Tori looked at the back door that led to the steps where the man had been killed, then ignored it. Two cups and a teapot were arranged on the low table in the kitchen, in anticipation of her visit. There were two rolled-up mats instead of one. She cleaned the refrigerator, throwing out the contents—wilted bok choy, a shriveled orange, and a bowl of noodles.
The sleeping mat in the front room had been rolled up. Tori put her sleeping bag beside it. Lat’s turquoise slippers, embroidered with gold and black thread, were aligned side by side near the closet door. Her meager supply of books, tattered but in Vietnamese, were stacked neatly on the floor beside a small radio, one of Lat’s few concessions to the world beyond her door. The marigolds and dahlias in the vases placed on either side of a jade Buddha were wilted. The candles were new. Two zafu were placed before the altar: the green cushion for Lat, the yellow for Tori. As Tori tossed the flowers into the wastebasket, she made a note to replace them before Lat came home. Lat would come home. Soon.
A bare, low-watt bulb lit the rear hallway. Large dark pools of blood had congealed and dried on the five bottom stairs. Tori sat on the step just above them. Daily, they each recited the Mettasutta—the Sutta of Loving Kindness. Feelings of enmity were not Buddha’s way. What had caused the old woman to kill? She glanced at her watch. It was almost eight-thirty and her meeting with Lat’s public defender was at nine. She grabbed Lat’s long black wool sweater on her way out.
Lat’s attorney stared at Tori for a moment when she entered his office. That didn’t surprise her. Like her mother, Tori was tall and slender with skin the color of copper. But, she looked like her father—broad face, high cheekbones, dark eyes, and straight black hair. The Asian-African combination occasioned second looks.
“Miss Roberts?”
“Yes. Tori Roberts.”
He leaned across the legal-size manila folders stacked on his desk and extended his hand. “Just call me Bill.” His grip was firm, his smile friendly.
“I’m Lat’s friend.”
“Crusty old bird, isn’t she?” he said.
Tori had to smile. “Stubborn,” she agreed.
“She admits that she did it but gets vague on the details. Her prints are on the weapon. If she pleads to a lesser charge I think I can get her off with a few years’ probation. You know about the recognizance bond?”
“She refuses to leave.”
Bill ran his fingers through thinning brown hair. “Talk to her. We won’t have any problem with the plea if she agrees. I’ve tried to explain to her. When she doesn’t want to listen she answers in Vietnamese, but I’m sure she understands me. I don’t know if it’s something in her culture, her religion. Talk to her, please. It’s Wednesday already. We go to court next Monday.”
“Do you know why she did it? What happened?”
He gestured toward the folders. “I’ll do what I can. She’s old—and those scars—a sympathetic defendant. They’ll give us a lot of leeway—and leniency—if we plead.”
Tori asked to read Lat’s file. “I’m a college instructor—African and Asian studies—I’m not a lawyer, but …”
“Sure.”
He sorted through the folders, some bulging with papers. The one he handed her was thin. The police and autopsy reports told her little. Jed Morgan was forty-one. He had two hundred dollars, a woman’s ring, and a pack of gum in his pockets. He was stabbed once from behind. Lat would have known where to aim. The man, Jed Morgan, was five ten and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. His size would not have made a difference. Although Lat was petite and didn’t practice Tae Kwon Do any longer, she still did Tai Chi every day and had the strength and agility to stab him.
Tori didn’t know much about criminal law, but she thought the attorney was right. A lesser charge was a generous concession, sympathetic defendant or not. When she went to see Lat that afternoon, the old woman still refused to accept bail. What did Lat fear?
Back at Lat’s apartment, Tori checked the cupboards before going shopping, surprised to find them bare except for two boxes of birdseed. Lat’s Social Security check required that she be frugal, but there was always something to eat. Even Lat’s small supply of herbs and medicinals was depleted—no ginseng or red clover tea, no shark cartilage.
Tori checked the cabinet drawer where Lat kept what money she had in an envelope taped to the underside. Nothing. It was only the tenth of August. Disturbed, Tori got a bucket and knife to clean and scrape the blood from the stairs, and squeezed the last of the dish detergent into the water. There was a soggy rolled-up newspaper in the sink that had been lit at one end. She threw it away.
A man came to the second floor door while she was scrubbing. He was wiry and thin with a mustache that dangled down the sides of his mouth, and wore dirty torn jeans and a T-shirt. “Who are you?”
“Mrs. Nhu’s friend from Connecticut.” Tori remembered the elderly woman who’d rented the apartment last year. “Where’s Mrs. Nordstrum?”
“Died. June.”
Something about him troubled her. Perhaps it was just having another man living in the house with Lat instead of the senior citizens who used to.
“Did you know Mr. Morgan?”
“Didn’t want to.”
This tenant wasn’t mentioned in the reports. Tori wanted to ask if he knew anything about what had happened, but decided to be less direct.
“Too bad,” she said, gesturing toward the dried blood.
“Couldn’t say,” the man said, and closed his door.
When the stairs were clean, Tori went downstairs, the place where Morgan had lived. The door was padlocked.
Upstairs, she went to the closet to gel the small mat that Lat kept her papers wrapped in. It wasn’t there; Sitting cross-legged on the floor by the window, Tori let the sun warm her face and inhaled deeply. Three years ago, Tori wrote to a company that helped find missing persons. She received a list of everyone in Minneapolis with the surnames Nhu, her father’s name, and Roberts, her mother’s. None of the Robertses were related to or knew a Jayda Roberts. Lat was the only Nhu, and she’d kept Tori coming here for three summers, a taciturn but courteous Scheherazade weaving vignettes about Vietnam, about the war, about her family, into a meager tapestry intriguing enough to keep Tori wondering if perhaps, after seven years of searching, she had found someone who might have known or been related to her father.
No. She knew that Lat did not know anything about her father. That was not what brought her here. Lat knew the ways of her father’s people with an intimacy that Tori could never acquire. Lat could create a heritage for her, a past, that she would not have without Lat. Child of separation and foster care that she was, Tori did not expect vague memories of living in Minneapolis and Seattle and Santa Fe to lead her back to her family.
Tori heard someone sweeping. Mrs. Lindquist tending to the sidewalk. She hurried downstairs.
“Tori, you have come! How is my friend Mrs. Nhu?”
“They would let her out, but she doesn’t want to come home.”
“She was always so … serene. I can’t imagine what happened. Mr. Morgan was so friendly. Can I help you with anything, he would say. Or, I’m going to the store, do you need something? He was always such a nice man.”
A nice dead man. Tori went to the library on Nicollet Mall. Both newspaper articles were brief. Neither made the first page. Morgan was a Vietnam vet. Was that important? The only person who could tell her wasn’t talking. She walked to a restaurant that served Vietnamese food and ordered bun cha gio, egg rolls stuffed with a ground mixture of beans, beef, pork, and carrots served over rice noodles. A bowl of nuoc mam, fish sauce, was served on the side. If Lat weren’t in jail, they would have prepared a meal like this together. Was Lat eating in jail? There was not much about American food that she cared for, except doughnuts. Lat loved gooey, glazed doughnuts. Tori thought of the empty money envelope. She always sent something the last week of the month, when she knew Lat’s money was short. A small amount, which was all
that Lat would accept. Lat was so frugal. There should have been something in the envelope now.
It was getting dark when Tori returned to Lat’s apartment. She lowered the windows halfway and pulled down the shades. Sheer white panels hung at each window, but only because the landlord insisted. In the dim light of small lamps, Tori began a methodical search. Feeling along the walls of the closet, she found a seam in the wallpaper that was loose. Behind it, plaster had been scraped away to the wood frame and Lat’s small mat with her papers was tucked in the hole.
Tori sorted through passport, rent receipts, and folded scraps of paper. Opening them, she deciphered the Vietnamese script, pleased when she found her name. There were two notes written in French, not uncommon for Vietnamese who lived in the cities, but Lat only spoke of the countryside. Tori translated “he who comes from hell,” “nightfire,” and “bad sleep.” The dead man had brought back memories of the war. Lat was afraid of her dreams.
Tori called Lat’s attorney in the morning and he arranged another visit.
“You were having nightmares again, old woman. That is not a good enough reason to stay here. Whatever Morgan did, his karma is gone. There is no harm from the dead. You need to come home now, while I am here and you don’t have to dream alone.”
To Tori’s surprise, Lat agreed. On the way home they stopped for flowers and food and fresh-baked glazed doughnuts. Lat was embarrassed because there was nothing to eat and immediately busied herself talking to the birds and arranging the flowers, while Tori put produce and fish in the refrigerator and stocked the cabinet shelves. Together they prepared a meal and Lat ate as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
That evening, they sat side by side on the zafu. With her hands resting on her midriff, left hand on right palm, thumbs joined, Tori concentrated on breathing. As thoughts came, she let go of them until there was only her breath.
Lat’s dreams came toward morning. The old woman tossed on her mat and moaned, mumbling in what sounded like Vietnamese and French but wasn’t distinct enough for Tori to interpret. Tori gathered Lat in her arms. She brushed sweat-soaked strands of hair from Lat’s forehead, then touched the napalm scars on her neck and one side of her face.
“How much they have hurt you,” she said in Vietnamese. “How much you have endured and forgiven.”
Lat leaned against her, eyes squeezed shut, thick lashes wet with tears, and said nothing.
“Three years you have taught me like a mother teaches a child. Your own children died in the war. What did the war man do to you, little mother?”
Lat cried in harsh sobs, clutching Tori in a tight embrace.
“Tell me what happened,” Tori said when the crying subsided.
Lat still did not speak.
“Why was the packet of papers hidden in the wall? Why is the money envelope empty? Did you give to him freely or did he take what was yours?”
There would be little difference to Lat between giving and stealing. She would not kill to keep or avenge the taking of something material.
Lat slumped against her, exhausted. There was no glass window between them now, but Tori still could not reach her.
“What was the war like for you, little mother? My mother was a soldier there.”
“She was there before they brought the fire-death,” Lat said. “She brought life. You are born of a Vietnamese man. When you come to me, it is almost as if my own daughter returns, even though you look much like your mother. You remind me of the time before the fire, when the fields were green, and the land a place of peace.”
“And you soothe me in my searching,” Tori said.
Lat sat back on her heels, rubbing her eyes with her fists.
“The war, it is a time of terrible pain. Whole villages are destroyed. I can lie to you no longer. The place where your mother worked, it is gone. If your father was there also, then I fear he is no more either. There are many called Nhu. I cannot name him.”
“I know you don’t know him,” Tori said. “But when I come here, I learn who he was, and perhaps something more of who my mother was. That’s enough. That’s much more than I expected.”
Lat went to the back door, stood with her ear pressed against the wood, then opened it and turned off the light. She seemed to brace herself and held on to the banister. Tori followed as she made her way down the stairs. Lat stopped seven steps from the bottom and sat in the dark. Reaching down, she touched the scrubbed places. “Whore,” she whispered softly. “Whore,” she said again, using first the Vietnamese word and then the French. “Whore.”
“He raped you,” Tori whispered.
Lat sat very still, then she began rocking. A soft keening sound began deep in her throat. Slowly she raised her hands. Her moans became louder. Arms outstretched, she clenched her hands into fists. “No more,” she said. “No more.”
Tori sat on the steps and put her arms about Lat. “September seventeenth, 1980,” she said. “I was eleven years old. A teenager in my foster home raped me.”
Tears streamed down Lat’s face. “June nineteenth, 1971.” She began trembling. “I watch the Viet Cong rape and kill my daughters. Then again and again they rape me. I run, only to be caught by the fire. No more,” she said. “Never again.”
When Lat stopped shaking and slumped against her, Tori said, “What happened the night Morgan died?”
It seemed like a long time before Lat answered. “There is much that I cannot remember. He leaves. He is laughing. Then he is here on the stairs.”
The next morning the man who lived in the apartment below came to the door. He shifted from one foot to the other, then looked at Lat. “Ma’am, Morgan was never in ’Nam. I’m a vet. I’m sorry for what happened to you.” Anger flashed in his eyes and for a moment Tori felt afraid. Before she could speak, the man turned and went down the stairs.
Lat’s nightmares continued. She refused to tell anyone else that she had been raped. She refused to speak of it at all, walking shamefaced from the room when Tori mentioned it. The day before Lat was to appear in court, Tori didn’t know what to do. She wanted to respect Lat’s right to keep silent, but the authorities should know what Morgan had done. Neither hugs, nor questions, nor Tori’s fragmented memories of how she felt after it happened to her could bridge Lat’s silence.
After supper they stepped through the front window and sat on the small porch overlooking the street. The sky was clear with stars scattered across the darkness. A breeze brought relief from the heat. While she was here last summer they had joined Mrs. Nordstrum on the porch below. Lat, seldom talkative and not given to laughter, had done both as Mrs. Nordstrum told them about her family and growing up on a farm.
“I’m sorry about your friend, Mrs. Nordstrum. How old was she?”
“Seventy-three.”
“What happened?”
“They found her in her bed.”
Lat’s chin trembled.
“You miss her,” Tori said. Lat always seemed so self-contained and had so little to do with her neighbors.
“The lady next door says Morgan was a nice man—friendly, helpful.”
Lat stared at her hands. “Why is it that we think bad karma cannot also be all of those things?”
“Was he kind?”
“To others perhaps. I don’t know.”
“Did you let him help you?” As soon as she said-it, Tori wished she had not. Lat’s lips were compressed. She had lost their fragile thread of communication again.
“I paid him.” Lat spoke in a whisper.
“For what?”
“To leave me alone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You are far away. I am alone. I think I would have told you when you came.”
“Did he take money from the others?”
“I do not know.”
“Did he threaten you if you did not give him the money?”
Lat pressed her lips tight together. One hand gripped the other so tightly that the creases in the scar tissue stoo
d out. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply until she relaxed.
“When the soldiers came, some were very kind. They shared their food. They did not kill civilians. Others, they are like him—filled with anger. They beat us and shoot us, even strangle. His hatred for me was very strong. Perhaps he liked the others.”
Lat pulled the sweater tighter and turned her back to the wind.
“You are tired, old woman, but afraid of your dreams. Perhaps if you tell what happened the dreams will go away.”
“Tell me again of your mother,” Lat said.
“There isn’t much that I recall. She hugged us a lot, and I remember eating cake for supper and wishing for mashed potatoes. Sometimes she spoke Vietnamese. It was like the sun coming out. She became happy and sang and danced. They told me she was crazy. Whenever she went into the hospital, there were foster homes. One day that’s all there was, and I was alone and my mother and brothers and sisters were gone.”
“You are like a daughter to me,” Lat said, and moved closer. “Daughters. Mrs. Nordstrum had a daughter also. She wanted to have Mrs. Nordstrum’s ring.”
“The one that belonged to her great-grandmother?”
“Yes. But, when she comes, the ring is gone.”
“Gone? She said she never took it off.”
Tori remembered the contents of Morgan’s pockets. “Morgan had a woman’s ring when he died.”
Lat took a deep, shuddering breath. “I think he killed her.”
“Morgan?”
Without looking at her, Lat nodded.
“Then you must tell.”
“No. I am an old woman. I am not from this country. To whom, besides you, does it matter?”
Tori thought not of Lat and Morgan, but of the boy who raped her, of the times she was able to avoid his hands, and the times she was not.
“This was not the first time he raped you, was it?”
Lat moved away.
Women on the Case Page 10