Obedience Read online

  “I can’t tell her that,” Thao said. “It’s too cruel.”

  “Then just tell her that where the police have reason to suspect a homicide they can and will order an autopsy, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.”

  He walked into the courtyard and out through the moon gate. He looked up. The gate was twelve feet high, but the lattice work invited climbing. Rafe Carpenter, young and strong, could scramble over it in half a minute, and unless that room was locked at night—and why would it be?—slip inside, push a pillow down on the face of the sleeping Ba, and be gone again in next to no time. A sad shadow, for sure, and helpless to be anything but evil.

  13

  LE TRAN HAI SAID, “No time, no time. Busy day.” He tried to wedge his stout body past Dave’s lean one in the doorway of his glass-and-steel-paneled office high at the rear of the Le warehouse. The little Vietnamese clerks stopped clicking the keyboards of their white computers and rattling fanfold printouts, and stared, interested, spectacles glinting in the hard white fluorescent light.

  “This won’t take long,” Dave said.

  “You bring trouble,” Hai said.

  “Other people bring it,” Dave said. “I only take the wrappings off it.”

  “You have caused me the loss of my most trusted and valuable employee,” Hai said. “If it were not for your interference, Rafe Carpenter would be alive today.”

  “He tried to drop a crate on me,” Dave said.

  “No such thing.” Hai shook his head vigorously. His hair still looked uncombed. His eyes were bloodshot. “That was an accident. We do not wear hardhats in our work here for nothing. The docks are dangerous.”

  “His hardhat didn’t do Carpenter any good.”

  Hai barked a bitter laugh. “Ah, but you brought a different sort of danger, did you not? Guns, bullets, police.”

  “You’re confused,” Dave said. “The police had nothing to do with it. He was mixed up with drug smugglers, Mr. Le—very lethal people. They were the ones who killed him.”

  “You have not proved that to me, nor to the police. As to his trying to kill you—he was moving freight. Working late into the night. That is the sort of employee he was. Loyal. Devoted. No sacrifice was too much for him. He never waited to be asked. He knew what needed to be done, and he did it.”

  “And some of it was damned unpleasant,” Dave said.

  “I have just come from his home,” Hai said. “You have caused terrible grief to an innocent woman, to a little boy who must now grow up without the father who loved him.”

  “I’ve just come from your home,” Dave said. Hai blinked. “Where Nguyen Hoa Thao tells me you mean to see to it the widow and orphan are looked after.”

  “He paid for his loyalty to my father and me with his life. I must do what little I can.” Hai turned away, went to his desk. A window was behind the desk. He stood staring out the window that showed gulls circling against a hard blue sky. “It is a terrible thing to lose a father.”

  “I agree,” Dave said. “Also a brother.”

  Hai turned slowly, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “It never struck you as strange,” Dave said, “that Ba died so short a time before your father?”

  Hai squinted. “But it was illness. His heart stopped in the night. The doctor said it was a thing that happens to some young Vietnamese men. No one understands why.”

  Dave sat down on a chair that faced the desk. “He’d have learned why if he’d been able to order an autopsy.”

  “My grandmother would not permit it.”

  “I know. I spoke to her this morning, too. She’s a formidable lady.” He smiled faintly at Hai. “But she’s not in Vietnam now. She’s in California. And here the law is stronger than any grandmother.”

  “You believe my brother was murdered?” Hai almost laughed at the idea. “But you never knew him. How could he have enemies? Le Doan Ba? He was a boy, a poet, no harm to anyone. Who would want to kill him?”

  Dave took the poem out of his pocket, unfolded it, handed it across the desk to Hai. The stocky man sat down, frowned at the page. Dave watched his eyes. They took in the poem top to bottom once. Then again. He looked at Dave. “Where did you get this?”

  Dave told him. “Do you understand it?”

  Hai’s thick hand pushed the paper away from him. He looked away. “I am a businessman,” he said, “I have had no time in my life for poetry.”

  “Who is the boy in the poem?” Dave said.

  Hai shrugged impatiently. “I am not a child. Do not ask me to play guessing games.”

  “Ba and Carpenter worked together here. They used to drive together to the Le house sometimes on errands to your father. They must have chatted about things. Surely Ba knew at least as much as I do about Rafe Carpenter’s son. Even I know the boy is interested in baseball.”

  Hai scowled at the poem. “I see what you are saying. Yes. Maybe the boy in the poem is Jonno. Still—”

  “And the father is Rafe Carpenter,” Dave said, “and Ba wrote the poem because he’d just learned his supposed friend Rafe was up to no good here, and Ba was wondering what to do with that knowledge, how to handle it to keep Jonno from being hurt. Isn’t that clear?”

  Hai folded the paper and handed it back to Dave. “Nothing you bring me is ever clear, Mr. Brandstetter.” He got to his feet. “I saw my brothers body after he died. It was unmarked. What do you expect an autopsy to show?”

  “Tiny multiple hemorrhages in the lungs,” Dave said, “indicating suffocation. I think Rafe Carpenter smothered your brother with a pillow in his bed that night.”

  “And later shot my father?” Hai looked scornful.

  “For the same reason,” Dave said. “That he was about to learn Rafe was smuggling drugs through this warehouse.”

  “You have no proof,” Hai said. “The dead cannot speak, and poor Rafe Carpenter is dead.”

  “So is Ba,” Dave said. “But he’ll give me proof.”

  Tracy Davis worked among other lawyers in a honeycomb of glass cells on the eighth floor of a new county office building not far from the harbor. But her cell was empty now. A plump Latino kid, college age, wheeled a steel cart loaded with law books past her door. Dave asked him where she was. She was out to lunch. Dave rode an elevator down again, went out into sunlight glaring on the white cement of a government square planted grudgingly with young trees, and Tracy Davis came toward him, carrying a white paper sack printed with yellow arches. He waited for her on broad, shallow steps in the hot sun. When she saw him, she smiled and waved a hand, and he waved back.

  “This is unexpected,” she said, a little breathless from hurrying. “I thought you’d be in bed with pneumonia today.” She moved briskly on up the steps. He followed. She said, “You were starting an awful cold last night.”

  He made her laugh with his account of Cecil’s concoction. And by the time he’d finished, they were in her office, where she sat behind the desk and opened the white sack. She took out of it a wad of paper napkins, a red and yellow box that held a hamburger, and a red paper pouch of french fries. She excused herself, went away, and came back with two mugs of coffee. The mugs were imprinted with the seal of San Pedro County. The gold was wearing off She handed a mug to Dave, told him to sit down, sat down herself, and rummaged in a desk drawer.

  “I have a letter opener here somewhere. I can cut the Big Mac in half.”

  “Not for me,” Dave said. “Thanks. That’s little enough fuel for a busy career woman.” The desk was heaped with file folders, law books, blue-backed briefs, legal pads. Pencils and pens were strewn around. “I’ll bet you sometimes wish you were back with Abe Greenglass.”

  “Sometimes.” She unwrapped the hamburger and bit into it hungrily. “What’s on your mind?”

  He told her about his visit to the Le house, Ba’s room. He took a swallow of his coffee, set the mug down, pulled the poem from his jacket pocket, and handed it across to her. She frowned, took the page, unfolded it, and r
ead it, twice, munching steadily away at her hamburger and french fries. She looked at him blankly through her green rimmed glasses. “I was never any good at poetry. What does it mean?”

  Dave reached across, took the paper, put on his reading glasses, read the poem aloud to her while she finished off her food. When he quit reading and put away his glasses, she still wasn’t registering. He began to feel hopeless. He lit a cigarette and said patiently, “It’s about Rafe Carpenter’s little son. Ba is saying that the evil Rafe has done is going to darken and chill the boy’s whole life.”

  “Seriously?” she said. “This is evidence?”

  “Ba worked at the Le warehouse, too, remember? Why didn’t he stumble across what Carpenter was doing?”

  She stood, reached across, took back the poem, sat down, read it again. “I see. Right. He was wondering if he should tell his father. If he had the right to expose Carpenter and ruin a child’s life.”

  Dave beamed at her. “See? You are good at poetry.”

  She handed the page back, stuffed the white sack with the red box, the red pouch, the crumpled napkins, and dropped it into a waste basket. “Unfortunately, there are no names in the document, and it isn’t signed. Or dated.”

  “It was in the typewriter, so Ba must have written it the night he died. He couldn’t finish it then—the ending would depend on what he did. And he still hadn’t made up his mind. I think he’d confronted Carpenter with what he knew, Carpenter begged him not to tell, and Ba agreed at least to think about it. But Carpenter knew Ba was Vietnamese—that in the end loyalty to his father would come first.”

  “Obedience?” She smiled wanly.

  Dave nodded. “So, after lights out at the Le house, Carpenter came and suffocated Ba. I never saw Ba, but judging by the size of the rest of the Le’s, Carpenter was much bigger, much stronger. There was no autopsy. The grandmother wouldn’t have it.” Dave handed the folded poem back to her. “Keep it. We need an exhumation order on the body of Le Doan Ba, Tracy. If he was murdered, then there’s a solid chance Carpenter also murdered Le Van Minh.”

  She took the folded page, and gave a little soundless laugh. “It would be one for the law books, wouldn’t it,” she said, “getting an exhumation order on the evidence of a poem?” She said gently, “It’s brilliant detective work, but it isn’t likely to persuade a judge.”

  “Carpenter wasn’t killed by accident, Tracy. That should weigh in the judges mind. Along with Carpenter’s suspicious actions on the dock the day they buried Mr. Le. And remember to take those bank statements I gave you.”

  “Oh, I will,” she said doubtfully. “I wish to God Carpenter wasn’t dead. All of this would be a lot easier.”

  “That’s why he’s dead,” Dave said. “Has Flores found Don Pham? I hope bail was set at ten million dollars.”

  “Don Pham has vanished.” She smiled thinly. “Not long ago, you told me Rafe Carpenter was no killer, remember?”

  Dave made a sour face. “I was wrong. But I also told you it was time I retired.” He got heavily to his feet. “And about that I was right. I’m bungling this case.”

  “Don’t quit on me now,” she said.

  He went to the door. “They’ll have to kill me first.”

  She paled under her freckles. “Not funny,” she said.

  14

  HE WASN’T THE ONLY Westerner to choose the shiny, pastel-walled Hoang Pho, on its seedy waterfront street, as the place to eat lunch today. Hoang himself showed Dave a table. He did it as if he had lost the power of speech along with the ability to move the muscles of his face. He drew out a chair for Dave. Plainly Hoang would have been happier if Dave hadn’t showed up ever again: Remembering Hoang’s words about living with fear, Dave sat down, picked up a napkin, laid it in his lap, and took the menu Hoang offered him, still expressionless.

  “Thank you,” Dave said. Tables all around him were occupied. He lowered his voice. “And thank you for your help the other day. The results were interesting.”

  The little fat man murmured in his French accent. “I expected as much.” He looked sober, “Though I disliked to put you into danger.” He glanced watchfully around the room. “I have worried that perhaps harm came to you.”

  “A little excitement.” Dave put on his reading glasses and glanced at the mysterious listings on the menu. “But no real harm. Not yet.” He looked up into the man’s moon face. “I worried for you. That Don Pham might come here.” It was then Dave noticed the gray, bony, nondescript man in thick lenses. Where had he seen him before? He frowned to himself. It hadn’t been long ago. Then he remembered Hoang, hovering at his elbow. “Everything all right with you?”

  Hoang spread his hands. “As you see.”

  “Good.” Dave closed the menu, handed it back. “I put myself in your hands.” He pushed his reading glasses away. “I’ll have whatever you suggest.”

  “And will you have a cocktail while you wait?”

  Dave hadn’t realized Hoang Pho’s had a bar. He looked for it now and didn’t see it. “A double martini, thanks,” he said. “Straight up. Lamplighter. Twist of lemon”

  With a quick bow, Hoang went away. He disappeared through swinging kitchen doors. No bar then, just a stock of booze in the refrigerator. Dave looked at the gray, thin man again. He sat in his gray suit and gray tie at a corner table, far from the windows, eating, and talking to a stocky Asian whose back was to Dave. The gray man seemed earnest, and was leaning forward to do his talking and listening. The Asian leaned forward too. They might have been television actors, told by a director to look conspiratorial.

  Who the hell was the gray man? Dave knew it was just part of aging, so there was no point in fretting about it, but with everything else, his once sharp memory was developing leaks, and sometimes it made him frantic. Then it came to him. His second visit to the docks. The man had stood opposite Le Tran Hai in the doorway to the warehouse. Like Hai, he’d worn a hardhat, held a clipboard, and had checked items off a shipping manifest as forklifts jounced past, rolling crates into the looming building. Hai had been too busy to give Dave attention, too busy even for manners. He hadn’t introduced the gray man. Dave judged him to be in his sixties, but this morning Hai had described Rafe Carpenter as “my most trusted and valuable employee.” And Carpenter was only in his thirties. Yet the gray man had been doing an important job, teamed with the boss. While Carpenter was doing what—running the crane? Dave scowled.

  He stopped scowling when the tiny young woman with the tinkling laugh brought his martini. He thanked her, tasted the drink: Icy perfection. He lit a cigarette and smiled contentment. The pho, when it arrived steaming in its bowl, kept him smiling. So did the savory little rolls of pork and God-knew-what in puff pastry. He was downing the last of these, when the gray man and the Asian got up from their table and headed for the door. The gray man glanced at Dave in passing, but there was no recognition in his eyes.

  Then Dave wasn’t noticing him anymore. He was noticing his stocky friend. His heart bumped. It was the man off the power launch, the one who had met Rafe Carpenter at the docks the day of Le Van Minh’s funeral, and had walked off with the two attaché cases. Only distance had made it possible to mistake him for Don Pham. Though both stood about the same height and weighed about the same, the two men were wholly different. This man was flashy, with none of the gambling lord’s quiet menace. This man moved with a self-satisfied swagger. This man smiled too much.

  Hoang was trailing him, rubbing his hands, chattering, laughing. He opened the door to let them out onto the shabby, sun-struck street. Dave jerked bills from his wallet, laid them on the table, and followed, pushing the wallet away, taking long strides. Hoang caught his sleeve, frowning. “But, m’sieur, you have not finished your lunch.”

  “Who is that man?” Dave asked him.

  “Chien Cao Nhu.” The little restaurateur beamed after the swaggerer’s departing back. “He is a dealer in sailing craft built in Taiwan. It is a splendid business for this area—br
ings many wealthy people here.”

  “Who may just stop in at the Hoang Pho to eat?”

  Hoang nodded cheerfully. “He has only come here recently. From New York. We are all delighted. Plans are underway to honor him soon at a special banquet.”

  “Which you hope to cater, right?”

  Hoang laughed. “Of course.” Then he frowned. “M’sieur is troubled about something?”

  “I don’t think I’d count on that banquet.”

  Dave pulled the door open, half stepped out onto the sandy sidewalk. Chien Cao Nhu climbed into a glossy black Continental up the street. Not into the front. Into the back. A slim little youth in black opened the door for him. Turtleneck, tight jeans, leather jacket, he looked like one of Don Pham’s doll-boys. Probably with a .357 Magnum strapped to his delicate ribcage. The Continental rolled off. The gray man got behind the wheel of a gray Honda, a late model but nothing pretentious. Dave turned back to Hoang. “Who’s the man he lunched with?”

  “I do not know,” Hoang said. “It was before always another man. This man is a stranger to me.”

  Dave looked at him hard. “The other man—young, fair-haired, a dock worker?”

  Hoang nodded. “Carpenter,” he said. “Rafe Carpenter.”

  He followed the gray car. It wasn’t a long drive. He hadn’t expected it to be. The gray car slid down into the low-ceilinged cement fastness of parking levels where Dave had only a short time ago parked to visit Tracy Davis. The parking facility was under that bleak white square surrounded by new government buildings. Dave left the Jaguar not far from where the gray man left his Honda. He got into a red-doored elevator with the gray man, and watched him get off at the second floor. When the doors slid open to let him out, Dave saw on the opposite wall a big Federal seal. U.S. Customs Service. The doors closed.

  He rode up another floor, took a down elevator to the second floor, got off. Under the Federal seal, facing steel-armed waiting-room chairs with fake leather cushions, a reception counter was flanked by ficus trees. Behind it, a tan-uniformed, middle-aged woman sat at a desk. He went and leaned on the counter. The woman was talking on a telephone. She gave him a smile, spoke for another few seconds into the phone, then laid the receiver in place.