The Dark Root (22 page)

He was smiling when he said it, so I wasn’t prompted to defend my actions. “What’re you going to do?” I asked instead.

“Not much—stage an unscheduled press conference. I think this latest coup has made Mr. Derby a little more optimistic since our last chat, so he’ll probably be joining me in the limelight. Should be a good show, if I can think of something to say.”

“Which is why you’re here,” I finished.

“Just give me the good stuff.”

I steepled my fingers in front of my chin, concentrating on how to reduce what I had to headline length. “First, on Benny’s murder, I think we can now publicly say it was committed by three Asian males. One of those, Nguyen Van Hai, is now under lock and key; another, Truong Van Loc, has been identified but is still on the loose; and the third is still unknown and at large. We have pictures if you want them. That ought to titillate the crowd.”

Brandt shook his head. “They’ll want more about the shoot-out with you and Ron. Benny’s already old news.”

“Okay. We have photos of those three as well. You can expand on Henry Lam a bit—I wrote up a report on his background. You can also milk…” I paused to paw through some papers on my desk, “Chu Nam An. He was the shooter Ron nailed. Dan Flynn reported a car crash in Rutland involving Asians, and Hillstrom picked up on a recent seat-belt bruise on Chu’s chest. I’m planning on going over to Rutland tomorrow to see what else I can chase down, but it looks good.”

“So Chu wasn’t alone in the car?” Brandt asked.

“No, he had someone with him—no name given or asked for. Chu’s license and registration listed an address in Lowell, Mass., but the Rutland investigating officer also got a local address. Sol asked them to check it out, but the place was empty. Still, I thought I’d poke around a bit. If Chu and some of his pals lived there long enough, maybe the neighbors can tell me something.”

Brandt nodded. “Okay. What about the guy with the tattoo?”

“Still checking. First name’s Ut, he’s got ties to California, but we haven’t heard back from the police there yet.”

“Your last memo mentioned Truong got his start in California. You really think Truong and Sonny are one and the same?”

I raised my eyebrows equivocally. “It’s pure theory right now, but it fits. Dan Flynn’s looking into it for me. It sure would explain what’s driving him.”

“The dead brother?”

“Yeah. But I’m still working on the whys—why here, why now, why this particular approach. If revenge instead of profit is his motive, I have no idea who his target is, and I can’t explain why he seems so profit-oriented.”

“Which brings up the overriding question I’ll guarantee I’m going to hear—do we have a gang problem in town?”

I thought about that for a moment. “The short answer is yes, which actually might stimulate people to face it. Besides, the grapevine has it that Alfie Brewster’s imported some muscle to watch his back, so if something blows up, your butt’ll be covered if you’re already on record.”

Brandt looked at me closely. “Why’d he do that?”

“I don’t know yet. Could be he used the Leung home invasion to set up Sharkey and Vu. That’s what Sally Javits thinks, more or less. I’ve got Willy looking into it, but as usual, he’s disappeared…”

“Right.” He stood up, checking his watch.

“That it?” I asked him.

“Yup. I’m not going to complicate my life right now by mentioning the Canadian connection. The local angle’s enough. Besides, I’m due in ten minutes.”

I shook my head at this blessedly familiar nonchalance, knowing full well how much he put into protecting the department’s image. Years ago, I’d pulled a six-month stint as acting chief, and had hated it so much I’d insisted on a corporate shuffle that made Billy Manierre Tony’s next in line.

Tony paused at the narrow doorway to let J.P. Tyler squeeze by, who muttered, “Hi, Chief,” with his eyes downcast. Tony was perpetually amused at Tyler’s discomfort around anyone with a title, and merely shook his head with a smile before giving me a small departing wave.

“What’s up?” I asked J.P., once Tony had left.

“I got a match for the MO used on Benny Travers—a man named Johnny Xi was killed in Vancouver one year after Truong On Ha’s death in San Francisco. Xi was the red pole for the Dragon Boys at the time.
Red pole
is the title the Chinese give their head enforcer. It actually applies to triads, but some of the gangs use it, too, for prestige.”

Mention of triads made me think back to my conversation with Jason Brown. The FBI and other agencies were still hedging on whether the Hong Kong and Taiwan-based triads were officially on U.S. soil yet. Part of that may have been due to caution, and part to the constant blurring of distinctions among triads, tongs, and gangs.

“I called San Francisco PD, and they confirmed the ID. They also told me that, at the time, Xi had been their primary suspect as the leader of the team that shot up the restaurant.”

I sat back in my chair, pleasantly surprised. “You didn’t happen to ask how many other members of that team they’d identified, did you?”

He smiled. “I did, actually.” The smile then faded a bit. “But none of them sounded familiar.”

“Are they all still alive?” I asked, the question about Truong’s motivation still echoing inside my head.

His eyes narrowed in surprise. “Oh,” he murmured after a pause, “I see what you mean. I’ll find out.”

I gestured to him to stay put. “Tell me more about how Johnny Xi died.”

“Right. It wasn’t an exact carbon copy. He was tied to a door, not taped to a chair; all his clothes were cut off, not just his pants. But the important details match—the bag over the head, the use of the knife… And how it was used. Lucky for Travers he got away, even if he did end up dying anyway—Xi was castrated and skinned alive.”

“Did the PD find out who did it?”

“No. Benny busting loose actually did us a favor, ’cause that’s when this hit team made its mistakes. But there were no mistakes back then. The Vancouver Police couldn’t find a thing. There was a lot of blood, but that was all. They made the connection to the San Francisco shooting, but there was nothing they could follow up on. They wrote it off to inter-gang politics, and dropped the case into the permanent ‘open’ file.”

“The name Truong never came up?” I asked.

“Nope, nor any of the others I ran by them.”

· · ·

Ron Klesczewski lived in Guilford, south of Brattleboro, in a small development of modest, one-story homes, all built by the same contractor some ten years earlier. There were five buildings, placed symmetrically around a large circular drive, forming a layout typical of many crowded suburban sprawls. Except that here it was nestled in the middle of the Vermont woods, like the single lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle dropped from on high.

Wendy Klesczewski, Ron’s young wife, opened the door. She stood staring at me, utterly surprised, despite my promise that I’d be by. “Lieutenant… I mean, Joe. Hi.”

I was a little surprised myself. Wendy was clearly pregnant. “I didn’t know you were expecting. That’s wonderful.”

She self-consciously patted her middle, her smile becoming a little more strained. “Five months along. I miscarried once before, so we didn’t want to… You know…”

“Very smart,” I finished for her. “But everything’s going all right?”

“Oh, yes—so far, so good.”

There was that telltale skip in the conversation, when two uncomfortable people have just run out of small talk. We stared at one another for a couple of seconds before I finally asked, “How’s he doin’?”

Her whole face yielded to gravity, her smile collapsing, the corners of her eyes giving in to minute stress lines that tugged toward her temples. The blush of a burgeoning mother was eclipsed by the anxiety of a worried wife. “I don’t really know,” she admitted and stood aside to let me enter. “He’s in the back.”

The
back
, in their parlance, I knew from prior visits, was the one room in the house that defied the tiny neighborhood’s forced intimacy. Facing the rear, its one window looked out onto the woods and a small stretch of lawn reaching out to them.

I found Ron sitting in a recliner, a beer in one hand, staring out that window. I took a seat on the couch beneath it, so he was forced to look at me.

“Hi, Joe,” he said softly, a gentle smile on his face. “You want a beer?”

I shook my head. “All set. Thanks.”

He gave half a nod and his eyes strayed over my head to the darkening view. There were no lights on in the room, but enough of the day’s residue filtered in through the window to let me see his face clearly, and I saw the source of his wife’s concern.

For a man of twenty-nine, Ron Klesczewski was looking threadbare and ancient. His face had thinned, his eyes were sunken, his very skin pulled as tight to his skull as that of an old pensioner. He obviously hadn’t washed or shaved in days.

I didn’t tiptoe around it. “You look awful, Ron.”

That brought his eyes back to mine. “I know.”

“What’s been going on?”

“I can’t sleep. I’ve taken sleeping pills, had half a case of this.” He gestured with the beer. “Nothing works. I can tell it’s driving Wendy crazy.”

“You getting out at all? Seeing people?”

“You mean a shrink?” he asked without hostility.

“I didn’t, but aren’t you? I thought that’d been set up after the post-stress session.”

He flipped his hand feebly. “I am, I am. It’s not doing much good, though.”

“It’s only been three days. Maybe you’re expecting too much. You’ve got to surrender to what’s been bugging you—let things come out where you can take a look at them. It takes time.”

His brow furrowed. “I know I’m screwed up. That’s not the problem.”

“The problem’s that you can’t sleep?” I asked, purposefully incredulous.

His irritation climbed a notch. “That’s what I just said. If I could get some rest, I could think this through.”

“How ’bout the reverse? Letting it out so you can get some rest.”

He shook his head angrily but stayed silent.

“Cops are supposed to be superhuman,” I said. “Always calm, courteous, and available when the shit hits the fan. We begin to buy into that. But it makes us feel twice as bad when we stumble and show we’re human. We try too hard to live up to the fairy tale—to make the hero image real. But it’s not, Ron… You really think you can just brush off some kid opening up on you with a semi-automatic? Catch a little sleep and be good as new?”

“You look okay.”

“I’ve been through it before, in the service, as a cop, when Gail was raped. Even so, it might still hit me like a ton of bricks someday, and at just the wrong time. I’m not an example to follow. It’s better if you face it immediately.”

His right hand came up and stroked his forehead, less to wipe it, or smooth an errant hair, than perhaps to check that it was still there. His voice, when he spoke, had lost its earlier brittle edge. “I just keep seeing him—his eyes. First when he was shooting at me, and then after I shot him. I keep running it through, again and again, trying to see what really happened. It’s driving me nuts. We’re about to have a baby, and I’m headed for the funny farm.”

“You may look at the world differently after all this settles down. It will always be a watershed event in your life. But whatever happens, you’ll survive. I know that much about you.”

He rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes for a moment, a long sigh escaping his lips. “God—I hope so.”

I rose to my feet and walked toward the door, pausing by his side. “Just keep talking, bringing it out—remember how many people you have in your corner.”

He reopened his eyes as I patted his shoulder. “Thanks, Joe.”

Wendy met me in the front room, from where I knew she’d been listening, and silently escorted me to the door.

“He’ll be fine,” I told her quietly. “Try not to worry too much.”

Her eyes brimming with tears, she leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Thank you for coming.”

· · ·

It had been one of my favorite meals—a taboo when Gail was at home—a Velveeta and jam and mayonnaise sandwich, followed by a can of fruit cocktail. The thick, sweet, cloying memory of it lingered in my throat as I roamed the house, like a tourist in a museum.

The downtown apartment I’d lived in for almost twenty years had acquired the patina of an old bear’s den—comfortable, shabby, not too pristine, and very familiar.

Not like this house at all.

Lurking behind the furniture, barely covered by the coat of fresh paint and new carpeting, were the shadows and sounds of countless succeeding families, none of whom I’d known, dating back to when the core of the huge place had been built as a farmhouse in the early 1800s. These were not bachelor digs, nor were they truly ours yet. This was still so new to me that I felt like a guest at a dinner party, wandering in search of a bathroom.

But there were a few familiar touchstones—items half lost among Gail’s more numerous things—that reminded me of where I’d been born and brought up, and of the small house I’d owned when I’d been married. When Brattleboro was an overgrown village, and the police department had consisted of a small handful of ex-farmers.

Cancer had taken the marriage, and the house, and any hope of a family, and had encouraged me to enter a years-long emotional hibernation. Perhaps a different form of cancer—sometimes malignant, sometimes benign—had also transformed the erstwhile sleepy town of Brattleboro.

Buying this house with Gail had evoked mixed emotions in me, a sense of both moving ahead and traveling back—directions I felt were fraught with dimly perceived peril, and which became highlighted in her absence.

It was a large house, many times remodeled, with blond oak floors, dark beams set against glimmering plaster walls, skylights and double-paned bay windows tastefully spread throughout. The kind of house I’d visited on only a few occasions.

I went from room to room, remembering the two of us placing the furniture, choosing the colors of the paint, my watching how thoughtfully Gail made me feel a part of her decisions. A few of my possessions were logistically but self-consciously present in each one of the rooms. I still had a bachelor pad—two rooms upstairs, filled with my junk, sacrosanct. Gail had told me she’d never enter there uninvited and had requested the same limitations on her suite down the hall.