A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “He’s been watching you,” I said.

  Khanh shuddered. “I want to move away from here. But Sam says, no. Any affliction will only follow us, he says.”

  “Not if Bao is caught.”

  “Even then.”

  I heard bitterness in the tone of her voice. I said, “What a nightmare.”

  “I’m all right.” She pulled her long sleeves over her bruised wrists. “Some things are gone that can never be replaced.” Her glance fell to a side table where I remembered seeing a jade carving on an earlier visit.

  I asked, “How much did Bao take?”

  She turned her back to the table. “I do not dwell on material possessions we lost, Maggie. I think instead of the peace and sanctity of my family’s home that has been stolen.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you for all you are doing to help me.” Again, she reached out and touched my arm. “To celebrate the new year, after what has happened, Sam and I are especially anxious to have our family and friends in our house again, to exorcise our great fear. Will you and Casey and your man friend be able to join us on Saturday evening? Everyone will be here.”

  “Does everyone include Scotty?”

  “Scotty and Sam are very close.” She grew prettily sad. “We have missed you and Casey at our Tet celebrations the last few years, Maggie. Every time Scotty walks through my front door, I think in my heart that I will see you, too. But beside him there is only empty space.” She paused, coughed to clear her throat. To clear her gaffe. “Not empty exactly. Sometimes Linda is with him. But you know what I mean to say.”

  “It’s very kind of you to ask,” I said. “But if Scotty will be here, it’s best for everyone if I don’t come. Anyway, we’re going to San Francisco this weekend to take care of some business.”

  “Business?” She tapped her porcelain-smooth chin, thinking over something. “We haven’t spoken together for so long, and there is so much to say. But tonight is not a good time; Sam and his associates are waiting for coffee. Can we set a date, before you leave for San Francisco? Before Tet?”

  “If you want.” I ran through the week’s schedule in my mind. “How is Friday morning for you?”

  “Friday morning is fine. I have shopping to do before the children arrive, so I will be out early.”

  “How about nine o’clock at my house? We aren’t leaving until after noon. If we go.”

  “I am writing our date on my calendar right now.” She walked over to the desk. “I will be there. Nine o’clock Friday.”

  By the time I got down the front steps, the security people had my van waiting inside the gate, lights on, motor running. The gate didn’t begin to slide open until I was in the driver’s seat with the door closed and the gear knob in drive, ready to roll.

  I drove away, feeling I had escaped a haunted place.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Cops look out for each other. When Mike and I decided it was time to move our families in together, one of his old Academy classmates offered to lease us his grandmother’s vacant house in South Pasadena, a small sanctuary of a town a few freeway miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

  At one time, the old house had been a beautiful example of turn-of-the-century craftsman design. But Grandma had let the place fall to ruin long before she moved into a nursing home. Mike and I were given a huge break on the rent in exchange for making repairs.

  We didn’t mind the work. After six months, we had restored the house to something like its original state of grace. But after six months, even though I could see my handiwork everywhere, I still felt like a paying guest.

  When I got home, the house was dark and quiet, uncomfortably so. I put Vivaldi on the CD player and curled up on the couch in my workroom to return calls. Our dog, old Bowser, sauntered in from the backyard to finish his nap at my feet. I was glad to have his company.

  The location auditor and I were haggling over budget manipulations when Arlo Delgado called.

  “Caught the scent of your boy,” Arlo said, sounding less than triumphant. “But you’re dead right that the trail gets cold in a hurry.”

  “Tell me what you have.”

  “This Bao Ngo guy arrived in Wilmington aboard a Canadian-registered freighter, the Manatee. Cargo was mostly Canadian embassy furnishings, personal possessions of embassy personnel—household furnishings—and one dozen passengers. Diplomatic stuff is exempt from search. All the crates were sealed and shipped over to LAX, on their way to Canada.”

  I said, “There’s an invasion underway, refugees are desperately trying to get out of the country, and people take up space with their furniture?”

  “Looks like it.” Arlo guffawed. “But it gets interesting, Maggie. According to the manifest, the ship was at maximum load, and it towed a fully loaded barge behind. Barge cargo was more household goods that got sent up north.” He paused for effect. “There was also a container of artworks and antiques, property of the Republic of Vietnam. I should say, property of the late Republic of Vietnam. And it was manifested to your guy, Bao Ngo.”

  “Bao Ngo got out with a load of booty?”

  “That ain’t the beauty part. You ready?”

  “Lay it on me, Arlo.”

  “Your buddy Bao Ngo has to clear Customs, cuz he’s stayin’ in this country and he ain’t no diplomat.” Arlo paused again, milking all the drama he could from his tale. “He has this stack of documents saying all the shit is valuable art and antiques. Madame Nguyen Van Thieu, the president’s wife, is supposed to be the official trustee, and this Bao guy is her agent. He has a fistful of papers with seals and ribbons all over them to prove he has the authority to be in possession. Bao also has a catalogue from some museum, and the stuff in the container is supposed to match up with it. He’s supposed to be on his way to some museum here that’s going to safeguard the stuff until someone figures out where it belongs.” I heard ice cubes clinking on Arlo’s end of the line. “The scam is, you don’t have to pay duties on fine art. So, the inspectors open everything to have a peek, and you know what they found?”

  “Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “No way.” Arlo thought, belatedly, to laugh. “Maggie, it was mostly all fakes. Just crap.”

  “Can you document this, Arlo?”

  “Yeah, sure. I can transmit you a copy of the report from Customs. Is a fax good enough?”

  “For now,” I said. “Did you get me any names?”

  “I got a dozen names. I’ve tracked down a couple of them from Customs. Want me to try and locate the rest?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll leave anything I find on your e-mail. That okay?”

  I said it was, thanked him, and promised to call him in the morning.

  I looked at my watch and decided that it wasn’t too late to call Khanh.

  Right off, she said, “Do you have a conflict with our date on Friday?”

  “No,” I said. “I found out something new about Bao.” I repeated the information Arlo gave me about Bao and the cargo he brought out of Vietnam.

  Khanh laughed—not the reaction I expected. She seemed neither surprised nor scandalized. “All fakes? Poor Bao. How can that be? Bao would know the difference.”

  “Would he?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you think of any reason he would knowingly bring in fakes?”

  “I can think of only one possibility at the moment. Do you know the story of the boy who every day came to the border pushing a bicycle with a small bag of flour over the handlebars? And every day the suspicious border guards inspected the bag, and every day all they found was flour inside. The guard was afraid to be shown for a fool by a mere boy. Every day he grew more and more angry, because every day the boy came home across the border wearing something nice and new. Every day they repeated the ritual as the boy crossed the border, and every day the boy came home richer. But never did the guard find anything. Do you know what the boy was smuggling?”

  “Bicy
cles,” I said. “So what was Bao smuggling?”

  Again she chuckled. “That is the question, isn’t it? All that we can say is, he did not have valuable artifacts to sell.”

  After we said good-bye, I called Guido.

  “Cool,” he said when I had filled him in about Bao’s phony cargo. “When are you going to tell me the rest?”

  “That’s all there is.”

  “I’m here, Maggie,” he said. “When you need me, I’m here.”

  I said, “I love you, too, Guido,” and hung up.

  I rummaged through the videotapes stacked on my shelves until I found the one I had made of a conversation with Khanh a long time ago for a short film I had done about the immigrant experience. Something she had said during that conversation suddenly clicked.

  On tape, Khanh told me how she left Vietnam in a panic. If she’d had time to think, she said, if it had occurred to her that she wouldn’t be able to return for decades, then she might have stayed, as her cousin Honey Thi Nguyen had, and faced the consequences. When I mentioned that for Honey the consequences included ten years of forced labor, Khanh, sitting in her elegant living room overlooking her quarter acre of landscaped backyard, said that there are many forms of prison.

  Khanh said she longed to go home, but she was afraid that her name was still on a blacklist.

  “That’s your friend, huh? The one who got roughed up.” Mike’s voice startled me. He slouched against the door frame watching the video, jacket slung over his shoulder, hands full of unsorted mail he had picked up from the front table. “Have I met her?”

  “You met her.” I moved over to make room for him beside me. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Did your little murderer’s mother stand you up?”

  “No. She came in.”

  “Did you get me permission from her to interview the girl?”

  “Got it.” He handed me a signed waiver form. “You can call her and set it up.”

  “Any possibility I can go talk to the girl in juvenile hall tonight? Might be good stuff; she has to be scared to death.”

  He looked at me askance, chagrined maybe. “The kid went home.”

  “To sleep the sweet slumber of the innocent?”

  “Sho’, you right.” Mike dropped down beside me, jacket and mail on his lap. He let his head drop wearily against my shoulder.

  I turned off the volume but let the video run. “So, the girl is innocent?”

  “Says her. There were seven kids in that house working on Pedro. According to my girl, it was the other six who did it all: nine hours of torture. They beat him, they burned him, they carved their gang names on his chest and back, poured bleach down his throat. The whole time that was happening, she says, she was in the next room watching TV and taking care of her baby. She admitted she knew what was going on, but she didn’t participate except once, when she burned him with a hot spatula from her mother’s kitchen.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Hell no. But she agreed to give up the other six, so we’re letting her walk.”

  “If she didn’t stop the others or call for help, isn’t she just as responsible?”

  “If she doesn’t talk, then we don’t have enough to file the case and they all walk. She wasn’t the shooter, so I won’t lose sleep letting her kick this time. She’ll be back in the system on something else soon enough.” He picked up the telephone bill and slit it open. “Anyway, if I book her, her baby goes to foster care.”

  “What did the girl’s mother have to say?”

  “The mother?” Mike had a sardonic grin. “Not much. She’s pissed about this going down in her house. But pissed is a long way from taking responsibility. She told me that when she got home from work and saw Pedro bound hand and foot in one of her bedrooms, she told her daughter’s friends she was going down the street to play dominoes for a couple of hours and she wanted the mess cleaned up before she got back or she would call the police. Pedro was still alive at that point. The kids didn’t know what to do with him. So three of the boys stuffed him into a laundry bag, dumped him into a grocery cart, then pushed him down the street to a school yard and shot him three times.”

  “Jesus, Mike. Why?”

  “So he wouldn’t identify them.”

  “I get that. But why? Did Pedro do something to them?”

  “Complete stranger they picked up in the park. His crime? He let these predators see his wad.” He glanced at the phone bill. “What’d I tell you? The city has gone to shit. But what do I care? After May, I’ll be a long way into somewhere else and I won’t have to see it or smell it or try to fix it anymore.”

  Nodding toward Khanh’s image on the screen, he said, “Where did I meet her?”

  “You met her and her husband, Sam, around Christmas. We ate at their restaurant. Remember? Big holiday party.”

  “There were a lot of people around that night. She and Sam are legal clients of Scotty? Is that the connection?” A furrow appeared between Mike’s white eyebrows as it often did when my ex-husband entered the conversation.

  “Clients of Scotty. Friends of mine.” I wasn’t sure how far to explain things. When Scotty and I divorced we divided the china, the bank accounts, and most of our friends. Rightfully Khanh and Sam Nguyen belong to Scotty, but we stayed in touch. They weren’t my best friends, but they were old friends, and that was worth something.

  I said, “Guido and I helped her find a relative down in Long Beach this morning.”

  “Oh?” Mike narrowed his eyes, raised his chin so he could look up at me; a cop look, an expression of doubt. A challenge. “What did she want the guy for?”

  “Mostly just to know that he’s all right.”

  “Did you tell me this before?”

  “Dunno. We’ve both been working so many hours that we’ve let a lot of details slide.”

  “Out of the blue, she wants you to find this relative?”

  “Not out of the blue,” I said. “After what happened to her, she wants to gather her family around her. I think that’s natural.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Could you do me a little favor?”

  “Could be. What do you need?”

  “Can you call the San Marino police and get a copy of Khanh’s burglary report? There are some details I would like to know.”

  “Is there a reason you can’t just ask her?”

  I held up my hands in front of him and spread my fingers, looked at my short fingernails. “What would happen to a woman’s fingernails if she was tied up for the better part of a day?”

  “I know what handcuffs do to a whore’s manicure. Why?”

  “Khanh’s nails are perfect. And they aren’t fakes.”

  Mike frowned, thinking things over. He reached for the trashcan and set it in front of him and began sorting the mail. He tossed the junk—the greater part of the stack—into the can, and the rest of it he sorted into piles on the floor in front of him. Without looking up, casually, as if the answer to the question was of no consequence to him, he asked, “This gal still a client of Scotty?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll give San Marino PD a call tomorrow.”

  Casey and Michael were home, chattering as they came through the house from the back. The dog heard them, too, and went out to meet them. When Casey and Michael walked into the workroom, Bowser was beside them, dragging his leash.

  “Hey, Pop. Hi, Maggie.” Michael, a taller, handsomer version of his father, sidestepped Bowser, came and perched on the arm of the couch next to Mike, rested his arm across Mike’s shoulders. “How’s it going?”

  “How was the library?” I asked.

  “Awesome,” Casey said, big gray eyes lit. “Michael’s college is so hot, Mom. It’s, like, really huge. The bookstore is this total mall.”

  “She asked about the library,” Michael prodded.

  “Library was good.” Bowser burrowed his muzzle into her armload of books. “Better than the public library, unless I went downtown. And who
has time for that?”

  Michael tossed a small pillow at her. “If you didn’t procrastinate.”

  Bowser, impatient, barked.

  “I’m not going to walk you, old man,” Casey scolded. “I have to type a paper. I’ll be up all night.”

  Casey appealed to Michael with a saucy little moue. Michael raised his hands and backed away from her. “He isn’t my dog.”

  Bowser looked from one to the other of them, expectant, the clip on his leash clanking on the hardwood floor as his head snapped back and forth.

  I stooped over and snapped the leash onto Bowser’s collar. “Let’s go, old fella. Just you and me unless I hear from volunteers.”

  Mike groaned. “It’s late, Maggie.”

  “Tell the dog.”

  “Guess a walk won’t hurt.” Mike got up, took off his tie, and came with me, stopping to trade his black oxfords for the old sneakers he always left beside the kitchen door.

  Bowser was happy to be outside the fence. The cool evening air was a relief after a day that I remembered as essentially one freeway excursion after another.

  Mike talked about going to the morgue to observe Pedro’s autopsy. I told him about going to Minh Tam’s hovel. He liked the part about the hovel floating out to sea the best.

  Walking slowly, we were less than two long suburban blocks from home, Bowser trotting beside us holding the handle of his leash clamped in his mouth, when I heard Casey call.

  “Mom!”

  We turned and waited for her to catch up. My ballerina daughter was already six feet tall. I loved watching her run, long skinny legs fully extended, toes pointed, loose hair. The streetlights, shining through the massive old trees along the curb, covered her in a moving canopy of pale yellow lace.

  “There’s a sight,” Mike said, hugging me. “The hell of it is, you make good babies.”

  “You do, too.”

  Casey was moving so fast that she almost overran us.