The Dark Root (17 page)

A couple of cars later, a new team sauntered onto the receiving apron, replacing Sally’s crew in a ritualized exchange of physical and verbal insults. A few rags flew through the air, a sponge or two was thrown at a ducking head, and then she was walking down the sidewalk after punching out, her square, compact body straining the fabric of her damp uniform T-shirt.

I started up my engine and slowly drove up alongside her as she walked. “Hey, Sally.”

She barely glanced at me, her face still flushed from the enjoyment of her boisterous departure. I was happy to see she was in a good mood. “Hey, yourself, Gunther.”

“Got time for a chat?”

“’Bout what?”

“I’ll buy you dinner.”

She stopped and gave me a dubious look. “Where?”

“Your call.”

Her face cleared. “Yeah! No shit. How ’bout Toney’s?” She pointed to a tiny grocery store on the corner where Elm Street slopes away from Canal to cross a bridge over the Whetstone Brook. The store served grinders from a rear deli counter, the quality of which was famous all over town. A good many of the department’s patrol division considered this an altar of affordable
haute cuisine
.

“You got it,” I agreed and parked by the curb.

She ordered meatball, and I, despite knowing Gail was making something at home, had a bag of chips and a Coke. After receiving our food, Sally led the way outside and headed back up the street toward the recently opened Little Caesar’s. “Wanna dine with a view?” she cracked over her shoulder.

She entered the fast-food restaurant’s parking lot, walked to the rear, and plopped herself down on one of the six-foot-long concrete wheel stops marking the lot’s boundary, using the bumper of a parked car as a backrest.

“Wicked, huh?” She gestured out ahead of us as I settled down next to her. The ground fell away precipitously at our feet as a fifty-foot embankment went in search of the winding Whetstone Brook far below us. There was a wide field between the foot of the grade and the water’s edge, choked with brush and weeds, strewn with trash and garbage, and occasionally clotted with larger items like a stray grocery cart or a gutted sofa. On the distant bank was a holding yard for a lumber company, with metal-roofed sheds and bundled stacks of boards on pallets, and beyond that lay most of lower downtown Brattleboro, climbing, street by parallel street, back up the more gradual opposing slope.

It was the kind of gritty, blue-collar urban view to make a tough kid’s spirits soar. I looked out the corner of my eye at her pleased expression, her mouth already smeared with tomato sauce, and couldn’t resist a matching smile of my own. “Yeah, wicked.”

She took another wolfish bite and spoke through her food. “So, you and Ron almost bought the farm. That why you’re here?”

She remained, in her fashion, a businesswoman.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Did you or anyone else know a home invasion was in the works?”

Her chewing slowed. I could sense the caution lights going on in her head. “That’s what those people do. It’s not the first time it’s happened. You guys just walked into it.”

“So did Vince.”

She stopped chewing altogether and looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We figured something was going down—that’s why we followed Leung home. How did Vince know where to show up?”

In point of fact, we knew Sharkey had been watching Vu. What bothered me was his timing, which smacked of a double setup. The only catch was that, in order to make it work, the person pulling the strings had to have known about the home invasion.

The sandwich forgotten, she twisted around to face me bodily, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You wanna shit or get off the pot?”

I gave her a scenario I thought she might accept, and maybe even confirm. “Vince was suffocating under Benny, but he didn’t have the balls to do anything about it—until Sonny showed up, or at least Michael Vu in Sonny’s name. A deal was cut. The Asians would remove Benny if Vince set him up. In exchange, Vince would replace his boss, and then allow Sonny a large hunk of the local action, something Benny had refused to do.”

“And you think they planned to off Vince?” Sally reinterpreted. “A double cross?”

“Maybe,” I countered and edged closer to where I wanted to be. “And maybe not. As things turned out, Vince almost killed Vu. If it hadn’t been for us, he might’ve succeeded, even as high as he was. So if Vince was set up, it means someone was after him and Vu both—or at least didn’t care which one got whacked.”

Sally turned away, ostensibly to face the view, but I thought in fact to avoid making eye contact. “So what?” she asked rhetorically.

Her studied vagueness was encouraging.

“C’mon, you’re one of four or five people at most who make things happen in this town.”

She snapped back around to glare at me. “What the fuck’re you gettin’ at? I don’t have anything to do with the slopes, and I didn’t whack Vince. He was a loser.”

I smiled guilelessly at her. “You and I know that. Somebody didn’t.”

“The fuckin’ Chinese,” she tried again. “If they set Benny up, why not Vince, too?”

I shook my head. “Using Vu as bait? Doesn’t make sense.”

There was a prolonged pause as she stared out at her view. Finally, she let out a sigh and chucked the rest of her meal down the embankment, paper wrapper and all. We both watched it tumble and roll, disgorging its crimson contents as it went.

What she said then exposed her confusion. “You’re sayin’ somebody put Vince up against the chinks, knowing you guys might take ’em both out?”

“I’m saying Benny’s death created a vacuum that more than one person wanted to fill. Vince spent the entire night winding himself up and could barely see straight when he pulled that gun on Vu. We talked to the people who got high with him. They don’t think the party was Vince’s idea—they felt the glue and dope were supplied by someone else, and that Vince was as happy as they were to get it. You got any ideas about that?”

She made a face and spat into the dirt between her tattered sneakers. “You could ask Alfie Brewster. He and Vince didn’t get along, and he sure doesn’t like what’s goin’ on.”

“You think he could’ve manipulated Vince into confronting Vu?”

“He’s a smart guy, and he’s running scared as shit now. After the shoot-out, first thing I heard was Alfie had called in some buddies from Springfield, Mass., to back him up.”

“They here now?” I asked, not bothering to hide my surprise. If she was right, Brewster’s reaction would fit a man whose plans had backfired. Also, if Vu and Brewster both knew that the latter had tumbled to the home invasion ahead of time, then Vu would now have good cause to go after Brewster.

“Oh, yeah. Alfie’s takin’ good care of ’em—for as long as he can. His stock is a little low.”

His “stock,” we both knew, primarily meant girls, most of them very young.

“So what happens when the entertainment runs out?” I asked.

“Who the shit knows? They either leave town or they start throwing their weight around. Alfie’s just adding to the problem, if you ask me.”

I tried for some specifics. “And what is the problem, from where you stand?”

She shook her head and then looked at me steadily. “You’re not going to like it. The other reason Alfie got some troops is that Michael Vu is really ripped over what happened. Losin’ his boys like that makes him look bad—there’ve already been a few jokes about it. You might want to check out Lenny Roberts if you don’t believe me. He gave Vu some lip, and Vu damn near took his head off.”

“Hit him?”

My enthusiasm gave me away. She smiled bitterly. “Forget it. If you want to get Lenny to press for assault ’n’ battery, you’ll have to find him first, and then you’ll have to convince him that talking to you isn’t the same as a death wish. He was scared shitless, and so are most of the rest of us. Michael Vu isn’t fuckin’ around anymore.”

Her eyes widened suddenly as she thought of something else. “You know, all your bitchin’ and moanin’ about who’s setting up who… You were the one who yanked Vince’s chain. Got him so pissed off he couldn’t see straight. But now that he tried to whack Vu, you’re running around planting ideas that somebody else set him up. Scared they’re going to figure out you fucked up big time?”

But she missed her target. Instead of hitting what was in fact a guilty soft spot, she brought back what I’d mentioned earlier to Sammie. I hadn’t set Vince against Michael Vu. I’d set him against Sonny. So what had made Vince go after Vu?

“Sally,” I asked her, “have you ever actually met Sonny?”

She looked away again. “Sure.”

Her brevity told me otherwise. The trick was going to be forcing her to admit she was lying without making her look bad. I faked a surprised reaction. “That makes you the only one in town who has—the only one who can pick him out of a mug book, or prove he was in Bratt when this whole thing comes to trial.”

“I didn’t say I met him face to face,” she snarled, her face flushing. “It was on the phone… Once,” she added for safety’s sake.

“It’s been Vu from then on?”

“Yeah.” She hesitated and then said belligerently, “And from what I hear, you better hope you don’t meet Sonny, either.”

“What’s that mean?”

She stood up, suddenly restless to get away from this conversation. “That means, Joe Gunther, that the best way for a guy like Sonny to take back the juice is to whack a cop.”

· · ·

One of the selling points of the house that Gail and I had bought together was a rear deck with a huge maple tree growing through the middle of it. During the winter, we, or lately I alone, had sat by the sliding glass door of the living room and watched the snow settle around the tree in a perfectly flat plane, setting it off so that it looked like a bonsai arrangement with hormone problems, towering overhead, white and crystalline, isolated in its own natural beauty.

I was sitting beneath it now, in the pink afterlife of the setting sun, listening to a soft breeze rustling its new leaves, and keeping out of sight of the two cars parked on the street out front. Both of them contained reporters from out of town. They’d shouted questions at me after I’d parked in the driveway, but Gail’s earlier warnings to them had obviously been dire enough to keep them from actually stepping onto the property.

Gail came out with a soda water, and a Coke for me. “You look like you had a rough day.” She nodded toward the road. “Were there a lot of them at the Municipal Building?” She stretched out onto the lawn chair next to mine and tilted her head back to enjoy the branches above us.

“They’ve made the central hallway look like a panhandlers’ convention. Every time any of us cuts from one side of the building to the other, we run the gauntlet. Tony’s scheduled two update sessions a day, upstairs in the selectmen’s room, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

She reached out and took my hand in hers. “They came by here so often, I finally went to the library to work. What’s the mood like at the police department?”

“Not good. You see the paper?”

She nodded. “It’s in the kitchen.”

“Willy said the only section not covering the shooting is the funnies page. He’s not far off. They feel like they’re under a microscope, and they don’t like the second-guessing that’s already started—excessive force, endangering the public, all the rest. There’s a rumor that one of the Leungs’ neighbors is considering a lawsuit because of the stress we put them through. I had a meeting with the squad this afternoon—just to make sure everyone’s on track—and you could’ve cut the air with a knife. Only Dennis was normal… Oh, and Ron’s on administrative leave. Seems like the shooting totally pulled the rug out from under him.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“I tried to—spoke with Wendy instead. Anyway, it means we’re a man down.” I took a long swig from my Coke. I didn’t bother mentioning Sally Javits’s last words of warning.

“I take it the case isn’t going too well, either?” Gail commented gently.

“I’ll give you an example. There may be a crooked credit-card angle tied into the Thomas Lee home invasion, so I called the investigation branches of some of the major card companies and told them I was worried about a possible fraud taking place at the Blue Willow Restaurant in Brattleboro, Vermont. I could almost hear them yawning. They told me—though not in so many words—that certain losses are built into the budget, and that any fraud emanating from a Podunk backwater like ours wouldn’t amount to much. They took down the information and thanked me very much, but you know what that means.

“Any other time, we get one dead body, we know pretty much what to do about it. Now we’ve got five and we’re basically nowhere. And on top of that,” I concluded, “I’m no longer sure the guy I’ve been after isn’t a figment of somebody else’s imagination.”

“I’ve lost you, Joe,” Gail said, smiling at my rambling.

“No one’s ever set eyes on the mysterious Mr. Sonny. I’m beginning to think Michael Vu made him up.”

The phone rang inside the house. Gail moved to answer it, but I got to my feet first. “I thought that damned thing was off the hook.”

She gave me a warning look. “Dinner’ll be ready in five minutes, okay?”

It was Dennis DeFlorio. “Hi, boss, sorry to call you at home, but I got something I thought you’d like to hear right away. Remember you asked me to look into Michael Vu’s background in California, for something beyond his rap sheet?”

I shifted my weight impatiently. I’d received this update right before I’d gone out to meet Sally Javits. “Yes.”

“I think I might have found something. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with Vu, but Sammie was real excited about it.” He paused, as if he’d just given me something I could work with.

“Keep going, Dennis,” I encouraged him, used to his style.

“Right, well, after you left this afternoon, I got hold of a cop who’d dealt with Vu. He wasn’t real helpful—friendly enough, but kind of busy. I got to talking to him about what had happened here, you know, trading war stories and stuff, and I mentioned Henry Lam. He jumped on the name, said he’d dealt with Lam as a juvie. ’Course, it was a long time ago and, like I said, he was busy, but he told me to talk to a caseworker who’d handled Lam early on, from when he first came to America. He said this caseworker was super-involved with the Asians—that since he was retired now and a regular civilian again, he’d probably be free to give you the lowdown on Lam and maybe some of his buddies.”