by Sanchez, Bob
“Detective Sambath Long, Lowell Police,” he said. “I’m very sorry about your brother.”
“What do you want that can’t wait?” Jesus said.
“Was anyone trying to hurt Justo?”
“It was a fuckin’ accident. Why? What’s this all about?”
“Had anyone threatened him?”
Jesus looked up at the ceiling, his eyes welling with tears. “Man, I don’t need this now.”
One of his friends put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, Jesus? This guy bothering you?”
“Nah. It’s all right. Let us be a sec, okay, Manny?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, “but this is very important.”
“He was a scrappy guy,” Jesus said. “Didn’t let no punks bother him.”
“Did he fight with any Asians?”
Jesus squared his shoulders and looked Sam in the eye. “Matter of fact, he knocked some Cambodian kid on his ass last week.”
“Can you give me a name?”
“Guy named, I don’t know. Just some douche bag. Manny, you there when Justo kicked that kid’s nuts last week?”
“You should of been there.” Manny punched at the air. Looked like he’d taken a couple of whacks himself.
“I’d of bought a ticket.” Jesus wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his sport coat.
“Who was he?” Sam asked.
“Seth something,” Manny said. He planted a left jab in the air in front of Jesus’s chest. Left. Left. Right. “Should of seen it.”
“Cut it out, Manny. This ain’t the time for Golden Gloves.”
“Viseth? Viseth Kim, maybe?”
A light went on in Manny’s eyes. “Yeah, that could be it. I think that’s it.”
But they didn’t know what the fight was about, and soon Sam headed for the room where Bin Chea lay. They were an older crowd, and mostly separate. Outside the room a guest book sat on a side table, and an elderly Cambodian woman hunched over to sign it. About thirty people, almost all Asians, milled around or sat in metal folding chairs, facing a closed casket of wood that was polished to a deep brown shine. No one looked familiar to him except for a somber Mrs. Chea and one of her neighbors, a well-fed Italian woman who held both of the widow’s hands and nodded in sympathy. On one wall was a display of flowers that dwarfed a pair of photos. This was what he wanted: to satisfy himself about who Bin Chea was. Or wasn’t.
The pictures came into focus as he approached. The first he looked at showed both of the Cheas, but as Sam’s eyes were drawn to Bin’s, he knew immediately. The face had the same roundness, the same soft features that had made Sam distrust gentle looks forever. Those eyes were empty of feeling the way they’d been when they had taunted Sam so many times. There was no flicker of pleasure or amusement, compassion or even hate. Nothing.
In the other picture, the presence of his wife and two children--were they his daughters?--did nothing to change his expression. Sam turned away in disgust. How could this man have had children of his own, and be the man who--?
But he did. And he was. The flames under his father’s feet licked at the edges of Sam’s heart. Rage swelled inside Sam’s chest as he fought the desire to smash the photo against the wall.
Did Mrs. Chea know what a cruel man he’d been? He didn’t remember seeing her in Cambodia, and their children were surely innocents. How much had they heard of the rumors about their father? Did they believe? Did they know or care? He looked around the room, wondering whether he would see them, but he didn’t. Then he remembered Mrs. Chea’s words: three children, all dead.
Tomorrow Bin Chea would lie in a wooden box that slid into an oven. Then his charred bones would be ground to a powder, and his widow would receive his remains.
Four pounds of dust. Good.
Sam called the station to arrange for the night shift to pick up Viseth for questioning. Not that getting beaten up was a crime. If Viseth killed Bin Chea, then he’d performed his first public service.
But Sam had no plans to thank him.
Khem the computer programmer met Sam in his company cafeteria. When the man hobbled to his chair and sat down, his trouser leg lifted a couple of inches to reveal a brace above his white socks. He’d been hit by a car a month ago and just came back to work last week. No way did this man shoot anyone and dash down three flights of stairs.
The night shift came up dry; apparently Viseth had left the area. Maybe the boys on days would have better luck. Meanwhile Sam searched for Khem at the Pailin Jewel, across the street from a sheet metal business with a chain link fence. The green-front restaurant sat in the heart of the Heights. He had only stopped there himself on occasional police business. There was a clothing store, a music shop, a beauty shop, a grocery, and the restaurant. Together they made up Pailin Plaza, and Cambodians came to it to shop, to socialize, to keep a sense of their identity in a strange land. Sam had never been to Pailin Province, the emerald-mining center that the shop was named after.
Every so often, a young man or woman would walk into a place like the Pailin Plaza and find an old friend, an old cousin long since given up for dead. Sam had already made his search, however. He had made dozens of trips from the refugee camps back into Cambodia to guide families past the traps and the bandits. Sometimes his trips took him back to his home city of Battambang, where his stucco house sat without a roof, looking like a scorched ghost. He unearthed his mother’s jewelry in his back yard, but none of his trips found him any of the relatives or friends he feared were dead.
The refugee camps themselves were no better. Sambath had witnessed a thousand reunions, but none involving him. Everyone he ever loved had vanished. It seemed as though he too had died.
In America, he was reborn.
Mrs. Chang’s place of employment sat like a small, unpolished jewel in the middle of the plaza. Like an emerald, as the bright green shades suggested. Maybe he would find someone there who knew where Khem lived. Not that Khem would be there now, if he had anything to hide from the police. Try Bangor or Stockton.
Inside, most of the tables were occupied with Saturday customers, mostly Asians. In a corner sat an American couple; a plaster apsara hung on the wall above their heads. In the center of the same wall hung a color photo of Angkor Wat, the great temple where the heavenly apsaras danced a thousand years ago. The curtains filtered the sunlight and cast a pale green glow into the dining area.
The place smelled of fried beef, onions, and cigarette smoke. Sam hadn’t eaten food in his home country’s style for months. Well, even cops have to eat, and here I am. A ceiling fan stirred the air like a lazy cook stirring soup. Tape-recorded Cambodian voices came out of a speaker, sounding like western rock singers.
The language was Khmer, but he couldn’t make out the lyrics. The style was half eastern, half western. Were these singers from before the civil war? Before the slaughter in the villages and the rice fields? A woman began to sing a solo, and he remembered his sister Sarapon. He’d been ten when he heard his sister on the radio as she sang the most beautiful ballads. His heart ached now at the memory of her, at the memory of his parents. That was the reason he’d walked away from his culture. There was so much pain in the memories.
A bald man in his late forties came to the table and wiped it clean, then left and returned with a steel pot of tea and a porcelain cup. Perspiration showed faintly under his arms. The manager, apparently.
Sam picked up a menu. “Sir,” he said, “I am trying to find someone named Khem. I don’t know his last name. Comes here often, I think.” He filled in the description.
“I don’t have time to talk now. Too many customers.” And he was gone. Might as well look at the menu. He ordered a dish with thin strips of pork and beef, diced green onion, bamboo shoots and cilantro. And of course a plate of rice.
His table had a bottle of Vietnamese soy sauce and two bottles of red chili peppers. Little ones, Thai chilis, maybe an inch long, packing the power of a .22-caliber bullet.
&
nbsp; He asked the waitress the same question. She wore a green blouse, and a yellow ribbon held her hair back. “Yes, I know several Khems,” she said. “Do you mean the man who’s been talking about that Cambodian landlord?”
“Exactly,” he said. “He was here?”
“Not in the last couple of days. Maybe he’s through spreading his lies about that landlord. Isn’t it a shame? I don’t believe him about the poor man, and now he’s dead.”
“The landlord?”
“The landlord, yes.”
“Where does Khem live? “
“Around the corner, on Parnell Street. Maybe I can find out the address for you.”
She came back later and left his check. “Sorry, that’s all we know.”
“Do you know where he works?”
“I never heard him talk about work.” The waitress made a face. Judging from the lines on her face, Sam guessed that she worked all the time.
“What did he say?”
“That he was a vicious butcher. But Chea was a victim himself. My husband says that Chea’s ribs had been crushed with a club.”
He paid his check at the cash register. Half of his meal was still on his plate when he left.
Rows of squat two- and three-story houses lined Parnell Street, their ancient paints slowly peeling. A white Victorian house with rounded corners sat next to an empty lot where boys played stickball in the weeds and glass. On the other side of the lot was a U-shaped building with a small courtyard behind a chain-link fence. A child’s slide sat in a patch of weeds and glinted in the sun. On the other side was a duplex with slime-green siding. Every house on the street seemed different to Sam, a place where bad architects dumped their failed experiments.
Inside a blue Yugo next to the curb, a man sat and emptied a bottle of wine. In front of a house across the street, three sunflowers reached all the way to the first-floor window next to the porch. Maybe spilled from the shattered bird feeder on the porch and left to grow, this was a patch of beauty--a patch of color, anyway--in a neighborhood of plywood, oil stains, and winos.
On the corner was a variety store with window signs advertising Coca-Cola, Red Man tobacco, and lottery tickets. There was also a banner printed in angular gray dots that said, “Go For It.” What had people ever done without computers?
He stepped inside and inquired about Khem.
“Sorry, I don’t live around here.” The sales clerk shuddered as she punched up a lottery ticket for a customer. Next to her, a young man sat on a stool and smoked. The girl’s lipstick was smudged, and she had a bright red welt on her neck. The jackpot was twelve million. “Wouldn’t, neither. What is he anyway, Lowatian?”
Sam wanted to answer Laotian, damn it. Learn something about your customers. “No. Cambodian.” At least she didn’t call them boat people.
The jackpot looked tempting. Maybe... He took out his wallet and bought a ticket. What would we do with all that cash? Buy a house, sure. A buck would be better just dropped in the bottle at home. It was a waste of time dreaming, but Sam felt lucky today.
He decided to ride his luck across the street. Maybe the sunflower house had someone who knew Khem. If not, he could get Wilkins to assign a patrolman to come around later. Now that would be luck.
The fourth house he tried was the Victorian, which was rounded at the corners with a high-pitched roof and painted scrollwork above a large porch. He rang the doorbell, standing in a sea of paint flakes. A woman pushed back a lace curtain; when he showed his badge, she motioned for him to step inside.
The front door opened into a foyer with a broad staircase leading to the upstairs apartments. “Mine’s over here,” the woman said. “Come right in.”
A green elastic band held back her thin white hair; her skin was the texture of dried-out clay. On the living room wall was a picture of Jesus, his heart shining through his robe.
“I told him not to do it,” she said. “Keepin’ guests up there. I told him and told him. You get rid of that fellow or I’ll have my son call the cops, I said.”
“Whom did you tell, ma’am?”
“Whom? I told my son Tony, that’s whom. How come you’re talking so formal?”
“What’s the problem with the tenant?”
“The problem is, there’s no sharing apartments here. Soon they’d be having women up there. Or even worse, men! God knows what those two men do together anyway. I don’t go for no unmarried grownups living together, that’s why Tony called the cops. And no offense to you, young man, you seem nice, but mixing the races, well you probably don’t like it any more than I do, am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was no sense in getting angry about this woman’s foolishness.
“And you know my husband Dino used to say, after all, Christ was white--”
Which was obvious to Sam from Christ’s portrait. Sam sniffed the air for the scent of alcohol, but caught only witch hazel and cat litter. He didn’t know about any complaint. Tony probably just said yeah, Ma, sure, Ma. “Who are the men up there?” he asked.
“Fellow named Norville Quigley. He took in one of them Oriental men. Like you.”
“Do you know the other man’s name? The Asian?”
“Of course not. It’s easier to throw a man in the street if you don’t know his name.” She sighed. “Except this one’s been hard to get rid of anyway. I was beginning to think Tony never really called the cops.”
Probably hadn’t. Sam thanked her and walked upstairs.
Norville Quigley answered the door holding a plate of fried sausage, his three chins glistening with grease, his hands as big as oven mitts. He looked at Sam’s badge, then at his face. “Come on in,” he said. “You lookin’ for Khem Chhap, too?” Quigley stood half a head taller than Sam, and looked like an out-of-shape linebacker. His New England Patriots tee shirt stopped short of meeting his sweat pants by a hairy inch. Small beads of perspiration dotted his face. “I been lookin’ for him for two days. Owes me rent money. Doesn’t come up with cash this week, his stuff goes right out the door. Oh, I’m sorry. Where are my manners?”
Quigley picked a sausage from his plate with his fingers and offered it to Sam. “Try one? Delicious.”
A taste of cilantro rose briefly in Sam’s throat. “No, thank you. Does he have a separate room?”
“What, do you think we share a bed?”
Sam pictured Quigley turning over in bed, steamrolling Khem to death. He stifled a smile. “No sir, of course not. Where can I find him?”
“Why? He done something wrong?”
“No, I just have routine questions.” Why were the windows shut on a day like this? The room smelled as though Quigley had been cooking dinner in a sweaty gym.
“How long has he stayed with you?”
“Three months. One month of rent, two months of promises. Gets old, ya know?”
“Where did he come from?”
“Long Beach, I think.”
“What does he do for work?”
“Says he works for a Cambodian community outfit.”
“The Cambodian Self-Help Organization?”
“That’s the one. Don’t know what he does there.”
“Did he ever talk about anyone named Bin Chea?”
“Might’ve. Honestly, though, he didn’t say much. Just took up space. Oh, you’re thinkin’ he doesn’t take up as much space as me? Well, that’s sure true. Hit the big four-oh-oh this week.”
“Any friends?”
“Not too many besides my frying pan. I don’t get around too much--”
“I meant Mr. Chhap.”
“If he does, I don’t know ’em. I warned him not to have any guests or Tony Carullo downstairs would throw us all out.”
“He’s the landlord’s son?”
“No, he’s the landlord.”
Sam pointed to a closed door. “That Mr. Chhap’s room?”
“Sure is. Let me show you.”
From the looks of Khem’s room, he planned to come back. The room was
barely large enough for the twin bed and dresser, and it smelled of stale tobacco. On the rumpled sheet was a small black hole from a cigarette burn. On top of the dresser were a half carton of Kools, a glass ashtray with six crushed butts, and a framed photo of an Asian woman who appeared to be in her fifties.
“His sister,” Quigley offered. “Calls her once a week.”
“The calls are on your phone bill? Do you have a copy?”
“Sure, I’ve got it here somewhere.” Quigley searched through the mess in the living room. On a coffee table held down by the platter of sausages was a Lowell Sun opened to the comics page. Quigley nodded toward the food. “Help yourself,” he said. Sam shook his head.
Quigley knelt on the floor and looked though the mail strewn on the carpet. The cushions in the middle of the couch were crushed by his mass, and a piece of paper stuck out from behind one cushion like a white flag of surrender. Sam reached over and plucked out an envelope with the telephone company’s logo on it.
“Oh, thanks,” Quigley said. He stood up, winded and slightly flushed. “That’s the list off an old bill. Anything besides a 617 or 508 area code is his. Borrow it and mail it back if you want. Or bring it by, and stop in for lasagna. That’s one thing I couldn’t get Khem to do, was eat. Pay rent was the other.”
Sam thanked Quigley and left. He’d have Garibaldi check out the telephone exchanges, then get on the computer and ask for some help from the other coast. Maybe Khem whacked Chea and flew home. Maybe the Long Beach police could pay him a surprise visit. Meanwhile, he would visit the Cambodian Self-Help Organization. They might be able to fill in some background.
The CSHO occupied a store front on Dutton Street, its name printed in modest black letters in both English and Khmer. No one looked up when Sam entered. In the background, an air conditioner hummed. An Asian man of about twenty-five spoke on the telephone while two hold buttons flashed. With the telephone wedged between his cheek and his shoulder, he turned and typed with two fingers at a computer keyboard. He wore a dark blue tie with its knot askew. A woman searched through a black file cabinet as an older woman stepped out of an office. She was American, with long gray hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. Sam showed his badge and stated his business.