Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

We hadn't eaten in what seemed like weeks, so we went to a McDonald's and had the meal I'd been aiming for all those bruises ago. Tran dried his cheeks and ate two of everything I ordered, cramming it under his twenty-inch waistline, and I searched my mind for the positive aspects of getting old. One would have sufficed. After he'd gotten up for an ice cream and returned with two, he drove the point home by saying, “You eat like old fart, too.”

“You'll be an old fart someday,” I said.

“No,” he said, attacking the ice cream. If another kid had said it, I might have thought it meant something else.

“You really,” I asked, returning to an old theme, “don't think you should call your mother?”

His face went still, and he swallowed before he spoke. “No,” he said. “What I'm going to say to her?”

“You can say she's got one son alive.”

He went back to the ice cream. “No talking,” he said.

I pushed some food around and wondered why I'd wanted it in the first place. I'd finally summoned the will to pick up a french fry when he said, in an elaborately casual tone, “How many people you killed?”

I put the french fry back on the plate. “One.”

“How?” His ice cream had all his attention.

“Burned him.” It's not something I like to dwell on, although I still dream about it.

“Wah," he said, giving it an entirely different intonation than he gave Charlie's last name. He was staring at me now. "Very bad.”

My turn to change the subject. “Let's go say hi to Mr. Tiffle,” I said.

Tiffle's office was a little bungalow set back from Granger Street, which was one-way and wider than a cow path, but not much. Chain link fence surrounded it, keeping the world at a distance from Claude Tiffle's plentiful secrets. Whatever doubt I may have felt about the likelihood of anyone actually having such a name was battered into submission by a comfortingly old-fashioned sign hanging over the gate that said CLAUDE B. TIFFLE ASSOCIATES, ATTORNEYS AT LAW.

“Associates?”

“Oh, sure,” Tran said in a tone I was coming to recognize as derision. "Should say 'sweeties.' "

“What did you do here?” The office was dark except for one light in a room at the back of the cottage.

“Deliver money. Sometimes pick up. Two times, I think.”

“Front or back?”

“Front.”

“What time?”

“Same time like now.”

“So,” I said, just getting it clear, “you took the money from the houses in San Pedro and brought it here.”

“Not always,” he said. “Sometimes a car behind us would blink lights. Bright, low, bright, low. Then we pull over and they take the money.”

“How did you know it was the right car?”

“Right number of blinks.”

The light in Tiffle's bungalow snapped out, and another came on in the front room. “Did you know when you made the pickup whether you'd be dropping it off here?”

“No. Supposed to come here unless we see the car. Mostly, the car.”

“Where did it stop you?”

He pondered. “Anywhere.”

“It couldn't be anywhere,” I said. “Charlie was going to a lot of trouble to avoid having Chinese stopped with the money. He would have pulled you over someplace near wherever he felt safe.”

“Charlie on the boat,” Tran said.

“Maybe.” I thought about the evening. “And maybe our friend Everett is a liar.”

Tran mentally ran through some of the trips. “Chinatown,” he said. “Always Chinatown.”

I was watching the lighted window. No one seemed to be looking at us, but I started Alice and turned on the headlights so as not to appear furtive. Around the corner, I pulled over again. “Did you ever pick up money from the restaurants, like the men we saw today?”

“Not thinking, you,” Tran said. “We don't know about that.”

“Probably not enough money anyway,” I said, attempting to recover a little face. “Not enough to get the cops suspicious if the mules got pulled over.”

“Charlie Wah not worried about cops,” Tran said. “Worried about other gangs.”

“Other gangs,” I said. “Jesus.” A door opened creakily in my mind, and a little light went on, not much of a light, but sometimes it doesn't take much.

“Sure. Other gang takes the money, kills the soldiers. This way they only kill Vietnamese.”

“Charlie doesn't care about the soldiers,” I argued.

“Soldiers,” Tran said patiently, even sympathetically, “don't know that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm stupid. Why the armed guard, then?”

He reached over and shook me gently, as though I were asleep. “So we don't take the money,” he said.

I thought about it. The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. “You know in English,” I asked, “ 'good, better, best'?”

“Sure.” Tran was openly humoring me now. “In school.”

“Say it, then.”

“Good, better, best,” he repeated, looking puzzled.

I punched him on the arm.

“Good team,” I said.

Tran hid a smile by looking at his lap.

“One more place,” I said, even though the new place wasn't anything I wanted to explore. “The Jesus lady you told me about.” I gunned the car. “Let's go see where she lives.”

She lived in Mrs. Summerson's house.

I had known she would, but hope springs eternal. The house sat there at the end of its extensive front yard, looking secluded and spacious, the perfect place to hide thirty or forty CIAs.

I sat at the wheel, trying to put Mrs. Summerson and Charlie Wah into the same room, and failing utterly. Why would Charlie need an ex-missionary? Why bring a gwailo into the distribution process? Tiffle I could see: He had his uses. But Mrs. Summerson had been Eleanor's savior; she'd taken care of her when Eleanor was a temporarily abandoned child with limited English. She'd been nervous, I recalled, when we'd asked her about Lo, but still, all those years ago, she'd given Eleanor affection and a home and brought her through the days of Ching-chong Chinaman. Of all the people in the world, outside of her immediate family, and maybe me on a good day, Eleanor loved Esther Summerson most.

And Lo, I thought, adding him to the list.

Eleanor was not going to be happy about this.

“How many times?” I asked.

“Two.”

“You delivered or picked up?”

“Picked up.”

“Great,” I said miserably. “That's marvelous.” Alice's clock, undergoing one of its temporary resurrections, ticked at us.

“Gave me cookies, her,” Tran said at last.

“I've no doubt.”

“We go in?”

“No. I need to think.”

“Not good, better, best?” he asked.

“Not nearly.” I tried one last time to be wrong. “Listen, Tran, an old lady, tall, thick glasses, white hair cut short, right?”

“In the button,” he said. I was going to write a dictionary of idioms someday.

“Well, fuck a duck,” I said. “We'll have to talk to her. And when the nice lady you tried to frighten-”

“Eleanor,” he said.

“Right, good for you, when Eleanor comes around tonight or tomorrow, you don't tell her about this, okay?”

In the end, I told Eleanor about Mrs. Summerson, after all.

When we got back to Topanga it was past ten, and I phoned her in Venice and asked if she could come take a look at Tran's arm. Then I called Dexter and added "black" to the list of qualifications for the knight in armor he was supposed to be recruiting. When he'd hung up, I dialed Peter Lau, first to make sure that he'd gotten home, and second, to check on what Everett had told me. Everett was trussed hand and foot in my bedroom with one end of Charlie's handy cuffs locked around a leg of the bed. I'd bandaged his thigh.