by Andrew Lanh
Benny Vu sat quietly at a table, relatives hovering protectively around him. His two children were sitting across the room with friends. I thought that odd. In his rumpled suit and cowlicky hair, their father was lost in a sea of cold comfort. Someone had placed a dish of food in front of him, which he ignored.
I didn’t know much about him, and on the drive over Hank had filled me in on a few details. Part of the first wave of much-televised Boat People of 1975, Benny had bummed around for years, lost in America, a handyman at an apartment complex, a janitor at a school, even a hot dog vendor at the UConn football games out at Storrs—a drifting sort known for his easygoing demeanor that disappeared only when he drank beer with his cronies. Then his face would turn beet red, the spittle would fly, and the fiery condemnation of the Viet Cong—as well as his enforced exile in an America he could never understand—would first startle, then scare, his drunk listeners at Bo Kien, the bar-restaurant where he hung out. Then, after making a few bucks off a vending cart parked in front of the Aetna Insurance building on Farmington Avenue, where he sold lunchtime Chinese food, he opened a small Asian grocery on Park, right in the heart of the burgeoning Little Saigon, a cluster of similar grocers, lunch places, nail salons, gift shops, and beauty shops. Tucked between My Xuyen Clothing and Song Ngoc Dental Office, his Vu Pham Market was one of the few struggling stores on the bustling strip. For years I used to stop in the neighborhood at Nha Trang Noodle Shop for the best pho, beef noodle soup with basil, or go for the best bun at Viet Huong. His piddling market barely made a decent living for the family, Hank said, because Benny wasn’t much of a businessman. Sometimes he’d close shop on a busy Saturday afternoon, when most Vietnamese did their shopping for the week, and head to Foxwoods Indian Casino to gamble.
In the car I’d asked Hank, “He has a gambling problem?”
Hank shook his head. “Dunno. No more than most Asians. You know, it’s a part of the culture. Look at Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun on Christmas Day or New Year’s. More Asians there than in all of Thailand. Don’t you get those glossy mailings in the mail from the Indian casinos? All in impeccable Vietnamese.”
“But some have problems. Maybe he’s in debt.”
Hank nodded. “Could be. My dad bitches that Benny closes the store at odd hours. He drives there to find that handwritten sign on the door: Dong cua. Closed. Tommy works there some days, but not always. He’s not loyal to the store.”
I told Hank about my only venture into Benny’s store, back before I knew Hank and his family, days when my encounters with the Vietnamese community were minimal. I’d gone into the market looking for some Vietnamese bean pudding, a weakness of mine, but there was not a soul in the store. “I didn’t like the place,” I told him. “It had a musty, leaden smell of uncleared shelves and unswept floors.”
“Sort of like your apartment.”
I ignored him. “Then I heard noises. Some loud voices, laughter, and in the back of the store I saw a stairwell. Stupidly, I walked down into what was a storage room and found four men playing poker at a table, piles of American dollars on the table. Benny was there, though I didn’t know him at the time, but the whole bunch jumped up, nervous. Apologizing, Benny followed me upstairs, introduced himself, shook my hand, and took my money for the food I bought. But he wasn’t happy at being discovered down there. I could have been Hartford undercover. There’s gambling like that going on all over Little Saigon.”
“Probably his son was supposed to be working and cut out. Tommy does that,” Hank said. “My cousin is a slacker.”
I joined Hank’s family at a table at the back of the hall as the room filled up. His grandma motioned me to sit by her side, smiled, and held my hand. I leaned in to kiss her cheek. “This is a great sadness,” she whispered in Vietnamese, and I agreed. Hank’s grandfather wasn’t there, and I didn’t ask why. Hank’s father, Nguyen Van Tuan, barely nodded at me. Hank’s younger brother and sister, Tinh and Phuong, fifteen- and thirteen-year-old kids, were giggling over something one of them said to the other. Grandma frowned.
Hank’s older sister Linh, who called herself Anna, sat stone-faced, pensive, looking at no one. Anna was taking a leave of absence from her job at Travelers Insurance—she’d been a scholarship student at Miss Porter’s and an economics major at Trinity in Hartford—to spend three months in Vietnam. Sometimes, after a little wine at New Year’s, she only spoke Vietnamese, refusing English as a language, a woman caught between cultures. Sometimes she smiled at me, but sometimes her cold stare dismissed me as a diminutive insect.
Hank said to his mother, “Why aren’t the kids sitting with Benny?”
His mother glanced at Grandma, then shook her head. “I guess they’re embarrassed by their father.”
Grandma clicked her tongue. “American children.”
Hank smiled. “Unlike me, right, Grandma?”
Anna looked at him and grunted. “Self love…”
“…is all I have sometimes,” Hank finished. “Anna, you’ve been telling me that since I was five.”
“Because you think you’re God’s gift to the earth.”
“Only women.”
Grandma interrupted, not happy with their conversation. “Quiet, you two. We are in a Catholic church.”
Hank insisted, “Not really. It’s the hall connected to the church.”
Grandma pointed at him, unhappy.
“How did the Le sisters get to be Catholic?” I asked Grandma. “Your side of the family is Buddhist.”
She waved her hand in the air. “Their ancestors lived in a different province. I guess the power of a Catholic God was stronger there.”
I watched Benny’s two children, sitting across the room. Tommy was the older, perhaps twenty-five now, a few years older than Hank. I’d met him a few times. Tommy had started his rebellion against his traditional and poor Vietnamese-American family early on by shoplifting plastic action figures at Walmart at age ten. One stupid, infantile arrest after another, loitering, sassing a teacher, petty theft, a smart-alecky boy who hated his parents—or so family lore went. Now he sat with friends and his sister, all of them picking at the food. Tall, skinny, with a bony, pushed-in face, his dark skin the color of nut bread, he usually cultivated a slacker appearance, wearing a weathered leather jacket with too many buckles and twists, a string of glittery earrings up and down both lobes, a tattoo of a green dragon with red fiery tongue on his upper left bicep, and a shaved haircut with a Mohawk sliver of hair left intact. Stomping boots, even in the dreadful heat of August. Today, for the purposes of grief, he did not have on his leather jacket. Instead, he wore a simple military camouflage jacket over a T-shirt, as tasteful as public urination.
At the other end of the table Cindy sprawled out, eyes half-closed, glossy red lips parted, listening to a chatty new-wave Asian boy with bright red hair puffed so high he could be taken for a streetlight. Whatever he said must have amused her, because I noticed the trace of a smile. Idly, she checked her cell phone—tapped out a text message. She looked like a candy cane confection with her white-powdered face, kohl-rimmed eyes, purple ribbons in her hair, too much costume jewelry, and mismatched pieces of clothing, colorful if not downright eccentric. Her miniskirt rode high over long legs encased in boots that were best worn in seasons other than summer.
Hank saw me sizing up her outfit. He leaned in. “No one dresses like Madonna anymore. Sad.”
As I got up to get some jasmine tea for Grandma, I sensed a shift in the currents in the cavernous room. People, sitting back after finishing eating, suddenly became alert. Every head suddenly shot to the entrance. Hank’s mother and grandmother were talking about the new super-sized Asian market, A Dong, that had high-quality lemongrass for ginger chicken, but stopped the conversation midsentence.
The Torcellis had arrived. Of course. Always the late entrance. Mary Le Vu’s twin sister, Molly, swept into the room, striding forward, trai
led by her husband, Larry, who looked the way he always did at Vietnamese functions—why the hell am I here? Behind them, walking as though they’d been promised Porsches if they behaved, were the two children: Jon, the aloof young man of twenty-five and heir to the vast car dealership franchise, and his younger sister Kristen, the fashion-plate daughter with the brain of an aquarium pebble, gorgeous and wide-eyed and personally happy that she was so stunning. Okay, I admit to a certain bias in these belittling descriptions, despite my scant acquaintance. I’d sat at a New Year’s table with them one time. It was very easy to dislike them. All four of them, Benny and Mary’s two kids, and Larry and Molly’s two, were kids who struck me as appropriate metaphors of a twilight of the American dream. Only the presence of Hank in this world—purposeful, smart, compassionate—saved me from utter disaffection with that Vietnamese-American generation.
But Molly always intrigued me. I loved the way she floated into any room. She’d always been, of course, one of the “beautiful Le sisters,” so she was used to flattery and attention. But unlike her dead sister Mary, she’d married a very rich man, Larry Torcelli, the ambitious son of a local hotshot Hartford politico and businessman, once questioned by the FBI for illegal contributions to a gubernatorial election fund. Larry was a striking, charming man who’d inherited one of the most lucrative automotive enterprises on the Eastern Seaboard. He’d also fallen in love with the stunning Molly Thi Le, a romance that surprised him, but especially alarmed his unhappy father. He took her off to a sprawling estate in the Farmington hills, where she produced Jon Dinh and Kristen Thi, cookie-cutter pretty children, the envy of absolutely no one. And so, over time, Molly became the “rich one” of the beautiful sisters whom people saw only at holidays and funerals.
Last winter, at a Vietnamese New Year’s party at a VFW hall in East Hartford, in the shadow of poor neighborhoods whose souls struggled to make ends meet, Molly swept into the dreary room, late as usual, very Ethel Merman with her booming voice and over-the-top Broadway gestures, and the room stopped. I remember that she wore an expensive fur. A mink, I was told. “She has three,” someone whispered. But she also had on a traditional ao dai, the high-neck silk dress, slit to the waist, worn over black satin slacks. Very eye-catching on a woman so beautiful. Now, striding into the late August sweltering hall, she struck me as still in silk and furs—the effect was always there, despite the simple blue dress she now wore.
At New Year’s I remember hearing Mary Le Vu, sitting with Benny at a nearby table, announce, “That’s why I’ll always be the one that people talk of as ‘the poor one.’” There was neither rancor nor envy in her voice, only a world-weary resignation to the unpredictable and heartless fate that had hooked her up with poor—and always to be poor—Benny Vu, nice guy with no bank statement.
Everyone at the table had laughed uncomfortably.
So the beautiful Le sisters had found disparate destinies: One had a subsistence life, lived off a struggling Asian market, life in the slow lane. The other had a Learjet housed at JFK in New York and a beachfront cottage in the Bahamas.
Now, in a room that became electric with the dramatic entrance of wealth and privilege, I watched the stylized routines as Molly embraced Benny, burst into tears, clung to him, then sought out Cindy and Tommy and embraced them. No one in the crowded room said a word, everyone eyeing the drama. Benny started sobbing again, but his kids didn’t.
Molly’s Larry stood behind her, not so much awkward—this guy never had an awkward moment in his life—but wholly deferential, waiting for his turn to shake Benny’s hand, say the appropriate remarks, nod at the kids, and then find a folding chair against the back wall and sit and wait for his wife to be finished. The Vietnamese community, a little intimidated and a whole lot nervous, didn’t know how to deal with him. He wasn’t friendly. Hank had told me once that people suspected he didn’t like the Vietnamese. He’d married Molly Le for one reason only—he couldn’t take his eyes off her ravishing face and her drop-dead body. No other reason. And he’d admit to that. He was inordinately proud of her beauty. He had no interest in Vietnamese culture—and he only followed certain obligations, like all-important New Year’s celebrations, funerals, and occasional weddings, because Molly looked good at those occasions. People didn’t like him. No, that’s not true—they didn’t want to know him. They felt that knowing him would be too much baggage to carry around.
“The rich are not as we are,” Hank whispered.
I’d had one conversation with Larry, the two of us standing outside during a New Year’s party, getting fresh air. Staring straight ahead, he asked me what I did for a living, and then told me he was rich.
“I know you are,” I’d commented.
“You do?” he’d responded.
“That’s what people know about you,” I’d said.
He walked away.
No one spoke to him now.
Larry hadn’t been at the church service, only Molly and her two children, arriving late, ushered to a front pew, and then leaving quickly. They didn’t linger to talk on the sidewalk with the priest or the mourners. They avoided the TV cameras. Nor did they show up at the gravesite at Cedar Hill.
Jon and Kristen sat down at Tommy and Cindy’s table as Hank darted over to join them, though I noticed he sat quietly, listening. No one paid attention to him, but Tommy did nod at him. Tommy talked on his cell phone for a minute. Kristen never let go of hers. Meanwhile Molly wandered throughout the room, hugging, weeping, and whispering. When Hank wandered back a while later, he was shaking his head.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You know what the kids are talking about?” he grumbled. “Jon just got a new car from his daddy. He showed us a picture he uploaded on Instagram.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, what else is there to talk about?”
Hank squinted, gauging just how serious I was. He tapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go. I wanna get out of here.”
In the car he wasn’t happy. “They’re talking like nothing happened.” He paused. “You know, these families are somehow related to me through my mother.”
“I know.”
“That doesn’t make me happy.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“I overheard someone ask Molly about Mary, and she just turned away, almost angry.”
“Asked her what?”
“About the sudden loss.”
“Well, maybe she was too hurt.”
Hank grinned now. “God, you are so…so forgiving at these funerals. Where’s the old cynicism?”
“Well, Hank, this is a blow to the family…”
“I know that. You know something else?”
“What?”
He turned in the seat. “Everyone avoided talking about the murder. I heard people talking about how good Mary was, how her death was so sudden and such a shock, how Benny looked horrible, what is he going to do because he loved her so much, how the kids looked like rejects from some MTV video—on and on, over and over. But no one used the word murder. No one.”
I sighed, thinking back to my days as a New York cop. “It’s a hard word to wrap your lips around.”
“Spoken like an ex-cop living in the suburbs.” The words came out too sharply.
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
“For God’s sake, Rick. Mary was murdered. Murdered. It’s not like she’s the murderer.”
“Here’s another cliché for you, Hank. Murder makes people uncomfortable.”
He sucked in his breath, then gazed out the window as he drove along. “I don’t give a damn. To ignore the way she died is to, well, dismiss her life.”
I quoted Buddha: “‘The killer and the one killed are the same. Parts of the whole.’” I glanced at him. “Forevermore she and the killer are one.”
“You sound like Grandma.”
“That
’s the nicest thing you’ve said today. When you were away from the table, she said to me, ‘We need your eye on this tragedy, Rick.’” I laughed. “Then she added, ‘There is an incompleteness that the universe hates. When there is a void, there must be an end to a void.’”
“Avoid what?”
“Never mind. She thinks I have some power that the police lack. She insists I talk to people.”
“Are you going to?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He grinned. “No, you don’t.”
“But you’re wrong about one thing, Hank. Some people did talk about the murder. In my earshot. A couple of times the talk was about what Mary was doing in that neighborhood. Why in God’s name would she venture into drug war territory? Goodwin Square. Christ, it was a Courant banner headline just a month ago. I even heard Molly telling one of the old ladies, ‘Mary wouldn’t be caught dead there.’”
“But that’s exactly what happened.”
Chapter Five
Later that afternoon, I stopped at my office to check the mail. Though I do most of my investigations out of my Farmington apartment, I am officially part of Gaddy Associates, Private Investigation, Inc., housed in the historic Colt Building in the South End of Hartford. When I pulled into the half-empty parking lot, I noticed the air conditioner whirring in the sixth floor office. Gaddy was there.
Gaddy is Jimmy Gadowicz, a rough-and-tumble PI, a man in his sixties, overweight, at times overbearing. He likes truck-stop diners and all-you-can-eat home-style buffets. Fat-free is a four-letter word.