The Man With No Time sg-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “You're kidding,” I said. The jade-green dining room of the Empress Pavilion yawned open around us. An infinitesimal Chinese waitress in a black skirt and white blouse was leading our wagon train toward an empty corner table. “Who's taking care of the twins?”

  “Uncle Lo,” Horace said, succeeding at speech against all odds.

  “He didn't come?” I asked stupidly, craning my neck around to look past Pansy. “But this was supposed to be in his honor.”

  “He decided to stay home,” Horace said enviously. “Said he'd had too much to drink last night.”

  “Also, jet-lagged,” Pansy said, translating her Fukienese dialect as she went. “He has some kind problem with time.”

  “We're here,” Eleanor said. An empty table for four blocked our way, and Eleanor began to organize. “You there, Simeon. Me, here. Horace, across from me, and Pansy-”

  “Just minute,” Pansy said, circling the table and doing things to lenses. “Sit, Horace, please. Sit, everybody.”

  We sat. Pansy took enough pictures to fill the Spiegel catalog and then seated herself, her face gleaming with exertion and good humor.

  I hadn't seen her look so happy since Horace had brought her home from Singapore, where they'd met. At that time her conversation had been full of Edward Weston, Robert Capa, Duane Michaels, and Cindy Sherman, photographers who had made a difference. She'd said “I'm fine" when asked, instead of "We're fine.” Now she said "we" all the time, and the names in her conversation were Horace, Eadweard, Julia, and Mommy, and the cameras had been left to hang on the walls.

  “It's, um, noisy,” Horace offered, surveying the room with ill-concealed loathing. As always, he clutched his knife and fork, the Empress Pavilion's sole concession to gwailos-non-Chinese-straight up in his fists, like a baby. A very large, very belligerent baby.

  “Poor Horace throw up this morning,” Pansy contributed. “I don't know why.” Her face was innocence personified.

  “Maybe it was the motion of the earth,” I said nastily. I made a whirlpool in the air with my hands. “You know, it spins and spins and spins. .”

  Horace waved my hands away pleadingly. “I want another planet,” he said. “One that isn't noisy. One that doesn't spin.” He fanned himself with his right hand. His upper lip was slick with sweat. “What was Uncle Lo drinking?”

  I tried to recall, but my memory seemed to be wrapped in opaque white cotton. “Not much, whatever it was. He said he was hung over?”

  The first dim sum cart appeared, an aluminum two-decker filled with balloons of white pastry, pushed by an angular Chinese man in a too-short white jacket above impossibly narrow black trousers. He rocked the cart back and forth as though the dumplings were infants about to cry.

  “If he's hung over, it's because he's not used to drinking,” Eleanor said a trifle severely, giving 90 percent of her attention to the dim sum. “He's a Responsible Human Being.” Eleanor was good at speaking in capital letters.

  “I gather Bravo didn't think so highly of him,” I said, watching her choose something white and vaguely spherical for me. Bravo Corrigan was the dog I'd loaned to Horace and Pansy so the kids could have something to torment. Big, genetically generic, raffish, and fiercely territorial, Bravo was Topanga Canyon's canine free spirit, taking up residence with anyone who would put out a bowl of something to his liking. “Tried to bite him, didn't he?”

  “Bravo only like the twins,” Pansy said, swallowing first, as always. Pansy's manners were brilliant.

  “He's wonderful with them,” Eleanor acknowledged as she flagged another cart pusher. “He sleeps in their room. He follows them all over the apartment. He lets them ride on him and try to tie his ears into knots.”

  “They call him 'Papa,' " Pansy said, laughing. "Horace get so mad.”

  Horace was staring balefully at the steamed buns on his plate as though he was afraid they might start square dancing. “I can understand their confusion,” I said.

  “Eat, poor Horace,” Pansy said, helpful as ever. “Make you strong.”

  “I don't want to be strong,” Horace said sullenly. “I want to be sensitive.”

  “The new Horace,” Eleanor cooed. “Remember all the new Nixons? Did I tell you,” she said to me, “that my mother's coming out to see Uncle Lo?”

  “Good lord,” I said. “Turning her back on the bright lights of Las Vegas?”

  “And the new one, too,” Eleanor said.

  I poked whatever she'd served me. “That's right, there's a new one, isn't there?”

  “A plumber. Actually, a plumbing contractor.” Eleanor put something that was almost certainly a chicken's foot on Horace's plate. Horace recoiled discreetly and looked out the window. “She wouldn't have a mere plumber.”

  “Should be good for her grouting,” I said. Mrs. Chan, now working on husband number four, was an energy demon whom I'd frequently seen scouring the grouting between her kitchen tiles with a toothbrush and a bottle of Clorox. Her fingers looked like she soaked them in lye, but her grouting was immaculate.

  “What's his name?” I asked Horace, trying to bring him back into the room.

  “She calls him Stinky,” Horace said. “I think it's a nickname.”

  “I certainly hope so. Rich, huh?”

  Horace shrugged experimentally. His head stayed on. “Who knows? He's Chinese.”

  “Mom says he's lazy,” Eleanor ventured. “But from Mom's perspective, who isn't?”

  Horace, often the cynosure of his mother's wrath at his inability to hold down more than two jobs at the same time, let out a sigh that fluttered his napkin, and Pansy put her hand gently over his. Horace retracted his hand, leaving Pansy looking down at empty tablecloth. I wondered, and not for the first time, whether something was going wrong between them.

  “What's your mom say about Uncle Lo?” I asked. “She must be thrilled.”

  “Well, she's coming. Sometime today.”

  “Today?” Pansy said, knocking over, and catching, a glass of water.

  “What time?” Horace demanded, alert at last.

  “Three.” Eleanor lifted a hand. “Horace, I told you on the phone last night-”

  “Who remembers last night?” Horace snapped.

  “The pictures,” Pansy said. She licked her upper lip and then wiped it with a pale forefinger.

  “Blinking baby Jesus,” Horace said. He stood up. “We gotta get home.”

  “I'm not hungry anyway,” I said truthfully. “What pictures?”

  Pansy, frantically hanging cameras around her neck, said, “Just pictures.”

  “We haven't paid,” Eleanor pointed out. She seemed privately amused at something.

  I got up and dropped thirty dollars onto the table. “Take that off last night,” I said to Horace, “and let's go.”

  “What's your hurry?” Eleanor asked.

  “I want to see those pictures,” I said.

  “It's Pansy's rogues' gallery,” Eleanor said as Horace, thirty feet in front of us, passed a truck on a blind curve. There was an indignant raspberry from the horn of an oncoming car, and a bright red Ultra-Nondescript hurtled past us, hugging the curb. The driver was facing backward and screaming out the window.

  “Remember when you could tell cars apart?” I asked. “Sweet little Pansy? A rogues' gallery? Who are the rogues?”

  “Everybody,” Eleanor said. “Pansy's been wicked with her camera. But it's mostly Mom.”

  “Ah,” I said, closing my eyes as I passed the truck. When I opened them, we were still alive. “Ergo, the rush.”

  “Pansy's always been the perfect Chinese daughter-in-law,” Eleanor explained cheerily. “ 'Yes, Mother, no, Mother. Of course you can cut the children's hair, Mother. Why should I have anything to say about how my children look?' And all the while, she had the cameras dangling all over the house. And good for her.”

  This was surprising. Eleanor had escaped her mother's massive gravitational field approximately ten minutes after she entered college, but sh
e'd always seemed to expect filial piety from Horace and Pansy. After all, it was traditionally the responsibility of the eldest son to take care of the parents. And Horace had come through. Until Mrs. Chan had moved to Las Vegas, only eighteen months earlier, she'd exercised absolute dominion over the small apartment in which all the Chans except Eleanor lived, and which Mrs. Chan owned. It had always seemed to me the most claustrophobic possible living arrangement; there was literally no room for disagreement. Not that Mrs. Chan, then between husbands and lacking a sinkhole for her supernatural energy, would have tolerated disagreement even if they'd all been rattling around in the Taj Mahal.

  “So what's wrong between Horace and Pansy?”

  I could feel Eleanor's glance. “Who says anything's wrong?”

  “Eleanor,” I said, “either I'm a member of the family or I'm not. They're not the same. Something's wrong.”

  “I don't know,” Eleanor said unconvincingly.

  Well, I thought I knew-I could smell Ning's perfume coming out of my pores.

  “I can understand if he's frustrated,” Eleanor said, capitulating. “Mom is the boss, and Pansy knows it, which is pretty hard on his ego. And Pansy's pregnancy was, well, difficult, you know? They couldn't make love for months and months.”

  “They can now,” I offered, and then I thought about it. “Can't they?”

  “Pansy says they don't.” People, even private people like Pansy, volunteered things to Eleanor. “I was there one night with the kids, and Horace hadn't been home for hours. She was setting the table for dinner, way too late to expect Horace to eat anything, and all of a sudden she fell to the floor and started to cry. She missed a chair on the way down. So I sat next to her, and the next thing I knew, she opened up. Yikes, of all the things I didn't want to know. She thinks he's got a girlfriend.”

  “I doubt that,” I said, joining the Brotherhood of Guilty Males as we coasted up the driveway of Mrs. Chan's apartment building. Horace and Pansy were climbing out of their car, Horace shouting at Pansy in Cantonese until she silenced him with something sharper in tone and further north in dialect. Over the squabble I could hear Bravo barking a manic welcome, but the barking sounded muffled. Pansy threw some phrase that was all elbows and edges over her shoulder as she climbed the steep exterior stairway leading to the back door of the apartment. Then, turning face forward again, she stopped climbing, so suddenly that Horace, running on momentum and alcohol fumes, stumbled into her back. Pansy had to throw out a hand and grasp the banister to keep from toppling back on him, but the gesture was nothing but muscle. She was completely focused on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  The rickety wooden child-restraining gate that Horace had installed to keep Julia and Eadweard from the first, and potentially last, fall of their lives was hanging open. Pansy snapped something that was clearly a question, and Bravo suddenly loosed a volley of barking that was more frantic and deep-chested than simple welcome.

  The gate was always kept closed. It was the last thing Pansy checked every night and the first thing she rechecked in the morning. She took the stairs two at a time, cameras banging against her body and each other, and bolted through the open back door. Horace trudged resignedly up behind her, and Eleanor pushed past me, her face grim and tight, a mask of muscle.

  Then Pansy screamed. It was a virtuoso, three-octave shrill. A diva's scream, breaking at the top of the scale and shivering its way down again. Eleanor and I got through the door just in time to see Pansy, hands pressed against her cheeks, fill her lungs all the way to her knees and start a new one.

  Horace had reached her by then, hoisting her like a sack of rice and carrying her backward. Following, I saw the kitchen.

  It had been trashed: utensils spilled glittering onto the floor, flour dumped everywhere, the first snowfall after the bomb. Bravo thundered away somewhere near.

  The hallway took me past the kitchen and into the combination dining and living room. The table lay on its top, legs sticking up into the air as stiff as a dead cow's. Upholstered chairs had been slit open and eviscerated. The rugs had been pulled aside. Pictures, including some from Pansy's rogues' gallery, had been torn from the walls and trampled. The family shrine had been bent and smashed, and a hole had been kicked in the wall below the mantel on which it stood.

  Horace deposited Pansy on a sofa that looked like it had vomited its intestines and headed off toward the bedrooms, and I followed, leaving Eleanor to try to take Pansy in hand. Horace was already in the twins' room by the time I hit the hallway behind him. I could see that one of the beds was lying on its side.

  “Shit,” he said, and the door to the hall closet buckled outward and then snapped back, held by a childproof external bolt five feet from the floor. I slid the bolt, and Bravo rocketed out between my legs, hitting me so hard that the door slammed shut again. I was turning away to join Horace, who was shouting something to Pansy from the twins' room, when I saw the piece of paper tacked to the door.

  It said: Theyre okay, dont do nothing.

  The sign drew my eyes back toward the door. I opened it and saw a surprisingly large and very dead Chinese man. He had a small mustache and wide empty eyes. He was no one I knew.

  From the driveway, far below, I heard Bravo loose a long, bereaved howl.

  3

  Table Talk

  The dead man's gaze gripped me. Even when I looked away I could sense it tugging at me as I shifted from foot to foot, feeling like a boat on a short rope. I forced myself to take a big enough step backward to break the strand. Free, I stood irresolute for a long moment, looking at nothing, and then I closed the door and followed the sounds of grief back into the living room.

  Pansy lay facedown on the erupting sofa, her body shivering under spasms of sobs that threatened to break her into pieces. Eleanor was massaging her rhythmically, stroking upward from the base of Pansy's spine in long, steady motions, as regular as the waves on a good beach. She was softly singing what sounded like a Chinese lullaby.

  Horace was still yelping and swearing in the nursery. Eleanor looked at me and then through me, indicating that there wasn't much I could do to help with Pansy, so I turned around and went to join him. Halfway there, I realized I was operating on automatic pilot: Head aimlessly for the living room, get bumped from the living room, head for the bedroom. Running on physics, not feelings or intellect, bouncing off other people's emotions like a human pachinko ball. I wasn't feeling anything yet.

  The nursery was hurricane country. It looked like one of those amusement-park houses where the furniture is on the walls in one room and on the ceiling in the next. Horace sat in the center of the floor holding on to a quilt Pansy had made for the two children when they slept in one crib. His other hand was screwed into a fist and pressed against the bridge of his nose. He was bent forward so far his forehead almost touched the floor. I sat next to him and wrapped my arm around his shoulders, and he straightened and turned in to me and wept, his face pressed tight against my chest and his shoulders shaking convulsively. I looked down at him from what seemed like quite a distance.

  “We'll get them back,” I said, focusing on plans. Plans seemed like the thing. “We'll call the cops. I've got a friend on the cops, you know? And we'll go after Uncle Lo ourselves.”

  “Sure,” Horace said, drawing back and wiping his nose on a corner of the quilt. “And we'll kill the kids playing cowboy.” He listened to the echo for a moment. “Uncle Lo? Uncle Lo didn't do this.”

  “Why not? I mean, he was the only one here.”

  “Why would he?”

  “I don't know,” I said.

  He spread his fingers wide and curled them inward, looking for something to strangle. “I wish he had. I wish I knew it was Lo. At least we could talk to-”

  “Horace. He set it up. Sent you guys out for dim sum and stayed home like he couldn't face it, when we both know he was the only sober one last night.”

  “Huh,” Horace scoffed. He glanced down at the quilt in his hand and
tossed it onto one of the beds, where it dangled disconsolately from a wooden leg like an abandoned battle flag.

  “Okay, if it wasn't Uncle Lo, who was it?”

  “Whoever took him away,” Horace said, after swallowing twice. “Whoever came and got him.”

  That stopped me, and I said, “Oh.” There was, after all, a dead man in the closet. Still, I knew Lo had faked his hangover so he could be alone in the house.

  Horace plowed on. “Why would he save our family and then do, do-this?”

  “Right,” I said, filling the silence.

  “And anyway,” Horace said, “why would he tear the place apart?”

  “Maybe he was looking for something.”

  “Like what? I've lived in this apartment most of my life. I know everything that's in it. There's nothing in it.”

  “Horace. Lo didn't know there was nothing in the apartment. He needed something, so he tossed it. And when he didn't find it, then he took the twins so he could demand whatever it was later.”

  Horace looked around as though he expected to see what Lo had missed. His nose was running, and his long hair, usually sprayed and combed forward to hide his balding scalp, was standing straight up. Without realizing what I was doing, I put out a hand and smoothed it. “However,” I said, “I have to tell you that someone else was here.”

  “Who?” Horace barely cared.

  “He's still here,” I said. “In the closet. We've got a dead guy.”

  It took a second for the words to cut through to him. Then he blinked heavily and said, “No.”

  “Can you look at him?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Look at a dead guy. In my house.” He blew out a quart of air. “Let's get it over with.”