Caught Dead (14 page)

“Why are you telling me?”

He reached into his wallet and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Because I think you already know.”

“I am the detective.”

“We're over twenty-one and single.”

“When's the last time you two were together?”

He actually blushed and looked away. “The night Molly was murdered.”

“I guess that explains why she's still glowing.”

He stood up. “I have that effect on women.”

Chapter Eighteen

Hank and I cornered Tommy at his father's grocery in Little Saigon. He was alone, sitting on a stool, playing a video game on his smartphone. “You looking for Pop? He's gone to the bank.”

We told him we'd stopped in to say hello, despite the fact that we'd sat in the car until we'd spotted Benny leaving the grocery and getting into his car. He never looked around him, head down, purposeful, unlocking the old Chevy, sliding in, glancing at traffic on the street, and driving away. Here was a man with little connection to the world around him.

“Yeah?” Tommy eyed us.

“What?” From Hank.

“I don't think you two are here to buy a fifty-pound bag of Thai rice.”

“I'm looking for one of those yummy cold-cut grinders,” Hank told him. “One of your famous
banh mi.
”
The familiar sandwich usually made with French bread, pâté, chicken, ginger, and onions.

Tommy yawned. “We're all out. I ate the last one.”

“How's your father doing?” Hank was looking around the room.

Tommy shrugged. “Moping around. He's lost interest in the store. I don't think he cares anymore.”

“And you?” Hank asked.

“Well, I didn't care shit to begin with. Look around you, man. This is my life. Partner in Daddy's rice hovel. Can't you smell the decay in the walls?”

The place was a shambles: a tiny corner store with Asian products strewn around haphazardly, some still in half-opened cardboard boxes piled in aisles. Cartons of canned soy milk. Bags of rice nearly blocked the front aisle, and the floor hadn't been swept in days. It had a funky smell. According to Hank, few folks shopped there, except some old buddies, loyal friends from the early days of his arrival in Hartford. As the Vietnamese community thrived, the area that came to be called, romantically, Little Saigon by the chamber of commerce witnessed an influx of entrepreneurial spirits, sons and daughters with degrees in Business Administration from the University of Connecticut. Soon glitzy bright stores opened on the strip, American style, with wide aisles, cruel florescent lighting, and zip-a-dee-doo-dah scanners at the registers. On Saturday you couldn't move in the parking lots. Cars with Rhode Island and Massachusetts license plates lined up, and the young professionals parked their red BMWs diagonally in two parking spots so that their cars and lives wouldn't risk dents. And at Benny's grocery, Vu Pham Market, an hour would pass, and an old woman would come in for
che ba mau
, a tricolor pudding that Mary used to make and sell. Or a neighbor would run in, in need of a tin of soy milk or a few sticks of lemongrass or a single piece of some fruit, like
du du
or
xoai
, papaya or mango.

“Your father works hard,” Hank grumbled, a little angry.

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Why do you work here?” I asked.

Tommy stared back, defiant, running his fingers over the gel-stiff Mohawk, today a mint green. “It's the closest I can get to getting free cigarettes and beer money, and not have to go to a real job.”

“Noble,” I said.

“And your snooping job is more noble?”

I didn't answer.

“Come on,” Hank pleaded. “We're here to help…”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” I went on, “I'm looking into your relationship with Molly's kids.”

“Kristen? Does she know the world exists outside her mirror?”

“I'm thinking about Jon.”

Tommy lit a cigarette and blew smoke at us. “I could give a fuck about him.”

“Didn't you threaten him once?”

Surprise in his voice. “How?”

“You suspected he ratted on you about drugs.”

Tommy laughed loudly, then started to choke. “One fucking moment in school, a couple of rolled joints, and a puff at a dance club—and Christ, I'm branded for life. Why is that coming up now? Who's talking about it?”

“Kristen, for one.”

“Yeah? What she say?”

“That Jon ratted on you and Danny.”

“Hey, everyone knew that—at least Kristen told everyone then. In secrecy.”

“And you wanted to hurt him?”

“Yeah, but what the hell. That was years ago. We were dumb kids.”

“Why would Jon rat on you?”

“You're not that bright, Rick Van Lam. Think about it. It had nothing to do with
me
. Don't you see? It was Danny he wanted to get at. Danny the wonder boy, Danny the great yellow hope. Get Danny in trouble—the hell with me, blood cousin. He and I actually got along. Neither of us liked anybody around us, and so we sort of found each other. But Danny got in the way.”

Hank shook his head. “But Danny got away with it. Nothing happened to him.”

“And I got probation, thanks to Fresh-Off-the-Boat daddy and mommy. Scare little Tommy into manhood. Well, it wasn't fun going to juvenile court, talking to the lawyers, afraid of being sent to Long Lane Detention. The whole shit. Thanks, Mommy and Daddy.”

“That wasn't Danny's fault.”

Again, the artificial laugh. “Everything is Danny's fault.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don't seem to realize how Danny fits into the life of the Torcelli-Vu community. Not that he did anything to make us hate him, but his
presence
alone. His
being
there. Don't you see? Handsome, charming, super intelligent, slick, athletic, you name it. He walks through a room, and the Torcelli-Vu world goes apeshit. Molly was afraid of him, Larry adores him like the son he never had, Jon hates him because he can never be as good, and Kristen throws goo-goo eyes at him and moistens her panties. And that's just the Torcellis. In the Benny Vu world”—he half-bowed—“of which I'm the shining example, he's the poor boy—like
me
, get it—who got the chance to shine. Unlike me, he did it. Honor student, future banker of America—the example of what me and my little New Age crystal-jingling sister can never be. And everyone keeps saying, ‘Look at Danny.'” His face got hard. “Look at Danny all right. Do you see why I don't give a rat's ass about him?”

“He paid a condolence call to you after your mom died.”

“Yes, Danny has a way of stopping in to remind us of what we are, driving up in a Mercedes and looking around my apartment like he's a social worker who's thinking of changing his job.”

“You used to be buddies.”

“I ‘used to be' a lot of things. I mean, we still talk and all. Facebook each other nonsense. ‘I'm going to Starbucks now.'” He laughed. “We don't come to blows.”

“What does he think of you?”

“You gotta ask him that. He stops in at the store now and then. Even at the house. We gab about…I don't know…music. Sports. Nonsense.” He looked around. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get ready for the Boat People who'll be here to buy scratch-off lottery tickets. The thing that keeps us afloat. As if coming to America wasn't a big enough gamble.”

“Tommy…”

“I don't see how any of this connects to the murder of my mother.”

“Maybe it doesn't.”

“Then it's over.”

***

Early that evening as the sun started to go down, the air still humid and sticky, Hank and I went for a jog. I tried to jog every other day, usually early morning, followed by a swim at the college pool. But lately I'd been sleeping later and later. This morning I'd got up late, sloshed through too much coffee, worked on my other cases—my tedious insurance fraud cases. I scribbled note cards on Tommy, Kristen, Jon, and, new to my pegboard, Danny. So when Hank called and said he wanted to jog around the West Hartford Reservoir—a lazy mile of water and pine and meandering collies and schnauzers—I said yes, come over. I thought I needed a run to clear my head.

The path was largely deserted at the supper hour, a few stragglers loping along with tired, panting dogs. It was sweltering out, and within seconds my T-shirt was plastered to my chest, my ankles ached, my sides burned. But eventually I caught my stride, and Hank and I cruised along, not fast not slow, comfortable enough to talk.

“I'm thinking Danny is somehow in this mix,” I told him. “But maybe unwittingly.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning everyone reacts to him. He's like the eye of a hurricane, there in the center, doing whatever he does, and all around him swim anger and jealousy and distrust.”

“But how do family squabbles lead to double murder?”

For a while we jogged without talking. Suddenly everything I'd been doing the past couple of weeks—all the conversations with family members, all the voyeuristic delving into their conventional pasts, even the pathetic rehashing of that simple marijuana bust almost a decade ago—seemed folly, a waste of everyone's time. I told Hank this.

“I know,” he said. “These kids do have a lot of baggage with each other, but it's all in the past. Prep school was their battleground.”

“But that incident in school keeps popping up. It's like it's not history, but something that happened yesterday. Which leads me to believe that maybe that story is still somehow relevant
now
.”

Back at the apartment Hank showered and dressed in clothes he'd brought with him. While I showered, he cranked up my stereo—I expected Gracie to bang on the ceiling with a broom—and drank a beer. Sprawled in a chair, I relaxed, feeling good, listening to the pleasant strains of Alicia Keyes.

“I was thinking about the kids while I was showering,” I told him. “Maybe something happened with them like the thing with Tommy and Danny, and of course that immediately involves the two sisters. That's what happened in prep school. The Tommy incident became warfare for everyone, mainly the grown-ups. Mary and Molly react for years to what their American kids are up to. They don't understand, and they overreact.”

“So you're saying maybe Mary and Molly found out something.”

“Maybe.”

“And it involved one or more of the kids.”

“Or maybe Danny.”

Hank bit his lip. “Probably not Benny or Larry. Both seem out of the loop. It's the mothers who maybe found something out.”

“So if there's an answer, it might lie in the kids. Maybe we're just not looking at this the right way.”

Hank nodded. “Maybe.”

“If I may quote Buddha: ‘If the glass appears empty, it is just because you have failed to observe its contents.'”

Hank shook his head. “I'll never understand half of what you tell me.”

Chapter Nineteen

The one person we hadn't paid much attention to was Tommy's younger sister Cindy, and Hank offered a reason—she hid in her eccentric clothing and her stark makeup. “She's created a caricature that keeps people away,” he summed up. “Her brother Tommy is a freak with his dark Goth clothing and chains. Jon is the Yalie with an attitude, and Kristen is the prom queen standing in front of a mirror, trying to remember her name.”

“But to hide what?”

We were sitting in my apartment, early afternoon, drinking iced coffee. Hank was chomping on a bag of chocolate-chip cookies he'd bought with him.

“You know, of all the kids, she's the one whose gene pool got fucked up. I mean her
looks
. Kristen used to taunt her, calling her moon face because her face is so round and flat and puffy.”

“That explains the makeup,” I noted.

“I don't know her that good, but she always struck me as unhappy. The other three are moody, careless, sometimes boisterous, always running with friends. Off to the mall. That kind of thing. Cindy—her real name is Hanh but she never uses it—had to invent her own world.”

“But at least she stayed in school. Unlike Kristen and Tommy.”

“Kristen is sadly dumb. Cindy is sadly intelligent.”

“I wonder how she looks at her aunt's murder.”

Hank grinned. “Maybe a lot, but none of it she'll share with you.”

“Call her up, Hank. See if she's home. Does she work?”

“She works at a Burger King on Farmington Avenue in Hartford.”

But it turned out Cindy was at her father's house. “Taking the day off,” Hank told me. “She called out because she felt drained.”

“Drained of what?”

“She didn't say. But she said it was okay to stop in. She's bored, she said.”

I hadn't been back to Benny's home in East Hartford since right after Mary's murder. The difference now was staggering. Newspapers and magazines littered the floor, video game sleeves and CD cases were stacked on the coffee table, someone had left a dirty footprint on the living room floor, and a hazy pall of dust covered the tables and chairs. Clothing lay in bunches in corners, as though the wearers, entering the warm rooms, simply shed them as they moved through the house.

She was sitting in the tiny living room, leafing through an issue of
People
, and she tossed it onto the floor, her foot nudging it away. Her head was bobbing to some music, but she slipped off the ear buds, dropping them onto a table. Her cell phone beeped, but she frowned at it. She'd colored her hair a brilliant scarlet, spiked it so that it mimicked a porcupine, and the filmy white lacy blouse, designed to expose her navel, reminded me of Stevie Nicks—Cindy'd probably never heard of her. But she was antsy, her left hand picking at the crimson lacquer of a nail on her right hand. Finally she bit off part of the nail, working it with a feverish dedication of a beaver on a river log.

“To what do I owe the pleasure,” she sang out, and then giggled at her own words.

Hank began, “Well, Cindy, we'd like to talk to the kids about your mother and aunt.”

She frowned. “The kids. We haven't been
kids
for years. I'm twenty-three now.”

Hank grinned. “To me, we'll always be the kids.”

Cindy narrowed her eyes. “You were never part of our group. You didn't go to Chesterton.”

“I didn't have Larry paying for my education.” Hank's tone was a little too sharp.

I stepped in. “Cindy, you know I've been asked to look into the murders.”

“Isn't that why police get paid?”

“But sometimes people say things to relatives”—I pointed at Hank—“and to friends of the family, like me, that they would never tell a cop.”

“I wouldn't tell a cop a damn thing.”

“Well, that's my point.”

“But I got nothing to tell you either.” She was still picking at that aberrant nail, and some of the glossy red polish broke free.

“I'm trying to get a picture of how your mother and her sister socialized. Maybe there was
somebody
they met together. Somebody they didn't like.”

She spoke in a flat monotone. “Mom went from this crummy house to the crummy store, and then sometimes to Aunt Molly's. She didn't
know
anyone…”

“And yet she was killed,” I interrupted.

She shrugged her shoulders. “You know, I keep asking myself why. I come up with nothing. Mom never went into Hartford. Outside of Little Saigon, I mean.”

“But she did that day.” From Hank.

“You know, Mom was a lady who was, well, just there. Like I never really thought about her having a life away from the house and Pop. Nothing. She didn't have any, you know, adventures.”

“Adventures?”

“Like, you know, excitement. She cooked for us. Cleaned.” She closed her eyes, sighed. For a moment I detected melancholy, real sadness. “She was good to us. She never bothered anyone. Nobody should die like that.” Nervously, she bit at that nail, attacking it.

“But someone killed her,” I said.

Suddenly angry, like a child: “Tell me why?” She yelled out the words.

“I don't know.”

Then she retreated back into her shell, tucking her chin into her chest. She looked up, staring from Hank to me as though waking up from a sleep, her eyes wide, unblinking. “My mother did something stupid.” Her voice was flat, low. “And that's why she's dead.”

“Stupid?” I asked.

Cindy kept rolling her tongue over her lips, moistening them.

“She always did dumb things.”

“Tell me.”

“She was always trying to make everybody happy. That's why she died. If someone asked her for five bucks, she'd hand it over. Someone says drive me to Motor Vehicles, she does it. Mom the coolie. She never wanted to say no to anyone. If she got herself killed, it was because she didn't
think
about what she was doing.”

“I don't understand.”

She looked at me as if I were stupid. “She never
thought
. Don't you get it? She wasn't a
thinker
. She just smiled and smiled and apologized and begged forgiveness for things she didn't do. She didn't
choose
to go to that spot by herself. That's not the way she was. Somebody drove her there.”

I waited, patient. She twisted around, nervous. “But the police found her car there. No one drove her there.”

“No, you fool. I mean she drove herself and all, but somebody
told
her to go there. Somebody said—get into that car, lady, and go to
this
address.”

“So you don't believe she went there by accident?”

She paused. “Maybe. But I think she drove there for a reason. Think about it—it's not like she's driving to Alaska. Pop's store is a dozen blocks over, not that far away. She wasn't a moron.”

“What if she got dizzy or something?” From Hank.

“She never got dizzy any other time. Why there? Why all of a sudden?”

“Who would tell her to go there?”

“I dunno, but she was trying to make somebody happy. That's what she did. She didn't want to be on Molly's fucking charity but she couldn't say no. I had to hear about that all the time. All I'm saying is that, if she went there by herself, she was going there because it would make somebody
else
happy. Not her.”

As she was speaking, she sank deeper into the sofa, wilting, and I noticed, as she extended her legs, that her black nylons, tucked into high boots, were torn at the seams. Absently, she picked at the tears, exaggerating them.

Hank leaned forward in his chair. “Would Tommy have told her to go there?”

She chuckled. “Yeah, like she'd listen to Tommy.”

“What about her sister?”

“Aunt Molly? Maybe, but for what reason, for God's sake?”

“What about Danny, Susie's son?”

She waited a second before answering, then started to pull her body up on the sofa, wrapping her hands around her knees. “Why Danny?”

“He used to be close to Tommy.” From Hank.

“Not really. Not close. They hung out together in school, more than any of us. He's around now and then, you know, I've seen him slicking by in that car of his, blowing the horn. He pulls over and chats me up. Shows me his latest high-tech gadget—like I care.”

“You don't like him?”

“He's all right. Just a little too taken with himself. Pretty boy.”

I looked at Hank, who was staring intently into her ghostly face. “Did you two ever go out?”

She tightened her lips, her voice thick with emotion. “Look at me. The ugly duckling. Miss Plain-as-can-be. Look at me.”

“But Danny has a way…”

“You better believe it. A way. He should be
put
away. He's scum with girls. In school he had to have
everyone,
and the ones who said no were the ones he had to have most. He's a charmer, hands all over your neck and back and arms…”

“So you did go out with him?” I broke in.

She laughed. “A curious expression—go out with him. No, not really. I was there for the fucking. A hookup. One time. Almost charity, a pity fuck. Look, Danny, look. See girl there. Fuck girl, fuck.”

“And then he left you?”

“Listen to you. ‘Left you.' There was nothing to leave, Rick Van Lam. I was an after-dinner mint. A booty call. Next day he's back to being buddies with me, joking, teasing. Like it never happened. And to him it didn't.”

“But it's something you can't forget.”

She laughed again. “Not the sex. You can always forget sex.” A long pause. “You can't forget the humiliation.”

“I'm sorry,” Hank said.

“Everyone gets a crush on Danny sooner or later.” She turned to the side, retrieved a diet Pepsi off a table, slurped half of it. “Christ, my own mother had a crush way back when. When we'd come here from school. He'd flatter her, talk to her, bat those wide brown eyes, lean in to kiss her hello or good-bye, woo her like she was Miss Universe, sing Vietnamese songs to her. She'd get silly, and I'd want to gag. One time I told him, for Christ's sake, Danny, she's my mother. Do you know what he said? That she's a woman, and women love him. My own mother. Of course, after the pot bust he got on her shit list pretty fast. She didn't want him around, afraid of his influence on Tommy, the boy blunder.”

“Did your Aunt Molly have an infatuation with him?” I asked.

That surprised her. “Well, no, I don't think she ever really
liked
him. She was polite and all, but no, she thought he was too slick for TV. But I'll tell you who also had a crush on him. Uncle Larry, Mr. Money Bags.”

Hank asked, “Gay?”

“No, no, not like a sexual thing. But he was taken with the boy because Danny flattered, batted those eyes, praised, and asked for advice. ‘Oh Mr. Money Bags, I wanna be just like you—rich and powerful. Oh oh oh. Mr. Larry,
sir
.' And Uncle Larry fell for it. Danny this, Danny that. Danny's handsome, so bright, so top of the heap. One time Jon, disgusted, told his father he was acting like a fag, and Larry recoiled. I thought he'd hit Jon.”

“What happened?”

“Larry cooled it, and Danny sort of read the signs, drifting away. It's just that Danny is turned on by ambition. For him it's like some magic potion.” She finished the Pepsi, stared at the can, then idly dropped it to the floor, where it rolled a few feet into the leg of a table. We all watched its short journey.

“Ambition, huh?” I asked.

Cindy looked at the table clock and actually pointed at it, miming the gestures of I've-gotta-go-sorry. “Ambition,” she echoed me. “Danny has enough for a whole fucking army.”