Obedience

by Joseph Hansen

  “He’s a man who can’t afford mistakes,” Dave said. “And he doesn’t think I’m going to fail him.” He lifted his glass and gave her a smile. “Why don’t we drink to that?”

  She fretted. “I can’t believe he expected you to nail him for drug smuggling. How would that suit his plans?”

  Dave cocked an eyebrow, shook his head. “Damned if I know.” He tossed back the brandy. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  10

  HE FOLLOWED STREAMS OF red tail lights inland from the coast along miles of broad clean freeway. Before he reached it, a glow in the sky above the hills told him the shopping center was there. A spur of fresh black tarmac curved upward between hills, and when he got to the top, the shopping center sprawled bright below him. Five minutes later, he swung into a vast parking lot landscaped with slender young trees, and crowded with cars, waxed finishes reflecting rainbows from a riot of neon signs.

  Show-windowed shops framed the lot on three sides—women’s wear, beauty parlors, toy stores, book and record shops, jewelers, auto parts suppliers, furniture salesrooms, restaurants of many kinds. The American ones boasted steaks grilled over mesquite fires, barbecued ribs, New York bagels, Boston scrod, New Orleans crab, Maine lobster. There was a fake London fish and chips shop. There were Italian places, French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, West African. He worked his way toward Madame Le’s Pearl of Saigon.

  Inside, the place was a far cry from the cool pastels and hard plastic surfaces of the Hoang Pho. Madame Le had chosen Far East motifs—carved screens, cinnabar and black lacquer, rattan furniture, heavy bamboo beams, palm-leaf roofing, slow-turning ceiling fans, the Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene look. Shadows. Mystery. Intrigue. The spicy food smells perfuming the air were no different from those of the Hoang Pho. The tiny young woman who led him to a table in a sheltered booth was like the one at Hoang Pho. So were the other waitresses and waiters, young, slight, black hair, black eyes, skin smooth as ivory. He ordered brandy and coffee and asked:

  “Is Mr. Fergusson here tonight?”

  She blinked, looked at him warily, “You want to see Mr. Fergusson?”

  “Please,” Dave said. She glanced off someplace, undecided, and he dug out the folder and opened it so she could see his license. “I’m with the Public Defender’s office. I need to talk to him about the death of Mr. Le Van Minh.”

  “Ah.” Dave’s official standing made her brows twitch. She dipped her head. “I will speak to him.” She scurried away. Silver clinked softly on china, glassware tinkled, voices murmured around him in soft rosy light. In a few minutes, the tiny young woman came back with his brandy and coffee and, seeing that he was smoking, fetched him a bulky soapstone ashtray carved with dragons. “Mr. Fergusson be here soon.” With another frightened nod she vanished.

  It wasn’t exactly soon. Dave had time to finish the cigarette, drink half his coffee, half his brandy, and light another cigarette. He pushed back a jacket cuff to see his watch, and when he looked up Fergusson was standing there, young, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, a little sweaty, and giving off kitchen smells. He had got out of an apron and into his jacket hurriedly. Its collar was turned up at the back. One shirt collar point stuck out.

  “I’m Fergusson,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  Dave introduced himself and said, “Sit down. Tell me about the night your father-in-law was killed.”

  “I told it all to the police,” Fergusson said. “As you can see, we’re very busy tonight. Can’t this wait?”

  “The police report says you were here at the restaurant, working on accounts.” Dave nodded at the bench opposite him. Fergusson gave an impatient look around him at his domain and with a sharp sigh sat down. On the seat’s edge. He didn’t relax. “Until midnight. But alone. You have no witness.”

  “What’s wrong?” Fergusson scowled. “The police have Andy Flanagan in jail. It’s an open and shut case.”

  “The Public Defender doesn’t think so,” Dave said.

  “Well, I certainly didn’t do it.” He laughed—not a happy laugh, an angry laugh. “You think I killed Mr. Le? That’s crazy. He’s done more for me than—You’re crazy.”

  “Normally, at that time of night, you’d have been at the Le house with your wife and children, and all the Les, isn’t that right? You enjoy living there?”

  “Of course. They’re the only family I ever had. I love them, they love me. What are you saying?”

  “Your brother-in-law, Hai, said he argued with his father, tried to keep him from leaving the house in response to Andy Flanagan’s phone call. Why?”

  “Come on,” Fergusson taunted. “Have you seen the Old Fleet Marina? That whole district? It’s not safe.”

  “Yet Mr. Le insisted on taking nearly six thousand dollars in cash with him.”

  “Hai was right. He should have gone along.”

  “He looks strong to me. And Mr. Le was frail, isn’t that so? Couldn’t Hai have had his way if he really tried?”.

  Fergusson shook his head sharply. “You don’t understand. It’s a question of custom, the way they do things back in Vietnam. Mr. Le was head of the family, the father, and his word was law. You’re not there to question his decisions. You’re there to obey. Oh, it’s one thing if he asks your opinion. But if he doesn’t, you don’t offer it. He was going to meet Flanagan and try to ease things for the people being dislocated—that’s what the cash was for.

  “He pictured himself going around like Santa Claus handing out money to the boaties who needed it most. It was a bad idea, because it wasn’t enough—anyone could see that. Hell, there were ninety of them. Are. How far was six thousand going to go? And if he did give a few of them enough to really help, then the others would be all over him. There’d be no end to it.”

  Fergusson’s shoulders sagged, he sat back in the chair, reached for Dave’s cigarette pack, took a cigarette from it, lit it with Dave’s lighter. “Thanks. It was a spur-of-the-moment reaction Mr. Le was having. Angry. And guilty. He wanted to shut Flanagan and the rest of them up. He didn’t like the bad publicity. He’d donated to good causes for years in the Vietnamese community. He didn’t like being made out a villain in the newspapers and on TV. He felt he had the right to sell what belonged to him, but he also felt sorry for the boaties. That was why he’d let them stay on way past the deadline.”

  “And now he thought he’d buy them off,” Dave said.

  Fergusson nodded wearily. “He wasn’t thinking clearly. He could be hot-headed. It was late. The call had woken him up. If it was morning, he’d never have tried it.” Fergusson sat forward, twisted out the cigarette, started to rise. “I have to get back to the kitchen. Short-handed tonight. Cooks always call in sick when it’s busiest.”

  “Wait another minute,” Dave said. “I need to know two things, maybe three. First about Ba’s death.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Fergusson moaned. “We’ll none of us get over that. It’s so—incomprehensible.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “He was healthy as I am. Young, lightweight but wiry. And one night he goes to bed and just dies there. It’s weird. But it happens to young South Asian men. And medicine doesn’t have an inkling, not really. Stress, they say.”

  “He wanted to be a poet,” Dave said. “Instead, his father made him work at the warehouse. I guess that might have caused stress. The young think these situations are never going to end, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Fergusson nodded. Grudgingly. “Maybe you’re right. But he was a happy kid. He saw things differently from you and me—he could find little bits of beauty everywhere, point this out to you, that—a patch of paint peeling off a wall, the color of a leaf crushed in the street. He …”—Fergusson rubbed his mouth, frowning, hunting for words—“Life was full of beautiful surprises to him. It was so damned sad for somebody like that to die.”

  “There wasn’t an autopsy,” Dave said. “Why not?”

  “Old Mrs. Le,” Fergusson said. “Ba’s gr
andmother—she’s a Buddhist. They don’t believe in cutting up bodies after death. And if Le Van Minh ran the rest of us, she ran him.” He squinted. “An autopsy?”

  “First, four prominent Vietnamese businessmen are murdered at the Hoang Pho restaurant. Then young Ba dies in his sleep. Then Le Van Minh is murdered at the Old Fleet Marina. All of these deaths within a few weeks of each other. Why should one be an accident?”

  “Why should they connect?” Fergusson said.

  Dave said, “You tell me. Did your father-in-law know Mr. Phat and the others at the Hoang Pho?”

  “Of course. It’s a very tight community, the rich Vietnamese. He sat on committees with them. They ate dinner at each other’s houses.” Fergusson gave a little shudder. “He might have been with them that night, easy as not.”

  Dave frowned. “Why do you think Le Tran Hai told me his father didn’t know those men?”

  “Did he? Jesus, I can’t explain that. He’s smart. He’d know the police could look at his father’s Rolodex and find Phat and those others listed there. I never knew Hai to lie to anybody.”

  Dave smiled faintly. “I alarmed him today. He was flustered—that must be the reason.” Dave went on to tell Fergusson of his noon visit to the warehouse on the pier. And of his earlier visit, after the funeral. And a little about Don Pham and the doll-boys. “They were watching your father. Don Pham says they didn’t kill him, but they were at the Old Fleet at the time he died—a witness told me so. I think they meant to kill him. Why?”

  “Dope smuggling?” Fergusson’s face twisted as he argued in his mind with the idea. “No. If old Mr. Le knew about it he’d have put a stop to it at once. Same for Hai.” He shook his head, stubborn with conviction. “No way would either of them have had anything to do with anything crooked. As for Rafe Carpenter, he and his wife and boy were at the house once for dinner, but I don’t know him that well. All I know is, Mr. Le trusted him.”

  “So Hai told me,” Dave said wryly. “That’s sometimes a flaw in trustworthy people—they’re too trusting of others.”

  Fergusson bristled. “You don’t know for sure what Carpenter was doing at the pier that day. No drugs were ever discovered in any of the Le cargoes.”

  “So Hai said. And I believe he believes that. If only because he’s the one adult male member of the Le clan still alive. I wonder how long that will last.”

  Fergusson paled and stumbled up out of his chair. “You mean he’s in danger? Have you told the police? Is anybody protecting him?”

  “He’s not in danger yet.”

  “How can you know that?” Fergusson’s voice cracked.

  “Sit down. Relax. Here’s what’s been happening today. First of all, at some point, after thinking about it, Hai braced Rafe with what I’d told him, with the evidence I’d shown him.”

  “Oh, my God,” Fergusson wailed.

  Dave held up a hand. “Don’t get excited. There’s a killer in the picture—we both know that. But I doubt it’s Carpenter. He’s only a bag man—he delivers the contraband, gets the payoff, and delivers that. I don’t think he’s going to run and tell Don Pham or whoever pays him that he got caught red-handed. But he’s scared, and run he will. And when he does, I believe he’ll run to me.

  “You’re awfully sure of yourself,” Fergusson grouched. “Why hasn’t Hai turned him over to the law by now?”

  “You know better than that. Hai would lose face.”

  Fergusson sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Even though the Le’s had nothing to do with it, they should have prevented it—that’s how Hai will see it. It’s how the old man would have seen it. They shouldn’t have let it happen, and they did, and the name Le would be disgraced forever.” He twisted out his cigarette in the soapstone bowl. “What will you do when Carpenter comes to you?”

  “Get him to tell me who his boss is.”

  Fergusson’s eyebrows rose. “Just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because if this is as big a case as I think it is, if he turns state’s evidence he won’t have to go to jail. The Justice Department will protect him under their hide-the-witness-protection program. Relocate him and his family under a new identity. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose. My attorney can arrange it with a couple of phone calls. Carpenter will tell me.” Dave drank some brandy. “Now, you tell me about your beautiful visitor—Thao.”

  “What?” Fergusson’s jaw dropped. He knocked a fork off the table, picked it up. “What do you know about her?”

  “Nothing”—Dave smiled—“that’s why I’m asking.”

  “She’s the daughter of an old friend and benefactor of Mr. Le—Nguyen Dinh Thuc, a cabinet minister in the last administration at Saigon before the Commies took over. Wealthy businessman—in exile in France, now. He lent Mr. Le the money to start over in the States. But Washington says Nguyen made off with unauthorized U.S. funds, and if he enters this country, they’ll nail him.” Fergusson kept idling with the fork, looking at everything but Dave. “So he sent Thao. She’ll be going home soon.” He sounded relieved.

  “At the funeral,” Dave said, “she seemed awfully upset.”

  “Yeah, well—” Fergusson cleared his throat. “She’s kind of Westernized, you know?” He twitched a feeble smile. “She doesn’t hold her emotions in like most Asians do, or try to. She’s more French than Vietnamese, really.”

  “It’s a long way to come just to say hello,” Dave said:

  “Yeah.” Fergusson stood up. “Look, I have to get back to work.” He surveyed the busy room. “People are waiting for their food.”

  “Am I right,” Dave asked, “that we’ve met before?”

  Fergusson gulped, shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. Excuse me, please.” And he rushed off.

  “Oh, yes we have,” Dave said softly. But where, when?

  “For Christ sake,” Cecil said, “where have you been? I’ve been calling all over Southern California. You were going to phone me at home.”

  In the dim black-and-silver-papered hallway leading to the restrooms of Madame Le’s Saigon, where a mute row of shiny pay telephones waited, Dave read his watch. “I’m sorry. It’s been one damned thing after another.”

  “Numbers just about worn off the push-buttons here,” Cecil said. “I ran out of ideas after a while. Tried to get that Tracy Davis half a dozen times. Out of the office. Was she with you?”

  “It’s not a romance,” Dave said. “Just business.”

  “You had dinner with her, right?”

  “To bring her up to date on the case,” Dave said. “You can’t be jealous. Why were you calling?”

  “Because a man kept calling you. Ralph Carpenter?”

  “I’ll bet,” Dave said. “But it’s Rafe, not Ralph.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. I said for him to call back, and he sure as hell did, time after time. And the last time I was going out the door to come here to earn my grits and greens, and I figured I’d hear from you, and so I said for him to leave a number where you could reach him, and I’d pass it to you when you called me. But he didn’t want to do that, so he kept calling me here. Donaldson loved that. He expects me to do a little work once in a while, not keep trying to calm down hysterical strangers on the telephone.”

  “What did Carpenter say he wanted, exactly?”

  “Nothing exact about it, except the last call, an hour ago, he said if you called, I was to tell you to meet him at Pier Nine at eleven, the Le warehouse. Alone.”

  “Ah, that’s more like it.” Dave grinned to himself. “Just the news I’ve been waiting to hear.”

  “Sounds dangerous to me. Who is this dude?”

  Dave told him. “If I’m right, his boss is Don Pham. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see Don Pham locked up.”

  “Don’t go there, Dave. You know those docks at night. Why should this Carpenter tell you anything? Why won’t he just kill you? Even if Hai guessed what happened, he’d keep quiet to save face. You�
�d be dead for nothing. What would I do, then? Shit, you don’t even have your gun.”

  Dave groaned. “It’s at Mel Fleischer’s.” Cecil was right—he shouldn’t go alone, certainly not unarmed. “Look, can you get out of there? Go to Mel’s, pick up the Sig-Sauer. And meet me at the real estate office on the waterfront.” He read his watch again. “If you start now, you’ll just have time.”

  “I would if I had a helicopter,” Cecil said. “You wait, hear me? Don’t do anything till I get there.”

  11

  THE WATERFRONT WAS AS deserted and, except for the wash of water against the sea wall, as silent as if the world had ended. Dave had parked the Jaguar up a side street as before and gone on foot along the walk that faced the docks. The lights on the docks were spaced far apart. Out in the harbor, the sparse lights of anchored freighters and tankers only hinted their dark shapes, their hulking size. Reflections of the lights wavered yellow, red, green in the black water.

  He stationed himself well back in the shadowed entryway of the real estate place. Cold wind blew off the water. Blown trash, fried chicken bones, hot dog wrappers, soft drink cups crackled under his shoes. He peered at his watch. Ten forty. A light burned above the door of the Le warehouse. He saw it through the iron tracery of the crane whose lofty top was lost in high darkness. The light outlined stacks of empty crates on the dock.

  He waited. He wanted a cigarette but he didn’t light one. Invisibility might be important. This kind of waiting he had mastered long ago. Everybody in his line of work learned it after a while. Tension had no part in it. Tension tired you out. Excitement? Excitement made you make mistakes. All you wanted was a certainty that something would happen when it happened. This made for a kind of ease that came close to sleep but wasn’t sleep. Your thoughts could wash around one small, focused point of concentration, like surf around a rock, until the moment came to move.

  His point of focus was the pair of chain-link gates that let traffic down onto the pier. Unless something had happened to him, in the next twenty minutes Rafe Carpenter would drive up in that shiny car, leave it for a few seconds to work the padlock and swing the gates open, get back into it and drive it down the long ramp. Would he stop it there, come back, lock the gates again, to make sure Dave came to him on foot? Dave didn’t like the thought. He hadn’t believed Carpenter was dangerous. But desperation could change people.