The Dark Root (27 page)

“And what about the others?” I asked.

“They kept to themselves—maybe fifteen of them at any one time, all living in that one place. We always figured it was part of a pipeline, but that’s not our jurisdiction. Like I said, we got bigger problems.”

That sounded familiar. I looked up and down the block and then checked my watch. It was getting near suppertime, and the sky just beginning to fade. “Where’s the nearest dive? Bar, dance club, whatever?”

He gave me a quizzical look and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “A few blocks down west. Why?”

“I was thinking if I drove a fancy car and strutted my stuff, I might want to unwind someplace with the boys.”

Rawlings gave me the grin of a man suddenly catching the scent of something interesting—a pure cop’s reaction and totally at odds with his tweedy appearance.

“Right,” he said slowly and appreciatively and began giving me directions.

Unfortunately, that first stop came to nothing. The owner of what turned out to be a threadbare, pleasant, neighborhood bar not only didn’t recognize the picture of Chu I was carrying with me, he didn’t think a single Asian had ever crossed his threshold.

The same held true for the next two places we visited. Rawlings shook his head as we got back into the car. “This could take a while, Lieutenant. If they didn’t frequent the local bars, then we’ve got a shitload to choose from. Rutland has no shortage of gin joints.”

“How ’bout karaoke bars?” I asked, suddenly inspired.

“Where you sing along with the music?” he asked dubiously. “Yeah, we got one of those.”

We left the west side and went up the hill to the gaudy Route 7 strip, eventually pulling into the parking lot of a building so shoddily built under its camouflage of blinking neon it looked ready to fall apart. But by this time it was almost eight o’clock, and Mort’s, as it was called, was dressed to do some serious, if low-rent, business. Inside, the light was dim and bizarre, supplied mostly by blinking Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling. The music was low and schmoozy. Unfortunately, the magic wasn’t working—the place was almost empty. The karaoke fad, it seemed, was on the skids, and I was pretty sure we were about to strike out again.

The bartender greeted us with the traditional, “What’ll it be, gents?” as we selected two stools from among the twenty-some available.

Rawlings did his tactful bit with the badge while I groped for the picture inside my jacket. “You ever cater to any Asians?” I asked in the meantime.

The bartender was an amiable-looking bald man with a close-cropped beard, as perfectly suited physically to his job as if he’d come from central casting. He kept wiping a small glass he was holding with a damp rag, just like in the movies. “Sure. They like to do that sing-along crap. Terrible singers. Buy a lot, though.”

“How ’bout this guy? Ever see him?”

He looked at the photograph closely, even taking it under a small light suspended over the cash register. “He doesn’t look too healthy.”

“He’s not.”

He returned the picture gingerly. “Can’t say I have. I’m not too good with faces anyhow. You guys want anything?”

I didn’t know later if it was inspiration or dumb luck, but I said yes, and ordered a tonic water with a twist. Rawlings merely shook his head and swiveled around to look at the gloomy room.

The bartender returned moments later with my drink and volunteered, “You know. You might try one of the girls. They spend every night staring into guys’ faces, making ’em feel good.”

He indicated a corner table, far from the bar, where three shadows were hunched together over their drinks.

With Rawlings in tow, I walked over to the table, noticing that the closer I got, the more the three women took notice and changed accordingly. Their bodies moved slightly away from the table, the better to be seen, legs were crossed, lips moistened. There was an inaudible comment followed by a shared dirty laugh just before we got within earshot.

My glass still in hand, I smiled down at them. “Hi. Mind if we sit down?”

Two of them were brunettes, the third in blonde disguise. They were all weighted down by an excess of makeup and cheap jewelry, but their enjoyment, perhaps lingering from the joke we hadn’t heard, seemed genuine. The blonde indicated the only empty chair at the table, while one of her friends pulled another one over from the next table. “Please do,” she said.

“You from out of town?” asked the third. “I know we’ve never seen you in here before.”

“I’m from Brattleboro,” I answered and pointed at Rawlings, “but he’s local.” Rawlings smiled tightly and nodded, distinctly uncomfortable, and unsure of my strategy.

“What’re your names?”

“I’m Joe. He’s Sandy and, to be honest with you, we’re both flying under false colors.”

The three women quickly exchanged glances. “What’s that mean?” one of them asked.

“We’re cops. I’m investigating a homicide and Sandy’s helping me out here in Rutland—what they call a liaison.”

“You got badges?” the older of the two brunettes asked.

“Sure.” I whipped my shield out and placed it on the table before them. Rawlings followed suit more slowly. The three of them bent over to read the fine print in the dim light.

“Joe Gunther,” read the blonde, her voice warming back up. “You been in the papers?”

“Sure,” one of her friends answered. “And on TV. You were the one that got knifed last year—the one that got that rapist.”

I signaled to the bartender and ordered another round, “for the ladies.” I could feel Rawlings wilting beside me as I fed their curiosity about the case they’d alluded to.

“So now you’re working on a homicide?” asked the blonde sometime later. She’d introduced herself as Kim, and her friends as Mona and Candy. “That car bombing?”

“It’s connected to it.”

Rawlings let out a small sigh. Rule one in law enforcement—among dozens of others—was not to show your cards unless absolutely necessary, especially to civilians. It was, however, one I broke often to great benefit. Since the public had come to see us as tight-mouthed and generally aloof—answering every question with a question—I’d found the best way to win them over quickly was to be just the opposite.

The proof that it worked, at least occasionally, was evidenced by Kim’s understandable delight. “No kidding? That made the national news.”

I now reached for Chu’s photograph and laid it face up on the table. “Does he look familiar?”

Kim made a face. “Ooh, he looks dead.”

“I know him,” said Candy, who up to now had been the quietest of the trio. “I went out with him maybe a month ago. He was a creep.”

Everyone turned toward her, and she seemed momentarily tongue-tied at her abrupt notoriety.

“Could you tell me about it?” I asked.

“Not that much to tell. A bunch of them came in here one night. Mona and Kim weren’t around, and I was feeling lonely. They were throwing lots of money around, and this guy started buying me drinks. It was fun for a while. They sang at the machine—got me to do it, too…”

“Candy,” Kim burst out, almost in outrage, “you always hated that thing.”

“Well,” she came back defensively, “I was having fun. Anyway, after a while, he said he had a real nice car, and maybe I’d like to drive around a little. I knew what he was after—I mean, I’m not that dumb—but I thought he was pretty cute, and he talked funny, and the car was beautiful. I should’ve known it was going to get weird when his two pals came along…”

“Candy, you jerk,” Kim broke in again.

She didn’t argue the point. “Yeah—a drunk jerk, too. It started out okay, though. We did just drive around at first.” She gestured to the mug shot. “He found some back roads out of town and really opened that car up. It was fun. But they had a bottle with them and they started showing off, and next thing I know there was a gun being passed around…”

“Oh, my God,” Mona murmured. “You never told us any of this.”

Candy looked down at her lap. “I was embarrassed—maybe a little scared. There were three of them, after all. I know I shouldn’t have gone.”

“What happened with the gun?” I asked gently.

“I didn’t show I was getting nervous. I pretended to be impressed. They even let me hold it once. Then this guy here asked me if I’d ever shot one before. I had shot a twenty-two when I was little—my daddy’s gun—so that’s what I told him. He laughed and pulled over and fired the stupid thing right out the window. Scared the crap out of me. He tried to get me to shoot it and I wouldn’t. That’s when things kind of got bad. He put the gun away and made a pass at me, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore, and the other two being there put me off, too. It got a little rough, then. They started pawing me, ripping my clothes, trying to get at me…”

“Oh, my God,” Mona repeated. Kim was rapt, her mouth slightly open.

“I was fighting them off, and doin’ all right, since the car was too small for the guys in the back to do much, but then one of them hit me on the back of the head—maybe with the gun, I don’t know—and that sort of took the fight out of me. I figured, you know, what the hell? Just lie back, let ’em do it, and that’ll be that. What’s the fuss?” She added as a face-saving joke, “It’s not like I haven’t faked it before, right?”

But her eyes were brimming with tears, and Kim wrapped an arm around her.

“It didn’t happen, though,” she continued. “I guess I ruined it for everybody, ’cause they just threw me out of the car and drove off. So, other than a bump on the head and a ruined blouse, I was okay, except it took me over an hour to walk home. My feet ended up hurting worse than my head.”

Mona rubbed her friend’s back, repeating that she couldn’t believe Candy hadn’t shared this with them before.

“Candy,” I said, “are you up to answering a few questions about these guys?”

She nodded. “Sure. It actually feels pretty good getting it out.”

“Okay—easy ones first. What did this man call himself?”

“Bobby.”

I straightened slightly, caught off guard, and repeated inanely, “Bobby?”

“Well,” she amended, “he started out with something I didn’t understand—something Chinese or whatever—and then when I couldn’t get it, he said, ‘Just call me Bobby.’ And he introduced his friends the same way, as Frankie and Tommy, I think. I’m not positive about that.”

“Do you think you could describe either of the other two, including things like scars, tattoos, unusual eye color, anything like that?”

She hesitated and finally shook her head. “I was pretty far gone when I met them, and all four of us left almost right after. Plus they ended up in the back seat.” She grimaced apologetically. “I’m sorry, Joe, all I can say for sure is that they were Oriental and didn’t have any beards or mustaches.”

“They never said if they were Vietnamese or Chinese or something else?”

“No.”

“That’s all right. Did they say where they were from? Or what they did for a living? Places they’d been recently? Any kind of chitchat you can recall.”

“Bobby did all the talking, I remember. The other two just laughed or said stuff in Chinese or whatever. He said they traveled around a lot, but when I asked what they did, he just said they were traveling businessmen.” Her face became suddenly animated, and she leaned forward. “That’s how the gun came out. Bobby was talking about business, and how he was going to make a lot of money soon. I was getting scared and pretty drunk, so I don’t remember exactly how it all fit together, but there was a definite connection—the gun was going to make him a lot of money.”

I couldn’t suppress a pleased smile. Just like Henry Lam, Chu Nam An seemed to be playing a bigger role in death than the one that had cost him his life. We still had one missing player in Benny Travers’s death, and if Chu was him—and had been paid for his services—that made it murder for hire, which was a federal crime, and yet another tidbit I could use to interest the FBI.

“Okay. Can you remember exactly where you were when Bobby did his target practice? Did he hit anything?”

She broke into a smile. “That’s easy. After they threw me out, I remember actually laughing about it. He’d shot at the broad side of a barn.”

“Did he hit it?”

“He couldn’t miss—that was the joke. We were parked right next to it.”

· · ·

The next morning, I steadied the ladder as J.P. Tyler carved away at a post in the dimness of an old broken-backed barn on the outskirts of Rutland. Sandy Rawlings watched from the side, along with the quizzical owner of the property.

Following Candy’s directions the night before, I’d driven Sandy out to the barn to confirm her story and had found that Chu Nam An had done much better than hit the “broad side of a barn.” Clearly visible in my headlights, we’d found a tight, ragged cluster of five bullet holes puncturing the old boards.

J.P. pocketed the chisel he’d been using and began descending the ladder. “Aside from the fact that it made for a hell of a lot of digging, you couldn’t have asked for a better target.” He paused halfway down and pointed to the opposite wall, where the group of bullet holes sparkled with the morning sun behind them. “First those boards slowed the bullets down, and then that beam was so rotten, it was like hitting cotton wool.”

He continued down and, at the bottom rung, held out his hand. Two slugs were nestled in his palm. “Almost perfect condition. The other three rounds missed the beam and went out the other side.”

“Can you tell what they’re from?” I asked, sure I already knew.

“A Glock—no two ways about it.”

WALTER FRAZIER'S VOICE WAS FILLED
with mock incredulity. “I guess this proves how crazy they are at headquarters.”

“You’re kidding,” I burst out, tightening my grip on the phone. “They bit?”

“All the way to the sinker. ’Course, matching the Rutland bullet to the one from Travers’s body and faxing the news to DC was a nice piece of work. They loved it, and to be honest, losing one of your own men had a big impact.”

I didn’t miss the irony of Dennis’s newfound stature in death. “So what’s next? A background check from the U.S. Marshals?”

“That’s pretty much done. I asked them to get it started after you and Dan left my office. A little unorthodox, but I thought it would help you hit the ground running.”