Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  And this time it was that guy who had a red circle around his head.

  Eddie lifted the photograph and studied it carefully. But he didn’t really need to. He recognized the face immediately.

  It was Winnebago.

  Four

  “NO wonder I thought the ears looked familiar.” Winnebago held the photograph in both hands, his elbows propped on the bookstore’s counter as he shook his head slowly back and forth. “What about the envelope?”

  Eddie took the crumpled airmail envelope from his pocket and smoothed it out.

  “I told you those were Thai girls,” Winnebago said as soon as it saw it. He tapped his forefinger on the envelope. “It’s from Thailand. Says so right on the stamps there.”

  Eddie picked up the envelope and squinted at the stamps, but they were small and the printing looked like hieroglyphics to him. How did Winnebago know that?

  Winnebago held the picture up, twisting it around to catch the light. “It sure as all shit beats me, but I really don’t like the look of that red circle around my head.”

  “Who else was with us those times we were in Bangkok? Can you remember anybody?”

  Winnebago reached under the counter for his cigarettes. He lit one, taking his time about it.

  “That kid we called Donkey might have been there.” Winnebago pointed at one of the men in the background. “Is that him?”

  They both stared hard at the face, willing it to speak to them, to spell out to them whatever message they were supposed to be getting. But it didn’t.

  “What was his real name?”

  “Damned if I can remember.” Winnebago pondered a moment. “Isn’t there some place you can call about old military records?”

  “Yeah, well, I can just see myself calling up a personnel office at the Pentagon and saying, ‘Excuse me, but would you have anything on a guy named Donkey,’ and then listening to some NCO say, ‘Hey, pal, we’re all called Donkey around here.’ No way.”

  Winnebago thought some more. “Maybe you can find the captain somehow. That might be easier.”

  “Jesus, Winnebago, I wouldn’t have the first idea where to start looking.”

  “I’ll bet he’s become a real successful guy. He was just the type. Shouldn’t be all that hard to find him.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Probably did do something to get himself noticed after he got out.”

  “Yeah,” Winnebago nodded, “that sounds to me like the way to go. I’ll bet you Captain Austin made a real big splash somewhere.”

  ***

  EDDIE slogged away dutifully at this and that for the rest of the week, but he couldn’t get the photographs out of his mind and his concentration was all over the place. By four o’clock on Friday afternoon he gave up and started the weekend.

  The House of Shields was a saloon on New Montgomery Street just south of Market. It was comfortable as old loafers and still smelled a little of cigars and cigarettes stubbed out in what Eddie was sure were better times. In spite of its name, the place had nothing to do with medieval warfare, at least not unless you counted the screeching done by some of the old bags who hung around there most of the day with a snoot full. A guy named Shields, so the story went, had opened it near the turn of the century. He hung a big sign over the front door that said ENTER THESE PORTALS AND TIME AND CARES ARE FORGOT.

  Eddie liked that, even if they had taken the sign down a decade or so ago when most cares just got too big to be forgot anymore, and he liked the fact that a middle-aged woman in a taffeta prom dress and way too much make-up was usually there playing things like “Our Love Is Here To Stay” on a scarred, old Steinway. When it was slow, and sometimes it was very slow, Eddie would spread his papers around on the bar to make it look good, sip a beer or a diet soda, and whistle quietly along with the piano, easing his way out of another week.

  San Francisco did that kind of thing to you, Eddie knew. Maybe some other places, too, but San Francisco sure as hell did.

  When Eddie finished law school he was looking to burn down the world, but then he discovered all that good California wine at a few bucks a bottle; cracked crab straight off the boats at Fisherman’s Wharf back before all the real boats disappeared and the place turned into a tourist trap; the taste of warm sourdough bread as it came out of the ovens over at Sammy’s Bakery on Powell; the musty, used-book store up on Fremont that smelled like his grandmother’s attic; and the sun dusting the city with magic as it eased gracefully into the Pacific out beyond the orange towers of the Golden Gate.

  Almost before he knew it, twenty years slipped away, gone like a goddamned bullet. Oh, Lord, he had begun sighing to himself whenever he thought about it, what the hell happened to them?

  “Hey, fella. You know who you look like?”

  A voice behind Eddie shook him out of his reverie.

  “That actor. You know…”

  Eddie had noticed the guy in the brown leather bomber-jacket eyeing him, so he wasn’t particularly surprised when he started in. Whenever Eddie saw somebody looking at him like that, and it was way too often as far as he was concerned, it always came down to the same thing.

  “You look like…” The man wiggled his left index finger at Eddie and tossed in a little finger popping for punctuation. “You know, that actor…Bruce Willis! Yeah, that’s it! Bruce Willis! Anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Bruce Willis, man?”

  The guy grinned triumphantly at Eddie and then he twisted around to a thin woman with a pinched face and tiny lips who was waiting for him at a table and grinned some more.

  Big deal, Eddie thought as he always did. Big fucking deal.

  He arched his eyebrows steeply and keeping his face otherwise expressionless nodded very slowly a couple of times over his shoulder before returning his full attention to his Diet Coke. That just made things worse, he knew—it was exactly what Bruce Willis had done a hundred times in the movies—but it was still a look that Eddie particularly favored whenever the subject came up. The ambiguity of it appealed to him.

  When he heard the stool next to him scrape back a few moments later, Eddie glanced over and was surprised to see Kelly Wuntz sliding onto it. It had been three days since Eddie asked Wuntz if he could do something through SFPD to get a line on Harry Austin and he had heard nothing from him since. He figured that was a write-off, especially since his own efforts to locate Captain Austin had come to exactly nothing either. As far as he could tell, Austin had vanished cleanly off the face of the earth after he left the marines in 1975.

  Wuntz had an odd look on his face, but before Eddie could say anything about it Wuntz held a finger up to his lips and shook his head vigorously to indicate that Eddie should remain silent. Eddie looked around the bar, but there was no one near enough to overhear them; and besides, he was only going to ask Wuntz how he was doing.

  Wuntz eased up off the bar stool and walked away, gesturing for Eddie to follow. Even for Kelly Wuntz that was peculiar behavior so, half out of curiosity and half just to humor him, Eddie did. He trailed along behind as Wuntz went up the stairs at the end of the bar and disappeared into the men’s toilet. When Eddie followed him inside, he found Wuntz checking under the stall doors.

  “I’ve got something on your old captain,” Wuntz said very quietly when he was satisfied they were alone. “But first I have to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Shoot,” Eddie answered, immediately regretting his choice of word.

  “When was the last time you saw Austin?”

  “I don’t know.” Eddie thought about it. “Not since I was discharged.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  Eddie just shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. What is this, Wuntz?”

  Wuntz was still looking at him in a funny way and Eddie started getting a bad feeling.

  “You asked me to check on this Austin guy for you and I did. There’s this DEA fruit I busted a few months ago in a gay cat house over in
the Castro and then cut loose, so I figured he might be just the guy to poke around with the feds for me.”

  “If you’re going through all this just to tell me that Austin’s gay, I don’t really care. I just want to talk to him, not sleep with him.”

  “Look, Dare, you want to hear what I’ve got or not?”

  Eddie nodded vaguely, trying not to look too excited, which was fairly easy based on how the conversation with Wuntz had gone up to that point.

  “Then shut the fuck up for once in your life and listen.”

  Wuntz cleared his throat a couple of times, giving himself a build-up.

  “Okay, the guy says he’ll see what he can do and then today he calls me back. He sounds nervous and at first I don’t get it. I’m not looking to bust anybody’s balls here, I’m just asking this pansy to check around and see if he can get a current address on some guy who was a run-of-the-mill marine captain something like twenty years ago. Then he tells me that this Austin has a DEA file and I start to pay real close attention.”

  “Harry Austin was a drug dealer?”

  “I don’t think so. This guy says a file was opened on a routine investigation of Austin several years ago for some reason he didn’t know anything about. Apparently it turned up zip. That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point, Wuntz?”

  “My guy says the file was closed permanently two weeks ago.”

  “Because they didn’t find anything?”

  Wuntz blew air into his cheeks, puffing up like a chipmunk that had just found a particularly nice acorn. “This guy faxed me a copy of the last document in Austin’s file. You want to see it?”

  “Sure, let’s have it. After all the dramatics, I just hope I’m not disappointed.”

  “You won’t be.”

  Wuntz was giving him the eye, Eddie noticed. What the hell was going on here?

  “So all you wanted to do was to talk to your old CO, huh?” Wuntz asked.

  Eddie knew that was an introduction, not a real question, but he nodded anyway. More importantly, he noticed Wuntz had just switched into the past tense so, when Wuntz reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed Eddie a single sheet of paper folded lengthwise, Eddie was pretty sure what he was going to see on it, although of course he had no idea as to what form the details would take.

  Eddie unfolded the sheet and studied the smudged photocopy of a newspaper clipping while Wuntz walked around behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. The clipping appeared to be from an inside page of some newspaper, the right side just above the fold. It was obviously a foreign paper since it was printed in some bizarre-looking language that Eddie couldn’t even hope to make any sense out of.

  Of course, he had been right about what to expect. Both he and Wuntz stood silently for a few moments, looking down at the copy of the clipping and contemplating the blood and guts photograph that took up the entire top half of it: a man’s battered body sprawled lifelessly in a muddy street somewhere.

  “Jesus Christ,” Eddie finally said in a voice that was much smaller than he would really have liked, “look at that.”

  The head of the man in the picture seemed perfectly normal on one side. A dark eye stared so directly into the lens of the camera you could almost imagine it was about to blink. The other side of his head was something else again. It resembled a ripe pomegranate that had been dropped onto the street from a very great height.

  Recognizing Harry Austin after twenty years would probably have been hard enough anyway, Eddie thought as he examined the clipping, and having only half a head to work with didn’t make the task any easier. Maybe this wasn’t him. Then Eddie noticed two words in Western script that stood out quite clearly among the monotonous lines of unfathomable print below the picture: Harry Austin.

  “After everything he lived through, he walks down the wrong street on the wrong day and dies in an accident. It doesn’t seem right,” Eddie said, then he looked up and caught the strange look on Wuntz’s face. “What?”

  “You’re assuming this was an accident.”

  Eddie quickly glanced down at the clipping again to see if he was missing something, but nothing jumped out at him and he shifted his eyes back to Wuntz.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “My guy says DEA thinks maybe it wasn’t.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “He didn’t know. He’d just heard around that some people thought your man Austin was taken out.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t a drug dealer.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Then why would anyone want to kill him?”

  Wuntz rolled his eyes. “I look like the Amazing Randy to you or what, Eddie? How the fuck would I know?”

  “I thought maybe your DEA guy told you.”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  Eddie blew air out between his teeth and studied the clipping some more. “This is sure a hell of a coincidence.”

  Wuntz reached over Eddie’s shoulder and tapped his finger on a date that was stamped on the bottom of the clipping. “DEA logged this in three weeks ago, just before those pictures started showing up in your mail. Still think it’s a coincidence?”

  Eddie didn’t much care for the way the conversation was developing or for what he gathered Wuntz was suggesting. “Do you know what this story actually says?”

  “There was no translation in the file. Maybe one of those Asian hoods you call clients can read Thai.”

  Eddie’s eyes flicked up to Wuntz.

  “This is from a Thai newspaper?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s where Captain Austin was killed?”

  But Eddie knew, of course, what the answer was going to be before he finished the question.

  “Yeah. In Bangkok,” Wuntz replied, right on cue.

  Eddie’s reaction must have been easier to read than he would have liked.

  “Bangkok,” Wuntz repeated, giving Eddie a long look. “You know, the place with all the little broads and the big massage parlors. That mean something to you?”

  Eddie quickly shook his head. He knew Wuntz didn’t believe him, But he let it go anyway and Eddie was grateful to him for that.

  He didn’t really want to talk about it anymore right then and, even if he had, he couldn’t imagine what he would say.

  Five

  EDDIE was walking slowly along Market Street still trying to get his mind around the conversation with Kelly Wuntz when his telephone began tweeting. He hated that sound. Every time he heard it he wondered why nobody could make a mobile telephone that just rang instead of making a noise like a canary with gas.

  “Get back here now,” Joshua snapped before Eddie could say hello.

  “Hello, Joshua. How are you?”

  “I said get back here now.”

  “I heard you.”

  He gave it a second, but Joshua didn’t add anything.

  “We having a fire or something?” Eddie prompted.

  “There are some men here to see you.”

  Joshua sounded a little strange.

  “I don’t have any appointments this afternoon.”

  “Eddie, I’m telling you there are some people here to see you and you have to come back right now.”

  “‘People,’ Joshua? I thought you said ‘men.’ Now which is it? ‘Men’ or ‘people?’ You know that might have a very significant effect on whether I come back because—”

  “Eddie,” Joshua interrupted. “Cut the shit and get back here.”

  Then he hung up.

  ***

  WHEN Eddie walked into his outer office a few minutes later, he half expected to find Joshua tied to a chair with a gag in his mouth, but everything looked normal enough. Joshua gestured toward the closed door of Eddie’s office with a tilt of his head and went right on typing without looking up just like he always did. Eddie opened his door with a shrug and went in.

  There was quite a crowd waiting for him: three men and
a woman. At least they looked like a crowd all squeezed at once into Eddie’s office. He had only two straight-backed chairs for visitors and one of the men and the woman sat in them while the other two men leaned against the wall. The expressions of bored contempt on his visitors’ faces unmistakably marked them as cops to anyone who had been around the Hall of Justice as long as Eddie had.

  Wondering what kind of roust this was going to turn out to be, Eddie moved around his desk at what he thought was a stately enough pace to suggest a complete lack of interest and then settled slowly into his own chair. No one spoke, and he studied the man and woman facing him while he waited for something to happen.

  Eddie could work out easily enough who was in charge of the raiding party. The seated man wore the same kind of costume as the Olsen twins over against the wall, but he was older and had a look that made his authority obvious. With his short hair, wiry build, and rimless glasses, the man made Eddie think of an astronaut who had retired and taken up running a used-book store.

  The woman had close-cropped blond hair and a very fair, slightly ruddy complexion. She looked Irish, Eddie thought. Not bad really, for a cop at least. But then he spotted something considerably more interesting about the woman than her complexion. She had a pair of headlights on her that would freeze a moose.

  He remembered in college some woman telling him that the great tragedy of her life was being born with big breasts since men wouldn’t take a woman who had really huge ones seriously. He had cooed and comforted her, saying how wrong she was, but he would have said damn near anything just to get her to shut the hell up and take off her bra. Eddie wondered for a moment if the big headlights ever got in this woman’s way, professionally speaking of course.

  “What can I do for you, detectives?” he finally asked when no one seemed inclined to break the silence.

  “We’re not from the police, Mr. Dare.” The seated man spoke slowly without any change in his bland expression.

  Uh-oh.

  The man took a slim, black wallet out of his coat pocket. He laid it on Eddie’s desk and flipped it open.

  “I’m Agent Reidy. United States Secret Service.” He indicated the other two men and the woman by inclining his head slightly toward each with an economy of movement that Eddie found a little scary for some reason. “These are Agents Booth, Evans and Sanchez.”