Monkey on a Chain (13 page)

She was concerned and offered to have a service man check my line. “Of course,” she told me, “if it turns out that the problem is your telephone equipment and not our line, we’ll have to charge for the trip.”

“That’s fine. I don’t care what it costs, as long as I can talk to people without all that damned hissing. Does your serviceman have the right address?”

“Of course he does.”

“Verify it for me, will you?”

She repeated the service address. I told her that was the wrong address. She insisted it was right. I asked her what telephone number we were talking about. She read it back to me. I got mad at her. “Damn it,” I said, “that isn’t the number I gave you. I’m not even in that area!”

She apologized and asked for the right telephone number. I told her to forget it and hung up.

The billing address wouldn’t be of much immediate use unless I wanted to stake it out and wait for a pickup. The service address could be checked immediately, but not without proper equipment.

I found it in the classified section of last Sunday’s paper. Three garage sales included hunting rifles. I called the first number and asked if they had been sold. He had one left. I asked about its condition and the price. When he told me, I thought that was a little steep and asked if he had anything else he wanted to get rid of. He didn’t, but I struck gold on the next number. An hour later, I had an old Browning automatic and a box and a half of cartridges, and I felt more comfortable. Roy had been a friend a long time ago, but I wasn’t sure he still was. And even friends can behave unpredictably when they have uninvited guests.

April was the next problem. I didn’t want her along when I invaded Roy’s turf. I took her to a coffee shop downtown and explained the next step.

“It will be like Los Angeles,” I said. “You drop me off in front of the building. Twenty minutes later, you drive by again. I know you want to see him. If it’s safe, I’ll be standing by the entrance. You park and I’ll take you up. If there’s a problem, I’ll be at the corner. Slow down for me. If I’m not at either of those places, come back in ten minutes. If I’m still not around, go back to the motel, pack, and get the hell out of Texas. Check into the Albuquerque Hilton downtown. If I don’t show by noon, the day after tomorrow, go to my lawyer. You met him. He’ll have some things to tell you. Listen to him. Then get out of town. Hide.”

She listened seriously, nodded, and we took off. The phone we were interested in was on the third floor of an old office in a slum near the International Bridge. The building was in the middle of a block of brick-faced offices and stores that dated from early in the century. The store next to it sold used clothes,
ropa usada
. April pulled the car up in front of it and stopped. I got out. So did she.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She ignored me. She headed for the entrance. I cut her off, grabbed her arm. “Get back in the car,” I hissed. “You agreed to let me go in alone.”

“No, I didn’t. I just nodded that I understood you wanted to go in alone.”

She twisted out of my hands and pushed through the door. I caught up with her on the stairs. “Please don’t do this,” I said.

“I’m going to see my father.”

We stood there for a few minutes, breathing heavily, glaring at each other. Any kind of commotion would have attracted attention. There was no choice, so I gave in with my usual grace. “Okay, damn it, but you follow my lead. If there’s any trouble, you run. Do you agree?”

She nodded.

I shook her. “Nodding doesn’t cut it anymore, sweetheart. Tell me you’ll do what I said. If you don’t, I’ll carry you out of here!”

“I’ll do it,” she promised.

The third floor was not well lit. Faint voices filtered up the stairwell, but there was no sound on the floor. Dirty windows at either end of the hall showed an old linoleum floor that hadn’t been swept recently. Four doors opened off the hall. Room 303 was on the left, halfway down. The paint on the door had peel through three colors without showing wood.

I stood just to one side, listening and thinking. To knock or not to knock, that was the question.

After about ten minutes, April, behind me, began to move impatiently. I motioned sharply to her to be still. A little later, a telephone in the room rang once. There was no indication it had been answered, but it didn’t ring again.

I began to get an idea of what lay inside and puckered my lips. Roy was about as cagey as they come. I reached for the knob and twisted it gently. Locked. It was an old lock, almost no lock, but putting anything new on a door in that neighborhood would beg for a break-in. I pulled my pocketknife and pushed it into the crack by the latch, levering the blade outward until I felt the tip bite into the tongue. The only sound was the muffled traffic outside and the hiss of my breath. April didn’t seem to be breathing.

I stood in front of the door, exposed to anyone who wanted to put a round through it, and lifted on the knob and pulled it to the side at the same time I twisted the knife. I felt the tongue slide back and the door shifted slightly. I stepped quickly to the side and pulled the Browning, then pushed on the door with my knife hand. It swung open a few inches. There was no reaction.

I went through it fast and low, and dropped into a crouch, pushing the door against the wall with my back and waving the pistol vaguely around the room. The door went all the way to the wall behind me. I looked around. I was alone. I stepped to the door and waved April in, then closed and locked it behind her. We stood side by side, looking around.

The room held only an old metal desk. No chair, no filing cabinets, no wastepaper basket. There was a telephone and a small machine the size of a VCR on the desk. There were three telephone lines leading into the machine. Two led to jacks on the wall. The third was connected to the telephone.

April looked at the setup without understanding. “What is it?” she whispered.

There was no need to whisper, but something made me do it anyway. “A call forwarder,” I answered. “People call this number, and it automatically forwards the call somewhere else. Anywhere in the world. They don’t know the call is being forwarded. Even the telephone company doesn’t know.”

She sagged. “He isn’t here, then.”

“I told you he was cagey.”

“So what do we do now?”

“You search the desk. I’ll look at the equipment.”

She pulled out one drawer after another. There was nothing but dust in any of them. I looked at the machine. Without instructions, I had to wing it, but one of the buttons was a three-way switch. The panel under it read PROGRAM—ANSWER—TEST. After trying to think of an alternative without success, I decided what the hell and flicked the switch to the test position. A number appeared on the digital display just above the switch. It was not the kind of number I wanted to see. It was a Juarez number. The telephone rang. I jumped and April let out a small scream. I flicked the switch back to the ANSWER position. The phone rang again, the machine blinked, and then nothing happened.

April grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Back at the coffee shop, April was fighting an adrenaline high from the excitement of entering Roy’s office. At the same time she was disappointed that it had gotten us no closer to her father. She sat at the counter, sipped coffee, and talked nonstop. I grabbed the yellow pages and ignored her as much as I could.

The likeliest man for the job I needed done was named Archuleta. He had a small listing under DETECTIVE AGENCIES. The office was about five blocks away. If he did business in this neighborhood, I figured he had to be hungry. I called to make sure he was in, then walked back to the counter and told April we were going.

Disappointment must have won the battle with excitement for domination of April’s mood. She waited in the car while I went in. Archuleta’s office building was almost identical to Roy’s. It had the same dingy exterior, the same unswept floors, even the same worn gray vinyl flooring. The only real difference was the number of stairs. His office was on the second floor. The door had a frosted glass panel with B. ARCHULETA, INVESTIGATIONS stenciled on it. I had a feeling I’d seen the place before, only the name had been Spade. It wasn’t a good feeling.

B. Archuleta was on the phone, speaking in the low, suggestive tone usually reserved for new lovers. He looked up and murmured, “Gotta go. See you later.” He stood and offered his hand. “You the fellow who just called? Mr. John Smith?”

I nodded, shook, and said his name politely. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was and had maybe twenty pounds on me. He looked like he’d been in pretty good shape ten years ago. Now he looked soft. He smelled good, though. On the whole, my impression was very favorable. I wouldn’t trust him with a nickel till payday, and the sun would die before he’d make a moral judgment. I cut the amount I was going to offer him in half.

He motioned to a chair. “Call me Ben,” he said. “You have a very common name, Mr. Smith. Or should I call you John?”

“Call me anonymous.” I laid a fifty on his desk.

“You’re a nonamus.” He said. He didn’t reach for the bill, but it was on his mind. “So, what’s your problem?”

“A man owes me money. I want to know where he is.”

“He got a name?”

“A telephone number.”

“You don’t look like the kind of man who’d pay me to look up a number. So there’s a catch, right?”

“It’s a Juarez number. You have contacts over there?”

“Contacts is my stock in trade, compadre. And in exchange for this lonely little general on my desk, you expect what?”

“A street address, directions, and a description of the layout. That’s all.” I smiled at him. “General Grant will get some company if you do the job. Maybe a Ben, Ben?” I could be just as cute as he could.

He pretended to think about the offer. He was wondering how much more I’d stand, how much I was hurting. “Make it two Franklins,” he said, “and you got a deal.”

“Double or nothing,” I offered, “if you perform before ten in the morning.”

“No problem, my friend.” He reached for the bill. “Where do I collect?”

“I call at ten. Make me happy and I’ll make you happy.”

He shook his head. “Come by. Show me what I want to see and I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

I nodded and left him fingering the bill.

The car was like an oven inside. April wiped her forehead and asked, “What was he like?”

“Cool. Real cool.” I described the man to her.

“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.