Cocaine and Blue Eyes

by Fred Zackel

  The officer checked his notes. "The manager of this joint says a young Chinese male came in last night, paid his five bucks, then went out again. He didn't see him return."

  "Any description?"

  "Yep." The beat cop started paging backwards.

  "Save it for the report." Charlie remembered. "Anybody checking with the next-of-kin?"

  "Still trying," the beat cop said.

  "Thanks, Charlie." The captain looked at me. "It seems straightforward, doesn't it?"

  "Seems so," I agreed.

  "This old man and the Anatoles were pretty tight," the captain said. "Any connection with you?"

  "I think so, but I'm not sure yet."

  "Care to talk about what you know?"

  "Well, Orestes Anatole, the grandfather, hired Ruth Gideon and Pac-Con to check out some rumors. Ng's his lawyer and part-owner of the business—"

  Banagan interrupted. "Were you messing with the chick?"

  "Well, you see—"

  "Ng didn't like you messing with the hired help?"

  "Yeah, I guess so. He tried to hire me to chase down some Chinese who supposedly swiped a jade charm bracelet from him."

  "You didn't fall for that shit, did you?"

  "Oh no. I turned him down."

  "A good thing you did, too," he said. "Not only is it too obvious, but you're not bonded any more, are you?"

  "So what's the verdict?" The lady reporter had caught up to us again.

  "The old man got lured upstairs." Banagan looked at me. "After that, it doesn't matter much. Either a lover's quarrel, or the old man resented getting rolled."

  She seemed disappointed. "What was he doing here, anyway? I mean, why didn't he go down to some Chinatown bar, if he was trying to pick up a guy?"

  "He was a Chinatown lawyer," I heard myself saying. "If he got caught in Chinatown ..." I heard my voice fading away.

  "But here? To bring him up here? Above a topless joint?"

  "A lot of fags work the topless joints," the beat cop told her. "They got radar for the closet cases. Conventioneers, tourists, businessmen. Even their wives don't know they suck cock."

  I needed out. "You need me any more?"

  "What about our little talk?"

  I pleaded. "Tomorrow?"

  The captain was pragmatic. "Go get some sleep," he told me. "Maybe you'll feel better tomorrow."

  I took the stairs two at a time. I knew it wasn't going to be any better tomorrow.

  Chapter 32

  Two portable news teams had set up shop on the opposite curb. They were photographing the grey mansion because no one would let them inside. Neighbors were watching from behind closed drapes.

  The black maid blocked the door. "You fucked up my weekend." She wanted to sandpaper my skin.

  "Sure, I did," I pushed past her. "How come they got you wearing a maid's uniform?"

  "Cos we got company," she groused. She knew who to blame for that. She gave me another sour look. "Maybe you better come inside."

  "Thanks." I let her lead the way.

  The hallway stretched out like Death Row. If she were the warden, I must be the star of the show. I wondered what had happened to my last supper.

  I felt like hell. There was tequila in my guts and death on my mind. Thank God I still had a heat on. I hoped I wasn't sobering too fast. I couldn't face these people if I were sober.

  Orestes Anatole was alone in the library. He wore a three-piece suit beneath his blanket. His eyes were red with tears, and his chins were wet and stained. He sat in his wheelchair as if he'd been motionless for years.

  He noticed me. He knew my name. "Brennen." He spoke softly, slowly, fearing denture slippage. "Thank you for coming."

  "I came when I could."

  "You look tired." He thought it over. "You have been busy. And I've been waiting for the police to call."

  I hesitated. "What did Pac-Con have to say?"

  "They're going to call?" He sagged at the notion.

  I frowned. "They haven't called yet?"

  "No one's called." He amended that. "A television station. They wanted to interview me."

  "I'm sorry they beat me here."

  He waved a tired hand in the air. The silence of his heartache was oppressive. He was a newly haunted man. His grandchildren were ghosts.

  He tried to be professional. "I called Las Vegas." Maybe he hoped that would override the agony.

  A while before I remembered. "That guy who wanted to buy the fish company. He's still interested?"

  "It's a fair price." Orestes took control of himself. "A very fair price." He couldn't forget the prices he paid.

  Catherine came into the library. The artificial lighting made her look tired and frazzled. She had been crying. Her chin sagged and her face was pale and her cheeks seemed puffy. She stopped when she saw me. Her face said I was poison, but she said nothing. She went straight to the sideboard.

  I asked the old man if he would sell.

  He didn't know. "Why should I keep it?"

  I told him to talk with his employees first. "They worked to make it yours. And after all the shit you've been through, there's still no justification for screwing the people who put their trust in you. They deserve first crack at buying it."

  His chins quivered. He didn't want to remember.

  Catherine forced herself to be polite. "Would you like a drink?" She indicated a liquor cart that had been brought into the room. She was already pouring Gran Marnier into a snifter.

  I was wrong about her tears. She had tried to cry, but she was too crocked. It was alcohol that had paled her cheeks, her remarkable tan, the blue in her eyes. She was so smashed, I wondered how she could stand.

  "Why don't you have one for me?" I don't know why I said it. I had no reason being self-righteous. There were lots of living dolls like her. Lonely women who drank alone at home. Some were even quiet drunks. I wasn't a detox worker, and it wasn't my job to keep her from a bottle.

  Her eyes flickered, then froze. "Blondes are people, too."

  "I don't ever recall denying that."

  "I like to drink," she told me. She hefted the snifter and downed several mouthfuls. "Why did you come back here?"

  "I had to give my final report."

  She refilled her snifter. "Why did you bother? It's in every newspaper."

  "You were the one who hired me."

  "Yes, I did, didn't I?" She tried to laugh, but laughter hurt. "I hired you to keep our name from the newspapers. Now it's smeared across every newspaper in the state." Her voice was brittle with self-pity.

  "Your family name was smeared already."

  She hadn't heard me. "Do I get a refund?"

  "Do you want one?"

  Her tan paled even more. "You're disgusting."

  "If you want one, I'll give you one."

  "Get out of here. Right now. Get out."

  I threw her check on the desk. She stared at it as if it were shit. She made me feel like a dirty little boy.

  I needed that drink after all. I went to the liquor cabinet. There was kahlua and white rum and creme sherry, Cinzano and Dubonnet. I found some Hunting Port and belted it down.

  Her chin quivered. "Why did you do this to us?"

  "They were smugglers long before I got here."

  "This is all your fault," she said.

  "And it's never yours, is it?"

  She choked on a giggle. "Me?"

  "If you had just told me Dani was here," I said, "right at the beginning, all this would've ended before any of it had a chance to get started."

  She thought I was nuts. "If it weren't for you, she'd be alive today."

  "He tried to kill me because of her," I said.

  "No, you started this," she hissed.

  Orestes punched the power button, and his wheel-chair came to face me. "Is this true? Are you responsible?" His voice was an old woman's broken heart.

  "Maybe I am. It's hard to say." I shrugged off the guilt. "Like I said, they were smugglers long
before I got here. Sooner or later the local pros would've stepped in. Either they'd have let Dani and Jack join in, or they'd have cut them down to size. All I did was speed up the inevitable."

  "You started it," she insisted.

  I wasn't finished. "But if you're looking for somebody to blame, well, there's always yourself, for that matter."

  "I never knew they were smuggling narcotics," Orestes told me.

  "You told them about your liquor running days."

  "What's that got to do...?"

  "They were amateurs, too," I told him. "They'd been smuggling dope a couple of years already, but nothing big until this last deal. Maybe a couple of pounds of weed, maybe a couple of ounces of cocaine. Maybe you thought they were listening to grandpa's fairy tales, but to them it was proof that amateurs, freelancers, could get away with it."

  "They thought I gave them advice?" His eyes were glassy, and he had a hard time focusing.

  "What did you expect them to think? They were just starting out. The Junior Achievement of smugglers. Well, smuggling's a family tradition. Who else could they turn to?"

  "But that was years ago!" Catherine said.

  "What does it matter?" I looked at the old man. "You were the amateur in those days. You went against the pros and got out alive and rich. What other proof did they need?"

  "But they were smuggling cocaine!" he said.

  I shrugged. "It's the modern hooch."

  "You make them sound like criminals," Catherine said.

  Orestes raised wet eyes. "Is there any more?"

  "If you want to hear it." I didn't wait for him. "If it hadn't been for you, they never would have gotten as far as they did. You didn't even have to know about it."

  They were both silent, lost in that puzzle.

  "Once you were the Big Bad Wolf," I told him. "Tan Ng wasn't the only one who thought so. Maybe some people still think you are. Your name, even in the background, could've cooled the heat for Dani and Jack."

  "Was somebody after them?" Orestes said.

  I didn't hesitate. "They thought so."

  "The Anatoles aren't criminals," Catherine butted in. "We don't go around pointing guns and shooting people."

  "That's what they did," I said.

  "They're not criminals," she insisted.

  I held up my hand. "Maybe you're right. If somebody forced them out, they wouldn't steal cars or boost cigarettes."

  She brightened. "That's what I mean." She was clinging to straws. She was one step away from imbecility.

  I ticked off the other entries. "Mere possession of cocaine is a felony. It's a felony to use a gun during the commission of a crime. When somebody is killed during the commission of a crime, the charge is automatically murder."

  Catherine was livid. "I told you to get out of here!"

  I took another crack at the port. "You're just saying that to make me feel better." I went after the old man again. "Dani and Jack were lovers, weren't they?"

  "Oh, why don't you leave!" Catherine cried.

  "It wasn't her fault," Orestes said. His voice cracked like celery stalks. "What happened..." His voice tapered off. "...anybody in her shoes..."

  "Oh no." Catherine was crushed. She hadn't guessed.

  His eyes were elsewhere. "She tried to stop it. She couldn't. There was so much feeling..."

  "Is that why she went to Seattle?" I asked.

  He was drooling. "He proposed to her. She was scared."

  The gold woman closed her eyes. Money and looks were worthless now.

  Orestes went on. "She was afraid she'd end up like Lilian."

  It made sense. Jack was trouble, and Dani saw him coming. She left town to get away from him. She met Joey and moved in with him. She knew she had settled for less, but she made do, like most folks.

  For one thing, there were drugs. Other drugs, at first, and then came cocaine. Up to a point, it prolonged sex, which made her life more bearable. When Joey became impotent from doing too much, she didn't leave him. She started seeing other men. She bought a vibrator.

  Dani was predictable. When anything became too mechanical, too devoid of feeling, she left it behind her. When that happened with Joey, she wouldn't or couldn't cuckold him any more. She went to live with her sister. She tried more men, other arrangements. She was still resisting Jack. Maybe she did want time to think things over.

  Then she heard Joey Crawford was dead, that a private eye was snooping. The cocaine deal was a natural target. She tried running again. She ran to the safest place she could afford. The family business closed for the holidays. She froze to death there.

  Catherine walked out on us. Just breezed through the door like autumn's passing. You could hear her footsteps fading in the hallway, you could hear a cigarette burn in the silence she left behind.

  I got up to leave. There was no sense staying.

  Orestes stirred. "You might as well keep the money."

  "It was never mine to keep," I said.

  I found more to say when I reached the door, but the old man was staring at the bookshelves. I doubted they would answer his questions. There was nothing I could say to him, and I'm not good at watching old people cry.

  I found my own way out.

  Chapter 33

  Chinatown was winter quiet. There were parking spaces, and the restaurants were deserted. A rising wind rattled the glass in store windows, rattled the Christmas trees on the curbs. Tomorrow the scavenger trucks would come and swallow those trees. In some places they had already come and gone. Tinsel left behind looked like droolings from a metal monster.

  A light was visible in the offices above the draft board. I figured he'd be here, not at some joss house burning prayers in an oven. That was for tourists and grievers. I found the staircase and headed up. I was lagging and needed both railings to keep my momentum.

  He sat behind his uncle's desk, bent over like some ancient Chinese scribe. A pocket calculator and an IBM Selectric took the place of owl ink and the abacus. Papers on his desk rustled like the rustle of windswept leaves. He had a nice collection of paper cups and cigarette butts.

  "Brennen." He collected himself. "Come in."

  "Hello, Louis." I found a seat. "How's it going?"

  "I'm okay." He leaned back. "I hear you've been busy."

  "I'm pretty tired," I admitted. "God, you must love your job. It's Sunday night."

  He was calm. "Orestes Anatole wants the books done by tomorrow. I had to bring them up to date for him." He folded over some pages. "My uncle's reputation's at stake."

  I sloughed it off. "He never had anything to sweat."

  "He'll be happy to hear that." He paused, played with his pencil, started doodling on a file. "How can you be sure?"

  "I just came from Orestes Anatole."

  "How's the old man doing?" He cursed himself as soon as he said it. If he knew I had been busy, he knew how Orestes was doing. Louis had slipped.

  "He found a buyer for the fish company."

  "Why would anybody want to buy it?"

  "The guy wants to partition it off and make tourist traps, like the Cannery and Ghiradelli Square. He wants to call it the Fish Factory. He'll probably buy up your uncle's shares, too."

  Louis liked that. "My uncle will sell." It was a foregone conclusion in his mind. He looked at his doodles. "My uncle's not here right now."

  "I didn't come to see him."

  He looked me over with sharp eyes. Fag eyes that never stop propositioning. "Should I ring down for some tea?"

  I wanted to laugh. "He's not your uncle." I knew no polite way to say this. "You're a fag hooker. A street whore. He picked you up off the streets of Hong Kong. Or was it Taiwan?"

  He took it well enough. He didn't hold his breath and he didn't suck it in. He didn't even look at me. He went back to his doodles. "You need proof. Where is it?"

  I knew I had him then. "Cops are like elephants. They never forget. Maybe you have a record. Let's call the cops."

  His eyes flashed hellfir
e on me. He had a record.

  I looked at his scratch pad. Numbers. "He found you working the streets. He liked you, took an interest in you, fell in love with you ..." I shook my head. "Anyway, he brought you here and called you nephew, so the neighbors wouldn't freak."

  He frowned at a paper clip. "It's not what you think."

  I didn't care. "You had a pretty good set-up. Tan Ng never had a son, no one to carry on the family name. Family is very important to the Chinese, to any immigrants. Maybe you did have the same name, which made you part of his family clan. He wanted you to step into his shoes some day, carry on that name. That was your part of the bargain."

  He shrugged. "I'm not his nephew. But no one in this country knew that. Where'd you find it out?"

  "I stumbled on it," I admitted. "I wouldn't even have considered it until you had trouble understanding his Cantonese. For me, it was like listening to a Chicano and a Chinese doing business together in English. You had problems with his accent. But then Cantonese has different dialects. Regional ones, right?"

  He knew that. "We both came from Kwangtung province," he told me. "His parents were peasants. My family came from Canton. They're city people, not people of the dirt."

  I had no respect. "You big snob. It's always the same old story. The hayseed gets taken by the city slicker. He wanted to help you. He gave you a job. A job in America. That was the biggest break you ever had."

  "A job in a fish company," he advanced. He looked down at his pencil. "I don't have that job anymore." He threw his pencil with disgust into his papers. He had a good front.

  "That's where you met Jack Anatole, wasn't it?"

  "Of course." He frowned. "Why?"

  "And through him, the whole crowd." I went on like I was reciting a dream. "They'd been smuggling small amounts of weed into the city. You thought that was a great idea. There's lots of money in dope, and dope's easy to unload. Your uncle had connections in Chinatown, so nobody'd question his nephew branching out."

  He was motionless. "You're saying I'm a dope dealer."

  "More than that. You and Jack were partners, smuggling partners." I couldn't wait any longer. "Alex turned state's evidence."

  "Alex?" He glanced up. "Who's Alex?"

  "Jack's crewmate on the trawler."

  "I never met him." He was positive.