Dragonfish: A Novel (27 page)

“You spend money like you have it.”

“Didn’t when I got to town four years ago. This was the only place I could afford and it’s been good enough for me.”

“Kinda shady, no?” I peeked through the mini blinds at the alley below, shrouded in an orange-tinged darkness.

She shrugged. “I don’t go for walks at night.”

“Pretty sure we passed a drug deal down the street—those two kids on their skateboards.”

“Par for the course around here. Muggings too. A stabbing or shooting now and then. Doesn’t make me nervous anymore. If a man can live here with his wife and kids, I can too.”

“Easy to say until shit happens to you.”

“What makes you think it hasn’t?”

She went to the bathroom, and I heard her rummaging through drawers.

On the way to her place, she had asked if I liked being a cop. Her first personal question since we met. I told her that it depended on the day, that some days it’s just one idiot human being after another. When she asked if I had ever saved anyone’s life, I told her about the guy I once pulled from a burning car and how he survived despite third-degree burns to half his body. He’d also just robbed a convenience store, led me on a high-speed chase, and T-boned a minivan, killing a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. I’d wished at the time that he had burned in his car, but I didn’t tell her that. Helping the wrong people often felt as bad to me as hurting the wrong people.

She came back with some toiletries and what looked like a wooden statuette of Buddha, which she shoved into the outer pocket of the suitcase.

She finally went to her books, packing first a small stack of worn paperbacks. The Narnia Chronicles.

“I read those way back,” I said. “Can’t remember any of them except that one where they go through the wardrobe.”

“I’ve read that one eight times.” She snatched a cigarette from a pack on the windowsill and lit up as she picked through the other books. “This is gonna be tough.”

“Don’t take forever.”

“We still got more than an hour, don’t we?” She offered me the cigarette and went back to the books, sometimes lingering on a cover for a few seconds before making her decision. “Yeah, I used to go into my aunt and uncle’s closet and look for a door behind their clothes. I wanted so bad to find one. Just walk into
another world like the kids in the book. Close the door behind me, never come back.”

“Was that the kid in you, or was that LA?”

“Both.” She threw in a book on meditation, then a book on the stock market. “LA never felt like home to me. Neither does Vegas, but at least here you can be anonymous. Everyone’s from somewhere else. Passing through for a few days, a few years. Being temporary can be a good thing.”

“Maybe. Being permanent ain’t possible anyway.”

“Permanence is overrated.”

She zipped the stuffed suitcase, stood up, and looked around. She took back the cigarette. I glanced again at my watch but didn’t want her to stop talking. It was calming to hear her so chatty and relaxed, so perversely in denial of the circumstances. She smoked with her arms half crossed, her rigid posture giving her an air of both authority and wariness. The elbows of her leather jacket were frayed like her jeans and cowboy boots, but she wore it all well, with hushed purposefulness, as though she had chosen this uniform—the haircut too, the lack of makeup—to moderate her beauty. Help her blend into the background.

She said, “Do you miss her?”

“Depends on what’s missing.”

“Okay, what do you
not
miss about her—besides all the crazy shit she did.”

“I don’t know. I guess I was never a fan of all the praying and churchgoing. All that devotion to God. I indulged her, of course, but I haven’t set foot inside a church since she left.”

“It’s a Vietnamese thing. Ingrained in all of us. Total waste of time.”

“That wasn’t it. Your mother always seemed like she was hoping for a fucking revelation or something. You know what I
do
miss? When she wasn’t being so goddamn serious. When we traveled, on our road trips, she lightened up then. She hated leaving town at first, but she got to liking it over the years. It put her at ease—being on the road, seeing new things.”

“I get that,” Mai said. “Wish I did it more.” She bent down to stub out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve been saving up for a trip to Vietnam. I want to travel the entire country. Start in Saigon and go up to Hanoi, maybe find an apartment by Halong Bay. Live there for a year and see how it goes. That’ll all be easier now. Shit, I almost forgot.”

She went back into her closet and returned with her hand in the belly of a small stuffed bear. She pulled out a passport, slipping it into her back pocket, and tossed the gutted bear on her bed.

“Finally got one four years ago and still haven’t used it,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Mexico.”

A cell phone rang, but it wasn’t mine. Mai rushed to retrieve hers from her purse and threw me an eager look.

She answered it in a low voice and listened intently. Yes, she replied in Vietnamese and then asked a question. After a long pause, another yes. Then, eyeing me, she said, “Okay, okay,” and hung up.

“Was it her?”

She nodded. “She’s at a pay phone across the street. She’s coming over right now.”

“How did she know to come here?”

“Betty must have described me.” Mai hit the light switch and doused us in darkness. “Stay in here and I’ll answer the door. She sounded nervous. It might scare her to see you right away. Let me talk to her first.”

“She could have anyone with her.”

“Well, if she does, you can come out and shoot them.” She nudged me back a step, leaving the door slightly open.

With my gun again in hand, I watched her through the narrow opening. She stood waiting at the edge of the kitchen. After five minutes that felt like twenty, footsteps finally approached and stopped outside the front door. Two quick knocks. Mai disappeared from view.

I heard the front door open and Mai say “Hello, big sister” in Vietnamese. A soft voice replied in kind, but I couldn’t make out if it was Happy, only that it was a woman.

The front door closed, the lock clicking loudly.

They continued speaking in Vietnamese, their voices closer now, Mai’s calm and careful, the other quick and hushed. Mai started explaining something in a reassuring tone. She sounded like someone else entirely when she spoke her mother tongue.

Suddenly I heard my name. A silence followed. Mai’s voice called out for me. I wedged my gun into the back of my jeans. My heart was thumping, and for a moment I thought it was possible someone else had come.

When Happy saw me, she looked more confused than frightened. Under her black peacoat, she was wearing a uniform identical to Betty’s. Her bow tie was askew, her arms at her side with one hand holding on to the strap of her handbag, which nearly touched the carpet.

“She was at the casino after all,” Mai explained with pride. “She’d just left her shift and was about to leave the casino when Betty caught up to her.”

I said to Happy, “How much does Betty know?”

“She don’t know nothing,” Happy replied quickly, still eyeing me with suspicion. “I tell her somebody hit me. That it.”

I inched closer. Despite her makeup and her glasses I could
see the shadowy bruises around her left eye and the left corner of her mouth.

“She and me—we not good friend.”

“Then why did you tell her about it?”

“Three day I not leave the house and she come find me. She live in my neighborhood. Why you in Las Vegas, Bob?”

“Sonny. He made me come here and find Suzy for him. I found Mai instead.”

This made even less sense to her, but I didn’t feel like explaining.

She said, “You know she is . . .”

“Suzy’s long-lost daughter? Yeah. Found that out about three hours ago. Don’t think Sonny planned on anything like that.”

My mention of Sonny again brought a flash of venom to her eyes.

“Did his men do that to you?” I said.

She blinked away the question. “Why you try find me? I don’t know nothing.”

“Did you know about Suzy’s plan?”

“What plan? She don’t tell nothing to me. They come and they say about the money, but I don’t know nothing about the money. They hit me and they say they kill me and they kill Suzy too, but I not say nothing.” She looked at Mai. “That why I come to you Tuesday—to get you tell your mom leave town.”

“You didn’t let me explain that day,” Mai said. “My mother and me have never talked or seen each other or anything. I got a few brief letters from her last month and that’s it. I don’t even know what she looks like.”

Happy was quiet for a moment. Then she shook her finger at Mai and said something in Vietnamese, like she was gently chiding her.

“Hey, come on,” I said. “
English
.”

“I ask her why she not leave town. That what I say to her Tuesday. She need to go too.”

Mai was avoiding my eyes. She hadn’t mentioned that part to me. I couldn’t blame her for ignoring the wild exhortations of some strange woman at her door, but even at this point, such dire warnings seemed like invitations to an adventure for her.

I said, “Does Sonny know about her? Don’t lie to me, Happy. Did you say a single word to them about her?”

She dismissed the question with an impatient look. She set her purse on the coffee table and sank into the recliner.

Mai took a step toward her as if to shield her from my intensity. I couldn’t tell if she was playing good cop to my bad cop or if she genuinely felt sorry for Happy. It was undeserved either way.

“So my mom did come to see you?”

Happy nodded tiredly. “She come Sunday night.”

“She say anything about where she was planning to go?”

“No. She come to . . .” Happy bowed her head like she was about to cry, but when she looked up again at Mai, she seemed baffled. “How I can explain it to you?”

I let the silence eat her up for a bit. Then I said, “We know about you and Sonny.”

Her face showed no surprise. Just instant acquiescence. Then she narrowed her eyes at me, and that old glint of knowing amusement returned.

“You think I am horrible person.”

“I do.”

“You think you understand all the story.”

I nodded at Mai. “She figured it out. I was too stupid to. Never thought you’d go for a crazy criminal who nearly killed your best friend.”

“Robert, come on,” Mai said. “Go ahead, Happy, what did my mom—”

“Yeah,” I said, “Go ahead. Explain why you did it.”

“Bob, I tell you something—you think you are good man and you are police and you not like Sonny. But you no different.”

“What? He
cheated
on her. He locked her all night in an office, threw her down a flight of fucking stairs. And who knows how often he hits her.”

“You hit her too,” Happy noted. She asked Mai, “He tell you what he do to your mother before?”

“That was the first time I ever touched her. You know she’s hit me plenty over the years.
That night
she fucking hit me. I couldn’t hear out of this ear for a week!”

“You almost break her teeth.”

“Bullshit. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. No way you’re comparing that to what Sonny’s done.”

Happy was shaking her head. “But that not what I mean. You and him—you are both
weak
man. When you not understand somebody, you scare like little boy. You close your eye and you pretend they not there. You not know when you hurt them. Why you think Suzy not call to you for help? She know you still love her. She know what you do here five month before. Sonny hurt her, she almost die, but she
never
call you.”

“She didn’t come begging for your help either, did she?”

Happy’s scowl deepened as she sat on the edge of the recliner like an alert cat. All those years, she was always the one calming Suzy or me down, the buffer when the three of us were together, making jokes and changing the subject, never an angry word to anyone. It made me wonder now how often she had humored me, held back all the ugly things she really felt.

She turned from me, exhaling loudly as if to relieve herself of my presence.

Mai was standing warily between us. In a composed voice, Happy said to her, “Your mom—she is difficult woman. She scare just like Sonny and Bob. She hurt them too. I know. Fifteen year I friend with her and she hurt me many time. But she ask me come here because she have nobody, and she help get job for me. I know nothing about Sonny. I know nothing about you. But I know she not happy in Las Vegas. So I come. When I meet Sonny, I see he not good man for her. I tell her, but she not listen. And when they start fighting, I tell her leave but she not leave. What I can do? I just listen to her. But in the summer, she stop talking to me. I call her and she not call back to me. When I go see her, she like other person. So Sonny, he start come every day to my house. He tell me everything. Suzy sleep all day. Suzy not leave the house. She not talk to nobody. He say she not love him anymore.”

Happy’s eyes were glistening. Again, she had that inward-looking, baffled expression.

“How I can explain it? He the one who help get job for me. When I owe money to someone, he pay it. When I date the other man who hit me, Sonny go beat him and make him say sorry to me. I know he do the bad thing, but he always do good thing for me. I thought your mother not love him anymore. I thought . . .”

She grabbed a tissue from her purse and took off her glasses. As she carefully dabbed at her mascaraed eyes, Mai walked to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of water and set it on the coffee table.

She sat there slumped with her hands over her knees, clutching at the tissue. She looked fragile without her glasses and yet
also, in her suffocating vest and crooked bow tie, ridiculous. I could only half listen to everything, distracted by the memory of her naked in my bed, watching me undress and surely knowing that I could not feel for her as I did for her best friend. And yet she had pursued it, plunged into it as she would again a year later with Sonny. Even if it was not for love, it was still a futile thievery, taking something that could never be hers and offering herself too as something provisional. She must have known all that.