The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Page A

night. Eleanor put both hands on Horace's forearm but kept her eyes fixed on me. “I see,” she said tonelessly.
    I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything would be fine, but I didn't believe that it would. “He used the return address on a seven-year-old letter.”
    “Maybe Mom wrote him more recently.” She was looking at me but talking to Horace.
    “Ask her,” I said.
    “Yes,” Eleanor said, not doing anything. “Right.” Then she let out a deep breath, stood, and left the room.
    “What did you think, Horace? Did you have any doubt?”
    “I'm not sure I do now,” he said. “If that wasn't Uncle Lo, it was Laurence Olivier.”
    As long as Eleanor was out of earshot, I decided to try a sneak play. “Why won't you let me do anything?”
    “Those kids with the guns,” he said. “They're not on their own.”
    “Who are they with?”
    He shook his head.
    “She didn't,” Eleanor said faintly from the doorway. She was leaning against the doorjamb. “In fact, she's not sure she remembers writing him seven years ago.”
    “Wah,” Horace said, abandoning hope.
    “But you know Mom,” Eleanor added unconvincingly.
    Horace knotted his hands behind his neck and rotated his head with a noise like someone stepping on a wineglass, and Eleanor pushed herself away from the wall and sat beside him and began to knead his shoulders.
    “And, of course, your mother never saw him.”
    “Of course not,” Eleanor said, concentrating on Horace's shoulders.
    “Pansy,” Horace blurted, pushing her hands aside.
    “What about Pan—oh, good Lord.” Eleanor got up and hurried back into the hallway.
    Two minutes later Mrs. Chan was seated on the couch, flipping through a thin stack of Polaroids. She looked longest at the fifth, then took it between thumb and forefinger and brought it up to her eyes. It was a close-up of a laughing man with a seamed face, a lot of gold teeth, and a puffy black eye.
    She held the picture up to Horace accusingly.
    “Lo,” she said.

5 - Hypothetical Vietnamese
    T he very next day, Monday, I broke my promise.
    “Vietnamese,” Hammond said smugly. “Those kids have to be Vietnamese.” I'd spent the night dreaming without sleeping, thrashing around on my bed like a gaffed fish, tangling myself in the sheets, and trying not to look at the pictures projected on the insides of my eyelids: Eleanor finding the house I now lived in, Eleanor making the curtains that still hung on the walls, Eleanor's face when she'd learned I was having an affair, Eleanor's straight, slim back going down the driveway on the day she'd moved out. Eleanor with the kids. Pansy, the trusting bride from Singapore, luminous with pride after the doctor had told her she was carrying twins. Horace, that same day, being transparently modest about the strength of his loins.
    Eleanor with the kids again, the three of them tumbling and laughing in an early-morning room splashed with sunlight and bright dust. Eleanor and the kids she hadn't had.
    At five I'd given up on sleep and taken an early shower. I was jogging the perimeter of the UCLA campus by seven, trying to run off a load of guilt that was way too heavy to carry, and by nine, after a second shower in the men's gym, I'd used my stacks privileges at the University's Powell Library to pull out everything I could find about Chinese crime, and especially about Chinese crime in America. Maybe I could work the guilt off.
    There was a whole lot more than I'd thought there would be.
    Nine cups of coffee and three hundred pages later, it was three in the afternoon, and I was jittering in a chair at Parker Center, laying a line of carefully worked out bullshit on Al Hammond.
    As always, Hammond was a lot bigger than he needed to be and, as always, he looked mean enough to eat kittens. In front of cats. He always intimidated me, in spite of the fact that most of the time, Hammond was my friend. I'd chosen him from a roomful of cops at a Hollywood cop bar called