Another Man's Moccasins

I asked her if she was kidding.

She said she wasn’t.

I asked about the previous night, but she said that they pretty much closed up at nine and always left a number that would reach the owners if there were any problems, that they lived only three-quarters of a mile away.

I told her she could put the other headphone back in now.

I had turned Bill McDermott and his crew loose. I figured that the more important crime scene was the Dietz barn and that Henry and I could go over Tuyen’s room as a preliminary before calling in the cavalry.

The place was as I’d left it hours before. There was a large bloodstain at the foot of the bed, a smaller one further in, and an intermittent trail that led to the adjoining room and bathroom.

I turned and looked at Henry, who was still standing in the doorway. “If you came through that door and someone was waiting to hit you, where would they stand? ”

He looked around the entryway and to his right. “Behind the door.”

“Okay, you want to come in and close that?” He did as requested and then joined me in looking at the distance from the door to the first bloodstain. “What’d he do, jump when he got hit?”

“Perhaps the assailant waited until he was farther inside? ”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t make sense. I mean, if you were planning on getting somebody, would you wait until he closed the door and took three or four steps before you hit him? Especially someone as physically capable as Tuyen? ”

“So, you think he knew him?”

I walked toward the bed and kneeled beside the larger of the two stains. “I didn’t get much out of him, but he said that someone had struck him from behind, that he had hit the ground, started to get up, failed, and then hit the floor again.”

Henry stood by the dresser. “That would explain the first pool of blood, and then he tries to get up and falls where the smaller one is. Did he say he was unconscious before you got there?”

"Off and on.”

He squatted down beside me. “Where was the wound?”

“Right side of the head and toward the back, just at the crown.”

“Just one?”

“I’m not sure.”

Henry looked back toward the door. “Is it possible that he was struck once, and then, when he started to rise, the assailant hit him again? That would explain the two stains.”

“It’s possible.” I studied the spread that had been flung back from the corner of the bed, revealing the end of the angle-iron bed rail and the corner of the mattress, stained with blood.

Henry studied the corner of the bed frame. “So he was struck and then hit the corner?”

“Maybe.”

The Cheyenne Nation studied me. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I want to talk to Tuyen.” I stood and noticed that the metal case that was in Tuyen’s car was on the dresser. “Under the strictest sense of the law, I’m not really supposed to be going through his personal items.”

“No.”

I walked over to the bureau and flipped the leather-wrapped handle. “He didn’t say anything about missing his wallet and nothing else in the room seems disturbed, which leads me to believe that it wasn’t a robbery attempt.” I nudged the corner of the case with my finger. “Heavy; possibly a computer. If I was going to steal something in this room, I think I’d start with this.”

“Yes.”

"That makes this a suspicious item.”

"Yes.”

“And as a duly appointed law-enforcement official, it would be my responsibility to open it.”

“Yes.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“Yes?”

“It’s locked.”

With a sigh of exasperation, Henry slid the case toward him and flipped it up, looking at the four-digit combination. He paused for a moment and then rolled the thumbwheels until it read 1975. “Fall of Saigon.”

Click.

Saigon, Vietnam: 1968

I heard the safety go off but wasn’t sure where. The bouncer still stood in front of us, big, too big to be Vietnamese—probably Samoan. Our noses were about six inches apart—I was a couple of inches taller, but he probably had me by a good forty pounds. The really disconcerting part was that he was the one wearing a cowboy hat.

Baranski held his badge over my shoulder into the giant’s face. “Look, Babu, Criminal Investigation Detachment. We’re on a homicide investigation.”

That much was true.

“We’re working with your own ARVN intelligence sector...”

Not particularly true.

"... And if you don’t step aside, I’m going to tell USMC specialist Longmire here to drag you over to the Long Bin stockade and specialize in stomping a puddle in your chest and walkin’ the motherfucker dry.”

Hopefully true.

He didn’t move, but after a few seconds, he turned toward a slick-looking little fellow standing to the side, who disappeared behind the giant and then reappeared. He nodded his head, and the bouncer slipped to the left. I took a step forward but kept my face to him as Baranski and Mendoza passed behind me.

“Fuck you, son-of-bitch.”

I slowly smiled my best Powder River grin, the one that would’ve made Owen Wister proud. “Smile when you call me that.”