Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

  “You’ll get better.”

  “Yeah. So they tell me. How’s your arm?”

  “Not too bad. Still need the sling, though.”

  “You going to have full use of it?”

  “Sure. Never mind about my arm. You just came out of two and a half weeks in a coma.”

  “Been better if I’d never come out of it at all,” he said. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have got shot.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know? What do you know?”

  “All of it, Eb. Who shot us, who hired it done. And why.”

  The room seemed to get very still. Pain flickered across his face, and guilt, and remorse. He could not look at me anymore; he averted his eyes. It was several seconds before he spoke again.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Kam Fong called me after I got home from the hospital,” I said. “He gave me a name—Mau Yee, a Chinese body-washer—and said the shooting had to do with some kind of bribe. I went to your place and opened your safe and found the stock-transfer form. The rest of it was detective work.”

  “You always were a hell of a detective,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell the Department?”

  “Because I didn’t believe it at first. Because I’d been shot too and I was angry and I wanted to know the truth.”

  “And now you do.”

  “Now I do.”

  “This Mau Yee … is he still on the loose?”

  “No. He’s dead. Carl Emerson killed him.”

  A tic started up on the left side of his face; it took him a few seconds to get it under control. “Why did Emerson kill him?”

  I told him why. I told him all of it, straight through to my abduction of Lee Chuck from his gambling parlor; how I’d found out about Emerson, how I’d pieced the whole thing together.

  He said, “You crazy bastard. You could have got yourself killed, messing with a Chinatown tong.”

  “But that didn’t happen. I’m still here.”

  “And Emerson? What did you do about him?”

  “I didn’t do anything about him. He’s dead, too.”

  “Christ. How?”

  I explained that, omitting Tedescu’s name; I just said it was somebody who knew Emerson who’d been the catalyst in his accidental death.

  “So nobody’s left,” Eberhardt said, “nobody knows the full story except you and me. And you still didn’t go to the Department.”

  “I was waiting to talk to you,” I said.

  “Suppose I hadn’t come out of it. Then what?”

  “I never doubted that you’d come out of it.”

  “But if I hadn’t?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have done anything.”

  “Why not? Why shield a cop you figure’s gone dirty?”

  “Did you go dirty, Eb?”

  Silence for a time. Then he said, “You think I been taking all along? One of the graft boys?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you’re right. I never took anything in thirty years —not a nickel, not even a cup of coffee. Tempted a couple of times; who doesn’t get tempted? But I never gave in. I didn’t think it was in me to give in… . “

  He fell silent again. I waited. He was getting around to it; it was something he had to tell in his own way, maybe the hardest thing he’d ever had to tell anybody.

  “But things happen,” he said. “Some things you prepare for, like you get old and you get tired. Some things you don’t prepare for, because you never figure they can happen. Like your wife walking out on you, taking up with some other guy. Taking the guts right out of your life. You understand what that can do to a man?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I understand.”

  “Maybe you do. You wake up one morning, your fifty-three years old, you’re all alone, you got bills up the ass and half the money you thought you had in the bank is gone because the bitch grabbed off her share when she walked out. You say to yourself: I got to hang on, it’ll all work out. So you hang on. What the hell else can you do?”

  He might have been talking about me, too. Substitute losing your profession for losing your wife, and there wasn’t much difference between us. Or there hadn’t been up until three weeks ago. The difference now was that I was still hanging on and he’d already let go.

  “But then maybe you get tempted again,” he said, “one day right out of the blue. Not small potatoes this time, a whole goddamn feast. And all you got to do is look the other way on something nobody gives a damn about anyway. You get mad, you say no at first—but maybe you keep on listening. And maybe you break open inside and for a little while you stop caring. And maybe the no turns into a yes.”

  “I guess I can understand that, too,” I said. “But it was a homicide case, Eb. I don’t understand how you could look the other way on a homicide.”

  His cheek began to tick again. “It wasn’t murder,” he said. “Emerson swore up and down Polly Soon’s death was an accident. The witness, Ming Toy, corroborated it; she saw the two of them scuffling, the Soon woman tripped and went off the walkway, that was all there was to it.”

  “Why were they scuffling?”

  “Argument over how much she was charging him. He lost his temper and smacked her; she tried to claw him. Manslaughter, that was all I had on him. A smart lawyer could have got him off with a suspended sentence.”

  “Did you tell Emerson that?”

  “I told him. But he said the publicity would ruin him. His company was about to go public; he stood to lose millions.”

  “And that was when he made his pitch.”

  “Yeah. One thousand shares of Mid-Pacific stock, transferred over to me. Worth six figures in a few years, he said. Better than cash—security for the future. Pay taxes on the income, everything on the up and up; no way for either of us to get caught.”

  “So you took it.”

  “I took it.” He lifted a hand and rubbed the knuckles across his mouth. “You think I’m a real shit, don’t you?”

  “I’m not here to pass judgment on you, Eb.”

  “You don’t have to; I’ve already done that. But it’s not as cut and dried as it seems. I took the stock-transfer and went home and put it in my safe. But I didn’t sleep that night and I didn’t go to the Hall the next day. I kept thinking about it, all the clean years thrown away. And it got to me. I couldn’t go through with it. You can believe that or not, but it’s the truth.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “I called Emerson that Friday and told him I’d changed my mind. I told him I’d give him until Monday noon to turn himself in; otherwise I’d have to go after him. I told him if he said anything about the bribe offer, I’d deny it and it would go twice as bad for him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t give him time to say much of anything. I thought I had him buffaloed.” He made a sound that might have been a bitter laugh. “Some cop I am, huh? I underestimated that son of a bitch by a mile.”

  I said, “What about the stock-transfer form? What did you say you’d done with that?”

  “Destroyed it. I guess he believed me; if he’d thought I still had it, he probably wouldn’t have tried to have me blown away.”

  “Why didn’t you destroy it?”

  “I was going to.” He paused. “I think I was going to.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not sure. I took it out of the safe half a dozen times on Saturday and Sunday, to get rid of it, but I always put it back. I guess I was giving myself until Monday morning to make a decision.”

  “What would you have done on Monday?”

  “I don’t know. Either destroyed the form or called Emerson back and told him I was going through with it after all.” He closed his eyes; the pain, the uncertainty, lay over his features like a mask. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Both of us were quiet for maybe a minute. I finally got up and went to the one window and s
tood there looking out. Without turning, I said, “What happens now, Eb?”

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it? You got the form.”

  “It’s not up to me, it’s up to you. Your decision.”

  “Suppose I decide to just sweep it under the rug, go on as if nothing happened? Promise you I’d never do anything like this again? Would you go along with it?”

  “Probably. We’ve been friends a long time.”

  “But we wouldn’t be friends anymore.”

  “No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  Silence again. At length he said, “If I make a clean breast of it, they’ll put me up on charges and take away my pension.”

  “Maybe not. Your record’s too clean.”

  “That doesn’t count for much these days. Everything’s public relations, the squeaky clean image; you ought to know that if anybody does.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The least they’d do is suspend me without pay,” he said. “How the hell would I live?”

  “You’d find a way. Just like I’m going to do.”

  “There’d be an investigation and they’d find out about you; there wouldn’t be any way to keep you clear. Practicing without a license, withholding evidence, breaking and entering, failure to report a homicide … you could go to jail.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “No? Well I do.”

  I turned and looked at him again. He was staring up at the ceiling; his eyes had a haunted look.

  “The other thing I could do,” he said, “I could take an early retirement. Voluntary. Claim mental disability. That way, I’d get my pension.” He ran his tongue over dry lips. “I earned my pension, goddamn it. I was a good cop for a lot of years.”

  “One of the best.”

  “Okay. Give me a little time to think it through, will you? Twenty-four hours?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Take all the time you want.”

  “You better get out of here now. I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

  “All right. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  When I got home I took the stock-transfer thing out of the nightstand drawer where I’d put it, carried it into the bathroom, tore it into pieces and flushed the pieces down the toilet. No matter what Eberhardt decided, that paper was a symbol of ugliness—the last tie to Carl Emerson, the last tie to corruption and murder and all the craziness of the past three weeks. Getting rid of it was like purging myself of the last vestiges of a disease.

  Then I called Kerry and invited her to come over and have dinner with me.

  Then I got on with the business of living my life.