by Andrew Lanh
Good question. I had absolutely no response to that.
“Well?” Impatient.
“This really is not a case, Molly. Right now, I’m just exploring. I’m just talking a bit…”
She interrupted. “Rick Van Lam, it’s either a duck or it’s not a duck. You either do something or you don’t.” She half-closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. That’s not me talking. That’s my husband Larry. That’s his philosophy of life.”
“Drug dealers—or gangbang shooters—are not known to talk about themselves. Even the police hit a brick wall there. I’m more concerned with Mary’s behavior that night. Her decision to go there.”
Hank returned, sat down, and stared at her.
“Iced tea?” she interrupted, as though just remembering to be a perfect hostess. She leaned forward, indicating the pitcher. The gold bracelet, I noted, was inlaid with tiny diamonds. She handed two glasses to us.
“Molly,” I began as she sat back, “why do you think Mary was in that neighborhood, even stepping out of her car?” I waited.
The question took her off guard. She hadn’t expected it. Then she composed herself. “You know, I don’t have a clue. Mary wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place.” She looked away.
But in the split second that she caught my eye, repeated the line she’d said before, and then turned away, something happened. I caught a momentary flicker of an eye, a quick bleak flash of fear and terror. When she looked back, the eyes were dull, veiled.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I swear I saw something there.
The front door opened, and Larry walked in, undoing a tie and the top button of his blue dress shirt. He didn’t look happy to see us there. “I wondered who was driving the ancient BMW.” He looked at me.
He sat down, reached for the iced tea. That explained the fourth glass the maid had placed on the tray. I noticed thick graying beard stubble on his afternoon face. Larry had the rumpled, slightly gone-to-seed look of a very wealthy man who once was tremendously handsome, athletic, popular, and aggressive. Now, it seemed to me, the aggressiveness dominated, but it was tempered with a hazy sort of good looks. People would always refer to him as handsome, but they might also comment on the steeliness of his eyes, the harsh wrinkles around the sensual mouth. The Mediterranean good looks—he and Molly must have been Scott and Zelda country club luminaries way back when—had hardened, and the shock of black hair was thinning now, gray at the temples. What he exuded, I felt, was a kind of blunt, no-nonsense force, the authority of stock portfolio and embarrassingly wonderful cash flow.
He was trying to be friendly, joking idly with the totally unresponsive Hank. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” He punched him in the shoulder. Hank nodded.
Molly introduced me. “This is Rick Van Lam, a friend of Hank’s.”
Larry looked like he could care less, but he extended his hand, and we shook. His palms were wet.
“Horrible, horrible,” he spoke to no one in particular. “Makes no sense to anyone.” He undid another button on his shirt. The home was beautifully air-conditioned, but he looked flushed from the heat of the afternoon. He dabbed his face with a handkerchief.
Molly smiled thinly. “You know how we said the police were doing absolutely nothing, Larry?”
“What do you expect? It’s Hartford. Most of the cops are on the take, if they’re not boinking some crack hooker on Asylum Hill.”
“For God’s sake, Larry.” She looked at me, then back at her husband. “Larry is a man of definite opinions.” Her face crumbled a bit.
He smirked. “Molly hates it when I’m candid.”
“Rick here is an investigator and he’s looking into the case…”
I raised my hand in protest. “Wait. It’s not a case…”
“What case?” From Larry.
“Hank’s mother and grandmother have asked if he’d ask around about Mary. To see if anyone knows why she went there. You know, help the police a bit. You know. Talk to people.”
Larry looked at me as though he were in the presence of a lunatic. “You’re doing what?” Incredulous.
“Just talking to people.”
“Like us?”
“People.”
“Well, knock your socks off.” He shrugged, dismissing the subject. “But it seems to me you’d be better off nailing that lowlife that gunned her down.”
“For God’s sake, Larry,” Molly pleaded.
“Let the Ricans shoot each other. What’s sad is that Mary was…”
Hank spoke for the first time, “. . . in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I stared at him. His face was red now.
“Exactly,” Larry summed up. “Well, I got business I gotta take care of.” He stood up. “Molly,” he turned back, “where are Jon and Kristen?”
In the lower forty, I thought.
“I told Susie a half hour ago to get them to say hello to Hank and—and to Rick when they arrived.” She made a you-know-how-they-are gesture, and smiled.
“I’ll tell Susie again.” He nodded at us. “See you, guys.” He rushed off.
A horrible man. Or maybe not—a man used to having the world fall into line, a world that obeyed his commands.
Eventually, after an awkward silence during which we sipped tea, I heard footsteps on the stairwell, and Jon and Kristen strolled into the room, both looking like they’d been summoned to a gathering they preferred to skip. “What?” asked Jon.
His mother pointed to the two of us. We stood and shook hands. Jon said, “I saw you both at the funeral.” He sat down, yawning, but covering his mouth after the fact. I found myself looking at him, thinking of him in ways I often thought of myself. Here was this half-Vietnamese, half-white man, twenty-five years old, I’d been told, comfortable with himself, a BA from Yale, a perpetual student, now living at home during the summer break. According to Hank’s capsule summary in the car, Jon was getting a graduate degree in Public Policy, intending to become a lawyer “down the road, maybe.”
That was Hank’s quote.
Jon looked more Asian than white, though he had a square jaw and a shock of Italian hair. Those narrow eyes. Sepia skin like his mother’s, supple and silky, and he’d inherited his mother’s looks. Tall, a little too thin, he sat down with his long legs stretched out. He wasn’t wearing shoes. Hank had told me Jon had forgotten most of the Vietnamese his mother taught him as a boy. Mary once told Hank’s mother that Jon thought speaking Vietnamese made him sound like a Disney cartoon character. The few times I’d spotted him at gatherings he looked sullen and miserable. We’d never been introduced.
“Hi, Hank,” Kristen nodded at him. “I saw you in church.”
“Hi, Kristen.” Hank smiled. “Sorry again.”
“Oh, it’s just awful. Awful.” Then she stopped, as though confused.
“It’s all right, dear,” Molly said protectively.
We all knew that Kristen was, as one old Vietnamese man announced, “as dumb as two chopsticks trying to find each other in the dark,” a cruel barb that had some currency a while back, one that got back to Molly and Larry. Kristen was, well, slow. As Hank told me in the car, “She’s ngu nhu cho.” As thick as two short planks. She’d become a recurring joke in a Vietnamese community that celebrated brainpower. And because she was rich—and half-white—the joking was often vicious and heartless. She said dumb things, not knowing they were dumb. Her father had a long history of enrolling her in progressively more and more expensive girls’ schools. One of the last and most unsatisfying had been Miss Porter’s down the street from my apartment, a school that talked of Jackie Kennedy as though she were still enrolled there, sitting in the cafeteria adjusting her bobby socks. But Kristen forgot to go to class and was expelled. She didn’t care. I’d talked to her once at a New Year’s party and I found her a sad young woman who’d come to believe her drop-dead gorgeous
looks were all she needed to survive. That, her cell phone, and a checkbook.
Molly turned to Jon. “Hank and Rick have come to talk about your Aunt Mary.”
“Why?” From Jon.
I spoke up. “Everyone feels that there has to be some investigation, some answer to why Mary drove her car…”
Jon interrupted, brusque. “You mean, everyone in the Vietnamese world.” He ran his tongue over his lips.
“That’s right,” I insisted. “Closure, I guess.” I despised the handy word. “We may never know.”
On the defensive Hank added, “The Vietnamese need to tie all the strings, you know. Right, Jon? To leave little unanswered. What did Buddha say? ‘When the line of a circle begins to be drawn, it must go until it finds itself again.’” He looked at me. “Rick taught me that.”
I smiled. “Good for you, Hank.”
Jon just stared.
“We’re Catholic,” Kristen said suddenly.
Jon frowned. “I never knew Aunt Mary that well, so I don’t know what you want me to say. I couldn’t even guess why she went there. I know Tommy and Cindy, but I knew them better a few years back, when we went to the same school for a while.” He stared over my shoulder. “Our lives have gone in different directions. I don’t know what they’re up to these days. I mean, we’re all friends on Facebook, but that’s a way of not caring about people, right?”
“When we’d hang out with them, Aunt Mary wasn’t around much,” Kristen added. “She didn’t like to talk to us.”
“You know, she seemed uncomfortable around us,” Jon said. “Sometimes she looked at us like we were dollar signs, two little privileged kids.”
Molly spoke up. “You are privileged kids.”
Jon looked at her. “Thank God for that.”
Kristen smiled. “She was always nice to me.”
Jon smirked. “Everyone’s nice to you, Kristen. They want something.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Kristen suddenly said good-bye. “Gotta run, gang.” Nodding at her mother, she left the room.
Hank and Jon had started discussing Hank’s desire to be a state trooper. “Sort of cool,” Jon admitted. “Not for me. But sort of cool.”
Molly didn’t look too happy with the conversation, eyeing her son. I glared at Hank.
“When was the last time you spoke to Mary?” I asked her.
For a second, she got flustered, uncertain. “A day or so before she died, I think. We talked all the time on the phone. I‘d got her on a local Asian Relief charity that I chair. She had better connections to the old Vietnamese community, and—and—I, well, I was supposed to pick her up for a meeting. It would have been the day of her funeral.” She paused. “I missed her phone calls the day she died. She called me a few times—nothing unusual there. I called her. We played phone tag. Back and forth. We never spoke that day.” She began sobbing and reached for a handkerchief.
Jon got up to leave. “Ma.” Impatience in his voice.
I nodded at Hank. We said our good-byes. As we stood up, Kristen suddenly bounded down the stairs. Surprisingly, she’d gone to her room and changed her outfit, replacing the silky red blouse and baggy shorts for some tight jeans and a skimpy top.
“Going out?” her mother asked.
“No. Why?”
She disappeared back up the staircase.
Hank hugged Molly, who held on a long time. I could see Hank squirm. The maid stepped into the room. “Susie.” Molly introduced her to us. “Do you know Susie? Her name is Suong but somehow, years back, we started calling her Susie.” The short woman grinned, uncomfortable. We introduced ourselves. Susie led us into the foyer, but she hesitated on the threshold.
“Yes?” I encouraged her.
In broken English: “I know Miss Mary when she came here now and then. I always like her. A lot. She bring me cookies from her store, and she always asked about me and my boy. So sad to learn what happened to her. So cruel for a woman so good like her.” She looked into my face, and I saw her eyes were wet. She held my hand.
We stood there, awkward, the three of us.
Somewhere in the house Larry was barking at his daughter, the words biting and angry. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You don’t have a brain in that goofy head of yours.”
Susie saw me glance at Hank. “No listen to Mr. Larry. Please. He’s, well, a rough man, but only on the outside. Inside he’s a good, good man, let me tell you. I would not work in this house for more than twenty years if a man is evil.” She opened the front door for us and watched us leave. I looked back. She was looking over her shoulder in the direction of the father-daughter altercation. The door closed.
In the car I said to Hank, “Why is it I’m not liking these people?”
“I feel the same, and they’re my family. But I gotta tell you, Rick, they’re distant, distant cousins. Maybe not even real cousins. You know how Vietnamese call lifelong friends family, like brothers and sisters and uncles. We probably don’t even share blood….”
“Keep talking.” I was smiling. “It’s not helping you distance yourself from your, excuse me, cousins.”
Hank waited a second. “When you asked Molly why Mary might be at that drug-dealer corner, I noticed her body tighten so fast it caught my attention.”
“Not only that.” I told him I saw some confusing flicker in her eyes, a flash of fear.
“Does it mean anything?”
“Maybe nothing at all. Grief sometimes is hard to translate.”
Chapter Nine
Liz called with news.
“Just a tidbit that may mean nothing. Benny’s store was once cited after a municipal-FBI raid. They confiscated bootleg Asian videos, but nothing came of it. No fine, just a warning. But you know how the mom-and-pop Asian markets thrive on bootlegging Hong Kong and Vietnamese tapes. Benny’s was one of four shops raided in Little Saigon, a few splashy lines in the Courant, an indignant editorial from the paper about the death of legitimate free trade or something like that, what would the Founding Fathers say, and then the shelves were restocked with grainy copies of Jet Li kung fu flicks.”
Lying on the sofa, I absently scratched my stomach. “Hartford thrives on an illegal underworld of drugs, hookers, and knockoffs of Sean John sweat suits—and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee DVDs.”
“I lift my torch…”
“Anything else?”
“How’d you know?” I could hear her smile. “The only other arrest was for little Tommy Vu, back when he was a senior at the hoity-toity Chesterton School. He had a couple of minor-league run-ins as a juvenile, shoplifting stuff. Nothing much. But he had one serious count of possession of a controlled substance—an ounce or so of pot. Intent to sell. Some lawyer got the charge reduced, a fine, probation, no lockup. Nothing since.”
“How was he caught?” I asked.
“With the goods.”
“I mean where?”
“In a club downtown near Union Station, one of those dance clubs for high school and college kids. No alcohol, just Ecstasy and sex in the bathrooms. By the time it wound its way through the courts, it seemed small potatoes in comparison to the high-level street traffic elsewhere in the naked city, what with slaphappy gunfire and all those gold teeth that shine in the dark.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of anything.”
“I agree. But in the original police report a cop noted that Tommy struggled with the undercover agent, tried to flee, had to be cuffed. He said he’d get even with the snitch, even if it killed him.”
“What snitch?”
“Report didn’t say. You’re the venerable PI. You find out.”
***
The next morning, close to noon, I drove to the Elmwood section of West Hartford, to the three-family house where Tommy lived on the third flo
or with two roommates. I figured he’d be home, probably still in bed. The first-floor apartment was boarded up, the result of a fire. “No Trespassing” signs were plastered on the plywood sheets covering the windows. But there were fans whirring in the second- and third-floor apartment windows, and the door to the front entrance was wide open. I climbed the stairs, the acrid scent of burnt wood lingering in the stairwell.
He answered on the third knock, dressed only in baggy denim shorts and all those earrings. His chest displayed a sunburst tattoo around his navel, and a painful-looking ring dangled from his left nipple. He looked a little glazed so I figured he was stoned. But it could have been the haze of sleep. He stared at me, eyes half-shut. He stuck his hand under the elastic band of his shorts and scratched a nether region best left unexplored.
“Oh, it’s you. The PI. You’re…”
“Rick Van Lam.”
Confused: “You want something?”
“Can I come in?”
He was uncertain. “Sure, why not? Anything happen?”
“No. I wanted to talk to you about your mother.”
But he stood there, vacant eyed, blocking my path.
“Is this a bad time?” I hoped he’d move.
“What?” Did he speak English, I wondered? Finally he turned. “Sure, come in.” But he didn’t move.
“You have a fire downstairs?”
He grinned. “Small one, in the living room. Crackheads knocked over a candle.”
“I can smell the smoke.”
“Cool, ain’t it?”
I didn’t think so.
But he stepped aside and waved me into the room, where I noticed another young man sitting on a stained, patched sofa. At first I thought it had to be one of his roommates, but he looked too much like a visitor—that, or he was going on a job interview, dressed as he was in a suit and tie.
“Tommy, take care of yourself, okay?”
The man leaned in and with his fist gently bumped Tommy’s shoulder, some atavistic male bonding that seemed to energize the lethargic Tommy. He grinned, almost shyly. “Mom wouldn’t like my manners,” he said to me, and I found the statement oddly endearing. “This is my old friend Danny,” he pointed. “We went to school together a million years ago.”