Obedience (13 page)

Dave smiled faintly. “I alarmed him today. He was flustered—that must be the reason.” Dave went on to tell Fergusson of his noon visit to the warehouse on the pier. And of his earlier visit, after the funeral. And a little about Don Pham and the doll-boys. “They were watching your father. Don Pham says they didn’t kill him, but they were at the Old Fleet at the time he died—a witness told me so. I think they meant to kill him. Why?”

“Dope smuggling?” Fergusson’s face twisted as he argued in his mind with the idea. “No. If old Mr. Le knew about it he’d have put a stop to it at once. Same for Hai.” He shook his head, stubborn with conviction. “No way would either of them have had anything to do with anything crooked. As for Rafe Carpenter, he and his wife and boy were at the house once for dinner, but I don’t know him that well. All I know is, Mr. Le trusted him.”

“So Hai told me,” Dave said wryly. “That’s sometimes a flaw in trustworthy people—they’re too trusting of others.”

Fergusson bristled. “You don’t know for sure what Carpenter was doing at the pier that day. No drugs were ever discovered in any of the Le cargoes.”

“So Hai said. And I believe he believes that. If only because he’s the one adult male member of the Le clan still alive. I wonder how long that will last.”

Fergusson paled and stumbled up out of his chair. “You mean he’s in danger? Have you told the police? Is anybody protecting him?”

“He’s not in danger yet.”

“How can you know that?” Fergusson’s voice cracked.

“Sit down. Relax. Here’s what’s been happening today. First of all, at some point, after thinking about it, Hai braced Rafe with what I’d told him, with the evidence I’d shown him.”

“Oh, my God,” Fergusson wailed.

Dave held up a hand. “Don’t get excited. There’s a killer in the picture—we both know that. But I doubt it’s Carpenter. He’s only a bag man—he delivers the contraband, gets the payoff, and delivers that. I don’t think he’s going to run and tell Don Pham or whoever pays him that he got caught red-handed. But he’s scared, and run he will. And when he does, I believe he’ll run to me.

“You’re awfully sure of yourself,” Fergusson grouched. “Why hasn’t Hai turned him over to the law by now?”

“You know better than that. Hai would lose face.”

Fergusson sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Even though the Le’s had nothing to do with it, they should have prevented it—that’s how Hai will see it. It’s how the old man would have seen it. They shouldn’t have let it happen, and they did, and the name Le would be disgraced forever.” He twisted out his cigarette in the soapstone bowl. “What will you do when Carpenter comes to you?”

“Get him to tell me who his boss is.”

Fergusson’s eyebrows rose. “Just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “Why would he do that?”

“Because if this is as big a case as I think it is, if he turns state’s evidence he won’t have to go to jail. The Justice Department will protect him under their hide-the-witness-protection program. Relocate him and his family under a new identity. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose. My attorney can arrange it with a couple of phone calls. Carpenter will tell me.” Dave drank some brandy. “Now, you tell me about your beautiful visitor—Thao.”

“What?” Fergusson’s jaw dropped. He knocked a fork off the table, picked it up. “What do you know about her?”

“Nothing”—Dave smiled—“that’s why I’m asking.”

“She’s the daughter of an old friend and benefactor of Mr. Le—Nguyen Dinh Thuc, a cabinet minister in the last administration at Saigon before the Commies took over. Wealthy businessman—in exile in France, now. He lent Mr. Le the money to start over in the States. But Washington says Nguyen made off with unauthorized U.S. funds, and if he enters this country, they’ll nail him.” Fergusson kept idling with the fork, looking at everything but Dave. “So he sent Thao. She’ll be going home soon.” He sounded relieved.

“At the funeral,” Dave said, “she seemed awfully upset.”

“Yeah, well—” Fergusson cleared his throat. “She’s kind of Westernized, you know?” He twitched a feeble smile. “She doesn’t hold her emotions in like most Asians do, or try to. She’s more French than Vietnamese, really.”

“It’s a long way to come just to say hello,” Dave said:

“Yeah.” Fergusson stood up. “Look, I have to get back to work.” He surveyed the busy room. “People are waiting for their food.”

“Am I right,” Dave asked, “that we’ve met before?”

Fergusson gulped, shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. Excuse me, please.” And he rushed off.

“Oh, yes we have,” Dave said softly. But where, when?

“For Christ sake,” Cecil said, “where have you been? I’ve been calling all over Southern California. You were going to phone me at home.”

In the dim black-and-silver-papered hallway leading to the restrooms of Madame Le’s Saigon, where a mute row of shiny pay telephones waited, Dave read his watch. “I’m sorry. It’s been one damned thing after another.”

“Numbers just about worn off the push-buttons here,” Cecil said. “I ran out of ideas after a while. Tried to get that Tracy Davis half a dozen times. Out of the office. Was she with you?”

“It’s not a romance,” Dave said. “Just business.”

“You had dinner with her, right?”

“To bring her up to date on the case,” Dave said. “You can’t be jealous. Why were you calling?”

“Because a man kept calling you. Ralph Carpenter?”

“I’ll bet,” Dave said. “But it’s Rafe, not Ralph.”

“Yeah, well, whatever. I said for him to call back, and he sure as hell did, time after time. And the last time I was going out the door to come here to earn my grits and greens, and I figured I’d hear from you, and so I said for him to leave a number where you could reach him, and I’d pass it to you when you called me. But he didn’t want to do that, so he kept calling me here. Donaldson loved that. He expects me to do a little work once in a while, not keep trying to calm down hysterical strangers on the telephone.”

“What did Carpenter say he wanted, exactly?”

“Nothing exact about it, except the last call, an hour ago, he said if you called, I was to tell you to meet him at Pier Nine at eleven, the Le warehouse. Alone.”

“Ah, that’s more like it.” Dave grinned to himself. “Just the news I’ve been waiting to hear.”

“Sounds dangerous to me. Who is this dude?”

Dave told him. “If I’m right, his boss is Don Pham. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see Don Pham locked up.”

“Don’t go there, Dave. You know those docks at night. Why should this Carpenter tell you anything? Why won’t he just kill you? Even if Hai guessed what happened, he’d keep quiet to save face. You’d be dead for nothing. What would I do, then? Shit, you don’t even have your gun.”

Dave groaned. “It’s at Mel Fleischer’s.” Cecil was right—he shouldn’t go alone, certainly not unarmed. “Look, can you get out of there? Go to Mel’s, pick up the Sig-Sauer. And meet me at the real estate office on the waterfront.” He read his watch again. “If you start now, you’ll just have time.”

“I would if I had a helicopter,” Cecil said. “You wait, hear me? Don’t do anything till I get there.”

T
HE WATERFRONT WAS AS
deserted and, except for the wash of water against the sea wall, as silent as if the world had ended. Dave had parked the Jaguar up a side street as before and gone on foot along the walk that faced the docks. The lights on the docks were spaced far apart. Out in the harbor, the sparse lights of anchored freighters and tankers only hinted their dark shapes, their hulking size. Reflections of the lights wavered yellow, red, green in the black water.

He stationed himself well back in the shadowed entryway of the real estate place. Cold wind blew off the water. Blown trash, fried chicken bones, hot dog wrappers, soft drink cups crackled under his shoes. He peered at his watch. Ten forty. A light burned above the door of the Le warehouse. He saw it through the iron tracery of the crane whose lofty top was lost in high darkness. The light outlined stacks of empty crates on the dock.

He waited. He wanted a cigarette but he didn’t light one. Invisibility might be important. This kind of waiting he had mastered long ago. Everybody in his line of work learned it after a while. Tension had no part in it. Tension tired you out. Excitement? Excitement made you make mistakes. All you wanted was a certainty that something would happen when it happened. This made for a kind of ease that came close to sleep but wasn’t sleep. Your thoughts could wash around one small, focused point of concentration, like surf around a rock, until the moment came to move.

His point of focus was the pair of chain-link gates that let traffic down onto the pier. Unless something had happened to him, in the next twenty minutes Rafe Carpenter would drive up in that shiny car, leave it for a few seconds to work the padlock and swing the gates open, get back into it and drive it down the long ramp. Would he stop it there, come back, lock the gates again, to make sure Dave came to him on foot? Dave didn’t like the thought. He hadn’t believed Carpenter was dangerous. But desperation could change people.

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.”