Another Man's Moccasins

9

“Forty-two charges of manslaughter? ”

“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”

“Why Yugoslavia? ”

“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”

I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”

“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four five-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”

I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.

He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen? ”

“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”

I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.

“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.” After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started panicking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“All of them? ”

“All but one. I had a freight supervisor from the DOT, Danny Padilla, with me late that afternoon and we were the first ones in after we got the doors open. He said it was strange that it was a produce truck and not refrigerated; then we got the smell. I shined my flashlight, the floor was covered with bodies, none of them moving; like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Then I saw this young girl in the back. She was tapping the side of the container and trying to get our attention. She had to crawl over the bodies to get to us.”

“What happened to her?”

“Took her to County General, ran her through INS. Then she got a sponsorship from some group who deals with that sort of thing.”

“What was her name?”

“Not Paquet.” I listened to him rustling the papers. “Ngo Loi Kim. The poor kid. . . . Hell, I thought about adopting her myself.”

“Did you say last name Kim?”

“Yeah, ring a bell?”

I stared at the blotter on my desk and watched my hand write the name. “An old one. There was a girl I knew in Vietnam with that last name.”

The phone was silent for a second. “Walt, you know what the English translation for Kim is, don’t you?”

“Smith? ”

He chuckled. “That, or Jones.”

Ruby appeared in the doorway, but I held up my hand and she disappeared with Dog trotting after her. “What else did you get on this Paquet?”

“Quite a bit, actually. We seized his phone records, computer, and a bunch of other stuff. There was somebody moving a lot of Vietnamese illegals through L.A. County—child porn and some brothels that were in operation down here—and it turned out he was the kahuna on the deal, or so the California state attorney general’s office tells me.”

“Big investigation? ”

“Whopper. They even wanted to know how you were involved in all this.”

“Ever heard of this guy, Tran Van Tuyen? ”

“Can’t say that I have, but I can make some phone calls from this end.”

“That would be great if you could. Thanks, Ned.” I could hear someone talking to him in the background and waited.

I looked up at the clock on my office wall and figured Vic would be back from lunch any time now. “What about the prostitution charges on the granddaughter?”

“First-timer, and she had the unfortunate, or fortunate—I guess it all depends on your point of view—experience of having her premier customer turn out to be an Orange County plainclothes deputy.” It was silent on the line. “It’s hard for some of these people to assimilate into a new culture, and if she was from the wrong side of the tracks . . .”

I stared at the name I had just printed on my desk blotter. “Hey, Ned?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you check and see where this Ngo Loi Kim ended up?”

“I can do that.” It was silent again, the way it always was when men talked about things they’d rather not. “What makes you think this big Indian fella didn’t do it?”

“Just a hunch.”

I could hear him sniff out a laugh on the other end. “Sounds like he did a number on you.” I didn’t say anything. “You want that information faxed or do you guys have e-mail? ”

“I am speaking to you now from a push-button phone and hope you are duly impressed.” I transferred him to Ruby, and he called me a dirty name just before I pushed a button, and the coast grew silent.

I sat there and watched the aspen leaves quiver in the slight breeze along Clear Creek; the sky was still cloudless, and we continued to need rain. I was getting that feeling, the one like an itch I couldn’t quite reach. There was something going on with all of this, something below the surface, and I had a notion that when I found it, it was going to be something pretty simple.

I got up and walked down the hallway to the holding cells where the big man lay with an arm over his eyes and where Frymire sat snoring in his chair. My dispatcher/receptionist appeared a moment later with Dog and a notepad. Dog leaned against my leg with all the grace of a pet Kodiak, and Ruby lowered her voice upon seeing that everyone else in the room was asleep. “Henry says that Brandon will be back from Rapid City tomorrow, and Lucian called.” I looked at her blankly. “It’s Tuesday.”

I stared at her for a while longer, then shook my head and gestured toward the holding cell and whispered in return. “Vic and Cady are going to Sheridan to pick up Michael at the airport, so it’s my night to sit Virgil.”

“He said he’d bring the chessboard over here.” She crossed something off of her list and then sighed, making a face at the notepad.

“What? ”

“More of these garbled e-mails from the school WiFi system marked BPS.”

I pretended like I knew what that meant. “Call the school board.”

“I am.”

“Anything from Saizarbitoria?”

“No.”

"Vic?”

“Court duty, and that’s the second time you’ve asked.”

“DCI?”

“No.”

“Do me a favor?” She looked up at me, the Webster’s Dictionary illustration of irritated. “I don’t have a computer, or I’d do it myself.”

"What?”

“Look up this organization, Children of the Dust, and see what their connection is with Tuyen.” I stood there, looking into the holding cell, unable to tell if the big guy was really asleep. “And let me know when that report from LASD comes through?”

“He called.”

“Tuyen? ”

She nodded. “It was next on my list. He was asking about his granddaughter’s body and her personal effects.”

“Did you tell him that’s a DCI deal?”

“I did.”

“How did he respond?”

She looked up. “Not well, but considering the circumstance . . .”

“Did he mention anything about any official documentation that connects him with Ho Thi Paquet?” I could feel the big blue eyes on me.

“No, but he said that he’d be at the Hole in the Wall Motel, room number five.”

I returned her gaze. “He changed rooms?”

“He said the television wasn’t working in the other one.” She continued to watch me. “Walter, the man lost his granddaughter, and he’s sitting in a motel room by himself in Powder Junction.” Except for the quiet hum of the minifridge and Frymire’s snoring, it was silent in the holding area—her voice carried the extra weight of being whispered. “You don’t think that Saizarbitoria should go over and check on him?”

“I’ll go down in the morning—Cady will be spending time with Michael.” My voice sounded a little harsh, like it always did when I was embarrassed. I stood there for a while longer thinking it was probably time to take a Ruby moral sounding. “Can I ask you a question?”

She folded her arms. “Sure.”

“Do you think I’m a racist?”

She smiled and then covered it with a hand. “You?”

“Me.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

She tipped her head up and considered me, and I felt like I should be wearing a lead vest. “You mean because of your experiences in the war?”

“Yep.”

“No.”

It was a strong response, and one that didn’t leave a lot of room for further discussion. I glanced at her unyielding eyes and shrugged, turning to look back as Virgil’s arm moved and he looked at the two of us. “Just wondering.”

“You do have one prejudice though.” I looked back at her again from under the brim of my hat. “You don’t care about the living as much as you do the dead.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I leaned there on the headstone, but before long gravity and alcohol forced me to slip, and my head jarred with the impact of my ass hitting the ground. I sat there looking at my lap for what seemed like a long time before a streak of red light ricocheted off the thousands of white markers that surrounded me.

There was a movement to my right, and I rolled my head in that direction and rested it against the cool surface of the stone. There was somebody there. She was looking into the distance, standing in the graveyard. It took a while for me to find my voice. "Hey...”

The young woman turned. She was Vietnamese and familiar. She raised a hand and reached out to me, the fingers loose but imploring.

I started to move, but all I could do was swipe a gesture toward her. “Can’t, sorry....” I took a few breaths to get my stomach settled. I remembered her from somewhere but couldn’t see clearly through the red shooting stars.

Her fingers were still extended; they looked cool somehow, but they were just out of my grasp. I pushed my weight against the stone and raised myself on one arm, catching the edge of the next grave marker with my fingertips, and stood. I felt like a poleaxed Lazarus and wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.

I looked around, but she wasn’t there. When I saw her again, she was moving lithely through the stones, her fingers trailing on their surfaces, and I’m sure it was because I was drunk, but each time she touched a grave, I heard music.

I moved forward in her wake. She paused and looked back at me. The red lights flickered again, and there was a slight movement at the corner of her mouth like a smile.

“Wait, miss, please. . . .”

She turned slowly as though dancing, with two fingers whispering back toward me as I stomped forward like a sleepwalker, my head floating on my shoulders.

"Ma...” Her fingers traced the tops of the markers, and she played the headstones like a piano. She played like me, making the same mistakes, using the same dissonant chords.

I could see the waves of sound ringing from the markers like pebbles striking smooth water. The song was melancholy and sad, and I recognized it and started to sing—“A good man is hard to find / you always get the other kind”—I surged forward, but each time I touched a stone, the note it held was silenced until there was no more melody.

The night mist from the random bamboo stalks and irrigation ditches consumed her, the flickering red light was gone, and it was dark. I crashed against a line of markers and fell, lay there for a moment, breathing, and then finally rolled over again and pushed myself up. I looked for her, wavering a little, but there was no one there. I blinked. Nothing. Then I slowly stumbled forward using the now silent tombstones as crutches.

When I got through daydreaming, the sun was booming through the windows, and even with the air-conditioning it was hot. Frymire was still asleep in his chair with his arm in a cast and sling, his face discolored from his brow to down below the jawline.

I figured if Virgil White Buffalo had hit him any harder, it would’ve killed him.

The giant was standing by the bars now. He was so tall that he could see through the bars and out the window of the common area to the elementary school across the street. There was no formal school in the summer, but the county ran a day care, and the little citizens were scrambling over the playground like barn swallows. I had been a little unnerved when he’d first started doing it, but since reading his file I understood. Whenever the kids came out for recess, he would stand there with the bars in his hands and watch. When the bell rang and the youngsters went indoors, he would sit back down and the dark hair would once again enclose his face.

I thought about how the guys in Alcatraz could hear the New Year’s parties going on across the bay in San Francisco, how the prisoners at Folsom could listen to the passing trains, and wondered what they heard in Leavenworth.

I’d spoken to him, everybody had, but he remained incommunicative. He was scheduled for an examination with the attending physicians later in the week, and I was still trying to figure out how we were going to pull that one off without loss of life, limb, or deputy.

“He had a big lunch.” I turned to look at Chuck, who was now awake but was still talking a little funny. “We shared a family-style bucket of chicken from the Busy Bee; I had three pieces and he had thirteen, along with all the coleslaw, baked beans, six biscuits, and four cans of iced tea.”

We watched the giant as he continued to study the children. “That may be his plan, to eat his way out.”

Frymire stood and stretched, wincing a little when his right arm slipped. “I’m going to make a run to the bathroom, if that’s okay?”

I threw a thumb up, sending him out and then crossing to the window for a look at Virgil’s world. I watched the kids with him and thought about the boy and girl whose photograph was in the plastic child’s wallet, the beautiful woman who was tickling them on the bus stop bench, and about the hateful words scrawled on the chalkboard.

I thought about the file.

God.

The bell rang, and we watched the children flow to the open doors of the primary school as if somebody had pulled a stopper and they were all draining away. After the doors closed, I turned and looked up at Virgil. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back.”

He said nothing, lay down, and crossed his arm over his eyes again.

I watched him for a while before the intercom on the holding cell phone buzzed, and I crossed over and picked it up. “DCI on line one.”

I punched the required button. “Longmire.”

“No drugs.”

I nodded and leaned against the wall and tipped my hat back. “Hi, T.J.”

“Walt, this young woman was most likely a prostitute.”

“The sheriff of L.A. County pulled her sheet. He said it was a first offense.”

“Well, she might have been arrested only once, but the physical evidence indicates a number of vocational eccentricities.”

I could feel the old cooling in my face and the stillness in my hands. “Such as?”

“She’s been used to excess; internal abscess, ulceration, and thickening of the vaginal walls uncommon in a woman this young.” It was quiet on the line. “And she’s been modified.”

“What? ”

“At some point in time, she was sewn up to appear virginal, and the breasts are implants; a poor job.”

I took a deep breath and let the dregs of emotion trail out with the exhale, as well as the haunting image of the Vietnamese woman lying along the interstate.

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I looked at her body before the air patrolman stepped into my line of sight. She could have been asleep; it was difficult to tell in the gloom of the early morning. The red revolving lights of the air security patrol’s jeep had drawn me from the cemetery.

“Whoa there, chief. Where did you come from?”

He looked like one of the guys from Gate 055. I pointed back at the cemetery, immediately regretting the jarring that traveled from the middle of my back to the fracturing pain in my head. “Over there.”

He looked past my shoulder. “The graveyard?”

I stepped to the side and almost fell down. “Is that the girl I was following?”

He tried to block me again, but a voice commanded from behind. “Let him by—he’s one of us.”

I moved forward, and my eyes focused as Baranski looked up at me; he was sitting on the fender of a jeep and was filling out paperwork as the crimson lights flashed across our faces every two seconds. “Well, what’a ya know. It’s the First Division’s secret weapon.”

I stood there weaving, trying to get some idea of what was going on. “What are you guys doing out here?”

Mendoza stood and stepped in close to me and looked up from the second button of my uniform. “More to the point, man, what are you doing out here?”

I didn’t like his tone, so I pushed him. I guess I misjudged my own strength, because he fell backward and bounced off the jeep before falling to the ground. I felt one of the security detail grab my arm, but I threw an elbow at him and he went away. Another guy grabbed my other arm, but I pushed his helmet down and slammed him away, too. I stood there for a second and looked down at the woman who was lying on a collection of sandbags in the crumbled remains of the old bunker.

I recognized her and reached down through the pain in my head. She looked as if she’d fallen, so I thought the only thing to do was help her up.

There was a jarring at the back of my head, and suddenly my eyes wouldn’t focus. I could hear loud voices coming through in waves—and the world pitched to the left. I slowly started shifting in the same direction so I tried to correct the problem by transferring my weight, but then my legs collapsed from under me like a weak chair.

I hit the ground and could feel people piling on top of me. I lay there and could see the familiar face now, the stillness of the hand stretching to the arm, and finally Mai Kim’s eyes, which did not move.

“It’s your move, and it’s been your damn move for about three minutes now.” Lucian had decided to bring the game to the jail.

I looked at the chessboard again and couldn’t remember a single tactic. “Sorry.”

I was black and, from all appearances, black was in deep trouble. I reached across and hooked a knight in to take one of his pawns, a move he immediately countered by taking my knight with a rook that had been loitering with intent.

“Damn. . . .”

He shook his head, tipped back his hat, and clutched his chin like a fastball he was preparing to deliver high and inside. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You havin’ flashbacks or what?”

I half smiled. “I guess I am—daydreams at least....”

“This all about that Viet-nam-ese girl from out on the highway? ”

“Yep.” I started to bring out my queen but thought better of it. “Her grandfather, the fellow I told you about?”

Lucian peered into the holding cell where Virgil sat slumped on the bunk with his back against the wall. He was staring at the space between us. Lucian nodded. “That Van Heflin character.”

Jesus.

Lucian’s malapropisms were usually reserved for the Indians, but the Vietnamese had given him a whole new venue.

“Tran Van Tuyen.” I explained the situation, along with the ambivalence of my feelings toward the man.

Lucian didn’t say anything but studied the board. “They ought’a burn down that ol’ ghost town, that or ship it off to Laramie, put in a slicky-slide and a carousel up and charge admission.”

I opted for a pawn, and he immediately stymied the move with the same rook. I thought about the old Doolittle Raider and his experience in that Japanese prison camp. “You ever think about the war? ”

"Mine?” I nodded, and he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not so much as I used to.”

We sat there for a while, sitting on the folding chairs and looking at the chessboard balanced on the wastepaper basket between us. Every once in a while a question hangs in your throat waiting to be asked of the exact wrong person, but I asked it anyway. He laughed hard, fighting to catch his breath. “You?”

I nodded.

He shook his head. “You could do with a dose of prejudice.”

It was, after all, the response I expected. I brought my queen out.

He sat there looking at the board as I watched him, the smile slowly fading from his face as his ears plugged with the racket of two radial-cylinder Pratt and Whitney engines roaring him into his past. I listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall and waited.

“We ditched just off the Chinese coast, and the impact pushed my copilot, Frank, through the windshield. We had two men that were wounded so bad that they drowned before we could get to shore. A civil patrol pulled Frank and me out and pretty well beat the shit out of us right there on the boat. I guess that was one of the scary parts; there were so many of ’em that I figured they’d just tear us apart. Near as I could make out, an officer in the Kempeitai pulled ’em off us and claimed us as prisoners of Tojo, and they shipped us off to Shanghai in occupied China.”

“They got ten of you, right?”

He worked his jaw, moved his other bishop, and then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. It was like he’d been compacted there by the memories of his war. His sleeves were rolled up on his thin snap-front shirt, and I watched his Adam’s apple as it bobbed the top button a few times before he said anything. “They beat the shit out of us on a regular basis with them little bamboo, kendo swords, shinai. . . . Then they finally got around to shipping us off to Tokyo where they interrogated us for a couple more weeks.”

He reached down and picked up his bottle of Rainier, turning it so that the label faced him. It was quiet again, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to go any further. “We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.”

“I’m trying to tell you something, so shut up and listen.”

I smiled at him and watched as the jaw worked some more. He sipped his beer and rested it on his prosthetic knee. “They wanted us to sign these statements sayin’ we’d committed crimes against Japo citizens—you know, bombed hospitals, strafed schoolchildren, and shit like that.” His mahogany eyes came up and met mine. “... Which we didn’t.”

I moved my queen again. “I’d imagine they asked with all due courtesy?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” He leaned back in and examined the board. “They started out pretty easy, you know, not lettin’ ya sleep for a couple days, no food, hardly any water. . . .” He took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Get you good and loopy and then they’d start in with the hard stuff.” He took a deep breath and held it, finally letting it out with the words. “They had this one trick where they’d tie a wire around your head and twist it with one of them little kendo swords and they finally did it to Frank for so long that his jaw broke.”

I studied the hardness in the old man’s eyes as they reflected the light like tiny drops of crude oil.

“Any man that ever tells you that he won’t break no matter what they do to him? ” We both remained silent until his black eyes blinked. “They shipped us back to Shanghai and decided they were gonna have a trial, not a trial in any sense of justice, since they’d already found us guilty, but they needed to determine what kind of punishment was called for. Frank’s jaw was infected, and he was pretty weak by that time, so they’d take the two of us in together. We were in this solitary confinement compound at Kiangwan Prison, and they’d come get me and I’d lead Frank up these concrete steps into this shitty little wooden-slat building and they’d scream and yell about us and at us for a couple of hours, us not understandin’ a single word; then they’d take us back out and throw us in our cells until they’d come and get us the next day and do it all over again.” A tight little curve appeared at the corner of his mouth. “With the obvious limitations of not bein’ able to speak or write Japanese, we threw up a brilliant defense, and do you know them sons-of-bitches still found us guilty? ”

“Hard to believe.”

He moved a rook, and his hand stayed on the little wooden piece. “October 15, 1942. They gave us pencil and paper to write good-bye notes to our family, and I wrote mine to my mother and asked her to please ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb these little yellow bastards back into the Stone Age with all due speed.” He drank some more. “She never got it, so I guess it got lost in the mail. . . .” The short-lived smile faded again.

“What happened?”

He stared at the chessboard and withdrew his hand from the rook. “They put us all in this concrete bunker with these narrow slit openings and come and got the first three. They took ’em outside and made ’em kneel and tied ’em off to these stubby little crosses, and then they just shot ’em in the back of the head, one by one.”

I moved my queen in a disinterested fashion. “They let you live.”

He watched me move and then nodded. “I guess they felt like they’d made their point, so the rest of us got life imprisonment. ”

“What happened to Frank? ”

“Died in a camp in occupied China.” He reached over to straighten the angle of the wooden board on the trashcan. “So, you asked me if I thought about the war much—an’ I guess the honest answer would be, yes, I still think about it a lot. At least I think about Frank....”

“Check.”

I’d been watching Lucian’s face but hadn’t seen his lips move. I looked down at the board, and it was true that I’d accidentally positioned my queen for an impending and final victory over Lucian’s king. I looked up at the same time he did, a questioning expression on his face as he asked, “Did you just say check?”

I shook my head. “No, I thought you did.”

We both turned and looked at the big Indian, seated on the bunk and pointing a finger as big as a bratwurst toward the chessboard. The resonance of Virgil’s voice rattled through the damage in his throat like a very large and singular exhaust.

“Check.”