by Andrew Lanh
“One hundred shopping days left to Christmas,” I joked to Hank.
We parked on the street, and I stared at the house with its peeling paint and sagging front porch. Hank had mentioned that the grocery was closed now—and no one knew when it would reopen because, family gossip suggested, Benny had lost his spirit. Since the murder, he sat at home in front of a large-screen TV that stayed on the same channel, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the long trace of ash of each one finally falling onto his lap.
“That’s what my mother told me,” Hank confided. “She’s worried he’ll burn down the house.” Family dropped off food. Neighbors stopped in but quickly left.
The doorbell was broken, the cement landing was cracked, and the laminate on the cheap front door had buckled and split. The chain-link fence surrounding the front yard was rusted and, in one place, bent, as though a runaway car had plowed into it. The gate no longer latched. This was a house its owners forgot.
A woman Hank didn’t know let us in—“I’m Melissa from next door”—and we slipped off our shoes in the hallway. We sat in the tiny front room, the TV on, though the sound was turned off, and Benny mumbled something about tea. No, we both said. Then we all got quiet. The neighbor waved good-bye, looked relieved, and disappeared out the front door. Benny lit a cigarette. I noticed ashes on his shirt. He was staring at the images on the TV, as if he forgot we were there.
“Xin loi.” Hank leaned in. I’m sorry.
“Xin loi ong,” I echoed, apologizing for the intrusion.
He nodded, smiling thinly.
In contrast to the outside of the house, the living room was spotless, a hard-polished look to it, and I imagined Mary’s deft and passionate hand on every surface. But everything was old, threadbare. A boxy floor fan whirled hot air around us, but the windows were shut. The room was stifling. This would be a short visit. I found myself staring at a thumbtacked calendar from an Asian marketplace, not Benny’s, with the wrong month—July—still showing. Why hadn’t Mary changed it? Hadn’t she noticed? The house showed her attention to detail, so that fact bothered me. That, and the oversized flat-screen TV that seemed too large, too emphatic, for the tiny room.
A cousin Hank recognized walked in from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of iced ginger tea. A woman in her forties, she nodded at Hank and smiled at me. “I’m Hyunh Le.” She bowed and handed Benny a tall glass with a sprig of mint floating near the top. She sat down next to him, looked at us, and sighed. “Well.”
No one said anything.
Finally, struggling, sitting there with Benny and Hyunh Le looking into their laps, we began forced, idle talk about the unrelenting dog-day heat, the solemnity of Mary’s funeral, the recent flooding in the southern provinces of China. Benny, I realized, was still in shock because his voice was calm and deliberate, the words spaced out as though he were drugged. In fact, I wondered whether he’d been put on some medication. That might explain the narrowed eyes and the drumbeat monotone.
All of a sudden, at Hank’s mention of our visit to the crime scene—I’m not sure why he did it—Benny started to gurgle, a deep, bubbly sound erupting from the back of his throat, rising like vomit, until he stammered, “Somebody has got to pay for this. Mary needs justice.” The words hung in the air.
“Benny,” I began, “the cops have decided it was an accident. They say she got lost or…”
He stared directly into my face, and I involuntarily jerked my head back because his look was so raw and haunted.
“No, there’s more of an answer,” he cried out. “Mary did everything with purpose. You hear me. She was not a woman who made mistakes.”
It was an effort for him to say so many words, and he mumbled at the end, as though losing his train of thought. But then he summed up, his voice loud again. “Somebody didn’t love her.”
That sentence stunned me. “What?”
“There’s someone out there that killed her.”
True, I thought, but that didn’t mean the shooter knew her, wanted her dead, even cared whether she died—but I kept my mouth shut. Again, that full, stark look into my face.
“He has a name that somebody knows. Murderers have names.”
I swiveled toward Hank. He shot me a look. We sat there, our eyes riveted to the glass pitcher of iced ginger tea, beads of sweat running down the side.
The awful silence was broken by the sound of a slammed car door. Tommy and Cindy arrived, traipsing in from somewhere, rapid footsteps in the hallway and into the living room. Cindy was yelling at Tommy for something he’d said, which I didn’t catch. Suddenly the house had noise as Benny’s two children settled into armchairs, adjusting their bodies as if they were late for a good movie. Benny didn’t even look up at them. The cousin, unhappy now, with steely eyes and angry mouth, chided them for going out.
Tommy spoke into her face. “We can’t sit around here like zombies, Aunt Hyunh.”
“Your mother is dead.”
I thought that a little cruel, and even Benny looked at her.
Tommy closed himself in like a turtle, tucking in his neck and folding his arms. The pale sunlight filtering through the blinds caught the irregular shape of his metal earrings and his eyebrow ring, and he sparkled there in the shadows like a glittering store mannequin. I stared at him, this twenty-five-year-old who was a little old to be so punked out, so deliberately and calculatingly tough. Beneath the tattoos and ripped T-shirt, the stomp-you boots, the thick chains hanging off his studded belt, the last-of-the-Mohegans haircut—beneath it all was a gangly, feckless Vietnamese boy with a long narrow face and intelligent eyes, but eyes filmed with a spacey blankness I couldn’t penetrate. Something was going on there, for sure, but what? A drifter from one dead-end job to another—used-music store clerk, pizza delivery boy, various stock boy jobs, now and then a clerk in his father’s grocery. Tommy wanted nothing to do with his Old Country family. The son of one of the most beautiful women of Hartford, he had once told Hank that he had little use for his parents, born as they were into the woeful poverty and endless war of Saigon.
“They’re strictly FOB,” he told Hank. Fresh Off the Boat—that dismissive and insulting phrase. He, however, was ABV—American-born Vietnamese. That made all the difference.
I said, “Tommy, I’m sorry about your mom.”
For a second he looked ready to hurl a flip comment my way, because I saw his lips purse. But then his body sagged, folding into the armchair, and his arms fell like broken tree limbs against his side. It was like watching a puppet loosed from its strings. For a second his face crumbled, but then immediately tightened. He nodded. “Thanks, man. She was—okay.” That was a strange remark, but maybe not. It came out like a perfect epitaph for the mother he couldn’t help caring about.
And somehow those words, so casual but so apt, elicited an unexpected dry sob from Cindy, sitting opposite him. Her cell phone chimed, but she ignored it.
“I hate this.” We all looked at her. She was looking at Hyunh Le.
Cindy, I realized, must have had a brutal adolescence, living in the shadow of the legendary beauty of her mother. No one ever said the “beautiful” Cindy Vu. Not by a long shot. And they never would. She’d never approached even a suggestion of the sensuality, the allure, the dead-in-your-tracks beauty of her mother and Aunt Molly. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, I realized. It was that she was abysmally plain, as though fate had willed her the dull out-of-proportion features of her father, the flat round face, the loopy ears, the disappearing chin, the undersized head. She’d done everything possible to correct this. I’d never seen her without an overabundance of makeup. As she was now, in fact, sitting there with her Asian new wave wardrobe, the laced-up boots and tight halter top, that tattoo of a heart where her almost nonexistent cleavage began. And the spiked, magenta-tinged hair. But the face: the shrill whore’s lipstick, white Kabuki powder too generously applied, thin
ned out and repainted eyebrows, arching too high on the flat face. She’d done everything possible to hide the face she could not love. At twenty-four she was a young woman trying to disappear.
“What?” From Tommy, looking at her.
She was shaking. “I just hate this. This is not the way…” She fumbled. She looked at Hank. “We had a fight that morning. Like we always did, her and me. The same stupid, stupid fight over nothing. I told her that I hated her. I ran off and left her alone for the whole day. I was supposed to be with her that day. I didn’t go home.” A long silence. “Then someone calls the house that night and tells me somebody murdered her. How can your mother get murdered? How? She stocks shelves at a fucking loser grocery store. She washes the kitchen floor. She…”
“Dung ngay,” her father demanded. Stop it!
Cindy, trembling, stood up suddenly, ready to fall. Hank rushed over, wrapped his arms around her, and held her. Tears rolled down that powered face. I thought of mountain rivulets, water coursing through spring snow. She whispered, “Mommy.”
Tommy jumped up, chains rattling against his side. “For shit’s sake, Cindy, what the fuck’s wrong with you? We talked this out in the car, no?”
“Talked what out?” I asked.
Tommy looked at me, disgusted. “It doesn’t do any good to fall apart now.”
“What does that mean?” From Hank.
“It means, we gotta pull the pieces together and keep going.” The words sounded harsh and unfeeling, but there was a barely-controlled edge to them. Unhinged. Wound too tight.
“Dien,” Benny said, using his son’s Vietnamese name. “It is okay to grieve for your mother.”
Tommy looked from his sister, still held by Hank, to his father. He spat out angrily, “You never had a clue, did you, Pop?”
“Tommy!” From Hank.
“None of this is your business, Hank. Why are you even here? And why’d you bring him?” Pointing at me. “The white guy.”
They all looked at me. “Actually I’m half-Vietnamese.” I immediately regretted the words.
“Which is the half that made you stumble into our house?”
With that, he left, but not before hurling another angry look at his sister. Cindy moved away from Hank now, sitting in a chair with her arms folded around her chest.
Benny turned to me, his face sad. “My children don’t know how to grieve for their mother. They forgot that they loved her.” He lit another cigarette.
When Hank and I left, Benny was in his chair, slumped over, staring at the floor. He glanced up when we said good-bye, then went back to staring at the carpet.
“Well, that went well,” I said to Hank in the car. “Any other ideas?”
“And we didn’t really learn a thing.”
I shook my head. “Actually, Hank, I think we learned quite a lot in that house.”
“But none of it useful.”
“That remains to be seen.”
Chapter Eight
Molly Torcelli opened the door before we rang the doorbell. “You’re early.”
On the phone I’d said five o’clock, and it was ten of the hour. “Sorry.”
She turned, walked back into the vast foyer under the chandelier, and Hank and I followed. She hadn’t said come in, but she was used to people following her. To her back I mumbled my traditional Vietnamese condolences.
I’d never been to her home in Farmington, but I was surprised when Hank said he’d never been there either. Molly didn’t entertain stragglers from the Vietnamese community. Lost in the leafy, mountainous hills, the estate was set far back in a cove of towering maples, far inside the gated acreage, unseen from the narrow road we drove in on. A white sprawling Colonial, with Greek columns staggered across the front, it looked like the forest had grown up around it, sheltering it. A circular driveway followed a rise of land, with beds of flowers speckling the overwatered blue-green lawn. A bank of garages masquerading as a carriage house was off to the left. The neighboring estates were barely seen—a hint of chimney, a suggestion of attic windows—tucked away in their own private forests.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Molly said as we sat in a sunroom, all wicker and polished green ivy. “People have been coming all day, and they look at me for answers.” She sighed. “What answers can I give people? What? Tell me that. My twin sister is gone. Stupidly gone.”
Suddenly she was quiet, staring from me to Hank, but I could see her body tighten. She sat still, her hands folded into her lap, a study in fragile self-control. She was dressed in a light yellow cotton summer dress, with yellow sandals. A gold bracelet. In her hands she held a crumpled yellow handkerchief, wadded and damp. Only her hair held slight reddish highlights. And her nails—fingers and toes—were a shade of pink. Of course, as I looked at her, I pictured the dead sister, her dark flashing eyes in the oval, delicate face. Here was a woman who’d known nothing but being beautiful since she was a child. And the redundant yellow of her appearance simply reinforced her exquisite look. I was impressed.
A maid entered the room, almost apologetically, and set a large silver tray on the table. I saw a pitcher of iced tea and an array of Italian cookies. Four tall glasses, chilled. “Anything else, Miss Molly?”
Molly looked into her face and suddenly burst into tears. The maid nodded, made a sympathetic sound, looked ready to cry herself, and backed out of the room. Molly sobbed into her crumpled handkerchief. In between the giant, sloppy gasps, she tried to apologize, tried to control herself.
“No need to apologize,” I told her. “Maybe we should leave you alone.”
“No, no,” she protested, half rising. “I can’t get used to—can’t believe—Mary is gone. Unbelievable. Unbearable. Someone shot her. Mary. Quiet, simple Mary.”
Those quaint, sentimental words—“quiet, simple”—jarred me, maybe because I sensed a little patronizing tone, and I found myself adding the obligatory final word—quaint, simple, poor Mary. Probably this was unfair of me, I told myself, as I watched Molly pull herself together, pour herself a glass of tea. She forgot to offer us some. Her hand trembled.
I repeated, “Maybe now’s not a good time.”
She breathed in. “Will there ever be a good time for something like this? I don’t think so. Oh no.”
“Are your children here?”
She waved her hand in the air. “Somewhere.” The flighty hand suggested they were lost, out of satellite range, in some distant wing of the large palatial estate, doubtless playing violent video games on a Sony PlayStation in the lower forty.
Then, her sobbing under control, Molly looked at Hank, her voice all business. “Your mother called this morning. She told me about your grandmother wanting Rick to ask around.” She glanced at me.
Ask around—what did that mean? I tried to distance myself. “Mrs. Torcelli, the truth of the matter is that I don’t even know if there’s any reason to ask around. The police are pretty sure about this.”
“Please—my name is Molly.” Then, blunt, to the point. “But isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I suppose so. I told her I’d talk to people. But also, of course, bring my condolences.”
She almost smiled. “Like a good Vietnamese.”
She started to nibble on an almond cookie, collecting the crumbs in the palm of her hand.
“I’m not the kind of investigator who takes on murder…”
The word murder startled her, and she choked on the cookie. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “Just the way you said that hit me to the quick. It’s not a word I’m comfortable with.”
I apologized.
“No, no.” She leaned toward me. “It’s me. I had a sleepless night last night. I expect I’ll have a few more such nights ahead of me.”
“How’s your family doing?”
She ignored me. “I expect I’ll have to see someo
ne.” She looked away, as though running through a list of therapists on call.
It dawned on me that Hank had said nothing since we’d arrived. After offering his own condolences, he’d closed himself up. Glancing in his direction, I saw him leaning forward in his chair, elbows on knees, hands on the sides of his face, staring wide-eyed at nothing. Not at Molly, to be sure. His lips were drawn into a thin, disapproving line, bloodless and tight. In the car on the way over he’d confessed that he never really cared for Molly, what little he saw of her.
“Money has made her different.”
“It has that effect,” I’d told him. “How different?”
“She likes it too much.”
“That’s not a sin.”
“She learned it from her husband Larry. He’s the dean of that school, let me tell you.” He sounded angry.
“Well, think about it, Hank. She came from nothing, born in Saigon during the war, airlifted out, dirt poor, you know, and now she’s on the Board of Directors for the Athenaeum in Hartford. That’s a leap.”
Hank made a face. “I don’t trust people who don’t have any self-doubt.”
“But we can cut her a little slack in light of her twin sister’s death, no?”
“We’ll see.”
So now he sat still, Rodin’s The Thinker meets the young kid in Home Alone—that pose. Frozen, the prisoner in the tower.
When Molly confided, “You know, I’ve had to cancel four appointments this week alone,” Hank stood up, coughed, and gazed out the bank of windows at the rolling acres that swept down the back into a thicket of hemlock. The muscles on the back of his neck looked like rough thick rope.
Molly paid him no mind. “How do you go about questioning drug dealers?” she asked.