by Andrew Lanh
“Sit down.”
He didn’t move, standing in the doorway, his eyes watching me. He was dressed in old boxer shorts and a baggy T-shirt, and idly he scratched his chest. Suddenly he darted out of the room. When he returned, he’d thrown on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. Incongruous, vaguely funny—an iterated image of Mickey Mouse ran up and down his legs.
On the kitchen table a small bowl half-filled with dried rice, specks of stringy meat on top. An abandoned meal. A pair of chopsticks was dipped into the bowl.
I pointed. “Dustin, superstition says that chopsticks left in the bowl symbolize death. That’s why folks lay them across the top of…”
He yelled out, “You here to teach me manners?”
“Good point.”
I detected a sliver of a smile as he turned away.
He sat down opposite me at the kitchen table, arms folded. “People were yelling things at my door before.”
“And they left you a message with spray paint.”
“The whole goddamn neighborhood got graffiti.”
“Ignore it—when you see it.”
“You think I give a fu—?”
“You can say ‘fuck,’ Dustin.”
“I say it in front of Hank.”
I sat back and smiled. “He’s a cop. Lots of folks probably use that word with him—but usually it’s a choice two-word phrase.”
He got serious. “I don’t know why you’re here.”
“You know why I’m here. Those audiotapes need an explanation, Dustin. This isn’t a game. You’re in trouble.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that murder. I swear. Nothing!”
“Make me believe that.” I breathed in. “You have to realize how you come off on those tapes. Help me out. Your fight with Winslow— maybe you heard something. Maybe you said something to another student. Maybe another student with a grievance heard your battle and…I don’t know, Dustin. Maybe you’re connected to a murder but you aren’t aware of how.”
“That’s real crazy.”
“Is it?” I banged my fist on the table. “Explain those tapes to me.”
He bit the corner of a fingernail. “It was—stupid. Dumb shit.”
I was frustrated. “A body.”
He started. “He said that. I didn’t.”
“You’re lying to me. What are you hiding, Dustin?”
“Nothing.”
“You are, dammit.”
I could see him shutting down. “Maybe if you think back to kids you talked to. At school. What about this Darijo? Who does he know?”
His words flew out of his mouth. “Leave him alone. He’s not a friend.”
My eyes drifted to the shrine high on the kitchen wall. A gold-plated plaster Buddha surrounded by joss sticks in a ginger jar. A thin straw basket. A bowl of water. I pointed. “Dustin, why is there a McDonald’s Whopper on that shrine?”
Puzzled, he raised his head. He grinned. “You gotta have food for the ancestors or something like that. I think that’s why. For the long journey. That’s what my mother says. It’s—bullshit. I don’t pay attention.” He squinted. “A cheeseburger?”
“My question exactly.”
He started to laugh. “I guess Mom was out of those blood-red oranges.” He stood up and peered at the cardboard container. “My Mom’s fuckin’ nuts.”
He caught my eye, and for a brief moment we laughed. A wonderful moment. I’d never seen Dustin laugh before. “Quarter Pounder with Cheese.”
“Anyway, Dustin, back to…”
I stopped. The front door opened, and his mother walked in, one arm holding a paper bag. Her cane clacked on the floor. She deposited the bag on a table, took off her coat, let out a weary sigh, and seemed ready to head toward a bedroom when she noticed Dustin and me in the kitchen, both of us watching her.
“Anh Ky,” she began. “Mr. Lam.”
Her face closed up as she raised a fist in the air. “You can’t come here like this. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You have to leave now.” She stood in the doorway and yelled in Vietnamese. “De cho toi yen.” She sputtered in almost incoherent English, “Leave me alone. You. Go.”
“Let me…”
“Never come back.”
I hesitated, glancing at Dustin who had dipped his head down into his lap. I stood up. She waited in the doorway, her fists still clenched. As I walked by her, I noticed she was trembling, her eyes closed.
Chapter Nineteen
Hank stretched out on my sofa, his feet up on my old coffee table, his hands behind his head.
“You really should have more food in this apartment, Rick. How do you expect to entice guests into these rooms? On your personality alone? C’mon. This bagel is a year old.” He pointed to the bagel he’d taken from my counter.
“Yet my plan is not working. You’re here.”
“I’m family.”
“True. Family usually comes calling with—bagels. This hour of the morning.”
“I already ate breakfast.”
“And yet here you are.”
He swallowed the last of the stale bagel, wiped crumbs off his chest onto my floor. “You’re not the only form of life that occupies these rooms.” He squinted as though he’d spotted a colony of ants nearby. “I’m feeling charitable.”
“Hank, I’ve been thinking.” I reached for my coffee. “Maybe Dustin is involved—but unawares. Something he said—something said to him—some association at school that precipitated a murder he had nothing to do with.”
“Yeah, he’d like to hear himself described as such.”
“You know, six degrees of separation.”
“In this case, maybe one degree. That’s all it took.”
“But who is that person?” I wondered, tapping my fingers on the table nervously. “Dustin and one other person who…”
Hank broke in. “Yeah, someone using Dustin? Maybe. Someone, that one person, who knows the whole story of Dustin’s battles with Winslow and decides it’s the perfect plot for his own revenge. Someone who might trigger him as a scapegoat?”
“True. Maybe someone Dustin confided in.”
Hank sat up. “There’s Professor Laramie.”
“He seemed to enjoy the fight.”
“But could he fire two shots into Ben?”
“Unlikely. But who knows? Not a nice man, but a God-fearing born-again.”
“Yeah,” Hank sneered, “none of them ever take pot shots at their enemies.”
“You know what I mean. He’s seems—wimpy.”
“Once again, none of them…”
I held up my hand. “I get your point. Murderers come in all shapes and sizes and states of moral cowardice.”
Hank grinned. “Yeah, I remember hearing a prof of mine in Criminology saying those very words.”
I shook my head. “So where does this leave us?”
He sat up, bunched his arms around his knees. “Let’s make the assumption that Dustin is the innocent bystander here, but somehow integral to the murder.”
“Let’s talk to his almost-friend, the non-friend. Darijo Delic. Maybe he can give us a clue.”
Hank stretched out his arms, yawned noisily. “Where do we find him?”
“Finals are done. Most likely Darijo Delic is home or at his father’s restaurant in Hartford.”
Hank rubbed his stomach. “I’ve never eaten Bosnian food.”
“We’re not going there to eat.”
“If I’m weak, I can’t ask intelligent questions.”
***
Late morning, a bustling avenue in the South End of Hartford, cars double-parked and the boom boom boom thump of rap music from a low-slung passing car. Old Barry Square, now called Little Bosnia by locals after the migration following the bloodshed of the Balkan wars of the nineties. Vestiges
of the old neighborhood dotted the street: mom-and-pop Italian bakeries and pizza shops, a few stolid three-decker homes with green asphalt siding and peeling front porches. A speckling of Spanish bodegas and groceries and nightclubs lined the avenue. Two teenaged boys running between cars hurled curses in sputtered street Spanish at drivers who refused to slow for them. But in the teeming mix was a Balkan market on one corner, a glittery nightclub called Ziveli! in the middle of the square. Cruising through the side streets, sizing up the neighborhood, I spotted a real estate company: Herkovac Sales. An insurance broker named Mastovac and Sons. Bosnian Spoken Here.
“There,” I pointed. Hank craned his neck. “Sarajevo Café.”
A small eatery in the middle of the rundown block, an elevated brick front terrace surrounded by black wrought-iron railings. Summer patio tables covered with blue plastic tarps and coated with a thin film of ice. At the back of the terrace wide wooden doors, one bearing a small sign that announced: CLOSED.
As we walked in, we collided with a young woman in the process of leaning past us to flip over the sign. “I guess you ignored it anyway.” She grinned at us. Then she added, “We’re almost open for lunch.”
A small dining room with institutional lunch tables and helter-skelter chairs, nothing matching but somehow working—home-cooked meals from a family kitchen. Against one wall a coffee bar with an ornate Ottoman Empire urn. Dimly-lit wall sconces gave the room a shadowy feel, but someone snapped on overhead lights as we stood in the doorway, the room jumping to life. An amateurish wall mural depicted what I assumed was a scene from bustling Sarajevo: yellow-stone buildings with red-tiled roofs, a prominent minaret reaching into a blue sky.
Darijo Delic was standing by one the tables, his arms holding bunches of silverware as he watched us approach. His face was set in a grim line. “Dobar dan.” A greeting. Good day.
“Darijo,” I began, “a few words with you?”
He said nothing, simply stared, but then, as though obeying a shouted command, dropped the silverware on the table and turned quickly toward the voice behind him. “Father.” Words addressed to someone still in the kitchen but immediately at his side.
Father and son stood shoulder to shoulder, both faces stoic, though Darijo at one point cast a sidelong glance at his father.
Darijo resembled his father, both medium height, the father stockier than the slender Darijo, but both with long, almost stark faces, huge deep-set black eyes, chiseled chins under flat cheekbones. Dark, olive complexion, both with pitch-black hair, wavy and swept back from their foreheads. The father, probably late forties or early fifties, had a weather-beaten face, a lined forehead, but his son had the creamy complexion of a pampered child.
“What’s this about?” the father finally said, staring into my face. He spoke with a thick accent, barely intelligible.
Darijo nodded at us. “From school. The murder.” Then Darijo’s face relaxed. “My father Ahmed.”
“I’m Rick Van Lam and this is Hank Nguyen.”
“I know who you both are.” Darijo’s voice was slow and measured. “But I don’t understand.”
“You were—are a friend of Dustin Trang.” I watched his father’s face get cloudy. “We’re trying to clear his name, Darijo. We thought—a talk with people who know him.”
Ahmed interrupted, “He no part of murder.” He protectively placed his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“I know that,” I said hurriedly. “But they spent time together. Friends.”
“Not friends.” Darijo said.
“Not friends.” An echo from his father.
“But you’ve spent some time together. The College Union. In class.”
Darijo glanced at his father again. “I already talked to the cops.” But he lifted his chin. “A nice boy. To me. We are lost there…” He waved his hand helplessly in the air.
His father relented. “Then you talk.” He pointed to a clock on the wall. “But quick please, yes? The lunch people. In minutes.”
Darijo was dressed in black slacks, black tie shoes, and a crispy white dress shirt, open at the neck. “My sister and I,” he told us. “The only ones waiting tables today.”
Ahmed beamed. “Darijo has a scholarship. All A’s Bulkeley High School.” He nodded to a table in back. His laugh was boisterous, full-throated. “I time you like a factory clock.” But still wariness in his tone, his eyes dark with worry.
Sitting down, Darijo leaned in. “My father doesn’t like authorities. You know…cops. People who flash papers at him.” He flicked his head toward the kitchen. “A hellish life in Bosnia. The death camps. Cousins buried alive. Old women raped. At night, sitting here with his buddies, they drink slivovitz and weep. Everything is memory here.”
“You were born in America,” I said.
“Yes. A good thing. A bad thing.”
“Why?” From Hank.
“A good thing because it’s America and I can wake up without bombs blasting in my ears and people offer me money to go to college and have a good life.”
“And the bad?”
“Because I watch my father cry as nightmares wake him at night.”
Ahmed carried a tray from the kitchen and placed it on the table. “Turska kava,” he said. Turkish coffee. Small enamel cups inserted in filigreed silver holders. A burnished silver pitcher with a crescent star on top. He poured us coffee.
“This will put hair on your chest,” Darijo’s father told Hank.
Hank chuckled. “Ah, puberty arrives in a Bosnian café.”
Ahmed narrowed his eyes, confused, but his son said something in Bosnian. Ahmed stared, his brow furrowed, then laughed loudly, holding his sides and pointing at Hank.
Darijo shared a smile with his father. “He says you’re a comedian.”
Left alone, we sipped the potent brew, winced from its shot to the system. “Like Italian espresso on steroids,” Hank said.
Darijo watched us both. “My father demands you stay for lunch.”
“I was planning on it,” Hank told him.
Darijo nodded. He downed the last of his coffee, wiped his lips with the back of his palm, and said quietly, his eyes suddenly sad, “I don’t know anything.”
“Tell me how you know Dustin.”
He sat back, reflected. “We sort of fell in together, you know. I mean, we’re both in Professor Laramie’s class, and he was in the Union gazing out the window. I sat down with him, which made him unhappy.” His eyes twinkled. “I don’t think he wants friends.”
“Interesting. Do you like him?”
“Yeah, I guess so. He’s a smart guy. Can be funny, even.”
“Funny?”
“He used to make fun of Laramie.”
“How?” I glanced at Hank. “Dustin?”
Darijo chuckled. “Yeah. Professor Laramie sort of ends each sentence with a barely-suppressed sound—like ehh. Sort of. A nervous tick maybe. Dustin would read his notes from class out loud and end with…ehh.”
“Do you like Professor Laramie?” I asked.
He deliberated his answer. Then he said bluntly. “No. He’s…like patronizing. These off-hand remarks about America going down the toilet. And he’d look at the foreign students. Like me—like Dustin. He doesn’t like Muslims. Bosniaks.”
“He said that?” Hank’s face tightened.
“You don’t have to put it into words, you know.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
A slapdash grin, delightful. “You didn’t say it.”
“Did Dustin talk about his home life?” Hank asked.
“Not much.” He ran his fingertip across the rim of his coffee cup. “I mean, I asked him once.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he had no home life.”
That startled me. “Kind of extreme, no?”
His eyes flickered. “He said he was born in the middle of a highway.” An unfunny laugh. “And then he added that all his life people have been driving over him.”
Hank shivered. “Good Christ.”
“What did you say to that?”
“Nothing. No chance to. He said that, shrugged, and walked away. It sort of told me to keep my mouth shut.”
“Tell me something, Darijo.” I glanced at the clock and the shadow of his father in the kitchen doorway. “Did he talk about Professor Winslow’s murder?”
“No, we didn’t talk after that.”
“Did he ever mention problems with Winslow?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, it just exploded. Everything is okay, then—bam. Yelling at each other. Then—Winslow is dead. He did say he asked Winslow for a favor, expecting him to agree, but Winslow flipped out. He said Winslow wasn’t a kind man.” Darijo paused, rephrased his words. “No, I’m wrong. He said he was a kind man who didn’t understand how bad things were for him. For Dustin.”
“What did he mean?”
“Dunno. Then he stopped talking about it. He said it would blow over if Winslow would just get off his back.”
Hank and I exchanged looks. “But Ben wouldn’t let it drop.”
Darijo was eager to say something. “Can you really believe Dustin would shoot someone twice?”
“No.” I repeated myself. “No.”
Suddenly Ahmed and the young girl—“This is Almira, my daughter, a beauty, no? And a freshman at St. Joseph’s University, full scholarship”—covered our table with food, which Darijo began identifying. Cevapi, grilled bits of meat served with raw onion and slabs of pita bread. Some sort of Bosnian stew that smelled of exotic Arabian spices, heady, thick. Burek, a flaky pastry packed with meat. Platters of cold meats. Bottles of rakija—“brandy, homemade, not on the menu because we cannot serve because of the American laws.”
Darijo grinned. “You will need to sleep on the cots in back for the afternoon after this feast.” He pointed back to the kitchen. “I often do. My father does not believe in a salad with little bits of chicken sprinkled on top for lunch.”
Ahmed leaned in. “We are religious, if you need to know that. No pork.”