Crown's Law (23 page)

They all went silent again, and Sam got up
and fixed himself a brandy.

“Brandy, Dad?”

“No, I’m fine, Sam. I think I’ll go up and
join your mother. Watch the tube for a bit.”

John kissed Becky on the cheek and said,
“Good night, you two. Stay out of trouble.”

“Goodnight, Grandpa. I love you,” said
Becky.

“Love you, too, Beck.”

Sam sat back down with Becky and swirled the
amber liquid around in his snifter.

“Quite a day, Beckster.”

“Yeah. Hope you’re still not mad at me.”

“I wasn’t mad—just scared. Sorry I took it
out on you.”

“I didn’t think you got scared.”

“You’re wrong. Especially if I put someone
else in harm’s way,” said Sam.

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” Becky
remarked, a gleam in her eye.

“Oh, no!”

“No, Sam, it’s not bad!”

“What then?”

“I told you that engine design was good. It
was, but it had several shortcomings. I rewrote the whole
thing—created a much better engine! Roughly, I estimate my engine
is 40% to 50% more efficient, and probably 30% quieter!” Becky
said. “Should we tell the FBI that?”

Sam pondered what she had just said. A flash
of understanding zapped his brain. He had assumed all along that
Becky would eventually end up as a professor in some university,
sharing her ideas with wave after wave of students. That was OK,
but the pay was mediocre, not that she would ever be in need of
money. He would see to that. But he now saw a way for her to be
properly recompensed for her brilliance.

“No, Becky! You’re now in an area where I
actually know more than you do! You don’t give away such
brilliance. Do you think the people who designed that engine on
your test did it for free? Oh, no! They charged millions! Your
design, being even better, is worth a fortune!”

“Really?” queried Becky.

“Really. Here’s what I’m going to
do—next week if I can. I’ll have Nana’s lawyer set up a
corporation. We’ll need a name: maybe
Rebecca’s Folly, Inc
.,” he laughed. “Isn’t that
what some of the press call your theories? Anything you dream up
that has commercial value will be marketed to the appropriate
consumers. You’ll make a mint!”

“You mean I could make money by selling my
doodles?” she asked seriously. Then she grinned. “That way I could
pay you guys back for all the money you’ve spent on me! I’ve been
keeping track—just like I promised Nana when I came here. I figured
it would take a long time on a professor’s salary!”

Sam’s eyes got moist. He couldn’t believe how
precious this child was to him—and his parents.

“Beck, there’s another discussion we need to
have,” he said, his voice low, serious.

“Uh oh! It can’t be the birds and bees
thing!” laughed Becky. “I know about that in spades!”

“No, Beck, it’s about you, your future. Your
status.”

Sam began to choke up, so he took a swig of
brandy. This was a subject he had not wanted to ever bring up, but
Dr. Sue had convinced him that he had to.

“You OK, Sam?” queried Becky. “This is
serious, right?”

“Sorry, Beck. For selfish reasons, this is a
discussion I’ve been avoiding. Have you, in your vast reading
regimen, ever heard about the emancipation of minors?” said Sam,
his heart aching.

“Shit!” exclaimed Becky. “Of course I have. I
researched all of the options available to a kid when I was 13.
Foster homes, orphanages, juvy, adoption. I don’t like where this
is going! You’re talking about my own company, emancipation—all in
the same discussion. Are you dumping me, Sam?”

Tears were running down her cheeks.

“Hell no, Beck! I just thought it was my duty
to discuss your options with you. I told you I didn’t want to have
this discussion! I’ll never dump you! How could you even think
that?”

“Thank God! You scared me! I know I meet all
the requirements for emancipation: Job, wheels, education,
maturity—kinda. I would never choose that unless you wanted me to,”
wept Becky.

“Thank God, is right! I’d never ask you to do
that. Well, that didn’t go well, but at least the subject was
broached . . . and dismissed, I hope. I’ll never bring it up
again.”

“Sam?” Becky said.

“Yes, Beck.”

“Is a 16-year-old girl too old to sit on her
father’s lap?”

“I don’t know, Beck. I wouldn’t think so,” he
replied. He held out his arms and she came to him, sat on his lap,
her arms around his neck. She wept silently on his shoulder. He put
his arms around her. It felt right.

She sniffled, “Thanks, Sam. This is something
I’ve never been able to do, and wanted to do very badly. You know,
my stepfather . . .”

“Shh! I know,” he whispered as he stroked her
hair.

They were silent for a moment. She gradually
stopped crying. Finally, Sam broke the silence.

“I want to clarify something, Beck. The talk
about the company and making money had nothing to do with the
emancipation thing. You don’t have to do the company thing if you
don’t want to. You’ll be well set for the rest of your life in any
case.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, lifting her
head from his shoulder.

“As you know, your Nana is a very wealthy
woman. She set up a trust fund for you some time ago. Part of it
vests when you’re 18. The rest vests at various other ages.”

“She shouldn’t have done that! I owe her so
much as it is!” exclaimed Becky.

“This time, you don’t get it, Beck! You don’t
owe her—us—anything! Anything spent on you was because you belong
here. It was what we were supposed to do. It’s because you’re
loved—a part of the family forever.”

“Oh shit, Sam!” She started crying again,
nuzzled his shoulder. “I don’t deserve this!”

“That’s not your decision to make. We made it
for you. Also, you’re in Nana’s will. When my parents die—hopefully
a long time from now—this house will be yours, along with most of
their estate. You’ll be a rich woman, Beck, so your financial
future is secure. That shouldn’t stop you from making money with
your fabulous mind, however.”

Becky straightened up and looked Sam in the
eye. “This house and their estate should go to you, Sam! You’re
their only son. I’m just an orphan!”

“That’s the way they want it. The way I want
it. Besides, they took care of me years ago. I have a fully-vested
trust fund my mother set up when I was your age. I haven’t touched
much of it, so it’s been growing hand over fist for all these
years. I have plenty of money,” he told her.

“But . . . the house. It should be yours!”
she insisted.

“I have a house. You know the big house next
door to the pool area? That’s mine. It’s too big for one person, so
I rent it out. Maybe I’ll use it someday. After you grow up and get
married and kick me out of this one,” he laughed.

“Never!” she exclaimed.

“That’s ambiguous,” he chortled. “Never get
married, or never kick me out?”

“Both . . . probably. Sam?”

“What?”

“I want to be a ‘Crown.’ I want to dump my
friggin’ stepfather’s name. Can you adopt me?” she said with
fervor.

This took him aback. He had considered
adopting her in the past, but thought that a single man adopting a
teenaged girl might not fly well with the courts. Especially with
his well-known reputation as a skirt chaser.

“Well, Beck, I’ve actually considered that,
but there were two stumbling blocks. One was this damned
emancipation discussion—which I kept putting off—and two, the fact
that I’m not married. There are a lot of men like your stepfather
out there, you know. It’s the judge’s job to look after your best
interest.”

“What if I told the judge that’s what I
wanted?” Becky pressed on.

“That might help, but it’s still a long
shot.”

“But you know that judge. Talk to him. And if
you can’t adopt me, I’ll change my name anyway. I can do that can’t
I?”

“Yes, you can do that. I’ll talk to Judge
Manley. One way or another, you’ll be Rebecca Crown,” replied Sam.
“If that’s what you want. It would please me!”

Becky kissed his cheek and got off his lap.
“Thank you, Sam! I’m glad we had this chat. I am very, very
happy!”

“I’m happy, too, Beck.”

“I’m going to embarrass you again.” She
waited a beat, then said, “I love you,” as she went to the sliding
screen door.

“Er . . . I love you, too, Becky. Goodnight.”
He had said it out loud! It felt good. He felt like a father.

***

Sam stopped by the Santa Ana office on
Tuesday to give Pearl her instructions concerning the bug tapes,
then headed for L.A. Another
Investigations
International
detective, Freddie Funk, would cover the Mickey Malone office
Wednesday and Thursday, and Sam would be back on Friday to see what
Pearl had gleaned from the bugs. Pearl set up the high-tech system
so she could operate from her desk and got to work listening to
tapes.

***

Friday morning, June 1, Sam showed up at the
Mickey office at 9:00 A.M. and he and Pearl settled into his office
to discuss what she had found out during the week.

There was a lot of evidence of criminal
activity in the excerpts that Pearl had typed up for him on her
computer. The excerpts had been digitized and stored on
high-density computer storage devices for later reference.
Dynology
was obviously involved in
various kinds of international smuggling—diamonds, weapons, people,
cigarettes—using secret compartments in the containers they placed
on container ships on a regular basis. The component testing
business—though real—was just a front. There were three excerpts
that Sam was particularly interested in:

1. The person who had actually killed
William Jackson a.k.a. William Winston was a man named Bobby
Door—or Dior. He was a security guard and muscle man at
Dynology
. They had discussed the
murder in detail. They suspected Jackson of being an undercover cop
and Door beat him unmercifully for days to break him. They got
nothing from him. Door executed him, bled him, planted dope on him,
then dumped the body.

2. A man, purportedly CEO Bryce, was yelling
at a woman named Rosemary for failing to deliver an expected cache
of jewelry as expected. She yelled back, saying it wasn’t her
fault. She’d been betrayed by that Winston bitch!

3. They were expecting their sweetest deal
yet to take place on Sunday, June 10th. Someone named Anemone was
to deliver some highly classified material to them at a park in
Irvine at high noon. They had to have $10,000,000 in cash ready.
Their buyer was paying $100,000,000 for the information, whatever
it was.

Sam looked up from the reports and said
to Pearl, “This is hot stuff, girl! Completely useless legally, of
course. I had figured that that Wellington bitch was running a
scam, but I never thought it tied in with the Winston murder
and
Dynology
. Small world,
eh?”

Pearl said, “You have to do something with
this info. Especially about that exchange going down on the 10th.
That sounds like treason! It could affect our national
security!”

“I need to figure out a way to get this info
to the proper people. If it were just me, I’d go tell Pabst at CID
and Fenster over at the FBI that I have some illegally obtained
information that they need to know about. But Becky planted those
bugs, and I don’t want her involved in this in any way whatsoever,”
replied Sam, his brow furrowed. “See what you can find out about
this ‘Door’ guy, and also Rosemary Wellington. That might give me a
clue as how to proceed.”

“You got it, Sam. I’ve still got a lot more
tapes to do, too. I need a raise,” she laughed.

“Most of the time, all you do is your
nails.”

“
My heart leaps up when I
behold

A rainbow in the sky.”

William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up,
1807

Friday, June 1, 2001

Westminster, CA

Sam wanted to know more about the
crooks at
Dynology
. He
decided the best shot was to drop in on the chief crook in Orange
County: Danny Nguyen, leader of the Green Dragons, the most
notorious Asian gang in Southern California.

Danny Nguyen and Sam had a history. Danny—now
39 years old—was only 11 in 1973 in Vietnam when Crazy Crown was
screwing his older sister Di on his rare visits to Saigon. Their
parents being dead, the 18-year-old Di was taking care of Danny and
her 7-year-old sister Cara when Crown became involved with her.

When Sam recovered from his wounds in 1974,
back in the States, he had his CIA father track them down in the
after-war turmoil in Saigon. Di was dead, but the two younger
children were alive and scrounging in the streets. Sam’s father
used his clout to get Danny and Cara into the U.S. and placed them
with a Vietnamese family in Little Saigon in Westminster,
California.

As it turned out, Sam was not sure that
he had done them any favors. Danny and his sister grew up in the
gangs prevalent there, and now Danny was one of the kingpins of the
Vietnamese gangs in Southern California. But if anyone knew
what
Dynology
was up to it
would be Danny Nguyen.

Sam left the office, retrieved his Camaro,
and sped north on the I-405 towards Westminster. He got off on
Bolsa and cruised into the bowels of the area known as Little
Saigon, perhaps the largest Asian community in the U.S. Cultures
from such countries as Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, China, and
Thailand thrived in the area. It was like entering another
country.