Monkey on a Chain

by Harlen Campbell

  “You think he’ll get the address?”

  “He’ll buy it. Probably for ten or twenty bucks.”

  “Then why pay him so much?”

  “So he’ll feel smarter than me.”

  She shook her head. “What’s next?”

  “A cold beer and a dip in the pool.”

  The car’s air conditioner didn’t make much headway against the West Texas sun. By the time we reached the hotel, April was more interested in cooling off than in chasing the cowboy.

  There aren’t many ways to kill time in a motel. The most popular was out, at least as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t feel like sitting around a bar. That left the third.

  We changed to swimming suits and spent an hour in the hotel pool. April splashed me and I chased her around for a while. She laughed when I caught her, then splashed me again. The exercise reminded me that I had missed jogging for the last week. This was better than jogging, and I gave some thought to putting in a pool. It wouldn’t have been the same without her, though.

  After dinner, she asked what Roy was like.

  The waves are good at China Beach. They have thousands of miles to build up steam, all the way across the South China Sea, and they come in long and blue, not too big, with a perfect curl.

  I’d been sitting in the sand, drinking beer and watching the surf roll in the day I met Roy. Some of the troops taking their in-country R&R had checked out boards from the Special Services hut and I was watching them try to catch waves.

  When I came to China Beach, after the hospital, the scene had seemed unreal. Farm boys learning to surf under that blazing Asian sun, with barbed wire in the distance, M16s stacked on the beach, lifeguards with heavy machine guns mounted on their towers, and artillery pounding away somewhere inland. But by the time I was ready to leave, it had seemed normal. The way the world was.

  “It’s backwards, isn’t it?”

  I looked up and saw Roy standing over me. He was of average height, built like a grenade. Very stocky. Not fat. Muscular, explosive. He wore his light brown hair cropped close to his head and had the beginnings of a short Van Dyke beard, which he rubbed constantly. He had very pale skin, and the sun had worked on him. He looked like he would blister if he stayed out any longer.

  I grunted. Noncommittal. “What do you mean?”

  “The sun should set over the water. Here, it rises over the water and sets over the land. It isn’t natural.”

  “California, right?”

  “I spent some time,” he said. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Pull up a beer.”

  “Brought my own, thanks.” He dropped down beside me, pushed the cooler in my direction, and said, “Feel free.”

  “Thanks.” His were cold. I popped one and went back to studying the surfers’ techniques. Most of them didn’t have a technique. They just waited for the next wave and then paddled like hell. If they caught it, they rode it all the way in. If they could stand, they tried to balance on one foot. If they fell, they fell. Half of them couldn’t swim. They didn’t care. The water was safer than the land.

  We watched them for hours, saying little, pushing the cooler back and forth. The sun dropped behind the palms and evening in Vietnam blessed the beach with a cool breeze, a purple interlude of peace while the Americans chowed down and Charlie boiled his rice. Then darkness fell and the firing intensified. The artillery made a steady ka-whump from firebases inland.

  Eventually we got to talking about who we were and what we were doing there. I told him about my last fire fight, the iron I’d taken in my back as I crawled toward Sam with the dead medic’s bag between my teeth, my stint in the hospital, the return trip I was due to take the next day. “You’re young for a sergeant,” Roy commented.

  “Rank comes fast in the boonies. When you’re good at your job,” I told him.

  “And you’re good?”

  I stared over the sea. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “You like it?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe too much.”

  “Combat, you mean?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  Roy had been interviewing me for a job, though I didn’t know it until the next morning, when he showed up at the enlisted men’s quarters with his proposition.

  April was waiting, watching me expectantly. I tried to give her a taste of those first impressions. Perhaps she understood, but I doubted it. I was describing a brief time-out from the war more than I was describing Roy. But they felt like the same thing.

  “He was an officer?” April asked when I fell silent.

  “He was still a lieutenant at that time.”

  “But he sat with you?”

  “Roy didn’t give a shit about rank. He had his own program over there, and the Army’s distinction between enlisted and officers didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “He was shorter than you?”

  “A couple of inches. He was built like a tank. And fast. He had very fast hands. He said he was a boxer when he was younger. Golden Gloves, I think.”

  “Do I look like him?” she wanted to know.

  I looked her over. “No.”

  That was all we said about him then. Later, she crawled into my bed and lay beside me without touching. It was companionable, like she just wanted to hear me better. She asked about Roy again, but the question was about her mother as much as about him.

  “Did he love her?” she asked.

  It would have been nice to say yes, he had loved her deeply, but I couldn’t lie. “I don’t know.”

  “Did he kiss her?”

  “I never saw him kiss her. He touched her sometimes.”

  “How? Like this?” She touched me.

  “No. Not intimately. He’d put a hand on her back if they were close. I saw him hold her arm a couple times. Like that.”

  “Then he didn’t love her.” She said it with finality, as though the failure were proven.

  “I don’t know what happened when they were alone.”

  “He couldn’t have been in love with her. When I’m in love, I want to touch all the time.”

  “There’s a difference between loving and being in love. And you aren’t Roy. You can’t know what he felt or didn’t feel.”

  “I know what I mean by love,” she said. “He couldn’t have been in love. What about my mother? Did she ever touch him? Did she try to kiss him?”

  “No.” I don’t know why I added, “but there was a war on.” It seemed to make sense when I said it.

  April nodded, then turned on her side and butted her back against me. The light was off. We lay in the dark for a while, and then she asked, “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Did you ever touch her?”

  “She wasn’t mine to touch,” I said simply.

  “How sad for her.”

  Just before I went to sleep, she asked, “What is the one thing you remember most about her?”

  “Her laugh. When I made her laugh, she put her hand over her mouth and laughed sideways at me. And her laugh was like bells, like little silver bells.”

  “That’s pretty,” she said, “but no one laughs like bells.”

  I woke about three in the morning, not quite sure where I was or who I was with. Or how old I was. It was slow coming back to me. I lay cupped around April. Her bottom was pressed against my lap and my face nestled against the nape of her neck.

  When I breathed, her hair came partway into my nose and mouth. It smelled sweet. My arms were around her, and she held my left hand clutched to her right breast. The nipple was full in my palm. I licked her neck, tasted her as I had wanted to taste her mother. She sighed. I told myself to go back to sleep. It took a long time, but I didn’t mind. By the time sleep came, I wasn’t sure who I was holding.

  When I woke in the morning, she was gone. I showered and dressed, then went down to the restaurant. She wasn’t there. I found her in the pool, doing laps. She blew water at me. “I thought you were going t
o sleep forever,” she said.

  “I felt like it. What’s with the mermaid trip?”

  “Exercise. I don’t want to get fat.”

  “You’re too skinny. Come on out of there. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  I’d finished a plate of huevos rancheros by the time she appeared. She ordered an omelet and I told her about the way I wanted to approach Roy.

  “We need to get him on this side of the river,” I said. “Juarez is too dangerous. I don’t want to go over there unless I have to. Or unless I know, absolutely know, that he isn’t involved in Toker’s death.”

  “How can you know? I mean absolutely.”

  “That’s the problem. He’s our only suspect, but this sort of thing, bombs, killings, just isn’t his style. If Roy shorted those accounts, I don’t think anyone would get upset at this late date. I wouldn’t. I’m healthy. We all got healthy. So why the killing? But we have to know.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “First, find out from Archuleta where he is. Then we’ll call the number, see if we can’t lure him out of hiding. At least, we can ask some questions. If he is guilty, he may give himself away. If he isn’t, he may have an idea who is.”

  April finished her omelet while she thought about that. “How can you get him over here?” she asked.

  “There’s only one person I ever saw him afraid of. We’ll use his name.”

  It was after nine-thirty when we took off. April drove. She parked in front of Archuleta’s building just at ten. I left her in the car again and walked in alone. The foyer was silent and hot. I walked up one flight and knocked on Archuleta’s door. There was no answer. I had a bad feeling about that. I pushed on the door, and it swung open. Archuleta was waiting for me at his desk. His eyes were wide and staring. His tongue was pointing at me. His face was black. He didn’t smell as good as he had yesterday.

  The room was sweltering, but I was freezing. I ran to the window, tore it open, and looked out. The car was at the curb below me. I grabbed the telephone from Archuleta’s desk, tore the cord from the wall, and dropped the telephone out the window. April opened the car door and stepped out, looking up. I waved her away frantically. She stood for a moment, undecided, then stepped back in the car and pulled away from the curb.

  I closed the window and turned back to the room. I was shivering. It had been a while since I’d been responsible for a man’s death, and I wasn’t as used to it as I once was. I stood still, breathed as deeply as I could, and tried to think.

  There was a tissue box on his desk. I grabbed a handful and wiped off the window where I’d touched it. I also wiped off a spot on the desk that I wasn’t sure I hadn’t touched. I went back to the door and wiped the outer knob, just in case. Then I closed the door and turned around. If April remembered the old drill, I had about sixteen minutes before she returned.

  The stink in the room came from Archuleta’s pants. The black color in his face came from a guitar string wrapped around his neck. The flesh had swollen so that only the ends of the wire and the two dowels they were tied to were visible. They hung down behind him like pull strings on a talking doll.

  I didn’t have to search the body. Someone already had. Wallet, keys, change, an address book were scattered in and around the mess on the floor under his chair. I opened the address book. There was no Juarez address in it. There was an address and telephone number in a feminine hand, after the name “Rosalinda Garcia.” I checked his wallet. Garcia wasn’t the name on his driver’s license. I tore the page from the book and searched the rest of the office as quickly as I could. If he’d had an address for me, it was gone. I closed the door behind me when I left, wiped the knob once more just for the hell of it, stuffed the tissues in my pocket, and walked downstairs as calmly as I could.

  April cruised slowly down the street just as I stepped from the building. I picked up the broken phone from the sidewalk and hopped in the car. She sped away. “Well?” she asked.

  “Hit a store,” I said. “I want a cigarette.”

  “No, you don’t,” she told me. “You haven’t had one of those damned things for three days, and you don’t want one now. Just tell me.”

  That surprised me. I didn’t think it had been that long. But she was wrong; I wanted one bad.

  “He was dead,” I said. “Garroted. Strangled with a wire.”

  She nodded slowly, taking her time about adjusting to it. “Was there an address for Roy?”

  She trusted me to check. I liked that. “No. Nothing. But maybe a chance.” I told her about the address book and Rosalinda Garcia. We stopped at the first phone we passed and April made the call. I wanted to make it, but she argued that the woman would open up more for her than for a man, and she was right. When she returned to the car, she told me that the woman was both nervous and suspicious. Her husband was out of town and she was afraid of being found out. April didn’t tell her that Archuleta was dead, but she got her to agree to see us.

  The address belonged to a small ranch-style house on the east side. We went to the door together. Rosalinda met us in a house dress and led us to the den. She was a short, slender Spanish woman in her early thirties, very attractive and clearly upset. We sat on a couch opposite her. She licked her lips and spoke to April.

  “You said you got my name from Ben?” she asked.

  April held up the page from the address book. “From his book,” she said. “Your friend is dead. He was killed.”

  The woman turned pale. “Dead?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Who did it?” She looked at me. She was more frightened than ever.

  “We don’t know.” April nodded at me. “Mr. Smith found him this morning.”

  “Was he shot? How did you find me? Will the police come?”

  I took over. “He was garroted. Choked to death. I found your name in his address book. And the police won’t come unless I send them the page from his book with your name on it.”

  “They mustn’t come! My husband” She covered her mouth and looked back at April, as though afraid she had given something away.

  “He knows about your husband,” April told her.

  “But you promised.”

  “I lied. I had to.”

  “My husband will kill me,” she told me.

  I took the page from April and waved it. “This is the only connection between you and Archuleta,” I said. “Tell me what he learned and you can have it.”

  “Learned about what?” Her eyes were glued to the paper.

  “He was going to get an address for me. In Mexico.”

  The woman was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “He was here last night,” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  “You made love. In your husband’s bed.”

  She blushed and looked away from me.

  “Did he spend the night?” She nodded again.

  “So he had already been across the river. What did he tell you?”

  “He was scared. He said he didn’t know what he had got into. He said he was going to get more money.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I told her. “I need an address.”

  “But he didn’t have one. He just had another name. I can’t tell you an address if he didn’t get one! Please, you have to give me the paper!”

  “What was the name?”

  “Las Colonias del Sur. That’s all he said.”

  “Do you know who he talked to?”

  “Yes. A friend of his at the telephone company there. Juan Ortega. I’ve met him.”

  I stood up and motioned April to follow me. Rosalinda trailed along behind us. I stopped at the door and told her, “Call Ortega. Get the address of this Colonias place from him. If you get it, I’ll mail you the paper. If you don’t, the police will get the paper.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “Please,” she said, “you don’t know my husband. He’ll kill me. I’ll do anything, but I have to have the paper. Anything. You understan
d?”

  “Do what I told you.” I walked to the car.

  April started to follow, but the woman grabbed her arm. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I could see the desperation on her face. April listened silently, then walked over and climbed into the passenger seat. “Give me it,” she said.

  “You’re going to give it to her?”

  “Yes.” The woman was standing in her doorway, her hands hanging at her sides. She looked hopeless. I handed the paper to April. “Try to get her to find that address,” I said.

  The woman hugged her when April handed her the paper. She was crying.

  We drove in silence for a while. Then April said, “That was cruel.”

  “I didn’t get her involved with Archuleta. I didn’t kill him. But I need that address.”

  “Maybe she’ll get it.”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t have much hope. Of course, I still knew where Rosalinda lived and I could go back if necessary. Alone.

  We returned to the hotel. I felt as though death were dogging my heels, and I still didn’t know where it was coming from. It might be Roy. But suppose I eliminated Roy somehow and it kept on coming? He had been an ally once, a long time ago. He might be again. I had to see him, and there were only two approaches left. One was in Juarez, and I wasn’t going to go there if I could help it. That left the telephone. It was eleven-thirty.

  I picked up the receiver and dialed the Juarez number directly. “Señor Rodgers, por favor.”

  “No esta aqui.”

  “One hour. Una hora,” I told her. “Tell him that Max Corvin has his daughter. She will die if he doesn’t answer when I call back. One hour.” I hung up.

  April sat staring at me. “What was that about?” she asked.

  “Max was the only man who ever frightened Roy,” I told her. “Maybe he’ll answer the god-damned phone for him.”

  “Why did you mention me?”

  “If he knows about you, he might want to protect you. And if he doesn’t, he might be curious. We’ll find out when I call back.”

  “You talked about killing me.”

  “Somebody already tried once, with that booby trap,” I told her. “We’ve got to find out who.”

  “But what made you think of this Max?”