Big Mango (9786167611037) (4 page)

“Well,” Eddie admitted, “a lot of it, I
guess.”

Eddie and Winnebago stood together in silence
for a moment, each contemplating the mute relic of their past that
had suddenly elbowed its way into their present. Finally Winnebago
took a last puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray
already overflowing onto the counter.

“Who do you think sent it, Eddie?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

Winnebago just nodded a couple of times, then
looked up and studied Eddie carefully.

“I look at that picture,” he said, “and I got
to tell you I get a real bad feeling.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I don’t see why anybody would send
it, except to say they had some sort of business with you. And
don’t you think this is a pretty strange way to say that? Unless a
guy was a little off, wouldn’t he just call you up and say, ‘Hey,
Eddie, how’s tricks? Maybe you don’t remember me, but I’ve got some
business with you.’ Wouldn’t he just do that?”

“You’d think so.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what gives me a bad
feeling.”

Eddie decided that Winnebago was just being
inexplicably logical for once rather than measuring the pulse of
the unseen.

“How about the girls, Winnebago? Can you
remember any of them?”

“No. I’m ashamed to admit it, but all them
little chickens always looked pretty much the same to me. Besides,
I was only in Thailand a few times.” Winnebago tapped the snapshot
with his forefinger. “This is that place in Bangkok where we used
to go on R&R.”

Eddie picked the photograph up and looked at
it again. “How do you know that?”

“Those are Thai girls, man. Couldn’t be
anybody else.”

“I thought they were probably
Vietnamese.”

“Shit, Eddie.” Winnebago sounded disgusted.
“How could you forget? We’d get off the R&R flights, not even
get a room, just go straight to the bars. Usually slept on the
floor of one of them.” He shook his head a few times. “Those girls
may have been whores, but they were nice girls. They saved my life
more than once, I’ll tell you. Those are absofuckinglutely Thai
girls. You can bet your ass on it, man.”

Eddie looked at the picture some more and
felt the memories begin to stir.

“Maybe you’re right. I didn’t see that
before.”

Winnebago snorted. “You see today better. I
see yesterday better. I’m not sure who that makes worse off,
Eddie.”

The bell on the shop door tinkled and a very
fat woman came in with a very skinny man. They were wearing
matching polyester jogging suits in phosphorescent blue with white
stripes running down both legs and they stood looking around
uncertainly until Winnebago bounded out from behind the cash
register.

“Welcome, welcome! Just have a look around
folks. Hasn’t changed a bit since Allen Ginsberg and I started the
place in ‘65. Got first editions of Ginsberg’s books up there.” He
pointed to the rickety staircase. “Every one autographed by him
personally!”

The couple nodded tentatively and started up
the stairs as Winnebago settled back on his stool behind the
counter.

Eddie gave him a long look.

“Sometimes commerce demands you stretch a
point or two,” Winnebago mumbled, carefully avoiding Eddie’s
eyes.

Eddie picked up the photograph and pushed it
back into his pocket. He now knew something about it he hadn’t
known before, but it wasn’t much, and off-hand he couldn’t see what
use it was to him anyway.

“Okay, Winnebago. I got to run. See you
later.”

“Later, man.”

As he left the store, Eddie heard the fat
woman and the skinny man coming back down the stairs.

“Who the fuck is Allen Ginsberg?” the woman
was asking the man, but he wasn’t answering.

EDDIE waited outside Judge Rybeck’s court at the Hall
of Justice trying to make himself as comfortable as possible on the
hard mahogany bench. He hoped it wouldn’t be long before they got
to him because he was just there to enter a plea. He could do that
in his sleep. As a matter of fact, he usually did.

His client was a man named Dante Bauer who
was in the limousine business. Dante had been busted for living on
the earnings of a prostitute after his girlfriend Shalynn had
offered to go down on a plainclothes cop in the men’s room of the
St. Francis Hotel for a hundred bucks. Shalynn said it was all just
a misunderstanding. Dante said he didn’t know Shalynn was a hooker,
and besides, no one could actually live on the shit money she made
giving $100 blowjobs.

“Hey, Dare, I thought big-time criminal
mouthpieces just cut cozy deals for their clients and then hung out
at the golf course the rest of the day.”

“Yeah, Wuntz, you got that right. That’s
exactly what big-time criminal mouthpieces do.”

Kelly Wuntz wedged his way onto the bench
next to Eddie, glaring at a gangbanger in a baggy, red and gold
49ers jacket until the kid slid over and gave him some room. Wuntz
was a vice cop who worked the old Tenderloin district and he had
accumulated more nauseating stories about people than Eddie ever
really wanted to hear.

“Why are you always so hard on yourself,
Dare? Myself now, I think you’re an okay guy. If my ass were in a
crack, you’re exactly the fellow I’d want wiping it for me.”

“That’s disgusting, Wuntz.”

“Don’t mention it.”

A silence fell and they sat for a while
contemplating the courthouse crowd together. It had taken Eddie a
while to understand where he had landed after he was kicked out of
his big, uptown office: the one with the indirect lighting, the
glistening hardwood floors, and the expensive oriental rugs. He
eventually worked out that he had crossed over an invisible line,
one he had never before known existed. As quietly as a spy, he had
slipped through the border that divided the orthodox world in which
he had previously lived his life from an angry, corrosive realm
whose citizens reveled in being at war with everybody else.

Lawyers were like priests in that world,
Eddie soon discovered, the secular priests of the Other Side. In
the privacy of their lawyers’ offices, people told stories of
deeds, failures, and betrayals that were too horrible to mention
even in a real confessional. People came into Eddie’s office and
told him what they thought about when they couldn’t sleep at night.
They told him sad stories, shameful stories, brutal stories, even
funny stories. But they were always stories of misery, greed, fear,
and stupidity. They were stories that would break your heart, if
you let them.

Some lawyers Eddie knew had crossed the line
deliberately, so romantically enraged at the random idiocy they
encountered every day that they were determined to change things.
But they never did. Before long, even the craziest of them stopped
worrying about how the universe was screwing their clients and
started worrying instead about how it was screwing them. The Hall
of Justice was a mean and unforgiving world. It cut no slack for
good intentions.

“You hear about Judge Bono?’ Kelly suddenly
asked.

Eddie shook his head.

“We busted the bastard last night. He was
parked down in the Presidio in his big Mercedes swabbing out some
16-year-old’s throat with his shriveled little weenie.”

“Nobody cares about that garbage anymore,
Wuntz. It’ll probably just end up getting Bono appointed to the
Supreme Court.”

“You think?”

Wuntz savored his tales and liked to string
them out. This time he really had the look in his eye. Eddie saw
it, so he was half prepared when Wuntz eased in his punch line.

“I know we’re politically real righteous
around here and all that good shit…” Wuntz looked away and Eddie
couldn’t make out the expression on his face any longer. “But even
in San Francisco, don’t you think it might’ve been better for
Bono’s career if he’d been tonsil humping a girl?”

Wuntz turned back to Eddie, roaring at his
own story until he was almost choking. A few heads tilted toward
him, distracted briefly from their own private miseries by the
sight of an overweight man in a wrinkled, polyester sports coat
laughing himself into a fit. The Hall of Justice was not normally a
place where people found very much to laugh about.

Eddie was even smiling a little himself when
his telephone rang.

“Dad?”

“Hey, Michael. This is a surprise.”

Michael, as he usually did when he and Eddie
talked, got right to the point.

“Mom said I had to apologize to you before
she’d give me my allowance.”

“Apologize for what?”

“She said I was rude when you called last
week.”

Eddie considered that. “Do you think you were
rude?”

“No. I was watching the Lakers game. I just
didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Then don’t apologize.”

“Okay, I won’t.” The boy paused for a moment
and Eddie could almost hear him thinking, weighing exactly where
that left him. Then he made up his mind. “So here’s Mom. Would you
tell her to give me my allowance anyway?”

Eddie listened to the telephone receiver
scrape against something as Michael handed it to Jennifer.

“Hello, Eddie. I’m sorry about that.
Michael’s getting a little hard to deal with these days and I just
thought it wasn’t fair the way he talked to you when you called
last week so I insisted he apologize. Anyway, don’t make too much
of it. I’ll give him his allowance. You know how teenagers are. I
hope we didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

Jennifer always talked a lot when she was
working herself up to telling Eddie something she thought he
wouldn’t like to hear, so Eddie didn’t say anything.

“Eddie? Hello? Are you there, Eddie?”

“Yes, Jennifer, I’m here.”

Eddie glanced up and noticed that Wuntz was
trying hard not to look like he was listening.

“Look, Eddie, there is one other thing.”

At least she isn’t going to take any longer
getting to it.

“Franklin and I are going to Australia next
month.”

Jennifer had married Franklin Pierce who was
a spectacularly successful developer of shopping malls a few months
after she left Eddie. While the timing was rife with unhappy
implications, Eddie had never dwelled on it, preferring to keep in
mind instead that Franklin was a pleasant enough man and that
Michael could certainly have done a great deal worse for a
stepfather.

“Franklin wants to go diving on the Barrier
Reef.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you see, since Michael’s school
holidays are next month, we’d like him to go with us.”

So that was what Franklin’s latest kick had
to do with him. He had been just about to ask.

“The problem there of course is that Michael
won’t be able to come to see you this vacation. There’s the
problem.”

Jennifer paused a moment to let that sink
in.

“Michael really wants to go with us, Eddie.
If you don’t mind, that is.”

He damned well did mind.

“I wish you’d talked to me about this first,
Jennifer. I can’t tell Michael now that he’s not going to Australia
because he has to spend his vacation with me.”

“Well, It’s such a great opportunity for him,
Eddie. I knew you’d want him to go.”

“Yes, but I’d also like to spend some time
with him, Jennifer.”

“Next vacation, Eddie. Promise.”

Eddie clicked his tongue against his teeth a
couple of times while he thought, although he supposed there wasn’t
all that much for him to think about.

“I gather Michael doesn’t mind not seeing me
for a while.”

“I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Eddie.
This is just such an exciting opportunity for him, that’s all. So,
is it all right with you?”

Eddie took a deep breath. “Whatever he wants,
Jennifer.”

“Wonderful, Eddie. I really do think that’s
the right thing to do.”

Eddie knew the conversation was over after
that, so he drifted politely along with the small talk until
Jennifer decided a decent enough interval had passed to break off
and hang up.

When Eddie slowly folded up the telephone and
pushed it back into his pocket, he realized that Wuntz was looking
at him.

“Your ex busting your hump, partner?”

“One of them. And the other’s waiting her
turn.”

Oh Christ, Eddie suddenly remembered, he had
never called Kathleen back. That was going to cost him.

“You haven’t had much luck with the family
thing, have you, Dare?”

Eddie tried not to think of it that way. He
figured that if he let it get too deeply set in his mind that he
was just plain unfortunate when it came to his personal life, he
would do the sensible thing. He would fold his cards and stop
trying to have one. And he really didn’t want to do that.

“Is it Jennifer again, or the kid?” Wuntz
persisted.

“It’s no big deal.” Eddie tried to shake him
off. “Mike is just going through a phase.”

“Don’t take any crap from him.”

The emotion in Wuntz’s voice was so plain it
startled Eddie.

“My kid was ashamed his old man was a cop.
Started calling me a Nazi when he wasn’t even fifteen. Screaming
‘
Seig Heil!
’ when I tried to keep him in line. Crap like
that. I figured it would pass, so I ignored it. I let him piss all
over me. Tried not to think about it too much.”

Eddie could see the memory of it working in
Wuntz’s face.

“That was a long time ago, but nothing’s
changed. He still thinks his old man’s nothing but a fat jerk.”
Wuntz chewed on his lip a moment and then the corners of his mouth
slipped down into a shrug. “He doesn’t know a fucking thing about
me. That’s my fault, I guess, mostly. But it’s too late. I don’t
see him much anymore.”

Wuntz’s outburst left Eddie momentarily
confounded. It was as if a cloud had passed over them as they sat
there on that hard bench at the Hall of Justice. Eddie had known
Wuntz for five or six years, but they’d never gotten all that
personal with each other before and he really wasn’t sure he wanted
to start now. What was it about the few casual words he had
exchanged with Jennifer and Michael that had popped open Wuntz’s
floodgates like that?