The Man With No Time (7 page)

There was a whole lot more than I'd thought there would be.

Nine cups of coffee and three hundred pages later, it was three in the afternoon, and I was jittering in a chair at Parker Center, laying a line of carefully worked out bullshit on Al Hammond.

As always, Hammond was a lot bigger than he needed to be and, as always, he looked mean enough to eat kittens. In front of cats. He always intimidated me, in spite of the fact that most of the time, Hammond was my friend. I'd chosen him from a roomful of cops at a Hollywood cop bar called the Red Dog when I'd decided to be a detective, as opposed to a university professor. At the time I had put years into preparing to be a university professor and only weeks into being a detective, but those weeks were quality time, as people seem to like to say these days. A good friend of Eleanor's, a quiet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu, had been tossed onto the sidewalk from the roof of one of the UCLA dorms. Jennie had been dead on arrival, and Eleanor had been alive in my bed when someone had called to give her the news. Since the UCLA cops and the LAPD didn't seem all that interested, I'd helped Eleanor through her grieving process by finding the cocaine dealer who'd used Jennie to practice the vertical shot put. His mistake: He couldn't tell Asians apart. I'd happily broken both of his elbows, learning something sort of thrillingly unpleasant about myself in the process, and delivered him to the police. At that point I had more superfluous degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer, the result of having stayed in college for what seemed like decades because I couldn't think of anything to do.

After Jennie, I had something to do.

“Why Vietnamese?” I asked. We were in a long room full of sickly fluorescent light and scarred wooden desks. Other detectives talked on phones or slogged on big heavy cop feet toward the coffee. I'd passed on the coffee.

“Why are you here?” Hammond countered. He was a cop to his bitten fingernails.

“This is purely hypothetical, Al,” I said, retreating toward the bullshit.

“And it has nothing to do with Eleanor,” Al said with ponderous irony.

“Eleanor who?” I asked, crossing my arms to emphasize the scholarly patches on my jacket. The lapels spread to reveal the aging Megadeth T-shirt beneath, and I tugged them closed. Hammond, like most cops, thought heavy metal was the musical equivalent of assault and battery. “I've decided to finish an old sociology thesis on urban crime. Asians are tops in their high school classes, tops in the graduation lists of lots of universities. Where are they in urban crime?”

“Tops,” Hammond said promptly. “They're fucking with the Mafia like no one ever has. Ninety percent of the heroin brought into America today—” He stopped and lifted a hand half the size of Moby Dick. “You're actually sitting there and looking right at me and telling me this is for a paper?”

“The professor is named Mamie Liu,” I improvised, stalling. So far I'd met Chinese-Americans named Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, Eadweard, and Julia (as well as Homer, Ruby, and Maxine), and I'd worked up considerable curiosity about the American names Chinese parents chose. “What do you think, Al?” I asked. “Why do Chinese choose names like Mamie?”

“You want to ask someone on the Asian Task Force?”

“No,” I said, too quickly.

His grin turned wolfish. “Yeah? Why not?”

“Because it's only hypothetical. I don't want to waste their time. Is that straight about the heroin?”

“You bet.” He shifted his weight in his chair, settling in to be the expert. “The old French Connection through Marseilles, which the Mafia ran, was shut down years ago. Now the stuff moves from Burma through Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the Chinese run it.”

“All Chinese?”

“One hundred percent. Ethnic Chinese in Burma, Thailand, and Laos.”

Hammond's stomach rumbled. It sounded like an automobile accident.

“Who runs it here?” I asked.

Hammond looked hungry. “Like I said—”

“No, I mean who specifically? Who among the Chinese? The tongs?”

Hammond sat up. “You know about the tongs?”

“A little.” I'd also read about triads, village associations, and name societies.

“Like what?”

“The tongs started in San Francisco in the middle of the last century as protective associations,” I said, dredging my caffeinated memory. “The Chinese were very unpopular in those days. They made the mistake of working cheap. Occasionally they were shot for sport. The cops didn't care what went on in Chinatown as long as no white people got hurt, so the tongs stepped in and kept order. Also helped people in trouble, arbitrated disputes, paid for funerals if somebody died broke.”

“So far, okay,” Hammond said grudgingly.

“Chinese try not to die broke,” I said. “They come from a culture where starvation is the common denominator. Still, it's hard to make it into a visible tax bracket when you're working for half the minimum wage. But the Chinese work at it anyway. There are people working in Chinatown at three dollars an hour who save sixty, seventy percent of their salaries. And the tongs, today's tongs, I mean, help them keep their heads far enough above ground so that they can still open their mouths to eat.”

“You've been doing research,” Hammond said accusingly.

“For the paper. But there are lots of things I don't know. Like when the tongs got crooked.”

He gave me a long glance. “Right at the beginning.” He looked a little uncomfortable. “The U.S. immigration laws were pretty raw then. Chinese men weren't allowed to bring their wives in with them. The idea being that they were supposed to come, build the railroad, light the fuses in the mines, do the laundry, and go home again.”

“The ones who got blown to pieces were allowed to stay?” I asked. “And how do you know this stuff?”

“Interracial sensitivity meetings,” he said. “Three hours a week, when I have the time to go, which isn't exactly often. Also, the Asian crime situation is so out of hand that everybody's trying to be an expert.” He settled back, forcing a tiny scream of pain from his chair, and tried to remember where he was. “So anyway, you had a Chinatown full of bachelors. Classic economics. Demand creates supply.”

“And the tongs,” I volunteered, recalling a detail that had caught my attention at the library, “brought in slave girls.”

“I hate to say it,” Hammond said, “but that's a phrase with real interest value. Slave girls.”

“But against the law,” I said virtuously.

“Well, the law,” Hammond said. “The law never works where sex is concerned, you know? Ask the guys in Vice.” He chewed on that for a second. “Slave girls. The tong leaders didn't see the crime in it. It was just business. Brothels in China were no big deal. Lots of the girls wound up as third or fourth wives.”

“Third or fourth wives?”

“God,” Hammond said acerbically. “Imagine four wives.” He was in the middle of a vehemently acrimonious divorce.

“So there are tongs in every American city now?” I asked. I already thought I knew the answer, but I needed verification.

"Yeah. Except they're all the same tongs. The tongs, most of them anyway, are national. Hell, they're international. They've got branches in Hong Kong and on the mainland, and especially in Taiwan. "

“Why 'especially'?”

“We don't have an extradition treaty with Taiwan,” Hammond said. “And I'm hungry.”

“I promised you a meal,” I said. “So why don't you guys bust the tongs? That's what the Asian Task Force is for, right?”

He shook his big, badly barbered head. Hammond's hair always looked like it had been cut with a can opener. “We can't get inside. Can't even tap a wire and listen in. You know how many dialects there are in China?”

“No.”

“So guess.”

I tried to remember anything Eleanor might have said and failed. “Fifty,” I ventured.

Hammond tried to grin, but the grin was nothing but a mechanical muscle-pull at the corners of his mouth. “A couple thousand.”

“Jesus.” His stomach growled again. “What do you want to eat, Al?”

He glanced around the big ugly room. “Something expensive and far from here.”

“Steak? The Pacific Dining Car?”

“Fine,” he said, underplaying it. Hammond would have chewed his way through a yard of concrete to eat a steak.

“Why are the kids Vietnamese?” The Vietnamese hadn't been mentioned in the books I'd read.

“The kids in the Vietnamese gangs are the enforcers. They're the ones who scare people shitless when they're late with their loan payments. They're the ones who pour Krazy Glue into the locks of the jewelry stores when the owner won't pay protection. They're the ones who break the elbows and slice the faces and pull the triggers. Hell, they've lost their country and their culture, and they're starting to forget their language. There are still lots of great Vietnamese kids, or so I hear. But, all in all, the bad ones are just about the meanest, scariest, deadliest little motherfuckers going.”

“Great,” I said. “That's absolutely great.” I had a big molten ball of lead in my gut.

“And behind the tongs,” Hammond said, watching me, “are the
real
bad guys. The triads. The triads are the real Chinese Mafia.”

“I don't want to hear about it,” I said, giving up. “It's just a paper.”

“Yeah,” Hammond said, laying it on thick. “It's just a paper.”

Two hours later Hammond and I stood on a downtown sidewalk while a couple of Asian parking attendants hiked toward Mexico to get our cars. He'd had three glasses of red wine to wash down two pounds of raw steak, and he was at the point where we were two buddies, not cop and non-cop.

“Is this about Eleanor?” he demanded. “And don't shit me.” In his present embittered state, Eleanor was at the top of a very short list of women whom Hammond was willing to tolerate.

“No,” I said, shivering. It had turned cold while we ate. “It's something a relative of hers might have gotten into.”

He gave me a couple of eyes that were smaller than raisins and he screwed up his mouth until he looked like Roy Rogers's mummy.

“Do you think Roy Rogers was mummified?” I asked him.

He didn't even look interested. “Might be. Any asshole who could stuff a horse. And look at Disney, he became a Creamsicle.”

“They made Lenin into a coffee table.”

“Which relative?” he asked, without a pause.

“Just some uncle. Listen, Al, about all this. I'd rather you didn't talk about it with anyone, okay?”

“I'd be embarrassed to,” Hammond said. He burped french-fried onions and waved it away, toward me. “I'm supposed to be a cop.”

“I'll call you if it gets any closer to home,” I said, but he was looking over my shoulder and chewing at the left corner of his mouth.

“Hey,” he said, and then he stopped. He put one hand in his pocket and took it out again, then put it back. “Hey, look, did I tell you I'm seeing someone?” He stared off at the horizon, avoiding my eyes, and a slow flush began at his jawline and climbed upward like the mercury or whatever it is in a thermometer.

“That's great.” His blush deepened. “I think.”

He shook his big blunt head. “She's on the job,” he said, and then stalled again.

“Really,” I said, just to keep the afternoon moving. “Does she rank you?”

“I may be stupid,” Hammond said, “but I ain't no masochist.”

“What's she like?”

“It's what she's
not
like. She's not like Hazel.” Hazel was Hammond's soon-to-be-ex. I'd never met Hazel; Hammond and I hung out mainly in male-bonding areas like bars and places where someone either just had been, or was immediately likely to be, killed.

Since I didn't know Hazel, the statement wasn't particularly informative.

“In what way,” I asked, “is she not like Hazel?”

He shifted his focus to a spot a foot above my head. “She's Hispanic,” he said.

“Oh-ho,” I said. I waited until the pressure in my chest subsided and I was absolutely certain I wasn't going to laugh, and then said, “Bit of a change in the routine.” Although he generally behaved himself, Hammond's feelings toward people of color were not likely to attract the official attention of the Vatican after he passed on. “Well, well,” I offered. Hammond was still waiting for the moon to rise. “I'd like to meet her, Al.”

“You will,” he said as one of the attendants pulled up in the car. “Maybe tomorrow night. Look whose car came first,” he said, tilting his chin discreetly toward the attendant, who immediately looked very interested. Chinese people point with their chins. “Looks like you pay for the parking.”

“You know, Al,” I said. “You should really attend more of those interracial sensitivity sessions.”

“Can't,” he said. “I'm giving all my time to the homosexual empathy hours.” He opened the door of the sedan and slid heavily in. The car sagged with a certain mechanical irony. “By the way,” he called, “Roy Rogers is alive.”

My first stop was Horace's, where I picked up Bravo. I'd called from UCLA and volunteered to get him out from underfoot, not saying what I really felt: that he was a living reminder of the twins. Eleanor, who'd answered the phone, hadn't said it either, but she'd been a little too bright about what a good idea it was.

Horace opened the door, looking like someone who'd just bungee-jumped off the Eiffel Tower tied to a shoelace: hair on end, pouches of flesh beneath the eyes, a broken pencil dangling from his mouth like a dead yellow cigarette. One corner of his shirt collar poked a dimple in his left earlobe.

“Oh, yeah,” he said by way of greeting. “Bravo's here somewhere.”

“How are you?”

“Awake,” he said. “Alive.”

“Eleanor here?” Bravo bounded out and, seeing me, started to bark.

“No, she's, I don't know. Shut up, Bravo.”

“Pansy asleep?”

“Not now,” Horace said sourly, looking down at Bravo.

“I’ll get him out of here."

“Good idea. I'll call you if anything happens.” Horace closed the door on Bravo's rear end, and I stood on the porch, rebuffed. With Bravo at my heels, I went down the stairs and got in the car, feeling walled out.

Despite all the ups and downs Eleanor and I had endured, this was something new. We'd been friends briefly and then lovers for years, first in various student hovels around UCLA, and then in the awful little shack Eleanor found for us in Topanga Canyon, a tilting, rickety, three-room tribute to threepenny nails and wishful thinking, with nothing to recommend it except the best view in Southern California. I'd been accepted by Horace as a drinking partner almost at once. Mrs. Chan, who, after almost thirty years in the States, still considered all non-Chinese to be foreign devils, was a bit more difficult. It took months before she stopped calling Eleanor every forty-eight hours to harangue her about pure blood. Eventually she invited me home for the sole purpose of feeding me things she was sure no Westerner could eat. Over the course of ten or twelve dinners I swallowed steamed sea cucumber, the eyes and cheeks of fish, a veritable Fannie Farmer Assortment of entrails. I got it all down, nodded, smiled, asked for more. Most of it was delicious, although I have to admit the fish eyes later rolled uninvited into my dreams, goggled at me in threes, and waved at me with tiny white gloves.