Monkey on a Chain

by Harlen Campbell

  She shook her head.

  “God damn it, April, he wasn’t gay! There must have been women!”

  “There were. Always different women. I hardly ever saw them, though. He would just go out for the night, after I was old enough to stay alone. He never introduced me to any of them. When I was little, I thought he was ashamed of me. But then I realized it was just that they didn’t matter.”

  I finally saw what she was trying to say. “They were prostitutes?”

  She nodded and glanced up at my face. “I think so.”

  “No one else? Only prostitutes?”

  “Yes. And always different ones.”

  “Well, that makes it a little easier,” I said. “I’ve never heard of a prostitute using a Claymore. You said he was drunk that time he came home from the neighbor’s. Did he drink much?”

  “That was the only time I ever saw him drunk.”

  “What about drugs? Did he use them?”

  “Never. He hated them.”

  “Tell me about his personal life.”

  “He didn’t have one.”

  “He didn’t belong to any clubs? Civic organizations?”

  “No.”

  “His family, then. What about them? Where did his parents live?”

  She made a face, as though she tasted something foul. “They lived in Los Angeles. He didn’t see them very often. I think he sent them money sometimes, but not often.”

  “He didn’t take you to see them?”

  “Once. It was on my eleventh birthday, right after he brought me home. He had bought me a new dress. It was blue, I remember, and I thought I was very pretty in it, like an American girl. It was the first new dress I’d ever owned. I was so proud of it, and I really wanted them to like me. But they hated me.

  “I sat in the living room, all alone, and they were screaming at each other in the kitchen. His mother was screaming, anyway. She said that she wouldn’t have the little Commie gook bitch in her house. She yelled at him to get rid of me. I sat there in my new dress and listened to his mother for a long time. Then Dad came out and took me home. He never took me back.” She looked at me impassively.

  “Some people are like that,” I said. “Was that all of his family? Just his parents?”

  “There was a sister. He sent her cards on her birthday and at Christmas. I helped him remember them. I even bought the cards for him, when he was busy. But I never met her.”

  I made a face. “There’s not much there. As a motive.”

  “No. There’s not much there.”

  “What about you? How did he treat you?”

  “He loved me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course. He bought me lots of nice clothes. Just last year he gave me my car. He let me have my friends over whenever I wanted. Of course he loved me.”

  “Did he ever hug you?”

  She looked down at her hands, where her fingers twisted together on the table between us. “He didn’t have to. I knew he loved me. I know it.”

  “Did he beat you?”

  “Never. I told you, he loved me.”

  It sounded cold to me. I watched her playing with her fingers and tried to read her. If Toker hadn’t hugged her or displayed much emotion of any sort, she was apparently willing to overlook it.

  Of course, she had grown up Vietnamese-American in a land where any sort of mixed-race person was looked down on. She had been sent off alone by her aunt, and that must have felt like an abandonment. She’d survived the boat to Hong Kong and the British internment camp. She’d developed an American veneer, but underneath she was a survivor. She seemed to consider the food, the clothes, and the absence of blows enough. She talked about Toker as though she loved him. She wept when she spoke of his death.

  After three hours I had a better picture of Toker’s life, but his life didn’t seem to have much bearing on his death.

  April acted tired, or possibly depressed. She had answered my questions as well as she was able. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask at the moment, and it was getting late. “We’d better go,” I said.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why did Dad tell me to come to you?”

  I shrugged. “He said to come if you needed help. Sometimes I help people.”

  “You mean you’re like a detective?”

  “No. That takes a license. I call what I do Crisis Management.” I stood, hoping she would leave it at that, but she was persistent.

  “Does that mean you solve problems for people?” she asked.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I create them.”

  She thought about that for a few minutes, then asked, “Do you charge a lot?”

  “I’m cheap. One dollar and all found.”

  “A dollar isn’t much.”

  “I find a lot.”

  She shook her head uncertainly. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Sometimes it isn’t,” I told her. “But when there’s a clear-cut question of right and wrong, people don’t need me. They call the cops. I only come into a situation when everyone is wrong. I try to help the person who is most right. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “And you decide who is most right?”

  I nodded. “I decide.”

  “But why you?”

  “Because I’m willing to live with the consequences.”

  She thought about it a minute, then asked if I wanted a dollar. I told her Toker had paid me a long time ago. She left it at that. While she used the bathroom and reworked her makeup, I went downstairs. A cabby in the ranks outside the hotel looked smart enough to recognize an opportunity when he saw one, so I sold him the Orange County tickets for ten dollars each and went back up to collect April and the bags.

  The flight took an hour. I looked up Pearson’s number as soon as we landed and caught the lawyer as he was leaving his office. I told him I had a question about a title and made an appointment for the next morning. Then I checked out the car I’d reserved and found a hotel near the beach.

  April almost balked there. The room was of average size, with two double beds, but it was only one room.

  “Can’t I just go home?”

  “Not until we’ve got things straightened out with the police,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow night. But they’re probably looking for you. Your neighbor certainly called them when you disappeared. They’ll want to know where you went, and why. They may even think you had something to do with your father’s death.”

  “But I didn’t! I’ll just tell them I didn’t.”

  “You’ll spend all night at the station telling them.”

  “But why can’t I have my own room?”

  “The police are looking for you. Someone else may be looking for you, too. But they’ll all be looking for a woman alone. This way, you’re just half of a couple. No one is going to wonder why a man checks into a hotel with a much younger woman.” I gestured at the mirror, where we stood side by side. A young, pretty Oriental girl with dark eyes and a blond man about twice her age with a thin, sharp-featured face, watchful green eyes, and a tense way of holding himself. “We’re so obvious that no one will even see us.”

  I didn’t add that as long as she was in the same room with me, I could keep her off the telephone. Until I had a better idea what had led to Toker’s death, I didn’t want anyone to know she was back in Los Angeles. And I especially didn’t want anyone to know I was here.

  The possibility that the police might find her didn’t seem to bother her, but the idea that someone else might be looking for her shut her up.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll talk to the lawyer and the police.” I promised. “If everything works out, you can sleep in your own bed tomorrow night. At home.”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  While she changed for dinner, I put four thousand dollars in a hotel envelope. I wrote the last number I had for Roy on a piece of stationery and stuck it in with the money. The envelop
e went under the mattress at the foot of my bed. A poor hiding place, but good enough for a couple of hours.

  We ate in the hotel dining room. Chicken Marsala with blanched vegetables and a dry white wine. I’ve cooked better and eaten worse.

  April was quiet during the meal, but when the waiter brought our coffee, she asked, “How did you know my father?”

  “We met in Saigon during the war. He was in supply and I was attached to the Military Police.”

  “So you were friends?”

  “In a way.”

  “But I never heard him talk about you, except the one time when he told me to go to you for help. I mean, it doesn’t sound like you were friends. You never saw each other. You never called.”

  “We weren’t that kind of friends.”

  She thought about that for a few minutes, then changed the subject. “Where you live…it’s really out of the way. Do you really like it there?”

  She seemed to mean far away from people. There was no good explanation for that. Anyway, it wasn’t precisely true. I just shrugged.

  “Do you always live alone?”

  “Not always. Usually.” I saw that she was still thinking about the sleeping arrangements. “Sometimes a woman will stay with me for a while. One closer to my age.” Without really knowing why, I added, “They just never last. That’s all.”

  “Do you ask them to leave? Or do they go on their own?”

  She seemed to want to analyze me. I didn’t feel like talking about my failures with a girl too young to have gambled on sex. “Maybe a little of both, April. But stop prying. I’m here to help you, that’s all. If I wanted sex, it wouldn’t be with a girl young enough to be my daughter.”

  She finished her coffee in silence. I took her out to the car and drove to the nearest supermarket. One of the nicest things about America is that you can buy anything you need, any time you need it. April wasn’t wearing a watch. I bought her a cheap one. I also picked up a flashlight, a roll of electrical tape, and a pocketknife. I made a call to a man named Pedro at the West L.A. number I’d gotten from my contact in Albuquerque.

  The address he gave me was fifteen minutes away by freeway and almost an hour away by city streets. I took the streets, since it was still too early for what I had in mind. The drive took us deep into the barrio. I made April wait in the car while I went in. She acted nervous about the neighborhood. I didn’t much like it myself.

  Pedro was suspicious, but he must have checked my credentials. He sold me a .45 automatic and two clips of ammunition for three hundred and fifty dollars. I slipped the weapon under my sweater before getting back in the car.

  It was after ten o’clock when we reached April’s neighborhood. We cruised by her house once. It was large, set well back on a large lot. There was no activity around it, and no cars on the street.

  I found an all-night market half a mile away and bought a pack of cigarettes and two Styrofoam cups of coffee and carried them to the car. I made sure her new watch told the same story as mine, then I asked April for her keys.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I want to see the house. I want to see where Toker died and get a feel for what happened before we meet the lawyer. And I don’t want anyone to know I went in. The only way is to do it tonight.”

  “What if someone sees you?”

  “Nobody will see me.”

  “Somebody might be there.”

  “There’s no one around now. It should be safe.”

  She looked excited. “I want to come too.”

  “No. We can’t leave the car parked in front while we go in. Someone has to drive it and pick me up. You.”

  She looked like she wanted to object, but she didn’t.

  “At exactly eleven o’clock, you’re going to drive around the block once. If anything looks suspicious, we’ll call it off. If everything looks okay, you go around the block again. Memorize the cars on the street, what lights are on, everything. Slow down to two or three miles an hour in front of your house. I’ll get out by those bushes next to the street. You drive away. Kill some time. At exactly eleven-twenty, you drive around the block again. Have the headlights on high beam. If everything looks exactly the same, flick the lights down to low beam and drive around the block. Slow down again when you get back to the bushes. I’ll be waiting. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “If anything has changed, don’t flick your headlights to low. Drive away. Come back in ten minutes, at exactly eleven-thirty. Repeat the whole procedure. If there is still something suspicious, don’t flick your lights. Drive back here and wait for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t wait more than an hour. If I’m not here, go back to the hotel. I left an envelope for you there. It’s under the mattress at the foot of my bed. There’s some money and a man’s telephone number. Pack up and find another hotel. Use the cash. No credit cards. Call the man and tell him what happened. He might be willing to help. He might not. If he isn’t, you’re on your own.”

  That bothered her. After a long pause, she nodded. I took her wrist and squeezed it gently.

  “One other thing. You know people here. Probably most of them are on your side. But at least one person isn’t, and he might be one of the people you know. So don’t call anyone. Don’t let anyone know you’re in town. Unless I don’t come back and you can’t get any help from the number I gave you.” I smiled at her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  She smiled back hesitantly. “One thing. Could you get my diary?”

  “Your diary?”

  “It’s what I went back for that night. It was on my bedside table. I write everything in it. I wanted to write what I felt about him. About Dad. Being dead, I mean.”

  “I’ll try.”

  We traded places. I tossed the cigarettes in the glove compartment, removed the bulb from the overhead light, and gathered my stuff. Flashlight. Knife. Key. Gloves. Gun. I made sure which key worked the back door and asked her about the layout of the house and the security arrangements. Toker had not had an alarm system installed. That surprised me. You think you know someone.

  There was no moon. Only a few lights were on in the houses on her block when we made the first circuit. No cars parked on the street. Nothing suspicious. The second time around the block, April slowed almost to a standstill. I opened the door, slipped out, and ducked behind the bushes. She accelerated and was gone.

  It was very dark. A dog barked a block away. It took a few seconds to get to the side of the house, a few more to reach the backyard. I stood there with my eyes closed, waiting for my night vision, and counted to a hundred, listening.

  There was no sound from the house or from Mrs. Stillwell’s next door. I moved slowly past the pool to the back door and ripped off the police tape. The key slid in and turned noiselessly. I pushed the door open an inch and ran my fingers along the edge from top to bottom. Nothing. I slipped inside.

  The interior was about as April had described it. I was in a utility room. There were clothes on the floor. A short hall led to the kitchen. The cabinets had all been opened. The dishes were on the floor. The refrigerator door was open. That made me nervous. The normal human thing would be to close it, but I left it open and headed for the bedrooms.

  I had taped the flashlight so it threw only a tiny spot of light. I used it sparingly. Furniture had been turned upside down, cushions cut open, pictures pulled from walls, lamp bases shattered. Whoever did this was looking for something smaller than a bread box. Maybe bigger than a matchbox. The smallest hiding places hadn’t been touched. There was no sign the pockets of the clothes in the master bedroom closet had been searched, for instance, but the shelves had been emptied, suitcases opened.

  Toker’s office had been in a sitting room off his bedroom. It was easy to find. The wall was missing. Oh, the studs were there, but the wallboard had been blown away by shrapnel. A Claymore is beautiful in its efficiency. A small, heavy package, wider than it is hig
h, with a slight curve along the width, it throws a wide arc of shrapnel that shreds anything in its path. Wallboard. Meat. Bone. Anything. The outline of Toker’s body lay six feet back into the bedroom from what had been the door to the office. The remains of the mattress covered part of the outline and part of the dried goo under it.

  I stepped between two studs into the office area. The desk had been pretty heavily damaged when the Claymore detonated. There was no drawer that hadn’t been opened or up-ended. Paper was everywhere.

  Any hope I had carried into the room evaporated. There was no place left to search. No time to search in. I crouched down on my heels and let the feel of the place seep into me. It wasn’t good. What happened to Toker had been efficient, cold, ruthless. No one had wanted to talk to him, ask him questions, get information from him, demand money from him. The only thing his killer wanted of Toker was his death. But then he, or someone, had come back. Looking for what?

  In Saigon, Toker had been a sharp, lively man. Average height, dark hair and eyes. Intelligent. His degree in business administration from UCLA had bought him a silver bar by the time he rotated in-country from Germany. He was assigned to Johnny Walker’s supply unit at Long Binh. That was how we got him.

  He’d had nerve and a quick laugh. I’d liked the man, despite his attitude toward the locals. He was reliable. He had to be. We trusted him enough to let him close down the operation. Of course, he knew what would happen if he violated our trust, so his reliability was, in a sense, coerced.

  The last time I saw him, when I made his final delivery in ’seventy-four, he had been dealing in small parcels of land down toward San Diego. He’d smiled a lot. We’d had more than a couple of drinks and chased a couple of stewardesses out in Manhattan Beach, not really caring if we caught them. We hadn’t, but the night had felt good anyway. Full of possibilities.

  Now he was a crust of dried blood on the carpet and a sack of chopped meat in a cooler downtown. And the night didn’t feel like it had a single good thing in it for anyone. It felt like my first night standing perimeter guard in the boonies, when every sound was ominous and every silence menacing. It felt like war.