Obedience

by Joseph Hansen

  “You blame Flanagan?” Dave said.

  “The committee chose him because he was vocal,” Mannix said. “I’d have chosen Norma Potter. She’s got some sense. Flanagan’s crazy, if you want the truth.”

  “Crazy enough to murder Le?” Dave said.

  “That’s what the police think,” Mannix said. “And the way he felt about Vietnamese, maybe they’re right.”

  Out past the bridge, a steel loading crane swung atop its tower. Dave watched its cables lift a freight container into sight. He couldn’t see the ship the container came from. Slowly the container spun against the sky. “But you didn’t know him long.”

  “I didn’t know him long, and I didn’t want to. I don’t remember the war. I was only thirteen when it ended. But I guess older people figure he’s got a right to be bitter. Some of them, anyway. Some of them say the war wasn’t Vietnam’s fault. We had no business going in there. I don’t know. But it isn’t just Vietnamese he hates. He hates the Army for sending him there. Hates the Veterans Administration, hates the government—doesn’t matter it’s not the same as it was then. Hates pretty much anybody and everybody.”

  “Was that why you called him stupid?” Dave said. “Or did you have a particular reason?”

  “He arranged to meet Le without telling any of us. We’re a committee. We’re supposed to vote on these things. He went off half-cocked, trying to prove what a born leader he was, and he wrecked the last chance we had.”

  The sun beat down. Dave tilted up the soda can at his mouth and drank. “What chance was that?”

  “Le really didn’t know much about the whole thing. Or care, apparently. He’d been stalling, driving the developers nuts. He didn’t seem in any hurry to sell the Old Fleet. He sure as hell wasn’t hurting for money. Maybe he’d have listened to our side. Now there’s only those damn lawyers of his. Them we’ve met. We’ll get no breaks from them.”

  “Did you hear the shot that killed Le?”

  “We slept over at my in-laws in Long Beach,” Mannix said. “I’d been up there yesterday to get checked at the hospital. We only got back”—he read a Timex that looked too heavy for his wasted wrist—“three hours ago.” His laugh was dry. “Missed all the excitement, right?”

  “Flanagan ever offend you personally?” Dave said.

  “He sneered when he saw me on the protest committee. What did I have to worry about? My wife’s folks were Jewish. Jews have plenty of money. Deb and I and the baby would be all right. The rest of them here were in real trouble. I was so weak, I could hardly stand up. But if I was myself, I’d have beat the shit out of him, one arm or not.”

  “Norma Potter thinks he was framed.”

  Mannix tilted his head, wrinkled his brow, weighed the idea. “To shut him up? Naw. He was a pain in the ass to the developers and the City Council, but he couldn’t really hurt them, could he?”

  “Yesterday, when you weren’t here, he got your plight onto television and into the newspapers. That kind of story rouses public sympathy, turns them against cold-hearted corporations. Maybe that made them take him seriously.”

  “You don’t honestly believe that.” Mannix drank off the rest of the soda and set the green can on the deck, wincing when the motion pulled at his scars. “Norma reads too many detective stories. Why wasn’t Le just mugged?”

  “There was over six thousand dollars in his pockets.”

  “Well, that lets me out as a suspect.” Mannix gave a tired laugh. “I’d have taken the money. Believe it.” He went quiet. Dave frowned at the skeletal form stretched out on the flimsy deck chair. He thought Mannix’s eyes were closed behind those dark lenses. But his lips moved, he spoke, a whisper. “No—Flanagan just went off his rocker at last.” He sighed. “That’s all.”

  “I guess not. Someone here saw the killer.” Dave bent to pick up Mannix’s empty soda can from the deck. He pushed it into a pocket, his own into the opposite pocket. “He told Norma Potter. He didn’t happen to tell you too, did he?”

  Maybe Mannix was asleep. Maybe he was only shamming. Whatever the case, he didn’t answer. And Dave climbed down the steel ladder and went to the open cabin door to hand in the cans. “Thank you,” Mannix’s wife said with that pale half-smile of hers. “Each one is worth a penny.”

  He lit a cigarette, and started along the dock, looking for the next boat wired to a power pole. Movement caught his eye. Maybe thirty yards ahead. He stopped and stood, waiting for whatever it was to show itself again. It was quiet. Water lapped the pier stakes. The whine of the engine that powered the loading crane came to him. Nearer by, gulls cried their creaking cries. A dog, shut up on one of the boats, yelped to get out. Somewhere he heard the muffled quarrelling of soap-opera actors.

  Then he saw again what he thought he’d seen before, but hadn’t believed. A face, half black and half chalk white, flickered into sight and out of sight on a boat far down the row. Panic was in the eyes that looked at him out of that face. He threw his cigarette into the water, and used long strides to get him to that boat. It was a slim, white, forty-foot sailing craft that hadn’t sailed in a long time. STARLADY was painted on its bow.

  He didn’t ask permission. He swung aboard. Litheness had left his lean body some years back. He knew that, but at moments like this, mind on his work, he forgot. He damn near fell into the water. Hitting the deck, he sprawled. And a tall, running figure tripped over him, scrambled up, and tried to swing over the side to the dock. Dave grabbed one of his long, lean legs.

  “Let go.” The leg tugged. “I have to go to work.”

  Dave climbed to his feet, changing his grip from the leg to an arm in a floppy jacket. Under the jacket, the torso was half black, half chalk white. To match the face. So were the leotards. “To work where—Merrill Lynch?”

  “Oh, funny. The Arts Festival, man. Crowds downtown, looking to have a good time. I’m a mime, a juggler, a street performer. If I make people laugh, they throw me money.”

  “Here’s money.” Dave took out his wallet, slipped a twenty-dollar bill from it. “And you don’t have to make me laugh. Just tell me who you saw last night on the dock at eleven. And I don’t mean Andy Flanagan.”

  “Keep your money.” His eyes were fixed on the bill Dave held in front of them. He spoke the words faintly. “I don’t know nothing about that.” He moved to go away again. Dave caught him, pushed the bill into a pocket of the floppy jacket. The young man shook his head hard. “I mean it. I never saw nobody.” He waved an arm. “It happened way up the dock, there. How could I see from here?”

  “I guess you weren’t here,” Dave said. “I guess you reached the Old Fleet on the last possible bus from the music center in L.A. You walked to the pier and saw what you saw. And it scared you so you ran and hid. Which is why the police missed you when they questioned everyone else here. But you couldn’t keep it to yourself. You had to tell somebody. And that somebody was Norma Potter.”

  The painted head shook hard. But the eyes were brighter than ever with fear. “No way did I tell her. How could I tell her? I didn’t see nothing. Nobody. I swear it to you. Look, I have to go. It will be dark before I get to UCLA. That’s all to hell and gone.”

  “Hell and gone is where you’ll end up, telling lies that can send your neighbor to the gas chamber.”

  “Don’t talk theology to me,” the painted head said. “I am not some rag-head Baptist nigger. I am an artist and an intellectual. I am a secular humorist, and proud of it.” He paused. “Who are you, anyway?”

  Dave showed his license and told him why Tracy Davis had hired him. “Andy Flanagan hated a lot of people and a lot of things. And you were among them, isn’t that right? He didn’t like having you for a neighbor. He avoided you. Because you’re black.”

  “And gay,” the painted head said. “Don’t ask me to feel sorry for that pig-track Irish Catholic bigot. I hope they gas him up the ass and hold a match to his mouth.” He pulled the twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and pushed it back at Dave. “He
re’s your money. I’m going now.” He turned away, swung a leg over the side.

  Dave caught his jacket. “Wait a minute. Cecil Harris. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “The lovely, tall brother with the smile?” The painted head turned and cocked an eyebrow. “On the Channel 3 news? I never met him.” Eyelids batted coquettishly. “But I sure would adore to.” He grinned.

  “Good. He’s a friend of mine, and I think he’d adore to meet you too,” Dave said. “You’d make a great story for him. The Old Fleet is news, right now—”

  “That filthy rich old chino throwing us out. I’m glad he’s dead.” He snorted. “Looks like Flanagan was good for something in this world, after all, wasn’t he?”

  Dave finished his thought: “—and what you do for a living is off-beat, interesting, and a tie-in with the Arts Festival, which is also news right now.”

  Paint-head’s eyes narrowed. “He’d put me on TV, doing my act? You jiving me, Mr. Brooks Brothers?”

  “That could change your life, couldn’t it?” Dave said. “Where will he find you tonight? What’s your name?”

  “Carlton Simes,” paint-head said. “Cotton, to my friends. There’s a big event at Royce Hall. I’ll be on the steps—the long, broad steps, you know, ones that face West? But I’ll only be juggling tennis balls. Wouldn’t dare try cups and saucers tonight.” Cotton jumped lightly over the rail onto the dock. “If that sexy Cecil Harris really did show up, the breakage would be terrible.”

  Dave lay in bed on the sleeping loft in the dark, gazing up at the skylight. The long rectangles of glass were strewn with leaves. Between the leaves stars shone. The red LED numbers of the bedside clock said one forty-nine. The phone hadn’t rung. Where was Cecil? Dave had stared hard at the eleven o’clock news on the big television set in the front building, smoking too much, drinking too fast, worried that Cotton Simes wouldn’t get his fifteen seconds of celebrity. Cecil had resented the whole thing, grumbled there was no way he’d ever get the piece past the news director. The story at the Old Fleet was murder, not mime.

  “There’s a link,” Dave said, “and when he discovers that later on, he’ll be pleased as hell. He’ll give you a raise.”

  But when Dave had left the station, he wasn’t sure Cecil would even try. He hadn’t just tried. He’d used ingenuity, steered clear of Le’s killing, slighted the boaties’ protest, used stock teasers of Arts Festival events, shots of other street artists playing instruments, singing, eating fire, then sinuous Cotton doing his sly, mocking mime act on the lamplit, tree-shadowed steps at UCLA. It was the last piece on the show. On a night when news seemed in short supply, the artistry of Cotton Simes been given a generous twelve solo seconds. It was in rotten taste, on the air only because of a vicious murder, but would anybody notice? On a television newscast? Dave doubted it.

  Now he heard Cecil’s van jounce down from Horseshoe Canyon Trail into the brick yard, listened for the door slam, the crunching of Cecil’s feet across the dry leaves of the courtyard, the turning of the front door lock. A lamp was switched on below. The bathroom door opened and closed. The toilet flushed, water ran. The bathroom door opened. Glass rattled softly at the bar. Dave got out of bed, flapped into a blue corduroy robe, went down the raw pine stairs. Cecil looked at him from the shadows of the bar.

  “You have a lot to answer for,” he said. “When he told you he’d adore to meet me, ‘meet’ was not half of what he meant.” Cecil smiled wanly, and gave his head a wondering shake. “I almost ended up face down in a bunk. That willowy queen is a demon lover. No way was I going to get away from him. Not without knocking him upside the head. Luckily for both of us, his lady came home.”

  “Damn,” Dave said. “You mean you didn’t get out of him what he’d seen on the dock when Le was killed?”

  “I got it.” Cecil handed Dave brandy in a big snifter. “That’s how I almost ended up a victim of sexual assault. I didn’t really promise anything”—carrying his own brandy, Cecil wandered toward the stairs—“but I let him hope, didn’t I? Driving him home to the Old Fleet.” He climbed the stairs as if his feet were heavy. “It’s not his boat. It’s hers. She’s Lindy Willard, you know, the jazz singer? Working the Vine Street right now. Cotton is her fancy man. And from the way he let go of me when he heard her coming, she doesn’t know he’s gay, and if she did, he’d be out on his adorable butt.” On the loft, a lamp lit up.

  Dave switched off the lamp below, and climbed the steps. “That’s all very interesting, but what did he tell you about Le’s killers?”

  “It’s a good time for him right now”—Cecil’s voice came muffled by the shirt he was pulling off over his head—“because of the Festival, he works every day. But most of the year, it’s only weekends—at the art museum or the music center.” Dave reached the loft. Cecil was sitting on the far side of the bed, long back bent so he could unlace and pull off his shoes. He stood and stripped down jeans and briefs, tossed them on a chair.

  “So he’s not an artist all the time.” Cecil went naked to a stereo rig under the roof slope, rattled brittle boxes, dropped a cassette into the deck, poked steel buttons. Drums bumped. Miles Davis began to play “Tutu.” Cecil turned back, smiled, said, “Sometimes he’s a busboy.” He stretched out on the bed. “And that’s where our story begins.” He turned on his side. “Come on, I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

  Dave shed the blue robe, laid it over the loft railing, switched off the lamp, and lay down beside Cecil, who put an arm across him. “Tell me,” Dave said.

  “He had a job at Hoang Pho, a waterfront restaurant down there—and about ten-thirty, when there was nobody left but four Vietnamese men in business suits at a rear table, all of a sudden, the door bursts open and in come these two little guys in black jeans and black T-shirts, right? Black handkerchiefs tied over their faces.”

  “I remember reading about it,” Dave said. “They were armed with Uzis, weren’t they?”

  “With which they massacred the four men at the table in two seconds flat and were out of there.”

  “Never to be seen or heard of again,” Dave said.

  “You got it,” Cecil said. “And Cotton was dishwasher there that night. Only person left. The men had paid their check. He didn’t have anything to do but wait till they got finished with their conference, and lock up after them. He was in the kitchen, reading Rolling Stone, when he heard the shooting. He ran out the back and buried himself in a trash module. Well, they came out the same way, ran right past him. He damn near died of fright. But he peeked out. Getting into their car, they pulled off those handkerchiefs. Light was bad back there, but he saw their faces. And it took him a long time to get over the idea that they’d seen his. The police questioned him, of course, but he didn’t tell them.”

  Miles Davis played a comic riff—“put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right out.” Dave said, “And then he came home night before last, and here were these same two little men in black shirts and jeans again, running away from the Old Fleet dock, right?”

  “Uh-huh—you guessed it.”

  “Asians, right?” Dave said.

  “‘Tough little doll-boys,’ he calls them,” Cecil said. “‘Pretty as poison.’” Cecil lay quiet while “Full Nelson” thumped and tooted jokily around them. When the tune had pranced off into silence, he said, “What’s going to happen to Cotton when this comes out?”

  “I’ll try not to let it come out,” Dave said.

  “How can you help it? I know you. You think it was a Vietnamese thing, now. Nothing to do with Andy Flanagan. You’ll go after the doll-boys, and they’ll figure out it was Cotton who tipped you. And he’ll be black and white and dead all over. You were going to quit. Why didn’t you?”

  “I’ll protect Cotton,” Dave said. “Do you have contacts inside the Vietnamese community?”

  “Nobody has contacts inside the Vietnamese community. It can’t be done or the police would have done it, wouldn’t they?
”

  “It can be done,” Dave said.

  4

  HOANG PHO. THE place made no sense as a setting for murder. It was too bright. From ceiling banks of fluorescent tubes light glared off pale-peach-color walls, off apricot-color formica table tops, off the chrome plate of cane-seated chairs. It gleamed on the triple-gloss coating of the stiff menu card, and made him blink. He dug out his reading glasses, fumbled them on, and the print cleared for him. The meaning of the words did not. Bun & Mi. Che &Thuc Uong. He’d read this morning that some missionary had converted the ideograms of ancient Vietnamese into Western phonetics a hundred fifty years ago. If this had helped anyone at the time, it didn’t help Dave now.

  The tiny young woman poised at his elbow, waiting for his order, understood English no better than he understood Vietnamese, though she nodded, smiled, even tinkled a merry laugh at his questions. He looked around. The crowd of customers in the shiny place was all Vietnamese, none of them speaking English to each other over lunch. He’d have to do without a translator. He sighed, peered again at the menu, and read off to the young woman the name of one dish from under, each of the main headings. He’d never liked surprises, but there had to be a first time for everything.

  He held the sleek card up for her, and pointed to a listing under Pho. “Cha gio,” he said. “Please.” Under Bun & Mi, he pointed to and spoke the mysterious words, “Banh uot thit nuong,” hoping that, whatever they meant, it tasted as good as they sounded. She wrote on a pad, then pointed at another listing, nodding hard, smiling hard, and spoke her only English of the day. “You like, you like.” The name of the dish was bun cha. From the last section of the card, he chose a dessert whose name he recognized. “Flan au caramel” he said. The French had occupied Vietnam for a long time. Had this been their only legacy?

  His table was near the window. Waiting, he looked out at the street. It didn’t show him much but desertion—boarded-up stores, fading signs, MARINE SUPPLIES, DAY TRIPS, BOAT RENTALS. If he craned to see down the block, one of those warehouses Cecil had described, with most of its windows broken out, loomed against the sky. When he turned and looked the other way, the oil pumps nodded that he’d seen from the Old Fleet Marina. The rent here would be cheap. Or maybe free. Did the tiny exotic waitresses, the almost equally tiny waiters and busboys in some way owe their outlandish presence in this backwater of American urban decay to Le Van Minh who, when he lived, had owned this stretch of waterfront?