by Sanchez, Bob
“My name is Li Chang,” the mother said. “My landlord is dead. Yes, I saw the ambulance leaving when I came home from work last night.” The words struck Sam as flat, but compassion filled Li Chang’s eyes, and Sam had difficulty taking his eyes off her. The girl was right: Her mother was pretty.
Li Chang’s eyes were wide and brown, intelligent and aware. Her look said she would slice anyone who messed with Pheary, and Sam sensed deep emotional hurt behind those eyes--but who didn’t hurt somehow? She had delicate arms and long fingers, the kind an apsara might have. Gold bracelets jangled as she motioned for him to come in. Costume jewelry, Sam assumed, just like the jade earrings. Li Chang sat down slowly on her living room couch and put a hand on her forehead. “Please sit down, sir,” she said in Khmer, but Sam remained on his feet.
On the wall opposite the television were multicolored paper flowers like the ones his sister used to make in Battambang. They were like giant chrysanthemum blossoms with every petal a different hue. Twelve of them decorated the wall; they must have cost a fortune in construction paper. Childrens’ picture books were scattered on the couch, and a broken crayon lay in an ochre smudge on the carpet. A familiar-looking orange cat lay in front of the television--probably the mouse cop he’d seen in the hall last night. Mouse Cat was off duty, licking its paws. Here he sensed what seemed to be missing in the Lacs’ apartment: a family with a sense of unity, held together by caring and not by force.
Sam looked around the living room. One thing about the tenements on this street: the layouts were all the same. The kitchen was off to the left of the entrance, with side-by-side windows that offered a view of the back stairs coming down from the upper floors. If Sam stepped through the doorway into the kitchen and looked to the far corner, he would see the back door. Exit to the left, basement stairs to the right. The bathroom and two bedrooms were off the living room. Each apartment took up an entire floor.
“No, I don’t know him very well,” she said. “His wife comes by once a month to collect rent, and he was good about fixing smoke detectors and leaky faucets. But they never spoke much. Mrs. Chea is very shy, and they are both private people. Even so, lots of people come and go from this building. Except for the neighbors, I don’t know any of them.”
“Did you ever hear him argue with anyone?”
“Yes, I heard him yell at three or four Cambodian teenagers a few weeks ago. I don’t know what they had done, but he chased them toward the playground and used vile language I’ve never heard from him before.”
“What was that about?”
“I don’t know, sir. I mind my business.”
“Did his neighbors seem to like him?”
“Mostly they did. But sometimes there have been nasty whispers.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing I will dignify by repeating.”
“Even if the stories are lies, I need to know what people are saying about him.”
“But I hate to hear vicious stories about people. Where I work, I have heard customers say that Chea was--” Her voice caught on the phrase. “--Khmer Rouge. That he killed many people. It’s so easy to spread lies, and so hard to come along later and clean up the filth that people spout with their tongues.”
So perhaps that was it: simple revenge. Kum, the Cambodians called it. Nearly fifteen years had passed since the collapse of communist rule in Cambodia, and vengeance was still on some people’s minds. Sam didn’t blame them, though he for one had put his past behind him and slammed the door shut. Since 30,000 refugees had begun flooding the city, two had been shot dead. No suspects, and no apparent motive. Could this have been kum? No one was sure--at least no one who was talking.
“Of course you are right, Mrs. Chang. Anyone can accuse, and I won’t ask you to do that. But who is spreading the rumors?”
“I’ve seen the person at my work, and heard someone call him Khem Chhap. He said Bin Chea made him kill his best friend while others were forced to watch.”
Sam’s gut tightened. “When did you last see him?”
“Three or four nights ago, I think. He sat by himself, smoking and watching the TV above the bar.”
“Can you describe him for me?”
“He’s an older man with gray hair.”
“How about scars or jewelry?”
“He had a scar under his left cheek. I think I remember a wedding ring and a watch.”
“The watch was on his left arm?”
“No, on his right arm, I think.” Maybe the killer was left-handed, then. If Khem was the killer.
“Notice any tattoos or other marks?”
She shook her head.
“Where do you work, ma’am?”
“I’m a waitress at the Pailin Jewel. I start at three.”
“What about your daughter?” Sopheary sat next to her mother with a coloring book and a lap full of Crayolas.
“I’m too young to be a waitress,” Sopheary said. “I found a shoelace.”
“He means who takes care of you when I’m gone,” Mrs. Chang said, and she looked back at Sam. “My brother and his wife come home before I leave. Pheary isn’t alone at all.”
“What time did you get home last night?”
“About twenty past eleven.”
“Mrs. Chang, what has this Khem fellow been saying about your landlord?”
Li Chang placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Pheary, I want you to go into your bedroom,” she said. “Right now.” The tone was clear: no back talk, no delay. Sopheary looked hurt, but she left the living room immediately.
“Detective Long,” she said. “I don’t know how digging up garbage on a dead man will help anyone. A dozen people may tell you the same thing about Bin Chea, but I think the stories all came from the same man. As far as I can tell, the story is that Bin Chea was a monster who cut people’s bellies out and roasted them for supper. That he grew flowers in the eye sockets of a human skull. That is what I heard. Now let me tell you what I know.
“Last summer, my husband disappeared. We had just moved into this apartment, and--” Her voice caught for a moment, but she recovered. “Mrs. Chea brought us food and kept us company for days while I waited for my brother and his wife to come from Providence to live with Pheary and me. My brother Someth gave me money for the next month’s rent, and Bin Chea refused to take it. ‘Skip this month,’ he told me. He got me a job at his restaurant. For as long as I have known him, he has shown me nothing but respect. And he’s never asked for anything in return.”
“Did you call the police for help?”
“To find my husband? He’s not a criminal.”
“You could have filed a missing person report. We can still try to find him.”
“I think he’s just tired of me.”
“You think he left you?”
“For another woman, a better one, I suppose.”
“Why do you say that?”
She looked away. “Because I didn’t make him happy.” Li Chang seemed like a woman who’d have no trouble pleasing her husband, but that depended on the husband as well, didn’t it? Short of the obvious distress signs such as bruises or black eyes or restraining orders, how did you judge what went on in a marriage?
Sam thanked her, and she walked him to the door. “By the way,” he said, “have you ever heard of Paradise? Maybe it’s a business of Mister Chea’s or someone he knew?”
She said she hadn’t.
“Oh, just one more thing,” he said. “Your daughter is a good girl, but she’s a little too friendly with strangers.”
Sam stepped back outdoors and into the oven, glad to have a possible motive for the killing. The note that said “we know” must have referred to Bin Chea’s Khmer Rouge past. Li Chang’s story--no, the story she repeated--troubled him. She considered the accusations utterly worthless, and maybe she was right. Then what about the note, what else could it mean? Of course, Li Chang might also know more about Bin Chea than she let on.
Meanwhile, Sam wante
d to question Khem Chhap, and he still hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Chea in the hospital. Across the street, his car now had plenty of room on both sides. They sat alone, just the Ford and the fire hydrant.
On the sidewalk next to his car lay a rock about the size that must have hit his car. Sam ran his finger over the ding, where a flake of paint had chipped off and exposed the bare steel. It felt rough and blistering hot, like a battered skillet. It also felt like a hundred-dollar repair bill.
He lifted the windshield wiper and removed the ticket, which had an illegible signature. He jammed the ticket in his shirt pocket and drove back to the station. Damn, it was about the last thing he needed.
CHAPTER SIX
Back at the station, Sam filled out a report and pretended not to listen as Wilkins complained to Superintendent Corcoran. “This is the worst hot spell in twenty years, Chief. So how come we work with the frigging a/c off?”
“Sorry,” the Chief said, “but the city’s got us by the short and curlies.” Sam wasn’t sure exactly what the Chief meant, but he got the point: real men didn’t need a/c to stay cool, and the department’s performance was expected not to suffer.
“Damn voters want protection,” Wilkins said. “But they more or less don’t want to pay for it.”
But Sam had no complaints. With Gitman, Cerullo, and Danfil all laid off in the last week, he felt lucky to have moved up instead of out. Merit, Chief Corcoran said. Reverse discrimination, Lieutenant Wilkins said.
Wilkins and the Chief drifted toward Corcoran’s office. “You been the best chief Lowell’s ever had,” Wilkins said. They had matching flat-top crew cuts. The Chief’s hair was white, while Wilkins’ looked like poorly mixed cement: gray with sandy clumps.
Besson dropped a folder on Sam’s desk. “Not much here yet,” he said. DeVito called Besson the man of ten thousand freckles, because Besson’s fiancee supposedly counted them all. Probably true, because Besson grinned a lot.
“Got any prints we can use?” Sam asked.
“You give me some suspects, maybe I do. Looks like the family’s prints all over the place, what else would you expect? I think everybody but you and the pope left prints there. You need to give me somebody to focus on. Victim’s wife say the shooter was Asian?”
“No, she didn’t. Maybe he didn’t go inside, but I’d just as soon check it out. How about the victim?”
“We’re sending his prints to the feds, I’ve got nothing on Bin Chea here.” Sam gave Besson a list of names to check, including Nawath and other neighbors of Bin Chea. Then Besson went back to his desk.
“Hey, Hot Dog,” Fitchie said. “M.E.’s supposed to call this afternoon. I said when he’s ready he should call you direct.” Dark circles of sweat showed under his arms. Traces of mayo clung to the corners of his lips. “Good news, by the way. Chief’s told the state police we’re in the best position to handle this, having a Cambodian investigator. They’re willing to stand back for now.”
Sam laughed. “Cambodian? I’m a citizen here. American as apple pie.”
“American as mango pie, I’d guess.” The glint in Fitchie’s eyes said that he was teasing. A lot of personal troubles weighed on Fitchie’s mind, and it was good that he could joke about anything. “Anyway, Chief wants his money’s worth.”
“I’ll give him my best.”
“You’d better. Lieutenant More or Less will be like that Venus fly trap of his, you see it? Give you some sticky shit to land on, then snap! You be sure and disappoint him, okay?”
“I have nothing against the Lieutenant,” he said. “Got to have a quick sandwich, finish this report, then follow up on Mrs. Chea. She okay to see yet?”
“Yeah, I guess she’s calm now. She was pretty freaked out last night, though.”
“She went through an awful--”
“Yeah, a bitch of a time. Not as bad as her husband, of course. Look, I ran down the numbers on the phone bill. Got fifteen names, plus a couple of one-minutes to a Long Beach pay phone.”
“Wrong numbers, you think?”
“Who knows at this point? We have the addresses, but we can’t assume anything. You know what they say when you assume?” Fitch printed on the back of a “While You Were Out” message sheet:
ASS U ME
“It makes an ass out of you and me,” Fitch said.
Sam laughed. Julie would like that one--well, he liked it. “Who are these people he called? Maybe one of them has a rap sheet. And we should find the pay phone address on a map of Long Beach, then see who’s nearby. If it’s the same neighborhood as the other numbers--”
“Yeah, that would tell us something. And what about insurance policies? Who benefits from his death? I’ll check that out.”
“Mrs. Chea says she’s the sole surviving relative. Speaking of soles--”
“We were?”
“I was thinking about the shoes Chea wore when he died. Must have been wearing his oldest pair.” Even the little girl Sopheary mentioned shoes. Cute kid, a mild nuisance, but so what?
“Yeah? Who doesn’t have old shoes?”
“Just another detail. I’ll finish up here and see what I can learn from Mrs. Chea.”
“She’s in room 5115. You’ll have company in her hospital room, by the way. Patrolman McGinnis is there on chaperone duty. Chief thought whoever came for the old man might decide to come back for his widow. Actually, I sent her. Wilkins tried to veto it, then the Chief came along and overheard. He thought it was a good idea. Shit, man, the look I got from Wilkins!”
“I don’t blame Wilkins. Between cops laid off, on vacation, testifying in court, lying in traction from car wrecks--”
“Callahan, right. They say he’ll be back to work tomorrow. With all that, there just isn’t enough blue to go around.”
Sam sat at his desk and ate a bowl of rice and pork, leftovers from last night’s dinner. His eyes focused on his paperwork, but his mind focused on Bin Chea. He had once known a Bin somebody. “Bin Chea” could have been right, but “Comrade Bin” was all he remembered for sure. The man Sam once knew had run the death camp at Little Mountain, where surnames counted for nothing. But the man’s face was burned into the folds of his brain forever. High cheekbones behind healthy cheeks, fading smallpox scars, a thin smile that spoke nothing of the thoughts behind it. Eyes full of intelligence. Kindness. Malice. Indifference. That said you will live, you will die, or you matter less than the mud under his feet. But his eyes were just a mask of his true thoughts. Comrade Bin could lie with his mouth shut.
When they found the killer, Sam might find out if there was any connection. Maybe the killer was that fellow Khem Chhap. What few details Sam had heard so far didn’t specifically fit what he knew about Comrade Bin, especially the story about the skull used as a flower pot. Could have been a memory seen through the haze of 90-proof gin. And as Li Chang said, they were rumors anyway.
When people whispered about Comrade Bin in the camp, they only speculated about his surname. If only Sam had heard it once and known it for certain, he would remember it like his own name. Even if Bin Chea turned out to be Comrade Bin, they would put the shooter in jail. Hard time in a maximum security rat hole like the state penitentiary at Walpole, when maybe he should get a medal.
Sam had spent years trying to get Little Mountain out of his mind. Now this murder brought it back again. A dozen years ago in a Cambodian monsoon, he had struggled to live through the day.
Fierce rains had pounded his body that afternoon. He barely saw Boreth and Vacheran, teenagers like himself, who motioned to him from underneath a kapok tree near the edge of the mango orchard. Like Sambath, they wore only black trousers and no shirts, and their skin sunk in among their ribs. Their black hair was slickened by the rain, their toes buried in the mud. Vacheran’s eyes were set deep inside dark circles in his face and seemed to stare past Sambath at nothing. Boreth made way as Sambath scrambled under the tree and sat on his haunches to wait out the worst of the downpour while he looked past the lake shore th
rough the gray sheets of rain. All day, they had carted bodies from the field to the lake.
To his left, the old school building was only a smudge in his eyes. To his right, the lake stretched out a few hundred meters and dissolved in the mist that hid Little Mountain. The rumble he heard might have been thunder, or the bulldozer that pushed its way back and forth on the other side of the lake, or it might have been his insides. What did he really hear? What did he really see? It was hard to tell anymore.
He stared out towards the lake while his insides churned like the ocean. His head felt as though a stone cutter had chipped away at his forehead with a hammer and chisel. The surface of the lake was a moonscape of watery craters, an archipelago with human islands. A skull rose up, its temples caved in, black eyes peering out to see what had disturbed its rest. Had it been above water all the time? Sambath hadn’t noticed. The empty sockets looked directly at him, accusing. You. You! He heard a scream above the rain, a familiar sound, his own voice.
“Sh-h-h. Be quiet, comrade.” Boreth’s hand clamped firmly on his mouth. “Angka’s ears are everywhere, even in the rain. Let’s be like our friend Vacheran, who holds his screams in his heart.”
Of course Boreth was right. Angka was The Organization, and Sambath never knew whom to trust except for these two. Angka seemed to hear everything everyone said, as well as many things no one said--they heard what they wanted to hear. They did what they wanted to do.
Perhaps Vacheran’s mute witness was the answer. If he could not speak, how could Angka’s spies accuse him of speaking ill?
They had no right to break from work. Sambath gripped the wooden cart and pulled it through the mud. Boreth and Vacheran had to push from behind and make sure no bodies fell off. Together they moved slowly toward the old school yard, where a rusty bulldozer rattled back and forth.
When the bulldozer driver threw up, Comrade Bin motioned to Sambath. “Come help our Comrade,” Bin said, his eyes full of concern. “You take his place while he goes to the hospital.” No one survived the hospital.