Little Mountain (2 page)

         From inside a closed room came the moans of a woman--a freshly-made widow? Sam tried to block out his emotions, but anger seeped through. By the time he was twenty, he’d seen hundreds of corpses. Maybe he could find some justice for this one.

         On a small table opposite the door sat a photo of a smiling woman, her elegant features defaced by a spray of blood. A powerful image flashed across his brain: a man in black pajamas held the muzzle of a shotgun to the bridge of Sambath’s nose, and suddenly the barrel disappeared in a sea of red.

         Ugh. Where did
that
old dream come from?

         DeVito picked a pen from his pocket and chewed on the nub. “Let me guess,” he said. “You and Julie were getting it on when the phone rang. And Wilkins said get off your old lady and on the job.”

        
Getting it on.
The slang took an extra second to register. “You get too personal,” Sam said.

         “Bet you’re pissed.”

         “Of course I’m not,” he lied.
“Had to detour around the accident.
Looked bad.”

        
“Those kids?
Yeah, a fatal.
We got that call first and then this beaut.
Just another quiet night in Lowell.”

         The evidence tech’s camera flashed again as Sam turned toward the body. “Was the apartment robbed?” Sam asked.

        
“Nah.
Guy just delivered his message and left.
By the way, condolences on making detective.
We all know how much you love Wilkins.”

         “I never talk about the lieutenant,” Sam said. At least not with DeVito, who held his secrets the way a drunk held his gin. “Anybody with nothing to do should talk to the neighbors,” Sam said.

         “Got a couple guys looking for neighbors who speak English,” DeVito said.

         “Send two more. The M.E.
show
up yet?”

         “He’s on his way. He’ll take one look and say, ‘Yep. The son of a bitch is dead.’
Like we need Katsios to tell us.”

         Sam nodded toward the closed bedroom door. “Is the victim’s family in there?” he asked.

         “Yeah, Willie’s with the guy’s wife.” DeVito mimicked Groucho Marx with his eyes. Sam went in; DeVito’s leer was beneath comment.

         Patrolman Willie Johnson stood next to an old Cambodian woman, who sat upright on the bed with her fists clamped onto the bedding. “Oh no, husband. Not like this.” She spoke in Khmer, the Cambodian language.

         Sam touched her arm gently and introduced himself in his old language, the one he now used only for work. “Not like what?” he asked.

         “Not like this,” she said. “Not like this.” She barely seemed to notice him. He slipped his fingers under her wrist. Her pulse raced, and her breathing was fast and shallow.

         “Willie,” he said, “Get an ambulance to take her to the hospital.” Johnson spoke into his two-way radio while Sam turned back to the woman. “Is it your husband?” he asked, this time in English.

         She seemed suddenly aware of his presence, and opened her mouth--in surprise?
To speak?

         “Ma’am, what happened?”

         The woman stared past Sam, her dark pupils dilated to take in the horror of this summer night. Deep creases lined her face, and she had tied her hair in a gray bun. She had perfect-looking teeth that couldn’t be real. “They--they shoot my husband!”

         “Who did, ma’am? Who shot your husband?”

         “
They
shoot! They shoot my husband!”

         “Who are they, ma’am? Do you know their names?”

         She looked down at her lap. Teardrops formed pools in her glasses. “No, I never see them before.”

         “How many were at the door?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Then they didn’t come in and rob you?”

         The woman shook her head.

         “How many did you see?”

        
“Just one.”

         “Did he say anything?”

         “No.”

         “But you think there were others?”

         “I don’t know!”

        
“The man who shot your husband.
What did he look like?”

         “I don’t know.
Already so dark!”

         “Was he taller than your husband, or shorter?”

         She gasped for breath. “Maybe taller, I’m not sure.”

         “Could you tell if he was American or Asian?”

        
“No-o-o!”
Her answer became a wail.

         “What is your husband’s name?”

        
“His name Bin Chea.”

         The name sounded familiar to Sam, but he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was someone he’d met in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand. Chea was a common enough Cambodian name, though, and he could have heard it anywhere.

         “How old is Mister Chea?”

        
“He already sixty.”

         “Do you have any idea why someone would do this to him?”

         She closed her eyes and shook her head. The glasses drained tears onto her cheeks, and a few strands of hair stuck to her face. Her lips quivered.

         Sam touched her hands, which looked raw from scrubbing. “I’ll have to ask you to officially identify him,” Sam said. “Do you think you can do that? And we’d like permission to search the apartment.” She nodded, and Johnson handed Sam a clipboard with forms and a ballpoint pen attached. What a lousy time for paperwork. Sam helped her fill out the forms. She signed them, her hands shaking.

         Above the squawk of police radios, DeVito greeted the M.E. in the living room. Sam nodded to Dr. Katsios and stepped past Bin Chea’s feet, avoiding the blood as he walked toward the kitchen.

         “He’s dead all right,” Katsios said.

         DeVito laughed. “Hear that, Sam? My hunch was right. Was it the head wound, doc?”

         “Shut up,” Katsios said.

         “Show some respect,” Sam said.

         “Lighten up,” DeVito said. “The guy can’t hear us.”

         Sam walked into the kitchen with his hands behind his back. The stove looked brand-new, the counters were spotless, the sink had no dishes in it, and the crisp white curtain on the back window appeared to be freshly washed. The kitchen floor was bright and shiny, the way kitchen floors look in television commercials. On the kitchen table sat a bottle of chili peppers and three half-eaten bowls of rice-and-chicken soup, the
kao poun
he used to eat as a child. A Bic lighter and an unopened pack of menthol cigarettes sat like paperweights. Underneath
lay
a lottery ticket and a stack of mail. Sam flipped through the mail with the button on the top of his pen. A grocery circular, some third-class stuff addressed to Resident, an envelope marked “Extremely Urgent” in preprinted pink and addressed to “Bill Shea.” It was unopened. Either Chea didn’t read English very well, or he’d gotten wise to American mail-order gimmicks. Sam had gone through his own mail the night before, so he knew it was an offer for time-sharing condos.

         There were also bills from the electric and telephone companies. The envelopes were sliced open neatly. Sam held each by the edges and shook out the contents.

         The phone bill listed calls to Providence, Bangor, and Long Beach.
Two pages of them, most to the same three or four numbers.
At the bottom of the stack was a mortgage bill from the Cornerstone Savings Bank. This guy must have been the landlord. Maybe he’d evicted the wrong person.

         In the wastebasket under the sink were an envelope and
a news
clipping that sat on top of a pile of coffee grounds. He lifted it as carefully as he had the mail on the table. It was addressed to Bin Chea, with a 952 zip code on top of a flag stamp. The rest of the postmark was illegible.
West coast, maybe California.
Top of the trash.
May have shown up in today’s mail.

         Besson, one of the techs, held open a plastic bag. Sam dropped the envelope inside. Then he did the same with the clipping.

         Through the clear plastic Sam saw the photo of a man, his eyes blacked out with a ball-point pen. Long, sharp teeth made him look like a cartoon Satan. The back of the clipping looked like part of a cigarette advertisement: “Alive with Pleasure,” it said. There was no other writing on either side. In the white margin at the edge of the page were two words in Khmer handwriting: “We know.”

        
What
do we know? What secrets had finally unraveled on the victim? Had he failed to follow the path of his ancestors?

         DeVito walked into the kitchen. “So the guy blasts a sawed-off shotgun on the fourth floor, and he gets away just like that,” he said. “Took a real chance with all that noise, doncha think? Lot quieter if he’d of just torched the place.”

         Sam touched his wrist without thinking, and felt the old scar from Callahan’s accident. God, he hated fire. “Maybe he wanted to see his target so he didn’t risk twenty or thirty homicides. He might have wanted revenge against a particular person.”

         The ambulance arrived out front, and as Johnson escorted Mrs. Chea past the body, she averted her eyes.

         For the next twenty minutes Sam inspected the apartment. In the bathroom, the medicine chest seemed to have the usual array of lotions and remedies. The bottles were lined up by size with the labels facing out, and the sink was dry and spotless. Sam could see how Mrs. Chea spent her time. Her knees must have been as red as her hands.

         Something else seemed odd about this place besides the obsessive cleanliness, but Sam couldn’t figure out what it was. He walked back into the victim’s bedroom. The king-sized bed was made up, but rumpled from Mrs. Chea’s tight grip. Sitting on the telephone table was the current issue of
Cambodian Voices
, a weekly community newspaper printed in the flowing Khmer type. The mailing label was addressed to Bin Chea. In the headline, the Khmer Rouge threatened to disrupt the Cambodian elections. Voters risked death.

         The bedroom floor was polished wood that was free of dust, but scuffed near the base of the bed.
That seemed odd, a smirch in the midst of all the cleanliness in this room.
Could there have been a fight? On opposite walls sat matching dressers. They didn’t look like anyone’s hand-me-downs donated by a church charity or bought at a second-hand store. They looked first class, like furniture that he and Julie couldn’t afford on their two salaries. There probably weren’t even dust balls under the bed. When he kneeled to look, he saw that he was right: the floor seemed equally clean almost everywhere. In the closet, he found clothes spaced evenly apart on hangers, and shoes lined up neatly. The effect was cold and unpleasant, as though the bedroom had never seen love. Had the victim and his wife gotten along?

         In the other bedroom, a television and expensive-looking tape recording equipment stood against one wall next to orderly cardboard boxes of audio and video cassettes. Taped to one of the boxes was a piece of paper marked “Paradise” in English.
A sideline business, maybe?
Thirty thousand Cambodians in Lowell made a great market for bootleg entertainment. Thousands ached for home, dreamed of returning, clung to scraps of their culture. Some had returned to help with the elections, even to run for an assembly seat in the new government. They would return to rebuild their home.