T. Parker - Little Saigon

“No. I’d end up with my byline on the same kind of lies you let the other papers print today.”

Wiggins’s face darkened. “Chuck, let me put it another way. Stay the fuck out of Little Saigon and forget about Colonel Thach. I’ll give you the first tip for your big exposé. The main reason we didn’t release the MO on Xuan’s murder isn’t because we’re afraid of starting a riot in Little Saigon, though that’s a possibility. The main reason is that Colonel Thach can’t even leave his apartment in Ho Chi Minh City anymore. He’s in protective isolation — a better term for it is house arrest. The new Hanoi Politburo doesn’t trust him. He’s an old war machine and they know it, and they also know they can’t control him. They’ve been sitting on him since June. His ice is too thin for the kind of skating you’re talking about.”

Frye considered. “That’s exactly what Hanoi would tell you, if Thach were running an operation like this, isn’t it?”

Wiggins sighed and looked at Frye as if he were a moron. “Hanoi didn’t tell us that, Chuck, We’ve got more reliable sources than those lying bastards. So lighten up. Let the FBI do its job and you do yours. What the hell is your job anyway? Besides hustling Tuy Nha?”

“I don’t have one, exactly.”

“Well, you’re so hot to trot, why don’t you go find one?” “I’m working on it.”

Bill Antioch presided over the empty MegaShop, drinking his ever-present health shake. “Got you all signed up for the Masters at Huntington, Frye. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m also telling everyone you’ll be at the showing of Radically Committed Saturday night. At the Surf in Huntington. Any truth to that rumor?”

“It’s my movie, I guess I ought to be there.”

“Gnardical.” Bill gave him four comp tickets.

“How are we doing today, Bill, from a sales angle?”

“We’ve sold one bar of wax.”

“Large or small?”

Frye surveyed the shop. Bill had straightened things, dusted, arranged the boxes and boards, taken down the faded Christmas signs, put the wetsuits back on the rack by size. MegaT-shirts were marked down to three for ten bucks. This stung, but Frye said nothing. The windows were clean. The first inklings of retail hopelessness crept over him as he reached behind the counter for the phone.

He called Elite Management and got the usual put-off from the receptionist. She said that Rollie Dean Mack would return his call, but Frye had heard that one before. He tried again to get the address.

“It’s like no way, unless you have an appointment,” she said. She sounded like a certified surf-bunny, about age eighteen, loose-jawed, heavy on the schwas. “We don’t give out our business address unless we’re expecting you. Elite isn’t, like, geared to the publuck.”

Frye slammed down the phone. Then it hit him. “Advertising.”

“Can’t afford it,” said Antioch.

“No. Elite ran advertising in the Ledger, on Wednesdays, so that means someone had to go over the veloxes with them on Tuesday morning.”

“Cool.”

He called the Ledger and asked for display advertising, Dianne Resnick. Dianne once liked Frye, who occasionally wrote puff pieces to make her advertisers sound better than they were. Frye did this because Dianne had great legs, and because exaggerating the virtues of hopelessly third-rate companies was just plain fun. He brought a desperate, manic enthusiasm to these pieces, which read like a cross between Hunter Thompson and Alexander Haig. The all-seeing Ronald Billingham had edited the hell out of them.

Dianne answered the phone in her sales voice, soothing and eager to please. Frye explained that he needed to know where Dianne sent the ad proofs for Elite Management. The pulling of these ads was understandably a sore spot with Dianne, who was now out fifty-six dollars and seventy-eight cents a week in commission. “You still make ten times a week more than I did, Di,” he said.

“That’s because I bring money to this paper. Any nerd can write copy.”

“I did my best to tout those greedy mutants passing themselves off as businessmen. You have to admit that. It would mean a lot to me if you could give me that address, Dianne.”

She sighed. He heard papers shuffling. She put him on hold for a full minute. “Okay, Chuck, here it is. For a company called Elite, they sure didn’t seem to have much going for themselves. The receptionist proofed the ads, a little beach tart is what she sounded like on the phone. Anyway, it’s Number Eighteen Palisade, up in Newport Center. I’m sure the receptionist will just love you.”

“Rad.”

“Like, woah. Any chance you’re coming back? I really did like the piece you did about my rug dealer being a Persian prince, and his family being held hostage by the Ayatollah.”

“That one was true. Just nobody bothered to ask him. Put me through to Billingham, would you?”

“I think he misses you, Chuck.”

Frye asked Billingham for his job back and Billingham said no. Frye told him he had a Pulitzer winner on a Little Saigon patriot who finally got tracked down and beheaded by Hanoi. Bill Antioch looked on with horror.

Billingham waited. “I read the papers, Frye. Nothing at all about anybody’s head rolling. This kind of like watching that welterweight go down and calling it a dive?”

“It was a dive, and I can substantiate every word of it. Now this murder piece is already written. The slug at the top says Frye/ Ledger. Cost you my spindly salary for a look at it.”

“No can do. I’ve replaced you with a J-school girl already.”

“What do you pay her, two-seventy-five a week?”

“Two-fifty.”

“There should be a new rung in hell for editors like you.”

“Give us a quote about how the Fryes are coping with the kidnapping.”

“Get fucked, Ron.”

“Go to another paper. Our circulation’s dying anyway.”

“I just may do that, and you’ll be sorry I did.”

“How come you need an address for Elite Management?”

He guided the Cyclone through the long thin shadows of the Newport Center palms. The palms were newly planted, a hundred feet tall and there were millions of them. Everyone had a different story of what they’d cost: some said three thousand per tree, some said twenty thousand. The idea was to make the place more attractive to shoppers and the palms were brought in, like relief pitchers, after twenty years of so-so consumerism.

On the afternoon that he was fired, Frye had sat in his car for an hour and watched them plant a few. The root systems, carefully bound in wet burlap, were the size of living rooms. Now the emerald grass of Newport Center had been rolled right up to the trunks and the trees looked like they’d been there all along.

Number 18 Palisade was on the west side of Newport Center, in a building that housed a bank, a beauty salon, and a jewelry store. He climbed the stairs, looking in, each of the clients in a different state of beauty improvement. The hairdressers hovered over them, all elbows and chatter.

Elite Management was next to the restrooms. The door was locked, so Frye pushed the intercom button. The surf-bunny sounded half asleep when she asked who was there. Frye said he was UPS. The lock buzzed open and he walked in. The girl’s desk plate said SHELLY — RECEPTIONIST. Frye smiled and watched her face turn sour at his lack of packages and brown uniform. She had long blond hair, a denim dress, and skin rich and dark as teak wood.

“You’re not UPS, no way,” she said.

“That’s true.”

“There’s no reason for you to be here.”

“Why not?”

She picked up an index card and read Frye the blurb about Elite not being geared to the public. He studied the office: a small room with two chairs, a desk, a Hockney litho on one wall, and a door behind Shelly. The door was shut. She had been brushing her hair. The brush lay on her desk blotter, trailing golden scraps. She finished the reading and looked up at him. Her face changed. “You’re Chuck Frye, aren’t you?”