by Andrew Lanh
I waited, patient. She twisted around, nervous. “But the police found her car there. No one drove her there.”
“No, you fool. I mean she drove herself and all, but somebody told her to go there. Somebody said—get into that car, lady, and go to this address.”
“So you don’t believe she went there by accident?”
She paused. “Maybe. But I think she drove there for a reason. Think about it—it’s not like she’s driving to Alaska. Pop’s store is a dozen blocks over, not that far away. She wasn’t a moron.”
“What if she got dizzy or something?” From Hank.
“She never got dizzy any other time. Why there? Why all of a sudden?”
“Who would tell her to go there?”
“I dunno, but she was trying to make somebody happy. That’s what she did. She didn’t want to be on Molly’s fucking charity but she couldn’t say no. I had to hear about that all the time. All I’m saying is that, if she went there by herself, she was going there because it would make somebody else happy. Not her.”
As she was speaking, she sank deeper into the sofa, wilting, and I noticed, as she extended her legs, that her black nylons, tucked into high boots, were torn at the seams. Absently, she picked at the tears, exaggerating them.
Hank leaned forward in his chair. “Would Tommy have told her to go there?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, like she’d listen to Tommy.”
“What about her sister?”
“Aunt Molly? Maybe, but for what reason, for God’s sake?”
“What about Danny, Susie’s son?”
She waited a second before answering, then started to pull her body up on the sofa, wrapping her hands around her knees. “Why Danny?”
“He used to be close to Tommy.” From Hank.
“Not really. Not close. They hung out together in school, more than any of us. He’s around now and then, you know, I’ve seen him slicking by in that car of his, blowing the horn. He pulls over and chats me up. Shows me his latest high-tech gadget—like I care.”
“You don’t like him?”
“He’s all right. Just a little too taken with himself. Pretty boy.”
I looked at Hank, who was staring intently into her ghostly face. “Did you two ever go out?”
She tightened her lips, her voice thick with emotion. “Look at me. The ugly duckling. Miss Plain-as-can-be. Look at me.”
“But Danny has a way…”
“You better believe it. A way. He should be put away. He’s scum with girls. In school he had to have everyone, and the ones who said no were the ones he had to have most. He’s a charmer, hands all over your neck and back and arms…”
“So you did go out with him?” I broke in.
She laughed. “A curious expression—go out with him. No, not really. I was there for the fucking. A hookup. One time. Almost charity, a pity fuck. Look, Danny, look. See girl there. Fuck girl, fuck.”
“And then he left you?”
“Listen to you. ‘Left you.’ There was nothing to leave, Rick Van Lam. I was an after-dinner mint. A booty call. Next day he’s back to being buddies with me, joking, teasing. Like it never happened. And to him it didn’t.”
“But it’s something you can’t forget.”
She laughed again. “Not the sex. You can always forget sex.” A long pause. “You can’t forget the humiliation.”
“I’m sorry,” Hank said.
“Everyone gets a crush on Danny sooner or later.” She turned to the side, retrieved a diet Pepsi off a table, slurped half of it. “Christ, my own mother had a crush way back when. When we’d come here from school. He’d flatter her, talk to her, bat those wide brown eyes, lean in to kiss her hello or good-bye, woo her like she was Miss Universe, sing Vietnamese songs to her. She’d get silly, and I’d want to gag. One time I told him, for Christ’s sake, Danny, she’s my mother. Do you know what he said? That she’s a woman, and women love him. My own mother. Of course, after the pot bust he got on her shit list pretty fast. She didn’t want him around, afraid of his influence on Tommy, the boy blunder.”
“Did your Aunt Molly have an infatuation with him?” I asked.
That surprised her. “Well, no, I don’t think she ever really liked him. She was polite and all, but no, she thought he was too slick for TV. But I’ll tell you who also had a crush on him. Uncle Larry, Mr. Money Bags.”
Hank asked, “Gay?”
“No, no, not like a sexual thing. But he was taken with the boy because Danny flattered, batted those eyes, praised, and asked for advice. ‘Oh Mr. Money Bags, I wanna be just like you—rich and powerful. Oh oh oh. Mr. Larry, sir.’ And Uncle Larry fell for it. Danny this, Danny that. Danny’s handsome, so bright, so top of the heap. One time Jon, disgusted, told his father he was acting like a fag, and Larry recoiled. I thought he’d hit Jon.”
“What happened?”
“Larry cooled it, and Danny sort of read the signs, drifting away. It’s just that Danny is turned on by ambition. For him it’s like some magic potion.” She finished the Pepsi, stared at the can, then idly dropped it to the floor, where it rolled a few feet into the leg of a table. We all watched its short journey.
“Ambition, huh?” I asked.
Cindy looked at the table clock and actually pointed at it, miming the gestures of I’ve-gotta-go-sorry. “Ambition,” she echoed me. “Danny has enough for a whole fucking army.”
Chapter Twenty
Benny Vu struck me as a man so simple there was no way anyone might see him as a mystery. Which was why he intrigued me. Hank made a comment on the phone that got me thinking about the quiet, grieving widower. Actually he was questioning me, the way he often did, hurling back my random Buddhist-infused aphorisms, my loose translations, and my own brand of American-tinged Asian wisdom. “Remember,” he was talking about his own father, “what you always say. ‘Sometimes in the silence is the greatest noise.’”
His father had stopped talking to him. They’d been having a running battle after he quit the Chinese restaurant but also his sudden interest in a Vietnamese girl who happened to be the granddaughter of a North Vietnamese soldier. His father rarely liked Hank’s girlfriends, mostly white girls. But there usually was something wrong with the Asian girls he brought home—mixed blood, bui doi, lowlife parents, too giggly, too skinny, too timid, and now, the ultimate horror, a Vietnamese-American from the Commie North. Uncle Ho’s army. Viet Cong mon amour.
“Are you listening to me?” Hank spoke into the silence.
“I’m sorry. What you said made me thinking of Benny Vu.”
“My father?”
“No, the silence. The quiet man who doesn’t talk. The unassuming grocery man, lost in the bags of Thai rice and stalks of lemongrass and mint.”
“Sounds like you’re composing a haiku. But why Benny?”
“Because we never think about him, other than to express sympathy over his loss.”
“Maybe that’s all he is, Rick.”
“I’m gonna check him out, Hank. By myself.”
***
The next afternoon I found Benny alone in the grocery. Of course, there were no customers, so Benny sat on a stool, reading a Vietnamese newspaper published in one of the colonies in California. Tommy wasn’t working. Benny looked up, didn’t look surprised, nodded a faint greeting, and shook my hand. The guest in his house. The stranger at the door. His thin smile was laced with the smallest hint of wariness.
I apologized for interrupting and asked if I could visit. Is it okay? Yes, he said. Da. But I knew that Vietnamese men and women would often agree, say yes when they meant no. I’d have to read him carefully.
“Ban co thích uong gì khong?” Did I want something to drink? he asked. He knew I was not a customer.
I accepted a can of soy milk. It tasted metallic to me, or how I imagine aluminum might
taste on the tongue. He offered a cigarette, which I accepted. To do otherwise would be an insult.
I expressed my sympathy again, which was customary, and he nodded gratefully. Looking at him, I saw a humorless man with a tiny coconut head set on a skinny, bony frame. And the clothing he wore—like today’s faded blue dress shirt and the baggy, rolled-up jeans over shoes cracked at the seams—looked hand-me-down.
“I saw Cindy at your home.” I told him something he probably already knew. “And I’ve seen Tommy, too.”
He made a thick, heavy sound and jerked his hand in the air. “American-born children.”
I joked. “Typical American kids, these days.”
“Look around you. This is the American civilization that everyone wants. Money and makeup and babies born in the street.”
Hank had told me that Benny Vu was the world’s last moralist, and the most melancholic. Here was a man who compartmentalized the world into black and white and refused any gray areas. Looking at him, I realized that he could be unyielding, unforgiving. A man with a code.
“You know,” I countered, “America gives everyone a lot of choices.”
He looked into my face, searching for meaning. “Which can be a blessing. But to choose bad is not to choose well.”
“True,” I agreed, “but what’s the truth?” Intro to Philosophy 101, I thought, grinning. A B-plus grade at Columbia College.
“If you don’t know now, you never will.” Then he smiled that humorless smile. “But you didn’t come here to discuss philosophy.”
“It’s safer than a lot of topics.”
“And more interesting perhaps.”
“But there are no answers there.”
“And you’re looking for answers to my Mary’s murder.” He said the line so matter-of-factly, but the words hung in the air. I waited.
“And Molly’s,” I added.
He nodded. But mentioning his wife’s name seemed to have some effect on him, softening the corners. “Come.” He nodded behind him. “I will make good tea for us.” I thought he’d hang a “Closed” sign in front, but he didn’t. We walked into a small back storeroom with a tiny stove and refrigerator, almost lost among boxes and boxes of canned and paper goods. “In the afternoon I drink a root tea I buy in Chinatown. It takes away worries and loss.” He pointed to a chair. “Sit, please, sir.”
Neither of us said a word as we waited for the water to boil. Meticulously he spooned dried herbs into a tea caddy, poured steaming water on them, and the two of us waited. The acrid smell of dried autumn chrysanthemum and old weathered wood permeated the small space, not pleasant or tempting. With the cups steeping before us, he finally nodded, and I picked mine up. The taste was amazingly soothing, a little tart, a hint of old dried flowers and the sweet mildew of an attic space. But in the hot, steaming back room, sweat on my brow, the liquid calmed me down, settled me, and, in fact, cooled me like a window fan.
“I sense you’re a good man, Rick Van Lam.” He watched me closely. “This awful pursuit my family—Hank’s mother—has set upon you. It’s an honorable journey but maybe an empty one. Maybe the answer is some misguided Spanish boy in Hartford we’ll never meet.” He didn’t speak with any acrimony, just a low-key statement of fact. “I don’t sense murderers in the aisles of my store or on the green lawns of Larry Torcelli.”
“It’s something I have to do now.”
“As I said, a good man. Loyal to his people. To a country far away. But what do you find?”
“So far I seem to be collecting studies of the family, bits and pieces of lifetimes.”
“These are character sketches, not clues.”
“Exactly.”
“But let me tell you—that is the only way to do this. I don’t understand American investigation. I can’t watch the TV police shows because they are all microscopes and fingerprints and red flashing lights and…DNA.”
I laughed. “That works.”
“If you say so.” His tiny face was animated now. “But I think you are hard on yourself because you believe you are not listening to the white part of your soul, Rick Van Lam. The American self that is good and perhaps logical and fine. You are listening to the Asian part of your soul, the part that uses the mind to draw pictures of each person you meet. Snapshots in a book. Have more faith in the way you are doing things. If there is a story behind the faces, then you’ll find it. Do you know why?”
I waited. “No.”
“Of course you do. You’re being polite. It’s because when you look into one of our faces you see yourself, and in the act of looking you understand your heart. All the parts of your heart that are black are the parts that let you see the evil in others. The less-than-good in people that you call evil.”
“I thought we weren’t gonna talk about philosophy.” I sipped the tea. The afternoon seemed dreamy, suspended.
He almost smiled. “This is not philosophy. This is conversation over tea on a hot, hot afternoon.”
I was starting to like this man.
We sat back, sipped the tea, which seemed to put him into a trance. “You are too much in this country to remember the old Vietnamese saying.” Then he quoted: “Khi than vang mat khong co la tri nuong tuong.”
I had trouble translating. “I don’t know—something like—When God is away, imagination can’t come about.”
“Roughly.” He looked at me. “You have a difficult job, despite your talent. God has chosen to ignore the world. I have told no one how much my wife meant to me.” I stared at him, uncomfortable. “I love my boy and girl, though I don’t understand them, but Mary was my life. Now there’s this empty store and an empty home. The best part of me is gone.” But there was no sadness in his voice, not even bitterness. A plain statement of fact—there, out there, presented to me, a virtual stranger he somehow felt comfortable with.
“I’m sorry.”
He waved the comment away. “Of course. We had nothing but everything we needed.”
I drank the tea and felt like napping, my eyes lazy with the mixture of coolness and heat.
“Now I can grow old watching the mountain of disappointment in my own children.”
“They’re all right.” I tried to say something, but my words sounded too American, even in my stilted Vietnamese. So I said in English, “They’re all right.”
A weak smile. “A little right.”
I nodded.
“Tommy is weak, so unusual for a Vietnamese man. He lacks the spunk of a king.”
“How weak?”
He thought about it. “A couple weeks ago he’s working here and Danny is on the phone. Tommy is saying he has to work, but then he tells me he’ll be right back. He doesn’t come back until closing.”
That surprised me. “Danny? I didn’t think they were friends—spent time together.”
Benny looked at me. “They are not friends. They haven’t been friends for years.”
“But you said he called…”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t around.”
“He comes around?”
“Now and then, running in with his fancy suit and his fancy car, bowing and scraping to me. All slicked over like an oiled road.”
“But if they’re not friends…”
“Tommy tells me he can’t stand Danny.”
“But…”
Benny threw his hands in the air, as though the contradiction was trivial. “Danny stops in to say hello now and then, to talk to Tommy, to me, to Cindy. It’s like a rich person visiting a poor person—some charity. There’s nothing friendly in their talk, not when I’m here listening. In English: ‘Hi, how are you? Nice to see you. How’s the job? How’s the car?’ Strangers on a city bus.”
I had to digest this new information. I’d been lied to, it seemed. Danny, indeed, was more a presence in Tommy’s life than I’d been led to bel
ieve.
“You don’t like Danny?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’m indifferent to him. To dislike him is to, well, value him too highly. He’s a violator of what’s good in life because he’s too hungry.”
“Hungry?”
“He is someone else’s success story.”
“Larry?”
What was Benny talking about?
“Danny has no influence on my Tommy now. He once did. A bad influence. Trouble with the law. Some drugs. But that is over. Now he’s just a reminder of how some people make it and some don’t.”
“But you don’t trust his success.”
“I don’t really think about it.”
“Did Mary like him?”
“At first, yes. But that changed. She thought he was dangerous around the impressionable Tommy. But once he became a banker out of Harvard, well, he charmed her again. He wooed her, praised her cooking.”
“But still around.” I was talking to myself.
“Not around. Running in, running out. Months go by, and then the visit. We need to stop and honor him.”
“Are you bitter?”
“I told you—indifferent. Bitterness takes too much energy.”
But then I noticed cloudiness in his eyes, dullness. “What?”
“I was just thinking of his last visits to the store and once to the home.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I mean, he was the same, all that swagger. But I think he could no longer charm my wife. She got quiet when he showed up at the house that one time. Tommy was staying there because of the fire at his building. But she frowned at him.”
“Did she say anything?”
“No, just closed up. It was strange, though.”
“How so?
“She wouldn’t leave the room when he came. Like she was guarding Tommy from him. I know it made Tommy angry, but Danny just chatted and flattered. But she stared at him. Hard.”
“Could he have offended her?”
“He was never around long enough. Quick visits, hello and out the door. Blowing the horn on the fancy car.” Benny stopped to prepare us a second cup of tea. I waited.