Monkey on a Chain (6 page)

When we were back on the road, April asked me how it was. I told her it was unfriendly.

“I’ll bet,” she said.

We headed back to the hotel. There was still one chore left. The police.

April lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. I took an illegal little gadget that looked like a pocket calculator from my suitcase and called the switchboard for an outside line. When I had one, I dialed a 900 number. When I had the trunk line, I interrupted the call by holding the device to the phone’s mouthpiece and pressing a couple of buttons. Then I routed the call through Mexico City and back to L.A. I dialed the police department and asked for the detective handling the Bow homicide.

The police operator was reluctant to transfer me without a name, so I gave her Marlon Brando’s. I really didn’t give a damn if they tried to trace the call. Nobody can trace a call through Mexico City.

Eventually I was put through to a Detective Blankenship. He was polite but very circumspect. “Can I help you?”

“Maybe. I want to talk about the murder of James Bow.”

“Okay. What is your name?”

“I am a friend of his daughter, April.”

“Where is April? All her friends are worried about her. Mrs. Stillwell is worried about her. Where is she?”

“She’s safe. She came to me because she is afraid for her life.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She should have come to the police if she was afraid. We would have protected her. Where is she?”

“What is the nature of your interest in her?”

“We want to protect her. Where are you calling from?”

“Guess. Do you know that she was in classes all morning on the day her father was killed?”

“I am aware of that. Why did she run away?”

“Do you know that she left home before her father the morning he died?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she had anything to do with his death?”

“We don’t believe she set the bomb that killed him, no, but we don’t understand why she ran away. She should come to the station and explain her behavior. Are you her attorney?”

“Do you have any other reason to believe she was connected with his death?”

Blankenship decided to try an end run. “If you aren’t her attorney, I really can’t talk to you about April Bow. Is she there with you? Can I talk to her?”

“Yes and no. Do you have any evidence that she was involved in the killing? Other than speculation?”

“She disappeared immediately after her father’s death. Naturally we are very curious about that.” He sharpened his tone. “If she is concerned about protecting herself, she can contact an attorney or the Public Defender’s office. Someone will be provided to look after her interests. Someone who is an attorney.”

“The night of his death, she went back to her home to get a diary. She was very upset and wanted the emotional comfort and sense of closeness to her father that the diary would give her. She found that the house had been torn apart. Did your officers do that?”

“Of course not. Torn apart, you say?”

“I say very thoroughly searched. Miss Bow naturally became very frightened. She came to me for help. Despite her natural desire to help locate her father’s killer, I have advised her that going to the police at this time might be dangerous. I suspect that her father’s killer is targeting her as well.”

Blankenship abandoned the formal tone he had used up to that point. “Why?”

“Have you been in her house recently?”

“Not since the investigation.”

“Go again. Someone set a grenade with a trip line. A booby trap. For her. I disarmed it, but the line and can are still there. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I was in ’Nam,” he said slowly. “Damn it, who are you?”

“Just a friend. An uninvolved friend. One who doesn’t want to see her stuck for a killing she couldn’t have done just because she’s convenient.”

“Look, if she’s in danger, we can protect her. Better than you.”

“Maybe,” I told him, “but she’d lose her freedom while you were protecting her. And I don’t think you’re going to find the killer.”

“Why not? Do you know who did it?”

“I know who didn’t do it. April Bow didn’t do it. Bow was still home when she left the house. So the bomb had to be set after he left. He returned, for some reason, and the bomb went off. But April’s time can all be accounted for. She was in classes until your officer notified her of the death. On top of that, she had a very good relationship with her father. She loved him. He treated her very well. She gained nothing from his death and she lost a great deal. She didn’t kill him. You have no interest in her.”

“I have an interest in talking to her,” he said. “Who are you? Why is she afraid to talk to the police?”

“She’s afraid for her life,” I said.

He asked again where I was calling from.

“We just flew into Orange County,” I told him and hung up.

April was still staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were full. “I did love him,” she said. “I honestly did.”

“Get up and pack. We’ve got to get moving.”

She just lay there. “Where are we going?”

“Phoenix.”

She didn’t ask why. “You told them we are in Los Angeles.”

“I told him two people named James and April Bow are in Orange County.” I explained about the other two tickets I’d bought in Vegas and why I’d made the scene at the airport. “The police should assume those people were us. If they check back to Vegas, they’ll find we spent last night at the Palace. I knew I was going into your house, April. I wanted to be able to prove you weren’t in town in case they learn about the entry. Maybe they’ll look harder for another suspect.”

“You think ahead,” she whispered. She didn’t sound impressed.

She hadn’t moved from the bed. I sat beside her and took her hand. “Only stupid people act without thinking,” I said softly. “What’s wrong, April? Don’t you feel well?”

“I’m just tired,” she said. “I don’t know why. I’ll be okay in a few minutes. Go away.”

April kept her eyes shut while I packed our bags and called Hertz about keeping the car for a couple more days. Her breathing was slow, but irregular. I didn’t know what to do about her. I carried our bags down and packed the car. When there was nothing left to do, I alternately coaxed and growled until she began moving.

We were on the road by five, headed east. I stopped in San Bernardino long enough to pick up a sack of burgers, fries, and a six-pack of Coke, then pulled back onto the freeway. It was a waste of money. April wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk. She just sat in the green glow of the instrument panel and stared into the darkness ahead. Somewhere near the Arizona border, she fell into an uneasy sleep. I turned off the radio so that it wouldn’t disturb her and drove through the night in a silence broken only by the girl’s occasional soft whimpers.

Chapter 3

PHOENIX

At night, Phoenix telegraphs its presence from fifty miles away. As you drive across the desert of western Arizona, the lights of the city gradually smudge the eastern horizon. You feel like you’re driving into the dawn, even when your watch says it’s a little after two in the morning.

I found a motel on the outskirts of the city and left April in the car while I checked us in as Harold and Ann Stephenson. She didn’t awaken until I pulled our suitcases from the backseat. Then she just followed me into the room.

The drive had tired me. I dumped the suitcases and hit the shower. When I came out, she was asleep. It was then that I realized the room had only one bed. It didn’t matter. I just crawled in beside her, closed my eyes, and let the world go away.

The shower woke me the next morning. I lay with my eyes closed while the world gradually came into focus. April on my doorstep. Toker dead. The booby-trapped bedroom in Los Angeles. The interview with Pearson. Toker’s last message.

Bow’s death and April’s predicament were the clearest elements of the situation. The Claymore had orphaned her a second time, counting the death of her mother. And then the will that cut her completely from Toker’s estate left her with nowhere to go.

Her immediate needs could be taken care of. I could provide her with a new identity, if it came to that. A name, a degree, eventually a job. The message Toker sent with her, “You owe me,” was the last IOU he would ever call in, but it was a good one. I had owed him a debt that was not fully paid by the money I’d funneled to him in ’seventy-three and ’seventy-four, a debt I didn’t mind repaying to his daughter. At first glance it looked as if we could both walk away from Los Angeles, if April would abandon another chunk of her past. But she probably couldn’t do that. She was showing some of the signs of depression, and she didn’t seem to be grieving as I’d expected her to. She hadn’t asked me about the funeral. She might not even have thought of it. What she needed was a resolution.

She wasn’t alone. The letter from Toker more than implied a connection between his death and our past, 1991 Los Angeles and 1971 Saigon. And that connection could lead the killer to New Mexico, to me, and perhaps to the others. Rodgers and Coleman. If the past was stalking them, they had to be warned. So I needed a resolution, too.

The shower died. I opened my eyes and looked around, then remembered that there had been only one bed. I wondered how April would handle meeting me this morning, if she would be embarrassed.

She handled it like a zombie. Her eyes slid over me as easily as they passed over the decorative art on the wall behind the bed. She stood in front of the mirror and toweled her hair dry mechanically. She was naked.

I got up and took the towel from her and led her back to the bed. When I pushed her down, she folded like a rag doll. I pulled the covers over her and told her to rest awhile. There was nothing to do until later in the afternoon. Maybe nothing for her then. I showered quickly. It was easy not to think of her breasts, her thin dark triangle. The memory stirred no excitement in me. The emotion I felt was pity. She was reacting like a child and I found myself responding to her as if she were a child. Women had aroused my protective instincts before, of course, but only after a sexual relationship had been established. With April…well, there was some sexual tension. I couldn’t deny that. It had been there since I saw her in my shower the night she arrived. Before that, even. Her eyes, her hair, her faint accent, all were ghosts of what I had lost in Saigon. But she was only half my age, and I wasn’t fool enough to hope that what was lost could be found again. Time had closed the door.

I dressed and went out to get my bearings. The motel was laid out in a rectangle, with rooms stacked two stories high along the sides and back. The area facing the street was devoted to the lobby, front desk, gift shop, offices, restaurant, and lounge. A pool and flagstone court occupied the center. The parking lot surrounded the whole complex. The entrances faced the parking lot, but each room also had a patio door and a balcony overlooking the pool. The ground-floor rooms, like ours, opened directly onto the courtyard. Fifteen or so wrought iron tables, about half with red, white, and green umbrellas that advertised Cinzano, were scattered around the court. The day was warm, the sun bright. Morning in the desert.

I cut across the court toward the lobby. Two boys were splashing in the pool. The contest was apparently to see who could kick up the biggest wave. A woman and her teenaged daughter sunned themselves on two towel-draped lounge chairs. They lay facedown, in identical blue bikinis, as far from the boys as they could get. They were smart to go for the early sun. By midmorning, it would be brutal. Already their backs were dotted with perspiration. The mother looked up when I walked past them.

The coffee shop was serving the tail end of the breakfast crowd. I bought two papers from machines in the lobby, the
Times
and the
Sun
, and ordered coffee and a Denver omelet. There was nothing on Bow’s killing in the L.A. paper, and I discarded it. I looked over the
Sun
more carefully while I finished my coffee, but there was nothing in it to indicate that the trouble had come to Arizona. I flagged down the waitress and ordered another omelet with two large coffees, to go. While the order was prepared, I went to the gift shop and bought a couple of bathing suits.

April was lying with her eyes closed when I got back to the room. Her breathing was irregular. I put the breakfast and one of the coffees on the table beside the bed and made her sit up. She said she wasn’t hungry and weakly tugged the sheet up over her breasts. I put the plate in front of her and told her to eat anyway. Then I rummaged through drawers until I found a telephone book and carried it and my coffee out to the pool area.

The boys were still splashing. The woman and her daughter had rolled over and put on dark glasses. They lay with their arms beside them, palms up, and their legs slightly spread, about twenty feet away. The similarity between them was more pronounced from the front. I watched them for a few minutes, thinking about April. About April and death.

Four of us had survived the operation in Saigon. Lieutenant James Bow, nicknamed Toker, died in Los Angeles six days ago. Captain William Rodgers, nicknamed Roy, was somewhere in the El Paso area. Staff Sergeant John Coleman, nicknamed Johnny Walker, had settled in Phoenix.

Toker had been the last of us to leave the republic, as we called the Republic of Vietnam. He had closed the operation down in 1971 and knew about the end of it. And he’d left a message. Two messages, really. First, that the books had been off. Second, that Squall Line was broken. I didn’t want to think about the second unless I had to, so the first had brought me to Phoenix. Just as Toker had seen the end of our operation, Johnny Walker saw the beginning.

Actually, the operation hadn’t ended in ’seventy-one. Only the active phase of it stopped then. Roy and Walker had decided at the beginning that if they were going to do it, they would do it right. They would cover all tracks. There would be no large sums of money to explain when their war was over. Taxes would be paid on everything. They wanted to live the rest of their lives as though Vietnam had never happened, as though Saigon were just another city, a beautiful city in a land far away.

The rest of us had to agree to that before we were brought in. At first we hadn’t seen exactly how it could be done, but a plan had evolved over the years, over countless bottles of whiskey and packs of cigarettes and all-night sessions at Miss Phoung’s house off Tu Do Street, while artillery fire from distant firebases drummed like muted thunder. It was a complicated plan. Corporations had to be set up in Panama, the Philippines, Japan, and Mexico, as well as in the states. Money had to be transferred frequently, becoming a little more legal, a little harder to trace, each time it was moved. But the plan had worked. For twenty years, anyway.

And now Toker had implied that there had maybe been a second plan, that the accounting was off. I needed to know if Toker’s post mortem accusation was true, and if it was, when the second set of books was opened. And who had benefited. If Toker’s death was connected to an old treachery, the question of who had benefited was crucial. It would lead to his killer, to the resolution April needed and I wanted.

The problem was that twenty years had gone by. Actually, the problem was that they had gone by peacefully. Even supposing a hidden agenda had existed, it was buried deep in the past. Everyone had been happy for a long time. We had each taken a little over six hundred thousand home, after taxes. I had been the candyman, the delivery boy. I knew how the funds were transferred, how they had been invested. Toker hadn’t needed money before his death. No one should have needed anything. And yet Toker was dead. Things were falling apart. What had happened?

I sighed and spent a couple of minutes dredging up sixteen-year-old names from my memory, then opened the phone book. Only two of the companies were still listed. I memorized their numbers and carried the book back into the room.

April had stirred her food around a bit. She may have eaten a couple of bites. She had finished her coffee and was watching a television evangelist threaten his flock with the hereafter. She looked up dully when I entered. I dug out the bikini I’d picked out, tossed it to her, and told her to get dressed.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a beautiful day. Because I asked you to.”

After a long pause, she sighed and told me to turn around. I turned around and watched her pad into the bathroom in the mirror. There was no spring in her step. I opened the drapes and patio door and let the sun in. She came out after a couple of minutes wearing the suit. It looked good on her. Not too tiny, but she’d be able to get some sun if she wanted. I asked if she liked it.

She flashed a faint smile and nodded. I pointed to the courtyard. She left. I carried the phone to a chair where I could watch her and dialed the first number, Peacemaker Investments, and asked to speak to Mr. Coleman. The receptionist asked me to hold a moment, and then a man picked up the line. “Can I help you?”

“John Coleman, please.”

“There’s no one here by that name.” His voice was smooth, deep. It wasn’t Walker.

“When did he leave?”

He hesitated. “There has never been a Mr. Coleman at this number.”

I was patient. “Peacemaker Investments was in-corporated in 1972 by John Coleman and Harold Stephenson,” I told him. “This is Mr. Stephenson. I’d like to speak to Mr. Coleman.”

The next pause was longer. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Coleman has retired.”

“Fine. What is his home number?”

“That’s confidential information. I’m sorry.”

“He wants to talk to me.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Ask him.”

“Could you tell me the nature of your business with Mr. Coleman?”

The hook was in. “It’s confidential. Tell him I have to see him.”

“Have to?”

“Yes. Tell him Toker is dead.”

“Toker is dead.” He repeated the message flatly. “He’ll call you if your message interests him. What is your number?”

“I’ll call back in an hour. I expect him to answer.”

“Call at four. He may not be here, but I’ll give him the news about Mr. Toker.”

That seemed like the best I was going to get out of the man. I thanked him and hung up.

April was at the table I had used. The boys were gone. I walked out to her, scooped her into my arms, and carried her over to the edge of the pool. She screamed and beat at me with both fists, but her heart wasn’t in it. I tossed her in. She came up sputtering and cursing.

“Swim,” I told her.

She hung on the side of the pool and stared at me, but after a few minutes she began a slow backstroke toward the other side. I watched her for a while, then went in and put my suit on. When I returned, she was still swimming, grimly. The mother and daughter team were sitting up, watching us.

I sat on the edge of the pool, dangling my legs, and let April do another ten laps, then slid in and paced her for ten more. At first she tried to pull away from me, but I made a race of it, and we gradually synchronized our strokes. The sky was that hard turquoise blue you only see in the desert. It was getting on toward noon, and the sun was fierce.

Finally I’d had enough. I climbed out, grabbed our towels, and went to sit under one of the umbrellas. The mother and daughter had apparently lost interest when no further drama materialized. They were on their bellies again, and they’d both undone the straps on their tops. They were the same shade of golden brown. If the mother hadn’t been fifteen pounds heavier and puckered just the tiniest bit where her cheeks met her legs, they could have passed for sisters.

April walked out of the shallow end of the pool and sat beside me. A waiter wandered by and I ordered two beers. When he left, I asked how she was feeling.

“Okay, I guess.”

“Did you sleep well?”

She shot a quick glance at me, probably remembering that she hadn’t slept alone. But she just shrugged.

“Okay, I guess.”

The waiter wandered back with the drinks and I signed for them. The beer was cold, the sun was hot, the shade was pleasant, and a pretty girl sat beside me. But Toker was dead, Walker was hiding, the books were off, and Squall Line had been broken. I felt okay, I guess.

“They buried him the day before yesterday,” I told her.

She nodded slowly. No tears.

“How do you feel about that? Don’t say okay.”

“I don’t know. Empty.”

“His mother said you can keep the car.”

“I don’t know if I want it.”

“He wanted you to have it.”

“Did he?”

“He gave it to you.”

She took a swallow of her beer and shivered.

“We have a couple of hours. Is there anything you want to do?”

“Where are we?”

I stared. She seemed serious. “Phoenix.”

She closed her eyes and lay her head back in her chair. I looked at her. Her skin was faintly red above her top and on her face. Her passivity bothered me. When the waiter stuck his head out again, I ordered two club sandwiches. April groaned when they arrived, but I made her eat one and then walked her back to the room.