Authors: Charles Benoit
Relative Danger (23 page)
Just as Edna was saying that she’d accept the collect call, the delivery truck began backing down the street, its warning beep echoing off the buildings as it inched its way past the phone booth.
“I’m sorry about the mix-up the other night,” Doug was shouting into the phone. “I still don’t get that time difference thing.”
“It’s only nine p.m. now, so I guess you have it right. How are you doing, Doug? You really should call more often. What have you found out?”
Doug looked up into the cab of the delivery truck. The driver was leaning forward to be closer to the lone mirror, his eyes wide open and his tongue working back and forth across his upper lip in time with the beeps. Doug forced his finger deeper into his ear and pushed the receiver tight against his head.
“I’ve been going over the police report,” he said, holding up the photocopy for her to see, “and I have to tell you that, well, I don’t see anything here.”
“What does it say?” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the beeps.
“The report says that he, uh, Russell Pearce, was found in Room 302 of the New Phoenix Hotel, and they give a street address but it doesn’t match anything on the street map I have. It looks like that whole area was torn down and built over since there are office buildings there now. Anyway, it says he was shot once in the neck and he bled to death in the room. They figure it happened close to midnight but nobody heard anything.” From down the street came a dull thud as the backing truck bumped up against the front of a parked Toyota. The beeping stopped, replaced by the two-octave whine of the car alarm.
“They found the gun. It was a Russian pistol, a…” he double-checked the report, then sounded out the word, “a ‘To-ka-rev,’ model TT-33. 7.62.”
“That would be the caliber,” Edna said. “It’s a common size.”
Doug could barely hear the car alarm now, the police car’s siren blotting out most of the noise on the street. He leaned into the corner of the phone booth, which, despite the laws, smelled of urine. “Edna, it was Charley Hodge’s gun.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was. His initials were on it,” Doug said, and under the police siren but still distinct, he could hear Edna drawing in a deep breath.
“It was not Charley’s gun,” she said, each word clipped off clean so there would be no mistake.
“Edna, I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it looks like Charley and my uncle got into a fight over that damn diamond and Charley shot Uncle Russ. All the evidence points to it.”
“What evidence, Douglas? You haven’t found a thing.”
“I’ve got the police report right here,” he said, holding it up again. “It says, where does it say it, ah, here, it says ‘Witnesses agree’—down below it lists these Raffles hotel people as witnesses—‘that the victim was expecting one Charley Hodge the day of the murder.’ And then they find the gun with his initials and the gun matches the bullet they find at the scene. Edna, come on, be realistic here.”
“I know what I know, Douglas. Charley Hodge did not shoot your uncle.” Her voice sounded different, a tone she had not used before, maybe the same tone Nasser Ashkanani heard in his shop all those years ago. “I know I don’t have the proof, that’s what I sent you there to find.”
“Yes, Edna, I know,” Doug shouted into the phone, just as the police siren stopped. The sudden silence and his own voice surprised him. He paused and started again. “I know why you sent me on this trip.”
“Well if you know what to do, do it. Find the evidence that clears Charley and figure out who murdered your uncle.”
“I’ve tried, really, I have tried, but I just can’t do it. I’m not cut out for this.”
“I have spent a small fortune flying you around the world….”
“I never asked you to. You insisted.”
“…and now you’re saying that you just feel like giving up….”
“I never said that.” He was shouting again, but there was no police siren in the background.
“…and you haven’t even tried to find out what happened….”
“What? I went to frickin’
jail
….”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Oh geeze,” he said, resting his forehead against the phone booth door. A minute of static hissed in his ear before Edna spoke again.
“Can we start over?” she said, the sharp edge missing from her voice.
“Let’s,” he said, and for the next ten minutes they talked about the weather, shopping malls, jet-lag, and Raffles. It was Edna who said, “Tell me about the police report.”
“Okay. There’s only one page and it doesn’t look like there was any follow-up. There’s a line at the bottom that says Status but there’s nothing written there. What I’m thinking is that the first guy took a report and that was it. They didn’t even try to find any leads and just assumed that this drifter guy was killed by his friend.” He didn’t believe it as he said it, but when he was done saying it, it sounded plausible.
“I can’t say I’d blame them. I’m sure there were a lot of unsolved crimes at that time and if some foreigner gets himself killed in a flophouse, that’s his tough luck.”
“Did my uncle write to you from Singapore? Any cables?”
“Yes, and I showed you that last note in Toronto, remember? It was that short letter he wrote on the Raffles stationery. Let me get it quick.”
Doug listened to the steady hiss of the intercontinental static. Down the road the truck driver, the cop, and the car owner were exchanging paperwork in a quiet and orderly manner. Across the street a shop owner was hosing down his sidewalk, singing along to a Chinese rock band on the radio.
“Here’s all that it says about the diamond,” Edna said as she picked up the phone. “‘Don’t worry, I still have that third eye. It’s not on me but I keep it within my reach.’ The rest of the note is just pleasantries, things about the weather, how he misses people….”
“Anyone I know?”
Edna laughed. “Stop it Douglas, you know it wasn’t like that between us. But yes, he did say he missed me. Now, here’s what I’d like you to do,” she said, as if she was asking him to cut the lawn. “You can’t check his old room since you say the hotel’s gone….”
“The whole neighborhood is gone.”
“And you say that Raffles sold off all of his things to clear the debt….”
“
I
cleared the debt,” he corrected.
“And all the police have is a report, and not a very good one at that.”
“So?”
“So how are you set for money?”
He mentally went through his wallet. “I’ve got a couple hundred U.S. and I have hardly put a thing on my Visa card.”
“Well, save your receipts. There’s an outstanding zoo in Singapore and you already know about the shopping and the restaurants. Now, when you get a plane ticket, see if you can get one that flies via Vancouver and get a two-day layover….”
“That’s it?” Doug said. “We’re all done? What about the diamond? What about clearing Charley and finding the killer?”
“Douglas, you’ve been halfway around the world and we really don’t have any more than when we started. It’s time to admit defeat. That’s alright, I knew this was a long shot before I even wrote to you in Putzville….”
“Pottsville.”
“…and you did a fine job with the little you had to go on, but I guess there was nothing to find after all.” And, after a sigh, added, “You did the best you could.”
***
Flat on his back in Three Rivers Stadium, Doug caught the last out of game four of the Pirates’ sweep of the Yankees. It was the tenth series he had won in the past half hour and it was getting too easy.
Over the years, he’d won World Series, Superbowls, and Stanley Cups, dated pop stars and Playmates, run small countries, invented anti-gravity boots, traveled both back and forward in time, saved the world and bowled three hundred. Recently he had solved the case, found the diamond, married a beautiful woman, owned Raffles, and spoken Chinese. He was pretty good at imagining success, despite his total lack of experience.
Doug tried to time a toss so that the ball passed through the spinning blades of the ceiling fan, but they knocked the ball into the bathroom, just missing the open toilet. Next he tried to lob the ball safely onto one of the A-laden shelves over his head, this time avoiding the spinning blades. It took six tries but it finally found a spot. He stood on the bed to get the ball and, already bored with this new challenge, pulled down a copy of
Scolasticia
Encyclopedia
, volume 1. He flipped to make sure that there was no entry for baseball, but volume 1 ended with Auvergne (a province in central France, pop. 1 million).
He checked to see what
Scolasticia
had to say about adobe and it fit the facts as he understood them. He skimmed past aerosol, looked at a map of Africa, read the short history of Alcatraz, completely skipped the section on algebra, checked the stats on Mohammad Ali, and stared at the chart on alphabets.
An hour later he knew much more about the letter A.
And he knew who killed Russell Pearce.
In most places, as long as you have on shirt and shoes, you can expect service. But there are holdouts, none in Pottsville, but several in Singapore, that require a bit more formal attire. Raffles Grill was one of those places, even with a gift certificate signed by Mr. Fung Kee Fung. Fortunately Raffles housed several restaurants and Doc Cheng’s, the hotel’s trendy but less stuffy restaurant, offered a more casual dining experience. The fact that he was the only man without a tie attracted some attention but his date’s scandalously short dress attracted much more. It didn’t matter to Doug. He knew he was sitting across from the most attractive woman in the place.
“I’m glad you got my message,” he said. “I was having a hard time getting in touch with you.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to call,” Jang said as she dipped her steak-house style fries in a pile of catsup and hot sauce. “I’m just amazed that my roommate gave me the message. He’s kinda protective.”
“He’s jealous, that’s all.”
“Please, he’d rather be out with you. You’re his type—tall, good looking, sexy eyes….”
“Gee, I’ll give him a call. Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad you could make it.”
“You kidding? This is the first time I’ve ever been in the building and I’ve lived here all my life. I wouldn’t have missed it.”
“Well that makes me feel special.”
“Oh stop,” she said, pointing a catsup-soaked fry at him. “If you were a jerk I wouldn’t have shown up. Besides I figure I have to see as much of you as I can before you take off on some other wild adventure. So when do you leave?”
“I have some things to take care of here first. There’s a woman staying at this hotel, I met her in Morocco back in June. We sort of had a business agreement but I have to let her know that I don’t think it’s gonna work out.”
“Is she pretty?” Jang said.
“Stunning. Breathtaking actually.” It was the truth.
“Oh,” she said, and shifted her hamburger on her plate. “Why didn’t you ask her to dinner tonight?”
“I wasn’t thinking about her. I was busy trying to figure out how to get in touch with you.” That was the truth, too.
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “But I’m afraid this place is going to cost you a fortune.”
“Actually, the hotel owes me a favor,” Doug said. He told her about his uncle’s brief stay at Raffles, about the glove and ball and how he had paid the fifty-year-old debt. He stayed close to the fiction that Mr. Fung Kee Fung dictated to the
Straight Times
reporter. The Truth Must Be Told, sort of. Besides she’d read about it in the morning paper. He had hoped to point the story out to her himself, maybe as they enjoyed a cup of coffee, snuggled tight on her single bed, but she had already mentioned that she was staying at her parents’ house that night. “My mom’s birthday,” she said. “My dad and I and my kid sister are taking her to Sentosa Island for the day. It’s really boring and we’ve been there a thousand times, but that’s what she wants.”
“Lucky her.”
“Yeah,” Jang said, “well I was hoping to get lucky myself tonight, so what say we skip dessert?”
“Lucky me.”
***
Andrew Chan watched as the American and his date—a local girl with short hair in a wonderfully short print dress—headed out of the lobby and asked one of the doormen to hail them a taxi. The man had good taste, Andrew thought as he smiled. He checked his appearance, reflected in the polished brass table lamp next to his podium, before he picked up and dialed the phone.
“This is Andrew Chan at the Outer-Lobby Desk…. Fine, thank you, sir…. No, sir, there’s no problem,” he said, but still looked down to re-check the crease in his pants. “I wanted you to know that the gentleman in the photograph has just dropped off a message for Room 120, sir. Shall I have it delivered? Yes, sir, immediately. Thank you, sir.”
Andrew rang the small brass bell on the podium and watched one of the uniformed houseboys all but sprint toward him. His smile was so fixed that he unwittingly shared it with the errand boy. Plankton, he thought. Numerous, at the bottom of the hotel’s food chain, but the base on which the entire hotel rested. “Never forget,” Mr. Fung Kee Fung said, “the staff members below you are as important as the staff members above you.”
“Deliver this to Room 120 immediately,” he said as he handed the envelope to the houseboy. “Report back to me as soon as you are done.”
Andrew knew what it was like to be plankton and he knew what it was like to move up the chain. One misstep and he’d be gobbled up from below. But as he watched the American and his date get in the taxi, he was certain that wouldn’t happen to him.
The ball didn’t leap off the bat. First there was a mushy thump, like hitting a baked potato, and instead of arching gracefully across the park, it dropped, exhausted, after twenty yards and limped another two before stopping dead. A German Shepherd pup rushed over to sniff it.
“Thanks, kid,” Doug said, handing back the cricket bat. Swinging it proved harder than it looked but he couldn’t miss hitting the ball with the wide, flat blade. The kid resumed his bunched-up stance in front of the three plastic Coke bottles that served as a wicket and waited for his dad to bowl the tennis ball his way. Doug headed out to where the misshapen baseball recovered in the sun.
The park was near the quay, overlooking a wide harbor that was ringed with sleek, fifty-story, blue-glass and chrome office towers, and some turn-of-the-century government buildings, looking like the poor relatives of the Raffles complex. At the entrance of the harbor spouted the Merlion Fountain, the half fish, half lion symbol of Singapore that dated all the way back to the 1980s, an advertising agency’s version of an ancient mythology. The park was well kept and filling up with divorced career men and their kids, the scheduled Sunday morning quality time. It was sunny, already warm, and Doug was feeling pretty damn good.
He had done it. He had solved a fifty-year-old murder. He had cleared Charley Hodge’s name. He hadn’t wasted Edna’s money. He didn’t fail, he didn’t quit, and he didn’t fuck up.
True, he didn’t know what to do now, but he still felt good. His evidence wouldn’t hold up in court, but he knew he was right, as right as Edna had been about Charley, and that’s all that really mattered. He watched as the pup managed to get his mouth around the ball and trot off towards the benches that lined the walkway under the tall palm trees.
He wanted to call Edna but it would have to wait. He needed time to figure out how to tell her without getting all excited and sounding like an amateur. He had a professional responsibility to be cool. He practiced that cool as he walked over to the bench where a teenaged kid and the dog were playing tug-o-war with his ball.
“I’m afraid your dog ran off with my ball,” Doug said.
“No he didn’t,” the kid said, not bothering to look up. “He found it in the field.”
“He picked it up after I hit it with the cricket bat.”
The kid held onto the ball, pulling the dog’s head to the left and right, while the dog growled and wagged his tail harder. “This ain’t a cricket ball,” the kid said.
“I know,” Doug said, struggling to stay professional and cool. “It’s a baseball. An
old
baseball. And it’s mine.”
“Are you Mr. Reach?” the kid said, pulling the dog in a wide arc around the end of the bench.
“No.”
“Well, this belongs to Mr. Reach. Says so right on the ball.”
“That’s not a person’s name. That’s the name of the company that made the ball. Like Spalding or Nike.” He wanted to add “you little shit” but decided to be professional.
“Maybe, but he found it in the field so now it’s mine.” The kid looked up and brushed his thick black bangs out of his face. He had wrestled the ball free and leaned back on the bench like he was in his living room. The dog ran off, chasing a bird. The kid smiled at Doug and said, “Waddya gonna do, call the police?”
“No. An ambulance.”
“An ambulance? Waddya gonna do, hit me?” The kid laughed.
“Yes,” Doug said. He wasn’t laughing but he did have a strange smile on his face.
The kid looked at Doug and thought before he said anything. Doug felt his smile grow wider and stranger. “Fuck it,” the kid said, throwing the ball over his shoulder. “Thing’s a piece of shit anyway.” He ran off, as if he was chasing his dog.
Doug’s smile shifted. Cool.
He walked over to the poor ball. It wasn’t enough that it had been hauled around the world, stuffed in duffel bags with dirty socks, bounced off the bulkheads of tramp freighters, baked in desert suns, soaked in tropical monsoons, stuck in a box in a museum for half a century, chopped by a ceiling fan, and smacked with a cricket bat, now it had to endure a stringy coat of dog spit. The poor ball deserved a break.
Mr. Reach. How could anybody be so stupid, Doug thought. The letters were faded but it was obvious that it was machine-printed on the ball. The kid was just trying to be funny. “It’s not my ball,” Doug said, trying to capture the cocky Chinese-English tone in the kid’s voice, “it belongs to Mr. Reach.”
It’s not on me
.
Doug stopped and looked at the ball.
But I keep it within my reach
.
Doug sat down in the open field.
The stitching was worn and frayed, and there were spots where it missed one of the holes in the gray-white cover. There was a slack, saggy feel to the ball, like the taut winding inside had slipped loose. Or had been replaced. There were two shades of red stitching and strange knots where there should have been smooth seams. The weight felt right but a bit off balance.
He used his hotel room key to cut through the stitching, which pried up off the ball and broke. He opened a seam a quarter way around the ball then pulled on the leather casing, ripping the seam along until a crudely wound ball of string dropped free. It unwound rapidly, the string piling up in his lap, and revealed an oval wad of white cotton, held closed by a dry, hard rubber band that crumbled as he pulled the cotton apart.
It was about the size of a large grape and its facets caught the midday sun, bathing the cotton in a rich, red light.
