Frye shook his head.
“You saw these crates. How long were they, Chuck, how many feet long?”
“Three, four.”
“They’re forty-inches long, exactly. What would fit in a case that size, Chuck? Be honest now, tell me what would fit perfectly in a forty-inch wooden crate?”
“Guns. Arms.”
“Ah, somehow I thought you’d say that. Arms, sure. But what about legs?”
Frye didn’t get it.
Bennett looked down, grasped one of his stumps in both hands and lifted it up. Frye looked at the dirty padding on the bottom, a kind of special wad that Li sewed into Bennett’s pants to protect the tender ends of his legs. “What do you see besides a stump?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s exactly what a lot of those people over there have to stand on. That’s why we send those crates over. Legs. They cost almost a thousand dollars apiece, but we buy a lot of them and get a good price. It’s not the hardware that costs so much, it’s the doctors you need to fit them and show those crippled people how to use the damned things. They’re better than nothing sometimes, Chuck. Believe me. Yeah, there are arms in there too, and feet and hands. There are hooks and crutches, bandages, antibiotics, pain killers, vitamins, cortisone, and enough tape to wrap everybody in the country from head to toe. Any of that meet with your approval?”
Frye nodded.
“I’m happy to hear that. Now, why am I giving you a tape of DeCord paying money to Nguyen? Simple, Chuck, part of the money for those supplies comes from DeCord, I’m just keeping the accounting clean. If it’s ever necessary—and I hope it won’t be—I need to be able to prove where it came from. There is a lot of money involved. You must understand that.”
“Where’s DeCord get it?”
“Foreign sources, Chuck. Sympathetic to a free Vietnam. It’s nobody’s business, especially yours, who those donors are.”
“Why’s DeCord taking pictures of the airstrip?”
Bennett’s gaze shifted past Frye to the window. He looked at the black pane as if trying to read an answer there. “I don’t know yet. That’s why the video is important. It’s insurance. That’s where you come in. That’s why I’m asking you to trust me now. That’s why I’m hoping and praying I can trust you to take care of it. Have you?”
“It’s safe.”
Bennett smiled. “Things are pretty simple, when you slow down and look at them correctly. Aren’t they?”
“It’s just kind of embarrassing to be the last one to find out what your own brother’s doing.”
“I had to bullshit you a little, Chuck. The longer you thought she was going to Paris, the better. Chuck, what Li does—what we do—is outside official channels. It isn’t illegal, but sometimes it isn’t approved, either. There are some uncharted areas out there, and that’s where we work. But we have to keep things quiet.”
Frye got up, paced the tiny guest house, looked out the window to the back yard. I had Eddie Vo in choking distance. And I let him get away. “I’m sorry about Eddie. I was just trying to do something … something goddamned right for a change.”
“I know you were.”
Frye sat down on the bed. “I’m sick of being a liability to my own family, but you punch me again, I’m going to tear you apart. I mean it.”
Bennett reached out and touched Frye’s head, near the stitches, then placed his hand gently on his neck. “No one believes that, unless it’s you. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t blame yourself for Debbie. It wasn’t your fault. I know that, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about her, Bennett.”
Bennett looked down to the floor, ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. “Can’t you just understand, Chuck, that there’s some things you can’t do anything about? You can’t do anything about our sister. You can’t do anything about Li.”
“I can. I will.”
“You’re right. You can keep an eye on that tape I gave you. You can find out about John Minh. You can help me out when I need you, Chuck, I need you to be there for me.”
Frye looked at his brother. Somewhere just behind the skin, just inside those dark blue eyes, he could see Debbie: her spirit, her face, her blood. “I can’t do nothing, Benny. Don’t ask me to sit there again and do nothing.”
“Then tell me what you found out about John Minh.”
He told him everything.
Back in the living room he sat with Crawley and Nguyen, organizing the notes that Hy’s people had collected. Michelsen and Toibin looked on. One hundred and fifteen interviews, and basically it all boiled down to nothing.
Edison called and Bennett put the telephone speaker on. The sound-activated tape recorder started up.
Edison cursed the slowness of the FBI for a moment, then presented Pat Arbuckle’s first solid lead: He’d found a young lady who’d seen Eddie Vo’s car arrive outside the Dream Reader Sunday night. Inside were three men—she didn’t know them—and Li. According to the witness, Li wasn’t struggling at all, but standing up straight, head high, apparently part of a fortune-telling excursion. Arbuckle had determined that two of the men had stayed quite close to her. “With a gun to her back is my guess,” said Edison.
“Her blouse was torn and she only had one shoe,” said Bennett. “Didn’t the lady think that was unusual?”
“Apparently not. Maybe they gave Li a coat.”
“But they didn’t go into the Dream Reader?”
“The lady didn’t bother to watch them. They must have been switching cars, before they delivered her to Vo.”
“Did Arbuckle lean on the fat madam?” Bennett asked.
“Affirmative. But she really must not have seen them. Chuck out of jail yet?”
“He’s here. He’s okay.”
“I talked to the D.A. five minutes ago. He’ll drop the charges if I ride him hard enough. Tell Chuck to do us all a favor and stay the hell out of this mess from now on.”
Bennett hung up.
A minute later the phone rang again. Bennett punched the speaker button. The tape recorder started up. “Bennett Frye.”
A short pause. Then a quiet, distorted voice that sounded long distance, even though the connection was flawless. “I know. Hello, bạn. I have a greeting for you.”
Bennett turned up the speaker. Crawley stood. Nguyen straightened and checked his watch. Michelson and Toibin rose together and moved toward the phone.
Frye’s stomach tightened.
The next voice was Li’s. She was sobbing. “I love you, Benny. I’m all right. You’re number one. I am being taken care of.”
Bennett leaned toward the phone, hands out, as if to embrace the machine, the voice. “Li. Li!”
“Benny, I love you.”
The line went dead. He swung off the couch and started pacing the room. When he stopped, an odd smile came to his face, as if he were finally realizing something he’d overlooked too long. “She’s alive,” he said. “She’s alive.”
Frye felt a huge weight being lifted, a weight that, on some deep level, he had already prepared himself to carry for the rest of his life. All he could do was smile.
For a brief moment, they all looked at the phone again.
“She’s alive!”
Michelsen had already placed the cassette in its plastic box and headed out the door with it.
The cave-house was totaled. He just stood there in the doorway, his finger still on the light switch, his heart pounding like a dryer with a load of tennis shoes. Television crashed from its stand, stereo speakers ripped apart, couch cushions slashed open, wetsuits and surfboards everywhere, surfing posters crumpled and tossed to the floor, coffee table overturned, guitar smashed, lamps crushed, rug bunched and tossed in a corner, Linda’s oak credenza toppled and its doors pulled off. You name it, Frye thought, and it’s wrecked.
His hands were shaking. He didn’t have to look very hard to know that the videotape was gone.
CHAPTER 7
> THE KITCHEN LOOKED AS IF IT HAD BEEN bombed; the bedroom was worse. His box of Christmas ornaments had been dragged from the cave region to his living room. Through the carnage, strings of Christmas-tree lights blinked on and off, multi-colored, gay. A wreath hung from a nail that used to hold up a Surfer magazine photograph—framed, thirty bucks, now broken on the floor—of Frye dazzling the locals at Pipeline.
He toured the house with an unhealthy voltage roaming his nerves, alternating currents of rage and helplessness, feeling the need to reach out and break someone. His worst instincts gathered, brooding like demons. I’ve done some dumb things in my life, but this is off the charts.
He stood in his room for a moment, Christmas lights twinkling around him. Truly, he thought, the best thing I can do for anybody is just stay off their side. He thought of calling the Laguna Police, but the last time they were here was to bust him for indecent exposure at his own Halloween party. Hard feelings still lingered. He thought of calling Minh, but that was out of the question. He thought of calling Bennett but Bennett’s fury was simply too much to even think about at this point.
He thought of calling Linda but lost heart.
Instead he called the Newport Beach surf report, the recorded daily message that had comforted him in trouble spots all over the globe. Air sixty-eight; water sixty-five, visibility six miles; swell from the south at eleven-second intervals and a height of two to three feet; for skin and scuba divers underwater visibility is considered fair.
He listened twice, then finally decided to call the Laguna cops anyway.
The two officers who showed up half an hour later—Simmons and Kite—looked about nineteen years old and carried impossibly loud radios. The sight of their uniforms made him nervous. Frye wondered why cops were always turning down their radio volume but it never got quieter. They scribbled the vital statistics with an air of gravity befitting funeral mourners. Kite inquired as to the identity of the “Mystery Maid.” The officer attempted something jocular with his eyebrows. Frye referred him to his lawyer and Kite backed off.
Frye answered questions. Kite wrote with diligence.
Half an hour later came the detective, a middle-aged gentleman named Pavlik. He took one look around, sighed, and set down his case.
It was then, for the first time, that Frye noted the faint, muddy footprint on his floor. From the cave region, he figured, where they found the tape. Looks the same as the light gray stuff the dead kid at the Asian Wind had on his shoes. Mud. In the middle of August in Orange County, these guys find mud to walk in.
“What’d they take?” Pavlik asked.
“Nothing,” said Frye.
“What were they looking for?”
“No idea.”
“Got someone mad at you?”
“Not that I know of.”
Pavlik studied Frye through his thick lenses. “You’re the surfer reporter guy. Frye. Married the mayor’s daughter, right?”
“I’m not sure how right it was, to tell the truth.”
Pavlik surveyed the scene, pushed his glasses snug to his face with a forefinger. He looked disappointed. “I’ll try to lift some prints.”
Kite and Simmons left to question the neighbors, turning down their radio volumes, trails of official static following them into the darkness outside.
Pavlik already had his brushes and powder out, arranging them on the opened case lid with myopic intensity. Then he erected a tripod lamp, plugged it in, trained it on the door. “These bastards trashed your place here pretty good.”
“Bastards?”
Pavlik shrugged, dipped a narrow brush into a vial of black powder and went to work on the doorknob. “Just an expression. One could have done all this, I suppose.” He pointed to the footprint. “The one with the muddy feet.”
Frye looked at it, the wisp of gray on his wooden floor. “The guy who got shot the night they took Li. He had muddy feet too.”
“Not my jurisdiction.”
Pavlik held out a piece of white tape with a partial, black thumbprint on it. “Gimme your right thumb,” he said. Frye held it out. It was still black from the booking ink. Pavlik raised his eyebrows, passed the brush over it, then pressed it to the tape, which he finally held close for inspection. “They either wore gloves or wiped the knob. This is you. We’ll try the TV. You fingerprinted recently?”
Frye nodded but offered no explanation.
Pavlik dusted patiently, more black powder for the silver face of the television set. “Anything on your sister-in-law?”
“A suspect at large.”
Pavlik looked at Frye over his glasses. “Vietnamese?”
“Yeah. A gang kid named Eddie Vo.”
“Those gangs are bad news. The thing about the Viets is they don’t trust anybody. Keep it all to themselves. That’s what I hear anyway. Interesting that Lucia Parsons and her MIA Committee think they can deal with them, when our own government can’t. We don’t have many refugees in Laguna, ‘less it’s from the IRS. So I don’t really know.”
The television was clean, and so were the lamps, the light switches, the picture frames and the Christmas bulbs, still glowing red and green and blue all over Frye’s living room. Kite and Simmons later returned to report that the neighbors hadn’t seen a thing. The detective took a few pictures, examined the lacerated couch cushions, and made some notes.
He finally packed up his things and leaned in the doorway, beaten and apologetic, like a man about to abandon his wife and family. “They wore gloves.”
“What kind of gloves?”
“Hard to say. We could run a fiber sample through county, but it takes lots of time, and lots of money. Chief wouldn’t approve it, I can tell you right now.”
“But I’m important. I’m the former second-best surfer in this entire metropolis. This is a glamour crime if I’ve ever seen one.”
“It’s not even worth taking a sample. Nothing was stolen. For all we know it could have been Linda Stowe coming here to make your life miserable.”
“Tell the mayor that.”
“Not in my lifetime.”
“If they’d murdered me I’d be better off.”
“Anyone would be, evidence-wise.”
When the cops left, he repaired the major damage, putting the television back on its stand, rearranging the speakers, stuffing some of the foam back into the cushions. He played back his phone messages, finding a dinner confirmation from Tuy Xuan. He thanked Frye again, three times, for saving his life.
The Christmas lights actually pleased him in some unspeakable way, so he left them blinking brightly around the living room. He knew he couldn’t sleep, so he poured a rather colossal vodka over ice. Linda’s ghost threatened from the shadows. He sat for a while on his patio, watching the traffic below, listening to the throttled buzz of electricity in the power lines overhead.
The vodka disappeared at a truly astonishing rate. Evaporation, he concluded: a real problem here at sea level. He made another, which vanished immediately.
Half an hour later he was illegally parked near the Hotel Laguna, wondering at the dire motive that had propelled him here. He jaywalked Coast Highway to the Sail Loft Restaurant and found a seat, ordered a double and let the loose-jointed jazz rattle his bones. He asked the bartender if he knew a blonde who walked a dog with a red scarf around town. “I’ve seen her. Killer legs. Don’t know much about her, Chuck. Cristobel something or other. Why?”
“I owe her an apology.” I’m after her now, he thought. On a mission from God.
It seemed critical to keep moving.
Coast Highway was thick with walkers. He fell into a slipstream of perfume, letting two women pull him along like tugboats leading him to ports north. Their hair swung in the night breeze, riots of gold breaking out under the streetlights. Then everybody seemed to know him: Hi, Chucky; Hey, Chuck, big contest coming up and Bill says you’re gonna surf it; Chucky, my MegaSkate broke in half; Radical sandals, Chuck; I got an eight-ball of the flakiest, Chuck;
Chuck … Chuck …
He suddenly longed for a remote island, a big city, for blinding motion or invisible stillness; but the cave house with its ruined rooms was all that called, where Linda’s succubus beckoned from the bed, an apparition warm and tactile as the woman herself. Why does everybody know who you are, he thought, just when you want to be somebody else?
He paused for a moment at the corner of Forest and Coast Highway, where the street people hang out in summertime. A poster showing the outline of a man’s head and a strand of barbed wire was hanging in a storefront window. On top it said:
MIA COMMITTEE
THE CITIZEN’S COMMITTEE TO FREE OUR PRISONERS OF WAR
RALLY AT MAIN BEACH, LAGUNA
TUESDAY 1 P.M.
All Freedom-Loving Citizens Invited
Her third rally in the county this month, thought Frye. He wondered if Lucia Parsons had bitten off more than she could chew. She keeps promising proof that they’re alive. Good luck to you, he thought. Bring them all back home, each and every one.
The nearest bar was dark, hopeless and comforting. I am blending with my habitat, thought Frye, I am camouflaged. He felt like a perfect jungle lizard, hidden here amidst friendly branches. He ordered a double he was determined to nurse, which knocked another five bucks from his life’s savings. He took a stool and watched the pool balls roll around the felt. Sounds of contact from the table reached him late, like distant pistol shots, and the balls weren’t moving fast enough. His drink disappeared ahead of schedule. The TV on the wall kept falling down, then levitating up again, but no one seemed to notice. The physical world was a tad off tonight.
Try as he did to concentrate on the billiard balls, all he could see was Li being dragged offstage, the curve of flesh under her ao dai as it tore away, her screams amplifying through the Asian Wind. He could see her struggling through the back door exit. He could see her bloody blouse in the trunk of Minh’s car.
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