Big Mango (9786167611037) (2 page)

Imagine his surprise when he discovered that
the North Vietnamese hadn’t done anything with it.

Because they didn’t have it either.

FOURTEEN
months as a marine
corps grunt in Vietnam had left Eddie Dare with at least one
staunch conviction: he had been born for better things than
crawling around in the mud with a bunch of stoned assholes. Still,
when he reflected on the subject now—which was something he tried
very hard not to do—he was forced to admit that practicing law in
San Francisco had an awful lot of the very same qualities.

Eddie opened the
Chronicle
sports
section with a sigh, propped it against a stainless steel napkin
holder, and went back to his breakfast.

The Buena Vista Cafe was way down at the end
of Hyde Street, right on the bay where the cable cars from Union
Square turned around, and a stool at the counter there was Eddie’s
favorite place to begin a day. Three fried eggs, crispy bacon, that
thick-cut patty sausage that you nearly couldn’t find anymore, hash
browns swimming in catsup, and two slices of sourdough toast soaked
with enough butter to cause little rivulets to form and run down
his fingers every time he lifted a slice. Eddie knew eating
breakfast like that wasn’t fashionable anymore, but he figured he
probably wasn’t fashionable anymore either, so to hell with it.

The waitress eased over with a fresh pot of
coffee. Blond and athletic looking with a slight dusting of suntan,
she looked like the runners in Golden Gate Park who could only find
the time to put in miles on weekends. As she refilled Eddie’s
chunky ceramic mug, she tossed out her most dazzling smile, but
Eddie was tough to dazzle before his caffeine kicked in.

“Anything else, handsome?”

“No thanks, Suzie. Got to get to the
office.”

“Hey, new client, maybe? My tips going to get
better?”

Suzie had been flirting mildly with Eddie
ever since she started working days at the BV instead of nights.
Eddie noticed she had made a point of telling him she changed
shifts because she was sick of the yuppies and tourists who piled
into the place every night to slurp Irish coffee and check out the
action; that she liked more mature, more stable men, guys who had
lived a little. Eddie didn’t take long to get the idea, but it
didn’t really excite him all that much once he did. Suzie was okay,
but Eddie was already up to his ass in okay. Okay was the story of
his life.

Christ, is that what it’s going to say on
my tombstone?
he thought to himself
. Here lies Eddie Dare.
He was okay.

“Did that woman ever call? The one I gave
your number to?”

“I don’t do divorces, Suzie.”

“Well, you know, I figured with all the
experience you’ve had yourself…”

Eddie winced.
Okay, honey, so I’ve been
married a couple of times. So what?

“This woman looked like she had pretty good
money.”

“I just don’t do divorce work, Suzie.”

Suzie rubbed at a spot on the counter that
was invisible, at least to Eddie, then she tossed the towel away
and sloshed coffee around in the pot.

“So, you still working on that case for the
dog?” she finally asked, mostly just to keep the conversation
going.

“It’s not a case for a dog, Suzie. It’s a
case that happens to involve a dog.”

“I thought it was two dogs.”

“Okay, two dogs.”

Eddie had represented Eric Ratmoski on and
off for five years. Breaking and entering a few times; extortion,
of course; a couple of assault charges; a concealed weapons beef;
and an interstate gambling conviction. All that was pretty much
business as usual for Eric, but now he had plunged headlong into
the porno business. That by itself probably wouldn’t have bothered
Eddie so much, but Eric’s recent fixation with German Shepherds was
pretty far over the line.

Two dogs that Eric said he particularly
loved—and Eric’s choice of words there was something Eddie wasn’t
about to reflect on too closely—had been taken away and locked up
at the San Francisco Animal Shelter. Eric had been onto Eddie every
day to get them back and Eddie had been trying. He hadn’t managed
it yet, and he figured that if he had to sit through one more
meeting with the vice squad and listen to all those doggie fuck
jokes again, he was going to puke. Probably he should tell Eric to
get himself another lawyer. Maybe one who liked dogs.

“I don’t know, Eddie,” Suzie mused. “Seems to
me that talking to people about divorces isn’t any worse than
watching movies of dogs humping.”

Eddie was still trying to figure out what to
say to that when a customer down the counter waved his coffee cup
for a refill and Suzie wandered off. Eddie jumped at his chance. He
used the last crust of his sourdough toast to sop up a stray bit of
egg, dropped a twenty on the counter with a wave to Suzie, and
headed outside to grab a cable car back over Russian Hill to his
office.

People who lived in San Francisco claimed
that only tourists rode cable cars, and generally it was true. A
real San Franciscan normally couldn’t manage to wedge his way onto
one even if he wanted to. The flip-flops and camcorders and kids
wearing T-shirts with stupid slogans gave no quarter; but it was
still pretty early in the day for little hooligans to be out and
about their business of ruining the city and Eddie usually had no
difficulty getting on a car back over the hill after breakfast.

It had been several years now since he had
moved up to the better end of Grant just west of Market. He had the
second floor of a small, vaguely Victorian building with a Chinese
restaurant on the ground floor and something on the third floor
called Pacific Century Import Company that apparently opened only
occasionally and generally very late at night. That was odd, even
for San Francisco, but Eddie had made a point of not asking too
many questions. That was not odd for San Francisco.

Eddie had started out as an uptown guy in a
flashy, bronzed-glass office tower, then worked his way down to a
one-man office over a Chinese restaurant. Most people usually tried
to get that the other way around, he knew, and he would have
preferred that approach himself, but you had to play the cards you
were dealt and he figured he had done the best he could with
his.

His first stop after he left Wren &
Simon, the big downtown firm where he had started right out of law
school, had been two dingy rooms over a grocery store in Chinatown.
After Eddie took a few days in the silence of his new office to
contemplate the stark fact that he didn’t have any clients, not
one, he hit upon a marketing strategy that was designed to get him
some as quickly as possible.

The idea was straightforward enough. Mostly
he hung around the criminal courts at the Hall of Justice, wore a
good suit, and radiated a willingness to work cheap. It turned out
to be a remarkably effective plan because Eddie had one important
thing going for him: he was pretty fast on his feet. That gave him
a useful edge over the other lawyers who cruised the courthouse in
search of a living, most of whom in Eddie’s eyes were only a step
or two from swapping lives with their clients anyway.

When he managed to cut a few guys loose, even
if he wasn’t exactly sure how he had done it, he began to develop a
reputation among a particular clientele as a good man to know.
Almost before he realized it, he was on a roll, and it wasn’t long
before his client list was reasonably impressive, that is if he
stuck strictly to contemplating the quantity and didn’t worry too
much about the quality.

Sometimes it occurred to Eddie that he didn’t
know much about actually practicing criminal law since he had done
nothing after school except banking and finance work; but then most
if not all of the people who hired him were guilty as hell anyway
so he figured maybe it really didn’t matter that he knew so little.
Sometimes he wondered if doctors knew any more about medicine when
they started out on their own than he knew about law. That thought
always scared the crap out of him and caused him to swear that he
would never go to a doctor who wasn’t really old.

Eddie jumped off the cable car when it slowed
at California Street for the brakeman to lock-up for the steep
crawl down Nob Hill. He let the car’s momentum carry him into a
gentle jog onto Powell and angled off just enough to make the turn
toward Grant without slowing down. It was a slick-looking move if
he did say so himself and he felt a momentary stab of
disappointment that some woman he wanted to impress hadn’t been
around to see it. Good moves were good moves regardless, he
supposed, even if no one was around to admire them.

He climbed the stairs and heard the clicking
from Joshua’s keyboard even before he opened his office door. Eddie
had known Joshua since he had been his first paralegal at Wren
& Simon, although why Joshua had given up the security and
prestige of a big, commercial firm to go with him to Chinatown,
Eddie had never really understood. Joshua lived with a retired
fireman on a houseboat in Sausalito and he was Eddie’s most loyal
employee. Actually, he was Eddie’s only employee. Joshua was very
thin and, with his full head of long, silver hair and his rimless
glasses, he looked like he had come straight to the office from a
Grateful Dead concert in 1968 and hadn’t left since. Eddie didn’t
know for sure how old Joshua was, and frankly he didn’t think
Joshua knew either.

“If you’re thinking of giving me anything
else to do, you can forget it.”

As usual, Joshua didn’t look up or even stop
typing before he spoke. Eddie always wondered how he even knew who
had come in.

“I’m still doing the discovery motions in the
Wong robbery,” he added.

“How about starting on the Wright robbery
instead?”

“I don’t remember any…” Joshua’s fingers
stopped moving, but he kept his eyes fixed on the computer screen.
“Was that a joke, Eddie? It was, wasn’t it?”

Before Eddie could say anything, Joshua began
to shake his head. Then he started typing again, very fast.

“That was pathetic, Eddie. Really pathetic.
You’re no Al Gore, are you, man?”

“Any messages?” Eddie asked, not even
bothering to try for a witty recovery.

“Michael called from Seattle.”

That was odd. Eddie’s son had just turned
fourteen and didn’t call him all that often.

“Really? What about?”

“Didn’t tell me. Said he’d call back
later.”

Joshua had recently begun to resent Michael a
little and he didn’t try very hard to keep it hidden. He and Eddie
had never talked about it, but Eddie knew that Joshua thought
Michael treated Eddie disdainfully, almost like he was ashamed
Eddie was his father.

Joshua had Mike’s attitude diagnosed about
right, Eddie thought, and he didn’t like it much either. But he
also knew that being a father and an ex-husband was a complicated
thing and you had to make allowances. Joshua hadn’t had any
experience trying to be either, at least not that Eddie knew of, so
he just let the whole thing slide and they didn’t get into it.

Eddie had still been at Wren & Simon when
he came home late on a wet Tuesday in November and discovered that
his wife had taken Michael, as well as most of what they owned, and
moved out. Before he could get a grip on what was happening to him,
Jennifer surfaced in Seattle and filed for divorce and custody of
Michael. She told Eddie that it wasn’t his fault really. It was
just that she didn’t want to be married anymore, that she wanted to
have her own life, not live as an extension of his. Eddie didn’t
really know what to say to that—actually it sounded pretty
reasonable to him—so when the divorce papers came, he signed them
and sent them back.

It was while Eddie was still trying to decide
how he felt about being single again that what he later took to
calling ‘the disagreement’ occurred and he abruptly parted company
with Wren & Simon. That made two divorces in the same month. It
had been almost ten years ago now, but he could still recall every
minute of the day when the firm’s management committee called him
into the conference room and fired him. He could remember every
word they had said. His memory of the other divorce was less
vivid.

“No other messages?” Eddie asked.

“Nothing you care about.”

Bless Joshua, Eddie thought; he always had
everything under control. Eddie, on the other hand, wasn’t really
certain he’d had anything under control since about 1960. That had
been the time at his fifth birthday party when he socked Becky
Schulman in the nose. She had been seven and had stuck out her
tongue at Eddie and called him a ninny, so he had drawn back his
little fist and popped her right in the snot. Becky had bled all
over the carpet and Eddie’s mother had spanked him hard, although
whether for hitting Becky or for getting blood on the carpet he was
never absolutely certain, but he hadn’t yelled because it had been
worth it. He’d cold cocked the little bitch and even now he thought
she had deserved it. But he also figured that was probably the very
last time in his life that he had been fully in control of
anything.

“Could you bring me some coffee, Joshua?”
Eddie asked as he headed into his office.

“Right away, oh master of mine.”

Come to think of it, Joshua was starting to
remind him a whole hell of a lot of Becky Schulman.

Eddie flopped into his low back desk chair
upholstered in nondescript brown cloth—he hated those high back
leather thrones that lawyers usually sat in—and dumped his
briefcase on the floor. He rummaged halfheartedly through the mail
and was mildly pleased to find a couple of real letters among the
usual junk. The first bore the engraved return address of Martin,
Fletcher & O’Brien, a famously stuffy commercial firm that
occupied about half of the Bank of America Tower. Eddie threw that
one back onto his desk unopened.