Caught Dead

by Andrew Lanh

  “He ever let Tommy drive his car?”

  “Once, I think. That’s all Tommy could talk about. But Danny said never again. Tommy came close to running over an old woman. Danny joked about it, but he never tossed the keys to Tommy again. If they went off for a spin, Danny drove.”

  “They did go places?”

  “Up the street to get food. For a slice of pizza or a hamburger.”

  “But you didn’t want him around?”

  “Tommy doesn’t have many friends. Danny has a flashy car and bucks for food.”

  “When was the last time you saw Danny?”

  “A while back. Later I heard Tommy on his phone, and he was not happy about something.”

  “Why?”

  “I couldn’t catch the words but he called Danny an ass. Tommy calls everyone—including me—an ass, but this time he was sputtering, he was so mad.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  Another surprised look. “Do you think he’d tell me? Tommy yells at everyone who gets in his way. Sooner or later Danny gets on his nerves.”

  His eyes were closing so I knew it was time to leave. I thanked him for the tea and conversation, and we shook hands.

  As he walked me out, back through the empty store, and ushered me onto the hot sidewalk, he shook my hand again. “You are important here,” he whispered. “Gio thoi la choi troi.” When the wind blows, it is God’s broom.

  I started to say something, but he stopped me. “You know, in the war, many dead soldiers and civilians were buried in unmarked graves or left rotting in the fields. Their bodies were untouched. In Vietnam we believe the ghost of these people will wander, lost and afraid, seeking proper burial, homage, respect. At night I think about Mary’s murder. Her violent end. And I think her ghost is wandering now, somehow stunned, shattered, wanting retribution. There is no world without justice, you know. She—her ghost demands it.”

  I must have looked confused because he tapped me affectionately on the chest. “It is up to you, Rick Van Lam.”

  I nodded, and thanked him again.

  He touched my sleeve. “Ban la mot nguoi ban tot.”

  He considered me a good friend.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  On Saturday night I met school friends Vinnie and Marcie for Chinese food at the Joy Luck Palace in Avon. My best friends on campus, they were away for the summer at their cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but they’d come back for the weekend. I’d missed them, Vinnie the conservative and Marcie the firebrand liberal—Republican and Democrat—entangled in a long, talky marriage. When Vinnie had called on Friday, I’d filled him in on the double murder case, and Vinnie and Marcie wanted to know everything. He told me his old college roommate taught English at Chesterton, and he’d make a phone call. I hoped to get a better picture of the five kids at the upscale prep school in the woods of Simsbury.

  Marcie and Vinnie looked tanned, relaxed, at peace. Summers, they always said, were terms of necessary truce: no partisan politics, no elaborate social entanglements, no wrangling over the world’s precarious condition. Boating, swimming, barbecuing, they said. The trinity of escape that led to long, blissful nights of sleep.

  “All right. I’m jealous.”

  “Come back with us,” they pleaded.

  Last summer I’d gone for two weeks, and had a good time. But this year I’d gotten lethargic, content with jogging and local friends, even teaching that one-night-a-week course at the college, which I’d just completed, turning in the final grades the previous morning. I’d paid it so little mind, but now it was over. And then there was…The Case that ate away the last days of August.

  The three of us sat with a bottle of merlot, sharing salt-battered shrimp, moo goo gai pan, and Chinese broccoli sautéed in garlic sauce. We caught up on each other’s lives. They knew Hank, of course—he’d been a student in both their classes—as well as Liz, Jimmy, and Gracie.

  The talk turned to the murders. “We read about it in the Courant,” Marcie told me, “since we get the paper delivered, a day late.”

  Vinnie spoke. “We should have known you’d be involved.”

  Marcie grinned. “Two deaths in the Vietnamese community. And rich, rich Farmington money. Come on. Staying away from that drama is like Vinnie avoiding french fries at McDonald’s.”

  “Well, at first I was just trying to find out why Mary went to Goodwin Square. That was all. Then, of course, it mushroomed.”

  “How’s Hank doing?”

  “He’s okay. Hank was never close to that part of the family. His affection is more for his grandma and mother, and their concern.”

  “We had lunch with my friend from Chesterton today,” Vinnie told me. “When I called, he was free, so we met. We’d been roommates at Brown my senior year. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years. He’s divorced now, and restless.”

  Marcie winced. “Midlife crisis, I fear. Who else would leave a good, stable marriage?” She turned to Vinnie. “Don’t get ideas.”

  He teased her. “I run all my ideas past you, Marcie.” He got serious. “His name is Joel Riley, has been there for years. Likes teaching among the bright and moneyed, though he says the scholarship kids are often the ones worthy of real attention.”

  “And?” I prodded.

  “Joel remembers them, and he says he’s been thinking about them after reading of the murders in the paper. A couple were a little out of focus—like Kristen, there for so short a time—but he talked to someone after my phone call, and a lot of it came back. He even brought a yearbook to show me.” Vinnie reached into a folder and extracted some papers. “I’ve made notes, Rick.”

  “The memory is going,” Marcie said.

  “I know how you like exact quotation.”

  “Anything scandalous?”

  “My, my, so impatient. Of course. Why else would I be taking my sweet time here?”

  “Kristen,” I began. “What about her?”

  “The least memorable because she dropped out early. Flunked out. Never his student, but known to him. Part of the problem was her looks—just too movie starlet to fit into the obligatory school uniform which hid, but not well, the curves and dips of outrageous adolescence.”

  “He said she was stupid,” Marcie added. “But manipulative—cagey.”

  “That, too. I mean you get a lot of rich kids there who don’t have much brainpower, but she stood out. Because she didn’t even try. She just looked pretty, said vacuous things, answered the instructors back, sassy as hell, and seemed to rely on her being her Daddy’s little favorite. The teachers were in uproar, but her grades and some foul language directed at a fellow student meant that she had to disappear. Fast.”

  Marcie added, “Daddy’s money notwithstanding.”

  “I don’t think she was there the whole year,” Vinnie noted.

  “Barely,” I said. “What about her brother Jon?”

  “The spy in the house of love,” Vinnie laughed.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Jon was good looking, very bright, but he always seemed to be—Joel’s word—‘lurking.’ A tattletale. He’d be friendly with his cousins, with the other kids, but a lot of the kids didn’t trust him. Someone called him a moral prig—he didn’t like the sexual escapades of his friends. The parties, even the drugs. Girls came on to him because he was so good looking, rich, but his relationships always ended. He found fault with them—too shallow, too fat, too bony, too clinging. Worse, too promiscuous.”

  “So he probably didn’t lose his virginity there?”

  “Maybe not. Joel said he had a steady girlfriend for a year or so, a prim and proper young thing from Brookline, Massachusetts, supposedly a descendant of John Adams, who took her lineage way too seriously. She had chronic back illness—even an operation—so I don’t think they did it. They were always tog
ether, and then her father transferred her to Rosemary Hall Choate in Wallingford. They didn’t like Jon’s attention. He told a teacher it was because he was half-Vietnamese. The girl’s uncle had been a helicopter pilot at the My Lai massacre. Too many psychiatric-couch dilemmas there.”

  “Then nothing?”

  “Then Jon went back to his studies and his solitude.”

  “Good student, right?”

  “The best. But Joel said he hated it when he raised his hand in class. He loved finding any mistake a teacher made—a wrong date, a lapse in grammar, a random aside that Jon thought egregious and therefore unacceptable in an institution like Chesterton.”

  I laughed. “Thank God most of my students in Criminal Justice just want to fire their revolvers at me.”

  “As for Benny and Mary’s kids, Cindy and Tommy, there’s a lot that Joel can recall. Both were his students. Tommy was belligerent from the start, balked at the school uniform, developed this strident counterculture manifesto he proclaimed at any chance, and let it be known he despised the uptight, asshole school. His friends were kids he met in town, not classmates. No one was surprised when he dropped out, but they were surprised he lasted almost to the end. He actually handed out a flyer he’d run off in which he described the school as ‘a penitentiary for the petit bourgeois on the road to trust fund perpetuity.’ Folks there still bandy around that phase, delighted.”

  “He hasn’t changed much. More tattoos, more leather, more chains.”

  “And Cindy, the homely, gum-clacking girl, seemed not to know where she was but would surprise Joel with keen, insightful essays about her shitty life. He remembered her well. She resented being a poor girl at a rich school. The other girls avoided her. Even then she’d violate school rules by accentuating the uniform, trying to give herself a punkish look. She was always being told to tone down the clown makeup, but it only got worse. And, on top of that, instructors felt sorry for her, the dark side of a family that held Jon, Kristen, and even Tommy, three good-looking kids, lucky as hell. Joel said she looked like the lost child at a county fair, waiting for someone to find her.”

  “Poor kid,” Marcie mumbled.

  “Poor kid, indeed. Now and then she’d lose it, going off into hysterics and tantrums. She’d be out of school for days, rushing back home to mommy and daddy, who didn’t know what was going on.”

  “And what about Danny Trinh, the quintessential scholarship boy?”

  “Yeah,” Vinnie said, “I was wondering why you’d included the housekeeper’s son. At first. But, as it turned out, Danny is the most interesting of the lot, in my opinion. And in Joel’s.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, by the third year he had become the poster boy for the school. In the age of social gospel, he was the face on the postage stamp. Chesterton did a public service promotional deal, a multipage PR spread. You know, recruiting students, telling the community how generous and liberal they were, impressing the alumni, situating themselves firmly in the ranks of the American Dream. They used Danny’s welcome picture to promote the school. Not some predictable bleached-blond Aryan ski bum, shot from the loins of the CEO of Aetna, no, no. They’d found the all-in-one champion of prep school success story.”

  Marcie interrupted. “To cut to the chase, Danny was gleaming boy staring out from the display ad in the Courant and elsewhere. The boy, I must admit, is photogenic, if I can judge from the yearbook picture: that square-jawed face, that shock of deep-black hair. My, my, my. And an honor student, as well. Straight A’s. Athletic. Lacrosse, swimming, field hockey, you name it. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all banging at the door.”

  “But I feel you’re leading to something not so savory here.”

  “Bingo.” From Marcie.

  “It seems,” Vinnie continued, again scanning his notes, “Danny was having his biggest love affair with himself, though he managed to charm a dozen ladies along the way. One pregnancy scare. No big deal there, but it seems in his senior year he started to coast, a little lazy, not cracking the books the way he should, using charm to keep the As on the old transcript. Later on a teacher said she’d heard he got through Harvard all right, but just got by, smoothed through, as it were, the sloppiness nodded at, until they handed him the coveted BA in Finance.”

  “He lost steam? You think he learned how to work it?”

  “Probably a little of both,” Vinnie said. “But he never lost his ambition, Joel said. They were surprised when he came back to Hartford.”

  “Why?”

  “He had an in-demand internship at John Hancock during his junior year. But he chose to move back here. They offered him everything, but he took an offer from Bank of America.”

  “Danny had a sense of his destiny all along.”

  “But Joel didn’t like him. Too cocky. And then the notorious scandal.”

  “I knew it.” I pounded the table.

  “It seems a young male teacher made a couple of passes at him, acting a little foolish around the pretty boy. And someone reported it to the headmaster. The guy lost his job.”

  “Who reported it?” I asked. “Wait. Was it Jon, the snoop?”

  “Don’t know,” Vinnie said. “But the rumor was that Danny had actually encouraged the overtures, not because he was interested, but because he liked the power he had over the man. He’d hang out in the guy’s office. He was pissed off when the guy disappeared from campus.”

  “Did Joel say anything about drug activity?”

  “Of course. There’s always lots of drugs on campus—pot, cocaine, Ecstasy, that stuff. Party drugs. These kids have money and absent parents. Many times they keep it under wraps, but sometimes it gets out in the school. That’s what happened with Tommy. That arrest. He thinks that why he dropped out of school near the end of his senior year.”

  “Danny?”

  “No, he was specific about that. Danny’s name never surfaced in any talk about drugs, though Tommy told someone that Danny was involved. Joel thinks the headmaster kept it quiet. Larry’s money.”

  The evening wound down, the last of the wine gone. Sleepy, Vinnie yawned, looked for the waitress.

  “I met Molly Torcelli once,” Marcie said, surprising me.

  “And?”

  “Well, nothing. It was at a charity function held at the Farmington Country Club. I was moderator of a silent auction. She was introduced to me as the Mrs. Larry Torcelli, of Torcelli Motor Works fame, and I was supposed to bow.”

  “Any impression of her?”

  “It happened so fast. I remember being surprised that she was Asian, and thought that she was incredibly beautiful. But she also looked a little uncomfortable, but in the few words she spoke, I didn’t like her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” Marcie breathed in, “she seemed too snobbish. Someone nearby nodded to her, that kind of Queen Elizabeth nod rich women effect, and Mrs. Torcelli just turned away, whispering to a woman at her side, ‘And just who does she think she is?’ But she was smiling. It was a beautiful mixture of insecurity and arrogance wrapped up in a real strange lady.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I hate the surveillance part of my job. There’s nothing romantic about it. You sit as inconspicuously as possible, watching, watching. Nothing ever happens. You get hot, you get cold. You get hungry, you have to pee. People spot you sitting longer than they think you should and they dial 911. Cops rap on your window, expecting to haul in a pervert. A little cocky, you show them your ID. They still want to drag you in.

  But on Saturday I made up my mind—the day belonged to Danny Trinh.

  I borrowed Gracie’s car, a decades-old Ford, so I’d be less visible, leaving her my decade-old BMW. Gracie never drives, but believes she needs a car for emergencies. The men in her home take care of her. We squire her to doctor’s appointments, to church suppers, to the bus station in Farmington so she
can catch a Greyhound to the Indian casino at Foxwoods. On Sunday she walks down the street to Catholic Mass. The tenant on the top floor services her car on schedule, tunes it up, makes it hum like a happy pet, and I have it washed and keep the tags current. It’s what we do for her. Sometimes she lets me use her car. Like now.

  I figured Danny would be at the gym near his home, and I was right. I spotted the Mercedes, freshly washed, parked near the street, away from the other cars. I tucked Gracie’s car in between a male-dominant Hummer and an SUV that was supposedly good for rigorous mountain trails it would never come near. Gracie’s rusty Ford nosed out from both vehicles, with me slumped in the seat, windows open to catch what little air there was, nursing an iced tea and croissant from Dunkin’ Donuts.

  Eventually Danny strode out of the gym with the same cocksure strut he’d shown the last time I met him there, this time with low-slung chino shorts and the neon-blue muscle shirt. He paid no attention to anyone around him, hurling his gym bag into the trunk, and then driving out of the lot. I was close enough to hear the pumped-up stereo. It was a CD by Bruno Mars. That should have made me like him.

  As expected, he pulled his car into the garage at his mother’s house, and disappeared inside. I circled the block, dallied at the corner, tucked the car behind a Dumpster at the Mobil station at the corner, and generally tried to appear as inconspicuous as possible. I had a clear view of his house. The car sat in the garage, the overhead door down, and the street was quiet. I nearly dozed off.

  But then the side kitchen door opened and Danny, dressed now in a baggy jeans and a white polo shirt, as well as a Boston Red Sox baseball cap pulled backward on his head, strolled out, looked at the flower beds, and said something to his mother, who stood in the doorway. He pointed to the shock of color, and she made an it’s-nothing gesture. In a tender moment, he strode back, gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and walked down the small driveway onto the sidewalk, opening the gate of the chain link fence.