by Andrew Lanh
“Well, I hope Simon has come to his senses. His days as a juvenile delinquent need to be over.”
I puffed out my cheeks. “Lord, I hope so. As Buddha said, You need to prune the growing plant when its leaves are still tender.”
Hank’s eyebrows shot up, a quirky smile on his face. “Grandma always says to me, Ai lam nay chiu.”
You blow an evil wind and soon you’ll have a raging storm.
I was surprised. “You’re finally starting to listen to her.”
He smirked. “When did I ever have a choice?”
While Hank wandered across the room to say hello to a state police lieutenant he knew, buzzing as though surprised by a celebrity popping up in a donut shop, I typed some notes into my laptop while idly sipping my third cup of good coffee. Sleepy, I stretched my back and told myself I needed to get back to running, maybe take in a swim at the college pool, write a final exam for my night class. My phone rang.
“Liz.” I snapped shut the laptop, sat up. “Hello.”
“Where are you?”
I told her. “I’m with Hank.”
“I’ll drive over. I was just leaving the office.” Then, a rousing laugh. “Tell Hank to save me one of Lucille’s chocolate croissants.”
“You’re thinking of Jimmy, Liz,” I said, laughing. “Hank only eats protein bars that resemble wood planks, omelets fashioned from the whites of free-range eggs, and kale smoothies that look like a baby’s digestive surprise.”
“Okay, thanks. There went my appetite.”
By the time Hank returned to the booth, Liz was walking into the eatery. She waved from across the room.
She slipped into a seat and poured herself a cup of coffee from the carafe. “Lord, I know everyone in this place,” she whispered. “Even some of the criminals twirling around on the stools at the counter.”
I checked the time on my phone. “You have news, Liz?”
“You bet.” She took a sip of coffee, sighed. “The best, always. Anyway, news on the Judd Snow front. Good in its own bizarre way, but also bad. Maybe ‘sad’ is the word I want.”
“He’s leaving Hazel alone, I hope.” Hank sounded angry.
“Well, he has no choice these days. But there’s more to the story.”
“There always is.” I leaned forward in the booth.
“Here’s the deal. I’ve been working with a colleague to get a restraining order for Hazel, who now talks to me every day, I am happy to say. Warm, friendly talks. She’s starting to feel good about herself—not in the cocky teenage pretty-girl way but, well, genuinely. Talking to her dad. More attention to schoolbooks. I gather Judd had been making her life miserable for a long time, and she never told anyone. Ashamed—blamed herself. He helped that idea take root. She kept it hidden last year. I never knew.”
“What about you?” I asked.
She smiled. “Yes, that too.” She laughed. “Yes, a fortyish woman has to petition for a restraining order against an eighteen-year-old boy.”
“Man.” I stressed the word. “A man.”
“Yes, of course.” She glanced around the crowded room. “A troubled man, that one.” She shuddered. “Hazel now confides horrible stories to me. The slaps, the raw, verbal assault.”
“So what happened?” Hank was anxious, leaning in.
“Liz,” I said, “you’re leading up to something.”
She smiled at me. “So impatient. At this moment he’s cooling his heels in a Hartford jail.”
“What?” I blurted out.
Liz sat back, narrowed her eyes, savoring the tale. “Well, we’ve talked about the toxic relationship he has with his father. Hazel insists there’s some truth to Judd whining that Daddy hits on young girls. Namely, Hazel. Makes your skin crawl, no? Daddy slinks around town in Mick Jagger’s rock ’n’ roll discards. Now that Hazel has told Judd to get lost, Judd’s hormones compelled a new girl into his lair. One of them sneaking away from Kingswood, much to the delight of Daddy who came home from the office to discover the pair. Oddly, learning of it, Hazel got jealous, angry. A typical reaction, if an unappealing one.”
“Fireworks?”
“You got it. Judd and Daddy Leerest got into it yesterday, and Judd, the poster boy for failed anger-management classes, beats up his father. Okay, Judd is already a wounded animal from the kerfuffle with Frankie, but, though he’s hobbling around, he tackles his father, bloodies him, until the neighbors call for help. Judd is carted away, and because this isn’t his first foray at the rodeo, he’s actually booked, fingerprinted, the whole nine yards. A night in the slammer, where, as I say, he now sits, though not for long.”
“Let me guess,” I volunteered, “Daddy’s posting bail.”
“Exactly. A father’s love and devotion for an errant child. Sort of sounds like he should be a member of the Tran clan.”
“That’s not fair,” I said sharply. “Simon would never punch out his father.”
Hank jumped in. “Because Mike Tran would run the game on that skinny little body.”
I shook my head slowly. “This is horrible. But at least Hazel is free of him.”
“Well.” Liz stretched out the word.
“Christ, no. What?” I raised my voice.
“There’s always a second act to a domestic tragedy, no? Well, it seems Daddy called Hazel last night, imploring her to forgive Judd. To take him back. He’s hurting. He’s in love. His behavior was unseemly. The courts will look upon Judd with more forgiving eyes if she withdraws her plans for a restraining order. No need to testify before a judge. Why would she want to hurt him? He’s been hurt so much. On and on—drivel.”
“You’re kidding.” Hank slammed his fist down on the table. “He called her?”
“Sweet-talking her. Pleading. ‘My only son. There’s just the two of us. Mommy ran off with the candlestick maker. The bitch abandoned him—walked away and never looked back. He still has nightmares—cries out in his sleep.’ Hazel hung up the phone and called me.”
“The man is a creep.” Hank lowered his voice. “A damned creep.”
“Which one?” Liz arched her voice. “The father or the son.”
“They’re both cut from the same cloth,” I noted.
“Daddy is bandaged up.” A pause. “Well, then, so is Junior.” Liz took a final sip of her coffee. “Gotta run, gentlemen. The world of criminal psychology is demanding. Every detective on the Farmington force is a manic-depressive. I mean—bipolar. But I knew you’d want to hear the latest from the Avon Mountain Gazette and Coupon Clipper. Liz Sanburn, editor-in-chief. One subscriber.”
“Call me later,” I said as she walked away.
“Are you taking me out to dinner?”
I glanced at Hank, who was grinning. “Well, of course. You pick the restaurant. How did you know?”
She laughed. “One thing about being married to you in the golden age of Ronald Reagan, Rick—I could always read your mind.”
She walked away.
“I love her,” Hank said. “I think you two will end up remarried. God’s plan. Buddha’s magic.”
I said nothing.
“Say something,” Hank insisted.
“I have nothing to say.”
***
Hank had orchestrated a plan for later that afternoon. We’d watched the brief video given me by JD—what amounted to ten seconds of impossible images: cloudy, a flash of quick moment and blinding reflection of sunlight. Worthless. I’d emailed a file to Detective Ardolino, and he’d left a message on my machine: “Are you nuts? My alcoholic nephew shoots better footage when he’s heaving in a corner. This is supposed to help the case—how?”
Ten seconds of video, but definitely an intended assault in Little Saigon, one that was thwarted by the car crash that sent the culprits scurrying away. Worthless. I agreed with Ardolino.
N
ot so, Hank. “A video is a video,” he said, a line I frowned upon because it told me nothing.
“And a rose is a rose,” I told him.
“That makes no sense, Rick.”
“Gertrude Stein.”
“An old girlfriend?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
He was adamant. “What I’m saying is that there is something there. Yes, hard to read. Maybe impossible. But I have an idea.”
What Hank had done was to edit the snippet of footage, slowing it down, breaking it into ten distinct seconds, each the equivalent of a still photograph. I’d watched it with him, but still saw nothing. But Hank wasn’t through.
“We’re going to reenact the ten seconds, frame by frame. With space between. With real people, not frenzied flashes of movement and light. We’ll try to approximate the real action of those ten seconds. Same time of day, same direction—into the sun.”
“How?”
A mischievous grin. “You ever want to star in a video?”
He had it all worked out. At four that afternoon, the approximate time of the footage, Gracie, Jimmy, Hank, and I stood on the sidewalk in front of Gracie’s house, positioning ourselves according to Hank’s direction so that we were at the camera’s angle, facing the bright sunlight. Gracie was commandeered to use Hank’s phone camera, a task that stymied her. “Oh, I can’t.” But of course she was game.
Jimmy was now walking without crutches, though his foot was still bandaged. “I’m up for this.”
Our director Hank named Jimmy the victim, the old Vietnamese man. Hank and I would be the miscreants, aborted in our knockout endeavor. Hank positioned his laptop on a chair dragged from Gracie’s apartment, and the second-by-second slow-motion video was to be our script. Our abbreviated scenario.
We rehearsed. The culprits were on camera for ten seconds. A blink of an eye. The old man walked slowly. Someone runs up, flying up the street, suddenly in the frame, near the old man. A movement—perhaps a thrust of arm in the air, raised. A blur. Meanwhile the second culprit, smaller, is not seen until the final seconds, off camera until the sound of the car crash, at which time he steps into the frame but turns suddenly, rushes away, disappears. We see him for two or three seconds.
“But they’re all ghosts,” I complained to Hank. “You can’t even tell if the moving figures are—male. Or young. Old. It’s a scene shot through a plywood lens.”
“It’s something.” He shot me a look. “C’mon, Rick. Game up for this.”
So Jimmy stood still, stopped by the movement behind him. I was the assaulting figure, rushing in, raising my fist. Hank was the shorter figure, stepping into the frame, twisting around toward the camera angle, and disappearing.
We rehearsed. Gracie recorded the ten seconds. We did it over and over.
Dressed in an oversized I Luv NY sweatshirt and misshapen stretched-out sweat pants—the logo of the New England Patriots had almost disappeared—Jimmy had also donned a World War Two vintage feathered fedora. “A chill in the air,” he explained.
“Where in the world did you get that?” I asked.
Gracie spoke through clenched teeth. “My dead husband’s wardrobe, which I keep in a back closet. Off limits. Jimmy rifled through it.”
“Hey, I’m an investigator.”
A gaggle of girls from Miss Porter’s, strolling by, stopped to gape, and looked ready to applaud wildly. Perhaps because of the fedora, but more likely enthralled by Gracie, dressed as she was in some 1940s Betty Grable cocktail dress with bunches of red silk roses at the bodice, her notorious black cape dramatically draped over her shoulders. She managed the camera with the care and attention of Cecil B. De Mille staging Birth of a Nation with megaphone and safari hat. Apropos of nothing, she sang out to the girls, “I was a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall.”
They bustled away.
“They know nothing about art,” she grumbled.
Jimmy, standing in position but wobbly on his bum foot, smirked, “Yeah, I’d like to thank the Academy…”
Back in Gracie’s apartment we watched ourselves. Hank fed the cell video through the TV, and put it on a loop. Juxtaposed with the original video. Back to back. Over and over, ten grim seconds. We were a fleshed-out version of the original’s opaque images.
‘What do we see?” I asked.
“Well, the original video is jerky,” Hank said. “Look. The Rick/evil person is moving in on the old man. In the original sequence the image is broken by starts-and-stops.”
“But,” I said, “that isn’t the case with the other perp. The Hank/evil person flows in and out smoothly, though in a flash.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “But look at Hank/evil person’s head? When you look at the original, there’s…a sudden glare. Like a light in your eye? A spotlight? What in the world?”
“Have we learned anything?” I asked again.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I’m the only one with talent. Someone’s lifting an arm to slug me and I stand there. In character.”
“Method acting.” Gracie smiled at him sweetly. “Yeah, you and Brando.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Grandma’s kitchen smelled of diced ginger. She stood at the counter, an oversized cleaver in her small, frail hand, and she wailed at the brown fibrous tubers. At one point she stopped, picked up a few flecks of the savory herb and handed them to me. “Chew these.” I placed them in my mouth: potent, tangy, my nose twitching. She smiled. “A cure for everything that can be cured.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I laughed. “I’ve heard you can see in the dark.”
“It’s seeing in broad daylight that’s the real problem for so many folks.”
On the late April afternoon, a chilly day, the kitchen was warm and toasty. Not only the heavenly scent of chopped ginger, but a small bowl of grated garlic, a colander of freshly rinsed broccoli, the florets gleaming as if waxed. Long strands of lemongrass lay like marsh reeds across a cutting board. The rice cooker hummed, whiffs of steam seeping out. On a cutting board a plump bitter melon.
A drifting afternoon in the kitchen, as I sat at the oilcloth-covered table, quietly sipping jasmine tea and munching on ginger candy so tart my eyes teared and my mouth puckered.
“This is nice.” Grandma walked by and patted my wrist. “You stay away too long.” She was wearing one of her daughter’s old housedresses, too big on her small frame, bunched at the waist.
I smiled up at her. “Busy, Grandma.”
She swung her head back and forth and looked like a small doll that might shatter. “Foolish boy. You have to always come home.”
“I’m here.”
She squinted at me, her foggy eyes trying to focus. “You look tired. This…this Tran boy…this case.” We were chatting in Vietnamese, hers a slow drawl and mine a hesitant attempt, but now she lapsed into English, always a strain for her. “I watch TV, Rick. Americans like to talk of dying.” Then, back to Vietnamese. “They think if they talk about it, it will not come for them. They don’t understand that we have no choice but to suffer.” She tapped my wrist. “Lua thu vang, gian nan thu suc.”
A man’s misfortune is the touchstone of his life.
I laughed as I dropped another candy into my mouth. “Everyone wants to live forever.”
“Then they are foolish,” she answered.
She bent over the cutting board, intent on what she was doing. I heard her chuckle, and mutter, “The act of living is the act of dying. One and the same.” But she seemed to be saying it to herself.
Grandma’s kitchen. Of course, Hank’s Grandma, but mine by love and possession. And I cherished the time sitting alone with the old woman, a woman so tiny she came up to the world’s hip but oddly dominated any room she walked into. That wrinkled prune face, wreathed by a halo of brilliant white hair. Slightly hunchbacked, she shuffled along, at yo
ur side, leaning in, whispering, smiling, holding your hand. She was medicine for any day of blues.
Hank was at the Academy, so he couldn’t make supper. His mother and father were somewhere in town, dragging along Vu and Linh, Hank’s younger brother and sister. Grandpa, never a fan of mine, was somewhere in the house, doubtless listening to Grandma’s encouragement of me—and shuddering. No matter: I loved this late afternoon with Grandma.
Grandma finally sat down opposite me, her hands circling a small cup of tea. “Yesterday I spent the day with Lucy.”
Grandma had undergone a painful reckoning. She wanted to undo the transgression she believed she’d committed years back when she let the friendship die after Lucy’s marriage to an untouchable. They’d talked a few times on the phone, both overjoyed with their rediscovery. Now another milestone: Lucy had invited Grandma for lunch. The two women, after all these years, a lunch.
She whispered, “Decades of my shame leave me now.”
I said nothing.
She sat still. Finally, “Doi cha an man, doi con khat nuoc.”
She saw the question in my eyes, and translated in slow, fractured words. “When parents eat salt”—she struggled.
But I knew the rest: “The children die for water.”
She smiled. “The horrible things we do to our children.” A heavy sigh. “The years are nothing now. I was a foolish woman who let others tell me how to live my life. As Buddha would say”—now she pointedly looked at me—“Di hoa vi quy.” The need for cherished peace.
So she’d spent a lovely day at the Tran household, Mike Tran working at the garage all day. Lucy alone in her kitchen.
“I’m glad you two are friends again.”
She shrugged away that comment. “We were always friends, but I listened to the wrong voice inside me.” A wistful smile. “Now I listen.”
“I’m happy.”
“She tells me you brought Simon home. A boy covered with bandages. Black and blue.”
I nodded. “I took him first to Gracie’s. He’s all right.”
“He told her that you saved him.”