Little Saigon

Chapter 3

He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t concentrate. Every time the breeze rattled the blinds, his heart flew up and hovered like a bird. He kept hearing sounds. So he paced the cave-house, still seeing Li as she was pulled offstage, still hearing her last shriek above the screams in the Asian Wind.

He kept calling Frye Island to talk to his parents, but both lines were busy. Just before four in the morning, he got through. Edison told him to be at the island at eight, then put him on with his mother. Frye could hear her summoning strength, forcing her voice into rigid optimism. “I just know she’ll be okay,” said Hyla. “I just know it. Pray, Chuck. It works.”

“I’m going to be there for you,” said Frye.

Hyla hesitated. “Oh, Chuck, that’s so good.”

“We’ll get her back, Mom. I know it too.”

He hefted the cigar box, shook it, held it to his ear like he would a Christmas present, set it down. Solid. One pound. Animal, vegetable, mineral?

With Bennett’s orders not to open it ringing in his mind, Frye opened the thing anyway, layers of silver duct tape rasping off, sticking to his fingers. He lifted the top, looked in, then spilled the contents: one video cassette, black case, rewound.

He slipped it into his VCR, turned down the volume, and watched. Bad color, jerky camera work. Then Nguyen Hy, the young refugee leader, sitting alone in... a restaurant?

He checks his watch. He sips from a tea cup. Fifteen seconds later a man in a tennis shirt and chinos strides in, briefcase in hand, sunglasses on. He’s tallish, well-muscled, with a no-nonsense look when he takes off the shades. His mustache is heavy, drooping, red. They shake hands and talk silently; Nguyen accepts the case. More talk; Red Mustache leaves. Hy lights a cigarette, waits half a minute, then squares the briefcase before him, lifts open the lid and displays to the camera neat stacks of twenty-dollar bills. Nguyen smiles, shuts the case, leaves.

The screen goes blank, then Nguyen again — or someone who looks just like him. He’s far from the camera, standing under a tree not far from the Humanities building on the UCI campus. It must be early morning. No students. He’s being shot from above, from an office, or maybe the fifth floor German department.

Frye recognized the place because he’d flunked out.

Hy smokes, waits. Red Mustache arrives shortly, wearing a coat and tie this time, and a pair of professorial glasses. No mistaking his hair; his erect, athletic posture. The briefcase looks the same; they talk; he leaves. Again Nguyen waits, then walks toward the camera, stops on a walkway below, and, with a grin, opens the case.

Money again.

More than I make in a week, Frye thought.

He hit the fast forward to another scene with Nguyen. This time, the video tape showed still photographs of a drop near the carousel at South Coast Plaza. Nguyen sits alone on bench; Red Mustache, arrives with the briefcase and leaves without it, Hy doesn’t show off his booty this time, he just looks into the camera without smiling, then grabs the handle and leaves.

That was the grand finale.

Interesting theme, here. The only thing Frye could come up with was: If you get something you gotta give something. Especially if you’re getting a briefcase full of money.

He stuck the tape back in the box and took it to the far dark region of the cave-house, where he stashed it deep down in a cardboard box of Christmas ornaments.

He stood there for a moment, feeling the eerie proximity of the cave walls, the solid darkness encroaching just outside the beam of his flashlight. In the old days, he thought, I liked this cave. It was a little corner of mystery right in my own house. Now, it just scares me. Just like the surf when I go under. He felt a wave of vertigo wash over him, thick, warm, tangible. His scalp crawled and his heart sped up. He followed his light beam back out.

Benny, what did you get yourself into?

And who wants this tape so bad you can’t even keep it where you live?

He went outside. From his patio he could see the Pacific — a dark, horizonless plate with a wobble of moonlight on it. High tide at five-forty, three-to-five foot swell from the south, warm water, strong waves. Hurricane surf due soon, spawned in Mexico. What’d they say her name was — Dinah, Dolores, Doreen?

The trouble with five in the morning is Linda’s ghost. It’s her time, Frye thought, she’s got the run of the place. Ought to charge it rent. Eight o’clock in New York. She’s up...

He went back inside and pulled on a short-john wet-suit — one of his own MegaSuits — and ground some fresh wax onto a board. Then into a pair of red MegaSandals for the steep walk down the hill and into town. Where are you now, Li? What have they done with you? Red tennis shoes. The man who dragged you out was wearing red tennis shoes.

Forest Avenue was deserted. The morning air was cool but already he could feel warmth building inside the wetsuit, and smell the biting, high-pitched smell of rubber and sweat wafting up.

He thought about the ocean and saw himself going down, swirling with dizziness and vertigo, thrashing in panic. Will it happen again, this time? Next?

He walked past the leather shop and the flower stand, boarded up for the night. Then past the post office, where a bum was sleeping under the wanted posters, his shopping cart standing guard above him.

I’ll tell Detective Minh tomorrow: The man had red tennis shoes.

A painting in the Sassone Gallery stopped him cold, a giant blue swirling metallic thing that seemed spring-loaded, ready to act. The longer he stared into the dense psychedelia the more he saw forms of Li’s last show: bodies in mass exit, glass falling like rain, pockets of light marching the walls, a halo of red mist suspended in the stage glow over a dying man’s head.

On the kiosk outside the gallery hung a poster for the MIA Committee — Lucia Parsons’ group for getting American prisoners out of Vietnam. Frye studied the stylized graphic of the silhouette of a man’s head, with a strand of barbed wire behind it. Lucia Parsons, he thought. The Ledger society-page pet, and Laguna’s local heroine: rich, educated, willing to speak her mind. A former U.N. translator, fluent in four languages. She’d worked briefly for President Carter. Since coming to Laguna three years ago, she’d scaled down a bit: delivering food and money to earthquake victims in Guatemala, stopping offshore oil drilling, mobilizing the city to build shelters for the homeless. Then, two years ago, her MIA Committee began quietly getting attention. Now, she’s all over the place again, he thought. Always in the news, in the spotlight, rallying for support, money, publicity. A dozen trips to Hanoi in the last two years and, after each one, more “positive developments” on the MIAs. In last week’s papers she claimed she had evidence that American soldiers were still alive in Southeast Asia. She hadn’t delivered the proof. Frye wondered why. Lucky you missed the birthday concert tonight, he thought, would probably have wrecked a good cocktail dress.

Beside the MIA poster was a “no nukes” poster, below that, something for the whales. There was also a poster for the free clinic. Laguna, he thought, so rich and sated, but so hungry for a cause.

He jaywalked across a barren Coast Highway and arrived at Rockpile with the first light of dawn. The waves slapped the beach hard, indicating size and precision. To the north he could see the cliffs of Heisler Park, the profile of its gazebo, Las Brisas restaurant and a stand of palm trees, all outlined in lazy relief against a lightening sky. The rockpile began to materialize before him, whitewater surging on boulders where the pelicans stand eternal guard: observant, stoic, craphappy. He plopped down his board and sat on the sand beside it. Looking to the water he could see the sets forming outside, shadows within shadows, and feel the frightened beating of his heart.

Frye had once loved being in the sea, and she had loved having him in her. But things had changed since the accident, since Linda. When he went down in her now, he could feel her cold fingers reaching for him with dark intent, trying to hold him there forever. Frye understood, on some primitive level, that he had disappointed this ocean. He wasn’t sure how or when or why. Now she was unforgiving of error, poised for vengeance. To Frye, hell was a small, dark place.

There’s only one path to atonement, he thought.

Try.

In the hissing tube of his first wave, Frye kept seeing himself going under, swimming down through darkness but thinking it was up, his head crunching against the rocks or the bottom. At least it looked like himself, but his hair was longer and his eyes were different. Himself, but not himself.

It was a right — top-heavy, cylindrical and adamant, the sweet-spot rifling toward him as he shot through, rose to the lip and aimed back down for a bottom turn of such velocity that thoughts of disaster peeled from his mind and he finished in a balls-out rush that sent him and his board rocketing skyward, then down with a splash. For a moment he tred the dark water, heart thrashing like a kitten in a gunnysack.

One is enough. Don’t press it.

He sat on his board for a while.

As always, the fear left him hungry for something to hold onto. Something actual. Something warm. Something that won’t go away.

He paddled back in.

A young woman was standing on the beach as he came up. Jeans, a sweater, no shoes. Good face. Frye caught her eye and got an evaluatory glance that measured and classified him in one instant. A big dog with a red scarf sniffed around her, then pissed on a mound of sand for lack of anything more vertical. “You’re Chuck Frye.”

“I am.”

“I saw you in some contests. You were real good.”

“Thanks. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me?”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“I see. What’s your name?”

She yanked the choke chain, and the dog snapped to her side, red bandana trailing.

A moment later she was gone, blending with the sunrise, her dog a minor blotch of red moving across the sand.

He watched her go. There was always in Frye a yearning for the unlikely.

Newport Beach is six miles up the coast from Laguna, and is rightly considered to be a stronghold for conservative high-rollers. Their children drive Carerras and BMWs, purchase their educations at USC, marry each other, then head into solid careers. Basically, Frye had flunked out. To his mind, Newport Beach was a pain in the ass anyway, though it does have a couple of great breaks.

Frye Island is the smallest island in the Newport Harbor, but the only island with just one house, a helipad, tennis courts, and servants’ quarters on it. When Frye was a child, it was his entire world. Driving up Coast Highway, he wondered at the distance he had come since those days, about the life that had developed. From Frye Island to the cave-house in thirty-three years, he thought. Is this growing up?

According to his father, it was not. Edison considered him prodigal and had abandoned hope that Chuck would, in any Biblical sense, ever come home. Frye grew up with his father’s disappointments like some boys grow up with bicycles: one model always on the way out, another forever on the way in. He had let Bennett carry the family banner. Flagrantly, though often accidentally, Frye had besmirched the family name. As a child, he had been indifferent to adults, given to odd enthusiasms, and always seemed to get caught. A school psychologist had termed him “troubled.” He was the kind of kid who drinks highball remnants at his parents’ cocktail parties, then falls into the punch bowl. Frye knew that Edison had hoped for vindication in his university career, at which he had failed miserably. Instead, he opted for the pro surfing tour, the MegaShop and his line of surfing gadgetry, all a shameful demerit to the Frye name. His high status as a surfer was his nadir with Edison, something on par with sodomy or treason. His marriage to Linda Stowe had been “a dot of light at the end of one helluva dark tunnel,” as Edison had once quipped, but was now coming to a screeching official halt. His stint as an Orange County Ledger reporter — his first real job — was over.

Long ago, Frye had abdicated success to Bennett, to whom it came more easily, upon whom it sat with a certain grace that Chuck could never muster. After a point, it was expected.

Turning onto the Newport Peninsula, Frye mused on his latest sin against the family name: an alfresco sexual event that took place at his own Halloween party and was found so shocking by neighbors that they called the police. The foreplay was duly photographed by one Donovan Swirk, a photojournalist of the lowest order. The picture, which ran front page of Swirk’s Avenger, showed Frye in an ape costume — without the head — chasing a woman dressed as a maid toward a hedge of blooming hibiscus. Frye was leering wildly. The maid’s minidress danced up to reveal her naked buns, which caught the strobe flash just so. But her face was turned from the camera. The caption read: HALLOWEEN DREAM — LAGUNATIC CHUCK FRYE GOES APE OVER MYSTERY MAID! What actually transpired behind the hedge was hinted at. Swirk had made an offer of one hundred dollars for the maid’s name, which was to be announced in his next issue. Edison and Linda’s father — Laguna Mayor Ned Stowe — had run Swirk out of business with dispatch. Frye punched Swirk in a restaurant one night, but the damage was done. He wouldn’t give up the name of the Mystery Maid, and that was that. He was released on his own recognizance, charges pending — disturbing the peace and indecent exposure.

Frye remembered the angry visit from Ned, demanding to know how Frye could pull such a shit stunt while married to his daughter. Every few weeks since then, the Laguna cops had called him in to say that Mayor Stowe would press charges unless the Mystery Maid was identified. Frye sensed a bluff here: Everybody feared they knew the girl. This civic interest was, to Frye’s thinking, prurient beyond belief. On some primitive level, he had cuckolded the entire city.

As he drove over the peninsula bridge and watched the yachts bobbing at their moorings, he realized with a sharp sadness that Swirk’s photograph had doomed his marriage long before he even knew it was doomed, an invisible turning point, an imperceptible pivot. How had he been so deaf then, he wondered, only to hear it now, like the report of some distant pistol? The beginning of the end with Linda, he thought: and I was too dumb to know it.

The Cyclone eased off of Balboa Boulevard, then through a series of short side streets. He crossed a narrow bridge, regarding the canals and homes crowded onto the precious sand-spit peninsula. The road shrunk to one lane and took him over another bridge that left him facing a black iron gate with a brass plate that said FRYE ISLAND. He got out and called on the intercom. A moment later the gate swung open on silent, well-oiled hinges.

Home.

The driveway leading to the main house was wide and lined with stiff, pungent junipers. Edison preferred masculine flora. Frye guided the car around a curve, bringing into view the big antebellum house, sprawling lawn, a sliver of swimming pool, the helipad and copter at the far west end, the servants’ house, and his father’s cottage. Two new Mercedes and a red Jeep sparkled in front of the white colonnade of the house. Bennett’s van was there, with two more cars Frye didn’t recognize. Beyond the orange trees that surrounded the entire island, ocean glimmered on pale sand. Motor yachts heaved slowly at the dock — Edison’s Absolute looking like a skyscraper turned on its side.

Hyla met him at the door. She hugged him and he pressed gently back, feeling the stiffness of her aging body, smelling her hair, thinking that she seemed a skosh shorter than the last time he’d seen her. Mom. Straight shoulders. Strong face. Eyes blue and clear as bottled water. Her hair was cut short, in New Wave fashion. She stepped back and looked at him. “All I can do is thank God you two are alive,” she said. “And all I can tell you is that Li will be all right. We’ll get her back. I know it.”

Frye nodded. Then Hyla was crying, but her face never lost its composure, just big tears rolling down her cheeks. “I keep thinking about her, about what I could have done...”

Frye held her close, saying what he could about not worrying, thinking positive, faith, and a dozen other ideas that seemed pitifully outgunned by actuality. It was the first time since she learned about Benny that Frye had seen her cry.

She took a deep, quivering breath and stepped away again. “They’re in the cottage. Breakfast is ready when you are. And happy birthday, Chuck. We’ll have a proper dinner on Thursday, okay?”

He walked across the lawn to his father’s cottage, a squat, one-level affair on the far north end of the island. A kennel built onto it teemed with springer spaniels, who bounced and yapped as Frye ran his hand along the chain link. It’s useless to try for names anymore, he thought: There must be a dozen dogs now, maybe more.

As usual, the cottage was locked. He knocked, and a moment later Edison swung open the door: gray hair slicked back over his big patrician head, shirt-sleeves rolled up, eyes hard, his face heavy and lined. “Well,” he said. “Look what the tide washed in.”

Bennett was sitting behind the desk. Donnell Crawley leaned against one wall, arms crossed. A man that Frye recognized as Pat Arbuckle, head of Frye Company Security, stood beside the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. Two of his men were with him, at semi-attention. A bulky man in a pale suit sat on the sofa, with the telephone to his ear, concentrating.

“You stash that box I gave you?” Bennett asked.

“Stashed.”

Edison reintroduced Chuck to Arbuckle.

The man with the telephone stood up and gave it to Edison with a frustrated shrug. Edison listened a moment, then barked into the mouthpiece. “I don’t give a damn what any lame-ass senate committee thinks it’s doing this morning. Get me Lansdale out of that meeting and do it now.” His bushy eyebrows raised and lowered. “Of course I can wait, but not for very goddamned long I can’t!” He slammed down the receiver and wiped his forehead. “Politicians. Okay, Bennett, we’ve got Nguyen and his Vietnamese out on the pavement, digging for a witness who doesn’t have lockjaw. We’ve got Minh and the Westminster cops looking for this Eddie Vo. I’ll get Lansdale to light a fire under the FBI. What in hell are you doodling there, anyway?”

Bennett looked up at Edison, then back down at the graph pad before him. Frye looked over his shoulder. A simple schematic of Saigon Plaza, the parking lot and shops, the place where they’d found the blue Celica marked by a square with an X in it. “Somebody at the plaza saw her.”

“Maybe they’ll talk to Nguyen.”

Arbuckle stepped forward, flicking his cigarette into the fireplace. “Apply pressure.”

“Pat’s good at that,” said Edison.

Arbuckle’s men nodded gravely.

Bennett leaned back in the chair. “Apply lots of it. That fat Dream Reader sat there and watched the car pull up. I know she saw them. Cops searched her place but they found the same thing we did. Nothing. Bring me that phone, Chuck. Maybe Minh’s got something on Vo.”

Edison took Arbuckle by the arm and aimed him toward the door. “You’re wasting time and oxygen, Pat. Go apply pressure to the fat madam.”

Bennett finished dialing, looked up. “Money talks with her. And get one of Hy’s people to interpret.”

Arbuckle was still nodding when Edison pushed him out the door, his assistants in tow.

Frye looked at the heavy man in the suit. “Chuck Frye,” he said.

“I know,” said the man. “Phil Barnum. I’m the congressman for the Westminster district. Friend of Bennett’s.”

Edison glanced at Chuck, then to Bennett, who was still waiting for his call to go through. “You’ll get a ransom demand today. And you ought to be home where those bastards can find you. Fucking Lansdale. Where’s the FBI anyway, those goddamned blue-suit Boy Scouts?”

Edison now marched to a far wall, onto which he had stapled several sheets from a large desk pad. He had written the main headings in black felt-tip: POLICE (MINH), FBI (LANSDALE), HOUSE/SENATE (BARNUM), FRYE COMPANY SECURITY (ARBUCKLE), COMMITTEE TO FREE VIETNAM (NGUYEN), BENNETT, EDISON. Under each he had noted the exact time and whatever progress each had made, or whatever assignments he wanted them to carry out. Frye saw that his own name was not included. Beneath (LANSDALE), Edison now scrawled “8:12 A.M. — STILL OUT!”

“Bastard,” he muttered, then dropped the pen, which swung on a string tacked to the blotter.

Bennett raised his hand, leaned into the phone. “Minh... Bennett Frye. Was that Eddie Vo’s Celica I chased all over hell last night, or not? The word I get from the street is it was.” Bennett pressed the speaker button and put down the receiver. Frye heard Detective John Minh’s clear voice come back over the line.

“Eddie Vo drives a dark blue Celica, painted out like the one at the plaza. He reported it stolen two days ago.”

“You bust him?”

Minh paused. “We approached him for questioning early this morning. He escaped.”

“What do you mean, escaped?”

“We’ll find him. We now consider him our prime suspect.”

“I sure as hell hope so. What about fingerprints, hair? Got an ID on the dead man yet?”

“That’s all I can tell you right—”

“ ‘Cause that’s all you have!” bellowed Edison. He began a verbal assault and Minh clicked off. Edison stopped mid-sentence, sat down, stood up again, and looked at Chuck. “What you hear in this room stays in this room.”

Frye nodded. “Fine, but Eddie Vo didn’t do it.”

They looked at him. Edison raised an eyebrow. “The hell’s that mean?”

“He was in the parking lot, sitting in a car. I saw him. Minh knows it — I told him last night.”

“Then he’s obviously found out something you don’t know. He’s the prime suspect, son. You heard the detective.”

“I don’t care what he is, Vo wasn’t even inside the Wind when it happened. Bennett, listen to me... I saw him sitting—”

Edison shook his head and turned to Bennett. “Minh isn’t going fast enough on this. Gimme that phone, I’m trying Lansdale again!” Thirty seconds later he was swearing out the senator, demanding an elite FBI team in Westminster before evening. Frye listened to Lansdale, pausing, evading, placating.

“She could be at the bottom of the Pacific by then!”

“They’ll find her, Ed. Just hang tight.”

Edison pounded down the receiver, stared at Bennett’s notepad for a moment, then marched to the intercom and demanded breakfast immediately. He looked at Chuck again, then at Bennett. “What do you want him to do?”

“I need you to drop off Kim at the LAX, Chuck. She’ll have the Halliburton case with her. You got some gas in that clunker?”

“It’s ready. Shouldn’t I do something a little more useful?”

“Like what?” asked Edison.

Frye looked at his father, then at Bennett. “There are plenty of things I could—”

Edison stood up and went toward the door. “What you can do is what Bennett tells you to do and no more, Chuck. It’s a case of too many cooks.”

“While you and Minh chase a guy who didn’t do it? Come on, I’ll go out with Hy’s people, work the neighborhoods... something. I know a little bit about asking questions.”

Edison shook his head. “This isn’t the time for that.”

“You better go,” said Bennett. “Kim’s plane leaves at eleven, and I want you there plenty early. Call me as soon as you get home, okay? And one more thing, if Kim says there’s been a change, there’s been a change.”

“Of what?”

“Do what she says.”

Frye pushed through the door and headed back to his car. Bennett padded up behind him. “Chuck... there is something else you can do for us. It’s not easy, but your contacts with the cops might help. If it gets sticky, back off. But find out what you can about John Minh.”

Tough assignment, thought Frye. Cops don’t talk about other cops. Especially to reporters, ex or not. “What’s in the case that Kim’s taking to the airport?”

Bennett looked at him matter-of-factly. “Li.”