by Peter Colt
“What does it say?” I said, pointing to the inscription.
“It says, Merry Christmas, Round Eye Private Eye, you still not rich enough to marry my daughter.” He then laughed his rich belly laugh.
I was invited for Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year. It was a big deal in Vietnam, imagine Christmas, New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July rolled into one holiday. It was such a huge holiday that in 1968 the Viet Cong attacked every major city in South Vietnam knowing that they would catch the ARVN off guard. It said a lot about how close I had grown to Nguyen’s family that they invited me to their Tet celebration. I got to know Nguyen’s wife, An; his son, Tuan. Tuan was a graduate student studying for his MBA. Linh was halfway through a BA at Northeastern. It was nice, after so many years in the cold, to have something approximating a family.
* * *
March in Boston is cold. People start thinking about spring, but in reality, it is more cold and wet weather. Sometime toward the end of April, spring finally shows up like a guy late for a date with his wife; he meant to be there sooner, but something came up . . . you understand? Other than making some old wounds ache, I didn’t mind it. I walked to the office, dodging puddles of slush and avoiding patches of ice.
I had on duck boots from L. L. Bean and a Pendleton’s wool button-down shirt that was some sort of blue plaid only a lumberjack could love. I had my Colt Commander in a holster on my hip. I was wearing my peacoat, and a silk houndstooth scarf that An had given me for Christmas. I was as prepared for March in Boston as one could be.
I stopped at the corner store across the street from my office and bought a Globe. There was a new coffee shop next door, and they were happy to sell me a coffee and corn muffin. I managed to cross the street without getting killed or splashed with slush. I went into the pizza place downstairs. Old Man Marconi always insists on giving me a cappuccino in the morning, even though I like my coffee black. I have learned not to argue with him.
After the cappuccino and talk about the weather and talk about boxing, it was time to go upstairs. The only sport Marconi liked to talk about was boxing. I hung my coat on the coat tree and sat down at my desk. The only messages on the machine were about people who wanted money from me and none from the people who owed me money.
I drank my now cold coffee, ate my corn muffin, and read the paper. It was the usual mix of depressing news. British coal miners had ended their long strike. The other international news was bad. Russia still had nukes. We still had nukes. We were still pointing them at each other. We wanted to spend millions on a new type of missile. There was still a war going on in Afghanistan. The city news wasn’t much better. Everything seemed to be getting more expensive. A man was stabbed in his car in Chinatown a couple of days ago. The police weren’t saying much, other than it was fatal. They had no leads in last week’s murder in Quincy where a Vietnamese man was shot leaving a Vietnamese newspaper that I had never heard of. Then again, I was not an expert on Vietnamese publications. The police didn’t have much to say about that one either. Maybe it stood out because I had Vietnam on the mind. April was coming up, the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The end of my war.
I folded up the paper and brushed the crumbs off my shirt. The newspaper went out into the waiting room, on the table. It helped the illusion that I was so busy that people had to wait to see me. I spent the next couple of hours catching up on paperwork: bills that had to go out and reports that had to be written. I did all this while smoking a pipe of tobacco; it was a rich blend of Latakia cut with Virginia and Cavendish. I had the window cracked to let the smoke out and some cold, fresh air in.
The bell on the outer door tinkled, and I stood up. Most people called ahead, but I had the occasional walk-in. I put my hand on the Colt, just to reassure myself that it was still there. I was pretty sure that no one was actively trying to kill me right now.
She was standing in my waiting room wearing a blue winter coat that reached down to her calves. Her boots were more practical than fashionable. She was putting a knit wool cap into the pocket of the parka. Her hair was black and fashionably clipped by someone who had been well paid for it. She saw me and smiled hesitantly. She had one of those bags that looked like a large leather sack. She was Vietnamese.
“Mr. Roark?” I had been expecting the patois of pidgin English mixed with Vietnamese. Instead, her accent was decidedly California.
“Yes, I’m Andy Roark.” My brain was trying to catch up to my eyes and ears.
“The detective?”
“I hope so; it was expensive to have it painted on the door.” The bad joke fell flatter than Mrs. Sullivan’s pancakes.
“Yes.” She dragged it out, and I was vaguely disappointed that she hadn’t laughed.
She had unzipped the parka and put it on the rack next to my peacoat. She unwound a long silk scarf and put it over her coat on the rack. What was revealed sans parka was an odd mix of slim and curvy. She wore blue corduroys tucked into her sensible boots and a cashmere sweater in a shade of green that worked with the pants. She wore no rings, and the only jewelry she did wear was a pair of diamond earrings. She was elegant in a world that seemed to think that women with safety pins in their cheeks and purple, spikey hair were all the rage.
“Mr. Roark, I need a detective. I am hoping that you are available?” I assured her I was. She held out a hand that was long and slim. I took it in mine and felt the pressure of her fingers as they briefly squeezed my hand.
“My name is Thuy Duong.” Her name could have been Minnie Mouse, my heart would have been racing just the same. “You read this morning’s paper?” She pointed at it.
“Yes.” It had been almost the most productive part of my day.
“I am concerned about the murders. The Vietnamese man at the paper was my uncle, Hieu. He was a journalist, and lately he was scared of something or someone.” Her lower lip trembled as she said it, and I was having unprofessional thoughts about it.
“The newspaper said the police think it was a mugging gone wrong.”
“No, he was shot several times. There was no attempt at robbery.”
“Okay, you said murders?” I left the question out there.
“There was a Vietnamese man stabbed in Chinatown. I do not know what the connection is with my uncle, but it seems unlikely two Vietnamese men are murdered so closely together?” I was stumped at that one.
“You don’t know the second victim?” It seemed intelligent to say the obvious thing.
“No, but how could it not be related? How many Vietnamese live here in Boston? Also, how many police are Vietnamese? You at least were in Vietnam.”
“Good point. Okay. I am not the police. They have lots of resources. Lots of men, labs, etcetera. On the other hand, this will be my only job while they will have to deal with every crime in the city.”
“You will take the case.” It is impossible to describe the way she said it or bit her fleshy lower lip, but it made me weak in the knees.
“Yes, I will.” I then explained my fees and how I worked. She nodded and opened her bag and took out a large stack of cash.
“I have been traveling. I cashed some traveler’s checks on the way here.” She counted out ten one hundred–dollar bills and handed them to me. “If this runs out, you can call me for more.” She handed me a card that said she was a language tutor. It had her number on it. She wrote out her uncle’s full name and address on the back of her card. I told her I would call her when I had something. She went to the rack to get her coat. I watched as her body shifted under the cashmere sweater and corduroys as she slipped on her coat and wound her scarf around her neck. She left and the show was over.
I breathed normally again. It wasn’t physical exactly. I knew that. It wasn’t just that. There was something about talking to her, being around her. . . . It felt like the beginning of something that had nothing to do with the case. It was possibility. She was Ms. Unknown Variable, that tall/short, skinny/curvy woman who might offer a respite
from the loneliness of a lonely life. I hadn’t felt that since I handed Leslie The Raymond Chandler Omnibus from the top shelf in the Brattle Book Shop.
Chapter 4
Now in the movies or TV, I would call up an old buddy from the force and buy him lunch and ask for a favor. In reality, it didn’t work that way. I would need to go to the police headquarters at 154 Berkley Street, inform them that I had been hired by the family, and see what they would share with me. It wouldn’t be much. I would be lucky if anyone would talk to me.
Police headquarters wasn’t far, and the weather was not quite Arctic, so I decided to walk. I locked up and went out into the street and the cold. By the time my eyes were watering, the tip of my nose was numb, and my ears hurt, I was standing in front of police headquarters. There were cruisers parked out front, and the building loomed above me. There were many taller buildings in Boston, but the stone and cement monolith that was built in 1920 seemed to tower over me.
I made my way in and waited my turn to speak to the desk sergeant. He was rumpled and weathered and straight out of Central Casting’s request for an Irish police sergeant. He was chewing on a cigar that had gone out and looked like he impersonally hated every human being in the world. He took my card, looked at my license, and snorted when I told him why I was there.
“Son, are you having me on?” I was pretty sure that my skull would be dented by a nightstick if I were.
“No, Sergeant.”
“Did Solly or one of those other limp dicks upstairs put you up to this?” I assured him I was serious and didn’t know anyone named Solly or any of the limp dicks upstairs. He picked up the phone in front of him, and, looking suspiciously the whole time, dialed a number.
“McCourt here, sir. No, you are not gonna believe this. No, sir. An actual Shamus. No, sir, he says Solly isn’t behind this. Yes, sir. His name . . . hey, Shamus, what’s your name?”
“Roark.” He repeated it, and the conversation they just had. Then he put the phone down with a bang and a “Ha.”
“Captain will see you.” He handed me an orange badge to pin to my coat that said, VISITOR. He flagged down some passing patrolman and told him to take me to Captain Johnston’s office. The young cop motioned me to follow him, and I was reminded of my own time working for the police.
“You really a private eye? Like Magnum?” I was trapped in an elevator with him and it didn’t seem the time to tell him what I thought of TV private eyes.
“Yep, except this is Boston and I don’t drive a Ferrari.” He laughed. “Too much slush and too many potholes.”
“Also, you’re too short.” Everybody is a critic.
We spent the next few minutes talking about the Celtics. Then we were up in the detective bureau in front of a door that said, CAPTAIN D. JOHNSTON. The kid knocked, and when the voice inside said to come in, he opened the door, explained who I was, and ushered me inside. Captain Johnston was not what I was expecting. Instead of the usual corned-beef-and-cabbage-fed cop, he was black. Black cops weren’t anything out of the ordinary, but a black captain of detectives was a bit of a novelty. When I had started on the job, Italians were considered minorities and Hispanic cops were downright exotic. There had been some black guys, but the force had been mostly corned beef and cabbage.
He was taller than me with a fastidious air about him, with hair that was cropped close to the rounded curve of his skull and shot through with curls of gray. Above his lip he had a mustache that was neatly trimmed. Johnson was well dressed in pressed gray slacks and a white shirt. The square butt of a large revolver stuck out of his waist band. Next rode a gold shield; literally his badge of office. He stuck out a hand and shook mine. He had enough self-confidence that he didn’t feel the need to try to crush the life out of my hand when we shook.
He motioned me to a metal chair that looked like it was a veteran of World War II. Johnston sat down behind a desk that was a battleship. His desk had a gooseneck lamp that shone on a series of piles of papers and folders. He had a black push-button phone off to one side, and an electric typewriter took up most of the middle of his desk.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Roark?” His eyes were brown, and under the left one he had a triangular scar the size of a pencil eraser.
“I was hired to look into the murder in Chinatown and the one in Quincy to see if they are in any way related.” He looked at me, his face motionless, flat as a calm sea.
“Of course, they’re related. Two Vietnamese men killed in two days a few miles apart . . . how could they not be related?”
“That is my client’s thinking.”
“Or they are just two unlucky idiots, killed in two separate, unrelated incidents, in two different towns.” Now he cocked his head, and I realized that the eye with the scar was lazy. “Why should I help you? You are just going to make a mess of things, and I will have to clean them up.”
“Because I will have to investigate no matter what. Sharing what you already know means I won’t go back over territory you’ve already covered. If I find out anything new, I would be obligated as an officer of the court to share it with you.”
“You used to be a cop on this job.” It was most definitely not a question.
“Yes, sir.” I was wondering if it would come to this.
“I asked around. People said you were good but too smart for your own good.”
“That sounds about right.”
“I see.” I was glad he did because I was still figuring it all out. He picked up the phone and summoned a detective with an Irish-sounding last name. The detective came in, handed him a file, and looked at me. I don’t know why—I surely didn’t know anything.
“Kelly, you have the Chinatown stabbing. Does anything stand out?” Kelly looked like his name implied. His suit was Jordan Marsh and crumpled.
“No, sir. It is all in the report. It was pretty straightforward. The victim, named Pham Duc Dong, was parked in his car near the Chinatown gate a little after ten at night. His car was running and in park. He was a smoker and had his window rolled down. We think he was waiting for someone. A person or persons unknown reached through the window and stabbed him once in a downward fashion through the collarbone area, severing the subclavian artery. Death happened in seconds. The blade, according to the doc, is a thin, sharp, double-edged knife. No weapon was recovered at the scene. There are not a lot of forensics to go on.”
“Double-edged knife. Like a commando knife?” I asked.
“It could have been. Like in the old movies. We can check. Either way, Mr. Dong didn’t bleed much.”
“Mr. Pham,” I clarified. “Vietnamese people use their last name first, then middle, then first.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, whatever order he puts his name in, he is just as dead.” Detective Kelly left the office to see about his other cases, one of which might actually be solvable.
The captain handed me the file. “You can look this over and take notes, but you can’t take it with you. I am going to go get a cup of coffee. Leave it on my desk on your way out.”
I read through the report and looked at the black-and-white crime scene photos. There was not a lot to be learned from it. A Vietnamese businessman from Virginia in his Mercedes sedan was killed, quickly and efficiently. There wasn’t a lot of blood. The blade had severed the artery and punctured the top of the left lung. He bled out into his own lung. It would have been quiet and taken seconds. There were no fingerprints, no clues, no forensics. Just him, a pile of cigarette butts outside his car, and a neat, clean killing. To the casual observer it wouldn’t have looked like much. Just another drunk passed out at the wheel.
I scribbled some notes in my notebook, made a copy of the dead man’s property form and his address in Virginia. I also made a note of his business address, a suburb in Virginia that I recognized as housing a lot of people who make money from the U.S. government. Then I put the file back on the captain’s desk. I took out one of my business cards, wrote my thanks on it, and left it on top of the file.
That done, I made my way out of police headquarters.
I was not going to walk to Quincy, so I made my way back to the Ghia. The weather hadn’t warmed up much in the time I had been at headquarters. She started with limited protest, and, after a bit, a thin stream of heat made its way from the heater to me. I took the southern artery, which brought me right to the police department. As buildings go, it was an uninspiring hunk of gray concrete and stone. It was WPA era but had none of the artistry that went into other WPA buildings: no eagles, decorative moldings; no sense of the importance of combining art and structure. Just an ugly gray box with windows.
I parked in the visitors’ area and made my way inside. There was a glass window, beyond which was a clerk with permed hair and the look of perpetual boredom that they all have. She looked at the photostat of my license and ID. I told her I was hoping to talk to someone about the Hieu homicide. She told me to wait and indicated a bank of plastic chairs that looked uncomfortable and nearly indestructible. I was right about their comfort level. It only took me two of the twenty minutes that I was sitting in one to figure it out. I never had the chance to see if it was indestructible.
The door opened, and a middle-aged man, sagging around the middle, badge and gun on his hip, looked at me. “You Roark?” Resisting the urge to point out sarcastically that there was no one else waiting, I assured him I was. He held out a perfunctory hand and said, “My name is O’Brien. I’m a detective. Come on in.” We walked back into an office area with the usual mix of desks, cops, and cigarette smoke. On the walls were posters of wanted people, occasionally broken up by pictures of guns.
We went to his desk, and I sat down where he indicated. He pulled out a slim folder and passed it to me. “There isn’t much. Hieu Tam came here from Vietnam in 1980. He was a journalist and worked for the Globe as a part-time translator. He also edited a local Vietnamese paper whose name I can’t pronounce. He was leaving work a couple of nights ago and someone shot him with a .380. He took four in the chest and three to the face. No witnesses, no one around. Someone heard the shots and called it in. Took the patrol guy a little while to find him.”