“Did Arbuckle lean on the fat madam?” Bennett asked.
“Affirmative. But she really must not have seen them. Chuck out of jail yet?”
“He’s here. He’s okay.”
“I talked to the D.A. five minutes ago. He’ll drop the charges if I ride him hard enough. Tell Chuck to do us all a favor and stay the hell out of this mess from now on.”
Bennett hung up.
A minute later the phone rang again. Bennett punched the speaker button. The tape recorder started up. “Bennett Frye.”
A short pause. Then a quiet, distorted voice that sounded long distance, even though the connection was flawless. “I know. Hello, bạn. I have a greeting for you.”
Bennett turned up the speaker. Crawley stood. Nguyen straightened and checked his watch. Michelson and Toibin rose together and moved toward the phone.
Frye’s stomach tightened.
The next voice was Li’s. She was sobbing. “I love you, Benny. I’m all right. You’re number one. I am being taken care of.”
Bennett leaned toward the phone, hands out, as if to embrace the machine, the voice. “Li. Li!”
“Benny, I love you.”
The line went dead. He swung off the couch and started pacing the room. When he stopped, an odd smile came to his face, as if he were finally realizing something he’d overlooked too long. “She’s alive,” he said. “She’s alive.”
Frye felt a huge weight being lifted, a weight that, on some deep level, he had already prepared himself to carry for the rest of his life. All he could do was smile.
For a brief moment, they all looked at the phone again.
“She’s alive!”
Michelsen had already placed the cassette in its plastic box and headed out the door with it.
The cave-house was totaled. He just stood there in the doorway, his finger still on the light switch, his heart pounding like a dryer with a load of tennis shoes. Television crashed from its stand, stereo speakers ripped apart, couch cushions slashed open, wetsuits and surfboards everywhere, surfing posters crumpled and tossed to the floor, coffee table overturned, guitar smashed, lamps crushed, rug bunched and tossed in a corner, Linda’s oak credenza toppled and its doors pulled off. You name it, Frye thought, and it’s wrecked.
His hands were shaking. He didn’t have to look very hard to know that the videotape was gone.
Chapter 7
The kitchen looked as if it had been bombed; the bedroom was worse. His box of Christmas ornaments had been dragged from the cave region to his living room. Through the carnage, strings of Christmas-tree lights blinked on and off, multi-colored, gay. A wreath hung from a nail that used to hold up a Surfer magazine photograph — framed, thirty bucks, now broken on the floor — of Frye dazzling the locals at Pipeline.
He toured the house with an unhealthy voltage roaming his nerves, alternating currents of rage and helplessness, feeling the need to reach out and break someone. His worst instincts gathered, brooding like demons. I’ve done some dumb things in my life, but this is off the charts.
He stood in his room for a moment, Christmas lights twinkling around him. Truly, he thought, the best thing I can do for anybody is just stay off their side. He thought of calling the Laguna Police, but the last time they were here was to bust him for indecent exposure at his own Halloween party. Hard feelings still lingered. He thought of calling Minh, but that was out of the question. He thought of calling Bennett but Bennett’s fury was simply too much to even think about at this point.
He thought of calling Linda but lost heart.
Instead he called the Newport Beach surf report, the recorded daily message that had comforted him in trouble spots all over the globe. Air sixty-eight; water sixty-five, visibility six miles; swell from the south at eleven-second intervals and a height of two to three feet; for skin and scuba divers underwater visibility is considered fair.
He listened twice, then finally decided to call the Laguna cops anyway.
The two officers who showed up half an hour later — Simmons and Kite — looked about nineteen years old and carried impossibly loud radios. The sight of their uniforms made him nervous. Frye wondered why cops were always turning down their radio volume but it never got quieter. They scribbled the vital statistics with an air of gravity befitting funeral mourners. Kite inquired as to the identity of the “Mystery Maid.” The officer attempted something jocular with his eyebrows. Frye referred him to his lawyer and Kite backed off.
Frye answered questions. Kite wrote with diligence.
Half an hour later came the detective, a middle-aged gentleman named Pavlik. He took one look around, sighed, and set down his case.
It was then, for the first time, that Frye noted the faint, muddy footprint on his floor. From the cave region, he figured, where they found the tape. Looks the same as the light gray stuff the dead kid at the Asian Wind had on his shoes. Mud. In the middle of August in Orange County, these guys find mud to walk in.
“What’d they take?” Pavlik asked.
“Nothing,” said Frye.
“What were they looking for?”
“No idea.”
“Got someone mad at you?”
“Not that I know of.”
Pavlik studied Frye through his thick lenses. “You’re the surfer reporter guy. Frye. Married the mayor’s daughter, right?”
“I’m not sure how right it was, to tell the truth.”
Pavlik surveyed the scene, pushed his glasses snug to his face with a forefinger. He looked disappointed. “I’ll try to lift some prints.”
Kite and Simmons left to question the neighbors, turning down their radio volumes, trails of official static following them into the darkness outside.
Pavlik already had his brushes and powder out, arranging them on the opened case lid with myopic intensity. Then he erected a tripod lamp, plugged it in, trained it on the door. “These bastards trashed your place here pretty good.”
“Bastards?”
Pavlik shrugged, dipped a narrow brush into a vial of black powder and went to work on the doorknob. “Just an expression. One could have done all this, I suppose.” He pointed to the footprint. “The one with the muddy feet.”
Frye looked at it, the wisp of gray on his wooden floor. “The guy who got shot the night they took Li. He had muddy feet too.”
“Not my jurisdiction.”
Pavlik held out a piece of white tape with a partial, black thumbprint on it. “Gimme your right thumb,” he said. Frye held it out. It was still black from the booking ink. Pavlik raised his eyebrows, passed the brush over it, then pressed it to the tape, which he finally held close for inspection. “They either wore gloves or wiped the knob. This is you. We’ll try the TV. You fingerprinted recently?”
Frye nodded but offered no explanation.
Pavlik dusted patiently, more black powder for the silver face of the television set. “Anything on your sister-in-law?”
“A suspect at large.”
Pavlik looked at Frye over his glasses. “Vietnamese?”
“Yeah. A gang kid named Eddie Vo.”
“Those gangs are bad news. The thing about the Viets is they don’t trust anybody. Keep it all to themselves. That’s what I hear anyway. Interesting that Lucia Parsons and her MIA Committee think they can deal with them, when our own government can’t. We don’t have many refugees in Laguna, ‘less it’s from the IRS. So I don’t really know.”
The television was clean, and so were the lamps, the light switches, the picture frames and the Christmas bulbs, still glowing red and green and blue all over Frye’s living room. Kite and Simmons later returned to report that the neighbors hadn’t seen a thing. The detective took a few pictures, examined the lacerated couch cushions, and made some notes.