No Good to Cry
Page 24
Gracie frowned. “Whatever that means. How do you unfriend someone? In my day you waited until they walked by you, and then you cut them dead. Very Victorian, and very effective.”
“But then he sent a tweet—‘Goodbye, Hazel.’ Just those words. And those words scared Hazel more than anything.”
“Choices,” Jimmy broke in. “The Tran family. Choices.”
“But,” I said, “maybe someone is making the choices for them.”
Jimmy yawned. “Well, Rick, it’s up to you to do your job. Your name is in gold lettering on the office door, no? Under mine. Not as big, of course, but there. Investigate.”
***
Thinking of Jimmy’s words, I sat in the Hartford office, lazily staring down into the street. My cell phone rang. Detective Ardolino.
In the morning’s Courant there was a short page-six piece about the delays in the arrests for the two deaths in the West End, as well as a snide, accusatory commentary on the editorial page. Citizens, the editors noted, were squawking, fearful of strolling the popular streets. Business was impacted. Folks from the suburbs heading for Japanese food at Ginza or Portuguese food at Porto’s changed their minds. Somehow I suspected the reporter’s piece and the editorial board’s testy, slap on the wrist rankled Ardolino, and he’d be itchy for an arrest.
“I was expecting your call,” I told him.
“Yeah, like we got this psychic bond, you and I.”
“Maybe we do. We’re destined…”
He cut me off. “Quiet, Lam. By August I’m gonna be lying in the shade of a palm tree in Porto Gordo while the missus merrily wades too far out in shark-infested waters.”
I laughed. “Then you’ll have to rescue her.”
“It’s bad enough I gotta constantly save your ass.”
That surprised me. “I thought we were a team.”
“I work alone.”
“Which explains why you’re calling me now?”
“Don’t be a wise guy. I’m calling because…well, just listen to me. There was another incident yesterday afternoon. Can you believe it? My fucking luck. Same time. Four o’clock. The hour when everybody in the world is hiding office supplies in their trousers and getting ready to leave good old Hartford.”
“Except the school kids,” I said. “Prime time for wandering the streets, no?”
“And the dropouts like your boys.”
“They’re not my boys.”
“Look, Lam. This nuttiness got to stop.”
“Tell me what happened. There wasn’t anything in the papers this morning except…”
He rushed his words. “Yeah, I read that shit. The editors of the Courant are noted for gazing off into the sky while some pervert diddles their privates. If you know what I mean.”
“That’s not a good image.”
“Are you saying I ain’t a poet?” He chuckled to himself. “There was nothing in the paper because nothing happened. Sort of. I mean, this happened right in Little Saigon, go figure. This old Asian fart tells a cop two boys dressed in black hoodies run past him, and the big one is breathing down his neck. He sees a fist go up, he ducks ’cause he got this survival instinct, I guess, but down the street two cars slam into each other, a loud bang that has everyone running out of their skin, and the boys run on. Nothing happened. But he calls the cops. All the old folks buying their dog meat at some Vietnamese market think they’re next. Christ, they expect to see it on CBS Evening News or on Anderson Cooper—that ass gets all excited over a homeless guy sneezing on the subway—and that’s that.”
“Almost a knockdown,” I said, almost to myself.
He echoed my words. “Almost. Yeah, an almost-killing.”
“Same culprits?”
“Bingo.”
“No exact identification?”
“What do you think?”
“I would’ve thought Simon and Frankie would be taken in by now.”
A rasp in his throat, angry. “Yeah, you’d think so. So would any decent person on this earth. But the D.A. is dragging his heels, biding time. No visuals, no witness identification, just that lousy postcard that could mean nothing—he says. It’s a bus stop, he says. Lots of kids step off the bus there. The bus to Frog Hollow. Where Frankie lives. He says a defense lawyer can eat up that bit of evidence in court. But it seems to me…” His voice trailed off. “Never mind.”
“What do you want from me, Detective?”
“Here’s the deal. Go to Little Saigon, Rick. Talk around. Those VietBoyz losers. This is your territory, man. You speak the language. I walk those streets and I’m in never-never land. Every store looks like a kung-fu palace or something. Christ, in the Minh Loc Pool Hall even the cue balls look foreign to me. Nobody talks English.” A pause. “Maybe they’ll tell you things.”
“Maybe not. I’ve gone there a few times. Talked to folks.” I was ready to hang up. “You know, Detective, maybe you should get some Vietnamese cops on the force.”
“There’s a rumor that we got one or two, but maybe they’re Chinese.” His voice was laced with laughter. “And, besides, I hear there’s gonna be a Vietnamese state trooper coming up. Excuse me—Vietnamese-American trooper. It’s a new America.”
“Thank God.”
“From sea to shining sea.”
“Goodbye, Detective.”
“As I say, I like to look at the larger picture.” The line went dead.
***
Near dusk someone rapped on the downstairs door, and I looked out the window. I’d been home for an hour, reviewing my files, getting nowhere. The “almost” attack on Park Street. Little Saigon. The “almost” knockdown. A different area of Hartford. Different attackers? But two boys in black hoodies? Copycats?
The rapping got louder.
A Harley motorcycle was parked in front of the house, nosed into the curb. I’d heard the loud rumble of the bike, but paid it no mind. The tenant on the top floor, a fortyish manager of a local Pizza Hut, rode bikes, had friends who disturbed our quiet evenings. Gracie repeatedly asked me whether she should ask him to leave, but Gracie was too kind-hearted to evict anyone. “I told him I want a quiet building. He said he worked for Pizza Hut.” At the time I thought—there’s no connection between these two sentences, but I let it go. “Talk to him, Rick.”
Again the loud knocking, insistent. Regular visitors knew to open the front door, always unlatched, and check the three mailboxes. Gracie’s apartment door faced the mailboxes. Now, listening, Gracie’s voice rang out. “Door’s open, whoever you are.”
I smiled and opened my door and peered down the stairwell.
JD walked into the vestibule, stood there looking lost, and Gracie, stepping into her doorway, said, “From the looks of you, I guess you want Rick. Second floor.”
JD said nothing but glanced up the staircase where I stood on the landing, waving him up. Slowly he climbed the stairs.
He didn’t look happy. We watched each other, feet apart, me in the doorway now, arms folded across my chest, and JD stopped in place at the top of the stairs. Dressed in an old brown leather bomber jacket with a ratty fur collar, unzipped over a camouflage T-shirt, tapping a biker’s boot on the floor, he was waiting for my move.
I smiled. “I thought you said you never went to the suburbs.”
A quirky smile. “You believe everything I say?”
“Why not?”
“Then you’re a fool.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
I motioned him into my apartment, but he hesitated, unsure. I stepped back, leaving the door wide open, and he walked in, though he lingered just feet inside. Nodding his head up and down, his tongue rolled into the corner of his mouth, he surveyed the room.
“You want to sit down?” I asked him.
“No.”
“You want to stand there?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
He walked past me to the front of the apartment and gazed out the window into the street below. The skittishness was gone now, replaced with his gangland swagger, as if he’d decided to own the space. A crooked smile. “Is my bike safe around here?”
“Probably not.”
He swung back quickly. “Then I gotta get going.”
“Well…”
He thrust out his arm. “This is for you.” In his hand was a CD in a plastic jewel case, unlabeled. I reached for it. For a second he kept his hand suspended, his fingertips gripping the plastic. Broken nails, I noticed, dried blood at the nub of his fingernails, a smear of splotchy bike grease. He made me yank it from him. He dropped his hand to his side and backed up.
“I don’t understand.”
“You hear about the thing in Little Saigon?” He waited. “I mean, the old guy almost attacked. Nothing happened but the police swarm the streets like it’s Pearl Harbor Day in a Japanese restaurant.”
“That’s funny.” I said. “That line.”
“It ain’t original with me.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“As I say, nothing happened, but the old guy is the grandfather of a friend of mine. So the whole thing got real personal real fast.” He pointed to the CD in my hand. “Le Hanh Fashions a block away got this security camera. This here is the video. It’s shitty ’cause all it shows is blurry figures and a lot of bright sunlight shining off the cars. The guys ran into the sun. But it’s the only video.”
I fingered the plastic case. “Why don’t you give it to Ardolino?”
A phony laugh. “Yeah, are you serious? Can you imagine that scene? I ain’t got street cred walking up your damn stairs right now. And I don’t wanna find myself in a goddamn police lineup. You hear me?” He moved toward the doorway.
“What can I see on it?”
“Nothing. I seen nothing.” But he grinned. “But maybe you’re a magician.”
He turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to ask you…”
He waved me off. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why are you doing this?”
His words came out fierce, hostile. “Because no one fucks people over in Little Saigon on my turf and gets away with it.”
“Understood.”
“No one.”
He stepped into the hallway, but then he deliberated, looked back at me. He fiddled with a gold stud in his ear. Then, zipping up his bomber jacket, he reached into the pocket and took out a slip of paper. “Here.”
I read the scribbled pencil. “87 Buckingham. Room 3.”
“What’s this?”
“You figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty-six
The video was useless. Or that’s how it struck me when I first played it. That night Hank and I watched it over and over. Slow motion, zooming in, zooming out. All the pyrotechnics whiz-kid Hank could muster on a computer screen. Nothing: splashes of intense sunlight, vague ghostlike figures running. A shaft of piercing sunlight on a car fender, blinding. Nothing.
The perps on the screen for—ten seconds. Tops.
“What we can see,” I summarized, frustrated, “is a tottering, slow-moving figure brushed by two wisps speeding past. Paranormal activity.”
Hank watched the screen closely. “But there’s a reason JD gave it to you.”
“What he wants is no trouble on his block. Bad for business.”
Hank made a face. “There is that.”
I shrugged, watching as he pressed “Replay.” “Maybe he just wanted to prove to me that he wants justice for Simon and Frankie.”
Hank stood up, yawned. “Thanks for the movie. Next time make some buttered popcorn. I gotta get some sleep.”
I waved the slip of paper at him. “You’re forgetting he gave me an address.”
Hank sat back down. “Yeah, what did you find out?”
“A rooming house a few blocks down from Farmington. A dead-end street. On the edge of Little Saigon. A little seedy, a drug den maybe. I know there’s drug activity there. But also, I suspect, where I can find Diep and Khoa.”
“But he didn’t tell you that.”
“In his own way he did.”
***
Another night of dreaming. The orphanage. The boy named Le Xinh Phong. The black kid that allowed me a little breathing room—for a second. The gang of boys chasing him. Waking, the image of that face metamorphosed into that of Simon, running, running. Police dogs tracking him, crying on the banks of the South China Sea during the monsoon season. I woke, gasped out loud. Did he live? Some hardscrabble, piddling life, the boy in the corner. Did he make it to America? Like Mike, was he slipped into the family tree of greedy folks, shuttled to America, and then abandoned? Did he come to understand that none of this was his fault, that he was an accident of war and disaster, that his American father might still remember his mother, the…maybe nothing at all. His GI Joe father. Back in America, a life lived with new children, a wife, a Chevrolet, breakfast special at Denny’s. A summer vacation at Disney World.
No. I shook myself awake. Stop it. No. Because thoughts of that boy—and Simon—came cascading back into my own life. And I didn’t want to think about it.
But I had to. Early, perhaps seven, the sound of the garbage truck clamoring on the street, the phone rang. It was Mike Tran.
“What happened?” I got out.
The black boy. The orphanage. The Most Blessed Mother Orphanage. Don’t hurt me, Viet.
Please.
Mike took some time to answer, and I thought the line had gone dead. But I could hear tinny radio music behind him, drifting in from another room. An oldies station. Johnny Cash, I thought. Or Glen Campbell. A country guitar, twang and strumming.
Finally, clearing his throat, he said, “Maybe it ain’t nothing, but last night I heard Simon on the phone. He was calling this other guy. Kenny, I think. Sounded like he said Kenny. But he was whispering, secret-like, but I heard him say something about, well—‘I don’t wanna do that.’ But then, he said ‘All right, all right. Tomorrow. Frankie said yes.’ When I walked into the room and snatched the phone from him, he beat it out of there, hiding in his room. I couldn’t sleep all night, worrying. Should I be worried?” An exaggerated laugh. “I mean, any more worried than the kid makes me already? Who is Kenny? I woke up and thought—something bad is gonna happen to my boy today.” A deep sigh. “So I called you.”
“I’m glad you did, Mike.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Is he there?”
“Locked in his room, but that don’t mean nothing. He runs when he wants to. You know that. I can’t lock him in no more.”
“I’ll look into it,” I promised him.
“You will?”
“I will.”
***
A day of surveillance then. Now that I knew where they lived, I’d been planning on checking out Khoa and Diep—Kenny and Joey. Maybe trail them—learn their habits. They loomed too large in Simon and Frankie’s world. JD’s dislike—and his sending me in their direction—suggested what? Time for me to move?
If Simon and Frankie hooked up with the brothers today, I’d know about it because I’d be their persistent shadow.
By nine in the morning I sat in my car across the street from 81 Buckingham, idling in the parking lot of a Shell station that had gone out of business, the windows boarded up, a few old cars lined up near the curb, all with For Sale signs on the inside windshields. A number to call. My ancien
t Beamer fit in nicely with the old rusted relics.
I waited.
I kept an eye on the small parking lot on the side of the old rooming house. The low-slung Toyota with the dark tinted windows sat there, front bumped up against a crashed-in chain-link fence. The guys were sleeping in—or they’d gone somewhere on foot. But I suspected they were late-sleepers. Night clubbers, party boys in their high-life duds, smoking reefer in the parking lot of the Boom Boom Room, a hot-as-hell Asian New Wave night spot, dancing till dawn. A seedy venue, often raided. Gunfire. Fistfights. Kewpie-doll Vietnamese hookers. Kenny and Joey’s world, I believed. At nine in the morning, they’d be yawning and stretching like alley cats facing sunlight.
I sat with a bag of buttery croissants from Amy’s Bakery on Buckingham and Farmington, a huge mug of coffee, and three Hershey chocolate bars if I got peckish later in the morning. If they were at home, I’d tag them.
The rooming house was an ancient ramshackle Dutch Colonial with green asphalt shingles and white peeling shutters. To the left and right were cheap brick five-story apartment buildings, and across the street were mom-and-pop businesses, an Asian grocery, a beauty parlor called Hair for Now, the deserted Shell station next to a thriving Mobil station, and an auto body repair shop, already doing a brisk morning business. A neighborhood of shops and poor people. The sign that advertised the rooming house announced, honestly: ROOMS. CHEAP. DAY RATES. Then, an afterthought: Mrs. Homer’s Rooms.
I sipped coffee slowly, leaned my head back against the headrest, nibbled on the corner of a croissant, and waited. Just waited. At ten o’clock I sat up sharply when the front door opened and the two brothers walked out. They were laughing at something. The taller one, in front, swiveled around and playfully head-butted his shorter brother, who jumped back, then clipped the other with the back of his hand. Even from across the street, crouched low in my seat, I could hear their boisterous humor, overlapping voices in Vietnamese.
“Toi doi.” One was hungry.
His brother teased him. “An khoe nhu voi.” An appetite like an elephant.
At the edge of the sidewalk both paused, debated the direction, and the taller one nodded down the street. A small art deco diner on the corner, a gigantic roof sign that announced: AETNA DINER 24 Hours. But the “E” and the “I” had darkened, and the “R” flickered. ATNA DINE. Brilliant even with the morning sunlight hitting it. “Diep,” the shorter brother called out and pointed.