The Dark Root (19 page)

“All right,” I said as I wrote down the phone number and address he gave me.

“One last thing,” Brown added, his voice full of good humor. “Just to prove there are such things as miracles. I seem to remember that, as a little kid, Henry Lam used to hang out with Chinatown Gang. He was too young to merit a tattoo, and he moved with other gangs as well, but that’s another connection you might be able to use.”

I took one last shot, my eagerness overriding good manners. “Do you know if one of the other gangs he hung out with was the Dragon Boys?”

“I believe it was.”

I sat back in my chair, for the first time flushed with the feeling that I might be getting somewhere with all this. Michael Vu had been with the Dragon Boys also—back in the old days.

“Thanks for the information, Mr. Brown. You’ve been a glass of water in the desert.”

There was a telling pause at the other end. “Don’t make any assumptions, Lieutenant. You’ll never really get a handle on all this—no more than any of the rest of us.”

BEFORE SHE LEFT TO RETURN TO
law school early the next morning, Gail had persuaded me not to call Nicky Tai right off, as I’d been inclined to. She felt that Tai’s possible reluctance to talk to a cop should not be too quickly dismissed. Considering the potential value of the information I was seeking, she’d cautioned, a little time spent plotting the right approach might be a wise investment. I unhappily took her point and thus arrived at the office both impatient and hopeful, an attitude that was only somewhat alleviated by the discovery that two of the TV trucks had vanished overnight, and that the building’s central hallway was back to its usual abandoned self.

What J.P. Tyler had to tell me as I was finishing the night’s “dailies,” however—the reports filed by the graveyard shift—improved my attitude immeasurably.

“You got a second?” he asked, poking his head around the edge of my door frame.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I got the blood analysis back from Waterbury. Most of it’s definitely a match with Benny—except for what we found on the counter, under that broken glass cabinet door. That belongs to somebody else.”

I matched his pleased expression, recalling how dour the entire squad had been only last night. “Which means somebody’s running around with a pretty nasty cut.”

“And probably stitches,” J.P. finished for me.

Nicky Tai was suddenly bumped from first priority. I reached for the phone to call Billy Manierre, speaking to J.P. as I did so. “Round up all the free hands you can and put them onto every doctor, ER, and clinic you can think of. We’re looking for a young male Asian with a bad cut, probably on the hand or arm, but maybe the head, who came in the day Benny died or shortly thereafter. I’ll tell Billy you’re on the way over to raid his manpower. And find Kunkle. I want an update on what he found out about Alfie Brewster.”

· · ·

One hour into our telephone survey, Dennis DeFlorio appeared before my desk.

“Got something?” I asked him.

He looked at me quizzically for a moment, then shook his head. “No, I’m still phoning. I just got a fax from that cop in California. It’s nothing much—what they had on Michael Vu and Henry Lam.”

“I thought they didn’t have anything on Lam, as an adult, I mean.”

He looked down at the sheets in his hand. “No felonies. He did some misdemeanors. Most of it’s technical junk—date of birth, an address, a description—nothing much.”

“Okay. Give it to Sammie. And, Dennis?” I added as he turned to leave, “I found out last night that the tattoo and the CTG initials on the shooter called Ut probably come from California, too. Locate every anti-gang squad you can out there, especially the ones specializing in Asians, and get them copies of both the tattoo and of Ut’s mug shot from his autopsy file. CTG stands for Chinatown Gang. They operated in the Bay Area, so you might try San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland first. You seen Willy, by the way?”

“Nope.”

A shouted, “Yesss,” from the squad room suddenly drew our attention. Sol Stennis, who was working Ron’s phone, stood up and announced generally, “Keene, New Hampshire—the Cheshire Medical Center. They treated somebody late on the night of the murder. A deep cut to the back of the right hand—eight stitches. He even said he’d cut it on a broken window.”

“When’re the stitches due to come out?”

“Tomorrow.”

I stepped into the squad room and spoke loudly enough that they could all hear me. “Okay. Contact everyone you’ve either called or will call and tell them to be on the lookout for a young Asian male wanting those stitches removed—just in case he decides not to go back to Keene. Sol, you go to Keene with the Ident-i-kit and our mug-shot album and either get a description or find a match, along with any paperwork they’ll volunteer to hand over. If they hedge at all, get a subpoena. Once you’ve done that, have J.P. generate copies and have ’em delivered to everyone on the phone list. Stress to these people that all we want is a phone call, though. They are not to do anything beyond what they’d normally do, and they are not to let on that we’re interested in this man.”

I headed back to my office and then called out to Sol.

He turned, his phone already in hand. “What’s up?”

“This is probably a long shot, but when you’re over there, find out if they took any blood samples. If they did, and if they kept them, we can get a subpoena for them, too, and try for a DNA match with what we’ve got.”

Stennis nodded and began dialing. Satisfied I’d done all I could for the moment, I returned to my cubbyhole, closed the door, and dialed the phone number Jason Brown had given me last night.

It was, as he’d mentioned, a restaurant-supplies company, so it took me a few minutes—and a few extra seconds for reflection—to reach Nicky Tai.

Gail had been concerned that if Brown’s character sketch of Tai was correct, then the only reason the ex-gang member would speak to me was if he had something to gain. In my little world of Brattleboro snitches, that meant either money or leniency, but as Gail and I both knew, neither applied here. Unfortunately, that’s where our brainstorming session had stalled and why Gail had hopefully concluded that a few hours’ thought on the matter would probably yield results. I wasn’t so sure.

When he got on, Nicky Tai’s voice was cautious, almost wary. Clearly he was a man who didn’t much enjoy surprises. “Mr. Gunther? How may I help you?”

I dove right in. “It’s Lieutenant Gunther, actually, from the Brattleboro Police Department in Vermont. I’m calling on the recommendation of Jason Brown.”

The voice didn’t soften any. “Oh?”

“I called him last night to ask him something about his past experience with Asian teenagers.”

“Uh-huh,” Tai said dryly, making me sound blatantly disingenuous for having skirted the word
gangs
, which is what we both knew I was talking about.

“I better get straight to the point here,” I hurried on. “We’ve just had a shooting—a home invasion that went wrong. Three young men tried to extort money from one of our local businessmen—an Asian also—and happened to bump into a couple of our officers. All three were killed in a gunfight.”

Unlike Brown, he didn’t inquire about the officers or the intended victims.

“Anyway, we’re trying to find out who two of those three were.”

“And my name came up as someone with past experience who would talk to you.”

I paused a moment, wondering how to play this. Tai was well spoken, obviously bright, and apparently not given to snow jobs. I decided to reciprocate in kind. “Not really. Brown said you’d be pretty reluctant—that either you still had some fond feelings for your friends from the old days, or that you knew better than to talk to a cop.”

I sensed, however unconsciously, that I’d ruffled his pride. “Well, he’s wrong on both counts,” he answered sharply and then added with a hint of face-saving swagger, “although I haven’t made a habit of the second.”

“I understand that. What I’m after,” I continued, “or I think I am, is pretty much ancient history anyhow, so if I ask anything out of line, feel free to let me know. As far as I’m concerned, you’re doing me a favor here.”

“All right,” he said, cautious again, but seeming more in control.

“The only one of the three dead men we’ve identified was named Henry Lam—that’s how we made the connection to Jason Brown, who counseled him after he got to this country. Brown said Lam used to be a runner for Chinatown Gang back when you were a member.”

There was a moment’s silence on the line. “I remember Lam.”

That was the first hurdle, I thought. “What was he like?”

He hesitated again. Despite Tai’s denial of Brown’s appraisal of him, I sensed the man was in a quandary. Talking to me would have cost him dearly a few short years ago. Not talking to me now would make true the suggestion that he was still too scared.

“Dangerous,” he answered in my favor. “He was hard to control. He wanted to be a big man fast.”

“I understand he also ran with the Dragon Boys, among others.”

“That was done all the time. We all used kids.”

“One of the men killed with Lam was called Ut, and had CTG tattooed on his hand. Did you know him?”

His immediate answer was disappointing—and familiar. “Ut’s a very common name.”

I quickly moved along, not wanting to lose momentum. “All right. The man we think was running all three of them here used to be a Dragon Boy. His name is Michael Vu. Does
that
name ring a bell?”

Another long pause, this one filled with potential. With Michael Vu, I was no longer asking about “ancient history” or dead people, which meant the possible danger to Nicky Tai was no longer to his pride alone. “Why do you ask?”

I shored him up with a real concern of my own. “Two reasons. The obvious one is that I’m trying to file some paperwork and retire this case. The other one is that I don’t want the Asian population in general—such as it is here—tainted by something like this. Vermont is mostly white, rural, and lower-middle-class to poor, and racism is always just below the surface. If I can get a fast handle on who’s behind this, I might be able to nip a big problem in the bud.”

He thought about that for a few moments, weighing my sincerity. I was hoping I’d touched some portion of what had stimulated him to leave the gangs.

“I knew Michael,” he finally answered.

“Did he leave Dragon Boys?”

“I heard that. I don’t know where he went.”

“When was the last time you were aware of his being in California?”

“A few years ago—I don’t know exactly. We were not friends. Dragon Boys was one of the reasons Chinatown Gang was destroyed. They saw us as a threat and took out our leadership.”

“Killed them?” I was caught off balance, surprised that members of what I thought was a single gang might have once been bloody rivals.

“Yes. There was a shooting at a restaurant in San Francisco. Five of our people died. The police never brought any charges, but everyone knew it was Dragon Boys.”

“Did Michael Vu play a role in that?”

“He was a
ma-jai
then,” Tai said dismissively, “a street soldier. This was done by higher people.”

“So Dragon Boys became a major gang?”

“They got bigger. They absorbed some of our group, and others, too. Taking care of us gave them big face.”

Which probably explained what the one named Ut was doing working for Vu. “Did Michael Vu move up the ranks?” I asked.

“For a while. Then Dragon Boys began to fade. Their leadership got in trouble with the cops. People started to leave. There wasn’t as much room at the top as there had been. Michael Vu got stuck.”

“Sounds like a middle-management crisis,” I murmured as an aside.

He actually laughed, if only for a second, but it showed me how far we’d come in just a few minutes. “Yes. I guess someone made him a better offer.”

The whole Sonny-as-smoke-screen gambit rose anew in my brain. “Couldn’t he have just set up a whole new operation on his own?”

Tai hesitated and finally compromised. “Not the Michael Vu I knew. People change, of course.”

I remembered Heather Dahlin reporting how the Hartford Police had seen Vu meeting with anonymous parties in a motel. Her assumption that he’d been acting under orders apparently matched Tai’s reading of Vu’s character. “All right, do you have any idea who he might be working for? We’re starting to think the people who are giving us problems here got to know each other in the Bay Area.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me, Lieutenant. When CTG died out, many people went looking for new places to go.”

“Could I fly a couple of names by you?” I asked, my voice studiously nonchalant.

“You can try,” he said, back to his neutral self.

Not expecting to get much further than I had with Jason Brown, I began with Edward Diep and some of the people we’d seen most frequently in the company of Michael Vu. Nicky Tai showed none of Brown’s impatience with the process, but he was also no more helpful.

Until I mentioned Truong Van Loc.

“I knew a Truong On Ha. I think you’re talking about his older brother.”

I quickly pawed through the papers on my desk and retrieved the report I’d received months earlier on Truong Van Loc, following Marshall Smith’s now-famous traffic stop. As I’d remembered, On Ha was in fact the brother who’d been killed in a gang fight. “But you didn’t know the elder Truong?”

“No. I only saw him at the funeral. On Ha was one of the victims in that shoot-out I mentioned.”

Startled again, I blurted out, “But you said only the CTG leadership was wiped out in that.”

“No, no. You misunderstand. Truong On Ha was an innocent bystander—a waiter. He never had anything to do with the gangs.”

As in the cartoons of old, I felt a light suddenly snap on above my head. “And the older brother—Van Loc—was he in the gangs?”

“Not ours—or theirs—but I think he had been. But he’d dropped out, like I did.” Tai paused a moment, reflecting. “Lieutenant, are you familiar with the concept of karma?”

“What you do now may come back to haunt you later?”

“Crude, but close,” Tai conceded. “At the time of the funeral, it was said that Truong On Ha’s death was part of his older brother’s karma for his past activities.”