Monkey on a Chain (8 page)

Walker cleared his throat. “Woman’s mother said it was the cowboy,” he said. “She ought to know. And you sure ain’t no cowboy. So, say it was Roy. What does that mean?”

I turned and walked back to them. April sat in her chair with her knees pressed closely together, her hands in her lap, her eyes cast down. I felt very tired. “I don’t know. What does it mean?”

“Why would Roy kill Toker? Why would he try to kill his own daughter? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe he ran out of money.” But even as I suggested it, I knew it was wrong. Roy would never run out of money. “Maybe he ran out of luck.”

Walker was shaking his head. “He could have come to me. To you. To any of us. We were brothers.”

I knew what he meant. There was no one alive I could trust the way I trusted the black man sipping a scotch and milk opposite me. And that would be true if I didn’t see him for another sixteen years. We had the same mother, the war, and that made us brothers. I nodded and lifted my glass to him. I didn’t mention Cain and Abel. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. “Just don’t forget the letter.”

“Do you have it?”

“Of course.” I tossed the damned thing on the table in front of his couch. He picked it up and read it aloud: “Squall Line was broken. The accounts were short. Take care of April. I don’t know who else to trust and I can’t say any more.”

He looked at me. “It says he didn’t know who to trust. I guess that means he didn’t trust me.”

“It doesn’t sound like he was very sure of me, either.”

He shrugged. “Something was coming down and he didn’t know where it was coming from. But if it was coming from Roy, he would have known, right?”

“He might have. We don’t know. Let’s take the things it says for sure.” I glanced at April. “First, he was concerned about her. He wanted her taken care of. Second, it says the accounts were short. And third, it says Squall Line was broken. We’ll take them in order. You want to start?”

Walker was also looking at the girl. “She is Miss Phoung’s girl. I can maybe see it, a little. So we got to take care of her. Not just because Toker asked us to, but because she’s part of the family. Right?”

“Right. What about the accounts?”

He looked troubled. “I just don’t know what to think about that. Roy started the operation in ’sixty-six, I think. But it was small potatoes until Sissy joined him. That would have been about May of ’sixty-seven. Two months or so before I got roped in.”

“Exactly how was that?”

“I was in supply. One of the enlisted men in the command got picked up for a little bit of nothing. He locked and loaded and shoved his M16 in the belly of some shithead second lieutenant in a bar on Tu Do Street. Well, the louie shipped out the next day and I went down to the cop shop for a sergeant-to-sergeant talk, you know?”

I nodded.

“Anyway, we worked out a trade. I got my boy and the sergeant got a case of cognac. I worked that kid to death. I thought I’d made a fairly decent soldier out of him. But he was born dumb, I guess. He put in for an intra-theater transfer and wound up at Khe Sanh. I heard he got dusted. But the sergeant turned out to be Sissy. He knew I was reasonable from the booze I traded, and a week later he called me. We met at the VNAF club. There was a first lieutenant with him, a stocky white dude with brown hair and tiny little eyes.”

“Roy.”

He nodded. “It was pretty cute for a while, the three of us talking around it and nobody committing to anything. But finally Roy just came out with it. It was like he was making a business presentation, once he got started. When I saw what they were doing, and how it would go with my end, I was hooked. I told them I wanted to think it over, but I was already in and they could see it.”

“How were the accounts handled then?”

“Same as when you came in. They were always handled the same. One of us kept the books. Roy, until he rotated out in November. Then Sissy. Of course, it didn’t amount to much that early. Maybe twenty a month.”

“And the records for each transaction were destroyed as soon as it closed out?”

“The minute the funds cleared shore.”

“Was there ever any question about the amounts?”

“Never. Anyone could see the books. Anytime. In fact, we were usually together when we posted, and we all agreed, every time, about when to destroy the pages.”

“Where was this? At Miss Phoung’s?”

“It wasn’t her place then. Sissy didn’t meet her until later, maybe June of ’sixty-eight. He bought the house from a colonel in the White Mice named Thieu. It was a payoff for ignoring the Thai connection.”

“He bought low, sold high, and kept his eyes closed?”

Walker smiled. “Well, there was a little more to it.”

April interrupted. “What are white mice?”

“The national police,” Walker explained. “They wore spotless white uniforms. Very crisp, starched, clean. They’d kill anyone, do anything. Price negotiable.”

“Like everything else,” I said.

“That’s right. Everything was negotiable. The generals were spending the weekends with their wives in Bangkok. The ARVN didn’t leave camp without a payoff. The White Mice were for sale to anyone with cash, goods, or services. Air America was flying missions and drugs. Our government was making the soldiers pay for the war that was killing them. Everyone was for sale, even us.” Walker’s voice was bitter. “Everyone except Charlie,” he added. “Maybe that’s why Charlie won.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Charlie won because he couldn’t afford to lose. Everyone else had a cutout. The Americans went back to the land of the round-eyes. The Vietnamese politicians had their Swiss accounts and apartments in Paris. Everyone in the Republic was playing a game, even Charlie. The only difference was that Charlie played for keeps.”

“It wasn’t a game for my mother,” April said.

That silenced us. “You are so right,” Walker admitted finally. “She was playing for keeps. We were all playing for keeps. It was like a secret that only Charlie knew, that the game was for keeps.”

“Charlie and the dead guys,” I added. Miss Phoung was on my mind. She had been so alive for me, back then. Always with a smile, laughter like little silver bells. I asked April, “How did she die?”

“Someone shot her. My aunt never knew who did it. She told me to say it was the Americans, but people still treated me like dirt. For a long time I hated everyone. I even hated my mother for giving me an American father. I cried a lot in those days.”

April spoke softly. “But it turned out to be a good thing, having an American father. It made it easier to get on the boat. I could pretend that I was going to see him. That he would find me, somehow, and love me.”

Sometimes you hate seeing how things end.

“When was she killed?” Walker asked.

“In 1971. In September.”

“After I left,” Walker said.

“I was gone too,” I told him. “I mustered out at Oakland in July. But I didn’t see her for the last six months. She disappeared a couple months after Roy took his discharge in-country. That was in November of ’seventy. Thanksgiving Day, I think.”

“I never understood that,” Walker said. “It was hard to get an in-country discharge. How did Roy swing it? And why?”

“He said it was to close down the Thai connection. I think he promoted some sort of job with Air America. Anyway, he got the discharge and then he disappeared. Miss Phoung disappeared too, shortly after that. I figured they were together, maybe out of the country. I got messages from him now and then, but the next time I actually saw him was in ’seventy-one. He was busy setting up the stateside end of the operation.”

“That’s when you became the candyman?”

I nodded. “We were bouncing money from country to country like a ball around a racquetball court. We were both in and out of the country a lot in those days. Roy more than I because he still had some kind of special passport left over from Air America. There were accounts in the Caymans, Panama, Japan, Manila, and Switzerland at one time. We finally brought the last of it home through Mexico.”

“And there was no question about the accounts then?” Walker asked. “The rest of us never knew. We just set up the transfer companies like he told us and funneled the commodities you delivered through them. It seemed like the totals were right, but we had no way of knowing.”

“As far as I could tell, Roy never dropped a dime,” I said. “The books were always open to me, and he explained everything he did, every move he made. He took two shares, for closing out the accounts, and the rest of us got one share apiece, just like we agreed in Saigon. Yours went into Peacemaker Investments and Sunpower Investment Company. Toker’s went into his land and properties in L.A. Mine went into property in the Albuquerque area. Roy kept half of his in the El Paso area and washed the rest of it through Quintana Enterprises, a holding company that invested in land in northern New Mexico. He closed that down just before I made the final deliveries to you and Toker. And that was it. Of course, I don’t know what happened after the final deliveries.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

I nodded. “In late ’seventy-four. Just after I saw you. I met him at the American Bar in Juarez. We had a couple of drinks, and then I walked out.”

Walker poured two inches of scotch over his ice cubes. The liquid turned a milky amber. He passed the bottle to me and I gave myself a couple more inches just to keep him company. He looked troubled. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Toker said the accounts were off, but where? When?”

“There’s only one place left.”

“Squall Line?”

I took a healthy swig. “Yeah. Squall Line.”

“What was Squall Line?” April asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Walker told her. “It was just something we got roped into, a payoff. A government operation.”

“A payoff?” She wasn’t going to let it alone.

“Something we had to do to stay in business. It began in September of ’sixty-eight. I was working at a warehouse in Long Binh. It was hotter than hell that day. The humidity was up around ninety, and inside the warehouse you felt like you were swimming in your own sweat. We were loading a shipment for some of the exchanges up north. I had a couple of spec fours running fork lifts, putting pads on a truck for the airport, when a skinny Honky named Max Corvin showed up.

“I knew he was trouble the minute I saw him. He was in civvies, starched shirt, light blue blazer, tie, the whole nine yards. He even wore a hat, in that heat. And pure white! He was the whitest man I ever saw. Living in ’Nam, and he looked like the sun never touched him. The guy scared me even before he opened his mouth.

“I walked him into the warehouse where we could be out of sight, and he laid it on me. He knew everything we were doing, who was involved, how it worked, everything. I was sweating like a stuck pig after five minutes. And then he told me that we were going to slide. If we played ball.

“Sissy and I were the only guys in-country at that time. Roy had wrangled an assignment to the Southern Command, in Panama, ten months earlier. He was setting up receivers for the money. We were dragging about sixty a month and living like kings. And this guy had us by the short hairs. We talked about everything. Wasting the dude, everything. But there was no telling how far up the line Corvin had taken the story, so we just had to sweat it out and wait for him to yank our chain. Man, those were some bad weeks!” Walker shuddered at the memory.

April looked at me. “Where were you when this happened?”

“Fort Benning. I didn’t arrive in the Republic until January of ’sixty-nine.”

She turned back to Walker. “What did he want?”

“A piece of the action at first. Ten thousand a month. But later, he wanted errand boys. He said he was with Air America. Thinking back, I don’t believe it, but I did then. He was spooky enough.”

“What kind of errands?”

I cut in. The conversation was going where I didn’t want her to follow. “We had to make some deliveries out of country,” I told her. I turned to Walker. “This is not a good thing to talk about,” I said. “Maybe there was a shortage out of Squall Line. The best way to find out is to ask Roy. The only other way is to find Corvin. And I don’t know how to do that.”

“There is a third way,” he said.

“I don’t want to go back there.”

“Back where?” April asked.

“Where Sissy was killed,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while. Eventually Walker said, “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about. What to do if it is Roy behind all this.”

“We’ll do what we have to do.”

“And if it’s Corvin? Or someone else?”

“Same-same,” I said.

“I can’t go with you.”

I just looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Joyce is pregnant,” he said slowly, “and I’ve got another kid, a boy. He’s only ten.” He swallowed and looked across the room, away from me. “I’ll pay you, of course.”

“I’ll bill you,” I told him, and stood to go.

When we were back in the car and on our way to the motel, April asked, “What did you mean, you’ll do what you have to do?”

I studied the traffic for a long time before answering her. Finally, I said, “This has to be stopped. Even if Roy is behind it. But I don’t think it is him.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s no reason I can think of for the trouble to have started now. I mean, all this happened twenty years ago. That’s a long time. Why would Roy have started hunting us now?” I glanced at her. “Did anything happen recently? Anything that might have changed the status quo?”

It was her turn to take a long pause. I assumed she was thinking, but when I looked at her I saw that she was weeping. “Just one thing,” she said softly. “I told Dad that I wanted to find my real father.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. I just drove, trying to make sense of it and of what I’d learned about the girl. She was Phoung’s child. That changed the way I thought about her, somehow. And then the possibility that she was Roy’s changed it again. Some part of me didn’t want to think about that, preferred not to know who was her father. But it had to be thought of. It seemed tied to what had happened in Los Angeles.

Suppose Roy were April’s father, as now seemed likely. Suppose Toker knew how to get in touch with Roy, which was pretty damned unlikely, and told him she was looking for him. So what? There was still no reason for Toker’s death. Roy could have denied being the girl’s father. There was no way she could prove it. And even if she could, so what again? She would have no legal claim on him. There was no way she could hurt him. She couldn’t even embarrass him.