by Andrew Lanh
“And me?”
“An experience you probably won’t repeat.” He laughed at his own joke.
“What do you want to show me, Mike?”
He reached over and opened the glove compartment and pulled out a large manila envelope, wrinkled, grease-stained. It was thick with newspaper clippings. Quietly, a bunch at a time, he handed me clippings from the Courant, from the New Britain Herald, from the West Hartford News, carefully scissored clippings. Some yellowed and torn, dirt stains, coffee stains. Awards for his children, Dean’s List, Honor Society, Woodsman of the World medallions, scholarships from a women’s club. A library commendation for Wilson. Dozens of them. Michael, Hazel, Wilson, even Simon. A middle-school commendation, Simon accepting the award in front of the school sign. He looked joyous. I’d never seen Simon look—joyous.
“Impressive.”
Mike grabbed them back from me, stuffed them back into the envelope, and dropped the envelope into his lap. His hands rested on the folder, his fingers interlaced.
When he faced me, his face was broken and tired. “Sometimes I think that if I threw this envelope away, I could start all over.”
“Why?”
His voice shook. “Then maybe I could do it right this time.”
Chapter Twenty
The message from Michael Tran on my home phone sounded urgent. When I reached him late at night, the urgency had passed. Instead, in a yawning, lazy voice he said something had come up that bothered him.
“Urgent? That’s what you said.”
“Well, yes. I don’t misuse the English language, you know.”
“What is it?”
A long pause. “You woke me up.”
“Urgent, you said.” Now I was impatient. “I also understand the English language.”
I could hear him laugh. “Touché. It’s just that…well, a couple of things are bothering me…worrying me. Actually, yes.” He deliberated. “I’ve tried to stay out of my family’s petty nonsense, but that seems impossible.”
“Tell me.”
“A call from Hazel, who never calls me. She’s worried about Simon, which I don’t think she ever is. And a visit from Simon who slept on my couch again but who is…different. Also, well, worried, if I can judge by the look on his face and his muttered conversation about the state of things in his part of the world.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re calling me.”
An edge to his voice. “Well, you are the investigator in all this, as I recall from your visit to my apartment. If anyone can give me a perspective on what’s happening, it has to be you.”
“And you want a perspective?”
A sardonic laugh. “Amazing, isn’t it, Mr. Lam? I surprised myself by making that phone call to you. Maybe there’s hope for me after all.” He laughed outright, but immediately stopped. “I have no proof of anything, but suspicions, worries. Could we meet tomorrow for a drink? Right now I’m sleeping. You did wake me up. Otherwise you’d have heard more worry—maybe wonder—in my voice.”
I agreed, hung up the phone, and sat back in my chair, mulling over a conversation that bothered me—because I realized how much I disliked the smug young man.
Late the next afternoon I met him at a tavern on Park called Gully’s, a watering hole a block or so from Little Saigon. He’d nixed my suggestion to meet at a small bar and grill called Xuong’s, a dark hole-in-the-wall largely populated by Vietnamese workers straggling back after numbing shifts in the nearby Colt factory on New Park. “No, Gully’s,” he said. “I don’t go into Little Saigon without a court order.” Then that arch laugh. “Sometimes I meet friends at Gully’s.”
A local college bar with wet T-shirt contests and sloppy pitchers of sticky green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. University of Hartford frat house celebrations that spilled into the pizza joint next door. Ecstasy with a chaser of spicy pepperoni.
At mid-afternoon the place was nearly empty, a booth of shaggy men in splotchy painter’s pants and white caps lingering over a pitcher of beer. Now and then a heated exchange. Thick Slavic accents. Refugees from Little Bosnia by Barry Square in the south end of Hartford. They faced each other across a table with looks that suggested they’d never met one another before and were resentful that strangers had plopped down uninvited opposite them.
I sat across the room, ordered a bottle of Tsingtao, stared out the window, and watched Michael parking his old Lexus in front. He hadn’t won his National Merit Fellowship to Trinity based on his parallel parking skills. I was sure of that.
He shook my hand and smiled as he slipped into a seat opposite me. Dressed in a brilliant purple polo shirt and creased khakis over brown loafers, a light tan spring jacket hugging his shoulders, he looked relaxed. A recent haircut, neat and conservative, a hint of scissored hair across his ear lobes. “Good to get out of the apartment for a bit. Too much studying makes me a dull boy.”
For all his mission of urgency he now acted breezy, nonchalant, with all the time in the world. Even his voice had lost the tempered, stilted inflection I’d noticed in his apartment and even last night on the phone. A performance? I wondered. Perhaps the lazy-eyed girlfriend who’d watched us from across the room in his apartment—probably occupying a pillow last night as I roused him from sleep—compelled him to affectation and attitude.
He glanced around the place. “At night, sitting here with friends from Trinity, the place is hard-core rock ’n’ roll. And pseudo-intellectual pyrotechnics from the pretenders.”
I pointed to the inebriated house painters. “Now it’s round one.”
He squinted at them. “They look angry.”
“And drunk.”
“That, too.” He ordered a beer—Heineken—and admonished the barmaid, “Make sure it’s ice cold.”
She smiled at him. “I’ll fly it in from Alaska.”
He winked at her, which bothered me. But she seemed to expect it from him.
“You come here a lot?”
He ignored the question, instead leaning in, arms folded on the table. “You know, Hazel never calls me. We’re not that close. She thinks I’ve left the family.”
“You have.”
His kneejerk smirk annoyed me. “Well, there is that. But for her to call me, well, I guess I had to sit up and take notice.”
“What did she say?”
But Michael wanted to tell his story with his own syncopated rhythm. He waited a bit, watching me closely, and then said, “We were never close.”
“You already told me that.”
Now he grinned. “At first I didn’t even recognize her voice. It sounded—strained, echoey, like she was calling from a tunnel. Then she said, ‘It’s me. Hazel.’ Then she yelled, ‘Your sister.’ That was unnecessary. So I waited and she started to ramble on and on until I broke in. ‘Hazel, what the hell? What’s the matter?’ Then she started to sob.”
He paused as the barmaid set down the beer and stood there, waiting for his comment. But he didn’t even look up at her. She walked away, her shoulders tight.
Women probably found Michael attractive: a long narrow face, rich mocha skin, lazy eyes, that shock of neatly barbered hair, even modest dimples when he smiled. But more so, I realized, was the aura of aloofness he projected, a suggestion of erotic distance that probably drew women in, challenged them, made them hungry to earn a hesitant grin from him. He’d written his script, and knew its nuances and triggers.
Back when I was a National Merit Fellow who still believed I had no right to be anywhere in the world—and that at any minute someone would snatch everything away from me—I wore a medieval hair shirt to class. Michael obviously suffered no such squeamishness. For a second I was jealous of that self-possession. Me, forty years old, staring at a boy who could be my Vietnamese son. Like me, mixed blood. Unlike me, ignoring it.
He was talking in a slow dr
awl, hypnotic. “First off, there’s this Judd character. The blond white boy from Avon that I’ve never met but heard lots about from Simon. The über-male, Nietzsche’s Will to Power Nazi. Hazel, at least according to Simon, can’t stay away from him—yet wants to. I love you but please leave me alone. Simon hates him. I guess there have been run-ins, especially with Simon’s dim-watt buddy, Frankie.” He stopped, flicked his head to the side. “Anyway, that’s a different story. Sort of. Hazel told me she wants to get away from Judd—break it off. But she can’t. I guess she’s been building her—her what?—liberation? She told me he hit her. Hit her!” He yelled out the words. “That fucking cave man. That was the last straw. She mentioned your ex-wife, Liz. Helping her.”
“Well, she has to leave Judd.” I locked eyes with him. “Hazel has no choice.”
“But she can’t break it off. Whenever she talks of taking time off—that lovely euphemism for desertion and abandonment—he goes ape-shit.” Michael looked into my face and repeated, fury in his voice, “He hit her.”
I cringed. “Liz’ll know what to do. She occupies an office in a police station.”
“No,” Michael thundered. “No.”
“What? Why?”
“Hazel told me she’d handle it. She wants to keep Liz away. I guess this Neanderthal has a thing for Liz.” Michael threw his hands into the air. “I don’t know. It’s so messy, and I have tried to keep my life away from all that.” He fluttered his fingers as though shooing away pesky gnats.
“If she’s afraid of Judd…”
He drained the last of his beer. “No cops, she said.” A sly grin. “Aren’t there enough cops slithering around the Tran household?”
“Still and all…”
He signaled the barmaid for another beer. “But that’s not the only reason she called me. And the reason I finally called you. She mentioned being worried about Simon. And that surprised me.”
“So she never expressed worries before?”
“Not to me, at least. When he was hauled off to Long Lane and exile in that penal colony, she was indifferent, shrugging her shoulders. Simon as dumb kid. That was her attitude, at least as I heard it from my mother. I never talked to Hazel about it.”
“But something has changed?”
The barmaid put two beers on the table. She leaned into Michael. “Cold as your heart.”
He looked into her face. “Sally, you need a new line.”
She tapped him affectionately on the shoulder. His eyes followed her back to the kitchen. “Anyway,” Michael continued, “Hazel says that Simon talked to her when she came home for the weekend—hinted that he had a secret that he couldn’t tell her. Something he found out—suspected maybe. Lord, a secret. What? Hazel said he sounded real scared. And that affected her—made her stop checking her lipstick in the mirror or ordering another Hermès scarf online.”
“You’re cruel.”
“Thank you.”
“But what secret?” I wondered out loud. “I mean, Simon slinks around the streets, a boy who likes to play tough with the VietBoyz”—Michael raised his eyebrows, dismissive—“so I can’t imagine what would finally get to him.”
“Hazel didn’t know, but it bothered her enough to reach out to—me. Me! I’ve become the family confessor. Father Michael of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery Day Camp.”
I laughed. “I grew up in a Catholic orphanage in Vietnam.”
“It shows.”
That rankled me. “Really?”
“Yeah, you look at the world as a big cesspool, your eyes filled with wonder. That’s why you chose your profession.”
“A reading from the Missal of St. Michael the Arch-Villain, Reader’s Digest Condensed Version.”
He grinned widely now. “I get around.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with the death of Ralph Gervase?”
“Who?”
That annoyed me. “The old man knocked over and killed, the man who…”
He broke in. “Oh, him. Sorry, I can’t remember the name of every old drunk toppling over on Hartford streets. But, to answer your question, I have no idea.”
“Maybe Judd Snow?”
“I can’t imagine what Simon has to do with that. Although Hazel did say Judd likes to refer to Simon as ‘the family murderer,’ much to her chagrin. She told him to stop, but telling Judd to stop is to open the floodgates of verbal assault.” He started to peel off the paper label the bottle of beer, his fingernails scratching the wet paper, balling it up, flicking the round missiles away from the table.
“Maybe Simon knows something about Frankie. The VietBoyz. His older brother, Jonny.”
“Christ, what are you talking about? Simon is turning informant for the Feds? They’ll put him in a witness protection program and change his name to…Jackie Chan.” He pointed a finger at me. “I do remember something Hazel said. When she told Judd boy she wanted her ‘space’”—Michael mimed two quotation marks in the air—“he said that her brother Wilson could have a convenient accident.”
“What?”
“I guess Wilson’s on his shit list since he’s become the chess master royal of the prep school. The new darling of the chess club advisor, sent into North Hartford to instruct minority kids in the rudiments of a game they can’t afford to play. Judd was the star of that outreach camp. But Wilson refused to ride with Judd. He takes the bus—two buses to the boys’ club. Can you blame him?”
“Maybe Simon confided in Wilson—his secret.”
He was shaking his head vigorously. “No, I asked her that. She said that if it isn’t about a chess move or…or Huck Finn or some god-awful term paper that’s due tomorrow, rush, rush—well, he’s not listening.” He tapped the bottle with his finger. “The boys like each other—don’t like each other.”
“So what do you want me to do? You asked for this meeting.”
He sat back and smirked. “You’re an investigator, no? Credentialed and certified and solidified and verified? Find out what’s tearing apart my family.”
“And your role?”
His eyes widened. “Well, I just did my part. I off-loaded the misery onto you.” He reached into his pocket and took out a wallet, signaled to the barmaid. “I have to leave.” He started to slide out of the booth.
“One minute, Michael. Sit down.”
He did, though reluctantly.
“I want you to call Hazel and tell her to call Liz. I’m going to talk to Liz later. You need to encourage Hazel to get help. She can’t do this alone. If Hazel wants to end this thing with Judd, she’ll need support.”
He didn’t answer, but I could tell he was thinking of what to say. Finally, scratching the side of his face, he mumbled, “Will do.”
“Thanks.”
He leaned forward across the table, his voice low. “Another thing, now that I think of it. Simon slept on the sofa the other night. This was before Hazel’s call. No secrets revealed to me, by the way. Anyway, the next day I decided to drive him back home. But when we turned off New Britain Avenue, headed to our home, he tensed up. There was some beat-up Toyota parked at the end of our street. He ducked down in the seat.”
“Tinted windows?”
“Yeah.”
“Two Vietnamese guys.”
“You know them?”
“I’ve seen them, Simon and Frankie in the backseat of that car.”
“Well, Simon wasn’t happy. I asked him what the hell was going on. He mumbled two names. Diep and Khoa. And then sneered, Joey and Kenny. Brothers. Diep the older. The only thing he said was that he knew them and they were looking for him and Frankie.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “He knows them from Little Saigon, I guess. And I guess Frankie—he says it was Frankie—snagged some weed from the guys. A big no-no in gangster land.” He breathed out. “Christ, that boy�
��s nothing but trouble.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. By the time I pulled into our driveway and Simon scooted out, hunched over like a corrupt Hartford mayor avoiding the photographers, the Toyota was gone.”
“Christ,” I mumbled.
Michael stood up, slapped some cash on the table, and nodded at me. “Out of here. Things to do.”
I called after him. “Sounds to me like you’re becoming part of the family again?”
He stopped walking. “Don’t count on it.”
“It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Of course, it always hurts—family.”
He started to walk away but turned back. “Well, think about it, Rick. I don’t want my brothers and sister—hurt.”
I threw out a line in Vietnamese. “Mot giot mau dao hon ao nuoc la.” It gave him pause. I could see him translating. I helped him along. “Blood is thicker than water.”
“Did you make that up? So clever, the modern PI running with chopsticks at the ready.” He sighed. “But I suppose it’s true.”
“Blood being thicker than water?”
“Blood being preferable to slaughter.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Hank bustled into my apartment. “News, news, glorious news.” He bowed. “The venerable town crier has arrived.” He placed his laptop on my coffee table, and switched it on. “News, news.”
“Did you call Big Nose?”
“Of course.”
“Big Nose is the real town crier, Hank. Did he come through?”
With the appearance of the Vietnamese gangsters in the low-slung Toyota, I needed information. Kenny and Joey. Khoa and Diep. The slick punks in the black linen suits.
“Yeah,” Hank began, “lots to say, running his mouth.”
I smiled. “An understatement, Hank.”
“Big Nose got the dope from Frankie. The duo moved up from Bridgeport, two slimy brothers. They beat up a massage parlor owner there. They’d been part of the Saigon Crips gang out of Canal Street. They got into trouble there, so they had to get out of town. Loose cannons, nuts. They gravitated to VietBoyz because that’s what you do if you’re a thug, but JD isn’t happy with them.”