A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Bingo,” Mike said.

  I said, “Bao Ngo, I presume.”

  The box was full of clean white bones, with a naked, grinning human skull on top.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Mike said. “I’ll go call the local cops.”

  He turned toward the stairs, but stopped so suddenly that Max and I turned to see what had happened.

  “If you please.” Minh Tam stood on the bottom riser, a dirty 9mm automatic held loosely in his grip. “Stay where you are, please.”

  I felt more afraid of the careless way he waved the gun than I did about his intentions.

  As a lover who needed comforting might, I put my arm around Mike’s waist and slipped my hand inside the back of his jacket. He wrapped his arm around me. My hand found the Airweight holstered at the small of his back. I unclipped the holster tab and lifted out the small gun. Mike’s free arm went to his side and I pressed the butt of the gun against his open palm for an instant. He kissed my cheek, and then dropped his hand to the side where Minh could see it, yet in position to take the gun from me in a big hurry.

  I challenged Minh: “How did you get here?”

  “Your very efficient assistant, Miss Ferguson. She has been so helpful to me for the last two days, helping me to know where you are.” He smiled wickedly. “You see, ever since you put me in the hotel room, Miss Ferguson has assumed you and I were friends. It was she who told me where you were dining last night. And with whom.”

  The light dawned. I said, “You were at the restaurant last night.”

  “I stand upon my right against self-incrimination.”

  “Dowd was mad at me because he thought I killed Scotty,” I said. “But it was you.”

  Minh’s gun came up level with my eyes. Mike’s hand twitched and Minh saw it.

  Minh snapped, “You, the policeman, I need to see your hands.”

  Without so much as a glance my way, Mike slowly raised his hands. I did the retiring violet thing, slipped behind Mike as if I needed a shield, used him as cover to slide the gun into my belt, covered by the front of my wool blazer.

  “Policeman, move away from Maggie and turn around.”

  Mike did as he was told. Minh patted him down. “Don’t policemen carry arms?”

  “Not on airplanes,” Mike said.

  “All right,” Minh said.

  Mike came back and stood close beside me again. His hand bumped the gun butt under my jacket, making sure it was there.

  “If you please,” Tam said, waving that 9mm again. “I would appreciate very much if you would help me to wrap the collection for shipment. I have a truck outside.”

  Max tightened his grip on the ax handle.

  “Take everything, Minh, and good riddance,” I said. “You don’t need the gun.”

  Minh walked over to inspect our discoveries. Everything we had found was laid out along one single shelf. He smiled as he fondled the jade dancers, but he never forgot about us.

  “Where is the rest?” Minh demanded.

  “We don’t have a key for that last cupboard,” I said. “Everything else is just what you see.”

  “There has to be more.” Minh measured the cupboard with a dubious eye. Then he looked straight at me, angry. “You have sent many things away from here before I arrived. Where have you put them?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve never seen this stuff before.”

  “But where has it gone?”

  “My guess?” I said. “Over a twenty-some-year period it bought a lot of houses and cars, started a few businesses, paid off some debts. This is all that’s left.”

  “Houses and cars?” Distraught, he picked up an empty box and threw it to the floor. The gun in his left hand swept the room. “Houses and cars? The legacy of my people sold off for crap?”

  In a calm voice, Mike said, “Be careful that gun doesn’t go off accidentally.”

  Minh stopped flailing around, held the gun out in front of him stiffly. His face was red, but he was simmering down.

  I said, “Until late last night, I had no idea anything was hidden down here. If I had, I would have turned it over to the authorities.”

  “What authorities would you call? Your government? The Vietnamese government? I will take everything with me now. Where is the key to these last doors?”

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Dowd, coming from the laundry room under the stairs, aimed a .38 Magnum at Minh’s sternum. Dowd looked bad. His right arm was in a sling, the scrapes on his face had fresh red scabs. Like mine.

  “Minh Tam,” Dowd said in a slow, controlled voice. “Put the gun inside that first cupboard and shut the doors.”

  Dowd kept his gun trained on Minh until he complied. I was relieved to have that loose cannon out of the equation, but Dowd, well, here was a loose cannon of another variety.

  Max squeezed my hand. Under his breath he muttered, “Look at the time.”

  I glanced at my watch. Casey and my dad could arrive at any moment. Whatever was going to happen here, I desperately did not want my daughter to walk into the middle of it.

  Mike spoke to Dowd. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “I am the business partner of the late, and lamented, Scott MacGowen.” Dowd dipped his head to me. “My apologies to you. I heard what this asshole Minh said just now. You’re right. I did think it was you who hit Scotty. And I thought for a while that it was you who hit Khanh Nguyen. I didn’t see how it could possibly be anyone else. Now I get it. Minh, I should have shot you when I had the chance in 1975. You’ve messed me up royal.”

  “You were following me and my daughter,” I said.

  “Scotty asked me to look after you and the girl,” Dowd said. “He and Khanh were afraid of what Minh here might pull. Guess he had reason to be scared.”

  “Khanh sent me off to find Minh,” I said.

  “And you did a damn good job. We sent a private dick in, but he didn’t get anywhere. People were easier about talking to you.” Dowd smiled, proud of something. “We kept you busy down south for a while, didn’t we? Scotty needed some time, and Khanh agreed to give him some. She even had you looking for a dead man.”

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  “See those cupboards?” Dowd’s thumb pointed across the room. “Arrangements had to be made.”

  “What arrangements? We can get this stuff packed up in ten minutes and walk it up the stairs for you. Way too much fuss over a few artifacts.”

  “That shit is fluff. Nothing. Crate filler.” I had made him chuckle, the sadistic bastard. “Mrs. MacGowen, why don’t you go on over and open those locked doors?”

  When I started across the room to get the ax from Uncle Max, Mike began to come with me.

  “She’s a big girl,” Dowd said, training the gun on Mike. “She can do it all by herself.”

  I wedged the pick end of the ax in the hasp of the padlock and put all my weight on it. It took three tries, but finally the lock snapped and I opened the last set of doors.

  It didn’t hit me right away what I was seeing. There were four wooden crates, each the size of the coffin that held the set of bones lying on the floor beside me. The crates weren’t very big, but their contents were heavy enough to make the solid shelving sag. Like the coffin, all of them had Bank of the Republic of Vietnam stenciled on the side.

  “No.” Minh screamed. He charged for the shelves and managed to rip the top off one of the crates, didn’t seem to notice when he gouged his finger on a nail. He left a smear of blood across his face when he tried to wipe tears from his eyes. Stunned, he dropped to his knees and appealed, almost prayerfully, to Dowd. “Not this. Please. Where are the ivories? Where are the treasures?”

  “Most of it’s at the bottom of the South China Sea,” Dowd said. “Been there since 1975. You didn’t really think we’d let you waste valuable barge space on a bunch of old broken pots, do you? This is gold, asshole. Pure, solid gold.”

  “But Bao Ngo brought a cargo.” Minh refused to believe. “
It was reported. He came through Customs.”

  “Sure he did. We put enough of Bao’s pots in the crates to make the shipment look legit. The crates were the thing. Bao brought shit in crates lined with bullion.” Dowd caressed one of the wooden boxes. “This is what Scotty and I sent out with Bao. Or what’s left of it.

  “You see my problem here, don’t you?” Dowd sighed. “The trick is finding a way to move the shit, and a place to stow it, without leaving a paper trail or witnesses. Not like I can rent a U-Haul. The sad truth is, without Scotty, I’m stumped what to do next.”

  I pointed to the open box on the floor. “Is this Bao?”

  Dowd nodded. “Poor bastard.”

  “Khanh knew he was dead?”

  “Oh, yeah. She did the ceremony, put the bones in the box, burned the incense.”

  “Who killed him?” Mike asked.

  Dowd shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It had occurred to me that the possibility was very good that all of us weren’t going to walk out of the basement. From the brightness in his eyes, I knew that Mike had similar thoughts.

  The ax was still in my hand. Mike came up beside me on the pretext of getting a better look at the loaves of gold inside the box Minh opened. He slipped an arm around my waist, in a reversal of the earlier exchange, and palmed the gun butt.

  “What’s all this worth?” Mike asked, looking owlish.

  Dowd shrugged. “Plenty.”

  “Then I guess you’re set for a while.” Mike grinned at him. “None of us really gives a damn what you do from here. How about the rest of us just walk on upstairs and right out the front door? All I’ve had to eat since dinner last night was a bag of airline peanuts. I’m thinking a big breakfast down on the Wharf is a damn good idea. After we eat, we’ll have a long walk, maybe take in a movie. Will that give you enough time to finish your business here?”

  “Not hardly.” Dowd laughed. “Look, you people are okay. Mrs. MacGowen and me got off to a bad start, and I’m sorry about that. I think that if we could start over, we could get along okay. Be real nice for all of us to go on out and have that breakfast. But I know, and you know, that isn’t going to happen.”

  Max, ever the litigator, stepped forward. “As I see the situation, and from what I’ve heard, Minh Tam is the only one here who is in legal jeopardy. Maggie, am I wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “Not from where I sit.”

  “You wouldn’t have any reason to file any charges against Mr. Dowd for, say, assault, would you?”

  “Not as long as I can go get breakfast pretty soon. I’m starving.”

  Max turned to Mike. “Anything to add?”

  “One thing. I’ll hook up Minh and drive him over to the local cop house. I seem to recall hearing him confess to the murder of Ian Scott MacGowen, late of Denver, Colorado.”

  “You’re all very funny,” Dowd said. He wasn’t going to let us go. The strange thing was, he looked sad about what he had to do.

  “Mom?” From upstairs, I heard Casey’s voice. “Where are you?”

  We all froze; I felt hollowed, nearly crazed with panic.

  In the lull, Minh made his move. Screaming, “You bastards,” he dove for the cupboard where he’d put his dirty little 9mm.

  In the instant it took Dowd to raise his Magnum and find Minh in its sights, I snapped Minh on the legs with the ax handle, tripping him, sending him in a headlong roll across the concrete floor. The barrel of Dowd’s Magnum bobbed as he adjusted and readjusted his aim. As I leaned forward to trip Minh, I felt Mike’s Airweight slide up and away from my belt. Max flew into me, dropped me, covered me, so I never saw Mike actually fire the bullet that cleaved Dowd’s skull.

  A perfect red dot, like an Indian caste mark on Dowd’s forehead, was two degrees off dead center.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Bowser pulled against the leash, as anxious to get home again as he had been eager to go out. I wondered: If he knew this would be the last time we walked up our hill and turned a key in the door of the house at the top, would he be so eager? I confess, I felt more than a little wistful.

  The morning air was crisp, freshened by a stiff offshore breeze that carried the scent of roasting garlic up from the crab vendors on Fisherman’s Wharf; whole bulbs as big as a child’s fist, grown down south in Gilroy.

  The gulls were on their morning migration between the produce district trash bins—rich when the loading bays closed at nine o’clock—and the prenoon return of the deep-sea fishing charters at the Hyde Street Pier.

  When Mike and I paused to look back at the view across the San Francisco Bay toward Sausalito, a lone gull came down to eye us, lying nearly motionless on the airstream. He started to beg, a squawk so insistent that he made the dog bark.

  I cracked off a bit of the last of the dog biscuits we had brought for bribes and rewards, and tossed it high. The gull swooped down, caught the crumb in midair, circled us once, hoping probably for something better, and then, when there was nothing, sailed back into the current to join his fellows.

  “What a clown.” Mike laughed. “Good catch, though. The Giants could use him.”

  “He’s spoiled,” I said.

  We turned and started walking up the hill again. The sun was warm on my face. The scrapes were nearly healed, the bruises easily hidden by makeup. It was nice to be able to walk around with Mike again without people staring, wondering whether he beat me.

  “We’ve finished the rough cut on the new film,” I said, slipping my arm through his. “I like it very much. We juxtapose Minh Tam with Shannon, fade from Dowd to Tina, overlap the crime scene pictures. Everyone talks about how much they ended up with, which is just about nothing, unless you count life without possibility of parole. The two threads of the story wind along in parallel and then they merge at the morgue.”

  I looked up at Mike. “Did you know that Pedro and Scotty were on the same tier of the big cooler at the morgue for a while? Guido’s footage is incredible.”

  “I’m amazed you can talk about it so easily.” Mike shivered.

  “After you see a sequence of film enough times, it takes on its own reality. Does that happen to you when you’re working a case for a long time? The details become disembodied. The blood doesn’t represent pain after a while. It’s just the spatter pattern on the northwest wall?”

  “That’s how we survive the job.” He followed a gull’s flight overhead, distracted by its antics. “Casey seems better the last couple of days.”

  “The sadness comes and goes,” I said, “In a strange way, Dowd dying the way he did …”

  “‘Dying the way he did?’ It’s okay to say I shot him.”

  “Dowd dying the way he did”—I nudged Mike—“makes it easier for Casey to accept Scotty’s death. Her father got in way too deep with some very bad people, trying to get something he wasn’t entitled to. We were all in danger until you took care of Dowd.”

  “Scotty was a victim?” Mike’s voice held a challenge. He was adamant that I not sugarcoat the truth for Casey. “That’s how she sees it?”

  “No. She holds Scotty responsible. But it’s tough,” I said. “She also has Khanh to sort out, that beautiful life-style based on stolen property. Khanh was always so sweet to her.”

  “What about you?” Mike had a wicked grin on his face. “I did the math. The Porsche Scotty was driving around that sucked you right into his web, made you decide you wanted to marry him, how do you think he bought it?”

  “The same way Khanh bought her house and her restaurant. I’m sure the down payment on my house and more than a few mortgage payments came out of the stash in the basement.”

  “What does that make you?”

  “I don’t know, Mike. Ask me again next month when a check drawn against the proceeds from the sale of that house, bought with ill-gotten gains, goes to Trona to pay for Oscar’s rehab.”

  He laughed and wrapped his arms around me. “I
’ll do that.”

  “There may come a day when you’ll wish you had tucked away just one of those gold bars before the Feds came and took them all.”

  “I might. But I doubt it.”

  “My only regret is that we weren’t able to have all that cash Scotty tried to give me for the house turned over to Linda. He left her and their babies in a mess.”

  “She’ll be okay.”

  The house came into view ahead.

  My neighbor, Felix Mack, serenaded the neighborhood from his front porch, playing “Big Butter and Egg Man” on his tenor sax, borrowing his phrasing from Louis Armstrong, using the racket of the gulls filling the sky above us for counterpoint.

  We stopped below the porch steps to listen.

  Felix ended his tune with a showy flourish. “Morning, Maggie, morning, Mike.”

  “Nice day,” Mike said.

  “A little nippy,” Felix replied. Cold or not, Felix had his shirt open all the way down the front like the street musicians who hang out on the beach steps below Ghirardelli Square. Theirs was a life he craved.

  Felix, a neurosurgeon by profession, could never get far enough past his sweet and nerdy essence to become a true hipster, not even with his big horn between his knees and all of his chest hair showing.

  After my divorce, some of the neighbors assumed that Felix and I would hook up. We tried, but nothing ever stirred between us. Maybe it had something to do with all that visible chest hair, or his need to show it. Or maybe it was simply that he wasn’t Mike Flint.

  “Sorry to hear about Scotty,” Felix said. “I saw him a few days before he died, just gazing up at the house. He didn’t look happy. Didn’t even say hello.”

  “He probably had a lot on his mind,” I said. “Hope your new neighbors will be more quiet for you than we’ve been lately.”

  “I can hope,” Felix chuckled. “I heard you sold the house. What’d you get?”

  “All cash.” I filled him in on the details. Mother wouldn’t approve—never speak of money outside the family—but I thought that the price I got was Felix’s business. The sale of my house affected the value of every house in the neighborhood.