by Andrew Lanh
Karen was in a hurry to leave, snapping lights off before I could gather my jacket. In the driveway she confessed, “The place gives me the jitters.” She added, “It’s worse with you here.”
“Why?”
“With you going through her stuff, well, the smell of murder fills the place.”
“No murder yet, Karen.”
“I get a little crazy.” A long pause. “Sometimes.” She smiled an apology. “I feel like she’s been staring over my shoulder here, telling me I’m doing something wrong.”
“How about a cup of coffee? We can talk.”
She turned away. “I have to get back to the shop, Rick. I’m unloading stock later.”
Alone, I decided to walk Marta’s final route to verify the timing. I checked my watch. Four-fifteen on the dot. I set out on foot for Richard Wilcox’s condo, Marta’s destination the night she died. I walked down the sidewalk, ambled along the narrow road and through a small park near his home. I walked slowly, trying to approximate the methodical steps of a depressed woman, one nearly seventy years old, a woman with a little too much whiskey in her bloodstream. At exactly 4:37, by my watch, I turned onto the road that crossed the Farmington River. The garden-style townhouses were in sight. It was a short walk, shorter than I’d assumed. That was why she never drove her car.
Standing on the stone bridge, I gazed down into the Farmington River, churning and swelling with the heavy autumn rains we’d had recently. A few huge dark boulders dominated the stream. When she died in September, it must have been a mere trickle of water—after a parched August. I focused on the boulders, a run of sharp rocks and broken branches. From this spot Marta had fallen—or was pushed. Or, I realized, possibly killed elsewhere and dumped here. But that seemed a stretch.
The bridge was old-style masonry, ornate carvings decorating the rounded corners, unscary gargoyles peering out, without menace. A tarnished bronze plaque announced it was dedicated during the Depression. Calvin Coolidge was president. Silas Lowe was first selectman. The bridge arched up in huge carved blocks of dull brown limestone and beige granite. There were no metal railings here as I thought the police report indicated, only elaborate stone abutments, bulky and stolid. I realized the height was easily three-to-four feet of masonry, and a step up from the sidewalk.
No, Marta couldn’t have toppled accidentally into the river, even with her elevated alcohol level. She would have had to climb up onto the wall in order to hurl herself over the edge, a deliberate act.
Or, of course, she could have been pushed over.
I looked around. The bridge was shielded from the condo complex by a line of huge evergreens. Low-hanging hemlocks blocked the sky. Behind me was the park. There was a good chance she would be alone in this spot.
It was a good place to murder someone, assuming the victim would die after dropping the twenty or so feet onto the rockbed. An old woman, tipsy, would prove no challenge. But the murderer would have to check to see if the fall killed the poor soul.
My phone rang.
“It’s me.” Hank’s voice sounded far away.
“I just walked from Marta’s home,” I told him.
“Look,” he broke in, “I got Grandma to talk to Aunt Marie—and to Willie Do. Nobody’s happy.”
“I didn’t expect them to be happy.”
“You got your wish. Anyway, I’ll pick you up at six. We gotta have supper, she said. I gotta be there.” A heartbeat. “This is not gonna go well.”
“Six it is.”
“Don’t dress like you fell off a luxury cruise ship.”
“I’ll…”
The line went dead.
I climbed up the foot-thick rock wall, waist high, and stood there. I balanced, a little nervous in that precarious position. A boy, speeding past on his bicycle, stopped for a second and watched me curiously.
“You gonna jump, mister?” A smile on a wise-guy face.
I maneuvered myself down. “Do kids jump from here into the water?”
He looked at me as if I were stupid. “There ain’t no deep water here. It’s all rocks and stuff. You smash your head open if you try swimming here.” He sped off.
That, of course, was exactly what happened to Marta. A fearsome place to kill yourself. I couldn’t see Marta choosing this gruesome, unpredictable place to die, toppling onto the rocks below.
***
Back at my apartment I skimmed through my notes on the laptop, jotted ideas and facts on note cards that I pinned onto the pegboard over my desk, and stared. My computer screen won’t allow me that wall of real space to intuit connections that might leap out, slap me into sudden recognition of the obvious. One of Jimmy Gadowicz’s old-time methods still worked—post it all on a wall in front of you, index cards overlapping one after the other, colored pins suggesting patterns, and if there’s a secret there, it will emerge. That’s how Jimmy functioned. He was my teacher—I listened to him.
Then it hit me.
When Karen didn’t answer at home, I called the store. She seemed surprised to hear from me.
“Did your aunt have an insurance policy? I don’t recall seeing one at the house.”
A long silence. Then, awkwardly, “I told you I took some of her papers home. I’ll show you.”
I was impatient. “Was there a policy?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s for a half-million bucks.”
She waited for me to respond. Nobody collected if it was a suicide.
An edge to her voice, unhappy. “I didn’t want to tell you because I thought you wouldn’t take the job. I’m not in it for the money, Rick. Don’t think I’m doing this for the money. I should have told you. I was going to, I mean it.”
“You gotta be honest with me, Karen.”
“Oh, I am.” She made a clicking sound. “I try to be. Sometimes I have trouble telling people things they don’t want to hear. “
“But I need to hear things, Karen.”
A little pouting. “I know, I know.”
“I’m working for you.”
“Believe me. I already have money from her. She was my aunt…”
She went on and on until, annoyed with my silence, she mumbled good-bye and hung up.
Chapter Eight
Vuong Ky Do lived with his family in a triple-decker home near a busy corner off a small shopping plaza in Unionville, perhaps a half-mile from the modest neighborhood were Marta once lived. They were neighbors separated by two or three tree-lined streets. I noted this fact as Hank pulled up to the curb in front of the building. An isolated house, out of place on the commercial block, a Shell gas station next door with plastic streamers blowing in the wind, and a small discount liquor store on the other side. Across the street a strip mall of beauty parlors, laundromats, a mom-and-pop home-style eatery with a neon sign flashing GOO EATS, the “D” unfortunately missing. Cars buzzed in and out of the parking lot, blasted through flashing lights. A Dutch Colonial at the far end of the block had been converted into law offices and an optometrist’s office.
“I wonder how long Willie’s home will last,” I told Hank.
“The last holdout,” he answered. “The greasy wheels of progress.”
I sang off-key. “‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’”
“Hey, how poetic,” he said.
“Hank, I didn’t make up the line.”
A pause. “I didn’t think so.”
Each floor held a front porch with low turned railings, and on the first floor—Willie’s son’s apartment, Hank told me—a dumpy old sofa was pushed back against the clapboard siding. A couple plastic lawn chairs accompanied it, one turned over. What looked like the chrome bumper of an old car was leaning against the wall. Glancing up toward the second floor, I noticed an empty porch—but an old woman sto
od there, unmoving, staring down at us.
Hank waved. “Aunt Marie.”
She nodded and stepped back into the apartment.
As we sat in front of the house, Hank pointed out a chassis of an old Chevy up on blocks at the end of the long driveway that led alongside the house and ended at a back chain-link fence, rusted and bent in. “Probably gets more mileage than your tinker-toy BMW.”
I wasn’t listening. I was watching an older model Toyota with rusted fenders and a yellow tennis ball bobbing off the top of a wavering antenna. The car bounced into the driveway, disappeared from sight in a lot behind the house. But immediately a young couple walked alongside the house, headed to a side entrance.
Hank yelled out the window. “Hey, Freddy.”
The young Vietnamese man looked sixteen, a skinny kid wearing a baseball cap turned backwards. Shifting a grocery bag from one arm to the other, he said something to the woman with him. We got out of the car and Hank excitedly introduced me to his cousin Freddy, his young wife, Mia, and the chubby baby Sarah she cradled in her arms. Smiles all around, Freddy punching Hank in the shoulder, the baby gurgling her happiness.
Freddy whispered, “We heard all about you coming here.” He was looking at me. “Aunt Marie told us.” He leaned in. “She’s unhappy.”
“Everyone in this house is always unhappy,” Hank offered, but the remark confused Freddy. It also confused me. And it confused Hank himself because he twisted his head to the side, eyes narrowed, as though someone else had made the blanket statement.
Nothing more was said, but we followed the young family up the side stairwell, and waved as they headed to the third floor.
“Tell your mother I love her New Year’s rice cakes,” Freddy yelled down. Hank squinted up at him. “That’s a hint,” Freddy went on, grinning. “For more.”
Aunt Marie was waiting for us on the landing, her back against the open door.
A small, thin woman with large brown eyes in a smooth face, she looked like an adolescent girl, except for the shock of abundant white hair. Probably in her mid-sixties now, she’d pulled her hair back into a loose bun, a yellow silk ribbon sloppily attached at the back. She bowed to me, and I bowed back. “Welcome.” Another bow. But her voice trembled as she looked away, darting back into the room. I followed her nervous gaze, but there was no one else there.
“Vuong is not home yet,” she addressed Hank. She waved at the empty table.
For a moment they chattered in Vietnamese, the easy familiarity of family members, and I understood that he would return shortly. A favor to a friend who needed another hand to hold the end of some drywall going up in his house. She looked at me and said in English, “He cannot refuse a friend.”
“Of course,” I answered.
She held up a finger, as though remembering something, and scurried into the kitchen.
A neat apartment, hard-pressed curtains covering the windows, flowered slipcovers over the sofa, though the hallway into the rooms was cluttered with two large cardboard boxes tied with string, prominent addresses evident: Ho Chi Minh City. I noticed Hank eyeing them.
She laughed. “We send clothes and too much medicine to Vietnam.”
Hank looked at me. “In the early days they had nothing there, the family that stayed behind.” He addressed Aunt Marie. “But Vietnam is doing fine now—no need for medicine and…”
She shrugged off the comment. “Vuong will never stop sending packages back there. No matter what.” She shrugged. “It’s what he has to do.” She pointed to a small dining room table off the kitchen. It was covered with frayed oilcloth, with old wooden country-style kitchen chairs positioned around it. “Sit, sit. Please.”
As she walked by Hank, she let her hand graze his cheek, smiling at him. “I remember you when you were a little boy, Tan.” She used his Vietnamese name. “Always had an answer for everything. But adorable.”
I almost quipped, “Still does,” but such a remark from me would be untoward, rude.
Hank grinned foolishly. “I’m a man now, Aunt Marie. I’m gonna be a state trooper.”
“And such a handsome one.” She wagged a finger at him. “You give your mother sleepless nights.”
She bustled around the kitchen, refusing our help, though she kept glancing back at us, her face worried. When she caught my eye, she smiled warmly. A kind woman, I realized, a beautiful soul. That simple act of letting her fingers graze Hank’s cheek communicated so much—and for a moment I was jealous of that familial touch.
The aromas drifting from the kitchen reminded me of how hungry I was: the tang of lemongrass, the rich anise-peppered broth for the noodle soup called pho, even the tray of sliced overripe mangoes resting on a table. She placed a pot of jasmine tea next to it, and nodded at Hank. Pour. Sweet to the taste, a hint of flowers, soothing, rich. She placed a dish of goi cuon in front of us—thin rice paper wrapped around bits of shrimp, diced basil, and carrots. We dipped the treat into small bowls of peanut-speckled hoisin sauce. Freshly made within the hour, the appetizer was a mixture of textures and flavors. Hank grunted his approval. Then she served us bowls of Vietnamese comfort soup, pho, the beef noodle, thin strips of uncooked beef dropped into a fiery broth where they immediately cooked. Flavored with bean sprouts we lifted with chopsticks from a plate and sprigs of green basil we broke from the stem, hoisin sauce drizzled in, warm buttery vermicelli noodles floating at the bottom, I could have wept with pleasure. I watched Hank pour hot sauce into his, which I refused.
“Coward,” he whispered.
“This needs nothing but a pair of chopsticks and my appreciation.”
Aunt Marie smiled at me. “You do not live in a Vietnamese world,” she said quietly.
At that moment, startled, I was conscious of my status as bui doi, the almost white man in the room. I also realized why Vuong delayed returning home—or at least I believed I knew. I was a violator in this room, a different sort of ghost from old Saigon—the curse of the American War that took away his life. Generations in America would never forgive. Some folks would never break bread with me. I recalled a friend in college who was Vietnamese and Chinese—most of the first boat people were of Chinese background, in fact, Viet Ching—who traveled with a pack of Vietnamese friends in San Diego—until, that is, he told them that his mother was Chinese. He was shunned from the group. Now I squirmed in my seat, conscious of a bloodline I had no control over, and I caught Hank’s eyes on me. They twinkled. Relax, the look communicated. Friends here, all of us. Then, a sardonic shake of his head. At least until Vuong arrived home.
And yet I was invited here—Hank’s grandma, I figured, and the utter kindness of Aunt Marie. And probably awareness that such an interview was necessary.
“My Vuong,” Aunt Marie suddenly began, “is a difficult man.”
The words hung in the air, ominous.
Hank spoke up. “Rick knows the story, Aunt Marie.”
I murmured my condolences for the death of her daughter so many years before. But of course that horrific death of a thirteen-year-old girl was the morning’s news, always fresh, forever raw. Always a wound in the heart.
“He’s always waiting for something to happen.” She sat still, her hands folded in her lap, watching me.
“I mean him no harm,” I told her.
She smiled thinly. “I know that. Hank’s grandmother speaks of you with affection. You have her blessing.” I bowed. “But this has nothing to do with you, Rick. This is the story of a man who gets up in the morning and waits for the hour he can go to bed.” Her eyes got wet, and she turned away. “He carries our little Linh in his heart but she won’t speak to him.”
“Aunt Marie,” Hank began, “Rick just wants information.”
She wasn’t listening but spoke softly in Vietnamese. “Thuong nhieu qua.”
The words hung in the air, awful, powerful. So much love. A love
so profound it colors any day of any life.
At that moment the door opened and Vuong walked in, a little sheepish, his jacket folded over his arms. His wife immediately stood up and walked to him, tucked her arm into his elbow.
“Mr. Rick Van Lam,” she said.
“Thank you for seeing me.” I bowed.
We exchanged some pleasantries in Vietnamese, my own words catching in my throat, but Hank kept sliding us through the formalities, his own voice tense, brittle.
Vuong spoke now. “I remember you from the college.”
“Of course.”
A sliver of a smile. “A place that does not believe in Lucky Strikes.”
“Like a lot of the world, Uncle,” Hank said.
Surprisingly, the man walked up to me and stuck out his hand. “Willie Do.” His American name. I nodded.
Small like his wife, as slender, but with wired muscles, a bantam rooster of a man, powerful-looking, even in his late sixties, he scratched his balding head. Red blotches covered his scalp. A blood-red scar over his left eye, ragged and broken at the edges.
We sat in the living room, Hank and me on the sofa, Willie in an armchair, his knees drawn up to his chest. Immediately he lit a cigarette and the thick smoke circled his head. He smiled and pointed the cigarette at me. “Here no one will stop me.”
I smiled back.
Aunt Marie did not sit but stood behind his chair, hovering, watching, one of her hands resting on the top of the chair. At one point, as he settled back, twisting his head up to blow smoke into the air, she touched the back of his neck. He frowned.
Willie cleared his throat. “I never liked her.” Said with a finality, as though he understood he had to have this talk—did he see me as some sort of authority?—and wanted to cut to the chase. The information hurled out there—blatant, strong.
“Marta?”