Obedience Read online

  “I’m not from Mr. Le.” A gray plank lay across to the boat from the dock. He made to walk aboard.

  “Just hold it right there.” Wiping her hands on her shirt, she came toward him along a paintless deck, a bulldog set to her jaw. “If you’re not from him, you’re from the developers, and if you’re not from them, you’re from the city council.” She halted a few feet from Dave. A yellow cat with white markings had been asleep on top of the boat’s wheelhouse. Now the cat jumped down and began circling her ankles, bumping, tail straight up. “Well, we’re taking up a collection—got nearly five hundred dollars now—to hire an attorney and fight all of you. Lawyers seem to be all anybody understands anymore.”

  Dave took out the ostrich-hide folder that held his private investigator’s license, let it fall open, and held it out arm’s length so she could read it if she wanted to across the space of dark water that separated them. She blinked, squinted, shook her head.

  “No use. Haven’t got my glasses. No point wearing them to wash clothes. They just get steamed up. Or else they fall off into the soapsuds.”

  “My name is Brandstetter.” He slipped the folder back inside his jacket. “I’m working for the Public Defender handling Andy Flanagan’s case. Tracy Davis.”

  This got her attention. She eyed him, head turned, wary. “Working how?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Ms. Davis doesn’t think Andy killed Le Van Minh. She’d like me to find out who did. What do you think?”

  She snorted. “What all of us think. That Andy was a fall guy. He’d been raising hell about how they’re booting us out of here without a by-your-leave. He was a troublemaker. Powerful people don’t like poor people who stand up on their hind legs and fight back.”

  Dave started to say, “I didn’t know anybody liked him,” and out in the harbor, beyond the ugly steel lattice-work of the Edward Otis bridge, a freighter blew its whistle, a deep, hoarse roar. The sound shook the place. When the echo died, Dave said, “If I come aboard, it will be easier to talk.” She hesitated and he gave her a smile and said, “I think you’ve got ideas on this that can help me. Help Andy.”

  She nodded grudgingly. “All right, come on.” She turned and walked back aft past the superstructure to the bright tub on its bench. He crossed the plank, jumped down, followed her. He leaned back against a gunwale, and watched her bend over her wash again. She said, “They wouldn’t be so crude as to kill Andy outright, would they? A veteran with an arm shot off for his country?”

  “So somebody murdered Le to frame him?” Dave said.

  She lifted the soaking jeans out of the water, and squeezed suds out of them. She wrung them, grunting with the effort, stretched them flat on a wet patch of deck, took a green plastic garden hose, and sprayed them hard. She flapped them over, sprayed them hard again, turned off the hose, hung the jeans on the rope line, turned to face Dave.

  “That’s what I think,” she said. “I may look crazy, but my brains still work. I taught school till they made me retire. I live on Social Security and a laughable pension. But I live by the ocean, which is what I longed to do all my life and never could.” She glanced around at the shabby hulks, the weathered oil derricks, the deserted factories. “It’s not Monte Carlo. But I like it, and I want to stay here till I die.”

  Dave took out cigarettes and lighter, held them up, brows raised. She gave him a nod.

  “Go ahead and smoke. I’m not one of those people who enjoys spoiling everybody else’s fun. Too much of that these days.” She turned back to start rubbing a soggy print dress on the washboard. Dave lit a cigarette. The sea breeze snatched the smoke. Grunting between the words, she said, “They claim it’s your health they’re interested in, but the truth is, they just want you to be miserable. It’s the only way some people can be happy. Like the ones that want me and the rest of us out of here.”

  “How many of you are there?” Dave said.

  “Ninety.” She began to wring the dress out. “On forty boats. Couples—old a lot of ’em. But there are youngsters, too, with babies and toddlers.” She flapped the dress down on the deck, turned on the hose and rinsed it the way she’d rinsed the jeans. The water ran into the scuppers. Over the hiss and splash of the hose, she went on talking. “You must be good at your work—the way you dress, that car you drive. I saw you park up there.” She jerked her head at the seawall.

  “Was Le killed just so Andy would be arrested for his murder?” Dave said. “Or do you think whoever did it wanted Le out of the way too?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” She turned off the hose, threw it aside, peeled the dress off the curved deck planks, flapped it over the rope. “Le annoyed the developers and the politicians. He was slow to do what they wanted. He was supposed to have cleared us out of here months ago.” She lifted the washboard from the tub, leaned it against the bench and, getting red in the face, picked up the tub, hauled it to the rail, dumped the soapy water overboard. “That was why Andy thought maybe Le was worth talking to.”

  “Even though he was Vietnamese?” Dave said.

  “He didn’t like that, but what choice did he have?” She hung the tub on a spike in the wall of the cabin. Hands on hips, she regarded the wash on the line. “Well, that’s over for the week.” She gave a satisfied nod, turned to him, said, “You feel like iced tea?” She moved off. “Come on inside. Sun’s hot.”

  She opened a little pair of slatted red doors and ducked down a narrow companionway. Dave tossed his cigarette into the water and dropped after her into a dim cabin with threadbare cushions on built-in benches, storage cabinets above, small stove and refrigerator in a corner. Old television set. Pots of geraniums. Books and magazines lay around. Framed photographs hung on the bulkheads, family, friends, a long-ago cocker spaniel. Small, tarnished trophies stood with bric-a-brac on shelves. He put on his glasses and read the engraving on a trophy. Her class had won a state-wide spelling bee in 1939.

  The woodwork of the cabin was white with red trim. The white had gone yellow long ago, and the red had dulled and faded. Water lapped the wooden sides of the old craft. It rocked gently, so that the brass lamp overhead swung from its hook in a crossbeam. She told him to sit down, and she banged ice cubes out of a metal tray, dropped them into mismatched glasses, poured tea over them from a chilled glass pitcher with a nick in its rim. She handed him a glass and sat down opposite him.

  “It’s sugared and lemoned to start with,” she said.

  “Thanks.” Dave tasted it. The best that could be said for it was that it was cold and wet. “Killing sounds a little extreme to me as negotiating practice in a business deal. Framing a fractious tenant for murder isn’t common, either.”

  “You’re the expert,” she said. “But feelings were raw around here, on both sides. Still are. Most of us simply have no place to go. The Old Fleet was a last refuge. We’re desperate. We’re digging in our heels. And sometimes men used to having their way lose patience.” She drank some of the tea and made a face. “Tastes stale, doesn’t it? I guess something in that icebox ought to be thrown out.”

  “Tracy Davis says Andy has a short temper,” Dave said. “Why didn’t he do it?”

  “He was a talker.” She snorted. “All noise. Nobody around here listened to him. We learned to get out of his way when we saw him coming.”

  “Then how did he end up spokesman for all of you?”

  She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “By default, mostly. Not many people like stepping out in front of the crowd.”

  “You included, Ms.—?” He waited for her name.

  “Potter,” she said. “Norma. No, not me included. You know that already.” Her smile was wry. “But I’m a woman and I’m old. Being either one in this, society is a handicap. And up against a gigantic land development outfit, backed up by a bunch of cold-hearted bureaucrats—no, no. We needed somebody with an advantage, a wounded veteran.”

  “Willing to step out in front of the crowd,” Dave said. “Willing to talk.”

 
; “Willing and eager.” She grimaced. “Nonstop. But we soon saw it wasn’t going to help. That’s why a few of us pushed for hiring a lawyer. It hurt Andy’s feelings, I guess. That was why he phoned Le on the quiet, and asked him to come down here and talk with him, thrash things out between them.”

  “It never got to that,” Dave said, “if Flanagan’s telling the truth. He found Le dead on the dock.”

  She shuddered. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” She turned her head to look out one of the small cabin windows. “You don’t like ugly things happening where you live. This was a peaceful, pleasant place. Out of the world’s way. Now … it makes you feel naked, vulnerable, nobody to protect you. All sole alone.” She turned back. “Makes you angry too, ready to shoot somebody, yourself. It’s a feeling I don’t like. It’s not civilized.”

  “You didn’t hear the shot? The police report says no one heard it, but Tracy Davis thinks that’s unlikely. She wonders why people would lie about that. You know these people. Would they? Why?”

  “Probably not lying. They’re old and go to bed early, or they’re young and go to bed early, knowing the kids will get them up at the crack of dawn. There’s a few alcoholics that sit up late with their bottles, and a few people dying that sit up late with their pain. But most of us, up that late, would be running the television, wouldn’t we? I would. I do. Reading by lamplight’s hard on my eyes. I wish it weren’t. TV doesn’t have much to offer anybody accustomed to a lifetime’s reading. But I make do with it. For company.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a loud report,” Dave said. “It was only a twenty-two pistol.”

  She gave a jerk and stared. “A twenty-two pistol? But—but how could that kill anybody?” She seemed upset. “When I was a girl my brothers had a twenty-two rifle, and it would kill a rabbit or a prairie chicken. But a grown man?” Her tone scoffed, but her eyes were worried. Why? What about?

  “It happens. Maybe somebody did hear the shot, looked out, saw something, or someone—and they’re afraid to tell the police about it? Has any of you been threatened? Maybe people are afraid their children will be harmed.”

  “No, there’s been nothing like that. Only some heated language from our side—mostly Andy Flanagan’s.” She gave a snort of laughter. “And if Andy had been threatened, we’d have heard about it, believe me.”

  “What about the others?” Dave finished off the bad tea. “If they were afraid to tell the police, maybe they told their neighbors.” He got to his feet, carried his glass to the galley, set it in the sink. “Maybe they told you.”

  She eyed him watchfully. “Why me, especially?”

  He smiled. “That’s how you impress me, as someone people confide in—younger people, especially.”

  “The old,” she said grimly, “have nothing left to confide. All their confidences have gone to the grave with their friends. It’s why they can’t make new ones.”

  Dave stood over her, head bowed a little because the ceiling of the cabin was low, and he looked down at her steadily, until she was ready to leave her bitter reverie to draw breath and speak again. The glass was still in her hand. She looked at it surprised for a second. “That’s terrible tea,” she said. “You shouldn’t have had to drink it.” She rose and went into the galley. “A person gets out of the way of having company.” She poured the tea from her glass into the sink, and peered into the little refrigerator. “I’m afraid there’s nothing else here.”

  “It’s all right, thanks,” Dave said. “Who told you they heard the shot that killed Le, Ms. Potter?”

  She turned sharply. “What did I say? Did I say anyone told me?” She wasn’t angry. She was afraid she’d had a memory lapse, had spoken and already forgotten. “I didn’t, did I? Am I losing my mind? Nothing frightens me about getting old the way that does.”

  “You didn’t say anyone told you. I just figured someone did. And I figured right, didn’t I?”

  Her ruddy face closed. “He has reason to be afraid.”

  “Why? Did the murderer see him?”

  She shut the refrigerator door behind her, and came back to him. She’d been shaken for a few minutes here, by his questions, by her memories. Now she was once again stalwart, sure of herself, as he’d found her up on the deck in the sunlight, and as children must have found her in schoolrooms now no more than memories. She faced him calmly, faded blue eyes unwavering.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. It was a confidence.”

  “It wasn’t Andy Flanagan he saw,” Dave said.

  She shook her head.

  “Then his testimony could free Flanagan,” Dave said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure Cot—” She closed her mouth hard on the half-spoken name. Her smile was wry. “Let me put it this way. I told you most of us tried to avoid Andy Flanagan, but there were some of us Andy made it a point to avoid.”

  He studied her. “Are you giving me a clue?”

  She chuckled. “I knew you’d understand.”

  3

  UP ON THE DECK IN the sun and breeze again, he looked for the cat, who had gone back to the cabin roof. He reached up and stroked its fur. He liked cats, but it had been a long time since one had made a home with him. Tatiana had been her name. He frowned to himself—when was he thinking about? The 1940s. She’d delivered a batch of kittens at the foot of the bed one Eastern morning. That fancy white wickerwork bed he’d shared with Rod Fleming, both men in their early twenties. Tatiana was long since dead. So was Rod. Strange. It didn’t seem like any time at all.

  Tatiana had worn plushy gray and white stripes. Norma Potter’s cream and marmalade cat began to purr now, under his hand. He scratched its ears. It closed its eyes in bliss and kneaded the tough weathered roofing with its front paws. “A soft life around here, isn’t it?” he said. “All the fresh fish you can eat?” He hadn’t kept a cat, of course, because his work had taken him away from home too much. That wasn’t fair to an animal.

  Wondering how Cecil felt about cats, Dave crossed the boarding plank to the dock and headed for the next boat fed by sagging power lines.

  It was a broad, shallow-draft houseboat. Metal. The kind that loaf around the Sacramento delta. How had it got down here? They weren’t built for life on the bounding main. This one showed rust at its rivets. On the roof, a young blond man lay on the faded orange canvas webbing of a tubular deck chair. He wore only swim trunks and sunglasses. Nearby, a tattered Hawaiian shirt hung over a corroded railing and flapped in the breeze. Dave called:

  “Hello, on board the Wanderer.”

  The young man sat up. Dave winced. Long angry red scars in which the stitching showed marked the young man’s belly. His arms and legs were sticks, his ribs stuck out. He took off the sunglasses and squinted. “What do you want?”

  “I’m helping with Andy Flanagan’s defense,” Dave said.

  “The stupid son of a bitch is going to need all the help he can get.” Delicately running fingers over his marred belly, the young man pondered Dave, trying to make up, his mind. At last, he nodded. “Okay. Come on.” He reached to snag the shirt and put it on, moving as if he hurt. “On your way, will you duck inside and ask my wife for another soda, please?”

  Sea salt had pitted the chrome on the railings of the main deck. He crawled between these. His feet gonged the plating of the deck. The door to the living quarters stood open. He rapped the tin doorframe and poked his head inside. On a sink counter, a young woman with short reddish hair, was changing a baby’s diaper. She wore a large man’s shirt with long tails. She called, “Just a minute,” clipped shut a last safety pin, picked up the baby with a laugh, laid it in a bassinet. She crouched to retrieve a soiled diaper from the floor and, wrinkling her nose, carried this past Dave, to a round metal receptacle on the deck, pulled off the lid, dropped the diaper in, replaced the lid. She turned Dave a half smile. “Did I hear the captain order grog?”

  He touched the brim of his canvas hat. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She
went back inside, a refrigerator door sucked open, thumped closed, she brought two icy green cans, and looked somber as she put them into his hands. “Don’t stay too long,” she said. “He’s weak and everything tires him.”

  “I’ll make it quick,” Dave promised.

  “I wanted him to nap.” She looked reproachful. “He can’t sleep at night. He lies awake and worries.”

  There was a ladder to climb. Dave put the cans into jacket pockets and climbed, the effort bringing back a twinge of pain where his shoulder had been knifed by a half-crazy teenager last winter. He reached the roof deck, and stood for a moment, catching his breath. Then he handed the young man on the deck chair one of the cans. He popped the lid, swallowed some of the contents, held out a hand.

  “Ralph Mannix,” he said. “Who are you?”

  Dave shook his hand, spoke his own name, showed his license, said, “You didn’t like Flanagan?”

  “Hardly knew him. We only came down here six months ago. Last resort, all right?” He made a face. “I’ve been very sick. Diverticulitis. You know what that is? Your guts develop leaks. Inside. It’s a mess. The doctors made it worse. I had to have surgery, and surgery to repair the surgery, and surgery to repair the repairs.”

  “I saw the scars,” Dave said.

  “They’re only half of it. I owned a delivery service, rush mail, small parcels. It was growing fast. I’d just put in extra phone lines, a computer system. We’d bought a nice place in Westwood—swimming pool, sauna, you name it. When I came out of the hospital the third time, I was stripped. No business, no house, no car, nothing in the bank, and still deep in debt. My wife’s folks used their last thousand bucks to buy us this tub. She’s got the baby and me to look after, can’t go out to work, so she takes in typing here. It’s our only income.” He turned his face away for a minute, drew a few deep breaths, drank from the green can, worked up a kind of smile. “I’m sorry. I’m alive. That’s what counts, isn’t it? Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Gloom reclaimed him. “Only now we’re going to be chased out of here, and where will we go?”