“Two guys up the beach in that little yellow house. You know it?”
Ebsworth nodded.
“They’ve got Reuters, the commercial wire, in their fucking living room. How much does that cost?”
“About two hundred a month; maybe a little more with line charges.”
“They’re going to ride MidMin down to twenty-seven, which they claim is bottom.”
Ebsworth nodded again, thoughtfully this time. “Good luck,” he said.
“You don’t like it?”
Ebsworth shrugged. “They got inside somehow.”
Piers thought about it. “Probably.”
“You want me to find out how?” Ebsworth said.
Piers thought again for a few moments and then shook his head and said, “Don’t bother. Let me tell you how I met them instead.”
“Maybe you should,” Ebsworth said, and took a sip of his own coffee. Piers leaned back in his chair and stared out through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that offered a view of the curving shoreline and, in the far distance, Santa Monica, which seemed to be trying to grow a fresh batch of morning smog.
“I’m going along the beach with the dogs like I do every morning,” Piers said, “and I see this guy who’s a jogger. He’s a fat Chinaman, a big guy, and I see him every day and sometimes we say hello or how are ya or some shit like that. Well, this morning he trips over a dead pelican and either twists or sprains his ankle. He didn’t ask me to, but I give him a hand up and it turns out that he’s not as fat as I thought. I mean there’s a lot of muscle there, too. So I help him up and into this little yellow house that turns out to be his partner’s. How much would a house like that go for?”
Ebsworth looked up at the ceiling. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of—”
“Yellow with a green roof.”
“About a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Jesus, for two bedrooms and one bath?”
“It’s on the beach. In East L.A. It would bring thirty, maybe. When they built it twenty years ago it probably cost twelve, if that.”
“What would it rent for?” Piers said.
“Six, seven, maybe even eight hundred.”
Piers nodded his receipt of the information and went on with his tale, still staring through the window across nineteen miles of ocean to Santa Monica.
“Well, anyway, I get the fat Chinaman into the house and there’s his partner standing by the newsprinter, which is the first thing I notice. The partner’s a real tall guy too, sort of skinny with a hell of a tan and somewhere around thirty-six or thirty-seven. I think maybe they’re both around thirty-seven or so, although with the Chinaman you can’t be sure — and if I keep on calling him the Chinaman, I hope you and the ACLU will pardon me all to hell.”
“I’ll try to think of him as the Chinese gentleman,” Ebsworth said.
“Wonderful. Well, they offer me the best cup of coffee I’ve had in twenty years, and the tall, skinny guy bandages up the Chinaman’s ankle like he knows what he’s doing — I mean like maybe he’s had medical training somewhere. It was as good as any doctor could’ve done. Anyway, we get to talking and they tell me they’re going short on MidMin and that they sometimes fiddle around with this and that. We’re kind of kidding back and forth, but I’m pressing just a little because, hell, I’m curious, and so they come up with this real pisser.”
“What?”
“A couple of million that was supposed to be burned but got buried instead somewhere on the embassy grounds in Saigon.”
“And they have a map?” said Ebsworth.
“They know where to buy one — for five thousand.”
“And sell it to you for how much?”
“They didn’t try to sell it to me. That’s when I got interested. In fact, I got so interested that I invited them over for drinks this evening.”
Piers shifted his gaze from Santa Monica to Ebsworth, who stared back at him for a moment and then worked his face up into an expression that was even more dubious than usual. “The Chinese gentleman,” he said slowly. “Do you think he was really hurt?”
Piers gave it some thought. “He was hurt,” he said finally. “Either he was hurt or he’s the best goddamned actor in the world. Nobody could underplay it just like that and make the sweat pop out on his forehead and everything.”
“Did you get their names?”
“Artie Wu and Something Durant. Quincy Durant. Wu’s either W-u or W-o-o. He’s the Chinaman.”
“Really,” Ebsworth said, making a note on his pad and not bothering to keep the edge out of his tone. About the only thing Ebsworth could fault his employer on was Piers’s penchant for going into excruciating detail. Piers would sometimes justify it by explaining that experience had taught him that most people, present company excluded, of course, couldn’t pound sand down a rathole without printed instructions. Ebsworth had often wondered whether or not he agreed with this assessment and finally had decided that he did.
“So,” Ebsworth said, “did you pick up anything else I could use?”
“Scars,” Piers said. “The tall, skinny guy, Durant. He’s got scars on his back.”
“What kind of scars?”
Piers reached into a drawer, took out a sheet of thick, creamy paper, and using a ball-point pen, quickly drew the outline of a man’s nude back. The drawing was remarkable for its anatomical accuracy as well as for its economy of line. Piers thought a moment and then sketched in the scars as he remembered them. The only mistake he made was that he drew only thirty-two scars instead of three dozen. Finished, he handed the drawing to Ebsworth.
The lawyer looked at it and said, “Interesting.” Then he said, “I’ll try to find out how he got them. You want it all?”
“Everything you can get.”
“Five-thirty be okay?”
“Yeah,” Piers said. “Fine.”
Ebsworth rose. He looked at the drawing again and then at Piers. “Why these two?”
Piers locked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and resumed his thoughtful inspection of Santa Monica.
“Hunch, mostly,” he said. “Sometimes you can just tell about a guy — just like you can sometimes tell whether he’s ever had the clap or been in jail, you just know. These two — well, these two just might do.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
Piers shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we’ll keep on looking.”
Chapter 3
They broke McBride’s left thumb that morning at a quarter to eleven in the back booth of Sneaky Pete’s Bar & Grill, a place as shoddy as its name that was located three blocks from the beach in Venice, a failed paradise in Southern California.
They broke it casually, almost as an afterthought, the way a reasonably conscientious camper might break a match. McBride neither yelped nor yowled when they broke it, nor did he implore any particular deity’s intercession. All he said, very quietly, was “Motherfuckers.” If he felt any pain, which of course he did, he offered no evidence other than the single tear that formed in the inside corner of each eye and then trickled slowly down his check until he licked them away with a coated tongue.
The black man who sat next to McBride in the booth was the one who had pinned his wrist and arm to the table while the white man, sitting across from them, had reached over with only one hand, his right one; grasped McBride’s thumb; and bent it back quickly until the second joint went with a faint, moist popping sound. The black man was called Icky Norris, although his parents had named him Harold Ickes Norris when he had been born thirty-six years before on a farm near Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Icky Norris smiled faintly without showing any teeth as he watched McBride lick away the two tears. “Go ahead and cry, man,” he said. “Shit, we doan blame you.”