The Man With No Time sg-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Jeez, yeah?” Claude B. Tiffle grunted, and I found myself hoping I'd just contributed to coitus interruptus.

  “This is Dr. Skinker,” I said through my nose.

  “Froom,” Tiffle said, either cutting through the phlegm or operating under the assumption it was a word. “Little late, huh?”

  “I told you we'd have to meet at unusual hours.”

  He made a poot-poot sound, gathering his wits. “You mean now?”

  “No. Tomorrow morning at eight.”

  He breathed disgruntlement into the phone. “Is this important?”

  “In God's scheme, no. In terms of your future, yes, indeed.”

  “What's going to happen?”

  “Earnest money,” I said. “For the purchase of the church.”

  He cleared his throat. “How much?”

  “Six figures.” It was the truth. “You'll be there?”

  “Yeah, okay.” He was alert now. “Eight, right?”

  “Eight.”

  “Where?”

  I swallowed. “Your office.”

  “Glad to be of service,” he said.

  “No happier than I,” I said, hanging up.

  “One million twenty-four thousand dollars,” I said. “That's eight thousand and change per pilgrim, roughly, minus the money I gave to Mrs. Summerson.” Dexter's mutant coffee table was awash with cash, and four briefcases lay open and empty on the floor. “And about fifteen thousand in Taiwanese. Make it a million forty all together.”

  “I in the wrong line,” Dexter said.

  He'd traded in his robes for a pair of jeans and a lime-green shirt that identified him as a two-dollar-a-shirt man named Paul. Tran was asleep on the leather couch, and Horton was out cold in Dexter's bedroom. The doctor had come and gone, a frail, frizzy-haired white man with yellowish skin who smelled like a chemical dump. Two of the Doodys, after checking on the slumbering Horton and making clucking noises, had gone out to watch the prisoners in the car, and the other three had taken off to put the two bodies on ice, I didn't know-and didn't want to know-where. Everett still had possession of Dexter's bathtub.

  “Fifty each,” I said to Horace, fanning myself with a wad of bills. “And another fifty for each of Horton's brothers. That'll leave about half a million.”

  “Lot of salt,” Dexter said, eyeing the green.

  “We're looking,” I reminded him, “to attract attention.”

  “Quarter of a million gone to catch the eye, too.”

  “Half has a nice ring to it.”

  “You want a ring, go to Zale's. You can pick up a real flasher for three or four bills.”

  “Dexter,” I said, glad that Horton was off marauding in the Land of Nod, “you're pocketing fifty thousand for one night's work.”

  “What am I going to do with fifty thousand dollars?” Horace asked querulously.

  “You could give me some,” Dexter said. “All donations gratefully received.”

  “You make a down payment on a house for Pansy,” I said. “Give the kids a yard to play in.”

  “I'd have to cut the grass,” Horace said.

  “Astroturf,” Dexter suggested, giving up on further riches. “What time is it?”

  “You're wearing a wristwatch,” I pointed out.

  “Man with fifty thou in his jeans don't look at his own watch. Get some style.”

  “I've got fifty, too,” I said, counting it out. “We all do. I guess we'll just have to keep checking for sunrise.”

  “Ain't no good to be rich if everybody else rich, too,” Dexter said, checking his watch. “After two. Let's get some poor folk over here and lord it over them.”

  “Here's yours,” I said, pushing money at Dexter. “Don't spend it all on implements of torture.”

  “Peewee asleep,” Dexter observed. “Let's give him twenty and split the rest, act silently superior all night.”

  “Ha,” Tran said without opening his eyes. “You silent. Ha.”

  “Must of heard the money,” Dexter said.

  “Here,” I said to Horace. He looked down at the banknotes like they were cabbage. “Your turn for trunk patrol,” I told him. “Take some coffee to the Doodys.”

  Horace got stiffly to his feet, grumbling. He left the money on the table and went out to check on our human baggage.

  “Pizza,” Dexter said, solving his snobbery problem. “Order up some pizza, sneer at the delivery boy.”

  “Anchovies,” Tran said, rolling over to face the back of the couch.

  “Man eat fish on everything,” Dexter said. “Fish cookies, fish ice cream.”

  “Good for brain,” Tran said. “Try sometime.”

  “You could always stiff Horton,” I said to Dexter.

  “Not a wise career path,” Dexter said. “What you want on your pizza?”

  “Sausage.” I yawned and stretched the joints of an aging man. “Three hours, more or less. We'd better give ourselves forty minutes to get there.”

  Dexter, at the phone, said, “Thirty's plenty. We just gone sit there a couple of hours anyway.”

  “We go in in the dark,” I said for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  “We go in in the dark,” Dexter mimicked. “Hello, that Domino's?” He waited. “You can't be closed, man, we hungry.”

  “Denny's open,” Tran said without turning his head. “Get breakfast.”

  “A hundred bucks,” Dexter said to the phone. “And that's the tip.”

  “You'll be broke in a week,” I said.

  “Damn straight,” Dexter said to the phone. “Four big ones, one with sausage, one with everything, one with-”

  “Anchovies,” Tran said stubbornly.

  “-little fish all over it, and one with anything you want. Think that'll do for Horace?” he asked me.

  “Horace won't eat.”

  “He could go home,” Dexter said. “Extra little fish, hear? Pour the little fuckers all over it.”

  “He could, couldn't he?” I asked.

  “Could what?” Horace asked, coming in. “They're alive. Nobody wants coffee.”

  “You could go home,” I said.

  “Not likely,” Horace said. “Not when I'm having so much fun.”

  “Could of fooled me,” Dexter said.

  “That's because I'm hungry,” Horace said. “My blood sugar is low.”

  “Horace won't eat,” Dexter said in his white man's voice.

  “Shame it's so late.” Horace picked up his money and fanned it idly. “Nobody delivers now.”

  “They do to the rich and famous,” Dexter said.

  23

  Salting the Mine

  At 4:55 a.m. Chinatown looked like a closed department store. The streets were dark and empty; even the Christmas lights had been given a rest. Two Chinese men in paramilitary uniforms strolled Hill Street. They were laughing.

  “Foot patrol,” Horace the Expert said smugly from the driver's seat. “Neighborhood association. They do the whole circuit in forty-five minutes and then start over.”

  “Do they go up Granger?”

  “Nah. Only the main streets and the shopping alleys. The merchants pay them.”

  “Our resident fount of wisdom,” I said.

  “I had lots of time to figure it out.” He loved knowing more about anything, anything at all, than anyone else did.

  “Speaking of time,” I said automatically.

  “Almost five. We're right on top of it.”

  He pulled over at Hill and Granger and I got out. The night had grown sharply colder and the sky was low with fog and pale with city light. Two homeless men sprawled in a patch of weeds, partly covered by yesterday's news.

  The metal gate opened with a faint rusty protest. There was a streetlamp directly in front of the house, something I should have noticed before but hadn't, and I followed my lengthening shadow up the walk toward the dark bungalow, hoping that Tiffle wasn't shagging some silky immigrant on his desk. He was going to need his strength before the day was
over.

  I punched up 11–14 on the alarm keypad to the right of the door. Tiffle's birthday, Florence Lam had said, another piece of evidence that his brain worked on alternating current. Dexter's duplicate key turned without so much as a snag, and the light from the streetlamp illuminated Florence's desk, convincingly messy and busy looking. I pushed the door as far closed as I could without the latch clicking into place and switched on my flashlight. Moving quickly but deliberately, I searched the rooms, including the basement.

  The basement was entirely satisfactory. It extended beneath the entire house, it had a rough wooden floor, and there were no windows. Metal filing cases stood against two of the four walls; the others were occupied by a massive old gravity furnace and the stairs I had come down. The door at the top of the stairs opened out, as I'd hoped it would. The skeleton key worked just fine.

  Tiffle's desk was a steel hymn to paranoia. Not only did the three drawers lock, but an iron rod had been passed through their handles and locked to the desk frame at top and bottom. It might as well have had a neon sign on top of it saying search here. I was looking for the keys-not that I needed them, but as a way to pass the time-when I heard the first car door slam shut outside.

  Five o'clock in the button, as Tran would say.

  I had my hand in the inside pocket of Tiffle's suit jacket, which was hanging behind the door, and as I pulled it out my fingers snagged on something. “I'll be damned,” I said, pulling out a little keyring with four double-serrated keys dangling from it. “Thank you, Claude.” As I slipped one of the keys into the lock at the top of the iron rod, the first car pulled away and I heard footsteps on the front porch. The second car door slammed and the front door to the cottage opened almost simultaneously.

  “Surprise,” Dexter said from the front room. “Where the balloons and whistles?”

  “How many you got?” I called.

  “Four. Rest with Tran and two Doodys.”

  “They all inside?” The first lock turned easily.

  “No, you dinkus, I left them on the step.”

  “You know where they go.” The lower lock resisted, and I chose another key.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shoes scuffled across the floor and then down the steps to the basement, and I heard the door close. A moment later the front door opened to a confusion of soft voices, one of them a deep Doody rumble.

  “Here your jimmy,” Dexter said, coming into the office. He was toting a crowbar.

  “Don't need it. The man thoughtfully left his keys.”

  “Guy got to be in serious minus territory.” He leaned forward and studied the desk. “More locks than the mint, and he leaves the keys here.” The lower lock turned, and the metal rod slipped loose and clattered to the floor. “Good thing we ain't bein sneaky.”

  “Dexter, why don't you go help Tran or something?” I flipped through the remaining keys.

  “You the one needs help. Try the one with the nail polish on it.”

  I did, and it fit smoothly into the top drawer and turned. “See?” Dexter said. “Good thing you got friends.”

  “You're breathing on my neck.” I pulled the drawer open.

  “I doin it free, too. Cap'n Snow would pay good cash for a little of that. What's in the box, you think?”

  “Opening it,” I said patiently, “will be my very next act.”

  “Lordy,” Dexter said. It was full of money: five stacks, apparently all hundreds, each three inches thick. “A little dividend,” Dexter said. “One each.”

  I hesitated and then said, “Why not?” and scooped the money out of the box and handed it to him. “A sideline, maybe, something Charlie Wah didn't know about.”

  “Or insurance,” Dexter said, stuffing money into his pockets. “Getaway stash.”

  I put the box on the desk and rifled though the rest of the drawer's contents. A manila envelope contained thirty or forty green cards, genuine to my unpracticed eye, and four Canadian passports. The spaces for the photos were blank.

  “Hot shit,” Dexter said over my shoulder. “Hello, Uncle Sam.”

  “Downstairs, them,” Tran said, coming into the room. “Talk too much.”

  “Let's hope they keep it up,” I said, fishing out a cardboard stationery box that had been shoved to the back of the drawer. “Oh, well, Claude, you wicked dog.” The box was packed with Polaroids of naked Chinese girls, taken right there in the office. They were all young and all unsmiling, but other than that they ran the gamut from plain to beautiful, fat to thin. They had been posed obscenely, and breasts pushed themselves at the camera like swollen bruises, sex organs gaped like wounds.

  “Cops gone love that,” Dexter said.

  “Bleary,” Tran said, picking one out with thin fingers. “Here Mopey.”

  “Find Weepy and Snowbell,” I said, handing him the box. “Keep them.”

  “I'll keep Snowbell,” Dexter offered. “Just kidding,” he said, his free hand upraised, when I turned to look at him.

  An economy-sized box of twenty-four Trojan condoms rounded out Claude's private museum. Tran passed me the box of Polaroids, keeping four, and I closed the first drawer and went to work on the second.

  “They all untaped?” I asked as I worked.

  “Cept they hands and they eyes,” Dexter said.

  “Good,” I said. “Where are the cases?”

  “Hall,” Tran said. “You want?”

  “Not yet.” The second drawer was full of papers: deeds, quit claims, contracts, business partnerships, immigration forms. I flipped through them, looking for signatures and finding Florence Lam neatly written at the bottom of seven. Folding them lengthwise, I put them on the floor. Then I thought again and pulled out all the papers with women's signatures.

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-forty-two,” Dexter said. “Gone be light soon.”

  “Get the Doodys to untape their wrists and eyes, and then nail the door shut.”

  “Yes, Massa,” Dexter said. He straightened up and threw an arm around Tran's shoulders. “Come on, peewee, the Doodys got work to do.”

  “Ho, ho,” I said to the third drawer. It was empty except for a small stack of photographs bound by a rubber band. Charlie Wah's face gazed paternally up at me from the first one.

  He hadn't known he was being photographed. He'd been caught coming up the walk, with Granger Street fuzzy and indistinct behind him. He figured prominently in five others: one talking to Ying, two walking down Hill Street with his bodybuilders, one at the wheel of a car, and one, barely recognizable, in a restaurant somewhere. Each of the pictures bore a little electronic date in the lower right corner. Tiffle had been busier than Charlie knew.

  Just for the hell of it, I got up and went into the front room, listening to the blur of voices from the basement. Rolling a piece of CLAUDE B. TIFFLE ASSOCIATES letterhead into Florence Lam's typewriter, I typed Charlie Wah, and then Snake Triad, Taiwan. I looked at it for a moment and then realized what I'd forgotten to ask Everett. I couldn't ask him now, so I pulled my little phone book out of my pocket and dialed.

  “Whassit?” Peter Lau asked blearily.

  “Peter. Simeon. Sorry to wake you.”

  “Jesus,” Lau said. “My head.”

  “Listen, I need Charlie Wah's real name.”

  Bedsprings creaked. “Why?”

  “I want to send him a letter.”

  “No, you don't.”

  “Just give me the name, Peter.”

  “Wah Yung-Fat. Spelled like it sounds, but no 'o' in 'Yung.' " WAH YUNG, I typed. "Hyphen between Yung and Fat?”

  “Yes. What time is it?” — FAT, I typed. “Time for Charlie Wah to start worrying,” I said. “Keep your radio on the news stations.”

  I hung up and carried the paper into the office, where I folded it tightly and slipped it under the rubber band around the photos. Then I closed the drawer, got up again, and trudged into the hallway to get the cases.

  I put five or six thousand into Tiffle's litt
le box and closed it, then spread the rest of it, more than half a million dollars, over the surface of his desk. It looked impressive. By now nails were being driven into the door at the head of the basement stairs, and then the banging stopped and Dexter ambled in, the hammer still in his hand.

  “Wo,” he said, glimmering at the money. “Enough salt for Colonel Sanders.”

  “It'll make a nice picture, don't you think?” I locked the desk and tossed Tiffle's keys on top of the money.

  “Less the cops snatch it.”

  “There'll be too many of them. They'll be watching each other. You got the list?”

  “LAPD, INS, U.S. Marshals,” he recited. “Chinatown Association, Chinese Legal Aid Society, ACLU, Times, the radio and TV guys. Start dialin at seven. Give 'em the salt, the slicks downstairs, and the ol' Caroline B.”

  “Don't forget the safe houses,” I said. “We haven't got any real slaves for them, but we've got four houses full of stuff.”

  Dexter snapped his fingers. “The dresses,” he said, his face lighting up.

  “You're a deeply intelligent man, Dexter.” I scooped up the documents Florence Lam and the others had signed and put them into one of the briefcases.

  “I the bee's knees,” Dexter said. “Toss that.” I flipped the case at him, and he caught it one-handed. “You throw like a white girl,” he said. “A very young white girl.”

  “See you later.”

  “You gone sit here, huh? They can't get out.”

  “Just in case. No point in taking a short cut now.”

  “We had more like you,” Dexter said in mock admiration, “we wouldn't be sniffin around after the Japanese.”

  Tran came in behind Dexter. “Getting light,” he said.

  I tossed him the second case. “Beat it.”

  “You forgot to say we sposed to put a egg in our shoe,” Dexter said.

  “If an egg in your shoe,” Tran said to him, “you eat it.”

  “Hey,” Dexter said, brightening, “time for breakfast.”

  I sat there as the room gradually filled with light, bringing the green of the money out of the gloom like the colors of an underwater reef, and thought about the pilgrims and their long passage and the years of labor they would pass in dingy workplaces and crowded rooms, all to live in a country that didn't want them, that would send them home if it got a chance, but that they thought of as a rich mine, the Gold Mountain where they could trade their hours and days and years and skills for the money they folded meticulously each week into envelopes and sent home to the land of empty stomachs and waiting women. And I thought about Tiffle and his greedy acrobatics with phony green cards and false INS inspectors and the girls he'd invaded on his couch, and wished he were going to take a harder fall.