by Andrew Lanh
To my horror, he seemed to be walking to the end of the street, to the Mobil station. There was his house, the other two Cape Cods, and then the station. I ducked down in the seat, my head concealed, as he strolled within ten yards of me, and I could hear him whistling. Within seconds I heard an ignition start, and, sliding up as surreptitiously as I could, I spotted him in the next lot over, a used car lot, pulling onto New Britain Avenue in a nondescript gray Honda. Quickly, I turned onto the Avenue, trailing five or six cars behind him. So, I thought, he keeps another car for city use, leaving the Mercedes home. Not unusual, I thought, but, well—intriguing.
I had little trouble following him. He was in no hurry, slinking long, idling long at stop signs, seemingly enjoying the day. He was headed into Hartford.
For a moment I thought he might be heading to Goodwin Square, but he cruised through side streets leading to another seedy part of town, a street of shabby three-families, a few buildings boarded up, one burned out, others surrounded by dirt yards and little Spanish kids playing in the spray of a fire hydrant.
He pulled in front of a bodega, parking the car in a handicapped zone, and rushed in, emerging seconds later with a pack of cigarettes. I’m not sure why I thought that strange, other than his recent dedication to the gym and his body, but he flipped off the cellophane and tapped out a cigarette, lit it, paused for a second to inhale the smoke. His eyes scanned the street. He looked like he was at home on the littered, broken sidewalk. Back in his car, he chatted on his phone, then headed off, turning at the next corner, and suddenly, with me three cars behind, turned into the driveway of a three-family. The car disappeared into the backyard, out of sight. I drove past, craned my neck, but the other houses blocked my view.
I circled, hid behind parked cars, did my surveillance dance, but two hours later, he still hadn’t come out. Enough, I told myself. Time to go home. But I was armed with a new license plate number as well as a new house and street address.
Back at home I did some research on the web, found the listing for the current residents of 97-98 Hartt Street, Hartford, the three-family house. Owner, current occupants. Cross-referenced with online phone records. I learned that the resident on the second floor was Duong Xuan Trinh, age twenty-five. Danny himself. An unlisted land phone, but a call to Liz got me the information under the name Duong Xuan Trinh. Occupation: banker. She also made a call to someone with access to motor vehicle records, and I learned that the car he was driving was registered to none other than—Duong Xuan Trinh.
“What does this mean?” Liz asked.
“I don’t know. But our boy Danny seems to have carved a second life for himself, one a little bit under the radar.”
“Maybe he just needs a place away from Mommy.”
“Still and all…”
“A little too spy who came in from the cold?”
“This could be nothing, but Danny needs more looking into.”
Liz laughed. “You know what Jimmy would say.”
I smiled to myself. “Yeah, money.”
“Banker, Money. Think about it.”
I called Jimmy and filled him in on what I’d learned. “The second car bothers me. But I keep telling myself that I’m looking at him funny because he comes off as so perfect, so charmed, so—well, heroic.”
“Nobody likes a hero these days.”
“That’s because there aren’t any,” I told him. “You know, I should be applauding a guy like Danny, pulling himself out of poverty, but…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know how to fill in the rest of that sentence.”
“I think it’s time for me to call in some chips,” Jimmy said.
“Meaning?”
“A few phone calls. The money trail. Let me use my network…” He paused. “Expect a call within the week.”
I grinned. “Very mysterious.” He hung up.
Gaddy Associates, largely doing fraud investigations in the world of Hartford insurance, had ways of penetrating the often obtuse machinations of financial worlds. Jimmy had avenues I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Then I called Hank and told him the same story. I picked him up, and we drove to Hartt Street. From a phone booth we called Danny’s apartment, got a message that was curt—“Not in. Leave number”—click. But clearly Danny’s voice. And by pulling into the back lot of another three-family house, we saw that his old Honda was now gone.
“Let’s check it out.” From Hank.
“There’s nothing to check out. What do you want to do—break in?”
“Sure.”
“And you want to be a state trooper?”
“In class my instructor said sometimes the best cops were once the best crooks.”
I frowned. “Too much education for you.”
“I think it was you who said it.”
“I was probably thinking moments like this.”
But cruising by the house, we noticed an old Asian guy dragging out trash bins to the curb, sweating under the late-afternoon heat. “Pull over,” Hank insisted.
The guy eyed us warily, waiting. He was three or four feet away. “Yeah?” I started to say something, but stopped. “You cops?”
“No, we’re looking for someone.”
“If he’s a friend, you should know where to find him.”
Hank leaned over. “You know a guy named Harry Vinh? Vietnamese guy. I thought he lived in your building.”
“No.”
“Never mind,” I said to his back.
The man swiveled around, faced me. “Around here people get nervous when strangers ask questions.”
Hank spoke. “We’re not asking questions. We’re looking for someone.”
“That’s a question.” He walked away.
“That wasn’t good,” I said, driving away. “It was real stupid.”
“Why?”
“Well, if he’s buddies with Danny and something is up, he might mention the two Asian guys who came nosing around. He’s a little too suspicious.”
“Comes with the neighborhood, I think,” Hank said.
“Makes you wonder why a guy like Danny keeps an apartment here. This is not a place to leave from in the morning dressed in an Armani suit and tooling a Mercedes.”
“He pays the rent here. He needs this place.”
“The question is, what for?”
In the rearview mirror I saw the old man, standing by the trash bins, arms folded, staring at us as we drove away.
No, I thought: this was a stupid move. But maybe not. Sometimes stupid moves kicked in action that proved all to the good. Everything was too static. Maybe it was good to stir things up.
Chapter Twenty-three
Detective Ardolino had left two messages on my machine, one telling me to call him at home. Neither message was pleasant. When I called him back, reaching him at his house, he was eating. He was chewing on something, and he gulped so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “That good?”
“The wife’s barbecue ribs. Nothing like it. If I liked you, I’d invite you over.”
“I’m not the one leaving frantic messages on my machine,”
A pause, then a chuckle. “I’ve never been frantic in my life.”
“So?”
“I thought it was time to get an update from you.” He waited. “You were supposed to share info.”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Well, I’ve been talking to some of the same folks you have, and we seem to be covering the same tired ground.”
“Then you know what I know.”
“Maybe you see things a little different. Maybe your people tell you things they don’t tell me, an officer of the law.”
“Okay, here’s what I know.” I gladly filled him in on my investigation, the saga of the Torcelli-Vu child
ren, the jealousies and temperaments. Even the pot bust back in prep school.
“Yeah,” Ardolino said, “a bunch of freaks, if you ask me. The parents hold that pot bust over Vu’s kid like he fucked the pope’s daughter. Problem is—a couple of kids got money to burn and they fuck it up. And they all seem to hate each other.”
“But none of this translates into murder.”
“Who knows?”
We talked about Larry Torcelli and Benny Vu. He grunted. “Torcelli’s a self-serving money bag, real proud of himself and his little gasoline-powered world. Pissed that someone took his beautiful wife away because he lost a thing of great beauty, like she’s a statue in the fucking Athenaeum. And Benny Vu, that cipher, sitting there nodding at me like a skinny Buddha, agreeing with everything I say, and then telling me nothing. Nothing.”
“He’s a philosopher.”
“A what? Are you nuts? He sells jars of stuff I can’t even identify and probably illegal in the good old US of A. I picked up a jar and he tells me it’s toad skin. Another one’s powdered deer bone. We should raid the place. I tell you I got a headache from his nonanswers. And he gives me a gift when I leave. Tiger balm.”
I smiled. “Dau cu la con Cop. Rub it on your temples.”
“Haven’t you people heard of Vick’s Vapor Rub?”
“Try it.”
“Give the man a scratch-off lottery ticket, and you’ve made his day.”
“That’s not fair.” I wanted to defend Benny Vu. “He’s a simple man who lost his wife…”
“And don’t know where to find her.” He chuckled.
“I don’t think the Anti-Defamation League is gonna be naming you Citizen of the Year.”
“My job is to catch murderers, not talk pretty.” He sighed. “Look, Rick Van Lam, we’re at the same dead end here. The punk Rican that got winged in the first murder is in jail, won’t talk, but, I’ll tell you, he seems like small potatoes here. I’ve checked all the snitches, from the North End to Frog Hollow, and let me tell you, the word on the street is that the two murders ain’t got no connection to anything going on. Increased gang activity, but everybody laying low. You know the Mayor’s civic crackdown, with cops all over the place for pictures in the Courant. Well, that good-time-Charlie feeling is still going on. As I said, right now everybody’s laying low. What I mean is that the drug lords—not the pipsqueaks on the street corners—don’t want no major shit coming down right now. They know the game—wait for the mayor to fall in love with preschool programs for AIDS-infected, drug-addicted mommies and for the Courant to rediscover the joys of gubernatorial corruption—and then the drug kings will kill each other.” He stopped suddenly, almost out of breath.
“So it comes back to something to do with Mary and Molly.”
“Or, and this I don’t believe, there are new, higher-up players on the scene, trying to take over the territory. But that don’t make sense.”
I agreed. I asked him about Danny Trinh. He seemed surprised. “That fellow?”
“You talk to him?”
“Of course. And his I’m-so-happy-I’m-the-American-Dream mama. Neither one likes talking to cops, and the mama complained about you, but she wouldn’t tell me why.”
“I asked her if Danny was screwing Kristen.”
Ardolino cracked up, choked, and ended up with a hacking smoker’s cough. “You did? Fucking fantastic. Man, I may actually grow to like you.”
“Don’t try too hard.”
“What’d she do?”
“She kicked me out of the house.”
“Don’t blame her. But you know I sort of liked Trinh. Didn’t have much to say. Like everyone he’s baffled by the ‘turn of events,’ as he put it, speaking in better English than the President. Just seems to be a little too edgy, ambitious.” He paused. “But you obviously don’t like Trinh as much as I do.”
“How do you know that?”
“You forget I’m a detective. Years of experience.”
“In fact, I don’t.” I told him about Danny’s being a player through the years, a cad. A sexual hotshot. I told him how he used Cindy. But I also told him about the old Honda and the apartment on Hartt Street in Frog Hollow.
Silence. “Thanks for saving that thunderbolt until the end.” A long pause. “What’s with that?”
I told him what I’d found out.
“You gotta be careful running around that neighborhood,” he said. “Lots of crime there.”
“It’s my job.”
“No, it’s my job.”
“I’m helping you.”
“Yeah, I forgot. I’m the one who called you.”
“I was gathering my thoughts.”
“I’ll call you back. I gotta check this address out.”
“For what?”
“I’ll call you back.”
And he did, an hour later. “Guess what I learned? That house is owned by the guy on the first floor. Binh Ky Trinh. Lives there with his wife and a hundred children and grandchildren. He’s sixty-three, one of the Boat People. And he’s a cousin of Danny’s mom’s ex-husband. The third floor is another cousin. And Duong, a.k.a Danny, has been living there for three years, since moving back to Hartford. All in the family.”
“I wonder if his mother knows.”
“The ex-husband walked out on her, but I learned he’d been around town, off and on. Out to San Jose, back here. Dead now, five years. But Danny—Duong—knew him to say hello to. The guy uses the place to chill, most likely. I guess the stress of Mama Susie and Bank of America and Larry Torcelli’s vision of greatness can get to a man.”
I was impressed. “How did you find all this out so fast?”
“I told you. I’m a goddamned good detective.” I heard him belch and cough.
“So all this could be nothing.”
“Yeah. Or something. I’m having background checks done on the whole house.”
“But you still like Danny,” I said.
“Hey, the guy has to have a place to bang girls, no? You can’t do it with Mama Susie in the next room, blessing herself and saying the Rosary.” He sighed. “Keep in touch.” He hung up.
***
The next afternoon I stopped at Hank’s house only to find him out with his mother and grandmother. The crusty grandfather was annoyed when I knocked on the door. He watched me through the screen door, saying nothing, looking as though I woke him from a nap. Did he know when they’d return? He didn’t answer. Would he tell Hank I’d stopped in? He didn’t answer. I felt foolish, just standing there, so I turned to leave. Behind me, I heard a dismissive grunt. Exiled in a strange land he could never understand, the man would never like me, I knew, blaming me for the death of his serene life in the old homeland, the American soldiers as destroyers of national identity, these same soldiers who brought about the bastardization of his Vietnamese people. And I was one of the bastards.
So I drove back to my apartment, did some paper work, went for a run down past Miss Porter’s School, and then returned for a bracing shower. It was a good afternoon for running. Another rainstorm had made the air pleasant.
At six I met Liz at the police station and we drove to a Thai restaurant on South Whitney Street, near downtown Hartford. I stopped at a liquor store so I could pick up a six-pack of Sam Adams, and we sat at the tiny, out-of-the-way restaurant, eating hot basil shrimp and red-curry chicken, the cool beer accenting the spicy food. Liz had on her work clothes, very professional in a light-blue cotton dress and sandals, her hair pulled back so that her prominent cheekbones were even more dramatic. A slight trace of peach lipstick. Pink nails. Toenails. A late summer confection. A beautiful woman, I had to admit. And once my wife.
“You look good.” I toasted her with a glass of beer.
“You always say that.” A heartbeat. “You look tired.”
“I am.”
>
“It’s summer and you should have a tan.”
Liz had news for me. “Listen to this. Mary made a phone call to the to the Hartford police three days before she was murdered. She identified herself as Mary Le Vu, and asked to speak with Detective Eric Smolski.”
I looked blank. “And?”
“Well, Eric Smolski retired three years back. There was no way she could have known that. And when she was referred to someone else, she said she’d call back.”
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“No,” Liz said. “I just discovered this by talking to Detective Ferguson, who got her transferred call. He wrote down her name in a log, but she said she’d call back. She never did.”
“Christ, what does this mean?”
“Well, Ferguson said she didn’t sound anxious or anything, so far as he could recall. It was brief. Wanting to talk to Smolski. When she learned he’d retired, she sighed, said good-bye. So all he had was her name in his log book, but nothing else.”
“Why didn’t this come up before? After all, she was murdered.”
“He’s been on family emergency leave, out of state for a month. Mom dying of cancer in Rochester. He returned to work, caught up on the life of crime he’d missed, and spotted the name Vu. It caught his attention. He remembered the call. He told the chief. I got a call out of Hartford from my friend, who put me through to Ferguson. Ardolino also knows about it now.”
I sat back. “So she wanted to talk to a Hartford detective.”
“Not just any detective. Eric Smolski.”
“Why him?”
“Simple,” said Liz. “He’s the detective who handled her son Tommy’s drug bust back eight or so years ago. He was probably the only detective she knew.”
“Something is up.”
“It brings us right back to that pot bust.”
“Which no one seems to have forgotten.”
“But why Smolski? After all this time.”
“Mary wasn’t just placing a friendly call to Smolski. She needed help,” I said.
“And three days later she’s dead.”
“And she didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even her husband Benny. He would have told me. I don’t think he’s hiding anything.”