Monkey on a Chain (40 page)

She sat on the foot of the bed and stared at the television. It wasn’t turned on. I opened her suitcase, picked out a pair of panties, a brassiere, white slacks, a cream-colored blouse, and laid them beside her. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Damn it, do I have to dress you?”

She stood and started taking off the bikini top. I grabbed some clothes and headed for the bathroom. When I came out, she was dressed. She had picked out a different blouse. I thought that was probably a good sign.

We spent a couple of hours in the nearest mall. I told her she had to buy clothes, that I wouldn’t let her leave until she’d spent two hundred dollars. She shopped apathetically at first, but toward the end she was showing a little enthusiasm. We got back to the motel by three-thirty. I made her model the dress and pants outfit she’d decided on. She acted pleased when I complemented them.

At four o’clock I called the number again. The man I’d spoken to earlier answered on the first ring.

“Mr. Stephenson?”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I told him.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Coleman will not be available. He asked me to convey his regrets and to say that he remembers the last time you met with fondness, but he will not see you again.” The man’s voice never strayed from gentle civility. “Goodbye, Mr. Stephenson.”

I hung up before he could. His politeness irritated me. Walker’s caginess was beginning to irritate me. I said “Shit.”

“What’s wrong?” April was watching me from the bed.

“Nothing. I’m just irritated.” She waited. I threw myself on the bed beside her. “Walker wants to play games. Or maybe he’s scared. I don’t know which.”

I stared at the couple in the mirror opposite the bed for a long minute before adding, “At least nobody is shooting at us.”

She said nothing. Well, there was nothing to say. I told her I was looking at a long night and to wake me at seven. She reached for the television controller as I rolled over. I spent some time deciding how to play the few cards I held, and then I let myself drift off. I woke a few minutes before seven. April was asleep. I woke her and prodded her to dress. She wore one of the new outfits. Before we left the room, I turned on the radio and all the lights and opened the curtains over the patio door. We ate a leisurely dinner at the motel and were on the road by eight-thirty.

My last meeting with Walker, the one he remembered with such fondness, had been in a lounge near the American Airlines gates at the Phoenix airport. I was delivering some papers that would transfer ownership of a shipment of machine tools being held in bond at the port of Los Angeles. The value of the cargo had been small, around fifty thousand. The twenty thousand profit he would make on the shipment represented the last payment on Walker’s account, and I hadn’t expected to see him again.

He had to catch a flight too, and we barely had time to meet. The transfer had gone smoothly. I had walked into the lounge, seen him standing at the bar, handed him an envelope, shaken hands quickly, and walked away. Very businesslike. But as I walked away, I’d felt as though I were floating. It had been the last payment. I had felt as if the war was finally over. Maybe he had felt the same. Maybe he actually did remember the meeting, but I doubted that he remembered it with fondness.

I parked in the long-term lot at the airport, as far away from the rest of the cars as possible. There was only one vehicle nearby, a late-model Cadillac Brougham. I left the automatic under the front seat and we walked in.

When you suspect a man might have a reason to want you dead, an airport is a good place to meet him. There are plenty of people around, none of whom have the slightest interest in your business. And if you’re meeting by the gates, both you and he have to clear the metal detectors. No guns allowed, in other words.

Only ticketed passengers are allowed in the gate area, so I bought two tickets to Las Vegas, just because they were cheap, and led April down the concourse. It took a few minutes to find the right lounge. Walker was waiting at the bar. It was like the last sixteen years had disappeared.

He nodded when he saw me enter, then gave me a hard look when he realized I wasn’t alone. I ignored him and led April to a table away from the crowd around the television. Once we were seated, he carried his drink over and joined us.

Johnny Walker was a black man, about my height, only twenty pounds or so lighter. In fact, he was almost too thin. But he’d always been that way. His suit was well tailored. He carried himself with a slight stoop. His hair was about half an inch long and going gray. It framed his narrow face like a halo.

“Long time no see,” I told him.

He grimaced and said, “What’s happening, Rainbow.”

“You know the answer to that.”

He looked April over carefully, then said, “I thought this was a business meeting.”

“There’s business and then there’s business. She’s business.” I introduced them, told him who she was.

“Ol’ Toker must have been pretty busy after I left,” Walker said. “Looks like he did pretty good work, too.”

April gave him a faint smile.

I told him she was adopted, one of the boat people from Hong Kong.

“I still don’t like it. How much does she know?”

“Some of it.”

He shook his head. “I don’t like this at all,” he told me.

“There’s no way to keep her out of it. Toker’s dead.”

“So I heard.”

“And there’s this.” I gestured vaguely at the bar, the airport. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

He gave me a long, measuring look, then pulled his chair forward and leaned over the table. He spoke quietly. “Some questions first. Are you active in my town? You been checking up on me, maybe for old times’ sake?”

I shook my head.

“Roy, then. What about Roy?”

“I haven’t seen him in years. I don’t know what he’s up to. I’m not even sure how to find him. All I have is a fifteen-year-old phone number.”

“You found me. You could find him.”

“You’ve got family,” I said. “You were kind of stuck here. Roy is different. You know that. What’s all this about?”

He took a deep breath and lowered his voice again. He spoke directly to me, as though he wanted to exclude April. She sensed it and looked around the bar, pretending to ignore us, but I could tell she was listening.

“I protect myself,” Walker said. “I keep my eyes and ears open, and I’ve got trip wires out, little signals that will let me know if someone is getting interested. Lately, a couple of them have gone off. There was a credit check when I didn’t apply for credit. The outfit that ran it doesn’t seem to exist. Someone has been investigating my properties, to see what I own and where it is. I don’t like it. I get nervous. And now you show up, like some kind of honky ghost, talking about dead men. I don’t like it at all.”

“Something is happening,” I said. “More bad news out of the Republic. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it was finished when Toker got wasted.” I told him how Toker died and what I’d found in April’s bedroom.

He cursed.

“There’s more,” I said. I told him about the meeting with the lawyer. Then I told him about the letter from Toker.

He grew as pale as I’d ever seen him, a kind of dark gray, and looked nervously over his shoulder. “I don’t like this at all,” he said. “We’re sitting in a goddamn fish bowl here.”

I suddenly felt the same way. “Look,” I said, “we’ve got to trust each other. Like in the old days. I came here and I didn’t know what you were up to. But now I think we have the same problem. And we have to talk about it, figure out how to make it go away. Can we get out of this fucking airport?”

He looked uncertain. He jerked his eyes toward the girl. “What about her?”

“She’s in it too.” But I knew what he was thinking. “The problem existed before she came along. It would still be here if she were gone. Besides, she’s Toker’s kid.”

“Or somebody’s,” he said.

April had given up pretending. She was watching both of us carefully, warily. Walker turned to her. “Who did you say your father was? Your real father?”

“My aunt said he was a cowboy.” Her lips were tight. “That’s all I know.”

Walker made a decision and stood abruptly. “We’ll go to my place,” he said. “It isn’t in my name. I think it should be safe.” He gave me an address and we started out. At the entrance to the lounge, he hung back and grabbed my arm, pulled me away from April and close to his lips.

“Let me give you something to think about,” he hissed. “Who was the most famous cowboy of all time?”

As we walked toward the lot, I puzzled over his question. And then I saw what he meant and felt a chill in the hot Arizona night and missed a step.

He noticed. “Got it, huh?”

I nodded.

“Got what?” April asked.

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

We walked out of the airport in silence. I moved like a mechanical man, eyes scanning the passages ahead for congested points, knots of travelers to avoid, potential ambushes. But I had no thought for the process. One question preoccupied me. If Roy was her father, who was her mother?

Walker split off in the long-term lot and headed for the Cadillac. I noticed that we seemed to have the same sort of self-protective instincts and knew that was a problem, something an enemy could use to his advantage. I decided to try to be less predictable.

In the car, April was silent, waiting. I said nothing, and after a mile or so she cleared her throat. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“What did Mr. Coleman tell you about me?”

“It’s just a possibility,” I said. “Your aunt told you your father was a cowboy.”

“So?”

“The other man, the one who started the operation in Saigon, was Bill Rodgers. He was a Captain in the Military Police. He had a nickname too. We called him Roy. Roy Rodgers.”

“Like the cowboy,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She said no more until we pulled up in front of Walker’s house. She put her hand on my shoulder to hold me when I opened the car door. “Do you think Roy was my father?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But if he is…? Do you think he might be the one? You think my real father killed my…killed Dad?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Walker met us at the door. Behind him, a thin, pretty black woman, about thirty-five, looked anxious. He introduced her as his wife, Joyce. I shook hands and said her name. April tried to smile at her, but it was a total failure. Her lips didn’t want to cooperate. Walker gave his wife a meaningful glance and she excused herself.

We went into the den. Walker asked if I wanted a drink. I asked him if he was still on scotch. He shook his head and rubbed his belly. “Not anymore,” he said. “The doctor cut me off. Ulcers. But I keep it in the house.”

I told him a Johnny Walker would be fine. April didn’t want anything. She took a chair and looked impatient. Walker disappeared, came back with a glass of ice, a glass of milk, and a bottle of Black Label. He poured for me, then looked over his shoulder at the door and quickly tipped the bottle over his glass.

“Scotch and milk?” I asked him.

He smiled guiltily. “Gather ye rosebuds…”

I shrugged and sat. The scotch was smooth.

April broke the ice. “What makes you think this Roy Rodgers was my father? My real father?” she demanded.

“So you told her?”

“In for a penny,” I said.

He sighed. “I don’t know if he was or not. It might explain some things, but it would raise other questions.”

“What questions?”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He acted embarrassed. “About Toker,” he said. “About why he adopted you.”

I knew what he meant. That had bothered me ever since April first told her story. She looked her question at me.

“Toker was prejudiced,” I told her. “He didn’t like the Vietnamese.”

“The gooks, you mean,” she said.

“Yes.”

She took her time to let it settle in, then began to tremble. “So all the time, when I was calling him Dad, he was looking at me and thinking…” Her cheeks were wet.

“You don’t know what he was thinking,” I said. “Nobody does. People change.”

“That’s why, then,” she said softly.

Why he had never filed the papers, she meant. But I wasn’t so sure.

“What was your mother’s name?” I asked. She gave the answer I was afraid of.

“Phoung.”

Miss Phoung, we’d called her. She had been Roy’s woman, in a way. Sissy had found her and she lived with him until he bought it, then transferred her loyalty to Roy. For a while, I’d thought I was in the running. But I hadn’t been. And now it was sinking in, slowly and painfully, that she was dead. The girl sitting opposite me was all that remained of her. April had sat on my deck and told me her mother was dead, killed in one of the war’s smaller spasms of violence, and I’d shrugged it off. I felt a sense of shame for that. I shrugged it off, too.

Phoung had been a slight girl, very pretty, about twenty when I first met her. There was a trace of French in her ancestry from an earlier generation of the war. When Roy left, she had inherited the house we used as our headquarters in Saigon. Had he left her with more than the house?

“Still doesn’t mean anything,” Walker said. “You know how it was then, man. Lots going on. People coming and going all the time. Only one it couldn’t be, for sure, is me.” He smiled at her.

April looked at me and began to blush.

“Not me,” I said quietly. “I never slept with Miss Phoung.”

Walker was still making a joke. “Don’t be too sure,” he said. “You did some powerful drinking in those days.” Then he noticed April’s blush. “Uh, oh.”

I stood and walked away. There was a phone on a table under the window. I memorized the number automatically, then stared out at the night. “No,” I told the room behind me. “I’d have remembered that. Miss Phoung was like…she was something I couldn’t ever have. I had other women. Sometimes I brought them there, to the house. And Miss Phoung was a lady. She always treated…I mean, she knew how it was with me.” I felt my train of thought slip completely away. It wasn’t possible to explain what it had been like for me, not even to Walker. I had been too young then, and I was too old now. I blinked rapidly and rubbed my eyes.