Big Mango (9786167611037) (5 page)

Wuntz looked at the floor between his feet
while Eddie shifted his weight uneasily on the bench.

“Kids make you look at stuff whether you want
to or not. Stuff about yourself.” Wuntz spoke so quietly that Eddie
almost missed it. Then he looked up with more hurt in his eyes than
Eddie could stand. “Do whatever you have to do. Just don’t lose
your kid like I lost mine. Once he’s gone, he’ll never fucking come
back.”

Wuntz’s hurt stuck in Eddie, but before he
could work out exactly what to say to him, Judge Rybeck’s clerk
came out of an unmarked door carrying a pile of papers and headed
straight for him.

“Sorry, Mr. Dare. There’s no way the judge
can take your plea today. Everything except this freaking
Carnotolli case has been put over to Monday.”

Pissey Carnotolli was a flamboyant Italian
who owned a chain of stores around the Bay Area called Hide-A-Bed’s
Galore. A local celebrity from his late-night TV commercials in
which he wore nothing but a very large diaper, Pissey had been
charged with killing his wife and the Examiner had hinted he had
brought in hired muscle from New York to do it. Eddie figured if
Pissey had used local guys, he might never have been indicted. San
Francisco was an awfully insular place.

“Anyway, wait a second.” The clerk pawed
around in the papers he was carrying and pulled out an envelope.
“Joshua sent this over a couple of hours ago. Said he thought you’d
want it right away.”

It was another of those airmail envelopes
like the one in which the photograph with the red circle had come.
Eddie hesitated a moment, not sure that he wanted the damned thing,
but then took it and slowly turned it over. It was addressed to him
in the same careful printing and it had the same kind of
exotic-looking stamps.

Eddie tore off one end and dumped a single
photograph into his palm, remembering this time to fold away the
envelope and put it in his pocket.

Wuntz, fully recovered now from his outburst,
leaned over and took a look.

“What the fuck’s that?”

Eddie didn’t answer, but he knew of
course.

It was another picture of him with the same
young marines and the same girls. This one had apparently been
taken at about the same time as the first one, but from a slightly
different angle because now the guy who had been standing behind
Eddie in the other photograph was fully visible.

And this time it was
that
guy who had
a red circle around his head.

Eddie lifted the photograph and studied it
carefully. But he didn’t really need to. He recognized the face
immediately.

It was Winnebago.

“NO
wonder I thought the
ears looked familiar.” Winnebago held the photograph in both hands,
his elbows propped on the bookstore’s counter as he shook his head
slowly back and forth. “What about the envelope?”

Eddie took the crumpled airmail envelope from
his pocket and smoothed it out.

“I told you those were Thai girls,” Winnebago
said as soon as it saw it. He tapped his forefinger on the
envelope. “It’s from Thailand. Says so right on the stamps
there.”

Eddie picked up the envelope and squinted at
the stamps, but they were small and the printing looked like
hieroglyphics to him. How did Winnebago know that?

Winnebago held the picture up, twisting it
around to catch the light. “It sure as all shit beats me, but I
really don’t like the look of that red circle around my head.”

“Who else was with us those times we were in
Bangkok? Can you remember anybody?”

Winnebago reached under the counter for his
cigarettes. He lit one, taking his time about it.

“That kid we called Donkey might have been
there.” Winnebago pointed at one of the men in the background. “Is
that him?”

They both stared hard at the face, willing it
to speak to them, to spell out to them whatever message they were
supposed to be getting. But it didn’t.

“What was his real name?”

“Damned if I can remember.” Winnebago
pondered a moment. “Isn’t there some place you can call about old
military records?”

“Yeah, well, I can just see myself calling up
a personnel office at the Pentagon and saying, ‘Excuse me, but
would you have anything on a guy named Donkey,’ and then listening
to some NCO say, ‘Hey, pal, we’re
all
called Donkey around
here.’ No way.”

Winnebago thought some more. “Maybe you can
find the captain somehow. That might be easier.”

“Jesus, Winnebago, I wouldn’t have the first
idea where to start looking.”

“I’ll bet he’s become a real successful guy.
He was just the type. Shouldn’t be all that hard to find him.”

“Maybe you’re right. Probably did do
something to get himself noticed after he got out.”

“Yeah,” Winnebago nodded, “that sounds to me
like the way to go. I’ll bet you Captain Austin made a real big
splash somewhere.”

***

EDDIE
slogged away dutifully
at this and that for the rest of the week, but he couldn’t get the
photographs out of his mind and his concentration was all over the
place. By four o’clock on Friday afternoon he gave up and started
the weekend.

The House of Shields was a saloon on New
Montgomery Street just south of Market. It was comfortable as old
loafers and still smelled a little of cigars and cigarettes stubbed
out in what Eddie was sure were better times. In spite of its name,
the place had nothing to do with medieval warfare, at least not
unless you counted the screeching done by some of the old bags who
hung around there most of the day with a snoot full. A guy named
Shields, so the story went, had opened it near the turn of the
century. He hung a big sign over the front door that said ENTER
THESE PORTALS AND TIME AND CARES ARE FORGOT.

Eddie liked that, even if they had taken the
sign down a decade or so ago when most cares just got too big to be
forgot anymore, and he liked the fact that a middle-aged woman in a
taffeta prom dress and way too much make-up was usually there
playing things like “Our Love Is Here To Stay” on a scarred, old
Steinway. When it was slow, and sometimes it was very slow, Eddie
would spread his papers around on the bar to make it look good, sip
a beer or a diet soda, and whistle quietly along with the piano,
easing his way out of another week.

San Francisco did that kind of thing to you,
Eddie knew. Maybe some other places, too, but San Francisco sure as
hell did.

When Eddie finished law school he was looking
to burn down the world, but then he discovered all that good
California wine at a few bucks a bottle; cracked crab straight off
the boats at Fisherman’s Wharf back before all the real boats
disappeared and the place turned into a tourist trap; the taste of
warm sourdough bread as it came out of the ovens over at Sammy’s
Bakery on Powell; the musty, used-book store up on Fremont that
smelled like his grandmother’s attic; and the sun dusting the city
with magic as it eased gracefully into the Pacific out beyond the
orange towers of the Golden Gate.

Almost before he knew it, twenty years
slipped away, gone like a goddamned bullet. Oh, Lord, he had begun
sighing to himself whenever he thought about it, what the hell
happened to them?

“Hey, fella. You know who you look like?”

A voice behind Eddie shook him out of his
reverie.

“That actor. You know…”

Eddie had noticed the guy in the brown
leather bomber-jacket eyeing him, so he wasn’t particularly
surprised when he started in. Whenever Eddie saw somebody looking
at him like that, and it was way too often as far as he was
concerned, it always came down to the same thing.

“You look like…” The man wiggled his left
index finger at Eddie and tossed in a little finger popping for
punctuation. “You know, that actor…Bruce Willis! Yeah, that’s it!
Bruce Willis! Anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Bruce
Willis, man?”

The guy grinned triumphantly at Eddie and
then he twisted around to a thin woman with a pinched face and tiny
lips who was waiting for him at a table and grinned some more.

Big deal, Eddie thought as he always did. Big
fucking deal.

He arched his eyebrows steeply and keeping
his face otherwise expressionless nodded very slowly a couple of
times over his shoulder before returning his full attention to his
Diet Coke. That just made things worse, he knew—it was exactly what
Bruce Willis had done a hundred times in the movies—but it was
still a look that Eddie particularly favored whenever the subject
came up. The ambiguity of it appealed to him.

When he heard the stool next to him scrape
back a few moments later, Eddie glanced over and was surprised to
see Kelly Wuntz sliding onto it. It had been three days since Eddie
asked Wuntz if he could do something through SFPD to get a line on
Harry Austin and he had heard nothing from him since. He figured
that was a write-off, especially since his own efforts to locate
Captain Austin had come to exactly nothing either. As far as he
could tell, Austin had vanished cleanly off the face of the earth
after he left the marines in 1975.

Wuntz had an odd look on his face, but before
Eddie could say anything about it Wuntz held a finger up to his
lips and shook his head vigorously to indicate that Eddie should
remain silent. Eddie looked around the bar, but there was no one
near enough to overhear them; and besides, he was only going to ask
Wuntz how he was doing.

Wuntz eased up off the bar stool and walked
away, gesturing for Eddie to follow. Even for Kelly Wuntz that was
peculiar behavior so, half out of curiosity and half just to humor
him, Eddie did. He trailed along behind as Wuntz went up the stairs
at the end of the bar and disappeared into the men’s toilet. When
Eddie followed him inside, he found Wuntz checking under the stall
doors.

“I’ve got something on your old captain,”
Wuntz said very quietly when he was satisfied they were alone. “But
first I have to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Shoot,” Eddie answered, immediately
regretting his choice of word.

“When was the last time you saw Austin?”

“I don’t know.” Eddie thought about it. “Not
since I was discharged.”

“Have you heard from him?”

Eddie just shook his head.

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. What is this,
Wuntz?”

Wuntz was still looking at him in a funny way
and Eddie started getting a bad feeling.

“You asked me to check on this Austin guy for
you and I did. There’s this DEA fruit I busted a few months ago in
a gay cat house over in the Castro and then cut loose, so I figured
he might be just the guy to poke around with the feds for me.”

“If you’re going through all this just to
tell me that Austin’s gay, I don’t really care. I just want to talk
to him, not sleep with him.”

“Look, Dare, you want to hear what I’ve got
or not?”

Eddie nodded vaguely, trying not to look too
excited, which was fairly easy based on how the conversation with
Wuntz had gone up to that point.

“Then shut the fuck up for once in your life
and listen.”

Wuntz cleared his throat a couple of times,
giving himself a build-up.

“Okay, the guy says he’ll see what he can do
and then today he calls me back. He sounds nervous and at first I
don’t get it. I’m not looking to bust anybody’s balls here, I’m
just asking this pansy to check around and see if he can get a
current address on some guy who was a run-of-the-mill marine
captain something like twenty years ago. Then he tells me that this
Austin has a DEA file and I start to pay real close attention.”

“Harry Austin was a drug dealer?”

“I don’t think so. This guy says a file was
opened on a routine investigation of Austin several years ago for
some reason he didn’t know anything about. Apparently it turned up
zip. That’s not the point.”

“Then what
is
the point, Wuntz?”

“My guy says the file was closed permanently
two weeks ago.”

“Because they didn’t find anything?”

Wuntz blew air into his cheeks, puffing up
like a chipmunk that had just found a particularly nice acorn.
“This guy faxed me a copy of the last document in Austin’s file.
You want to see it?”

“Sure, let’s have it. After all the
dramatics, I just hope I’m not disappointed.”

“You won’t be.”

Wuntz was giving him the eye, Eddie noticed.
What the hell was going on here?

“So all you wanted to do was to talk to your
old CO, huh?” Wuntz asked.

Eddie knew that was an introduction, not a
real question, but he nodded anyway. More importantly, he noticed
Wuntz had just switched into the past tense so, when Wuntz reached
into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed Eddie a single sheet
of paper folded lengthwise, Eddie was pretty sure what he was going
to see on it, although of course he had no idea as to what form the
details would take.

Eddie unfolded the sheet and studied the
smudged photocopy of a newspaper clipping while Wuntz walked around
behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. The clipping
appeared to be from an inside page of some newspaper, the right
side just above the fold. It was obviously a foreign paper since it
was printed in some bizarre-looking language that Eddie couldn’t
even hope to make any sense out of.

Of course, he had been right about what to
expect. Both he and Wuntz stood silently for a few moments, looking
down at the copy of the clipping and contemplating the blood and
guts photograph that took up the entire top half of it: a man’s
battered body sprawled lifelessly in a muddy street somewhere.

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie finally said in a voice
that was much smaller than he would really have liked, “look at
that.”