Monkey on a Chain (3 page)

We ate in the hotel dining room. Chicken Marsala with blanched vegetables and a dry white wine. I’ve cooked better and eaten worse.

April was quiet during the meal, but when the waiter brought our coffee, she asked, “How did you know my father?”

“We met in Saigon during the war. He was in supply and I was attached to the Military Police.”

“So you were friends?”

“In a way.”

“But I never heard him talk about you, except the one time when he told me to go to you for help. I mean, it doesn’t sound like you were friends. You never saw each other. You never called.”

“We weren’t that kind of friends.”

She thought about that for a few minutes, then changed the subject. “Where you live…it’s really out of the way. Do you really like it there?”

She seemed to mean far away from people. There was no good explanation for that. Anyway, it wasn’t precisely true. I just shrugged.

“Do you always live alone?”

“Not always. Usually.” I saw that she was still thinking about the sleeping arrangements. “Sometimes a woman will stay with me for a while. One closer to my age.” Without really knowing why, I added, “They just never last. That’s all.”

“Do you ask them to leave? Or do they go on their own?”

She seemed to want to analyze me. I didn’t feel like talking about my failures with a girl too young to have gambled on sex. “Maybe a little of both, April. But stop prying. I’m here to help you, that’s all. If I wanted sex, it wouldn’t be with a girl young enough to be my daughter.”

She finished her coffee in silence. I took her out to the car and drove to the nearest supermarket. One of the nicest things about America is that you can buy anything you need, any time you need it. April wasn’t wearing a watch. I bought her a cheap one. I also picked up a flashlight, a roll of electrical tape, and a pocketknife. I made a call to a man named Pedro at the West L.A. number I’d gotten from my contact in Albuquerque.

The address he gave me was fifteen minutes away by freeway and almost an hour away by city streets. I took the streets, since it was still too early for what I had in mind. The drive took us deep into the barrio. I made April wait in the car while I went in. She acted nervous about the neighborhood. I didn’t much like it myself.

Pedro was suspicious, but he must have checked my credentials. He sold me a .45 automatic and two clips of ammunition for three hundred and fifty dollars. I slipped the weapon under my sweater before getting back in the car.

It was after ten o’clock when we reached April’s neighborhood. We cruised by her house once. It was large, set well back on a large lot. There was no activity around it, and no cars on the street.

I found an all-night market half a mile away and bought a pack of cigarettes and two Styrofoam cups of coffee and carried them to the car. I made sure her new watch told the same story as mine, then I asked April for her keys.

“What are you going to do?”

“I want to see the house. I want to see where Toker died and get a feel for what happened before we meet the lawyer. And I don’t want anyone to know I went in. The only way is to do it tonight.”

“What if someone sees you?”

“Nobody will see me.”

“Somebody might be there.”

“There’s no one around now. It should be safe.”

She looked excited. “I want to come too.”

“No. We can’t leave the car parked in front while we go in. Someone has to drive it and pick me up. You.”

She looked like she wanted to object, but she didn’t.

“At exactly eleven o’clock, you’re going to drive around the block once. If anything looks suspicious, we’ll call it off. If everything looks okay, you go around the block again. Memorize the cars on the street, what lights are on, everything. Slow down to two or three miles an hour in front of your house. I’ll get out by those bushes next to the street. You drive away. Kill some time. At exactly eleven-twenty, you drive around the block again. Have the headlights on high beam. If everything looks exactly the same, flick the lights down to low beam and drive around the block. Slow down again when you get back to the bushes. I’ll be waiting. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“If anything has changed, don’t flick your headlights to low. Drive away. Come back in ten minutes, at exactly eleven-thirty. Repeat the whole procedure. If there is still something suspicious, don’t flick your lights. Drive back here and wait for me.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t wait more than an hour. If I’m not here, go back to the hotel. I left an envelope for you there. It’s under the mattress at the foot of my bed. There’s some money and a man’s telephone number. Pack up and find another hotel. Use the cash. No credit cards. Call the man and tell him what happened. He might be willing to help. He might not. If he isn’t, you’re on your own.”

That bothered her. After a long pause, she nodded. I took her wrist and squeezed it gently.

“One other thing. You know people here. Probably most of them are on your side. But at least one person isn’t, and he might be one of the people you know. So don’t call anyone. Don’t let anyone know you’re in town. Unless I don’t come back and you can’t get any help from the number I gave you.” I smiled at her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

She smiled back hesitantly. “One thing. Could you get my diary?”

“Your diary?”

“It’s what I went back for that night. It was on my bedside table. I write everything in it. I wanted to write what I felt about him. About Dad. Being dead, I mean.”

“I’ll try.”

We traded places. I tossed the cigarettes in the glove compartment, removed the bulb from the overhead light, and gathered my stuff. Flashlight. Knife. Key. Gloves. Gun. I made sure which key worked the back door and asked her about the layout of the house and the security arrangements. Toker had not had an alarm system installed. That surprised me. You think you know someone.

There was no moon. Only a few lights were on in the houses on her block when we made the first circuit. No cars parked on the street. Nothing suspicious. The second time around the block, April slowed almost to a standstill. I opened the door, slipped out, and ducked behind the bushes. She accelerated and was gone.

It was very dark. A dog barked a block away. It took a few seconds to get to the side of the house, a few more to reach the backyard. I stood there with my eyes closed, waiting for my night vision, and counted to a hundred, listening.

There was no sound from the house or from Mrs. Stillwell’s next door. I moved slowly past the pool to the back door and ripped off the police tape. The key slid in and turned noiselessly. I pushed the door open an inch and ran my fingers along the edge from top to bottom. Nothing. I slipped inside.

The interior was about as April had described it. I was in a utility room. There were clothes on the floor. A short hall led to the kitchen. The cabinets had all been opened. The dishes were on the floor. The refrigerator door was open. That made me nervous. The normal human thing would be to close it, but I left it open and headed for the bedrooms.

I had taped the flashlight so it threw only a tiny spot of light. I used it sparingly. Furniture had been turned upside down, cushions cut open, pictures pulled from walls, lamp bases shattered. Whoever did this was looking for something smaller than a bread box. Maybe bigger than a matchbox. The smallest hiding places hadn’t been touched. There was no sign the pockets of the clothes in the master bedroom closet had been searched, for instance, but the shelves had been emptied, suitcases opened.

Toker’s office had been in a sitting room off his bedroom. It was easy to find. The wall was missing. Oh, the studs were there, but the wallboard had been blown away by shrapnel. A Claymore is beautiful in its efficiency. A small, heavy package, wider than it is high, with a slight curve along the width, it throws a wide arc of shrapnel that shreds anything in its path. Wallboard. Meat. Bone. Anything. The outline of Toker’s body lay six feet back into the bedroom from what had been the door to the office. The remains of the mattress covered part of the outline and part of the dried goo under it.

I stepped between two studs into the office area. The desk had been pretty heavily damaged when the Claymore detonated. There was no drawer that hadn’t been opened or up-ended. Paper was everywhere.

Any hope I had carried into the room evaporated. There was no place left to search. No time to search in. I crouched down on my heels and let the feel of the place seep into me. It wasn’t good. What happened to Toker had been efficient, cold, ruthless. No one had wanted to talk to him, ask him questions, get information from him, demand money from him. The only thing his killer wanted of Toker was his death. But then he, or someone, had come back. Looking for what?

In Saigon, Toker had been a sharp, lively man. Average height, dark hair and eyes. Intelligent. His degree in business administration from UCLA had bought him a silver bar by the time he rotated in-country from Germany. He was assigned to Johnny Walker’s supply unit at Long Binh. That was how we got him.

He’d had nerve and a quick laugh. I’d liked the man, despite his attitude toward the locals. He was reliable. He had to be. We trusted him enough to let him close down the operation. Of course, he knew what would happen if he violated our trust, so his reliability was, in a sense, coerced.

The last time I saw him, when I made his final delivery in ’seventy-four, he had been dealing in small parcels of land down toward San Diego. He’d smiled a lot. We’d had more than a couple of drinks and chased a couple of stewardesses out in Manhattan Beach, not really caring if we caught them. We hadn’t, but the night had felt good anyway. Full of possibilities.

Now he was a crust of dried blood on the carpet and a sack of chopped meat in a cooler downtown. And the night didn’t feel like it had a single good thing in it for anyone. It felt like my first night standing perimeter guard in the boonies, when every sound was ominous and every silence menacing. It felt like war.

I turned over a few pieces of paper and flashed my light on them, but they weren’t anything I recognized. I stood and headed for April’s room.

Maybe it was thinking back to the old days that stopped me outside her door. Something spooked me. I knelt down and stuck my head in slowly, with the flash directed along the floor. I stopped breathing.

What looked like a ray of light flashed across the doorway, three feet above the carpet, then abruptly disappeared. I took a breath, and there it was again. It took a minute to recognize it. Fishing line, pulled taut and running from a thumbtack stuck in the top of a girl’s desk toward the headboard of a brass bed on the other side of the doorway. I held the flashlight next to the line and followed it. It disappeared into a tin can taped to the headboard. I felt immeasurably cold. This was about the worst thing I could have found.

It was a simple booby trap, very popular in some parts of my past. You take an ordinary fragmentation grenade, tie a line to it, and slip it into an ordinary tin can. Once the lever is inside the can, pull the pin. Tie the can somewhere convenient. Stretch the line across the path of someone you don’t like and tie it.

The bad guy comes walking along. His foot catches the line and pulls it. The grenade pops out of the can and the lever flies away. The bad guy realizes something is wrong and starts to think what it could be. Then the grenade goes off and the bad guy stops thinking. Of course, bad guy can be a relative term.

But this was wrong. The line was too high. When your target is walking, his foot is the part of his body moving fastest. It is also the one part of his body he can’t stop without losing his balance. The line should have been lower, no more than six inches off the floor. It didn’t make sense until I remembered the target. A young woman. Never been in the jungle. Not wary of sudden death. With a target like that, the technical details wouldn’t matter much. Still, the lack of craftsmanship bothered me. If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it right.

The dog was still barking a block away. I crouched in the dark and tried to work up enough spit to swallow my fear. Then I took out my knife, reached into the room, and cut the line where it lay against the desk top. It fell to the floor, and I entered. Very cautiously. I flashed the light around. Her room had received the same attention as the rest of the house. Clothes, paper, pillow stuffing everywhere. It seemed almost pointless to search, but then I saw the diary lying next to the bed. It had not been what the killer was after.

I scanned a page here and there and read the last few with greater care. She had written about school, her friends, her life. It seemed unimportant, at least in the current context. The last few pages were about her father. Not Toker, though. Apparently she had some idea of finding her real father. I closed it and tried to decide whether to reset the trap. No matter how I figured it, it seemed like the smart thing to do. But somebody was going to trip it if I did, and maybe not a bad guy. Feeling like a fool, I searched the floor until I found the pin, then eased the grenade slowly from the can and replaced the pin. I dropped the grenade in my pocket and left the house.

Two minutes later the car cruised past. The headlights dimmed. I dashed to the bushes by the street and took cover. Nothing moved. The damned dog finally stopped barking. It took about five seconds to get in the car when April slowed for me. I collapsed on the seat, breathing heavily. She accelerated smoothly. A few seconds later, the shakes tried to come. I fished the cigarettes out of the glove compartment and lit one. It took two matches, but that was just because of the wind from my open window. The cigarette kept the shakes away. By the time I was done with it, my breathing was back to normal. But I still felt explosive, like that damned grenade I’d brought away with me.

April kept stealing glances at me. I told her to keep her eyes on the road. Then I repented and pulled her diary from under my sweater. When she saw it, she said “Ahh!” and I saw that she was crying.

“The beach,” I told her. “Then the hotel.”