The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Page B

the Red Dog when I'd decided to be a detective, as opposed to a university professor. At the time I had put years into preparing to be a university professor and only weeks into being a detective, but those weeks were quality time, as people seem to like to say these days. A good friend of Eleanor's, a quiet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu, had been tossed onto the sidewalk from the roof of one of the UCLA dorms. Jennie had been dead on arrival, and Eleanor had been alive in my bed when someone had called to give her the news. Since the UCLA cops and the LAPD didn't seem all that interested, I'd helped Eleanor through her grieving process by finding the cocaine dealer who'd used Jennie to practice the vertical shot put. His mistake: He couldn't tell Asians apart. I'd happily broken both of his elbows, learning something sort of thrillingly unpleasant about myself in the process, and delivered him to the police. At that point I had more superfluous degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer, the result of having stayed in college for what seemed like decades because I couldn't think of anything to do.
    After Jennie, I had something to do.
    “Why Vietnamese?” I asked. We were in a long room full of sickly fluorescent light and scarred wooden desks. Other detectives talked on phones or slogged on big heavy cop feet toward the coffee. I'd passed on the coffee.
    “Why are you here?” Hammond countered. He was a cop to his bitten fingernails.
    “This is purely hypothetical, Al,” I said, retreating toward the bullshit.
    “And it has nothing to do with Eleanor,” Al said with ponderous irony.
    “Eleanor who?” I asked, crossing my arms to emphasize the scholarly patches on my jacket. The lapels spread to reveal the aging Megadeth T-shirt beneath, and I tugged them closed. Hammond, like most cops, thought heavy metal was the musical equivalent of assault and battery. “I've decided to finish an old sociology thesis on urban crime. Asians are tops in their high school classes, tops in the graduation lists of lots of universities. Where are they in urban crime?”
    “Tops,” Hammond said promptly. “They're fucking with the Mafia like no one ever has. Ninety percent of the heroin brought into America today—” He stopped and lifted a hand half the size of Moby Dick. “You're actually sitting there and looking right at me and telling me this is for a paper?”
    “The professor is named Mamie Liu,” I improvised, stalling. So far I'd met Chinese-Americans named Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, Eadweard, and Julia (as well as Homer, Ruby, and Maxine), and I'd worked up considerable curiosity about the American names Chinese parents chose. “What do you think, Al?” I asked. “Why do Chinese choose names like Mamie?”
    “You want to ask someone on the Asian Task Force?”
    “No,” I said, too quickly.
    His grin turned wolfish. “Yeah? Why not?”
    “Because it's only hypothetical. I don't want to waste their time. Is that straight about the heroin?”
    “You bet.” He shifted his weight in his chair, settling in to be the expert. “The old French Connection through Marseilles, which the Mafia ran, was shut down years ago. Now the stuff moves from Burma through Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the Chinese run it.”
    “All Chinese?”
    “One hundred percent. Ethnic Chinese in Burma, Thailand, and Laos.”
    Hammond's stomach rumbled. It sounded like an automobile accident.
    “Who runs it here?” I asked.
    Hammond looked hungry. “Like I said—”
    “No, I mean who specifically? Who among the Chinese? The tongs?”
    Hammond sat up. “You know about the tongs?”
    “A little.” I'd also read about triads, village associations, and name societies.
    “Like what?”
    “The tongs started in San Francisco in the middle of the last century as protective associations,” I said, dredging my caffeinated memory. “The Chinese were very unpopular in those days. They made the mistake of working cheap. Occasionally they were shot