by David Daniel
Even with the tricks the minutes ticked by. It was going on ten o’clock when he called back, quarter past by the time I got to DSS.
Ada had sounded tired when my call awakened her at seven-fifteen, but she was fully alert now. Her face was scrubbed and glowing. I couldn’t tell if her eyes had shed tears. She had on the black skirt and pale pink blouse she’d been wearing the day we met, and that innately suspicious part of my brain wondered if she knew this too. Was there half mourning in her mood, and half joy?
She led me back to her cubicle. There was no door to close. “I heard all about it on the radio. You were right about Suoheang.”
I nodded. “You were right about Bhuntan Tran.”
“We both were. I have things to tell you, Alex.” She was searching my face for something.
“Same here.”
“There are reasons why I never told you about having been married, and about Suoheang. I honestly didn’t think he was involved in any of this.”
I shrugged.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“Okay, but I want to see Walt first. Is he around?”
“Not yet.”
“The excitement probably wore him out. You know where he lives?”
She found the address in a Rolodex file and wrote it on a yellow note square. As she gave it to me, she touched my hand. “This evening?”
“Sure,” I told her.
At the doorway I turned. She looked at me. I was trying to think of something to make it easy; but that was a wheel you could turn all day and night and still find yourself where you started. I waved.
33
THE ADDRESS WAS not familiar, though I knew it was off Rogers Street, a busy drag of car dealerships, drive-up banks, fast food and faster oil changes, all winking in the midday sun. I almost missed the turn. Businesses on the narrow road thinned quickly—an auto body shop, a fenced storage yard—and then it was dusty hardpan with tall bulrushes on one side, swampy woods on the other. Finally I saw a trailer park, a dozen decaying units scattered around a two-acre lot with a cluster of mailboxes at the entrance. The road went on to a cement plant, I knew, and a limestone quarry that had not been worked in years. It was full of standing water. I had swum there as a kid with Joey Costello. It was a long way from the glimmering pool in Andover.
Walt Rittle’s pickup, hooked to a small flat-top camper, was beside the third trailer in, a rust-freckled beige and green affair with 1950s contours. Clumps of willow and tiger lilies crowded the cinderblock foundation. Everything was powdered with fine dust from the passage of cement mixers.
I rapped on an aluminum door beyond which came the twang of country and western music. Except for a chopped Harley missing a front wheel, there were no vehicles at any of the neighboring trailers. One had an orange FOR RENT sign on it, and in the yard of another a black German shepherd on a cable-run barked at me. Even he looked dusty. I knocked again and after a moment Walt opened the door.
“Hey, Alex.” No alligator this time. He was in brown cords and a denim workshirt. “C’mon in. I’ve got the AC on.”
I had about two inches of headroom on the inside, which consisted of woodgrain-panel walls and a brown and gold chessboard floor of press-on linoleum squares. A sofa in green and mustard tweed did double duty as a bed. At the back end, to my right, a louvered door was closed on what I guessed was the bathroom. At the front was an open kitchenette with a small portable radio playing and a light on over the butane stove. Otherwise the trailer was dim and cool.
“How ’bout some iced tea?” Walt asked. “I just this minute mixed a batch. Or I can fix you a bourbon. With a little branch water?”
“Not out of that branch out there, I hope. No thanks,” I said.
“Coffee? You look tired.”
“No.”
“Well, set a spell. I’m not going to work till late today. Figure I earned me a breather last night. We both of us did. Sit down.”
Out of uniform, he had downshifted into a casual, more Southern persona. I sat on the day bed sofa. He moved into the kitchenette and lowered the volume on the radio. Coarse beige drapes hung open a few inches over a screened jalousie window through which I could see the tower of the cement plant and past that, through trees, the flash of cars on 495. The window AC unit chugged away, browning out the power every few moments as it cycled up and down. Walt looked over from putting ice cubes into a large mason jar of tea. “So, how do you like my little place?”
“You rent?”
“Yep. Cheap.”
“This used to be the Amazon jungle when I was a kid,” I said. “That highway was just a smudge on some state DPW engineer’s plat.”
“Still is peaceful, except for the trucks, and the neighbor’s pup. She’ll hush up pretty quick.” He dropped the empty ice tray in the sink and began stirring sugar into the tea.
“You giving notice when you go in today?” I asked.
He glanced sideways, puzzled a moment, then laughed. “Are we due for a fat reward from a grateful public?”
“I doubt it. But then I guess you’ve got all you’ll ever need, huh?”
The rattling in the jar quit, but the soupy liquid went on swirling in a slow brown vortex. He was eyeing me quizzically. “What’s this about?” he asked.
“About this much.” I held forefinger and thumb an inch apart. “About almost pulling it off.”
I was watching for the small changes, but I did not see them, and the thought crept into my mind: my connections were crossed. Too little sleep could do that. He poured tea into a tumbler and came into the main room. He pushed his glasses up with a finger. “I reckon I don’t read you,” he said.
“Ada said it days ago. Social work is a burnout job. People don’t last long doing casework. She didn’t mean you, of course. Ada thinks you’re superman. We all did.”
He set the glass of tea on a plastic parson’s table at the end of the sofa and looked at me like I had been pan-frying in the sun. I felt leaden with exhaustion.
“Jeezum, Alex, I’m gettin’ a mite riled here. Where you goin’ with this?”
“All those years with the State Department,” I said, “some of them as a relocation counselor in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. That must’ve been heavy. Before that isn’t quite clear, some kind of classified recon over there. You told me you were Airborne. You said you’d gotten to know Montagnards. That where you picked up the t’ai chi?”
“Is that what this is, man? Old war stories?” He tried a grin, but it did not go deep; his eyes didn’t join in, and that’s when I knew I was right. I kept going.
“You must’ve heard a lot of atrocity stories in the camps. I’d imagine that to get extra rice or medicine or maybe a chance to be out of there, the survivors of the Khmer Rouge were willing to trade most anything. Probably even old family treasures,” I said. “Like jade.”
He looked like the heat was getting to him too. He removed his glasses and pinched at the red groove they had left in the bridge of his nose. All at once his vitality seemed to fail him. He settled onto a chair near the door. On the radio a hillbilly vixen was singing about hangovers and heartbreak.
“This is kind of crazy,” Walt said.
“No argument here.” Outside, the neighbor’s dog barked just to hear itself. “You must’ve needed a way to move the jade, since getting caught would’ve meant your job, and probably a stretch in a federal slam. What’d you do? Entrust the stones to someone coming Stateside?”
“Crazy,” Walt said again, putting his glasses back on.
But it wasn’t anymore. Last night, watching the locomotive tug its freight cars had prompted me to remember that when I had gone back to the courtyard at Hamilton Textiles, the tennis ball cover had been pulled off the trailer hitch on Rittle’s truck. He had already been preparing to skip. “Maybe you laid the stones on one of the Cambodians who was getting out,” I said. “Only he got cute and decided it was a better cut if he took it all.”
I was i
nventing, off on details most likely, but the big pieces stacked up. I had worked on them most of the night. John Potter’s phone calls that morning to the right places in the federal web had confirmed Rittle’s military service and work overseas. Walt let me blow solo awhile, and I went on about how, when he had finally mustered out and come back to the world, he saw the way it was, so he set out to find whoever had crossed him. Or maybe he had assumed everyone in that one particular refugee group that got to California was in on the rip-off, so he started in Stockton and worked down the list.
“Really crazy,” he said when I finished.
“I had my doubts too, until I saw the diskette at the DSS office listing the names of the Cambodians on the flight. I thought it was Ada’s file at first, but then I knew it was yours, and that now you’d be moving on. Was the method of killing just inspiration? To scare them into confessing about the jade? Or were you looking to set somebody up? You probably didn’t learn much. I doubt anyone but Khoy knew. He was in San Francisco doing outreach with new refugees then, but he’d already acquired a coke habit. In fact, he got busted for it. Ada knew him from Berkeley, so she married him to save him from being sent back as an undesirable. One of her human reclamation projects, I guess. She got cut off from her family’s dough for it. Khoy would’ve needed money to fund his habit and his lifestyle, so the jade made sense.”
Rittle glanced away as if he were going to go on denying everything. I was too tired for games. The cops could handle the rest of it. I turned to look for a telephone.
He moved with a quickness I should have remembered from that night in Lauren’s kitchen. His right foot slammed into the outside of my knee, dropping me onto the sofa. He covered the few steps to the door in an instant and yanked it open, so I had to wince against the blaze of pain and sunlight to see that he wasn’t bolting. Someone else was there. The music and the air conditioner and my own golden voice had hidden the person’s arrival. Resisting the burning in my leg, I rolled and came up with my .38.
But I stopped right there.
Rittle had an arm around Ada’s chest; with his other hand he held something to her throat. Ada was pale as she struggled with her shock.
“Gun down,” Rittle said in a voice from which the chumminess had run out like blood.
What he was pressing against her throat, I saw, was a knife, a dagger fashioned from milky green jade. The handle was carved in an intricate and ornate dragon. It was a beautiful and deadly piece of work. I lowered the gun.
“Easy,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”
He kicked the door closed, keeping the dagger where it was. He said: “This sucker slew enemies a thousand years ago, and it’s just as sharp now as the day it was made.”
Ada’s eyes flicked across mine, then away. My blood was surging; it beat in my head, throbbed where the tendons in my knee were on fire. Sunlight coming through the dusty jalousies hit the blade and bounced a smear of green reflection on the low ceiling.
“So that was the last piece of the collection,” I said, to say it, to keep the moment from collapsing irrevocably on us all. “Khoy probably saved the dragon to sell separately. Which is why his prints were at Castle’s. He’d gone there to pitch it. You went and got the other jade back, only Khoy never had sold the knife, and you wanted it. I see why. It’s a piece of art.”
“What tipped it?” Rittle demanded.
I saw an artery pulse in Ada’s neck under the blade’s edge. I swallowed. “Nothing big,” I said. “I was pretty slow. When we found that newspaper in Khoy’s apartment yesterday, you referred to Castle as ‘the guy who died,’ yet you showed up at his funeral, looking for Khoy. I saw your face in a photograph.”
“Shit. I gave Castle’s gorillas a trip to Boston to get them out of the way. The idea wasn’t to kill him, just to get the stones. But he was there futzing around in his den, arrogant bastard, and suddenly it made sense. I’d already struck on a way to tie Khoy to everything. He did rip me off, the prick. Most people in those camps wait years for sponsors to cut the red tape to spring them. I worked it so he got cleared through ahead of others. He was gonna be my Stateside man. But he wrote and told me the stones never arrived, had a story about how they were seized by Thai customs. I didn’t figure him for the rip-off till later, after he’d vanished—and after I knew he didn’t get all his dough from you, darling.” Rittle wrenched Ada’s head and she gasped.
“Easy, man,” I said. We all shifted position a little on the brown and gold tiles. My knee was blazing.
He was wound up, adrenaline-fueled. “I traced the others, figuring they could give me a line. But I didn’t know if they knew about the jade or not, so why take risks? They even got their stories together, they could’ve put me in hurt. Tran was the last. It made sense Khoy would’ve been in touch with him. They were buddies.”
“Did Bhuntan know?” Ada asked in a voice I almost did not hear. The knife was right there on her throat.
“Nah. And he wouldn’t even confess he’d seen Khoy. But he had.”
“You killed him,” she rasped.
“Ada, don’t,” I said; I knew every word was costing her.
“You planted cocaine at his house!”
“Part of the setup. Like wearing the stocking when I went to your old lady’s place,” Rittle said to me. “I hung around town, biding my time, getting credible. Hell, I actually did some good in this city. Then I spotted Khoy at a Cambodian market. He saw me too and bolted. I tracked him to his rat hole on Broadway, but he was already smoke. I knew he wouldn’t be around long. Ada’s been impressed with you, Rasmussen. Hey, I never would’ve made that tinsel work.”
I said, “The cop who questioned us last night told me no jade’s been recovered. What’d you do, go back into the warehouse when I went to call them?”
“I got lucky. The stones were in one of the crates right by the dead chick. This beauty along with them,” he said, tilting the dagger again, causing it to shine dully. “I stashed everything in the toolbox in my truck.”
“You take the coke too?”
“I don’t touch that shit. The jade is the point. I did my time, sticking my neck out in the war. I lost my marriage, my home. So I stayed over there afterwards.”
“To help the needy,” I said. “Good old Walt.”
“I’ve got shrapnel in my back and shoulder. When do I get a reward for that?” He gave a tense smile and brandished the dagger. “I’ve got it now. You know what this stuff is worth? Time to make it all come up green, and I know how.”
He reached over and flicked off the air conditioner, which died with a gurgle. “We’ll go in your wheels, pal. You drive, Ada in the middle. Down the road there’s a quarry. I’ll take your gun now.”
I envisioned one ending then. Someday long hence a curious scuba diver would find the antique Bobcat, a lace of rust in eighty feet of dark, still water, two skeletons inside, and the books would close on a mystery fifty years old, and by that time investigators and killer alike would long since have died and the Yunung-kash jade would have been bought and sold many times and still be as bright and shiny and priceless as it was right now. I shivered as though feeling the cold water already. I needed to invent a different ending.
I slid a painful half-step to the right. My knee was locking up, broken tendons curling back up inside like snipped cables. “Here it is,” I said, pointing to the Masterpiece. “Take it.”
Rittle didn’t move. With the AC off, the coolness was evaporating. The sun blazed on the metal skin of the trailer and glinted on the edge of the dagger. We were all sweating.
“What’ve we got us?” he said. “A Texas-death standoff? You’ll gun me all right, but Ada spurts her blood all over the floor and dies gagging.” He forced her head back farther, exposing her throat. “Your move.”
I edged another half-step to the right, trying not to wince. He turned, twisting Ada, keeping her between us. It was chess with life-size pieces. My face was slick with sweat. “Haven’t you figured
out that I tipped the cops before I came here? Jeezum, Walt, you that dumb?”
He licked his lips and forced a smile, and I tried to decide which was real: the amiable, energetic little man? Or this perversity who had murdered seven people already? Would he let her live? “They’re out there now,” I said.
“Forget it. I saw you and the cops last night. Your fan club’s small, Rasmussen.” He angled the blade, and I saw a smear of blood on Ada’s throat. Panic flickered in my mind.
“Put down the fucking gun!” he said.
I didn’t want to; I was not where I wanted to be yet, but time was a string that had run out. Ada’s life beat a membrane thickness from the green dragon. I bent to set the .38 on the parson’s table, turning my shoulder to cut his view as I did. I gripped his tumbler, almost losing it as the wet glass squirmed in my sweaty fingers. But I had it. I swung my arm up in an arc, hurling tea, ice cubes, and then the glass, into his face.
Ada cried out once and tried to break away. Rittle recoiled, hanging on. As he brought the dagger up, I fired.
The round hit him high in the chest, the impact slamming him against the paneled wall, jolting the trailer, knocking his eyeglasses askew. The dagger clattered to the linoleum tiles. I did not fire again. He slid to the floor wearing a last look of enormous and useless surprise. Checkmate.
Ada reached for the dagger, then stopped and yanked back her hand. She gave a sob and threw herself into me, burrowing her face against my damp shirt to where my heart pounded. I set the .38 aside and held her for a long time.
34
THE SOIREE WAS SLATED for eight P.M. at the International Institute. The doctor had gone into my knee with an arthroscope. I was still limping, but on the mend. Feeling spry I decided to walk from my office. As I cut across a big empty parking lot I saw three kids shooting hoops at a rusty ring on a telephone pole. The ball tipped off an outstretched hand and rolled my way. I scooped it up, dribbled, and sank it from thirty feet out. Bang. The kid who didn’t faint grabbed the rebound and flicked the ball back. I caught it.
