Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

“No, the picture. The picture came that way.”

  “What do you mean? Where’d it come from?”

  Eddie told him.

  After he heard the story, Winnebago just shook his head slowly.

  “Ain’t that the weirdest thing, man? Ain’t that the weirdest?”

  “Do you recognize anyone?”

  “I recognize you, Eddie.”

  Winnebago had times like this, times when all the foreign substances he had poured and sucked and snorted into his body over the years held a convention in his brain all at once. On the other hand, Eddie knew there were also times when Winnebago was so penetrating and insightful that he scared the hell out of most people. When the magnetic fields in his brain overlapped just right, Winnebago sounded like an Old Testament prophet who had suffered the bizarre misfortune of emerging from reincarnation as a hippie Indian working in a bookstore in San Francisco.

  “No, Winnebago, anyone else. Do you recognize anyone else in the picture?”

  Winnebago looked hard at the snapshot, tilting it from side to side to study the faces more closely. The smoke from his Camel formed a little wreath around his head and caught the light in such a way that it made Eddie think for a moment of some bizarrely vandalized Renaissance painting.

  “Isn’t that guy behind you somebody from our squad?” Winnebago laid the photograph back on the counter and twisted it toward Eddie.

  “Maybe. You can’t see him well enough to tell.”

  “There’s something about his ears. They look familiar.”

  “You can’t remember we had pizza together two weeks ago and you recognize the ears on a guy you haven’t seen in twenty years?”

  “Man, I remember every minute of twenty years ago. Don’t you?”

  “Well,” Eddie admitted, “a lot of it, I guess.”

  Eddie and Winnebago stood together in silence for a moment, each contemplating the mute relic of their past that had suddenly elbowed its way into their present. Finally Winnebago took a last puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray already overflowing onto the counter.

  “Who do you think sent it, Eddie?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  Winnebago just nodded a couple of times, then looked up and studied Eddie carefully.

  “I look at that picture,” he said, “and I got to tell you I get a real bad feeling.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I don’t see why anybody would send it, except to say they had some sort of business with you. And don’t you think this is a pretty strange way to say that? Unless a guy was a little off, wouldn’t he just call you up and say, ‘Hey, Eddie, how’s tricks? Maybe you don’t remember me, but I’ve got some business with you.’ Wouldn’t he just do that?”

  “You’d think so.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what gives me a bad feeling.”

  Eddie decided that Winnebago was just being inexplicably logical for once rather than measuring the pulse of the unseen.

  “How about the girls, Winnebago? Can you remember any of them?”

  “No. I’m ashamed to admit it, but all them little chickens always looked pretty much the same to me. Besides, I was only in Thailand a few times.” Winnebago tapped the snapshot with his forefinger. “This is that place in Bangkok where we used to go on R&R.”

  Eddie picked the photograph up and looked at it again. “How do you know that?”

  “Those are Thai girls, man. Couldn’t be anybody else.”

  “I thought they were probably Vietnamese.”

  “Shit, Eddie.” Winnebago sounded disgusted. “How could you forget? We’d get off the R&R flights, not even get a room, just go straight to the bars. Usually slept on the floor of one of them.” He shook his head a few times. “Those girls may have been whores, but they were nice girls. They saved my life more than once, I’ll tell you. Those are absofuckinglutely Thai girls. You can bet your ass on it, man.”

  Eddie looked at the picture some more and felt the memories begin to stir.

  “Maybe you’re right. I didn’t see that before.”

  Winnebago snorted. “You see today better. I see yesterday better. I’m not sure who that makes worse off, Eddie.”

  The bell on the shop door tinkled and a very fat woman came in with a very skinny man. They were wearing matching polyester jogging suits in phosphorescent blue with white stripes running down both legs and they stood looking around uncertainly until Winnebago bounded out from behind the cash register.

  “Welcome, welcome! Just have a look around folks. Hasn’t changed a bit since Allen Ginsberg and I started the place in ‘65. Got first editions of Ginsberg’s books up there.” He pointed to the rickety staircase. “Every one autographed by him personally!”

  The couple nodded tentatively and started up the stairs as Winnebago settled back on his stool behind the counter.

  Eddie gave him a long look.

  “Sometimes commerce demands you stretch a point or two,” Winnebago mumbled, carefully avoiding Eddie’s eyes.

  Eddie picked up the photograph and pushed it back into his pocket. He now knew something about it he hadn’t known before, but it wasn’t much, and off-hand he couldn’t see what use it was to him anyway.

  “Okay, Winnebago. I got to run. See you later.”

  “Later, man.”

  As he left the store, Eddie heard the fat woman and the skinny man coming back down the stairs.

  “Who the fuck is Allen Ginsberg?” the woman was asking the man, but he wasn’t answering.

  Three

  EDDIE waited outside Judge Rybeck’s court at the Hall of Justice trying to make himself as comfortable as possible on the hard mahogany bench. He hoped it wouldn’t be long before they got to him because he was just there to enter a plea. He could do that in his sleep. As a matter of fact, he usually did.

  His client was a man named Dante Bauer who was in the limousine business. Dante had been busted for living on the earnings of a prostitute after his girlfriend Shalynn had offered to go down on a plainclothes cop in the men’s room of the St. Francis Hotel for a hundred bucks. Shalynn said it was all just a misunderstanding. Dante said he didn’t know Shalynn was a hooker, and besides, no one could actually live on the shit money she made giving $100 blowjobs.

  “Hey, Dare, I thought big-time criminal mouthpieces just cut cozy deals for their clients and then hung out at the golf course the rest of the day.”

  “Yeah, Wuntz, you got that right. That’s exactly what big-time criminal mouthpieces do.”

  Kelly Wuntz wedged his way onto the bench next to Eddie, glaring at a gangbanger in a baggy, red and gold 49ers jacket until the kid slid over and gave him some room. Wuntz was a vice cop who worked the old Tenderloin district and he had accumulated more nauseating stories about people than Eddie ever really wanted to hear.

  “Why are you always so hard on yourself, Dare? Myself now, I think you’re an okay guy. If my ass were in a crack, you’re exactly the fellow I’d want wiping it for me.”

  “That’s disgusting, Wuntz.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  A silence fell and they sat for a while contemplating the courthouse crowd together. It had taken Eddie a while to understand where he had landed after he was kicked out of his big, uptown office: the one with the indirect lighting, the glistening hardwood floors, and the expensive oriental rugs. He eventually worked out that he had crossed over an invisible line, one he had never before known existed. As quietly as a spy, he had slipped through the border that divided the orthodox world in which he had previously lived his life from an angry, corrosive realm whose citizens reveled in being at war with everybody else.

  Lawyers were like priests in that world, Eddie soon discovered, the secular priests of the Other Side. In the privacy of their lawyers’ offices, people told stories of deeds, failures, and betrayals that were too horrible to mention even in a real confessional. People came into Eddie’s office and told him what they thought about when they c
ouldn’t sleep at night. They told him sad stories, shameful stories, brutal stories, even funny stories. But they were always stories of misery, greed, fear, and stupidity. They were stories that would break your heart, if you let them.

  Some lawyers Eddie knew had crossed the line deliberately, so romantically enraged at the random idiocy they encountered every day that they were determined to change things. But they never did. Before long, even the craziest of them stopped worrying about how the universe was screwing their clients and started worrying instead about how it was screwing them. The Hall of Justice was a mean and unforgiving world. It cut no slack for good intentions.

  “You hear about Judge Bono?’ Kelly suddenly asked.

  Eddie shook his head.

  “We busted the bastard last night. He was parked down in the Presidio in his big Mercedes swabbing out some 16-year-old’s throat with his shriveled little weenie.”

  “Nobody cares about that garbage anymore, Wuntz. It’ll probably just end up getting Bono appointed to the Supreme Court.”

  “You think?”

  Wuntz savored his tales and liked to string them out. This time he really had the look in his eye. Eddie saw it, so he was half prepared when Wuntz eased in his punch line.

  “I know we’re politically real righteous around here and all that good shit…” Wuntz looked away and Eddie couldn’t make out the expression on his face any longer. “But even in San Francisco, don’t you think it might’ve been better for Bono’s career if he’d been tonsil humping a girl?”

  Wuntz turned back to Eddie, roaring at his own story until he was almost choking. A few heads tilted toward him, distracted briefly from their own private miseries by the sight of an overweight man in a wrinkled, polyester sports coat laughing himself into a fit. The Hall of Justice was not normally a place where people found very much to laugh about.

  Eddie was even smiling a little himself when his telephone rang.

  “Dad?”

  “Hey, Michael. This is a surprise.”

  Michael, as he usually did when he and Eddie talked, got right to the point.

  “Mom said I had to apologize to you before she’d give me my allowance.”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “She said I was rude when you called last week.”

  Eddie considered that. “Do you think you were rude?”

  “No. I was watching the Lakers game. I just didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Then don’t apologize.”

  “Okay, I won’t.” The boy paused for a moment and Eddie could almost hear him thinking, weighing exactly where that left him. Then he made up his mind. “So here’s Mom. Would you tell her to give me my allowance anyway?”

  Eddie listened to the telephone receiver scrape against something as Michael handed it to Jennifer.

  “Hello, Eddie. I’m sorry about that. Michael’s getting a little hard to deal with these days and I just thought it wasn’t fair the way he talked to you when you called last week so I insisted he apologize. Anyway, don’t make too much of it. I’ll give him his allowance. You know how teenagers are. I hope we didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

  Jennifer always talked a lot when she was working herself up to telling Eddie something she thought he wouldn’t like to hear, so Eddie didn’t say anything.

  “Eddie? Hello? Are you there, Eddie?”

  “Yes, Jennifer, I’m here.”

  Eddie glanced up and noticed that Wuntz was trying hard not to look like he was listening.

  “Look, Eddie, there is one other thing.”

  At least she isn’t going to take any longer getting to it.

  “Franklin and I are going to Australia next month.”

  Jennifer had married Franklin Pierce who was a spectacularly successful developer of shopping malls a few months after she left Eddie. While the timing was rife with unhappy implications, Eddie had never dwelled on it, preferring to keep in mind instead that Franklin was a pleasant enough man and that Michael could certainly have done a great deal worse for a stepfather.

  “Franklin wants to go diving on the Barrier Reef.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, you see, since Michael’s school holidays are next month, we’d like him to go with us.”

  So that was what Franklin’s latest kick had to do with him. He had been just about to ask.

  “The problem there of course is that Michael won’t be able to come to see you this vacation. There’s the problem.”

  Jennifer paused a moment to let that sink in.

  “Michael really wants to go with us, Eddie. If you don’t mind, that is.”

  He damned well did mind.

  “I wish you’d talked to me about this first, Jennifer. I can’t tell Michael now that he’s not going to Australia because he has to spend his vacation with me.”

  “Well, It’s such a great opportunity for him, Eddie. I knew you’d want him to go.”

  “Yes, but I’d also like to spend some time with him, Jennifer.”

  “Next vacation, Eddie. Promise.”

  Eddie clicked his tongue against his teeth a couple of times while he thought, although he supposed there wasn’t all that much for him to think about.

  “I gather Michael doesn’t mind not seeing me for a while.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Eddie. This is just such an exciting opportunity for him, that’s all. So, is it all right with you?”

  Eddie took a deep breath. “Whatever he wants, Jennifer.”

  “Wonderful, Eddie. I really do think that’s the right thing to do.”

  Eddie knew the conversation was over after that, so he drifted politely along with the small talk until Jennifer decided a decent enough interval had passed to break off and hang up.

  When Eddie slowly folded up the telephone and pushed it back into his pocket, he realized that Wuntz was looking at him.

  “Your ex busting your hump, partner?”

  “One of them. And the other’s waiting her turn.”

  Oh Christ, Eddie suddenly remembered, he had never called Kathleen back. That was going to cost him.

  “You haven’t had much luck with the family thing, have you, Dare?”

  Eddie tried not to think of it that way. He figured that if he let it get too deeply set in his mind that he was just plain unfortunate when it came to his personal life, he would do the sensible thing. He would fold his cards and stop trying to have one. And he really didn’t want to do that.

  “Is it Jennifer again, or the kid?” Wuntz persisted.

  “It’s no big deal.” Eddie tried to shake him off. “Mike is just going through a phase.”

  “Don’t take any crap from him.”

  The emotion in Wuntz’s voice was so plain it startled Eddie.

  “My kid was ashamed his old man was a cop. Started calling me a Nazi when he wasn’t even fifteen. Screaming ‘Seig Heil!’ when I tried to keep him in line. Crap like that. I figured it would pass, so I ignored it. I let him piss all over me. Tried not to think about it too much.”

  Eddie could see the memory of it working in Wuntz’s face.

  “That was a long time ago, but nothing’s changed. He still thinks his old man’s nothing but a fat jerk.” Wuntz chewed on his lip a moment and then the corners of his mouth slipped down into a shrug. “He doesn’t know a fucking thing about me. That’s my fault, I guess, mostly. But it’s too late. I don’t see him much anymore.”

  Wuntz’s outburst left Eddie momentarily confounded. It was as if a cloud had passed over them as they sat there on that hard bench at the Hall of Justice. Eddie had known Wuntz for five or six years, but they’d never gotten all that personal with each other before and he really wasn’t sure he wanted to start now. What was it about the few casual words he had exchanged with Jennifer and Michael that had popped open Wuntz’s floodgates like that?

  Wuntz looked at the floor between his feet while Eddie shifted his weight uneasily on the bench.

  “Kids make you l
ook at stuff whether you want to or not. Stuff about yourself.” Wuntz spoke so quietly that Eddie almost missed it. Then he looked up with more hurt in his eyes than Eddie could stand. “Do whatever you have to do. Just don’t lose your kid like I lost mine. Once he’s gone, he’ll never fucking come back.”

  Wuntz’s hurt stuck in Eddie, but before he could work out exactly what to say to him, Judge Rybeck’s clerk came out of an unmarked door carrying a pile of papers and headed straight for him.

  “Sorry, Mr. Dare. There’s no way the judge can take your plea today. Everything except this freaking Carnotolli case has been put over to Monday.”

  Pissey Carnotolli was a flamboyant Italian who owned a chain of stores around the Bay Area called Hide-A-Bed’s Galore. A local celebrity from his late-night TV commercials in which he wore nothing but a very large diaper, Pissey had been charged with killing his wife and the Examiner had hinted he had brought in hired muscle from New York to do it. Eddie figured if Pissey had used local guys, he might never have been indicted. San Francisco was an awfully insular place.

  “Anyway, wait a second.” The clerk pawed around in the papers he was carrying and pulled out an envelope. “Joshua sent this over a couple of hours ago. Said he thought you’d want it right away.”

  It was another of those airmail envelopes like the one in which the photograph with the red circle had come. Eddie hesitated a moment, not sure that he wanted the damned thing, but then took it and slowly turned it over. It was addressed to him in the same careful printing and it had the same kind of exotic-looking stamps.

  Eddie tore off one end and dumped a single photograph into his palm, remembering this time to fold away the envelope and put it in his pocket.

  Wuntz, fully recovered now from his outburst, leaned over and took a look.

  “What the fuck’s that?”

  Eddie didn’t answer, but he knew of course.

  It was another picture of him with the same young marines and the same girls. This one had apparently been taken at about the same time as the first one, but from a slightly different angle because now the guy who had been standing behind Eddie in the other photograph was fully visible.