The Dark Root (18 page)

“Up-to-date information?” I asked, my interest caught. Lam’s only official appearance in the information network—that of his license registration—had been on the East Coast. This sudden California connection created a potential historical link to both Michael Vu and Truong Van Loc.

“I guess. He hasn’t been retired long.”

“This is good news, Dennis. Nice job. Did you or Sammie call him?”

There was a predictable pause on the other end. The response, when it came, fit Dennis like a glove. Having started out well, he was unsure of how to proceed. “No… Sammie told me to, since she’s kind of swamped, and I was about to, but then I figured if this guy is as good as the cop said he was, you’d probably want to talk to him anyway. You know—ask him things I wouldn’t think of, maybe.”

I smiled at the receiver and shook my head, all traces of my earlier depression washed away. “What’s his name?”

“Jason Brown.” He gave me the number. “That’s a business number. He works full-time as a hospice volunteer now.”

Gail appeared in the doorway as I was writing it down.

“Dennis,” I said, “if Willy’s around, put him on, will you?”

Kunkle came on the line a minute later, sounding peevish. “What?” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Relax,” I told him. “You’ll like this. Find Alfie Brewster. Sally Javits thinks Brewster might’ve set up both Vu and Sharkey for that shoot-out. Find out if he supplied Vince with the goodies for last night’s smoke-’n’-dope bash and if he knew about the home invasion ahead of time, okay?”

Predictably, Willy sounded suddenly more cheerful. “Sure.”

“But be careful,” I warned him. “Sally also told me he’s surrounded himself with hired help.”

Kunkle merely laughed and hung up.

“No dinner?” Gail asked from the door.

“Maybe. I’d like to see if I can contact this character first, if only to set up an appointment.” I checked my watch. “He lives in California—should still be at work.” I passed along briefly what Dennis had told me.

“Can I listen in? Sounds interesting.”

I hesitated a moment. It wasn’t a request she’d ever made in the past, nor was it even remotely within department rules. On the other hand, she and Tony Brandt were my two best sounding boards, and with Tony in his present mood, I wasn’t sure how much I could lean on him. Besides, I rationalized, with Gail’s ambitions to be a prosecutor, she was almost a part of the family.

“Okay,” I said.

She disappeared to turn off the stove while I dialed long distance. By the time she returned, a portable phone in hand, I was waiting for Jason Brown to come on the line.

“Hello?” His voice was deep, quiet, and curiously comforting—the voice of an older man.

“Mr. Brown, my name is Joe Gunther. I’m a lieutenant with the Brattleboro Police Department in Vermont.”

“Hello, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”

I found the lack of usual chitchat about Vermont and its quaint and provincial reputation—or my profession—reassuring.

“I’m on a bit of a fishing expedition, really. Did you ever have dealings with a young Asian calling himself Henry Lam?”

“Yes, I did,” came the immediate answer. “What’s he been up to?”

It was a fair question—Jason Brown didn’t know anything about me. But I also didn’t know him—or whether he and Lam had enjoyed a lasting friendship. Telling him right off the bat that I had killed him seemed a little impolitic.

I hedged a bit. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Ah.” Brown’s voice trailed off, and I heard the sense of loss in the brief silence. “I thought that might happen.”

“You had some trouble with him?” I asked diplomatically.

“Not personally,” Brown answered, “but he was more prone to the wrong sort of influence than some of them. He wasn’t very old when we met—just nine—but he’d had a terrible time of it and had already been in trouble a few times. Meeting him was a little like seeing someone just beyond your reach, sinking out of sight underwater.”

I could tell from Gail’s expression that she was as struck by the image, and the sympathy in Brown’s voice, as I was.

“How did he die?” came the inevitable question.

The truth would have been simply, “In a shoot-out with the police,” but I took a gamble that a little generosity would serve me well here.

“I’m afraid I had to shoot him. He opened up on me with a machine gun.”

The response was unexpected. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes. Some of my clothes got slightly shot up, but I’m fine. He was part of a home-invasion team, and my partner and I sort of stumbled into them. We don’t know who the other two were—they died, too. We’re trying to figure out where they came from, and why they were in our neck of the woods.”

“Yes, I don’t guess Brattleboro is much like L.A. Tell me something, these other two boys, were they younger than Henry?”

“They certainly looked it—mid-teens, I would guess.”

I could almost visualize him nodding at the other end of the line, reflectively taking his time.

I opened my mouth to say something, but Gail shook her head.

She was right. The next thing Brown said was, “Maybe I should tell you what I know about Henry Lam.”

I smiled at Gail and merely answered, “Please.”

“When I met him years ago, he was already as tough as nails, and God knows he should’ve been, considering everything he’d been through. He was Vietnamese by birth, but of Chinese heritage, which in Vietnam is a little like being black in the South in the fifties. After the Communist takeover, the fact that his father had been with the South Vietnamese Army made life pretty difficult for the whole family. Henry was only a year old when the U.S. was booted out of there in ’74, and his father tried to get by for about six years afterward.

“Around 1980, the whole family—Henry, his parents, and two sisters, one older, one younger—cashed in whatever savings they had and paid some crook for space on a boat heading out. Not surprisingly, things didn’t go well. It took me a while to get him to open up—although ‘open up’ is probably the wrong phrase with him—but I eventually found out what happened.

“The boat was just a small fishing rig—not designed to hold more than maybe ten people at most—and there must’ve been more than fifty on board. But the plan wasn’t to sail too far anyway. The boat owner was in cahoots with local pirates. About a day or two out to sea, he killed the engine, claimed it had broken down, and had them sit there in open water while he faked a repair job. Eventually, the pirates showed up on another, much bigger boat, and worked them over good and proper. Everyone was robbed, virtually all the women were raped, including Henry’s mother and older sister, and all the men and really small children—and Henry’s father and the other sister—were executed and thrown overboard.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Right. Hell of a thing for a seven-year-old kid. Anyway, the pirates took who was left with them, sold the women off as prostitutes—Henry never saw his mother and sister again—and were planning to sell the young males as slaves. At that point, things suddenly improved. There was a raid on the place Henry was being held, and the authorities placed him in a refugee holding camp for people hoping to come to the States.”

Brown paused a moment. “Is this more than you want to know?”

“No, no,” I answered quickly, amazed at my luck. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. Well, the camp was the pits—a training school for crooks and perverts, but it also provided one of the most effective networking systems I’ve ever seen. I mean, not all these camps are as bad as this one was—a lot of it depends on who’s running them and which country it’s in—but all of them seem to graduate refugees who keep in touch, no matter where they end up. The sense of village unity that most of these folks were born with is transferred onto the larger population of the camp. They become like family to one another. Whether they like each other or not, whether they’re crooked or straight, everybody ends up connected for life. Part of it’s because many of them spend years in the camps waiting for the chance to finally emigrate, but I also think it’s a little like a primer course in ghetto living. The strong ones, the ones with families intact, and especially the older adults, manage to survive. But the kids like Henry are pretty much doomed to end up in what the Chinese call the Dark Root, the underworld. They’ve got to hang onto someone, after all, and all that’s left are the slightly older, equally dispossessed male hoods. They’re a tiny minority of the overall population, but because of the social dynamics, they exert an incredible influence that ties into a heritage born of centuries of either foreign domination or dictatorial rule by feudal tyrants.

“In any case, by the time Henry got to California, he was a hardened crook, living off his fellow humans, dedicated to grabbing what he could get, and—although he couldn’t have articulated it—living totally without hope, resigned to having his life end violently at a moment’s notice.”

“How old was he when he reached California?” I asked.

“Nine. I met him less than a year later as part of my job. I was supposed to counsel and evaluate underage offenders, and then file suggestions that might help both them and the state find some common ground. Of course, almost none of the kids gave a damn anyway, and nobody in the bureaucracy either knew what my paperwork was for or had enough money to implement my recommendations. Kids like Henry just kept falling through the cracks, and getting into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Guns, drugs, gambling. Children are used as runners, lookouts, to hold contraband. The older ones know the judicial system doesn’t deal with minors well, so it doesn’t much matter if they get caught, since all we do is throw them back. But while Henry never played a direct role in any of the violent stuff, he saw it done often enough that he came to see it as normal behavior.”

“We think the group Henry was mixed into here has ties to Montreal.”

Brown laughed. “I’ll guarantee it, and to New York and Boston and Falls Church and Lowell and Bismarck, North Dakota, for all I know. I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I realize you’re trying to do your homework. I talk to the police a lot—or I used to—and the one thing I kept drumming into them is that they should throw out every preconception they have about organized crime when it comes to Asians. These people aren’t just mobile—they’re fluid, both geographically and in terms of alliances. I was always being asked, ‘What about this gang?’ or ‘What about that leader?’ or ‘Is this type of tattoo significant?’ But those labels will only mislead you. You’ll spend all your time trying to put together Cosa Nostra–type organizational charts, and by the time you’re done, none of the people you pegged down will be where they were when you started, and few of them will even have the same interrelationships. A leader in one group becomes a soldier in another. Enemies in one town become allies in another. That’s what living one day at a time really means.

“It’s true that there are established gangs out here—Born to Kill, Ghost Shadows, the Wah Ching, God knows how many others. Some of them have direct ties to the tongs in New York and even to the triads back in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and work almost like branches of a corporate whole. On an organizational level, they make the Mob look pathetic. But underneath that huge, interconnected, well-oiled machine, you’ve got dozens of nonaligned freelancers, like the people you’re probably dealing with.”

“I get what you’re saying, Mr. Brown,” I told him, familiar with much that he’d just told me. “But you said these folks keep in touch, so that no matter where they are, they’ve always got a place to go. If that’s true, then some of the same names must keep cropping up.”

“To a certain degree,” he agreed cautiously, “although many of them use our difficulty with their names against us, switching them around or changing them entirely. Henry Lam obviously wasn’t born with that name, for example, although it appears he kept it to the end. And we’re dealing in huge numbers here—while the criminal element is small in proportion to the overall Asian population, that population is still vast—the ‘overseas Chinese,’ as they call them, are fifty-five-million strong—so we’re talking about a criminal element of hundreds of thousands.”

“Have you ever heard of Michael Vu?” I asked almost abruptly, hoping to head off a far less pertinent lecture.

“No,” came the remarkably short reply.

I thought back to the name Amy Lee had given me. “How ’bout someone named Tri?”

“That’s a first name—right up there with ‘Bob’.”

That stung—intentionally, I thought. I didn’t bother with Ut or An—the two men killed at the Leung house—and sure as hell not Sonny. “Truong Van Loc?”

“No—sorry.”

“Edward Diep?”

“Lieutenant,” Jason Brown answered, his voice betraying his own thinning patience, “I don’t think this is going to get you anywhere. There are just under a million Vietnamese in California alone, not to mention countless Cambodians, Laotians, Chinese, Hmong, and anything else you can think of. You got lucky with Henry Lam. Given all I just told you about their mobility and numbers, I doubt we’ll be able to come up with another match.”

“One last name,” I asked, making even Gail’s eyebrows rise at my persistence. “There was a tattoo on the arm of one of the men who died with Lam, and under it were the initials CTG. Does that ring a bell?”

Brown burst out laughing. “My God, Lieutenant. You will make me eat my words, won’t you? Yes, it does. Are the initials in the web of the left hand, between the thumb and index?”

“Yes,” I answered, smiling with relief, “and the tattoo is of a crawling panther.”

“It stands for Chinatown Gang. They operated briefly in the Bay Area, and then were either absorbed by the bigger groups or dispersed. Now that you mention it, in fact, they were sort of like the gang you’re involved with—freelancers. They were trying to carve out some territory for themselves—make a name, gain some respect. That’s why the tattoo—they had big ambitions to become the next Born to Kill. But if you want to find out what really made them tick, talk to Nicky Tai. He used to run with them. He’s straight now—joined an uncle in the restaurant-supplies business. You’ll have to deal with him gently, though. He’s not a squealer. He left because Chinatown Gang collapsed and he had nowhere to go. Between you and me, he’d run out of gas, but whether he still has a sense of loyalty to that life, or he just knows that talking to cops is an unhealthy pastime, your profession will not be an asset to you.”