Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

Five o'clock in the button, as Tran would say.

I had my hand in the inside pocket of Tiffle's suit jacket, which was hanging behind the door, and as I pulled it out my fingers snagged on something. “I'll be damned,” I said, pulling out a little keyring with four double-serrated keys dangling from it. “Thank you, Claude.” As I slipped one of the keys into the lock at the top of the iron rod, the first car pulled away and I heard footsteps on the front porch. The second car door slammed and the front door to the cottage opened almost simultaneously.

“Surprise,” Dexter said from the front room. “Where the balloons and whistles?”

“How many you got?” I called.

“Four. Rest with Tran and two Doodys.”

“They all inside?” The first lock turned easily.

“No, you dinkus, I left them on the step.”

“You know where they go.” The lower lock resisted, and I chose another key.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shoes scuffled across the floor and then down the steps to the basement, and I heard the door close. A moment later the front door opened to a confusion of soft voices, one of them a deep Doody rumble.

“Here your jimmy,” Dexter said, coming into the office. He was toting a crowbar.

“Don't need it. The man thoughtfully left his keys.”

“Guy got to be in serious minus territory.” He leaned forward and studied the desk. “More locks than the mint, and he leaves the keys here.” The lower lock turned, and the metal rod slipped loose and clattered to the floor. “Good thing we ain't bein sneaky.”

“Dexter, why don't you go help Tran or something?” I flipped through the remaining keys.

“You the one needs help. Try the one with the nail polish on it.”

I did, and it fit smoothly into the top drawer and turned. “See?” Dexter said. “Good thing you got friends.”

“You're breathing on my neck.” I pulled the drawer open.

“I doin it free, too. Cap'n Snow would pay good cash for a little of that. What's in the box, you think?”

“Opening it,” I said patiently, “will be my very next act.”

“Lordy,” Dexter said. It was full of money: five stacks, apparently all hundreds, each three inches thick. “A little dividend,” Dexter said. “One each.”

I hesitated and then said, “Why not?” and scooped the money out of the box and handed it to him. “A sideline, maybe, something Charlie Wah didn't know about.”

“Or insurance,” Dexter said, stuffing money into his pockets. “Getaway stash.”

I put the box on the desk and rifled though the rest of the drawer's contents. A manila envelope contained thirty or forty green cards, genuine to my unpracticed eye, and four Canadian passports. The spaces for the photos were blank.

“Hot shit,” Dexter said over my shoulder. “Hello, Uncle Sam.”

“Downstairs, them,” Tran said, coming into the room. “Talk too much.”

“Let's hope they keep it up,” I said, fishing out a cardboard stationery box that had been shoved to the back of the drawer. “Oh, well, Claude, you wicked dog.” The box was packed with Polaroids of naked Chinese girls, taken right there in the office. They were all young and all unsmiling, but other than that they ran the gamut from plain to beautiful, fat to thin. They had been posed obscenely, and breasts pushed themselves at the camera like swollen bruises, sex organs gaped like wounds.

“Cops gone love that,” Dexter said.

“Bleary,” Tran said, picking one out with thin fingers. “Here Mopey.”

“Find Weepy and Snowbell,” I said, handing him the box. “Keep them.”

“I'll keep Snowbell,” Dexter offered. “Just kidding,” he said, his free hand upraised, when I turned to look at him.

An economy-sized box of twenty-four Trojan condoms rounded out Claude's private museum. Tran passed me the box of Polaroids, keeping four, and I closed the first drawer and went to work on the second.

“They all untaped?” I asked as I worked.

“Cept they hands and they eyes,” Dexter said.

“Good,” I said. “Where are the cases?”

“Hall,” Tran said. “You want?”

“Not yet.” The second drawer was full of papers: deeds, quit claims, contracts, business partnerships, immigration forms. I flipped through them, looking for signatures and finding Florence Lam neatly written at the bottom of seven. Folding them lengthwise, I put them on the floor. Then I thought again and pulled out all the papers with women's signatures.

“What time is it?”

“Five-forty-two,” Dexter said. “Gone be light soon.”

“Get the Doodys to untape their wrists and eyes, and then nail the door shut.”

“Yes, Massa,” Dexter said. He straightened up and threw an arm around Tran's shoulders. “Come on, peewee, the Doodys got work to do.”

“Ho, ho,” I said to the third drawer. It was empty except for a small stack of photographs bound by a rubber band. Charlie Wah's face gazed paternally up at me from the first one.

He hadn't known he was being photographed. He'd been caught coming up the walk, with Granger Street fuzzy and indistinct behind him. He figured prominently in five others: one talking to Ying, two walking down Hill Street with his bodybuilders, one at the wheel of a car, and one, barely recognizable, in a restaurant somewhere. Each of the pictures bore a little electronic date in the lower right corner. Tiffle had been busier than Charlie knew.

Just for the hell of it, I got up and went into the front room, listening to the blur of voices from the basement. Rolling a piece of CLAUDE B. TIFFLE ASSOCIATES letterhead into Florence Lam's typewriter, I typed Charlie Wah, and then Snake Triad, Taiwan. I looked at it for a moment and then realized what I'd forgotten to ask Everett. I couldn't ask him now, so I pulled my little phone book out of my pocket and dialed.

“Whassit?” Peter Lau asked blearily.

“Peter. Simeon. Sorry to wake you.”

“Jesus,” Lau said. “My head.”

“Listen, I need Charlie Wah's real name.”

Bedsprings creaked. “Why?”

“I want to send him a letter.”

“No, you don't.”

“Just give me the name, Peter.”

“Wah Yung-Fat. Spelled like it sounds, but no 'o' in 'Yung.' " WAH YUNG, I typed. "Hyphen between Yung and Fat?”

“Yes. What time is it?” — FAT, I typed. “Time for Charlie Wah to start worrying,” I said. “Keep your radio on the news stations.”

I hung up and carried the paper into the office, where I folded it tightly and slipped it under the rubber band around the photos. Then I closed the drawer, got up again, and trudged into the hallway to get the cases.

I put five or six thousand into Tiffle's little box and closed it, then spread the rest of it, more than half a million dollars, over the surface of his desk. It looked impressive. By now nails were being driven into the door at the head of the basement stairs, and then the banging stopped and Dexter ambled in, the hammer still in his hand.

“Wo,” he said, glimmering at the money. “Enough salt for Colonel Sanders.”

“It'll make a nice picture, don't you think?” I locked the desk and tossed Tiffle's keys on top of the money.

“Less the cops snatch it.”

“There'll be too many of them. They'll be watching each other. You got the list?”

“LAPD, INS, U.S. Marshals,” he recited. “Chinatown Association, Chinese Legal Aid Society, ACLU, Times, the radio and TV guys. Start dialin at seven. Give 'em the salt, the slicks downstairs, and the ol' Caroline B.”

“Don't forget the safe houses,” I said. “We haven't got any real slaves for them, but we've got four houses full of stuff.”

Dexter snapped his fingers. “The dresses,” he said, his face lighting up.