Obedience Read online

  At five minutes before eleven he began to listen in the water-lapping hush for Carpenter’s car. Or Cecil’s van. Or both. He didn’t hear the engine of a car, tires on grit, the ratcheting of a parking brake, but he heard car doors close quietly. Not out here on the waterfront, somewhere back behind the row of shops. Not Cecil’s—he knew the sound of those doors. Carpenter’s car? Not back there. Why more than one door? He strained to hear voices, footfalls. He heard nothing. He took two steps, inched his head out of the entryway, and peered along the street, to his right, to his left. Not a sign of life. He pulled his head in, waited a half minute, and looked again. Nothing. He stepped back into deep shadow and waited.

  Not forever. For ten minutes. Then he decided Carpenter must have got here before him. Or had been here for hours. Why wasn’t it from here he’d made that last phone call to Cecil at the television station? Why else ask Dave to meet him here? Dave stepped out of the doorway, again looking quickly along the waterfront street, left, right. Maybe a figure, small, slim, black-clad, flitted out of sight a few shops along. Maybe he imagined it. He didn’t think so. Once, twenty years ago, ten years ago, maybe even five, he’d have gone to look. Tonight, he didn’t go.

  But he didn’t wait for the gun either. He crossed the sand-strewn asphalt of the street, went down the zigzag plank staircase to the pier, walked out the pier, heading for the Le warehouse. The sound of the water lapping the sea wall, the barnacled pier stakes was louder here, but he thought he still might catch the noise of Cecil’s van if it arrived. Then the diesel of one of the anchored ships started, its rough basso thrum sounding in his ears like the coursing of his own blood through his veins. Soon this was joined by the clatter of an anchor chain, the howl of the rusty donkey engine lifting it. Shouted orders and replies in a strange language came over the water, the noise of hurrying footsteps on steel plates. The ship’s whistle bellowed, echoing and re-echoing off the surrounding warehouses.

  Dave hadn’t seen Carpenter’s car because it was parked behind a stack of crates. He peered at it. No one sat inside. He went straight to the small door set in the big doors of the warehouse. He tried the door. It was locked. He drew back a fist to bang on it, and the ship’s whistle roared again. The sound was like a physical blow. He waited for the echoes to quit, then hammered on the warehouse door. The noise of his pounding ricocheted through the place. He waited for results. A full minute.

  He banged on the door again, waited again, another full minute. And it came to him that no one was in there. This was only instinct, but many times in a long, hazardous life his instincts had proved out. So where was Rafe Carpenter. He stepped back.

  “Carpenter.” His shout banged off the front of the warehouse, off the dark water, the sides of ships. Nobody answered. “Carpenter? It’s Brandstetter.” Still there was only the lap of the water and the fading thump-thump-thump of the freighters diesel as it hove down the harbor for the open sea. “Carpenter?” Silence. Not a nice silence. The man’s car was here. The man had to be here. Dave stepped to the door, pounded on it again, shouted the name again. Nothing. He tried again to open the door. No use.

  He turned away, and again thought he saw a flitting figure. Out of the corner of his eye. Up at the land end of the pier. He stopped in his tracks and squinted hard up at the feebly lit wharf. Could it be Cecil? No. He wouldn’t dodge out of sight that way. It had to be one of Don Pham’s doll-boys, didn’t it? Dressed in black, small, slim, moving like a shadow, silent as a shadow? For a second, he felt fear.

  Then he laughed at himself. If they’d killed Rafe Carpenter, they wouldn’t still be hanging around. If they’d come to kill Dave, they could have done it in the doorway of the real estate shop. No—they were following him to find out what he found out, weren’t they? And he’d found out nothing. So they’d wasted their time. Good. He frowned again at the warehouse door. Had Carpenter glimpsed the doll-boys too? Was he too scared of them to show himself? It made sense, but Dave’s instincts said Carpenter just plain wasn’t in the warehouse. So where was he? “Carpenter?” he called again, and began to walk back up the pier.

  A creak and a wiry snarl overhead warned him. A voice shouted, “Dave, look out!” Someone hit him in a flying tackle and, locked in the tackler’s grip, he rolled across the wharf. A mighty weight struck the wharf and shook it. Wood splintered, nails shrieked. There was a jangle of metal and glass. A light machine gun chattered. He was in the water, under the water, water that tasted of diesel fuel. His clothes were heavy. He pumped his arms hard, but rose to the surface slowly. He coughed air into his lungs, wiped a hand down over his face, pushed hair out of his eyes. Cecil bobbed in the water too, a yard away, spitting water, scowling at him. “I said for you to wait. Couldn’t you just once do what I say?”

  “Next time,” Dave gasped. “How do we get out of here?”

  “Catalina Island might be safe,” Cecil said.

  They waited for a few minutes, treading water under the pier. Nothing happened, and they climbed back up to the wharf by a crude ladder hung with coarse black seaweed, rungs nailed to a splintery pier. The wind felt cold. They shivered in their wet clothes. A giant crate lay smashed on its heavy net. It had held stereo receivers. The remains of these glittered everywhere. Transistors and micro chips crunched under their shoes. Cecil pointed to the shadowy top of the crane. “Somebody was up there. He made a little noise. I looked up, saw him just in time.”

  Dave said, “For me.” Kicking aside shiny metal plates, knobs, switches, he walked to the foot of the crane where great bolts anchored it to a foot-thick concrete base. A man lay there, very still, one leg bent under him in a way only possible for the dead. “Not in time for him.”

  Cecil came up beside him. “Is it Carpenter?”

  Dave nodded. “I was wondering where he was.”

  Cecil knelt beside the body; “He didn’t just fall,” he said. “He was shot. Time after time.”

  “You’re not the only one looking out for me,” Dave said.

  Cecil squinted up at him. “Don Pham?”

  “His Ninjas.” Dave nodded at Carpenter’s corpse. “Get his keys for me.” Cecil found them, stood, handed them to him. “Thank you,” Dave said, “and for saving my life. Again.” He put the keys into a pocket, gave Cecil a kiss, a one-armed hug. Water from Cecil’s sleeve oozed between his fingers, cold as the grave. He shuddered inside himself, and pulled the hand away. “Let’s find a phone,” he said.

  Stripped of their wet clothes, and wrapped in police-issue blankets, a blue one, a khaki-colored one, they sat in the back of a Harbor Police car. Not handcuffed, but not exactly free, either. The rear door of the car was open. Lieutenant Raoul Flores, a thick man of forty, stood outside, hands on the car’s roof, leaning in at them. His skin was the smooth brown of a fine Aztec pot. His eyes were small and black and without humor. His white strong teeth would have served a smile well. But Flores didn’t smile. Not tonight. He said grimly, “This should not be news to me, Mr. Brandstetter. I should have been told about all of this.”

  Tracy Davis stood beside him. “That was my fault, Lieutenant. I was going to tell you tomorrow.”

  “It was your fault, and it was Mr. Brandstetter’s fault, and it is not something I can lightly dismiss. An apology is not enough.”

  A gurney passed, small wheels bumping over the wharf’s rough planks, mincing the glass fragments. White-clad ambulance attendants pushed the gurney towards a van with open rear doors, lights on the roof turning round and round, red, amber, white. It stood among four more police cars on the wharf, doors also open, radio speakers crackling now and then with the staticky code words of a female police dispatcher. Uniformed men, men out of uniform, prowled the pier with flashlights. Two clambered around high up on the crane. In the bright open doorway of the warehouse, a bald plainclothes man talked to Le Tran Hai and made jottings in a notebook. Hai looked grumpy. He was without a necktie. His hair was tousled from sleep. Flores lit a Mexican cigarette. The sharp sweetness o
f its smoke brought back memories to Dave of boyhood trips to Baja with his father fifty years ago. Flores pointed at the gurney.

  “That man would be alive now, if you had come to me with your information when you were supposed to.”

  “It wasn’t hard evidence,” Dave said.

  “He tried to kill you.” Flores’s tone was rich with sarcasm. “And somebody killed him. I find it difficult to believe these things happened because he was a saint.”

  “What we had didn’t prove any wrongdoing,” Dave said.

  “You saw him meet and pay off a drug smuggler down here the day of Mr. Le’s funeral,” Flores said.

  “You’re upset, and I don’t blame you, but you mustn’t let it interfere with your thinking,” Dave said. “I saw him meet a man off a power launch and give the man two attaché cases. I don’t know who the man was. I don’t know what was in the cases.”

  “You got his bank records,” Flores said. “He was banking money he never earned, spending money he never earned.”

  “But Le Tran Hai says it couldn’t have been from smuggling. All their shipments are inspected. Customs haven’t turned up any drugs.”

  “Then Carpenter was ripping off inventory,” Flores said. “It’s the commonest sort of crime on the docks, you know that. So common they don’t even bother to report it when and if they discover it. And smart thieves, working inside a place, the way Carpenter did for the Le’s—they make changes in the bills of lading. It can go on for years.”

  Dave shrugged. The blanket slipped from his shoulders. He felt cold and pulled it back up. “Did Le Tran Hai call you after I showed him those bank records of Carpenter’s?”

  Flores snorted in disgust. “You know the damn Vietnamese. Would they admit it if a crime was committed by an employee? Hell no. He won’t admit tonight what happened here was anything but an accident. It’s some crazy chink code of honor. Was it Don Pham”—Flores liked changing subjects abruptly—“Carpenter met here that day?”

  “Maybe,” Dave said, “maybe not. He was too far away.”

  “But you think I’m wrong, holding Andy Flanagan for the murder of Le Van Minh. You think Don Pham was behind it?”

  “I think he was behind the killing of Phat, Tang, and the other Vietnamese businessmen at the Hoang Pho. I have a witness who saw the same little gangster types there as came to my house with Pham the other night, and tonight so obligingly shot Rafe Carpenter.”

  “What witness? Why haven’t I talked to him?”

  “You have. He doesn’t trust the police.”

  “But he trusted you? I want to talk to him.”

  “He’s in New York, and he doesn’t plan to come back.”

  Flores’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you mean—that black faggot dishwasher? He claimed he hid in a trash module in the alley, and saw nothing.”

  Cecil drew an angry breath, and Dave said quickly, “Lieutenant, let’s stick to the subject. I figured Le’s murder was a leftover from the Hoang Pho killings, so Don Pham was responsible for it too. But he denies that, and I believe him.”

  “Why—is he a friend of yours?” Flores said. “He told you he deals drugs, isn’t that what you said?”

  “No—the weapon was wrong. Yes, he told me he deals drugs, but that may just have been bragging. If he dealt drugs, you’d know it, and you’d have him in jail for it by now, isn’t that right?”

  “I know he deals drugs,” Flores said drily. “Getting him into jail for it is something else. If he isn’t your friend, why are his boys bodyguarding you?”

  Dave grunted. “I’m not sure they were his boys. I didn’t get a good look. But if they were, the honest to God truth is, Lieutenant, I don’t know why.”

  “Come on, Brandstetter. When Tracy here hired you, I went to the library and read up on you in magazines. And nobody ever wrote anyplace that you were stupid.”

  “They also never wrote I was a mind-reader,” Dave said. “Don Pham wants something from me. I’d bet on that. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “No idea?” Flores said. “No idea at all?”

  “Possibly it connects to the Le family. Pham knew I’d never let him hire me to investigate them, so he pointed me that way, and set his boys to follow me.”

  “And when you turn up what he wants, they will hustle you into a car and take you to Don Pham so you can tell him, and after that, they will no longer be your bodyguards, will they?” Flores said. “They will be your executioners. They enjoy that. They do it well. Again and again.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Tracy Davis cried.

  Flores pulled his head out of the car and looked at her in exaggerated surprise. “Ah, counselor—you are a woman, after all.” He gave a short, sharp laugh, took a last drag on the Mexican cigarette, and flicked it away in a long arc. He watched its little red spark wink out in the dark water. He said to Tracy Davis, “You may well worry. You brought him into this. His death will be on your head.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Tracy,” Dave said. And to Flores, “What point would there be in killing me?”

  “You are joking,” Flores said. “Don Pham will act on the information you gather for him. And if you are still living when he does this, you will know who was behind it. And as a man of honor, you will tell the authorities, and Don Pham will go to prison. Simple, no?” Flores leaned into the car again, and said to Cecil, “Mister Television Reporter, why don’t you save the life of your friend one more time tonight? Drive him home and make him stay there.” His terra cotta face was close to Dave’s, his warm breath cloying from the tobacco. “Go home, viejo. Let us young dudes have a chance, okay?” Now he did smile, but it hadn’t been worth waiting for. It looked like a snarl. “Trust us. We can do the job. It is what the citizens pay us for.”

  “They also pay you”—Dave sneezed—“to shut down illegal gambling establishments.” He sneezed again. And a third time. “To get prostitutes off the streets, and”—he sneezed and shivered and wiped his nose on a corner of the blanket because there was nothing else for the purpose—“and to lock up drug pushers.” He blinked watery eyes at Flores and smiled. “I think you need all the help you can get.”

  Flores sighed grimly, slammed the door shut, walked around, got into the car behind the steering wheel, and slammed that door. He started the engine. It sounded as if it didn’t have many miles left in it. “I will take you to your car. Where did you say you parked it?”

  Cecil knocked nails into the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace, strung a cord between the nails, and hung their wet clothes on the cord to dry. He was naked and, moving lean and lithe in the flickering orange light of the fire in the grate, looked like the First Man, home from the hunt. Dave, just out of a hot shower, stood drying his hair in the bathroom doorway, and watched him. He ached, his nose ran, he was getting a sore throat, but what he saw made him smile. He got into blue warm-up pants, pulled up the hood of a blue warm-up top, and tied the strings. He went toward the bar that lurked in shadow at the far end of the long room.

  “Hold it,” Cecil said. “Wait for the pot to boil.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dave turned and grinned at him. “By the way, Emperor, I love your new clothes.”

  “Thank you,” Cecil said. He moved out of the firelight, headed for the door. “If you want to lose that cold, I have the answer.” He pulled the door open, and went out into the dark courtyard, the lights of the cook shack yellow on its far side. “Drink nothing,” he called back, “till you hear from me.” Laughing, shaking his head, Dave sat on the couch. Cecil could go naked if he wanted to. No one was likely to see and be shocked at two-thirty in the morning. And up here in the canyon, miles from the sea, the night was not cold. He was cold. And bruised, from that roll across the dock. His ribs hurt where Cecil had hit him in that flying tackle. He touched the place and winced. But cracked ribs had their point, particularly when he considered the alternative. He sat and watched flames licking a shag-barked eucalyptus log. Sea water dripped
from the hanging clothes onto the raised brick hearth. Monotonously. He fell asleep. Cecil said, “Now then—ready for Dr. Harris’s magical mystery cure?”

  “Huh?” Dave jerked awake. Cecil stood over him, holding a big tray of Mexican hammered tin. He set this on an end table under a lamp and switched on the lamp. A thick water tumbler was on the tray, what looked like two jiggers of whisky in it. A tea strainer. A long-handled spoon. A jar of honey. A lemon cut in. half. And the yellow enamel Japanese kettle from the cookstove, steam wisping from its spout. Dave blinked. “What’s all this?”

  “Show and tell time.” Cecil knelt, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Watch carefully, and in years to come, when Mother is no longer here to nurse you through your little sicknesses, you can do this for yourself.”

  Dave laughed. “Mother is an idiot,” he said.

  Cecil grinned. “But she loves you, don’t forget that.” He held the tea strainer over the tumbler and squeezed the juice from the two halves of lemon through it into the whisky. He used the spoon to stir the mixture. Next he unscrewed the lid of the honey jar, plunged the spoon into the honey, cranked the spoon around and brought it out, clotted with honey, and put the spoon into the glass and let the honey slide off it into the whisky and lemon. Now he picked up the kettle by its wooden handle and slowly poured hot water into the tumbler, stirring with the spoon slowly, steadily. Dave’s nose wasn’t working well, but the smell of the concoction was strong. Heady. He leaned over the steaming tumbler and inhaled.

  “It can’t be medicine,” he said, “it smells too good.”