Little Mountain (9 page)

         “What time did you get here this morning?”

        
“I don’t know, it was just dark.
I was awake anyway, so I just came in. The boys are with Ellen’s mother. By the way--”

         Wilkins walked past them, then snapped his fingers and pointed. “Sammy.
Fitchie.
My office.
Now.”

         Wilkins looked as though he’d been sucking on a lemon. One of those clear plastic cubes sat on his desk, with photos of his girlfriend and her kids. Of Wilkins and his own kids, standing in front of a 4x4 with a trailer hitch. What star was the lieutenant hitching to? Later, Fitchie would tell Sam that the lieutenant’s ex-wife was on the bottom of the cube.

         “You more or less did the right thing,” Wilkins said. “Cash doesn’t just drop in your lap in the middle of a homicide investigation.”

         “It was a teenager,” Sam said, “or a man with a slight build.
Weighs one-fifty, maybe less.
Fancy running shoes with more tread than a Michelin tire.”

         Wilkins looked as though he were about to comment, but stopped himself. The rookie Garibaldi stood at the door, trying to get the lieutenant’s attention.

         “My prints will be on some of the bills,” Sam continued. “Who else’s are there, I don’t know.”

         “Lot of people’s prints will be on them,” Fitchie said. “So they may not tell you much.”

         Wilkins had old sweat stains under his arms, and he was starting to sweat again. Saving money on laundry, the extra cash could go right to alimony. “Fitchie’s right,” he said, “half the country could have handled the cash. Needle in a goddamn haystack is what you’re looking for.”

         “There will be fewer prints on the envelope,” Sam said.
“Mine, maybe the delivery guy’s.
He might not have touched the money at all; maybe he was just a runner. I have a bad feeling about this money. I gave Donegan a list of prints to check, Lowell’s ten least wanted.” Wilkins gave him a look. “The ten people we least want walking the streets,” Sam said. “It seems Bin Chea dealt mostly with Asians, so for now it’s mostly Asians on the list.”

         Fitchie jotted in his notepad.

         “Why do you want to lift prints off a gift?” Garibaldi asked.

         Wilkins scraped a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, and fixed his eyes on the rookie. “You know how I said there was no such thing as a stupid question? I was wrong.” Garibaldi winced; thirty years from now he would still be directing traffic, but Wilkins had taken a needless shot at him. “Anyway, we released Bin Chea’s body to his family.”

         Released the body? “What was the hurry?” Sam asked.

         Wilkins narrowed his eyes.
“Hurry?
You don’t approve?”

         “It’s not that at all, lieutenant. I just didn’t know we had the final ID.”

        
“Got a match on the prints last night.
You and Fitchie work as fast as the feds, we’ll clear this case up in no time.”

         Obviously, Wilkins knew all about Fitchie’s situation with Ellen. That Fitchie wouldn’t spend much time on the street until his crisis had passed. Meanwhile, Fitchie kept his emotions padlocked deep inside his soul.

         “Think we have to take a close look at the widow,” Fitchie said. “Chea left a two hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy behind. Wife’s the sole beneficiary.”

         Wilkins opened his palms in a there-you-have-it gesture. “Well, there’s
your
‘who benefits,’” he said. “The ones ya love, nine times out of ten they’re the ones who get ya. What else, Fitchie?”

        
“Checked some old notebooks after you called last night.
I’d spoken to a guy named Dith Chang once last
year,
we were watching a tenement burn. Smelled like arson, but we made no arrests. I just learned he did odd jobs for Bin Chea. But what’s interesting is who owned the house.”

         Sam leaned forward. “So who was that?”

         “I mentioned a trust, right? Who owned the house was Paradise Trust.
Bunch of properties, some decent, some kind of shabby.”
Fitchie handed Sam a list of addresses.

        
Comrade Bin.
Maybe this was his way of evicting a problem tenant, or maybe it was his way of trying to kill one. But what would Chang have to do with it? “Was anyone hurt in the fire?”

         “Couple of smoke inhalations, a firefighter with minor burns, could have been a lot worse.”

         “We have to find Chang,” Sam said.

         Wilkins slapped a folder on the table. “You gotta find a killer. If tracking down missing people will help that, fine. But the more time goes by, the more likely the killer’s hiding out in East Dog Crap and we’ll never find him. Why do you think he’s important?”

         “He may not be. But what if he does more than odd jobs for Bin Chea? Let’s say Chea wants to recoup an investment on a house. He can’t sell it for what he wants, or he can’t sell it at all. And let’s say Chang has a talent with matches.”

         “So Chang burns people out and Chea collects the insurance. Torches ‘R’
Us
, huh? Tell me how it connects with the murder.”

         “An angry tenant,” Fitchie said.
“Present or former.”

         Of course it could be true. The simplest, least exotic solution was often the best bet. The idea that someone would bring a grudge across the ocean, nurse that grudge for more than fifteen years,
perhaps waiting
patiently--what had he been waiting for all this time?
Opportunity?
Courage?
Had someone like Khem Chhap been searching all these years for the son of a bitch Chea? No, Lowell was such an obvious place to look that he couldn’t have been looking this long. Still, how often was eviction a motive for murder?

         “Chang wasn’t evicted,” Wilkins said. “
Which doesn’t mean jack about motive.
”

         “But say Mrs. Chea wants her husband’s insurance money and hires the handyman to shoot him. Or say Chea hires himself a firebug,” Sam said, “and say that firebug feels cheated by his employer. He quits and leaves town, planning to come back and kill his boss later.”

         “But Chea tries to track him down,” Fitchie said. “We traced the toll calls on Bin Chea’s phone bill.”

         “This shit’s all speculation,” Wilkins said. “What kind of numbers?”

         Fitchie blew out a deep breath.
“Households, mostly.
A couple of businesses too, and a pay phone.”

         “Give me a list so I can run them down,” Sam said. “And I’ll take your Paradise list.”

         “I already started making calls,” Fitchie said. “Take a look at this place in Providence first. “When I called, they didn’t speak any English. I’m guessing they’re Cambodian.”

         Wilkins cracked his knuckles and yawned. “What else?”

         “Gonzalez talked to this kid who calls himself Viseth Kim,” Fitchie said. “He’s a wise-ass Battboy.” Battboys were mostly into spray-painting rest rooms and public buildings.

         “I know him,” Sam said. “He’s got a history with us. Couple of B & E’s, but nothing stuck. Got a rumor some of these guys are terrorizing other Asians, but no one’s talking yet.”

         “Sammy,” said Wilkins, “
anybody seen
this Kim with a sawed-off twelve gauge?”

         “Lieutenant, would you please call me Sam?
Or Sambath?”

         “My, aren’t
we
touchy?”

         Yes, we are. Get our names right. “No, Lieutenant. I’m not. None of these punks normally keeps weapons like that. Cheap stuff they can hide is more their speed, like a .25-caliber.”

         “Well, aren’t
you
the freakin’
fountain
of knowledge? These kids do any dope?”

         “Half the kids on Mersey Street do dope.”

         “Is Kim our Mister Trigger-Happy?”

         “Maybe he knows something.”

         “Battboys are more or less a close group, though. They don’t snitch a lot.”

         “They don’t talk a lot, period.”

         Wilkins propped his elbows on his desk, and rested his chin on clasped hands. “You’re a trouper, Fitchie. Is all I got to
say.
Look, you should take some time off, be a husband and father--”

         “Thanks,” Fitchie said, “but a husband and father earns a living.”

        
“Exactly what you’ve been doing.
But your boys, your wife, they need you now.”

         “You need my help on this Bin Chea murder.”

         “What you need, my
friend,
is perspective. Knowing that in times of crisis, your family comes before your work.”
This coming from Wilkins, of all people.

         “I don’t--”

         “That’s why you’re taking three days off as of now. You need more time, you just call me and it’s arranged.” His fingers formed a church steeple, and his eyes filled with compassion.

         The meeting went on for another five minutes, with Fitchie mentioning that Samson Cleaners had an all-Asian cast. He hadn’t seen Nawath there. Finally, Wilkins closed his folder. “Okay, people. We’re more or less finished here. Sammy, you stay a minute.”

         Wilkins closed the door behind Fitchie. “I got a complaint from the hospital you got on that old lady’s case.”

         “How do you mean, Lieutenant?”

         “I mean sometimes you’re over-fucking zealous.”

         Wilkins acted as though Sam had been his burden for two years instead of two days. “What did I say?”

         “How should I know? You talked to the woman in
Cambodian,
you were the only one there who could talk to her. Hospital says you had the woman in tears.”

         “Of course she was in tears, Lieutenant. She just lost her husband, and it’s my job to ask her questions. For all I know, she hired the shooter.”

         “Bullshit, she’s not capable. Well, she’s out of the hospital now. I don’t want you being an asshole to the old lady. Just find out which Battboy pulled the trigger.”

         “Lieutenant, I also need to find out where this Khem Chhap is, and somebody should talk to those people at Paradise Trust.”

         “That’ll be your job.”

At his desk, Sam tapped away at a computer keyboard with his index fingers. The department was tied into a national network that kept track of Asian gang members, who tended to treat a coast-to-coast trip as casually as a drive to downtown Lowell. From this network, Sam knew of a dozen cross-country trips to Long Beach and Stockton by Battboys such as Viseth. The 952 zip code on Bin Chea’s hate mail turned out to be from Stockton, but the prints were smudged.

         Sam held down an arrow and the names scrolled up the screen. There was Viseth, but where was Khem Chhap? His name wasn’t on the computer list, but the list was probably nowhere near complete. If Khem did have anything to do with the killing, Sam suspected, he and Viseth were probably in on it together.

         Sam tucked the list of names and addresses into his shirt pocket. There were only three Khems in the phone book, but maybe he could get someone down at the station to check again. But if this fellow just drifted in from Long Beach or Providence, then the local phone book wouldn’t do Sam a lot of good.