by Peter Colt
“No, but you don’t think it is odd that two Vietnamese die in the same area around the same time, much less are murdered? This is weird. This isn’t some gang thing in the projects or the Irish and Italian guys whacking each other. . . . When was the last Vietnamese murder in the state?” I didn’t know because the Vietnamese community, like most immigrant communities, was insular.
“What, now I am like Quincy on TV? I figure out and solve murders? No, Round Eye, you private eye . . . you been to Vietnam . . . you figure it out.” He slurped a particularly long noodle into his mouth. The noise was loud and drawn out sounding like a raspberry.
We spent the rest of the night talking about Saigon, the city he was born in and loved. We drank and talked about the war. He had joined the Vietnamese Navy before it existed; it was the French Colonial Navy then. He loved the Vietnamese Navy when it came into existence, loved the Americans who had been assigned to train and help them. His stories were hilarious and sad. We drank some more and he told me about what he had loved about his country, his home, and his beloved Saigon. He spoke about it with much more passion than I ever spoke of Southie. Many beers later, I drove home thinking that guys like Nguyen and Hieu were passionate about their lost country. I was just sad about my lost war.
Chapter 6
The next morning arrived filled with bright sunshine and the promise of spring that most people from Boston know to be little more than a cruel hoax designed to test our resolve. Up in Bangor, they expect winter to last almost to June, and down in Providence, the people were too tough to admit the weather bothered them. In New York, winter is something that makes Central Park look magical. Down in New Haven . . . well, I didn’t know anyone who cared about what people in New Haven think. After all, it is home to Yale and steamed cheeseburgers.
I went through my morning rituals involving getting up, getting presentable, and making my way to the office. I was thinking of poor Hieu, his hard life and bad luck and then to come here and get murdered. Was there a connection to the man from Virginia, or was it just dumb luck that two expatriates thousands of miles from home get murdered miles apart, a couple of days apart?
Hieu had lost everything once. He had been painfully reeducated and escaped Vietnam and made his way here. He took a stance that was unpopular and seemed on the brink of losing everything all over again. I never met him, but he seemed like a guy you couldn’t knock down and keep down. Nguyen was like that, too, eating out of bus trays and working two jobs, sleeping where he had to so his family could rest, get an education.
I often wondered about the people I had worked with and known. The Montagnards who had fought alongside us and then we split. Did they fade back into the mountains? Did they keep fighting? How many of them had been “reeducated”? How many had been killed? We abandoned them. There weren’t many things that my nation did that I was ashamed of . . . not Nixon, not Watergate. But that, leaving the Yards to fend for themselves, was unforgivable.
The office was the same as I’d left it. I drank my coffee from the Styrofoam cup and wrote up my case notes to date on a yellow legal pad. There were a lot of question marks and lines leading to other things on the page. I was no closer to solving the case than I was when I had taken it yesterday. I was a good detective, but I had never solved two murders in one day . . . not unless there was a butler lying around to blame.
The Yellow Pages gave me an address for Hieu’s paper in Quincy. It was in a strip mall not far from the shipyards. I went out to the Ghia, and as a nod to spring, I optimistically left my sweater at home. The peacoat went over the Commander on my hip.
The Ghia started as though it was under duress. Thin trickles of warm air came out of the vent when I turned the heater on. The rock-and-roll station was playing the Velvet Underground, and the day looked pretty fine. I was feeling pretty good. There was something about being on a case, a real mystery, not just taking pictures of people cheating; cheating on their spouses, cheating the insurance company, cheating themselves. I was in my cool car, listening to cool music, in one of the coolest cities in the world. I was going to investigate something. I was going to, briefly, be productive again. I was going to feel like I was relevant again.
The strip mall was where I remembered it, and the front door of the newspaper looked familiar from the crime scene photos of Hieu. The paper’s office was the last suite in the row of businesses. It was bounded by an open dirt lot where the blacktop of the parking lot ended. There was a pole with one light, and I imagined that at night the place was pretty desolate even though it was a hundred yards from the street.
I parked. The lot in front of the paper was bare except for the Ghia and one of those boxy little Hondas. The Honda was dented and rusty and made the Ghia look like a slightly less dented princess parked next to a frog. Farther down by the other businesses there were plenty of cars. It was a pretty good place to murder someone. It was a shitty place to die, but then they all were.
I tried the door, but it was locked. I knocked and waited and knocked again. After a few minutes, I saw a man approach. He was young, in his twenties, Vietnamese, with a wispy mustache. He was wearing jeans, a paisley shirt, and a blue jean jacket. If he had on boots and a Stetson, he could have been a cowboy.
“Yes?”
“My name is Roark. I’m a detective. I was hoping to talk to someone about Hieu?” My voice was raised to penetrate the glass door.
“Where is your badge?” He was understandably suspicious; it seemed like everyone was suspicious of me. It must be the mustache.
“I’m a private detective. Hold on.” I dug out the photostat of my license and held it up to the glass. He appeared to study it intently. All it would have told him besides my name and vital statistics was that I was licensed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a private investigator.
“All right.” He unlocked the door and opened it for me. I stepped into and onto a sea of wreckage. Paper was everywhere, and it looked like everything of value that could be broken was. Someone had spray-painted “Gooks die,” or words to that effect, everywhere they could. My nose twitched at the smell of dry, rancid urine.
“You’re not a cop.” He was looking at me with hostility. It was an occupational hazard. Someday my very presence will not make people angry. Someday.
“No, I was hired to investigate Hieu’s murder by his family.” I was looking around the wreckage.
“You don’t look like a cop.”
“I used to be one in Boston a long time ago, if that makes you feel better. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No, what’s the point?” He shrugged but took the cigarette that I offered. I rolled the wheel on the Zippo I had started carrying again. It was battered. It had my call sign and our team name on one side. It had an engraving of Vietnam on the other.
“Mike . . . who is that?” A girl emerged from a back room. She was slim and pretty, older than Linh, but I wasn’t sure how much older. Her hair was long and straight. She was wearing a sweater, red corduroys, and looked at me with unguarded suspicion.
“Thien, he is a detective. You know, like on TV.”
“He doesn’t look like a cop.” Her suspicion was not unwarranted.
“I used to be. Now I am a private investigator.”
“Like Magnum,” Mike added unhelpfully, but a cigarette does buy some loyalty still.
“He’s no Magnum. . . .” I was clearly too short and far too inadequate. I didn’t even want to contemplate their criticisms of my mustache.
“I get that all the time. Listen, do you guys work here?”
“Yes, Mike and I are journalism students at Northeastern. We intern here.” She was clearly the boss.
“Did you know Hieu?” As soon as I said his name, they both looked pained.
“He was such a . . . sweet man.” She crumpled against Mike and started to sob.
“I’m sorry, they were close.” He was used to holding her but a little embarrassed by the sudden intimacy in front of a stranger.
“No need to apologize. Grief right now is understandable.”
“It’s just . . . well, we both liked Hieu. He was . . . was so sincere.”
“Sincere?”
“Yeah, like he tried hard to teach us stuff about journalism. Not writing, not telling stories but digging into things, getting facts, then turning them into a story.” His passion overcame his youth, and I could see that he was going to be a real journalist, not just someone who majored in it in college.
“He wanted us to write about things that were relevant to the Vietnamese community.” This was from her, and each word was punctuated by sniffles. “He said he wanted us to be great journalists . . . not good, great.”
“He said any asshole could write about flowers or clothes or human-interest shit like puppies. He said real journalists wrote about stories that impacted people. Journalists were the ones who brought the truth to light for the people. They challenge governments and corruption and are the backbone of democracy.” Mike looked at me almost as though he wanted to fight me.
“Was he working on anything in particular? Was he excited about anything?”
“Why? Do you think he was killed because of a story?” From her.
“I think that the police are happy that this was a mugging gone wrong. Maybe it was. On the other hand, I know that Hieu was writing things that were making the Committee unhappy with him.”
“You know about the Committee?” Mike, raised his voice and started toward me. She took a step to the side.
“Yes, I do.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Wouldn’t understand what?”
“What the communists are like. What they have done to our country. We need the Committee. We need to fight them.” His voice was rising.
“No, we don’t. They are a bunch of assholes, Mike.” Her voice had lost all the weepiness. “If we are going to beat the communists, it will be through promoting democratic ideals, like Hieu taught us: journalism, freedom of press and expression. We already lost when we tried with violence.”
“What the fuck would this guy know. You, what did you lose?” He couldn’t yell at her, so he turned to me.
“Mike, I fought the communists. I was there when you were just a little boy. My blood was spilled on the ground in Vietnam. Most of my friends are dead. Please don’t lecture me about sacrifice, because I have had a bellyful of it.” I wanted to be angry but couldn’t summon it. His youth and certainty just made me sad.
“Yeah . . . where, what did you do?”
“Do you want to see my scars or should I dig out my discharge papers? I fought the NVA and the Cong. They killed us and we killed them.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“What was Hieu working on?”
“We aren’t sure. He said it was big. It was going to show what assholes the Committee were. Lately, he had gotten secretive and disappeared for a few days.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yeah, he showed up again after a few days and then he was murdered.” He crushed the cigarette butt out.
“Mike, I know you guys don’t know me, but I’m a friend. I only want to know who killed Hieu and why.”
“Well, when he first started writing, he was very pro Committee.” From Mike.
“He had been tortured in Vietnam. He was angry,” Thien weighed in.
“I can understand that. Torture does that to you.”
“He started off thinking that the Committee was the way, that they were going to finance and lead this glorious counterrevolution. They were waiting for when the time was right to strike. A crop failure. A political implosion. They were training saboteurs or training new fighters . . . but somehow . . .” Mike trailed off.
“The time was never right.” I could see where it was going.
“Hieu became disillusioned. He said that they took money from Vietnamese in America. He said they stole Vietnamese money. They promised much, talked about training camps in Thailand and showed slide shows of men in camouflage, but yet the time was never right. Each Recon mission didn’t bring back quite enough information.”
“He started to think it was a scam?”
“Yes. He felt that if they were asking for so much from us here that they should be doing more. Then he said it was just some sort of con.”
“Did anyone else think so?”
“If they did, they didn’t say. It was very unpatriotic. We grew up hating the communists. Everyone had to be against them, or you were one of them. That, in our community, that is worse than being a leper or having the plague.”
“When did he get labeled as a communist?” It was hard to imagine that there could be so much passion for labels and ideologies after a decade. On the other hand, as much as I had run away from Southie, no one took it from me. No one had tried to reeducate me.
“A year ago. Then he lost his job, and the paper was all he had. No one in the community would talk to him or his wife or his kids. He didn’t say anything to us, but you could tell it hurt him,” Thien said, her eyes shiny with tears that were waiting to come. “Imagine going through all of that and then here in the land of democracy he is painted Red and his community turns against him.”
“It was bad for his family. His wife couldn’t go to the Vietnamese stores, and his sons were always getting in fights in school. The funny thing was that Hieu hated the communists. He hated them more than anyone I know.”
“What changed recently?” One of the most critical skills of being a detective is to know when to insert a relevant question.
“He said that he had found someone, someone he knew from Saigon. He said that he could get proof, that he would make them look like fools.” Mike said it with conviction.
“Did he say what it was?”
“No, only that they, the Committee, were liars, not patriots, and that he would show them for what they were. He was going to clear his name.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Yes, absolutely. You have to understand, Hieu didn’t just say things. He was different. He said only things he meant. For him each word he spoke had meaning, purpose. That was just who he was.”
“Do you think that is why he was killed?”
“I don’t know. Hieu is killed, then your people vandalize our office. . . . Who can tell anymore?” His passion had deflated, and the moment was gone.
“My people?” I knew where he was going.
“White people. Whites did this.”
“Uh-huh. Was anything taken? Or was the place just trashed.”
“How can we tell? Look around you, man.” Mike was in that place where anger and defeat intersect.
“Please find out who did this to him. Hieu didn’t deserve this.” Thien clutched my arm and looked at me with brown eyes so sincere it hurt to look into them after my lifetime of sin. I gave them each my business card and unrealistic promises, and I left them to clean up.
Chapter 7
I drove back to Hieu’s house, the three-decker that they specialized in, in every mill town in New England hadn’t magically transformed into a mansion in my absence. There was no crowd today. Death is like that. The mourners decrease by day in inverse proportion. You lose the most in the first day until it is just family and die-hard friends.
I stepped onto the creaking porch and rang the bell to Hieu’s third-floor apartment. I heard footsteps on the stairs and then a Vietnamese woman in her forties opened the door. She was wearing black and had a cigarette in her hand. She reminded me of so much of Vietnam that I greeted her in Vietnamese without thinking.
“Sin Chow.”
“Hello.” She dragged on her cigarette.
“I’m sorry. My name is Andy Roark. I’m a detective. I was hoping that someone would talk to me about Hieu?” I showed her the photostat of my license. For all that she seemed to care, I might have shown her the top of a carton of Chesterfields. I took out a cigarette of my own and lit it.
“I am his wife. I was coming down f
or a cigarette. I wanted . . . needed to get away from . . . everyone. Family and friends are all trying to say nice things, trying to make me feel better, but, how can they?” She was not a pretty woman, but she had presence and bearing. Her English was accented but flawless.
“Is Hieu’s family here?” I was hoping that Thuy might be there.
“No. My family did not get along with his. We aren’t close,” she said, and it seemed as though she had said it often in the past.
“I was hired by his niece to try to find out who murdered him and why.”
“I see. Why would she do that?”
“She was concerned that there might be a connection between Hieu’s murder, and another Vietnamese man murdered in Chinatown recently.”
“Do you think there is a connection, Mr. Roark?” It occurred to me that what was nagging me about her speech was that it was educated. I had expected pidgin but instead received mildly accented Oxford. Her English had been professionally taught. Her family had money once. Her English was the product of expensive schools and being taught the language from a young age.
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. I don’t mean to disturb you while you’re mourning, but I am worried that the police will treat Hieu’s death like a mugging, that they will not look at all of the possibilities.”
“Why should that worry you? You did not know Hieu.”
“No, I didn’t, but it seems that after all that life had dealt him, he deserves better than to be written off. Treated casually.”
“Hieu did not deserve to be murdered. Shot down like that.”
“No, ma’am, he didn’t. Do you have any idea why anyone would want him killed?” It was a question that I hated to ask but had to.
“Of course. Anyone who knew him from Vietnam who couldn’t escape with him. Anyone from the Committee who painted him in a bad light recently. Anyone who believed them when they say that he was a communist.”
“He wasn’t a communist, was he?”
“No, Hieu hated the communists. The Committee has used that as a strategy for years. Denounce anyone, destabilize their lives, take away their friends, and Hieu was no different.”