Monkey on a Chain

by Harlen Campbell

  I turned over a few pieces of paper and flashed my light on them, but they weren’t anything I recognized. I stood and headed for April’s room.

  Maybe it was thinking back to the old days that stopped me outside her door. Something spooked me. I knelt down and stuck my head in slowly, with the flash directed along the floor. I stopped breathing.

  What looked like a ray of light flashed across the doorway, three feet above the carpet, then abruptly disappeared. I took a breath, and there it was again. It took a minute to recognize it. Fishing line, pulled taut and running from a thumbtack stuck in the top of a girl’s desk toward the headboard of a brass bed on the other side of the doorway. I held the flashlight next to the line and followed it. It disappeared into a tin can taped to the headboard. I felt immeasurably cold. This was about the worst thing I could have found.

  It was a simple booby trap, very popular in some parts of my past. You take an ordinary fragmentation grenade, tie a line to it, and slip it into an ordinary tin can. Once the lever is inside the can, pull the pin. Tie the can somewhere convenient. Stretch the line across the path of someone you don’t like and tie it.

  The bad guy comes walking along. His foot catches the line and pulls it. The grenade pops out of the can and the lever flies away. The bad guy realizes something is wrong and starts to think what it could be. Then the grenade goes off and the bad guy stops thinking. Of course, bad guy can be a relative term.

  But this was wrong. The line was too high. When your target is walking, his foot is the part of his body moving fastest. It is also the one part of his body he can’t stop without losing his balance. The line should have been lower, no more than six inches off the floor. It didn’t make sense until I remembered the target. A young woman. Never been in the jungle. Not wary of sudden death. With a target like that, the technical details wouldn’t matter much. Still, the lack of craftsmanship bothered me. If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it right.

  The dog was still barking a block away. I crouched in the dark and tried to work up enough spit to swallow my fear. Then I took out my knife, reached into the room, and cut the line where it lay against the desk top. It fell to the floor, and I entered. Very cautiously. I flashed the light around. Her room had received the same attention as the rest of the house. Clothes, paper, pillow stuffing everywhere. It seemed almost pointless to search, but then I saw the diary lying next to the bed. It had not been what the killer was after.

  I scanned a page here and there and read the last few with greater care. She had written about school, her friends, her life. It seemed unimportant, at least in the current context. The last few pages were about her father. Not Toker, though. Apparently she had some idea of finding her real father. I closed it and tried to decide whether to reset the trap. No matter how I figured it, it seemed like the smart thing to do. But somebody was going to trip it if I did, and maybe not a bad guy. Feeling like a fool, I searched the floor until I found the pin, then eased the grenade slowly from the can and replaced the pin. I dropped the grenade in my pocket and left the house.

  Two minutes later the car cruised past. The headlights dimmed. I dashed to the bushes by the street and took cover. Nothing moved. The damned dog finally stopped barking. It took about five seconds to get in the car when April slowed for me. I collapsed on the seat, breathing heavily. She accelerated smoothly. A few seconds later, the shakes tried to come. I fished the cigarettes out of the glove compartment and lit one. It took two matches, but that was just because of the wind from my open window. The cigarette kept the shakes away. By the time I was done with it, my breathing was back to normal. But I still felt explosive, like that damned grenade I’d brought away with me.

  April kept stealing glances at me. I told her to keep her eyes on the road. Then I repented and pulled her diary from under my sweater. When she saw it, she said “Ahh!” and I saw that she was crying.

  “The beach,” I told her. “Then the hotel.”

  She took the freeway. The trip lasted three more cigarettes. When she pulled into a parking lot, I tossed the rest of the pack. If I didn’t, I’d only smoke them, and I was way ahead of my quota already.

  I left April in the car and walked out into the surf. I fished out the grenade and pulled the pin, then heaved it as far as I could. There was a splash in the dark, followed by a dull whump that built a hill of white water in the distance. I returned to the car and April took off without a word.

  As soon as we entered our room, she headed for the bathroom and closed the door. I took the envelope from under the mattress and destroyed the paper with Roy’s name on it. Then I carried the diary to the table and examined it more carefully. It covered less than two years, beginning in January of ’eighty-nine. I guessed it had been a Christmas present.

  She’d made entries every couple of days through February, and then they had slowed down to every few weeks for almost a year. During the past month, she had been more conscientious, or had more to say.

  The early entries were devoted to boys, girls, descriptions of parties. Despite that, she didn’t feel she had many close friends, either male or female. She blamed the lack on her half-Vietnamese ancestry. There was a flurry of entries about the time Toker gave her the Jaguar. She’d loved it, even though it was three years old. And apparently it had increased her popularity.

  Five weeks ago she’d written two pages speculating on her natural father. All she remembered about him was what her aunt told her—he was a cowboy, and very handsome. She had tested a couple of scenarios in which he came looking for her. He would be very rich, very handsome, and love her very much. He would take her away and she would be very happy. She made no mention of Toker, or how he would react.

  There were several entries in that vein over the following weeks. Then she reported a conversation with Toker about her interest in finding her biological father. He had been upset by her questions. In fact, his reaction seemed strange. Her interest was surely natural, and it couldn’t have threatened him, and yet he had exploded. He’d shouted at her, forbidden her to talk about it, and stormed out of the house. But later he came to her room and spoke more calmly. He explained how impossible it was to try to find one man among the six hundred thousand or so who had been in-country at the time she was conceived.

  He was correct, of course. Even though there were only about twenty or thirty thousand in the Saigon area, chances were good that half of the men from Texas, or anywhere in the Southwest, had been nicknamed Cowboy by the other men in their units. And she had absolutely nothing else to go on.

  And what if she did find him? It wasn’t likely he would even remember her mother. April knew nothing at all of what her mother had been doing at the time. Her aunt had either not known or had not wanted to tell her. She could have been a bargirl, a hostess in one of the shops, a mama-san, a street girl, anything. There was no point of departure for a search, and no likelihood that finding the man would ease the girl’s loneliness.

  Apparently her car had broken down shortly after the confrontation over finding her natural father. It was in the shop for a couple days and no loaner was available. Her diary entries were about how hard it was to get around in Los Angeles without her car. The last few entries were about the classes she was taking and how she hoped to use the things she was learning at the dealership. I was skimming them when April appeared.

  “What the hell are you doing!”

  She stood by the bathroom door, eyes blazing. She stormed over and grabbed the book from my hands. “I mean it! What do you think you’re doing? This is private! You have no right to read my private diary!”

  I shrugged. “I thought it might give me an idea.”

  “It won’t! There’s nothing in this book but me and it’s none of your goddamn business!”

  “There’s your father.”

  “No! He’s not in here! I only wrote about finding him!”

  It took me a moment to see what she meant. Her biological father. “I meant Toker, April.
Your real father. James Bow.” I spoke mildly.

  “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. She sat on her bed and stared at me. “I thought you meant…”

  “I know what you thought. But you shouldn’t be upset. Or ashamed. It’s natural to want to know who you are, where you came from.”

  “I came from Vietnam. From the war. That’s all.”

  “That’s where you came from. It’s not who you are, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” After a short silence, I added, “I came from Vietnam, from the war, too. And so did your father. Both your fathers.”

  She sniffed back her tears. “It’s not the same thing. You existed before the war. All of you. You have history.”

  “I suppose.” What she meant was obvious, but it wasn’t as true as she thought. “And maybe your book isn’t important, but the war might be.”

  She stared. “What do you mean?”

  “There was another bomb. A booby trap. In your room.” I explained what I’d found in her house.

  She shuddered. “You could have been killed. Like Dad.”

  “No. He wasn’t expecting anything. I was.”

  She accepted that. She asked, “Was it another clayman? I mean Claymore?”

  “It was a fragmentation grenade.” I told her how it was set up, how it worked. She asked if it was important that it was a grenade instead of a mine.

  “I think so. But I don’t know why. Or how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That sort of booby trap was very common in the jungle. As far as I know, it was invented by Charlie. But everyone used them. They were simple, easy to put together. The materials were everywhere. A tin can, a grenade, and some string was all you needed. Every grunt in the field knew how to make one.”

  “But there aren’t any grenades here.”

  “There are grenades everywhere in the civilized world,” I said. She had a point, but I let it pass for the moment. “The thing is, the Claymore is a military weapon. And this booby trap goes back to ’Nam, too. Maybe your father was killed by the war, by something that came out of it. I just don’t see how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were two wars. There was the field, where Charlie and our guys snuck around shooting at each other, and there were the cities. Except for Tet and some bombings and random killings, the cities were fairly safe. And the men stationed there, like Toker, didn’t set booby traps. They were support personnel.”

  “But you said there were bombings. And now a bomb killed my father.”

  Well, yes. Some things are hard to explain. I wasn’t sure, myself, that a direct connection didn’t exist. I just didn’t understand it if one did exist. Toker had been a supply officer. He moved equipment and goods around, kept the PXs supplied with cigarettes, booze, toilet paper, toothpaste, condoms, and Playboys. Neither he nor any of the men he worked with regularly had spent time in the jungle. Except me.

  April broke the silence with a question that astounded me. She asked, very seriously, “What was Tet? Isn’t it a holiday?”

  I just stared at her. Nothing that could have emphasized the gulf between us more than that simple question. She was half Vietnamese, but she’d gone through puberty in Los Angeles, worrying about proms and a car. She was half my age and had never heard of the Tet Offensive.

  I sighed, vaguely depressed. “The Tet I mean was before you were born. The Viet Cong attacked. Some people were killed.”

  “But it didn’t have anything to do with my father?”

  “He wasn’t even in-country at the time.”

  “Then why mention it?”

  “It was an example. Forget it.”

  She fingered her diary for a few minutes. I just watched her. She cleared her throat. “Do you think what happened back then has something to do with why Dad was killed?”

  “I don’t know. It just feels like it might. We’ll know more tomorrow.” I stood and stretched. “We have to get going early. Let’s get some sleep.”

  She nodded somberly and took her suitcase into the bathroom. I turned on the television and scanned for a local newscast. It was way too late, and I wound up spending half an hour with Letterman. I turned him off when she called my name.

  She had the bathroom door cracked and was hiding behind it. I was reminded of last night, at my house, and my glimpse of her in the mirror. “What do you want?”

  “It’s just that I don’t have anything to wear,” she said.

  I found a T-shirt and tossed it to her. When she came out a minute later, I realized it was kind of thin. Her body was still damp, and the white shirt clung to her, outlining her shape. Her nipples were faintly visible, but that might have been my imagination.

  When I finished with the shower, I realized I hadn’t planned my wardrobe any better than she. I wound up wearing shorts and a towel. She was in her bed when I came out, with the light off and her back turned toward me. I dropped the towel and slipped into my own bed. We lay there in the dark for maybe half an hour. Then she said my name.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “For coming. For helping me.”

  There hadn’t been any choice, but I wasn’t honest enough to admit it. “You’re welcome.”

  “Rainbow?”

  “Yes?”

  “At dinner…you said you were old enough to be my father. But you’re not so old.”

  “Go to sleep.” I had trouble following my own advice. I was feeling younger than I wanted to. But what the hell could you do with a kid who didn’t know what Tet was?

  The tension I’d felt toward the girl was gone in the morning. She was one of those women who look good first thing, and I liked looking at her, but that was all.

  Pearson’s law offices were on the third floor of a glass building on one of the main drags, about half a mile from Bow’s car lot. He was expecting me, and his receptionist showed me right in. I hadn’t told him who I was or that April would be along. When he saw her, he spilled some of his coffee.

  “April!”

  She smiled shyly. “Hello, Mr. Pearson.”

  He fumbled with some papers, trying to regain his composure. I put April in a chair to one side and took the seat facing him. His reaction to the girl puzzled me. Since he didn’t want to start the conversation, I took the initiative.

  “I am an old friend of James Bow,” I told him. “I understand you were his attorney.”

  He admitted he was.

  “Did you handle his personal affairs as well as his business?”

  “I did.” He cleared his throat and avoided looking at April. “May I ask what this is about?”

  “His death, at least insofar as it affects his daughter.”

  That made him even more nervous for some reason. He asked what I meant.

  “He was murdered. You know that.”

  “I read the papers,” he said.

  “Murdered. In a way that threatens April. I want to know what happened, why he was killed. But first, I want to be sure it had nothing to do with April, and that she will be safe.”

  “I don’t know why he was killed.”

  “You know something about his business. You may know if his death resulted from something he was doing there.”

  “I don’t. As far as I know, his business dealings were all aboveboard. He was scrupulously honest.”

  “There was no unexplained income? No missing assets?”

  “No.”

  I stared at the man for a few seconds. “Did you write his will?”

  He nodded. “I did.”

  “Was there anything unusual in it, any strange bequests?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “No. None. He left everything to his family.”

  I was getting a very bad feeling. “Do you mean the reading has already taken place?”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “How could that be without his daughter present?”


  Pearson looked directly at me. “James Bow didn’t have a daughter.” He looked at April for the first time and added, “I’m sorry.”

  I looked at her too. She sat frozen in her chair, staring at the lawyer. “Then who is this?” I asked.

  “She is a woman known to me as April Bow. She lived with my client. She represented herself as his daughter.”

  “Did he represent her as his daughter?”

  “He may have.”

  I looked at him like a target. I spoke softly. “May have…?”

  He shrank a bit. “Yes…Yes, he did. As his adopted daughter.”

  “But she isn’t.” I kept my voice as flat as possible.

  “To my knowledge, Mr. Bow never adopted anyone.”

  “Do you know why he told people that April was his daughter, that he had adopted her?”

  “I do not.”

  My face felt flushed. I was angrier than I’d been in years. “God damn it!” I said, “You must know something!”

  Pearson flinched. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing of his actions with respect to Miss…to April…And nothing about his death. I’m sorry.” He was speaking to the girl. She sat with her eyes wide open, her cheeks wet. “I am very truly sorry,” he told her.

  I controlled my breathing. Anger is an enemy. “Then what do you know? Who were his heirs?”

  “I can’t say that. You know I can’t say that.”

  I stood suddenly and leaned over his desk. I grabbed his tie and pulled him toward me. His face turned purple. I hissed in his ear. “You can say. You will say. Look at me.”

  He rolled his eyes upward until they bulged at my face. They widened at what they saw there. He croaked. “Okay.”

  I let him go and he fell back into his chair. He started to reach toward the telephone, but I had the gun out and he saw it and stopped. After a moment he closed his eyes. “Put that away,” he said.

  “Do you know what’s at stake here?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Then don’t make any mistakes.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Can you be discreet?”

  “I’m a grave.”

  He took a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”