A Perfect Cover

by Maureen Tan

  “No, never heard of him. But I didn’t interview the family. If there was nothing suspicious about this kid…Tommy… He wouldn’t have been mentioned in the reports I saw. Though you’d think that Tinh would have mentioned him.” Then a shrug that I couldn’t see touched his voice. “Maybe he thought I already knew.”

  Maybe, I thought. But that didn’t explain why he hadn’t told me.

  It was an indication of how distracted Beauprix still was that, when I asked for Nguyen Tri’s address, he didn’t ask me why.

  Chapter 12

  After showering in the house’s odd, detached bathroom, I selected a wardrobe appropriate for visiting the house on Kim Drive. This would likely turn into a social call, I told myself, so I dug through the clothes I’d picked up from Goodwill and bought during a wardrobe-enhancing stop at the Salvation Army’s resale shop on Chef Menteur Highway. I was looking for an outfit that would impress a teenage boy.

  In under a week Squirt’s fashion sense, as well as her personality had become second nature. Tonight, I put on a little extra makeup and spiked my hair into stiff points, dressed in trendy jeans and a tie-died top that was tight and cropped. A quick look in the candle-lit mirror and I knew something was missing. Bling-bling, I thought, reminding myself of the current slang for glitzy bangles. I added a strand of red beads, a matching bracelet and dangly earrings. Then I looked in the mirror again, judged Squirt’s look to be complete, and frowned at my reflection.

  “Sucks to be you,” I said in Squirt’s best backwater accent, at once acknowledging and dismissing my longing to dress like an adult again.

  Before I left the bedroom, I slid my picklocks into my purse. Just in case. Then I made my way through the house to the back door with the broken pane, which I’d replaced with cardboard. I let myself out, popped the cardboard out to reach in and secure the lock, then stuck the cardboard back in place. Silly to think that system would keep out even the most casual intruder, but it did secure the back door against wind and rain.

  I never went out through the front door. I was supposed to be squatting, and squatters are notoriously shy. Besides, I didn’t have a key. But mostly, I didn’t want to be bitten by one of the dogs that lived, very literally, in my own front yard. I’d told Beauprix about the dogs. Warned him, actually. And, in the unlikely event he should ever need to get inside, I described the safest route into the house.

  During the day, the dogs were unthreatening. When the weather was clear, I’d seen them sunning themselves in the middle of the street, getting up only to dodge the few cars that cruised down the block. They were a motley pack of strays, medium-size mixed-breed brown and completely unremarkable. Except for a squat one-eyed male with short, reddish-brown fur and a missing rear leg. His attitude marked him as pack leader. His remaining legs were bowed, his right ear was torn and his left was missing, and his tail was docked. When I’d first seen him, I’d recalled an old joke, snickered to myself, and named him Lucky.

  Mostly, I was lucky he hadn’t yet attacked me.

  At night, Lucky and his pack claimed my front porch and the lattice-enclosed area beneath it as their own. The missing boards had provided them access to what was apparently a comfortable den. Every time I passed the porch, I would see reflections of canine eyes staring out from between the arrow-straight branches of the oleander bushes or glimpse furry forms skulking into the shadows at the far corner of the porch.

  I’d realized the dogs were full-time residents when I’d come too close to the porch as I returned from a quick look inside the shotgun house next door. I had discovered that it was unoccupied and my own front porch was not. Lucky had growled at me from the other side of the porch’s wrought-iron railing, his single eye shining eerily in the shadows. The growl, deep in his throat, was only a few feet away from me and was definitely a warning to stay away.

  “You win,” I’d said, keeping my voice firm and calm. “The porch is yours. But take one move in my direction and I’ll…”

  I’d let my voice trail off because the tone was more important than the threat and I didn’t, at that moment, have a tactic for dealing with him if he came up and over the railing at me. The self-defense I’d learned, thanks to one of Uncle Duran’s many contacts, had focused on using psychological advantage and hitting vulnerable areas hard and fast. As I crossed the driveway to the opposite side, staying close to the fence until I’d reached the backyard, I considered how that advice might be used to advantage against a canine, rather than human, adversary. That yielded no strategy I considered very effective.

  So I’d settled on bribery.

  Undoubtedly, the elderly cousin and Mrs. Yang felt they were feeding a starving teenager with the stale pork-filled buns they bagged up for me to take home every night. But, in fact, the buns were used to enforce an uneasy truce. And bribery seemed to be working. The one-eyed leader of the dog pack no longer growled at me when I approached the porch to lob steamed buns over the decorative iron railing. He’d actually started wagging his tail when I approached.

  But still, I remained cautious. Tonight, as usual, I used only the back door and walked quietly along the far side of the driveway until I reached the sidewalk. There was movement on the porch and I resisted the urge to look back over my shoulder. But from the sounds of nails clicking on the sidewalk, I knew that one of the dogs—probably Lucky—was following me. Fortunately, away from his territory, he’d shown no tendency toward aggression. By the time I rounded the corner, I was fairly certain he’d returned to the porch. I stretched my legs and added a confident bounce to my walk as I headed toward Kim Drive.

  The Nguyens lived at the end of the block in a neatly kept two-story that was set back from the street. Between them and the community garden next door was a lush growth of banana trees. It was from there, as I pretended to admire the flowers and vegetables in a nearby plot, that I watched the house. The light was on over the front porch, but there were no cars in the carport.

  The blinds on the front windows were open and the rooms inside were lit. From my vantage point, I could see into several rooms. After fifteen minutes, no one had moved inside. No one home, I diagnosed. I looked at my watch and guessed that the family was out for dinner. Or shopping. Or some school activity.

  I wandered along the edge of the garden, then along the marshy path that ran behind the Nguyens’ backyard. It was obviously a family home, with a tire swing hanging from a big oak tree, a basketball hoop mounted on a pole adjacent to a wide slab of patio and a pink-detailed girl’s bike leaning up against the house. Inside a small attached screened porch, I saw a weight bench and a punching bag and recalled how muscular Tommy was. I suspected this was why.

  Just above the flat roof of the screened porch was an open window. Good, I thought, nodding when I saw it. It would provide my escape route if the Nguyens came home while I was inside. I went back around to the front of the house but, this time, I walked up the sidewalk to the front door. I had intended to ring the doorbell to ask Tommy if he wanted to hang out for a while. And talk. But an empty house would yield some quick information.

  Though I was fairly certain no one was home, I rang the doorbell anyway. I rang it several times, just in case someone was bathing. Or sleeping. Easier to apologize for obnoxious behavior than to explain my uninvited presence inside someone’s front door. When I was satisfied that no one would answer the door, I slipped the ring of picklocks from my purse and applied one of the thin metal rods to good purpose. It wasn’t a difficult lock and, though I hadn’t practiced lately, it took me only a minute to open the door.

  Inside the house and beyond the front foyer, generations of framed family photos were displayed on a wall in the living room. The oldest, which was black-and-white and faded, showed an elderly woman wearing an ao dai—a two-paneled overdress layered over silky slacks—and a man of similar age wearing loose black trousers and a shirt. They stood in the courtyard of a house that reminded me of Grandma Qwan’s. Another photo showed a group of young soldier
s smiling happily from the open bed of a heavy truck. A jungle was in the background. From more recent photos, I picked out the current Nguyen family group. A mother. A conspicuously absent father. One daughter, obviously the youngest. And two sons. One of the boys was Tommy, the other undoubtedly his older brother, Tri.

  I slipped through the first floor of the house, opening books, reading messages on the corkboard in the kitchen, thumbing through the address book beside the phone. The number for Tinh’s City Vu was there, which was no surprise since Tommy worked at the restaurant. But scrawled beneath that was the number for Uncle Tinh’s private line and I had no ready explanation for that.

  In the mother’s bedroom I looked through the closet, pulled out every drawer and checked behind every picture and under every piece of furniture. From the lack of anything masculine in the room, I suspected that her husband was long gone.

  I searched all the rooms on the first floor for something hidden, something out of the ordinary. Listening constantly for the sound of a car on the driveway or footsteps on the front stoop, I worked as quickly as I could. And I found nothing. So I went upstairs.

  There were three bedrooms, one for each child.

  The younger sister’s was filled with clothes and books, toys and trinkets, barrettes and chaos. I spent only a few minutes there, handling every stuffed animal and doll to be sure that nothing was hidden inside one. A diary offered little insight into the family, exposing only abysmal spelling and her unrequited love for a boy named Smitty. Only the day before, Smitty had eaten lunch just three seats away from her. But at the same table.

  Despite the seriousness of my situation, that made me smile.

  Across the hall, another closed door was labeled with bright yellow warning signs emblazoned Tommy and Restricted Area. Inside, the room was a study in contrasts. Silver jewelry and an array of acne medication and hair care products were carefully laid out on the dresser. Books and magazines overflowing from a pair of bookcases were an eclectic mix that included science-fiction, car mechanics and poetry, though the majority were devoted to cooking and math. An intact PlayStation, a dismantled PC and a layer of dust covered the surface of his desk. What looked like homework in progress was spread across his neatly made bed. The space in between his mattress and box spring hid a smutty novel. I checked the pockets of the clothes that hung in his closet and encountered about ten dollars’ worth of loose change.

  Tommy was an interesting boy, I thought, but I knew that already. Nothing in his room suggested that he was anything besides what he seemed to be.

  When I opened the door at the end of the hall into Tri’s room, I discovered a memorial frozen in time, a testament to the love of a family still in mourning. Too easy to believe that Tri might return at any moment to take up his life, to finish the jigsaw puzzle laid out on the floor beside the bed, to put his feet in the athletic shoes lined up in front of his dresser, to wear the jeans and sweatshirts folded into his drawers. I searched his room carefully, located his checkbook and a file full of bank statements and discovered that he didn’t balance his checkbook regularly and didn’t have a lot to balance. A series of framed pictures suggested that he’d loved the same girl since high school.

  Tri’s computer, an expensive model with a large screen, was password protected. But the software boxes, users’ manuals and books on his shelves yielded their own information and justified the quality of his PC. He had been a full-time college student and was interested in architecture and art. I riffled through the portfolio I found tucked beneath his bed, examined the finished pieces he’d mounted on his walls, looked at the half-finished drawing on his drafting table. He was precise, intuitive and had a good eye.

  I took a final look around the room. A college kid, living at home, apparently not into drugs or alcohol. An artist, like me. So what had made him a victim? Nothing I saw suggested an answer.

  Noise from downstairs, then voices in the foyer, increased my heartrate and brought a quick halt to my examination of the upstairs bathroom. I rushed back to Tri’s room, opened the door quickly and closed it softly behind me, and went out the window. I crossed the rooftop, laid flat and slid over the edge, hung by my fingertips and dropped to the soft ground.

  I left the Nguyen’s home frustrated.

  Late that night, I called Beauprix again.

  I didn’t intend to tell him about breaking into the Nguyens’ house. I hadn’t gained any significant information and, besides, it was better not to unnecessarily challenge his good-cop sensibilities. In fact, there was nothing I had to tell him. Not really.

  After returning from Kim Drive, I had locked myself into the bedroom and was now sitting on the edge of the bed, my back propped with pillows, my feet stuck in a big pan I placed on the floor beside the bed.

  “I made five dollars in tips today,” I said after we’d talked for a few minutes. “And I spent it on epsom salts and candy. Even as we speak, I’m soaking my feet and eating M&M’s Peanut.”

  Beauprix’s deep chuckle carried across the connection.

  “I like the blue ones best.”

  “I’ll save ’em for you,” I said.

  “You can trade them for a foot rub.”

  I couldn’t help it. Suddenly, I was imagining his strong hands on the soles of my feet, smoothing over my ankles, his fingers working along the taut muscles of my calves, then slowly upward…. I shook my head, told myself I was being foolish, said a quick goodbye and disconnected.

  That night, I ate several packages of M&M’s, blues included.

  Chapter 13

  On Friday morning I added glittering pink gel to my black, magenta and pink spikes of hair. When I arrived at the Red Lotus at 7:00 a.m., the Yangs and the elderly cousin smiled warmly at me as I tied my white apron on over a purple shirt and acid-washed black jeans and went immediately to work.

  At just a few minutes before ten, a dozen Vietnamese men came streaming into the restaurant and took seats at the large round table in the corner. I rushed to take a tray from underneath the counter and began stacking it with a pair of teapots and a teacup for each place at the table. That was part of my job, and I was a determinedly hardworking employee.

  But Mrs. Yang had surprised me by taking the tray from my hands and walking it over to the table herself. Usually she only helped with the customers if I became overwhelmed. But the other tables in the restaurant were empty and no one sat at the counter. Mrs. Yang waited on this table anyway, and the elderly cousin busied himself in the kitchen preparing food that was not on the regular menu. Vit nau mang—stewed duck with vegetables—filled the restaurant with the sweet licorice smell of star anise and the earthy smell of black mushrooms.

  After just a week in Little Vietnam, I recognized all of the men who seated themselves around the table. They were all business owners and their ranks included the cheerful owner of the souvenir shop, the giant of a butcher and the angry baker. As a group, the age, manners and dress of the men marked them as “old country,” immigrants all. The butcher, who I guessed to be around fifty, seemed to be the youngest man at the table; certainly the oldest was the souvenir shop owner who was at least seventy. About half of the men wore traditionally styled shirts with straight hems untucked over dark trousers.

  Though they greeted each other cordially, and a few seemed to be friends, the formality of their interactions indicated that this was a meeting rather than a social event. By 10:05 a.m., all the seats around the table were taken, except for one. The men waited, sipping hot tea. Then white-haired Mr. Yang walked over to the table and seated himself. He tipped his head in the direction of the souvenir shop owner and the meeting began.

  As the group talked, Mrs. Yang had rushed repeatedly from kitchen to table and back, snapping directions and waving her hands at me—directing me to prepare another plate of fresh cilantro or to fill more tiny bowls with fermented fish sauce—nuoc mam—or with the pungent dark red oil from crushed peppers. She finally relaxed when each of the men pulled ornately ca
rved and silver tipped ivory chopsticks from their sleeves and deep pockets and began eating. Only then did she whisper an explanation to me.

  According to Mrs. Yang, there were two businessmen’s associations in Little Vietnam. Both groups met weekly at the Red Lotus on Fridays. This one, the Little Vietnam Benevolent Society, met in the morning; the Young Vietnamese Businessmen’s Association gathered late in the afternoon. Though she cautioned me to treat the men from both organizations with maximum respect, she clearly favored the group her husband headed.

  A few minutes into the meal and Mr. Yang gestured for his wife to come over to the table. The conversation that took place then involved the heads of those around the table periodically turning in my direction. The souvenir shop owner made a point of smiling at me, the baker scowled and the others managed looks ranging from idly curious to vaguely disapproving.

  When Mrs. Yang spoke to me next, she asked, “Parlezvous Français?”

  Lacie Reed spoke French and half a dozen other languages. Squirt did not.

  I looked up at Mrs. Yang blankly and said, “Huh?”

  “I said, do you speak French?”

  “Uh, no. Sorry.”

  Mrs. Yang patted my arm.

  “Not a problem.”

  Then she nodded in Mr. Yang’s direction and told me that I now had the honor of watching to see if the gentlemen needed anything.

  Earlier, the conversations I’d overheard at the table were in Vietnamese and occasionally in English. Now the men were speaking exclusively in French. But though they believed I couldn’t understand the language, the members of the Benevolent Society appeared to be extremely cautious men. I was discouraged from lingering within earshot. On the few occasions that a quick wave of the hand, snapping of fingers or a raised eyebrow brought me to the table, I could catch only snippets of conversation. Most of them irrelevant.