by Andrew Lanh
“A woman who fed him guilt and shame—and now demands obedience.”
“Something else, Hank. Grandma’s talk about the Trangs looking back to idyllic days in Vietnam, hoping to regain that paradise.”
“Grandma suggested that was one of the reasons they kept Dustin out of their world. He didn’t fit into the puzzle.”
“A distorted puzzle at that. Grandma wasn’t happy with their…I don’t know, their perversion of Buddhism.”
Hank chuckled. “The cheeseburger for the journey into eternity.”
I laughed with him. “‘This is not about a cheeseburger but it is all about a cheeseburger.’”
“Grandma’s Buddhist voodoo.”
“She’s telling us something.”
“To you maybe, the other Buddhist who spouts aphorisms from your book. Jesus Christ, Rick.”
“Maybe you should listen to us, Hank.”
He pulled back. “Sorry, but I always need an interpreter when the two of you wax…”
“Confucian?”
Another half-hearted laugh. “Exactly.” Mumbling, his mouth close to the receiver. “People are looking at me. I gotta cut this short.”
I ignored that, my mind racing. “When we first visited his home and met his mother, she said something strange.” I tried to reconstruct her words. “Something about Dustin not doing something. Yes. ‘I ask him one time.’ He didn’t do something for her. Another thought. Didn’t Darijo talk of some sort of betrayal hinted at by Dustin? His mother?”
“Okay, she exacted a promise. And compound that with his mother as warden and we have a little Dustin who shuts his mouth even if the cops and the whole world believe he shot Ben Winslow twice in the head.”
“Incredible.” I sighed. “Goddamn incredible. The weight of that family gets heavier and heavier.”
Hank summed up. “So Dustin sits in the library and reads about a war he knows nothing about, but now understands the why of his mother’s demands.”
“Hank, step back a moment,” I cautioned. “We’re assuming all this is true—that he’s shielding his family from something that happened those awful April days in Saigon. You know, that time I overheard Ben arguing with Dustin, I talked to Ben immediately afterwards—the first thing he asked was about me being Vietnamese. He said he’d never understood what that war was about. He’d never brought that up with me before. It was the squabble with Dustin. The war, Hank.”
“I believe it.” Flat out, emphatic. “I gotta go, Rick.”
Talking to myself, “It’s time we hammered Dustin to the wall.”
Hank laughed. “I have a feeling he’s ready. The image of that boy surrounded by all those books on the Vietnam War. That’s like—like a moment of crystallization.”
“Epiphany time in the library stacks.”
“But does any of this relate to Ben’s murder?” I could hear hesitation in his voice. “That’s what seems so far-fetched.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But if we can clear up this story with Dustin and his family, the cops can stop focusing on Dustin. If we take that away, maybe they—even you and me—can see the real murderer standing in front of us.”
“Waiting to be nabbed.” Hank added. “Someone we’ve talked to.” He spoke to someone near him. “All right. One minute.”
“Possibly.”
“So what’s next, Sherlock?” Hank asked. “I have people pointing at me, and not happily.”
“An invitation to my apartment. I’ll call him. Tonight. Chinese takeout.”
“Seven o’clock. After my shift ends. I’ll pick up the food. You get him there.”
“It’s time the boy comes clean.”
***
Dustin picked up on the second ring. “What?”
I waited a moment, then said, “Dustin, that’s not how you answer a phone.”
An edge to his voice. “You still teaching me manners?”
“Yes.”
I detected an uptick in his voice. “Everybody wants to change the world.”
“Why not?”
An unfunny laugh. “Yeah, why not. It’s all fucked up, right?”
“Dustin, you know why I’m calling you.”
That stopped him. “What do you want?”
“Again, Dustin, your tone.”
A moment of silence. “What?”
I sighed. “You need to come to my apartment tonight. Hank’ll be there. Dinner. Chinese take-out.”
A long pause. “Why?”
“We’re gonna talk.”
He didn’t speak for a long time, but finally, with a deep sigh, he said, “Yeah, I know.” More silence on the line. When he spoke again, his voice shook. “I know. I’ve been doing some thinking…reading and stuff. Now I understand something.”
I waited a heartbeat. “What do you understand?”
His voice a whisper. “I understand that I gotta talk to you about something.”
“Good. I’ll see you…”
The line went dead. So much for manners. My Sunday school primer. I shook my head. Rich Van Lam’s master class.
***
Dustin tapped quietly on my door, waited, then immediately tapped louder. He didn’t look happy when I greeted him, and he peered behind him into the hallway, down the stairs, as if he’d been followed. He walked by me, his book bag over his shoulder, which surprised me. He dropped it by the front door. He caught me looking at it. “I carry stuff.” Then he removed his shoes.
Inside, he took off his winter coat, an outlandish knit cap best saved for Alpine skiing adventures, and tucked mittens with too many worn holes into the pockets of his coat. Carefully he hung his coat on a rack by the door, and then watched me. “What now?”
“Relax, Dustin,” I assured him. “Hank’s on his way with the food.”
He’d dressed in Sunday best attire. Creased trousers a little too big and shiny in the knee, a faded white dress shirt, open at the collar but buttoned at his wrists. He’d worn old-fashioned penny loafers. I’d never seen him in any other shoes than his pristine sneakers and some muddy-brown Walmart work boots.
“You live in a strange house.” He gestured toward the front window. “It’s so—yellow.”
Gracie’s wonderful painted lady, a Victorian three-family with gingerbread cornices and octagonal windows and shutters with elaborate carvings. Every spring Gracie painted the outside a brilliant daffodil yellow. “The cheap blonde on the corner” was the neighborhood’s charming appellation for the stunning house, a stone’s throw from Miss Porter’s elite girls’ school and the town green ringed with staid Colonial white-clapboard houses. A string of Victorian upstarts around the corner from Main Street, stolid and grand. Gracie’s was the only maverick in the crowd.
“I love it.”
“It’s like living in a dollhouse.”
I pointed to the sofa. “Make yourself at home.”
He didn’t sit down. Instead, he walked around my living room, staring out the front window into the street below. “I like this place.” He faced me. “Yeah, I do. All the books.”
He stood in front of my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. One of his hands reached out and he ran his fingers across the bindings. I have rows of nineteenth-century volumes, leather-bound, dark and faded, echoes of ancient libraries. My life collecting books at church bazaars and flea markets up and down the East Coast.
He stood in front of a watercolor. “Le Pho,” I told him.
“Expensive?”
“A little.”
“Vietnamese?”
“Vietnamese French.”
“The French fucked us up, you know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I like this one.” He moved to the other side of the room and put his face close to a color lithograph of Anna Christie done by Robert De Niro, Sr. “Cool.”
/>
“A play by Eugene O’Neill.”
“Whatever.”
“The artist is Robert De Niro’s father. You know Robert De Niro?”
“Yeah, Analyze This. Late night TV.”
His body loosening, he strolled around, touching an oriental vase on a coffee table, picking up a figurine and squinting at the bottom as if he were an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, surveying the roll-top country-store desk in the corner, wandering into the kitchen and examining the old copper-plated ceiling. “Cool.”
He stared into the framed poster of a Joan Miro painting that I had hung over a cabinet. He ran his fingers down the glass, put his face close to it. His eyeglasses shifted.
He could have been a cat burglar sizing up his quarry.
Or, I smiled to myself, someone who had fallen into a warm bath.
“This place doesn’t look like you,” he said finally.
“What should it look like?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Police scanners, maybe. A wall of computer stuff. Black-and-white pictures of gangland killings. St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Machine-gun photos. You know, that stuff.”
“This is where I relax.”
A thin smile. “You did a good job of fooling me.”
A knock on the door.
“Food’s here.”
But it was Gracie who’d spotted the boy walking up the stairs and was anxious to meet him. After all, she’d had a ton of things to say about him at Zeke’s.
She carried a German Bundt cake on a platter, the icy frosting dripping onto the plate. She held it out. “A special treat.” She turned to Dustin. “And this is Dustin.”
He acted surprised that she knew his name. She smiled at that. I made the introductions. “This is Gracie, who owns the house and is a good friend of mine. She lets me live here.”
“Your hair is the same color as the house.”
She laughed. “Yes, I’m making a statement.”
“What’s that?”
She swirled around. Gracie was dressed in a flowing caftan decorated with outrageous purple hibiscus blooms. Around her neck huge turquoise chukka beads she claimed were given to her when she toured an Arizona reservation years back. Very little make-up, as always, but the illusion that she was ready for a stage walk-on was always there. That dramatic face, an old woman’s still captivating charm.
“I was a Rockette,” she told him. “I toured with Bob Hope during the Korean War.”
Dustin stared at her.
“You ever hear of the Rockettes, Dustin?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Gracie had a conspiratorial look in her eyes as she flicked her head around. “I stopped in to say hello.”
Again, the half-bow from Dustin.
“Such a handsome young man, Rick. Quite—striking.”
That news rattled Dustin, who took a step backward and almost toppled onto the sofa.
Probably no one had ever told Dustin he was good-looking. He shifted from one foot to the other, a little embarrassed but pleased. Color rose in his cheeks, and his eyes flickered. Handsome? The word made him happy. I looked at the young man—skinny as a reed but with brittle, spiked hair he obviously clipped himself with dull scissors. One side was longer than the other, and the back was a field of chopped weeds. Those oversized black-frame goggle glasses that kept slipping down his nose. A bit of tape on the corner of the frame suggested he’d snapped them. The long bony dark face. The fading black-and-blue bruises and that pale shiner. Handsome? I realized there was a good-looking boy under that mishmash of haircut and eyeglasses and bruises. Someday a woman would find him appealing.
Probably the same woman who would rebel against his dictatorial mandates and culinary fiats—and wield a wok. To use Grandma’s prophetic statement…
Hank bounded into the apartment, his arms filled with bags of food. “Dinner,” he announced, “is served.” He kissed Gracie on the cheek as she waved goodbye, and he said to Dustin, by way of greeting, “You better like Chinese food, kid.”
Dustin nodded. “Yeah.”
Dustin immediately began to nibble at the corner of his thumb. His eyes drifted over Hank’s shoulder as he breathed in. They rested on the book bag by the door.
Hank noticed the boy’s discomfort. Putting down the bags on the kitchen table, he approached Dustin, resting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, you know.”
Dustin squirmed. “No, it isn’t.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked quietly.
“I caused a lot of trouble. I didn’t mean to.”
His eyes drifted to the kitchen, and Hank motioned us to the table. Quietly, Hank unpacked cartons of food. Too many, of course, enough to feed—in the words of my adopted mother back in New Jersey when I first arrived in America—the Russian army.
As we dug into moo sho pork and chicken with snow peas and beef fried rice and pan-fried dumplings, I watched Dustin’s face. He grew distracted.
Finally, Dustin, dreamy-eyed, overfed, sat in the living room. Hank and I faced him, and I said, “Dustin, you know why you’re here.”
“I gotta tell you the story.”
“About time.” From Hank.
Dustin gave him a sharp look. “I didn’t know the story—I mean, all of it—until last night. I mean, today. Like early morning. I wasn’t supposed to look…” His words trailed off.
“Dustin, just tell us.”
“I’m gonna get in trouble.”
“We’ll handle that,” I assured him.
He swung his head back and forth. “I really fucked up.”
I caught Hank’s eye.
“Tell us.” My voice sharper.
“I mean, the talk about the war in your kitchen”—he looked at Hank—“like I never thought about it—the soldiers dying and the people…” A helpless shrug.
“Dustin, what are you telling us?” I asked.
He got up and picked up his book bag. While Hank and I watched, Dustin removed a tiny box, fumbling with it, letting it slip out of his fingers. Those small fingers, the fingernails bitten to the quick, that line of dried blood.
He placed the box on the coffee table. A small cloth-covered box, the blue and gold fabric dotted with stitched white flowers, the kind of box that opened to find jingling stress balls, a popular tourist gift in Chinatown. Now, his hands shaking, Dustin clutched a piece of white napkin, and spread it open.
He sat back, his eyes closed.
Hank reached over and picked up the inch-long cylinder. Pale white, bleached almost, grayish, splintered at both ends, jagged.
His eyes got wide. He held it out to me.
“A bone,” he whispered.
I took it from him, rolled the fragile piece between my fingertips. “Part of a finger.”
Dustin’s eyes got moist. He looked away.
“Jesus Christ,” Hank said, his voice hollow. “A fucking bone.”
“I’m sorry.” Dustin wiped away tears with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry. Sorry.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“The Commies.”
Dustin’s next words as we stared at him.
“Dustin, what the hell?” Nervous, I placed the bone fragment onto the table as we stared at it. “What in God’s name? A bone? Christ, a body part.”
His voice trembled. “I found it this morning.”
“Dustin, what the hell is going on?”
Hank snapped, “Dustin, are you fuckin’ crazy?”
Dustin shut his eyes. When he opened them, I saw fear. Maybe even terror. He blinked away tears. Silent, his hand scratching his neck, he blew out his lips. He began, “I got confused. I still don’t know…what the hell…”
I broke in sharply. “You know enough, Dustin. And you’ve known enough for some time. What the hel
l do you think you’re doing here?”
Hank softened his voice. “C’mon, Dustin, the story.”
The boy breathed out again. “All right. You know, like I said, at your mom’s house”—he glanced at Hank—“they were talking…asking me about the war, my family, what I knew. I knew nothing. Really. But I got to thinking. It was…like not real to me. All of it.” His lips quivered. “Just about a month ago I learned about the body. They found the body.”
“What body?” From Hank.
Dustin rushed his words. “I’m trying to tell you.”
I shot a look at Hank: Slow down. Easy.
“Go on,” I told him quietly.
He said something, a jumble of words, stopped, then took a deep breath. “You know how we were laughing about that cheeseburger on the shrine?” His eyes blinked rapidly. “Well, I never looked at the shrine. Why would I? Religion is—shit to me. But this morning, looking up, I realized there was a different McDonald’s burger there. That stunned me. Why? So Uncle Binh and Aunt Suong were at the house having coffee and I asked them—Isn’t that a new cheeseburger? Like—I thought—like a joke question. Everybody got hot under the collar, real crazy, and Uncle Binh told me to mind my own business. Mom was steamed. I hid in my room. When they all left, I snuck out to look. I stood on a chair, and I found this box.” He pointed to the box on the coffee table. “I took it down and found…the bone.”
“You didn’t know it was there?” I asked.
A hot flash of anger. “How would I? I’m not religious—not that it’s like, you know, a religious thing.” Again he pointed to the bone fragment. “But suddenly I realized what was going on.”
“What is going on, Dustin?” I asked, impatient.
“The reason for the cheeseburger.”
I quoted Grandma’s awful line: “This is not about a cheeseburger but it is all about a cheeseburger.’”
Dustin squinted at me. Hank was eager to say something.
“Yes,” Dustin said simply. “The soldier.”
“Tell us.”
“Just about a month ago Uncle Binh and Mom sat down with me and told me that we had to get the reward for the body.”
“Back up,” I said. “The body?”
Dustin, wide-eyed. “Okay. Yeah. We got some cousins or somebody in the village over there. Loc Dang, outside Vung Tau, I guess. Farmers, poor as shit. They dug up the remains of an American soldier in the field. Decayed, mostly. Covered with stones. But some bone fragments, some clothes, a dog tag even.”