by Robert Crais
It was still before eleven, and the restaurant was empty except for an ancient Vietnamese woman wrapping forks and spoons in white cloth napkins. Preparing for the lunch-hour rush. I smiled at her. “Do you have a take-out menu?”
She gave me a green take-out menu. “You early.”
“Too early to order?”
She shook her head. “Oh no. We serve.”
I ordered squid fried rice with honey, and told her that I would wait out front on the sidewalk. She said that would be fine.
I stood around out front with the little menu and tried to look as if I had nothing on my mind except food, and snuck glances in the Journal office next door. An Asian woman in her early sixties sat at a wooden desk, talking on the phone. Behind her, the walls were lined with corkboard and about a million little bits of paper and photographs and what looked like posters for community events had been pinned to the board. A couple of ratty chairs were at the front of the office, and another desk sat opposite the woman’s, this one occupied by a young Asian guy who looked to be in his twenties. He wore a Cal Tech sweatshirt and tiger stripe field utilities and Top-Siders without socks. He was leaning back, the Top-Siders up on the desk, reading a paperback. A half wall split the space into a front and a back, only you couldn’t see the back from here in the front. Maybe Clark was in the back. Maybe I could whip out my gun, charge through the front into the back, and shout, “Gotcha!” Be impressive as hell if he was really there.
The young guy saw me looking. I smiled and took a copy of the Journal from a wire rack bolted to the front of the building, just another bored guy killing time while he waited for his food. It was a tabloid-sized Vietnamese-language newspaper filled with articles I couldn’t read and pictures of Vietnamese people that I took to be from the local community. The printing was cheesy and smudged, and I wondered if maybe Clark had been hired to give them a more professional look. “Do you read Vietnamese?”
The young guy was standing in the door. Inside, the woman was still on the phone, but now watching me.
I shook my head and put down the paper. “No. I’m just waiting for some food next door. I was curious.”
He grinned. “They’re free. Help yourself, if you want. They make a great birdcage liner.” Mr. Friendly.
I strolled back past the restaurant and up a short alley, looking for the rear entrance. One of the wonderful things about being so close to the water is that the temperatures are so mild that you rarely have to use air-conditioning. It was in the low seventies, so the Journal’s rear door was open for the air. I peeked inside. Furtive.
No Clark.
I listened at the door, then stepped in. An Apple laser printer was humming on a little desk beside another door that led to a bathroom. Industrial metal shelves were stacked with reams of paper and office supplies and a well-used Mr. Coffee, but nothing screamed counterfeiter and I didn’t see any of the things that Clark had marked in his catalogs.
I slipped out, went around to the front again, and this time I walked into the Journal office. The young guy was back with his book and the older woman looked up from her word processor. The young guy smiled, but the older woman didn’t. I said, “My name is Elvis Cole, and I’m looking for Clark Hewitt.” I put one of my cards on the young guy’s desk. “His life is in danger and I’m trying to help him. I’m also trying to help his children.” Sometimes honesty is the best policy.
The young guy’s smile vanished, and the woman said something in Vietnamese. The young guy answered, also in Vietnamese.
I said, “Sorry?”
The young guy stared at me for a couple of seconds before he shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You could tell that he did. You could tell that he knew exactly what I was talking about, and that he did not like it that I had asked, or that I knew.
I glanced at the woman, and she turned away. Fast.
I said, “I’m driving a 1966 Corvette convertible parked down the block. It’s yellow. I’ll be sitting in it.”
I went to the restaurant, paid for my food, then walked back to my car, put the top up to cut the sun, and sat. The squid fried rice was excellent, but I didn’t have much of an appetite for it.
Twenty minutes later the guy in the Cal Tech sweatshirt came out to the street, looked at me, then went back inside. Sixteen minutes after that, a black 500-series Mercedes sedan circled the block twice, two Asian men in their mid-sixties inside. I copied their license number. Maybe eight minutes after that, a bright red Ferrari Spyder appeared from the opposite direction and eased to a stop a car length away from me. Whoever these guys were, they had money. The Ferrari was driven by a very young Asian guy, but an older man was in the shotgun seat, and, like the people in the Mercedes, both of them were nicely dressed in Italian business suits. I copied the Ferrari’s plate number, too. The two men in the Ferrari stared at me for a couple of minutes, talking to each other, and then the young guy rolled down his window and eased next to me to talk. I said, “Clark Hewitt.”
The young guy shook his head. “Got no idea who that is.” Flawless English without a trace of an accent. Local.
“I think you do.”
The young guy looked nervous, but the older guy seemed calm. The younger guy said, “My mother works at the paper, and you’re scaring her. I’m going to ask you to leave.” I guess the paper was a family business, but it probably didn’t pay for his Ferrari.
“Do you own the paper?”
“I think you should leave.”
I settled back in my seat. “Can’t leave until I see Clark Hewitt.”
The older man said something, and the younger guy shook his head. “We never heard of the guy.”
“Fine.” I crossed my arms and made like I was going to take a nap.
The older man mumbled something else, and the younger guy said, “Are you the police?”
“Clark knows who I am. I gave your mother a card.”
The older man leaned past the younger guy. “If you don’t leave, we’ll have to call the police.”
“Go ahead. We can talk about Clark and his association with your newspaper.”
The younger guy’s jaw flexed, and now he said something to the older guy. “You’re not going away?”
“No.”
The younger guy nodded. “Big mistake.”
He dropped the Ferrari into first gear and rocketed away, tires screaming and filling the air with smoke and burning rubber. Guess he’d seen someone do that in a movie.
The Mercedes left, too.
I waited. I had found the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, and I had found some people who clearly knew Clark Hewitt. I was making gangbuster progress, and I was feeling proud of myself. Elvis Cole, Smug Detective.
Ninety seconds after the Ferrari roared away three men came out of the alley and approached me. They weren’t in Italian business suits, and they didn’t look as if they would’ve been any more impressed by a kid peeling out than I had been. They looked hard and lean and focused with flat, expressionless faces, and all three were wearing long coats. They walked with their hands in their coat pockets, and when they reached the car the one in the middle pulled back his coat enough to reveal a stubby black Benelli combat shotgun. He said, “Guess what you’re going to do?”
“Leave?”
He nodded.
“Tell Clark I’ll be back.”
I started the car and drove away.
Honesty might be the best policy, but leaving is the better part of valor.
22
I drove back to Belmont Pier, parked in front of a shop that sold whale-watching tickets, and used a pay phone there to call Lou Poitras. He said, “Bubba, you really take advantage.”
“Funny. Your wife said the same thing.”
Poitras sighed. “Just tell me what you want.” Humor. You break them down with humor, and victory is yours.
I gave him the two license numbers, asked for an ID, and waited while he brought it up on his computer. It took less
than twenty seconds. “The Mercedes is registered to a Nguyen Dak of Seal Beach.” Seal Beach is one of the wealthier communities along the south beach.
“What about the Ferrari?”
“Guy named Walter Tran. He’s down in Newport Beach.” Another big-money community.
I said, “These guys show a history?” Asking him if they’d ever been arrested.
“Couple of speeding tickets on the Ferrari, but that’s it. You want to tell me what this is about?”
“Nope.” I hung up, bought an iced tea from a sausage grill, then stared at the bay. The water was clean and blue, and Catalina was in sharp relief twenty-six miles away. A young woman in short-shorts and a metallic blue bikini top Rollerbladed past on the bicycle path. I followed her motion but did not see her. The detective in thoughtful mode. I had never heard of Nguyen Dak or Walter Tran, but that didn’t mean anything. Multicultural crime was flourishing with the Southland’s growing diversity, and it was impossible to keep up. I had also never heard of the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, but I was pretty sure I knew someone who had.
I went back to the pay phone, and called this reporter I know named Eddie Ditko. Eddie is old and cranky and sour, but he is nothing if not a joy. “Christ, I got gas. You get to be my age, even water makes you cut the cheese.” You see?
“You ever heard of the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal?”
He went into a coughing fit.
“Eddie?” He was coughing pretty bad.
“Jesus, I’m choking to death.”
“I’ll hang up and call nine-one-one.” The coughing was getting worse.
“Screw nine-one-one. They’d probably just put you on hold.” He made a gakking sound, then got the coughing under control. “Christ, I just popped up something looks like a hair ball.”
“That’s more than I needed to know.”
“Yeah, well, try living with it. Getting old is hell.”
“Pacific Rim Weekly Journal.” Sometimes you have to prompt him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold your water and lemme see what we got.” He was probably scanning the Examiner’s computer database.
“Check out Nguyen Dak and Walter Tran while you’re at it.”
“Christ, you’re pushy.” He made a hawking sound, then he spit. Sweet. “Here we go. It’s a political soapbox for nationalist Vietnamese who want their country back. LAPD’s Antiterrorist Task Force has them on the monitor list.”
The blader with the metallic top rolled past in the opposite direction. I said, “Political terrorists?”
“You know how the Cubans in South Florida want to overthrow Castro? It’s the same thing. The Pacific Rim Weekly Journal raises money and lobbies politicians to discourage normalization with the Commies.” Commies. “They also advocate the overthrow of the Communist government over there, and under our statutes that qualifies as terrorism, so LAPD has to waste money watching them.”
“What do you mean, ‘waste’?”
More coughing. Another hawking sound, and then the spitting. “Christ, that one had legs.”
“Why a waste, Eddie?”
“We did a feature on these guys in the Orange County edition a couple of years back. Dak and Tran and some of their pals fund the paper, but it’s not how they make their living. They’re self-made millionaires. Dak washed dishes until he scraped together the money to open a noodle shop. That led to more noodle shops, and pretty soon he was building strip malls. Tran bought a goddamned carpet shampooer to wash rugs after the day shift, and now he’s got six hundred employees.”
I thought about Tran in his Ferrari. “Tran’s a young guy.”
“You must be talkin’ about his kid, Walter Junior. Walter Senior’s gotta be in his sixties. These guys came here with nothing, and now they’re living the American dream.”
“Except that they’re listed as terrorists.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t come over here for the oranges. They fled Vietnam to escape the Communists, and they damn well want the Commies out so they can go home.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
I put down the phone and stared at the Rollerbladers and thought about self-made men without criminal records who just want to go home. Good Republicans with a raggy little newspaper and a career counterfeiter on the payroll. Maybe they couldn’t quite raise enough money for the cause through strip malls and carpet cleaning and political action committees, so now they were branching out into crime. Crime, after all, is America’s largest growth industry.
I made one more call, this time to Joe Pike. “You hear from Lucy?”
“Yes.” She had given him her flight information, and he passed it to me. She would be arriving on a Delta flight from New Orleans in a little less than two hours, and she would expect me to pick her up. She had made arrangements to stay with Tracy, and, if I couldn’t make it, I was to call Tracy.
“Kids okay?”
Pike hung up. I guess too much time with Charles will do that to you.
I worked my way back onto the freeway and made the long drive north to LAX, periodically checking the mirror for Russians, federal agents, and Vietnamese thugs with Benelli autoloading shotguns. If I could bring these guys together, we could have quite a party.
The traffic was dense and sluggish, but I found myself smiling more often than not, and feeling pretty good about things. I was getting closer to Clark, and I was only minutes away from seeing Lucy. I had been neither shot nor beaten in almost three days. Happy is as happy does.
I was still happy when Lucy Chenier came out of the jetway, saw me, and opened her arms. She was wearing a charcoal suit and carrying an overnight bag. She wasn’t smiling, but that was okay. I was smiling enough for both of us.
We hugged, and I could feel the tension in her back and shoulders, and the strength there. I whispered into her hair, “It is so good to see you. Even for a rotten reason like this.” Her hair smelled of peaches.
She hugged harder, and an overweight man with no hair scowled because we were blocking his way.
“You want me to take you to Tracy’s?”
“I want to spend some time with you first. There’s something that we need to talk about.” Her face was composed and empty of emotion, and I thought it must be her game face. The same face she would use in court; the face she had used when she was working her way through college on a tennis scholarship.
“Okay. Do you have bags?”
“Only this.” She let me carry her bag, and as we walked to the car she said little. Focused, I guess. Sleek and stripped down and ready for war. Or maybe she was just scared.
Once we were on the freeway, she brought my hand into her lap, holding it tight with both of hers. I thought she might fear letting go. I said, “Does Ben know what’s going on?”
Her eyes were not quite on the creeping red lights ahead of us. “No. I’ve always kept the bad things between me and Richard from him. I’ve thought that was best.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t want him in the middle.”
“Of course.”
She glanced at me. “I don’t want you in the middle either.”
I looked at her. A woman in a black Jaguar cut in front of us and I had to brake. “Luce, there is no middle here for me. I love you, and I’m with you. I’ll help any way I can.”
A tiny smile worked at her lips. The smile was so small that it was almost impossible to see. I almost didn’t. She said, “I know that you do, but I have to do this without you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s important to me that you understand that I’m not being selfish. This isn’t about Ben.”
“All right.”
“When we got divorced, I offered Richard open visitation rights. He never took advantage of it. When Ben would stay with Richard on weekends, or during the summer or on holidays, Richard was never there. He would hire a sitter, or drop Ben at his grandmother’s. What’s happening now isn’t about Ben, it’s about me, and Richard’s need to control me, so
please don’t think that I’m this horrible woman who’s stealing a man’s child.” She looked at me then, and something in great pain was peeking through the composure. “I am not the villain here.”
“Luce, you never could be.” She said it all as if she’d spent most of the flight thinking it through. I guess that she had. “And you don’t have to explain yourself or your former marriage to me.”
She looked at our hands, twined there in her lap. “I know you want to help me through this. You already have, and I’m grateful, but you can’t help me anymore.” She tugged at my hand, and when I looked over I think she was trying not to cry. “I will not have my life defined by triangles. It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to me. Richard is my mistake, and I have to live with it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“What’s going on now is between me and Richard, and only us. I need it to be that way. Do you understand?”
“No.”
She frowned. “This is all about control, and he has to know that he can’t control me, or intimidate me.” She frowned harder. “I have to know that, too.”
I stared at her. Lucy Chenier seemed like the most uncontrollable woman I’d ever met, but maybe she hadn’t always been so, and maybe she needed to remind herself.
“I could just shoot him. That would solve the problem.”
She smiled, and it was warm. “I know, but then you would have saved me, and I wouldn’t have saved myself. This is for me.”
“Okay.”
“I am the saver, and not just the savee.”
“You don’t want me to be with you at KROK.”
She squeezed my hand again. “No, you can’t be there.”
I didn’t like it, but I tried not to look sulky.
“Richard and I will be the only two players on the court, and when I kick his ass, and get his good-old-boy buddy up the proverbial creek, Richard will think twice about ever trying anything like this again.”
I looked at her, and thought that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. “Can I shoot him later?”
She smiled again, and this time patted my hand. “We’ll see.”