Caught Dead (5 page)

“Exactly,” Liz nodded. “Every other shooting happened late at night, early in the a.m. in fact, the streets were closed up. Only the dealers manning the corners while the suburbanites cruised in over Avon Mountain in their Land Rovers to buy some coke.”

I agreed. “Even the little girl's murder was at midnight, her parents coming home from somewhere, running in for milk. After eleven or so all the decent citizens are sheltered in their apartments. No one wanders out—at least not there. You'd think no one lived there. But not at eight o'clock. People flood the streets.”

Liz sipped her wine, rolled her tongue over her lips. “Don't you find that odd, a killing in a busy city square on a brutally hot night when people sit on stoops or hang out windows?”

“We can't be the only two that noticed that.”

“Right. Ardolino is no fool, Rick.” Liz stared into my face. “But maybe it means that the drug-traffic turf wars are escalating…that this, this”—she checked the sheets for the wounded kid's name—“this Jose Santiago was targeted, and it took him off guard.”

“Whatever happened to after-midnight, deep-in-the-night sales?”

Liz grinned. “Lord, I've driven down Washington Street, headed for a doctor's appointment near Hartford Hospital at ten in the morning, and there are hookers in fake red-leather mini skirts and not much else, sashaying their rumps in the parking lot across from McDonald's.”

“I should make note of that.”

We laughed. I drank more wine. She looked at her watch but made no effort to leave, yawning, but trying to hide it by smiling. Finally, hesitant, she said, “It's getting late.” She stood up.

“I'll walk you to your car.”

Before she got in, jiggling her keys, she paused. “This was fun, seeing you and Jimmy.” She hugged me and kissed me on the lips, lingering a little too long. I smelled perfume and wine on her, and I stood there as she drove away. I loved Liz—always would—but sometimes when Liz got lonely in that apartment of hers, years away from the life she remembered in New York, times when she had no romance in sight, she looked back at me. I was always there in that rearview mirror, the tarnished knight of all those New York nights.

I walked home, feeling the wine now and sticky from the unrelenting wash of still, hot air that hugged the dog days of August. But I was also afraid of the delicious scent of perfume that stayed with me, like soft humming in my ear.

Chapter Six

The next morning Hank plagued me to do a walk-through at the crime scene, ignoring my halfhearted protest and reminding me that his grandmother loved me, trusted me, expected some Buddhist comingling of spirits, even promised me home-cooked chicken soup on Sunday. And, well, I agreed. I picked him up in East Hartford in my repaired BMW. The third-floor tenant of Gracie's house, a retired mechanic she'd dated a hundred years before, checked it out for twenty bucks, replacing a switch. I knew nothing of cars. I always assumed they'd keep running.

We drove to
Pho
501 on Burnside, had beef noodle soup for breakfast, the savory
pho,
the comfort soup of the Vietnamese, North and South, and everyone in between. Sitting in the crowded restaurant, I leafed through the
Hartford Courant
. The reporters who'd covered Mary's funeral described it as a sad day, with a photo of the coffin carried into the church on page one, “Story on page 3” under it. It was already becoming back-burner news, but there was a reiterated statement from the police that the shooting was an accidental drive-by. The reporter mentioned the grazing of Jose Santiago in the leg, with the glib speculation that the drive-by shooter had been trying to kill that hapless young man, who was quoted as saying, “Hey, it gotta be a mistake. Me and that dead lady was in the wrong place, like everybody says.”

“Like everybody says,” Hank echoed, spooning vermicelli noodles into a wide plastic dipping spoon, biting into a basil leaf.

“I guess it's official,” I summed up. “So why are we going to the scene of the crime, Mr. Nguyen?” I stressed my words so they were capitalized—The Scene of the Crime. I waited. Hank slurped his soup, made a disgusting digestive sound that suggested his utter satisfaction with the meal, and then smiled. “Grandma
feels
it in her ancient bones. The spirit of the legendary Truong sisters rising up against the Chinese.”

I interrupted. “Makes sense to me.” I nudged him. “Hurry up. I got things to do today. There's a file clerk in the bowels of the Aetna building who's siphoning off billions of misdirected health benefits intended for the old lady from Dubuque.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

In Hartford we pulled the car onto Zion Street, headed down Maynard, and crept through the desolate streets near Goodwin Square. The yellow tape was down, of course, though a few fragments remained wrapped around a parking meter, entangled with an empty Coke bottle. As the two of us stood on the sidewalk, a Hartford cruiser slipped by, the two officers inside eyeing us warily—and the square. The car slid through a red light and nearly hit a hip-hop kid who assumed he had the walk light, a kid who shot the officers the middle finger. The cops disappeared onto a side street. Two out-of-place souls, Hank and I stared at the sidewalk, with me dressed in Eddie Bauer unpressed khakis and a faded J. Crew polo shirt, in loafers with no socks. Very Farmington Country Club. Hank, at least, was dressed in knee-length cutoffs and a baggy tank top, looking like something out of an MTV self-indulgent reality show
,
a hip young man who knew when the cameras were on him. I suddenly felt old and I thought—My God, we've produced a generation of young kids who spend their lives dressing and acting and speaking as though cameras are always rolling.

The square was largely Hispanic with a smattering of blacks, a few old white shopkeepers who looked glazed and unhappy as they stood in doorways of shops that sold used furniture and bric-a-brac. One ran a check-cashing operation, with bulletproof barriers between him and the world.

We walked along. “I look out of place here.”

Hank grinned. “I don't.”

Midday, the street sang, families on the sidewalks, vendors setting up to sell knockoff Rolex watches and phony Boston Red Sox baseball caps. Kids sucking on raspberry sno-cones. The sidewalks were so hot a wavy film hovered in the air like a hot-air ghost. Folks moved slowly. At the end of the block someone had opened a hydrant and half-naked kids hurled themselves joyously into jets of cold, cold water. We talked to a lot of people. We found out nothing. As Detective Ardolino had suggested, the square was infamous for silence, that numbing blankness that answered any question.

“Could I ask you a few questions about the shooting here the other day?”

“Are you guys cops?”

“No, I'm a PI working for the dead woman's family, just looking for some answers.” I repeated the line over and over. I displayed my license, handed out my card with my office and cell numbers. Most didn't take it. But some examined my Connecticut State PI license with the care of a scholar examining the Dead Sea Scrolls right out of an unearthed pottery jar. But it didn't matter because nobody saw anything. Shaking heads, shrugged shoulders, quick turning away, tight lips, furrowed brows, palms out like a traffic cop. “No, nothing. Sorry.” Most times we didn't even get the “sorry.”

“Everyone is afraid,” Hank said.

“I know, but a lot of these people work and live here. The stores are open till nine. People sitting on stoops. Somebody saw something.”

Hank pointed out a young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, in a T-shirt that bore the name Bob Marley and displayed a bold marijuana leaf, a boy in baggy pants and work boots, who was lounging against a brick wall near an alley, dealing openly. But when we walked toward him, he bolted, disappearing so quickly into a half-boarded-up building that it was easy to believe he was never there in the first place.

“He thinks we're cops,” Hank muttered. “He's seen us going in and out of stores.”

So we talked to a clerk and the street customers in Baby Doll Video, a XXX adult video parlor that featured blinking lights in a painted-over window. The clerk was talky and funny, but wasn't working the five-to-midnight shift that night. In some of the groceries the owners only spoke Spanish—or claimed to. The guy in the check-cashing establishment turned his back on us. The Jamaican woman who was singing at the top of her lungs as we strolled into her discount women's dress shop decided to take a vow of silence. When we walked out, the singing began again. The owner of South American imported gifts was a sweet old woman who talked only to Hank, grinning into his face, but she said, “
Lo siento. Nada nada nada
.” A dashiki-clad young man in an apartment rental storefront—No Fees! No Hidden Charges!—wore drop earrings that made noise when he shook his head. “I no seen nothing. I go to the back parking lot when I leave anyway.” We had thick, potent coffee and lunch at a small Peruvian café, but the owner and patrons claimed there'd been nothing to see. Two of the customers said they'd been at the café that night, as was the waiter, who recalled, “Suddenly there's a bang bang, and then there is silence. I look out and the cops are speeding through. A body on the ground. It's over. Like that. We say, hey, another killing.”

And so it went, until we approached the old shopkeeper of a dreary pawnshop on the southeast corner: Meyer and Meyer, est. 1937. The faded contents of the grimy front window—a folk guitar, a set of mismatched barbells, some LP records, one of which was Harry Belafonte, and a console model 1960s hi-fi—appeared frozen in a past lifetime. Stuff no junkie would “smash and grab.” The burglary gates were half-down now, as if stuck in place.

The shopkeeper was a gruff, blustery soul who first warned us off. “What you expect in this neighborhood? Look around you. Not like the old days, let me tell you the God's honest truth. Now the punks bring in garden hoses they steal from people's garages and want top dollar. They walk in with DVD players with no backs, fresh from being pulled out of the wall. If I didn't own the building, I couldn't stay here. I still can't stay here. Look around. I'll be dead in…”

I cut him off. “The woman who was shot raised this young man here.” I lowered my voice. Hank tried to look mournful, but succeeded merely in looking like a melodramatic circus clown frowning for the kiddies. But the old man stared into Hank's contorted face, said something in a language I assumed was Yiddish, and made a guttural sound.

“This is what the world has come to,” he stammered. “You”—he pointed to Hank—“come to America and find not gold in the streets but gold in people's teeth and across their knuckles and chunks so big around their necks they got back problems if they live to my age.” He chuckled, pleased with his observation. “Look,” he added, “it's a sad story like all stories around here.” His lips trembled. “But I got nothing to tell you. I read the papers. I saw no shooting car, and if I did would I ever tell you about it? Not in this lifetime. But I did see your mother.” He looked at Hank, who was startled that the old man assumed Mary was his mother. “I'm closing up. It's eight or so, I go to lock the door, but, you know, having trouble with the old key, so I turn and see the woman walking out of a car and standing on the sidewalk. She's standing there under the streetlight, and I think, what's with the Oriental lady being here? But I think maybe she's working in the Chinese takeout one block over so I don't look back. I went back into the store to turn off a light I left on in back because I forget every day, and I close the front door behind me. Next thing I know—bang bang.”

“Two shots?'

“Two shots. I stay inside until the police come. Then I go home to watch it on the eleven o'clock news.”

“Thank you,” Hank told him.

“But I'll tell you, young man, a strange thing. In the split second I spot her standing there, she's there like she's looking for someone. That was the look on her face. Like she's supposed to meet someone there. Like a person would look at a watch, you know.”

“Did she look disoriented?”

“What does that mean? I don't know. I'm telling you, she might have been on the wrong corner by accident, but she'd come from somewhere looking for something.”

“Or someone.” I looked at Hank. “Maybe she was looking for someone.”

Chapter Seven

On Sunday I drove to Hank's home for
mi ga
, chicken soup, the Sunday morning ritual of Vietnamese the world over. Invited many times to his home, I still felt a twinge of nervousness whenever I turned the car in that direction. There was a time when I wouldn't have agreed so quickly to such an invitation. Hank's father and grandfather, defenders of the idea of Pure Blood, stared at me too long—me, the mixed-blood violator of the Vietnamese household. But Hank had made it his mission—once he got beyond his own bias inherited from the men in his family—to integrate me into the family. It worked. Sort of.

Inside the front door I removed my shoes, pushing them into the pile outside the kitchen door. I checked whether I had a hole in my sock. I didn't.

Hank saw me looking. “How Americanized you are.”

I grinned. “Look at you.”

Hank's big toe jutted from a white athletic sock. He wiggled it. “I'm at home.”

Hank's mother greeted me, hugged me, and her fingers touched my hot cheek. “Sit in front of the fan. Please.”

We sat at the huge Formica table. The life of the family was centered in the kitchen where all friends and family gathered. American guests sat in the little-used living room.

His mother handed me a glass of Vietnamese coffee, a potent brew sweetened by condensed milk. The glass was ice-cold to the touch. It tasted like a creamy dessert.

“I know you like it extra sweet.”

“
Cam on
,” I told her. Thank you.
Cam on nhieu.

***

No one spoke English now, so I stumbled a bit with my fractured Vietnamese. We discussed the heat of the day. His mother choked out a word:
Nong
. We all nodded. Hank, wide-eyed at some of my stuttered words, jumped in to save me from total embarrassment once or twice, my incomplete sentences hanging in the air. Yet I managed somehow, perhaps feebly.

I heard soft muttering in the hallway, and Grandma walked in, followed closely by Grandpa. Old, old, Hank's grandfather creaked along. I had been talking to Hank, facing him, and his eyes got cloudy, a wide, uneasy stare. The old man, small and withered like a gnarled twig, took a seat at the table, away from me, and looked at me as though I were a horrible nightmare, perhaps your worst enemy come to poison your table.

Hank cleared his throat, but said nothing. Maybe the old war had a few more battles left to fight. He'd been through this before, of course—warring with Grandpa's dislike of me, the visiting pariah, a dust boy from under a rock.

So I turned to Grandma, greeted her in halting but very respectful Vietnamese, and she smiled, leaned over the table for the obligatory kiss. I liked her, this woman so small she barely came up to my hip, her ancient face lined and blotchy. A woman given to generosity and love, she motioned her daughter-in-law to ladle delicious
mi ga
into my bowl. I nodded. Yes, please. Soon the whole family settled into chairs around the table, chopsticks clicking.

But today a film of grief covered that warm kitchen, quieting the tensions and angers that sometimes surfaced there between Hank and his father, Hank and his grandfather, and Hank and his older sister. This was a family that never understood their bright, clever, good-looking son, especially when he decided to become a cop. It made no sense to them. Good Vietnamese boys went to UConn, majored in finance or computers, and bought houses for their parents in Avon or Simsbury. Why else the arduous trek to America way back when?

Hank once told me, “Mom said I was too good-looking and too smart-mouthed for my own good. They would have been happier with a squat, chunky son with thick glasses and an obvious overbite, who could do math in his head.
That
is the son of choice in Little Saigon.”

We sat at the table, close together, even the younger kids. And the talk today was about the murder. Everyone had something to say, and the family talked over one another excitedly. Only Grandma, tucked into a kitchen chair by the open window, her head turned toward whatever breeze seeped into the room, kept still, though it was clear to me she was listening to every word. Hank's father talked of hatred of the Vietnamese. “We are the Jews of Asia,” he declared. “Mary's murder…”

Hank raised his eyebrows. “Why does everything have to be a conspiracy?”

“What does that mean? What conspiracy?” His father's tone was cutting.

“Maybe Aunt Mary made a mistake, that's all,” Hank's younger brother said, a little shyly.

“I'm tired of hearing that,” his mother groaned. “Everyone talks as if the woman was an imbecile.”

“Death by confusion.” Hank cleared his throat. His father cast him a withering look. “I mean…”

“The soup is delicious,” I cut in, looking first at his mother and then at Grandma. I knew both women created the aromatic
mi ga
together, a careful concoction of savory broth, diced scallions and herbs, tender bean sprouts, and pieces of chicken. I also knew that a concession was made for half-white and wholly American me. While the family ate the chicken soup with all the dubious parts of a slaughtered chicken tossed in—bones, cartilage, flabby skin, neck—my bowl held a floating layer of pristine, elegantly sliced pure-white breast meat.

Grandma once told me, “Foolish boy. White meat is inferior. The flavor is at the bone.”

Hank's grandfather, that moody, irascible man, given these days to spurts of gagged coughing from his three-packs-a-day Marlboros, monitored the conversation with the restlessness of a man sitting among inferiors. He shook his head when Hank's mom concluded, “We may never know what happened to sweet Mary. This is one of the mysteries that will linger in the Vietnamese community forever.”

“No.” Hank's father frowned. “It should be easy to nab a madman, some deranged American.” Hank's father believed the world had gone crazy after 1975. When he drank, he blamed the white man, who ruled the earth and ruined his life.

“Well, it's not like we don't kill each other,” Hank said, probably reading his father's mind. And he started to catalogue the domestic disputes of recent years in the Vietnamese community. Husbands strangling wives, wives bludgeoning husbands, homes ransacked, infidelities that led to street brawls, women slapped in West Farms Mall and their incredulous husbands, since a man can do whatever he wants to his wife, led off by overweight security rent-a-cops.

Mr. Nguyen boomed. “Enough. This is what you do in front of an American guest? You put down your people?”

Everyone looked at me, then at Hank, red in the face, sheepish. Until that moment I'd been feeling very much a part of the community, despite the curse of being mixed blood. Now, conspicuous, I blinked too much. I slopped
mi ga
on my white man's shirt.

Hank stammered. “Dad, Rick is Vietnamese.”

“If you say so,” the man sneered.

I looked at his mother. She wore a bewildered look, and when she noticed me eyeing her, she turned away, a hint of color rising in her cheeks and neck.

Grandma was following this unpleasant exchange with a glint in her eye. “Rick is like my son.” She stared down her son-in-law. “This is a good man. He's looking into this case…”

“Mmm.” I smiled. “I'm not really on any case here. I'm just asking a few questions.”

Hank's mother whispered, “Mary had no enemies. None. You have to
talk
to people, Rick. Find
out
things. She had no enemies.” Anger in her voice.

Grandma spoke quietly. “Of course she did. We all do. Even you.” She pointed at her flustered daughter. One of the kids actually giggled. She paused. “I know she had an enemy because I dreamed it.”

Immediately the whole family groaned. Grandma's dreams were notorious: cautionary tales of woe and doom, though they sometimes had silver linings in otherwise dismal landscapes. Hank once told me she could end a meal with a few dark images she carried from her dream life. Hank's father would walk out of the room.

“I'm not on the case,” I repeated slowly.

Grandma patted my hand, resting on the table. “I have faith in you, Rick. You understand that we all suffer but there are roads that shift, change direction, lead away from pain…You are a man with questions, and questions lead to answers.”

“Not always,” Hank insisted. “Sometimes questions don't have answers.”

I found myself staring at the Buddhist shrine in the corner—a bowl of blood-red oranges, sticks of incense, gaudy icons pasted to a board. That shrine always took me back to Vietnam and comforted me. In this typical American kitchen—with the Mr. Coffee and toaster and microwave oven and juicer, surrounded on every wall with calendars from Chinese or Vietnamese restaurants, perhaps five in all—I could always detect the peculiar smell of incense and Asian cooking, the curious mixture of sweet and bitter, a hint of jasmine.

Grandma reached over and tapped Hank on the shoulder. “You have a lot to learn, love.” But she was smiling at him.

When we were finished, Hank and I left the kitchen. Outside, Hank apologized for his father's insult to me, but I held up my hand.

“Sometimes I hate him,” he fumed.

“No, you don't.”

He actually trembled. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off. “Don't feel sorry for me, Rick.”

I waited.

Finally he stammered, “He
is
a good man, Rick.”

“I know that.”

“But I will never be like that. Never.”

***

We drove to Benny Vu's home to make our condolence call. “I'm not on a case,” I repeated. “I don't recall receiving a retainer from anyone involved, nor did Benny and his family hire me.”

Hank grinned. “Of course you're on the case. I've already told you that.”

“I forgot.”

“Besides, you wouldn't take money from family. That's not how you're built.”

I groaned.

Benny Vu lived on the other side of East Hartford, on Maple Street, a small dead-end street off Main Street, a row of squat houses whose backyards faced a moribund textile plant and a city incinerator. From the street I could see darkened smokestacks, a cell tower, and elaborate electrical grids. Overhead wires, strung on poles with red blinking lights, stretched and towered behind the small weathered Cape Cod house, company houses originally, that looked like hiccoughs of one another. The neighbors to the right still had their Christmas decorations hung, those redundant white-light icicles hanging off every eave and over their garage.

“One hundred shopping days left to Christmas,” I joked to Hank.

We parked on the street, and I stared at the house with its peeling paint and sagging front porch. Hank had mentioned that the grocery was closed now—and no one knew when it would reopen because, family gossip suggested, Benny had lost his spirit. Since the murder, he sat at home in front of a large-screen TV that stayed on the same channel, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the long trace of ash of each one finally falling onto his lap.

“That's what my mother told me,” Hank confided. “She's worried he'll burn down the house.” Family dropped off food. Neighbors stopped in but quickly left.

The doorbell was broken, the cement landing was cracked, and the laminate on the cheap front door had buckled and split. The chain-link fence surrounding the front yard was rusted and, in one place, bent, as though a runaway car had plowed into it. The gate no longer latched. This was a house its owners forgot.

A woman Hank didn't know let us in—“I'm Melissa from next door”—and we slipped off our shoes in the hallway. We sat in the tiny front room, the TV on, though the sound was turned off, and Benny mumbled something about tea. No, we both said. Then we all got quiet. The neighbor waved good-bye, looked relieved, and disappeared out the front door. Benny lit a cigarette. I noticed ashes on his shirt. He was staring at the images on the TV, as if he forgot we were there.

“
Xin loi
.” Hank leaned in. I'm sorry.

“
Xin loi ong,”
I echoed, apologizing for the intrusion.

He nodded, smiling thinly.

In contrast to the outside of the house, the living room was spotless, a hard-polished look to it, and I imagined Mary's deft and passionate hand on every surface. But everything was old, threadbare. A boxy floor fan whirled hot air around us, but the windows were shut. The room was stifling. This would be a short visit. I found myself staring at a thumbtacked calendar from an Asian marketplace, not Benny's, with the wrong month—July—still showing. Why hadn't Mary changed it? Hadn't she noticed? The house showed her attention to detail, so that fact bothered me. That, and the oversized flat-screen TV that seemed too large, too emphatic, for the tiny room.

A cousin Hank recognized walked in from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of iced ginger tea. A woman in her forties, she nodded at Hank and smiled at me. “I'm Hyunh Le.” She bowed and handed Benny a tall glass with a sprig of mint floating near the top. She sat down next to him, looked at us, and sighed. “Well.”

No one said anything.

Finally, struggling, sitting there with Benny and Hyunh Le looking into their laps, we began forced, idle talk about the unrelenting dog-day heat, the solemnity of Mary's funeral, the recent flooding in the southern provinces of China. Benny, I realized, was still in shock because his voice was calm and deliberate, the words spaced out as though he were drugged. In fact, I wondered whether he'd been put on some medication. That might explain the narrowed eyes and the drumbeat monotone.

All of a sudden, at Hank's mention of our visit to the crime scene—I'm not sure why he did it—Benny started to gurgle, a deep, bubbly sound erupting from the back of his throat, rising like vomit, until he stammered, “Somebody has got to pay for this. Mary needs justice.” The words hung in the air.