Early Graves (26 page)

Now he heard Cecil’s van jounce down from Horseshoe Canyon Trail into the brick yard, listened for the door slam, the crunching of Cecil’s feet across the dry leaves of the courtyard, the turning of the front door lock. A lamp was switched on below. The bathroom door opened and closed. The toilet flushed, water ran. The bathroom door opened. Glass rattled softly at the bar. Dave got out of bed, flapped into a blue corduroy robe, went down the raw pine stairs. Cecil looked at him from the shadows of the bar.

“You have a lot to answer for,” he said. “When he told you he’d adore to meet me, ‘meet’ was not half of what he meant.” Cecil smiled wanly, and gave his head a wondering shake. “I almost ended up face down in a bunk. That willowy queen is a demon lover. No way was I going to get away from him. Not without knocking him upside the head. Luckily for both of us, his lady came home.”

“Damn,” Dave said. “You mean you didn’t get out of him what he’d seen on the dock when Le was killed?”

“I got it.” Cecil handed Dave brandy in a big snifter. “That’s how I almost ended up a victim of sexual assault. I didn’t really promise anything”—carrying his own brandy, Cecil wandered toward the stairs—“but I let him hope, didn’t I? Driving him home to the Old Fleet.” He climbed the stairs as if his feet were heavy. “It’s not his boat. It’s hers. She’s Lindy Willard, you know, the jazz singer? Working the Vine Street right now. Cotton is her fancy man. And from the way he let go of me when he heard her coming, she doesn’t know he’s gay, and if she did, he’d be out on his adorable butt.” On the loft, a lamp lit up.

Dave switched off the lamp below, and climbed the steps. “That’s all very interesting, but what did he tell you about Le’s killers?”

“It’s a good time for him right now”—Cecil’s voice came muffled by the shirt he was pulling off over his head—“because of the Festival, he works every day. But most of the year, it’s only weekends—at the art museum or the music center.” Dave reached the loft. Cecil was sitting on the far side of the bed, long back bent so he could unlace and pull off his shoes. He stood and stripped down jeans and briefs, tossed them on a chair.

“So he’s not an artist all the time.” Cecil went naked to a stereo rig under the roof slope, rattled brittle boxes, dropped a cassette into the deck, poked steel buttons. Drums bumped. Miles Davis began to play “Tutu.” Cecil turned back, smiled, said, “Sometimes he’s a busboy.” He stretched out on the bed. “And that’s where our story begins.” He turned on his side. “Come on, I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

Dave shed the blue robe, laid it over the loft railing, switched off the lamp, and lay down beside Cecil, who put an arm across him. “Tell me,” Dave said.

“He had a job at Hoang Pho, a waterfront restaurant down there—and about ten-thirty, when there was nobody left but four Vietnamese men in business suits at a rear table, all of a sudden, the door bursts open and in come these two little guys in black jeans and black T-shirts, right? Black handkerchiefs tied over their faces.”

“I remember reading about it,” Dave said. “They were armed with Uzis, weren’t they?”

“With which they massacred the four men at the table in two seconds flat and were out of there.”

“Never to be seen or heard of again,” Dave said.

“You got it,” Cecil said. “And Cotton was dishwasher there that night. Only person left. The men had paid their check. He didn’t have anything to do but wait till they got finished with their conference, and lock up after them. He was in the kitchen, reading
Rolling Stone,
when he heard the shooting. He ran out the back and buried himself in a trash module. Well, they came out
the
same way, ran right past him. He damn near died of fright. But he peeked out. Getting into their car, they pulled off those handkerchiefs. Light was bad back there, but he saw their faces. And it took him a long time to get over the idea that they’d seen his. The police questioned him, of course, but he didn’t tell them.”

Miles Davis played a comic riff—“put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right out.” Dave said, “And then he came home night before last, and here were these same two little men in black shirts and jeans again, running away from the Old Fleet dock, right?”

“Uh-huh—you guessed it.”

“Asians, right?” Dave said.

“‘Tough little doll-boys,’ he calls them,” Cecil said. “‘Pretty as poison.’” Cecil lay quiet while “Full Nelson” thumped and tooted jokily around them. When the tune had pranced off into silence, he said, “What’s going to happen to Cotton when this comes out?”

“I’ll try not to let it come out,” Dave said.

“How can you help it? I know you. You think it was a Vietnamese thing, now. Nothing to do with Andy Flanagan. You’ll go after the doll-boys, and they’ll figure out it was Cotton who tipped you. And he’ll be black and white and dead all over. You were going to quit. Why didn’t you?”

“I’ll protect Cotton,” Dave said. “Do you have contacts inside the Vietnamese community?”

“Nobody has contacts inside the Vietnamese community. It can’t be done or the police would have done it, wouldn’t they?”

“It can be done,” Dave said.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1987 by Joseph Hansen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-1682-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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