The Color of Light (13 page)

Jean-Paul said, “In France, we have an expression:
Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid
.”

“Meaning?” I asked, as Duc laughed.

Duc answered, “Rome wasn't built in a day.”

He walked us back to the office and offered refreshments. As warm and thirsty as we were, we needed to get home.

“Thank you for showing us around,” I said. “What you have accomplished is very impressive.”

“Yes,” Duc acknowledged as he walked us out to the truck. “But possible only because I had help. Now, if there is any way I can be helpful to you, I would be honored.”

“Can you help me find Thai Van?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I'll make some calls and get back to you.”

Two of his gardeners were waiting for us beside the truck. Each held a bucket full of long-stemmed roses, one white, one red.

“You told me you're going to the Bartolinis'
Vu Lan
celebration,” Duc said. “Please take the white roses to Trinh's son, in memory of his mother. The reds are for you, in honor of your lovely mother. White for the deceased, red for the living.”

I glanced at the giant bouquet of white roses in the ancestor shrine in front of the office, then at Duc.

He nodded; yes, his mother had passed into the next realm.

During the drive home, Jean-Paul was thoughtful. I handed him a bottle of cold water from the cooler bag Lyle had sent with us. He drank half of it in a long gulp.

“Tired?” I asked.

“A little, sure. It's very warm.”

I checked the dash clock. “I think there's time for a short nap when we get home.”

He gave a curt nod as he negotiated his way around a road boulder in the high occupancy lane who was cleaving strictly to the speed limit, backing up freeway traffic behind him. I leaned my head against the seat, sipped my water and tried not to doze off.

We were passing downtown Oakland when the first shot pinged the truck somewhere on my side.

“Get down!” Jean-Paul snapped, pushing me down with one hand as he skillfully slipped the truck between two cars in the next lane. Hunkered below the window, I scanned the mirrors I could see, looking for the shooter as a racket of car horns and squealing tires roared around us. Jean-Paul changed lanes again, dodging, weaving, looking for a clearing to gain some speed, to get away. I saw a silver car, no more than a flash of late afternoon glare in the side mirror, as a second shot plowed through the tops of the white roses in back and exploded the rear window, filling the cab with a confetti of rose petals and glittering shards of glass.

“Jesus Christ,” Uncle Max huffed
as he ran his hand over the bullet hole in the truck's right side panel. “I can't let you out of my sight, can I?”

“Stuff happens,” I said.

“To you, it does.”

He was shaken. Jean-Paul and I'd had a couple of hours to get over the worst of the effects of the attack, but we were still edgy, scared. Somehow, needing to reassure my uncle that we were all right helped to settle me down. I gave him a hug and kissed his cheek, passed him a barely used tissue I found in my pocket to dab his eyes. He pulled in a couple of deep breaths and took another look at the bullet hole before he wandered over to listen in on the account of the incident that Jean-Paul was giving to a Highway Patrolman.

We didn't need Max to play lawyer, but he couldn't help himself. I had only asked my dear uncle to come and fetch us home from the Highway Patrol impound lot in Oakland, but I realized that maybe it was a good idea that a lawyer was there. The Oakland police had come by earlier, taken a look at the truck and our identification. When they saw Jean-Paul's diplomatic credentials there was a moment of alarm until he assured them that he was certain there were no international implications. The patrolmen were only too happy to declare that we were innocents caught in local gang crossfire, have us sign their brief written report, and to leave. The Highway Patrol was being far more thorough; the shooting had shut down their freeway in both directions for over an hour, so there were questions that must be posed.

I was taking our belongings out of the truck and transferring them to Max's car, waiting for a tow truck to show up to take the truck for repairs, when a Berkeley PD black-and-white pulled into the lot and Kevin climbed out.

“Thanks for calling,” he said, giving my back a pat as he looked at the truck's broken back window. “What happened?”

I told him what I had seen, which wasn't much.

“It's downtown Oakland,” he said with a dismissive shrug.

“That's what Oakland PD said.”

“So who's this Thai Van guy you said I should check out?”

I gave him the short version of the story of Thai Van and Mrs. Bartolini, and Duc Khanh and Toshio Sato.

“And while you're checking on people,” I said, “you might want to have a little chat with our old friend Larry Nordquist. Late last night we found him lying in wait for us when we got home. He suggested he knew something about the day Mrs. B died, but he said he would only tell me about it if we were alone.”

“I saw the report on the break-in at your place,” Kevin scolded. “Why didn't you call me last night?”

“And have you on my doorstep two nights in a row? The neighbors are already talking.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Who?”

“George and Karen Loper.”

“Fucking busybodies.”

Max, who had noticed Kevin when he pulled in, decided that it was time to amble over to see who this newcomer was.

“Uncle Max,” I said, “you remember Kevin Halloran.”

Max raised his eyebrows, studying Kevin as he offered his hand. Recognition suddenly dawned.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if it isn't little Kevin,” Max said, holding Kevin's big hand in both of his; Kevin towered over Max. Seeing the grin on my uncle's face, I dreaded what was coming next. “Or, as my brother Al called you, that damn bundle of hormones.”

Poor Kevin turned several shades of crimson; I probably did, too. I nudged Max. “That's Detective Halloran, to you, buddy.”

“Nice to see you again, sir,” Kevin said, his voice changing register a couple of times, the way it would when he was fifteen, about the age he was when first confronted with my doting uncle.

“So, Detective Halloran,” Max said, finally releasing Kevin's hand. “What brings you all the way from Berkeley?”

Kevin canted his head toward me. “Nancy Drew here called me. After someone took a couple of shots at her, she finally decided it was time to let me know where she's been poking her nose.”

“It's a nice nose, though, isn't it?” Max said, grabbing me around the shoulders and pulling me close so he could pick glass shards out of my hair. “She paid a lot for it.”

“No comment,” Kevin said, grinning, his normal color returning. He asked me to walk him through my version of the shooting. With Max listening attentively, I told him the sequence of events as we walked a circuit around the truck. Kevin took pictures of the bullet hole in the right side panel before he climbed up into the truck bed for a closer look into the cab through the gaping window. As he plucked a fragment of broken glass from the frame, he asked, “Truck registered to the boyfriend?”

“No,” I said. “It's mine.”

He snapped his head around, checked to see if I was kidding him.

“It's my truck, Kevin,” I said. “Sometimes itty-bitty girls have big trucks, too.”

“I didn't say anything,” he demurred.

“You didn't have to. If it helps, the truck belonged to my late husband.”

That he could accept. “Where are you having it towed?”

“The insurance agent recommended the body shop at the Ford dealership on MLK, Jr. in Berkeley.”

“They do good work.”

The tow truck, a big flatbed, arrived to haul the pickup for repairs. Kevin exchanged cards with the driver and with the Highway Patrol investigator, oversaw the process of securing my pickup. As the driver signed paperwork proffered by the investigator, Kevin dialed a number he read off the card the driver had given him. After some automated switchboard folderol, he was put through to the service manager, to whom he gave sharp instructions for the truck to be locked in a secure area of the body shop over the weekend, and not to be touched until he arrived Monday morning.

“What was that about?” I asked when he put his phone away.

“The slug didn't pierce the truckbed liner, so it's probably still lodged inside the side panel,” he said. “Looks like the second slug is embedded in the dash. I want to be on hand when the panel comes off, see if I can find it. Ditto for the dash.”

I cringed. I had hoped the repairs would entail no more than replacing the window and slapping a patch on the side panel so that I could get the truck back right away; I needed it. But now it sounded like a rental truck was in the offing. And a big bill.

Max, damn him, introduced Kevin to Jean-Paul as my first big flame. That bit of slang did not need explanation. Jean-Paul offered his hand and a few gracious words while the two men, though they stayed in place, circled each other visually, like bantam cocks in the henhouse. I slipped my hand through Jean-Paul's arm, leaned my head against his shoulder and asked, “Can we go home now?”

“Yes.” He covered my hand with his. “If there are further questions, the authorities will call us.”

“I'm sure they will.” I felt something scratchy under my collar, gave my shirt a good shake and half-a-dozen more bits of glass fell to the pavement. Jean-Paul had a row of tiny cuts across the side of his face that showed the trajectory of the window's explosion. He had turned his head to check on me just as the second shot went through the back window and been hit by fragments of glass as they flew past; thank God he was wearing sunglasses.

We left Kevin speaking with the Highway Patrol investigator when we climbed into Uncle Max's rented red Cadillac, and drove out.

I sat in the backseat and listened to the two men discuss the incident.

“I believe it was a Toyota, maybe a Honda,” Jean-Paul told Max. “Silver-gray. Perhaps a Camry or an Accord. Several years old. Because of the angle of the sun, I could not see the driver, but my impression is he was alone.”

“Tall, short, dark, fair?” Max asked.

Jean-Paul shook his head. “
Qui sait?
I concentrated on getting out of his way, not seeing who he was.”

Max looked over his shoulder at me. “Maggie?”

I also shook my head. “I ducked. All I saw was something silver bobbing and weaving through traffic, trying to stay with us.”

Jean-Paul reached between the seats and took my hand. “I keep thinking about what that neighbor said this morning, about wishing he had a twelve-bore. So help me, this afternoon, I never wished for anything more than I did a great big gun to stop that lunatic.”

“Good thing we didn't have one,” I said. “Who knows who you would have taken out.”

Max caught my eye in his rearview mirror. “Maggot, where is your dad's Colt?”

“His what?”

“Gun.”

“Dad never owned a gun,” I said.

“Actually, honey, he did.”

I shrugged. “Ask Mom.”

“He certainly never told Betsy about it,” Max said. “She wouldn't have a gun in the house.”

That I knew. I needed just a few minutes with Dad; he'd left me with so many unanswered questions.

“But he went ahead and bought one,” I said. “Why?”

“Isabelle,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Just how crazy was she?”

“From day to day?” Max said. “Hard to say. But whenever she showed up here it was because she was off her meds and in a manic stage. Impossible to predict what she might do. Your dad caught her inside the house one night, in your bedroom, watching you sleep.”

“So he bought a gun?”

“He didn't buy it,” Max said. “The neighbor acquired it somehow and gave it to him.”

“Which neighbor, George Loper or Jake Jakobsen?”

“It wouldn't be Jake, now, would it?”

“No,” I said. “Jake is far too sane. But George Loper...”

“Your dad had asked the neighbors to keep an eye out for Isabelle, told them she was a former student who'd gone off the rails, which was only ten degrees off true,” Max said. “Loper came over one day and handed your dad a new, unregistered, unfired Colt Commander. Told Al that if he wanted to try it out, he should go way out into the desert and make sure he was never seen so that if he ever needed to use the damn thing he could ditch it afterward and there would be no way to trace it back to him.”

“Except George knew,” I said.

Jean-Paul had listened with rapt attention. He asked, “This George, is he in law enforcement or perhaps the military?”

“He's a rocket scientist,” I said. “Rumor is, he's brilliant.”

He laughed. “
Bien sûr
. The mad scientist next door.”

“You laugh,” I said. “But if he gave Dad an unregistered gun, you know he has one himself.”

A paper effigy of a large house
, and then a car and a bundle of hell money—gifts for ancestors—caught fire and burned in a flash, sending smoke and fine ash fluttering among the dozens of red Chinese lanterns strung like bright laundry above the Bartolinis' backyard.

“Beautiful,” Jean-Paul said, looking up at the lanterns.

It was nearly sundown by the time Jean-Paul and I arrived to honor the hungry ghosts. We brought the dozen or so white roses that had survived the events of the afternoon, now arranged in a vase, and several green silk-covered boxes of decadent French chocolates, some for the living, some for the dead. A red table and chairs were set in a place of honor for the ghosts who had come to eat among the hundred or so neighbors and friends who filled the yard. We placed a box of chocolates among the offerings heaped atop the red table, and then, like the other invited guests, gave the area a wide berth so that the ghosts could feast undisturbed.

There was a soft presence beside me. “Is that you, Maggie?”

Pa, a Buddhist monk Mom befriended during her work with refugee services, seemed to have floated out of the backyard throng; his long-sleeved white robes all but covered his feet. He put his palms together prayerfully and bowed when I introduced him to Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul acknowledged the greeting with a slight bow of his own, diplomatically not offering his hand.

“I was looking for your mother,” Pa said to me as he tucked his hands into his sleeves. With quiet yet profound concern, he asked, “You brought white flowers?”

“The flowers are for Mrs. Bartolini,” I said. In his circumspect way, he was asking if Mom had died. “Mom couldn't be here this year.”

“Your mother is well?”

“Very well.” I told him about Mom's move south and his expression brightened. “I'll tell her you asked about her.”

With another bow, he excused himself and floated off again.

As we ventured toward the buffet tables, I looked for Beto or his dad in the crowd. Among a noisy clutch near a beer keg, I spotted Kevin's wife, Lacy, and her younger sister, Dorrie, both of them listing a bit, as if the lawn underfoot was a storm-tossed sea. Kevin was nowhere to be found.

Lacy's name had suited her perfectly when we were kids. She was quick and bright then, a tiny, wiry, athletic little daredevil who plied her dimples to charm our way out of messes she generally got us into in the first place. Dorrie was as close to being Lacy's opposite as a sibling could be. Stolid, cranky, slow-moving and annoying. A tattletale. As a grown woman, though she had become quite striking, she did not seem any happier.

Dorrie saw me, whispered something to Lacy, threw back her shoulders, and headed in my direction with an alarming air of purpose. I gripped Jean-Paul's arm and readied myself. Before I could warn him to be prepared to hear whatever was on Dorrie's mind, Beto pushed through the mob from behind us bearing a raffia-wrapped bottle of chianti and a stack of plastic cups. Dorrie backed away.

“What kept you? I was about to send out a search party to go find you guys,” Beto said. When I introduced him to Jean-Paul, he offered a cup from his stack in lieu of a handshake. As he filled both our cups, he nodded toward the bouquet. “Are those for Mom?”

“Yes,” I said. “They're from an old friend of hers.”

“Who's that?”

“A man named Khanh Duc,” I said. “Remember him?”

Beto frowned, thinking. He said, “Maybe. Let me get my kid to take over refill patrol, and we'll take the flowers inside to Mom.”

He summoned his teenaged son, Bartolomeo Bartolini III, by calling out across the masses, “Yo, Trips.”

“Yo, Pop.” Trips, a lanky, handsome six-footer, more Bart than Beto, squeezed through the crowd. He draped an arm across his father's shoulders, leaning on him; he towered over Beto. “What's up?”

Greetings and introductions taken care of, Beto handed his son the cups and the bottle and took the flowers from me. “I'm going inside with Maggie and Jean-Paul for a minute. I need you to keep an eye on Lacy. If she gets out of hand before Uncle Kevin shows up, I'm going to ask you to drive her and her sister home, okay, son?”

Trips took a quick glance in the direction of Lacy and Dorrie, and nodded. Raising the wine bottle, he asked his father, “Can I have some of this?”

“Of course, my angel.” Beto patted his son's smooth cheek. “In three years, when you're legal.”

As Beto led us inside to place the roses in the shrine to his mother I said, “Uncle Kevin? Since when?”

“Kevin is Trips's godfather.”

“I didn't know,” I said.

“Guess you wouldn't,” he said. “Where were you eighteen years ago?”

I shrugged, “Dallas, I think. I worked at a local TV station there until Casey was three.”

He grinned. “Well, you missed a good party.”

“My loss.”

Beto placed the vase in the entry niche shrine next to the golden Buddha, making space among the offerings to his mother that were already there: a plate of fresh fruit, a circlet of pearls, burning incense, pictures of her grandchildren, and a rosary. After a moment of silence, Beto reached behind the Buddha, took out a prayer card and a St. Mark's medal and handed them to me.

“Father John left these for you,” he said. “He offered rosaries for Mom and Mark at mass this morning.”

“Is he here?”

“Been and gone. He came over early, said a blessing, ate some food and took off. He tires out pretty fast now.”

I suddenly felt like crying. Too much day, adrenaline let-down, too many shadows from the past rattling around. Jean-Paul noticed, wrapped an arm around me and kissed my forehead. I took a deep breath, composed myself and smiled at him. He was still carrying chocolates.

“These are for you,” Jean-Paul said, handing the remaining silk-covered boxes to Beto.

“Holy cow,” Beto said when he saw the label. “Wow. I've only heard about this stuff. Primo. I saw they're opening a shop in the City.”

“Yes, next week,” Jean-Paul said. “I'll see that you get an invitation to the opening, if you wish.”

“I'd love to go, yes, thank you,” he said. With an elbow he nudged me. “Looks like Ghirardelli has some competition in San Francisco now.”

“I think they'll survive,” I said.

Bart shuffled in, walking like his feet hurt. Without his usual verve, he said, “There's my girl. How are ya, Maggie?”

I kissed Bart's proffered cheek and introduced him to Jean-Paul. He noticed the roses and asked, “Did your dad bring those over? I didn't see him come in.”

I exchanged glances with Beto, who said, “He's on his way, Papa.”

“Good, good,” Bart said. “Every year he brings white roses for my Tina.”

“Papa,” Beto said, “this time, an old friend of Mom's sent the flowers.”

“Yeah?” His head seemed heavy. “Who's that?”

Beto turned to me. “What was the name?”

“Khanh Duc,” I said, looking for a flicker of recognition from Bart. “He used to spend a lot of time with Dad in the yard. Maybe you met him?”

But Bart didn't seem to hear. His eyes were glassy, his skin an alarming shade of gray. Probably exhausted by party preparations, I thought, and the noisy mass of people underfoot. Beto took him by the elbow and turned him toward the living room.

“Let's go sit down, Papa. Take a load off.” Bart did not protest. Over his shoulder, Beto said to us, “Go eat, for God's sake. Papa's been cooking for two days. So have Zaida and her mom and Auntie Quynh.”

Bart, his back to us as he shuffled out, raised a hand and waved. “Try my ravioli aragosta. But hurry up before it's all gone.”

Jean-Paul and I stood for a moment in the quiet of the entry hall, sipping the very good chianti. Looking at me over the top of his plastic glass, he said, “Your father is expected?”

“The spirits of the dead are here, remember?”

“However...”

“Bart's having some memory issues,” I said. “He seems to think Mom is dead. And Dad isn't.”

“I see, yes. A man of a certain age,
n'est-ce pas
?”

“Oui.”
I took his arm. “Let's eat. The food will be an Italian-­Mexican-Vietnamese fusion, and the head chef recommends the lobster pasta.”

The partiers outside seemed to have grown noisier during the short time we were in the house with Beto; the Bartolinis were as generous with drink as they were with food. I heard Lacy's high-pitched laugh above the din as we headed toward the buffet tables.

The side gate opened and Kevin blasted through like a sudden squall. He nodded curt greetings to various people but kept moving on a straight trajectory toward his wife. When he reached Lacy, he took her by the upper arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. I heard him say, “What were you thinking?” as he fast-walked her toward the gate with Dorrie following in their wake. When he passed us, there was the merest hesitation when he noticed me. I thought he wanted to say something, but he just shook his head and kept going.

A general tittering followed their exit, but it soon died away. Apparently, that scene, or some version of it, had played a few times before.

Gracie Nussbaum sidled up next to me. All she said about the drama was “Oh, my.” And that just about summed it up.

Jean-Paul and I filled plates at the long buffet table and ate standing up, talking to old friends and neighbors. Jean-Paul, always charming and self-effacing, seemed to be having a good time. Certainly he was more relaxed, I thought, than he had been at the more formal museum party the night before. He went back to the table for seconds of Beto's mother-in-law's little carne asada tacos and the ravioli aragosta tossed in garlic and olive oil. Then he mediated the ongoing but good-natured little competition between Beto's wife, Zaida, and his Aunt Quynh over the former's ceviche and the latter's Vietnamese-style shrimp rolls. Jean-Paul engaged the cooks in a conversation about the ingredients while he sampled both dishes. Both women preened for him. Charm the man had, as well as a good appetite and, apparently, an iron stomach.

Trips came by offering wine refills. “Uncle Kevin asked me to tell you he'll catch up with you later.”

“Too bad he couldn't stay,” I said.

“Lacy needed to go home,” Trips said, doing a pretty good imitation of a drunk slurring his words. I tried not to laugh. He leaned in and said, “If you ever want to talk to Lacy, you need to catch her pretty early in the day. Otherwise—” He waved the bottle, and walked off to serve other guests.

Just as Jean-Paul headed toward the dessert table, I heard someone call my name. When I turned to see who it was, I nearly bowled over Lacy's sister, Dorrie.

“Dorrie!” I grabbed her by the shoulder to steady her. “So sorry.”

“So, you remember my name?” She seemed surprised.

“Of course I do. I thought you left with your sister.”

She laughed, but there was nothing happy in the sound. “Kevin extracted Lacy. I wasn't about to get into a car with the two of them, not when you're in town and she's had a few.”

“When I'm in town? What's that have to do—”

She held up her hand to forestall the question. “Maggie, you don't know what it's like for her. All through high school, she had the biggest crush on Kevin, but he was with you and wouldn't even look at her. Now, every time one of your shows comes on TV, it just stirs up all those old feelings again because everyone in town, including Kevin, watches you. Then for a couple of days afterward, that's all anybody talks about. Whether they agree with what you said on the show or not, it's all Maggie, Maggie, Maggie everywhere Lacy goes, especially if she's with Kevin. For a woman like Lacy, the attention you get around here is painful.”

“What do you mean, a woman like Lacy?” I asked.

“Well, hell, think about it,” Dorrie said, as if I missed the obvious. “Lacy always thought she should be both the soprano and the conductor in her own opera, if you know what I mean. But she peaked in high school. Head cheerleader, then has-been. And look at what you've accomplished.”

“Jesus, Dorrie, there are eight or nine Nobelists in Berkeley. For Lacy to compare herself to me, a face on TV, that's just—”

“Normal,” she said firmly. “It's bad enough for her when Kevin sees you on the tube, but when she heard that you're in town and he's hanging out at your house, well, she just can't handle it.”

“Hardly hanging out,” I said. “He came over once, on police business.”

“That isn't the way Lacy heard it.”

“Heard it from whom?”

“That damn Mrs. Loper. I think she gets off on stirring things up between people.”

I nodded; it was true.

Jean-Paul edged his way back to me, trying to keep slippery homemade flan from sliding off his slick plastic plate. He offered me his spoon. “Try this.”

I did; it was wonderful. “Jean-Paul, this is an old friend, Dorrie Riley.”

“Dorrie Riley Ross,” she said, glowing a bit as she offered her hand to Jean-Paul. Dorrie wasn't unattractive, and I have to admit that when Jean-Paul turned his attention toward her, just being polite, I slipped a few inches closer to him, making it clear that he was not available. And did not admire myself for doing so.

I said, “Please reassure Lacy that she has no reason to concern herself with me.”

“But she does, you know,” Dorrie said, giving my hand a quick squeeze. “She does.”

Dorrie moved off into the crowd. I saw her speak to Beto before she slipped out the side gate.

There were dark circles under Jean-Paul's eyes. I said, “Had enough fun for one day?”

“Enough for several.” He patted his flat belly. “And more than enough to eat.”

It was time to say our good-byes. We found Beto tidying the buffet table.