. I could hardly move with the amount of people in the place; nearly all were locals, but the few servicemen who were mixed in with the mass of civilians were mostly enlisted. It looked like we were the brass, for better and probably worse. Mendoza and Baranski were already scouting the crowd but, from their continued craning, it was pretty clear that they hadn’t spotted Hollywood Hoang yet.

Mendoza leaned in and spoke above the music. “You stay here, man, and we’ll walk through and see if we can’t flush him out.”

“What about the back?”

He shook his head. “This your first time to the rodeo? There ain’t no back door.”

I watched as they disappeared into the crowd. There was a dance floor where Jim Ed Brown’s “Pop a Top” warbled through the narrow building and made me homesick. I planted myself against a newel post leading to a stairwell to the basement and a beaded door. I was tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, so I closed my eyes for only a second. When I opened them, there was a teensy Vietnamese woman in a brightly feathered child’s war bonnet who was standing on tiptoes to get my attention. “You like dance?”

“No, thanks.”

“I give special plice?”

“No, that’s okay.” It was easy to see over her; only the tips of the feathers were in my line of sight. With the constant flux of people going in and out, it was hard to keep track, but if Hoang was wearing his trademark powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf, I figured he’d be easy to pick out of the crowd.

She stepped in closer and put her hands on my uniform. “Special plivate dance?”

I blew on the feathers to get them away from my face. “No, really . . .”

“You look for fliend?”

“No...” I glanced down, and her eyes carried a greater intensity than they should have. “What?”

Her voice lowered but still held the same urgency. “You look for fliend?”

I was glancing over her head for either Baranski or Mendoza, neither of whom were in sight. “No, really, I’m a monk.”

She stared at me for a moment, looked back into the main part of the room, and then glanced down the stairs leading to the basement. “Onree you.”

I stood there looking at the sheen of the Southeast Asian night on her skin and thought of Mai Kim. I was assaulted by the hokey music, and the tumblers fell into place. “Do you know Hoang? Hollywood Hoang?”

Her eyes flicked back over her shoulder and then down the stairs again. “Onree you.”

“Is Hoang down there?” Her face remained immobile. “I’m not going to hurt him, but I can’t leave this spot unless he’s down there.”

The feathers bobbed imperceptibly as she nodded. My nod was just as slight. I slipped around the railing and started down the steps and thought about Hoang—how much he’d thanked me for saving his life in Khe Sanh, and how, if he’d really wanted to kill me, he probably would have already. He’d certainly had a bunch of opportunities.

But you never knew.

I unsnapped the strap on my .45 and pulled the hammer back. There was no door, just the beaded curtain, and it was dark. I thought about what a great backlit target I was making, parted the curtain, and stepped through.

The basement was even narrower than the bar. I walked past a dirt shelf that held a bunch of tiny compressors that looked more like gerbil wheels than coolers as they valiantly attempted to keep the upstairs, well, cool. There were boxes to my left, stacked to the ceiling as far as the light from the doorway would allow me to see. Jim Ed Brown had given way to Buck Owens and the Buckaroos upstairs, so I raised my voice a little and rolled the loaded but still holstered dice. “Hoang?”

I thought I could make out the sound of a movement behind me and to my right. I turned slowly and looked into the beer-can barrel of a Walther PPK silenced pistol.

His eyes were wide, and sweat had saturated the powder-blue jumpsuit to a sopped navy. I raised my hands without being bidden. “How are you, Hoang?” He didn’t say anything and scanned to the right for anybody who might’ve been following me. “I’m alone.”

His eyes couldn’t remain still, and I could see the barrel of the pistol shaking in his hands. “Mai Kim...”

“She’s dead.”

His eyes welled, and he half swallowed, like there was something in his throat that wouldn’t go down. He looked at the ground between us, but the pistol stayed where it was. After a few seconds, his voice wavered. “You know who kill her?”

I lowered my hands a little and he didn’t seem to take exception, so I let them drop to my sides and slowly placed the .45 in my duty holster but left the safety off and the leather strap unsnapped. “You know, that’s funny—we had a little discussion about that; your name came up.”

He shook his head vehemently. “I no kill Mai Kim.”

I was developing a hard-fought talent in Vietnam for being able to tell if people were lying to me. He was convincing, and I let the weight of it settle and drift us toward more conversation. “Well, then, who did?”

“I no kill Mai Kim!” The fat barrel faltered a moment then came closer to my face; I turned my palms out and took a half-step back, dropped my gun hand down, and gestured with the other. “All right, all right.” He switched the gun to his other hand. “If you didn’t kill her, then why are you holding a pistol on me?”

His lips compressed, and he swallowed again, the barrel not moving. “You on up?”

“What?”

“You on up?”

I inclined my head. “You mean the up-and-up?”

He nodded. “Up-up.”

I took a breath and sighed. “Yep, I’m on the up-up or else why would I be in a bar basement off Tu-Do Street with my sidearm back in its holster?”

He paused for a moment, took a deep breath that caused his whole body to shudder, and then lowered the Walther. I took another half-step back to show him I’d meant what I’d said, leaned against the dirt shelf, and listened to the rickety compressors and Buck and the Buckaroos. “Hoang, if I wanted you dead, I’d have left you in the mud at Khe Sanh.”