“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.