Child of My Winter

by Andrew Lanh

“Liz,” I said. “Think about it. Darijo’s connection with Ben is tenuous. One class. Nothing in particular.”

  “And,” Hank added, “it was Dustin who had the row with Ben.”

  She protested. “Who knows what other stories were taking place in Ben’s world? Darijo may have had more of a connection with him. Did you ever think that Dustin is—incidental? Maybe Darijo was friends with someone else on campus—someone who needed to kill Ben.”

  Hank was frustrated. “Wouldn’t there have been hints—rumors? Especially after the killing. Somebody would talk, no? I mean, the cops investigated every story, interviewed everyone. Not a word. It’s—Dustin for them. Sadly. And now this attempt on Darijo’s life. What? A revenge killing?” He slapped the table with his hand.

  Liz smiled at him. “Calm down, Hank. I’m only suggesting a scenario. A killer no one thought of. In the shadows. I don’t want you two boys to go riding off into the Wild West with guns a-blazing, only to discover tumbleweeds blowing in your path.”

  “That makes no sense,” Jimmy said to her. He signaled to the barmaid and ordered a beer—“Budweiser in the bottle”—while Gracie said “Ditto” and I went for a glass of pinot.

  We ordered Zeke’s notoriously greasy hamburgers and salty fries and heart-attack onion rings and a Caesar salad with chicken—for Liz, the naysayer in the group—and settled back, watching one another, enjoying the fact that all of us were together.

  Gracie raised her glass. “A merry Christmas to us all.”

  Three days before Christmas, and Zeke’s had dragged out last year’s decorations. White lights blinked erratically over the entrance. A plastic Santa Claus had a chip of plastic missing from high on his left thigh, which made the illuminated Santa vaguely risqué—in a certain light. A fake green garland with red bulbs hung over the mirrored bar, a decoration the manager sometimes forgot to take down until someone reminded him that it was Easter.

  Jimmy sat back, eyeing us all and tapping the pack of Marlboros in his breast pocket, a sign that he was ready to speak. He cleared his throat. “I called this meeting because I gotta listen to everybody asking my advice over the phone. Rick calls and doesn’t let me get a word in edgewise. Hank calls and asks me what Rick has said about him. Liz and I talk all the time, which is a pleasure, even though we’re talking about Rick.” He started hacking, his thick cigarette cough, while we waited. Again his fingers tapped the forbidden cigarettes. “This kid Dustin is like a sun and you’re all, you know, revolving…”

  “Nobody talks to me about it.” From Gracie, her lips set in a grim expression as she watched Jimmy. Her eyes also took in Liz, a look that suggested her alarm that Jimmy and Liz had bedtime phone chats.

  Liz spoke up. “Gracie, all our conversations end up talking about you.”

  “Nice try, Liz.” But Gracie was delighted with the comment.

  Impatient, Jimmy went on. “This Dustin has become Rick’s obsession. However”—he held up his hand when I went to protest—“however, I understand how he gets a little nuts with this Vietnamese stuff.” He stopped. “Anyway, here’s what I gotta say—nothing gets to that kid. Right? Nothing seems to scare him. I mean, the police haul him in. He keeps quiet. He’s the subject of TV and social media crap. He keeps quiet. This crackpot preacher over in Bristol talks about him. He keeps quiet. Hank tries to charm him—he shuts up.”

  “What are you saying, Jimmy?” From Hank.

  “I’m saying he is acting like someone in a war. Like in Vietnam you couldn’t let anything touch you. Think like a soldier. He’s like—name, rank, serial number. That kind of attitude.”

  “So?” Again from Hank.

  Jimmy sat back, folded his arms across his chest. “So the question is—why? It would be easer for him to talk, no? There gotta be something so powerful making him hold that secret—if he got a secret, which everyone thinks he has—close to his chest. What?” Jimmy raised his voice. “Life and death. Powerful. You find that out, Rick, and you got yourself a solution to this story.”

  Suddenly Gracie spoke. “He’s protecting someone.”

  “What?” From Jimmy, startled.

  “His silence. He doesn’t have to be quiet. A secret. If you got a secret, you are helping someone. Protecting someone. Keeping someone from being hurt.”

  “Or,” I said, “keeping someone away from you. Or keeping someone happy.”

  “Who?” From Hank. “I mean, he keeps saying it has nothing to do with the murder so why does everyone want to know his business?”

  “Maybe he has a point.” Jimmy was nodding furiously. “Maybe it doesn’t have to do with the murder.”

  “Or,” I said, “maybe it does but he doesn’t know it does. He lives such an isolated life maybe he can’t put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that he’s in the middle of.”

  Liz was thinking of something. “The boundaries of that jigsaw puzzle center on the house he lives in.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  She took a sip of wine. “Think of it. That’s the world he knows. He doesn’t really connect to the outside world. Alone in the library. Alone at the College Union. An occasional talk with this Darijo. He’s a prisoner in that apartment.”

  “It’s funny you mention that,” I began. “Grandma used the same word. Prison. But of the past. His family’s past in Vietnam. The way his family stopped living when they got to America.”

  “When they stopped living, they froze him with them.”

  “But they don’t want him in the picture at all,” Hank said.

  “Unless he serves some purpose,” I said.

  “The hold of his family? Maybe? The power of his Uncle Binh?”

  “I don’t know.” From Jimmy, shaking his head.

  “They crippled the boy.” Gracie watched my face. “Crippled,” she repeated, furious.

  “This loneliness,” Liz began, “has to do with his family. Alone in that house with a mother who seems indifferent—maybe even hostile—to him. An unwanted child. A boy who finds his own way—to the library, to good grades, to college. All on his own.”

  “Well, he’s bright,” I said.

  “And he knows how to survive.” From Hank.

  “Not only that,” I went on, “but he’s found a way to particularize his life. Everything orderly, precise. Even his future—the number of children he wants. Christ, you should see how he unties and ties his shoes. A ritual. Everything exact.”

  “Someone who is afraid of loosing control,” Liz said.

  “Because he has anger problems,” I added.

  “Well, of course he does. He’s ready to explode.”

  “But maybe murder?” Gracie wondered.

  “No,” I insisted.

  “I agree,” Hank emphasized. “Murder is too—messy for him.”

  Jimmy fumed. “What the hell does that mean? Messy?”

  “He likes a well-ordered universe.”

  Jimmy smirked. “Hey, if your world is out of whack because somebody is on your case, shoot him. Then you got the world you want. Orderly.” He took a swig of beer. “Anybody here listening to me?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  But Liz was anxious to say something. “Wait. If he’s a prisoner in that apartment, he has a keeper.”

  “His mother,” I concluded.

  She was nodding. “Who doesn’t love him—or want him there.”

  “But he stays.”

  “Because he can’t go anywhere else,” Gracie said.

  “So,” Liz summed up, “maybe he is trying to curry his mother’s favor. To get her to love him. To have her say he’s important.”

  “That’ll never happen,” Hank said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Liz insisted. “Dustin probably can’t believe his own mother would not love him. That’s horrible for a child
.”

  “So what does he do?” I asked her.

  Hank answered. “He protects her.”

  “Or her secret.” From Jimmy.

  “So the secret that he confided to Ben has to do with protecting his mother?” I asked. “Seems improbable. What could be so horrible in her life—to make Ben so angry?”

  Jimmy held up his beer bottle and saluted me. “Maybe you should run with that idea for a while.”

  “He’s got brothers,” Hank said.

  “But,” I noted, “they don’t talk to him. One can’t come into the apartment per his mother’s orders. I met him—scary as hell. The other’s a nebbish on the sofa.”

  “Okay, leave them out of the equation,” Liz said. “View this just as a drama between an uncaring, distant mother and a hungry, lonely boy—two occupants of that cage. No one else matters. A mother who looks back to a life in Vietnam when she was happy. A war that took away the future she dreamed of. When she had a future.”

  I nodded. “Back to a time when there was no sprawling brat named Dustin who appeared one day during a highway crash that took her husband and left her with two worthless boys and a baby that got in the way.”

  “No wonder she runs to that godless church,” Gracie commented. “False promises. False prophets. Family-sized hope and salvation. Gold as—release from pain.”

  “Imagine the guilt she’s bred into that boy.” Liz shuddered.

  “And the guilt he’s owned,” I said to her. “An unreal obligation to her.” I smiled at Liz. “An obligation to protect her secret—even to the point of fighting with Ben.”

  “But not kill Ben,” Hank added.

  Jimmy was fussing. “I’ve made my point already, folks—go in that direction, Rick.” He signaled to the barmaid. “Do you see us sitting here waiting for the goddamn dessert menu?”

  “I’m gonna have to talk to Dustin,” I said emphatically. “Finally. The talk.”

  Gracie was waiting to speak. “A suggestion, Rick. Why don’t you invite him to your place? Your apartment. Not the prison of his home. Not the library where he hides out. The school. But a different world from what he knows.”

  Hank protested. “But, Gracie, he’s been to my parents’ home.”

  Smiling at him, a little patronizing, Gracie shook her head. “He knows that world, Hank. Vietnamese. Wonderful, yes, but he needs a jolt into a calm, serene world.”

  Hank grumbled. “Yeah, that’s Rick’s apartment. Somber as a tomb. So quiet that even the mice in the walls hush each other up.”

  Gracie frowned at him. “We do not have rodents in my building, young man.” She winked at me. “You know what I mean, Rick? A place where he can feel—warm.”

  “I don’t know, Gracie.”

  My phone beeped, and Jimmy winced. “You know how I feel about phones when we’re eating.”

  I glanced down. “It’s Marcie.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the pope. We’re eating.”

  Hank waved a hand at him. “Actually we’re done eating.”

  “I haven’t had dessert.” Jimmy reached for my phone. “Rude manners, Rick.”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree with you, Jimmy. But Marcy sent a text.” I held up the phone. Marcie’s message:

  Dustin sighting. Interesting. Where R U?

  Jimmy smirked. “Tell her we’re sitting with folks that still know how to spell.”

  I texted back:

  Zeke’s. All of us.

  Ten minutes away. Wait.

  Hank pulled out his phone and tapped something onto the screen. He handed it to Jimmy, who grumbled, “What the hell?”

  Hank was laughing. “An emoticon for Jimmy. A good title for an after-school HBO movie.” He held up the screen. A simple :) followed by a happy face: 

  “Goddamn hieroglyphics. No wonder the Egyptians all died out.”

  “You’re thinking of the Aztecs.” Hank arched back his head.

  “Symbols, signs, gobbledygook. That’s how we talk to each other. Guess what country is next to disappear? Thank God I won’t be around to see it.”

  “Always the optimist.” From Gracie, leaning over to pat his forearm.

  Within minutes, Marcie and Vinnie walked in. “You all look so grim,” Marcie said.

  “Jimmy has predicted the end of American civilization.” Hank reached over and lightly punched Jimmy on the shoulder.

  Vinnie saluted Jimmy. “No one told me it had arrived.”

  Marcie added, “It too late for civilization.”

  Marcie slid into a chair and Vinnie pulled up a chair from another table. “We caught an early movie, the two of us, and we stopped at the college library on the way home. I wanted to pick up an interlibrary book that came in. Deserted, as you can imagine. A few stragglers in the library, but the librarian whispered nervously that Dustin was back in one of the carrels.”

  Vinnie added, “That annoyed me, frankly. Like she was afraid she was going to be ax-murdered by that boy.”

  “Anyway,” Marcie went on, “I strolled back there out of curiosity.”

  “Nosiness.” From Vinnie, leaning his head onto her shoulder.

  “Civic duty.” She brushed his head away. “There he was, drowsy, it seemed, head bent into some tome. The desk was filled with volumes, stacked around him like a fortress. He started when I approached and sat up, but turned his face away.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  She shook her head. “No, I was sorry I went back there. He struck me as so—intense.”

  “Intense?” Hank echoed. “What does that mean?”

  Marcie’s eyes got cloudy. “As I walked by, I saw that all the books—at least the ones I could see—were on the Vietnam War.”

  “The war?”

  She nodded. “Histories of the war. Robert McNamara’s book on top. Military campaigns. Like he was searching for answers. It was a little—unnerving.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  Again she shook her head. “I couldn’t. Really. His head jerked up and I lost my breath.”

  “Good God. Why?” From Gracie.

  “He looked like someone who’d just seen a ghost.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sometimes history falls like a ton of bricks on the innocent.

  That cryptic line from Melody Winslow came to me as I tossed in bed the following morning. I tried to get it right. The exact words: Yes, that line. A line her father told her after getting off the phone. An unsettling conversation. But was it Dustin? No matter because the line resonated, disturbed.

  I sat up in bed.

  The past—and probably not even Dustin’s own immediate past, his deadened eighteen years. The War. The Vietnam War. Marcie and Vinnie talking about Dustin squirreled away in the college library, the young man suddenly discovering the brutal war that shifted so many lives, including those of his parents. Uncle Binh, Aunt Suong. Even, I supposed, the two little boys dragged behind them. Timmy and Hollis. Thang and Hiep. A war kept from Dustin, little spoken of, but now a war that loomed large and fierce in his consciousness. What suddenly exploded inside him to propel him to that library?

  I texted Hank who texted back that he’d phone on his break.

  “What’s your thinking about this?” His first words to me.

  I emphasized Melody’s recollected line, my belief that Dustin’s secret was somehow connected to his mother and, more importantly, to a war he knew so little about.

  “Yeah,” Hank agreed. “That talk at Zeke’s sort of made me sit up.”

  “What does it all mean?”

  Hank’s voice got louder. “Whatever it was, it was possibly illegal.”

  “Because Ben was talking about the FBI?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m convinced this has to do with the war.”
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  Hank’s voice dropped off as he spoke to someone in the room. “Sorry. The citizens of Connecticut expect me to be working.” A deep breath as he went on. “Maybe the flight to America? Grandma said he was a prisoner of the past.”

  “Something happened those last days in Saigon. April 1975. The Trang family given special treatment. Flown out in a military helicopter headed to Guam.”

  Hank mumbled, his voice low. “Yeah, Uncle Binh. What could be so dangerous all these years later?” Again he pulled the phone away from his mouth. “Give me a second, sir.”

  I spoke quickly. “That’s what makes no sense. And why would Dustin turn to Ben Winslow?”

  “For help. Legal advice. Maybe immigration authorities were on their case. ICE.”

  “No, Hank. All these years later? Uncle Binh was a South Vietnamese military honcho. A hero to so many.”

  “But maybe he did something that violated some U.S policy.”

  Pacing the floor of my apartment, I shifted through the facts as I knew them. “Still, again, Hank—more than four decades later? Old people now. Sick. A man in a wheelchair.”

  Hank scoffed. “Men in wheelchairs can coordinate crimes, Rick.” A long pause. “Or want to cover up an old crime.”

  I thought about it. “David Laramie said Dustin told him that Ben failed”—I banged my forehead—“‘us.’ He said—us. Who was the ‘us’?”

  “On the audiotape Dustin says ‘I gave my word.’ To who?”

  “But once Ben was murdered, why wouldn’t Dustin simply tell us the story? The game is over.”

  “Because the problem hasn’t gone away. His family’s problem. Possibly it has nothing to do with Ben’s murder—Dustin’s bad timing—but the family is thinking trouble. Illegal something or other. Turning to Ben. Turning to an American professor who was sympathetic to his students.”

  “But Ben balked—didn’t want to get involved with the Trang dilemma.”

  “Or, more likely, he demanded Dustin call the authorities himself—take responsibility.”

  I sat down, stretched out my legs, and groaned. “Yeah, a lesson in proper protocol. Ben demanded Dustin turn in his own family. His mother? That old woman?”