The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again, harder.

  “Sean? You in there?”

  The door opened wide and there he was. Only it wasn’t so much Sean Hallady I noticed. It was the gaping muzzle of the .45 semiautomatic aimed at my face.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Hallady’s bare chest was a tribute to bad tattoo art. Inked above his left nipple was a likeness of Jesus with the words, “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.” On his right chest were renderings of a scorpion, an M-16 rifle, and a marijuana leaf. He was clutching a bottle of Budweiser in his left hand. There were traces of white powder below both nostrils.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said, his eyes asymmetrical and unfocused.

  “I’m just a simple country doctor who doesn’t appreciate guns being pointed in his face. Do me a favor, Sean, and put the pistol down.”

  “Well,” he said, slurring his words, pointing the .45 sideways, the way bad guys do in the movies, “maybe I don’t feel like it.”

  “Looks like you could use another beer.”

  Woozily, he held the bottle up for a closer inspection. That’s when I backhanded his right wrist and twisted the .45 from his grip.

  “Hey, man, you can’t do that.”

  “Apparently I just did.”

  “That’s my gun, dude! Give it back.”

  “Later.” I slid the .45 into the back of my jeans and pushed him inside. “First we need to have a little chat.”

  “What the hell. This ain’t your house. This is my house!”

  “Take a seat, Sean.”

  I shoved him down hard on a brown corduroy couch that had definitely enjoyed better days. On his battered coffee table were copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine and the ossified scraps of a pizza, still in their cardboard box. A Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor flag was tacked to one wall, NASCAR posters elsewhere. Dirty clothes were strewn about the carpeted floor. The TV was tuned to an episode of the The A-Team. I turned down the volume.

  “My name’s Logan. I’m working with the government. I need you to answer a few questions about your trip to Vietnam.”

  “Fuck that noise. Come barging in here all big and bad. I ain’t talking to you.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I ain’t saying shit to nobody about nothing.”

  “I’m trying to help your grandfather, Sean.”

  “My grandfather?” His eyes got wet. “My grandfather’s a great man. He was a hero. In Vietnam.”

  “So I understand. Lemme get you that other beer.”

  “Fuckin-A,” Sean said.

  The refrigerator stank of curdled milk. By the time I returned to the living room with a fresh Budweiser, he’d dozed off with his neck craned back and mouth open. I patted his cheek.

  “Wake up, Sean.” He wouldn’t. I stomped on his bare left foot and he came to with a start. “Here’s your beer.”

  “Cool, thanks, man.” He took a long draw and belched.

  “Sean, I need you to walk me through what happened that last night in Hanoi.”

  “Whadda ya mean? Nothing happened.”

  On TV, Mr. T fired a rocket launcher, sending a truckload of miscreants pirouetting in slow motion across the sky. Hallady was mesmerized by the pyrotechnics. I turned off the tube.

  “Sean, I need you to try and focus.”

  He tried, blinking.

  “Personally,” I said, “it doesn’t matter to me what you did over there. What’s done is done. What’s important is that we close out the books on this whole thing, put it all behind us, so people can get on with their lives, right?”

  Sean Hallady was looking up at me as if I had two heads. “I have no clue what you’re talking about. What night?”

  “The night you and your grandfather killed the guard, Mr. Wonderful.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Wait, what the—are you shittin’ me? That guy got murdered?” He grinned and pumped his left fist. “Dude, that is out-fucking-standing.”

  I said nothing, waiting for him to elaborate. A look came over his face: realization, followed by fear.

  “Wait a minute—you think I killed the dude?”

  I waited.

  “Okay, look.” He rubbed his left temple. “I don’t know where you came up with that, okay, but that’s a complete total raft of bullshit, okay? I didn’t murder nobody. Not in Vietnam, not nowhere. You don’t believe me, gimme a lie detector. I’ll take one right now.”

  “What about your grandfather?”

  “No way.”

  “Revenge can be a powerful motivator, Sean.”

  “My pop-pop, he don’t have it in him to murder a fly. Anybody who says he does is a goddamned idiot.” Sean was starting to get agitated again. “Listen, you know what? This is my house, okay? I live here. And I don’t have to sit here, in my house, listening to some guy I never even ever met come in here, in my house, and talk smack about me and my pop-pop. Now the way I see it, you got two choices: you either leave right now on your own, okay, or they’re gonna be calling an ambulance on your ass.” He started to get up.

  “Sit down, Sean.” I shoved him back down on the couch. “We’re not done.”

  “I didn’t do nothing! And neither did my grandfather. He’s a war hero, and you got no right coming in saying stuff like that. This is bullshit, man!”

  “How do you know? Mr. Wonderful gets stabbed to death and the two of you fly out of Vietnam not long after. You’ve got to admit, it sounds pretty suspicious.”

  “Look, I’m telling you, there’s no way he killed anybody. If you saw him, you’d understand. We got back to the room and went to bed. My cousin’s in medical school down in New Orleans, okay? She was getting an award for being number one in her class. Half my family went. It wasn’t like he ran out or something. We took off the next morning when we were supposed to. The tickets were bought a long time ago, okay? You can check. I mean it ain’t like I’m making this up or some shit.”

  “How much did you drink that night?”

  “Enough.”

  “Meaning you got drunk.”

  He shrugged.

  “Did you pass out?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So you did, in other words.”

  Another shrug. Hallady sipped his beer. “Maybe.”

  “So, maybe, your pop-pop got up when you were sleeping and left the room without you knowing.”

  “Look, I’m telling you, he would’ve never done nothing like that. It ain’t like him. My pop-pop, he don’t have a mean bone in his body.”

  “He swore an oath to ‘get’ Mr. Wonderful if it was the last thing he ever did.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I read it in the newspaper.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s bullshit. Newspapers lie all the time.”

  “So do guys who get kicked out of the corps and use their girlfriends as punching bags.”

  “I ain’t lying.”

  “If I find out otherwise, I’m coming back and you’re going to prison for a long time.”

  “What about my gun? I got rights, you know.”

  I ejected the pistol’s magazine and thumbed all seven bullets onto the floor. I pulled the slide back, ejecting the live round seated in the firing chamber, and tossed the empty .45 on the couch cushions beside him.

  “Hey, man,” he said, “you want a beer?”

  “No, thanks.” A thought hit me as I headed for the door. “You don’t speak Vietnamese, do you Sean?”

  “Are you serious? Dude, I have a hard enough time with English.”

  V

  I called Buzz from the Salt Lake City International Airport as my plane to Los Angeles was about to board. Mindful of the butt-chewing he’d given me for not keeping him apprised of my movements, I recounted how Sean Hallady had denied even knowing of Mr. Wonderful’s death, but that he’d possibly further implicated his grandfather by revealing how Billy Hallady may very well have wandered out of the hotel as Sean snoozed in the hours preceding the murd
er. My game plan, I told Buzz, was to catch a connecting flight from LAX to Rancho Bonita, grab a few hours’ sleep, then get up early the next morning and fly myself in the Ruptured Duck to Redlands, California, where I’d track down and confront the elder Hallady, hoping to exclude him as a suspect or extract a confession.

  Buzz reminded me that the White House, anxious for answers, was still on the warpath. Losing the trade agreement could cost untold American jobs, and losing jobs could prove a liability to the president’s political party in the upcoming elections.

  “The White House wants to get ahead of the story before it breaks,” Buzz said. “That gives us no more than a day. Any chance you can get to Billy Hallady tonight?”

  “If you sent that private jet of yours, I could.”

  “The bird’s tied up on another op.”

  “That’s your only jet? What kind of two-bit operation are you running out there, Buzz?”

  “We’re working for Uncle Sam, Logan, not Warren Buffett.”

  To satisfy Buzz’s demands, I agreed to rent a car after arriving at LAX at 1800. I would then drive to Redlands, about ninety minutes away. With any luck, I told Buzz, I’d make contact with Hallady that night.

  “Get on it,” Buzz said. “Do the best you can.”

  I did the best I could. Unfortunately, United Airlines didn’t. The inbound jet on which I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles had encountered an unspecified mechanical issue, requiring a replacement aircraft be flown in from Chicago—a minimum six-hour delay. There were no available seats on any other United flights departing that afternoon from Salt Lake City to anywhere in the Southern California area. Nor were there on any other airlines. And pulling rank proved pointless.

  “It’s imperative I get to Los Angeles,” I told the blue-blazered, June Cleaver look-alike ticketing agent holding down the fort at United’s customer service counter.

  “Imperative. Great word. Haven’t heard that one this afternoon.” She pecked away on her computer keyboard, pausing every few seconds to tap her teeth with her pen and frown at her monitor. “Unfortunately, every flight’s showing full. The best I can do is rebook you on the replacement aircraft coming in. That’ll get you into Los Angeles around eleven.”

  “OK, look, here’s the deal,” I said, keeping my voice down so the thirty people behind me couldn’t hear. “I’m traveling on official federal business, on a matter of national security. I can give you the telephone number to call of the people I’m working for if you don’t believe me. Please, there must be one seat available on a flight leaving sooner.”

  “Honey, do you know how many times a day I hear that ‘I’m-on-official-government-business’ routine?” She handed me back my boarding pass with a sympathetic smile and gestured over my shoulder to those waiting in line. “Next, please?”

  I called Buzz, got his machine, and left a message explaining my predicament, then brooded. By the time I got into Los Angeles, rented wheels, and hit the road, it was more than an hour past midnight. Fortunately this car wasn’t a Fiat, but a silver, four-door Toyota Camry.

  Satirist Dorothy Parker once famously described the greater Los Angeles area as “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.” Nowhere is that truism more in evidence than east of LA in the grandiosely named “Inland Empire,” a jumble of hardscrabble municipalities that meld together along Interstate 10 into one vast, polluted, contiguous, graffiti-splashed pastiche of commercial warehouses and junkyards, of billboards advertising strip joints and ambulance-chasing attorneys. It is, by any definition, an inordinately unattractive stretch of the modern Americana best driven through in the dark. Then there is Redlands. With its lush, Midwestern-style college campus and grand Victorian homes, the town sticks out among its lesser neighbors like a French poodle at a pit bull convention. Traffic that morning was light. I arrived shortly before 0300 hours—too late, I realized, to go knocking on an old man’s front door, but not too late to reconnoiter where he lived.

  Based on the specifics Buzz’s crew had forwarded, Hallady resided on Cyprus Circle in a tidy, pea-green bungalow with an arched roofline and a front porch flanked by Grecian columns that looked like an architectural afterthought intended to class up the place. Parked in the driveway, under security lights that lit up the entire property, was a tapioca-colored Oldsmobile Delta 88 station wagon, circa 1977, with wood-grain siding and a bumper sticker that said, “Republicans, working like crazy to support the lazy.”

  I parked three doors down where I could keep an eye on the house, tilted the seat back, closed my eyes, and slept nearly four hours straight—the first time I’d done that in as long as I could recall. I found a Denny’s about a mile away near the freeway, availed myself of the men’s room, and ordered coffee, black, along with a short stack of blueberry pancakes, if only to convince myself that my body was a temple and that I was eating healthily. When I was finished eating I walked outside, sat on the hood of my rental Toyota, and returned Alicia Rosario’s call from the previous day.

  “Hope I’m not calling too early.”

  “Not at all. I’m just getting off work.”

  “Off work when most people are going to work. Such is a cop’s life.”

  “You got that right.”

  She asked me how I’d been and said she’d been thinking about me. I made a joke, something about probably owing her money, and she laughed, assuring me that wasn’t at all the case. Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then she said, “So the last time we saw each other, you were thinking about getting back together with your ex. How’d that work out for you?”

  Alicia Rosario was a homicide detective. My guess was that she already knew all about Savannah’s murder—the story had been widely reported—and that she was testing me, gauging whether enough time had passed such that if we did become romantically entangled, the relationship wouldn’t involve her trying to nurse an emotional basket case back to some semblance of mental health.

  “She was killed, Alicia. You may have read about it.”

  “Actually I did. I’m so very sorry, Logan.”

  I thanked her.

  “How’re you doing with all of it, emotionally, I mean?”

  “Good days and bad. Sort of like life, you know?”

  “Yeah. I do. There’s a lot of evil in this world.”

  “Sadly true.”

  Another pause. Her tone brightened. “So, anyway, you got my message about flying lessons? Sounds like it would be a lot of fun.”

  “Famous last words. When were you thinking of coming up to Rancho Bonita?”

  “Whatever works best for you. I’ve got a bunch of leave just sitting on the books. If I don’t use it pretty soon, I lose it. So, you know, whenever. The sooner the better definitely works for me.”

  We made arrangements to get together the following week. I would’ve offered to let her stay at my place, but there’s only the one bed, and I didn’t want her getting the wrong idea. Besides, if she bunked with me, she’d also have Kiddiot to deal with. I wasn’t about to subject anyone to that kind of abuse, especially a woman to whom I found myself attracted. He’d probably find her attractive, too, but one really never knows what a cat thinks of anyone. Especially mine.

  My watched showed 0820. I drove back to Billy Hallady’s house, hoping to finally uncover the truth behind a brutal murder that had occurred 8,000 miles away, involving a man who’d probably had it coming for a long time. And that’s what I found. The truth. Only it wasn’t exactly the kind I had anticipated.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The bell chimed “America the Beautiful” and the dog inside started barking like crazy. After about twenty seconds, a corpulent old lady, in pink curlers and a pink terry cloth robe, cracked open the front door. The skin of her face was baby pink.

  “Ferdinand, hush!” she said to the miniature schnauzer at her feet, yapping and snarling at me from behind the screen door. Ferdinand ignored her.

  “Good morning, ma’am. I apologize if I woke you up. My name’
s Logan. I—”

  “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any.”

  “I’m not selling anything, Mrs. Hallady. I’m here to speak to your husband.”

  “My name’s not Hallady, and my husband’s been dead for eight years.”

  She started to close the door. I opened the screen door and blocked her effort.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, please, but this is very important.”

  She took a step back, her eyes wide with fear. “If you don’t go away, right now, I’m calling the police.”

  I knelt and let Ferdinand sniff my hand. He stopped yapping and wagged his stubby tail as soon as I petted him. My new best friend.

  “I’m looking for Billy Hallady. I’ve come a long way to talk to him. I was told he lives here.”

  “Billy Hallady is my brother; this is his house,” she said. “What is it you want to talk to him about?”

  “It’s about Vietnam.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have been in Vietnam.”

  Her name, she said when I asked, was Dot. I told her that, like her brother, I’d flown combat aircraft, but not in Vietnam. I told her how much she reminded me of my own mother, whose face I can no longer remember, and how much I loved dogs, which was no lie. I told her that her brother and I had mutual friends, and that I was interested in discussing his recent “vacation” in Hanoi because I was thinking about going there myself. Anything to build rapport and get me inside without having to force my way in.

  “Billy’s still sleeping,” Dot said. “He usually gets up around nine.”

  “I’m happy to wait. Promise I won’t be any trouble.”

  She thought about it, watching the way her dog was reacting to me. “Well, if Ferdie thinks you’re not some psycho, then I suppose you’re not. You want some coffee?”

  “Please.”

  I followed her through the living room. The furnishings were a shrine to Naugahyde. In the kitchen was a Formica dining table and harvest gold appliances, circa the Nixon era.

  “You want a doughnut?”

  “More than life itself.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She poured coffee into a chipped green mug from one of those old, stove-top percolators, then strained to grab a box of Hostess mini powdered doughnuts off the top of the refrigerator. I helped her.