Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 2

  The address Billy gave me was in Beverly Hills, a problem for me because I was a bit low on funds at the moment. I do not own a car. Fortunately, I have my connections at the Greyhound station across the street and one of the regular day drivers, a salty old jarhead named Weathers who had the Santa Barbara run, gave me a freebie to the Hollywood terminal, from which I blew my absolute last dollar on a cab to the address in question. After which I found myself standing in front of a high stucco wall with a big iron gate, a speaker box and a couple of cameras. Enough security to give the occupants warning should something wicked their way come. There was an old brass plaque embedded in the wall. The Dell. You know you’ve made it to the top when your house has a name. Perhaps I would name my place. The Dump. There was no button to press. Which meant they had somebody watching full time, or some other method of alerting them to the presence of strangers.

  “Wha’ chew want?” the woman’s voice over the speaker was clear, Spanish accented, and by it’s lack of spark I could tell that my image in the monitor had failed to impress. I could also tell they had no salaried security flunky working the grounds. What amounted to a fatal breach of security the way I saw it. Because when somebody wants to kill you, you need somebody else to stop them. Not many assassins get killed by cameras or monitors.

  “I’m looking for Angela Caldwell,” I said. “Billy sent me.”

  I waited a few more minutes while somebody thought this over, or called the cops, or did whatever it was people do when they look into a security monitor and see a scarred up, cranky old bastard who’s a hair over six-foot seven and pushing three hundred fifteen pounds.

  “Go away.” This voice was mature female, Anglo, doubtless the mistress of the manor.

  “My name’s McDougal,” I said. “Billy sent me.”

  “You’ve got five seconds to convince me or you’ll have a Doberman on your ass.”

  “He came to my place this afternoon and said somebody killed his son.”

  “He did no such thing. He’s unable to travel. Whoever you are, you’re a sick freak and you should know we are well-armed. Security has been notified. And I’m letting the dogs out.”

  “Wait one,” I said. I reached inside my big leather bag, the one I always carried with me, rain or shine, and pulled out the Bowie. Perhaps not the best idea to inspire someone to open a gate. But if she knew anything at all about Billy, she would know the knife, and know that anybody who had it was closer than a brother to the man.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I got it from Billy.”

  “Billy had a nickname when he was in Vietnam. What was it?”

  “They called him the Montagnard Monster.”

  Billy must have told the mother of his son, the woman named Angela Caldwell, to ask me that. The Montagnard Monster. Like some sort of code word. The gate swung smoothly open. There were no dogs making a try for my fountain of life. No squad cars sprouting shotgun toting officers to command me to kiss the bricks. The sun continued to shine. So I walked up the driveway.

  I don’t like walking uphill, by virtue of the shattered rib I received as a result of that sniper’s bullet long ago. There’s still about ten pieces of bone moving around inside me and at times, on the worst days, it’s all I can do to get out of bed in the morning. Nonetheless, when one must jump to it, one must jump. I put the Bowie back in the bag and began the slow painful walk up the steep drive to the house, which, as I approached it, could clearly see was a very large mansion, even by Beverly Hills standards. The thing rested in what was a compound of forested grounds and outbuildings covering a good five acres. Perhaps if I was lucky, she would offer me a drink.

  The front door opened and a woman came out to meet me. She was probably around fifty, but had the carriage and good looks of a former model. One of those women who’d never had the plastic work done because she didn’t need it. She’d look good until the day she died and look even better dead in her coffin than most women did who were still alive. She was wearing a decent pair of running shoes and some old baggy sweats, none of which detracted from her beauty. She wore no makeup and her mouth was drawn tight and her eyes seemed to be staring at something just over my head, something ugly and perhaps too old to be counted in conventional numbers. She’d lost her son.

  “You’re a big one, aren’t you,” she said, looking up at me, by way of introduction. There was no handshake or any of the formal niceties, none of which I needed or required. “Billy told me he was sending somebody out, but we still had to put you through some kind of security check. I’m slurring my words, please forgive me. My shrink has me doped up to High Heaven so I don’t die of shock. Let’s go inside and I’ll get you a drink.”

  The place had an entranceway big enough to warehouse the Spruce Goose, and a massive spiral staircase, and an impressive kitchen with a lot of real marble and copper pots. The furniture, to my surprise was mostly of the big and sturdy kind. A maid appeared.

  “Juana, get McDougal, or whatever his name is, something to drink.”

  “I’ll have tumbler of pepper vodka over crushed ice and a can of Mr. Pibb to chase it down,” I said, enjoying the impossible specificity of my order. This wasn’t the kind of place that carried Mr. Pibb, and the pepper vodka was also doubtful. We took seats opposite each other at the marble table, a gigantic, old, heavy slab from someplace in Italy, perhaps obtained from a garage sale at the Vatican, resting on massive iron legs probably crafted by some ancient Roman blacksmith. Maybe the same guy who made the nails for the cross, for all I knew. Juana disappeared and reappeared from somewhere, and in a matter of minutes had fulfilled my request to a T.

  “I didn’t think you’d have the Mr. Pibb,” I said.

  “My second husband was a staunch AA’er,” she said. “He stocked every imaginable soft drink.”

  “Was? Is he off the wagon?”

  “He passed away a year and a half ago,” she said. “Heart disease. He left behind about twenty cases of Mr. Pibb that I’ll never get rid of.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Would you like them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have my gardener drop them by your place.”

  “He better be in shape. I’m on the tenth floor and the elevator’s out.”

  She looked at me, and for a moment I found the gaze of her blue eyes unsettling, as though she was seeing something more to me than I cared to reveal.

  “Why did they call Billy the Montagnard Monster?” she asked

  “Billy was something of a legend in Nam. He ran around in the mountains with no shirt on, carrying only the big Bowie knife, crawling into tunnels and wreaking a certain weirdly gruesome physical and psychological carnage, the kind only a devil with a big knife can make. As a result of which, he terrified everybody, and they wound up referring to him as the Montagnard Monster. Whenever there was a pile of dead Charlie’s with their heads literally looking out of their asses, they knew the Monster had been there. Everybody feared Billy. As well they should have.”

  “Well, I deserve that information. But now I’m sorry I asked. You believe in telling things straight, don’t you, McDougal?”

  I nodded.

  “I ... I don’t know what Billy told you about ... about my--”

  “--He told me somebody shot your son. That somebody shot David.”

  “Two days ago. The coroner won’t release the body. I can’t even give my son a decent burial. They told me it would have to be a closed casket ceremony. They said--”

  Her tears escaped on the wave of great, sweeping gasps, and groanings which came from some primitive recesses so deep within her, they were doubtless medically uncharted. I sat. She cried. I sat some more. She cried some more. I drank some more pepper vodka. She reached, finally, for my glass and took a great gulp.

  “Our son,” she said, ”David, was the by-product of a youthful romance duri
ng the Summer of Love in ‘67. That summer, Billy and I hung out together in Griffith Park. With his long braids and wearing that big knife, Billy the Indian had been a pretty cool dude to hang out with back then.”

  “I remember,” I said. “They’d just made the movie, Billy Jack, and Indians were popular with all the Hippies.”

  She nodded. “When we met, at first, it was simply a free love kind of thing, but there was a spark that led us further than that, and we had a son together. I wanted to get married, but Billy got cold feet and went into the Navy before we could arrange anything. Afterward, after the war, Billy had a bad booze thing going on and couldn’t get his head together and never came back to his woman and child. He wound up living in the tunnels underneath Union Station. At least until he sobered up a couple of years ago. Now he’s got an apartment in El Segundo. I offered to move him to someplace nicer, but he refused.”

  I nodded.

  “I never stopped loving Billy,” she said. “At least some part of me never did. The doctors tell us he has only another couple of months’ to live.”

  Stupid me. I remembered something I had forgotten to mention. “They were wrong. Billy’s dead. He died in my living room.”

  “Dear God. Billy’s dead? I’ll have to bury them both.” The shock of this additional news brought her to her feet and she reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny automatic pistol and slid it across the table towards me. An Accu-Tek V-25. A ladies weapon, or an expert’s weapon, depending on how you look at it, tiny but with just enough punch to ruin your day if she peppered you in the groin at close range with the contents of its 6-round magazine.

  “I want you to find my son’s killers and kill them with this,” she said.

  “Don’t need it. I carry my own.”

  She looked at my bag, the big leather one that was always strapped across my chest. “In that bag?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me see it.” I opened the bag and she peered in. “My God. You’ve got enough crap in there to stop an army. Is that gray can with the yellow stripe a grenade? And what is this thing? It looks like a pipe bomb of some sort. Is it legal to carry stuff like that around? Just what in the hell are you doing with all that stuff? Aren’t you afraid you’ll be arrested?”

  “They will never arrest me again.”

  She thought about this. I could see her wheels turning, trying to fit what I was into some sort of civilized framework. To make what I was somehow familiar.

  “I can see Billy was right about you,” she finally said.

  “Right about what?”

  “Billy said you could help me find whoever killed my son. He said that you were the only person he knew who was more dangerous than he was. He said you didn’t have a soul. That he’d once seen you crush an old woman’s skull in your bare hands after she tried to cut your balls off in the latrine.”

  “She was pissed off because I’d just burned down her village after the people there ambushed a friend of mine. I’d been up for three days on Green Hornets. I was fresh out of the milk of human kindness. But all that’s in the past. And I do have a soul. My Granny’s in Heaven right now praying for me. God is going to save me at the end. My Granny said He would.”

  “God won’t save you,” she said. “Because God doesn’t save anybody. He just wound this whole thing up and let it go.” She sipped at my pepper vodka for awhile. Somewhere off the entranceway, a Grandfather clock chimed. All about the place, dust settled in an attempt to reduce us all to itself. Juana reappeared and brought a fresh drink to help me cut the dust which was thickening in my throat. “I’m not a killer,” she said. “In fact, I’m Catholic. Killing somebody would be a mortal sin. Calling you in was Billy’s idea. He had his own way of looking at the spiritual side of things. He told me the hour of mercy for the men who killed his son ran out when they pulled the trigger. A week ago I would have disagreed. But now my son is dead. Now I understand what Billy was talking about. That’s why he wanted you here. Because this situation calls for a killer.”

  “I’m not a killer,” I said.

  “Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes. Your eyes are dead. There’s no life shining out of them.”

  “I take no pleasure in killing.”

  “But you do it when it needs to be done.”

  “Listen lady, I’m just a man that bad people occasionally run into who helps them put a stop to their badness. I’m the reason people shouldn’t do bad things. Because when people follow evil, they piss God off, and He causes their path to eventually cross mine.”

  “I can give you a car and some money,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “And something more. A name. Of the man who killed my son. A retired cop friend of mine knows who did it.”

  “You know the name of the man who killed your son?”

  “No. My friend didn’t tell me. He’s afraid I’ll try something stupid. He’s waiting to talk to you first. If he thinks you can handle the job, he’s going to give you the name of the man who killed my son. Who shot David just because he was buying his dying father a cherry pie.” She punched in a number on her cell phone. “You can talk to him now.”

  “I don’t use telephones,” I said.

  “You don’t what?”

  “The last time I used a phone, somebody I loved got her heart shot out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had a woman in Saigon. Her name was Phan. My relationship upset the local assholes. They came for us, and I got on the radio telephone to call for backup. Because I had the phone in my hand, when the first man came through the window, I was too slow to get him first. By the time I’d dropped the phone, he’d already put three rounds into my lady’s chest. So I don’t use the telephone anymore.”

  “God.”

  “Gimme your cop friend’s address and I’ll go see him.”

  She disconnected her call and scribbled the cop’s address on an expensive piece of tear-off Crane note paper, using a gold fountain pen which, if pawned, could have kept me in Big Macs for a decade.

  “What’s your first name?” she said. “Not that I need to know it. I just think we should be on a first name basis if we’re going partners on killing the man who shot David.”

  “I told you my name already. It’s McDougal.”

  “No. That’s too awkward. Tell me your real name.”

  “You don’t need to know that. But you can call me John. Billy was the one person in the world allowed to call me that, and now he’s gone. So I’ll pass the privilege on to you.”

  “John. I guess it will have to do.”

  “Okay, Angela. Is that about it?” I asked this, knowing the answer already. I could see in her pained eyes that there was unfinished business yet to come.

  “No, John. That’s not all. There’s something more.”

  “Yes?”

  “When you kill him, I want a trophy.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Not many people knew that kind of lingo. A trophy in military jargon was when you cut something off somebody and wore it around your neck, or dried it and kept it in a souvenir bag. “What kind of trophy do you want?”

  “I want his head in a bag. After I barbecue it, I’m going to feed it to my dogs.”

  “No,” I said. “I understand the feeling. But no.”

  “You have to. On your honor as a Navy SEAL. And because you owe it to Billy, because he saved your life.”

  “I am not a Navy SEAL. I owe them nothing. I paid them everything already. I paid them with three thousand six hundred and fifty days of sitting naked in a steel box in a military prison with no name of my own and no known public address.”

  She regarded me coldly, and in her intense blue eyes I could see only the hardness of unrefracted light. “Big deal. You spent ten years in jail. But now you’re out. You’re free. You understand nothing. I am a mother. My only son is dead. He will spend
the rest of eternity in a steel box. He will never be out. He will never be free. I will feed the killer’s head to my dogs. After I do that, I will go to confession and confess that I have no remorse, no forgiveness, and I will then demand that God apologize to me for having offended me.” She slid some car keys to me, along with an envelope containing what would turn out to be about twenty grand in cold hard cash. “It’s the silver Mercedes in the garage,” she said, rising and leaving me alone.

  The car was a convertible roadster, the big one, with the twelve cylinder motor. In Southern California, in February, when it rains it pours, but today it was sunny. I hit the push-button and put the top up against the sun and eased the surprisingly quiet vehicle out, stopping at the massive stone fountain when I realized I was being chased from behind by the dead boy’s mother. I rolled down the window.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “You’re not going anywhere. Go back inside and get drunker. I’ll be back with the head later.”

  “I’m going with you. I want to take the trophy myself. When we find the killer, you’re going to hold him down and I’m going to cut his head off while he’s still alive--with this!” To emphasize this remark, she brandished a small steak knife in my face. The knife had a serrated edge fitted to a handle made from a deer antler. Her hand wrapped around the deer antler was white-knuckled. I noticed all the nails were bitten down to the quick and the rest could have used a good polish. I could smell the acid scent of too much grief, fear and alcohol. Her body swayed slightly in the glare of the fountain, it’s spray sparkling bright in the sun and in spite of myself I could see she had once been a proud woman, whose statuesque figure suggesting a gait and carriage she no longer possessed, reduced as it was by recent events, doomed to finish life in a less grand manner, compacted, cowed, and pushed a fraction closer to the grave by the awful weight of her son’s death.

  I should have parked the car right there, tossed the money in her face and walked away. I should have done that, just as I should have done a lot of things over the years. But I didn’t do it, I didn’t do what I should have done, what my Granny would have told me to do, which was why I was who I was and where I was, and why my life had turned out as sorry as it had, instead of turning out better, with a family and a career, perhaps as a professional football player, or a sleazy politician, or a career Navy man, or, because of my devotion to duty, buried and forgotten in a prisoner’s grave someplace in North Dakota.

  “Leave the knife,” I said. “If we catch him, you can use Billy’s Bowie. It has a heavy blade. That way, you can chop most of the killer’s head off at the get go. It’ll be less work.”

  She tossed her kitchen knife into the fountain and got in. And we left to go see the retired cop who had the inside dope on the man who had killed her son.