by David Daniel
* * *
The neighbor with the hose had worked his way to the far end of his property, and I strolled down to where he was. He had a jar attachment on the hose and was spraying a fourth-generation Agent Orange on a clump of toadstools that had pitched camp on his lawn.
“Nice morning for it,” I said. I like to stay with a snappy opener.
He looked as if he’d have liked to hose me down and watch me wither. “Who’re you?”
He was in Madras walk shorts and a V-necked T-shirt. He was probably little more than my age—give him two and make it forty—but he had the Budweiser gut and could ask Santa for a training bra any time now. I went through my half of the introductions and got nothing in return. I might have hung it up right there, but it’s the shark-infested eyes that see things. “I’d like to ask a few questions,” I said.
“I don’t see some ID, I’m gonna call someone who will.”
The wallet copy of my private license earned a prolonged stare and finally a grunt. “I already talked to the cops. They given up?”
“I’m cooperating with them. I won’t keep you, Mr…?”
He was slow about it. “Azar.”
“I noticed the bedroom window over there faces your house and pool.”
“Yeah?”
“Any chance you saw or heard something the night of the shooting?”
“Wasn’t home.”
He was a fun type. But it didn’t figure he had all that swimming pool alone. Judging from his physique, it didn’t figure he had it at all. “What about your family?”
He strangled off the hose and walked back to a green metal reel at the spigot. I followed him. There was a black Bronco in the driveway, tinted glass, Yosemite Sam snarling “Back Off” from the mudflaps.
“Family?” I repeated.
Azar grunted. “No one heard nothing.”
I saw it move across his face like a shadow, and I didn’t want it to get away. “Any theories?”
He hesitated, then scowled. “I don’t think the cops’ve gotta look far to figure who did it.”
“Yeah?” My interest stayed with him.
“This is a regular neighborhood. You won’t find many of the other people.”
He gave the adjective a nasty little emphasis, and there it was. “I got nothing against anyone minds their own business,” he went on, “but people should stick to their own kind. And I don’t like wild parties till all hours, I can tell you that.”
“Bhuntan Tran had parties?”
“Tell the truth, Joe,” a woman’s voice said through a screen window above a hemlock bush. A face to go with it leaned forward on the sill. “I’m Claire Azar. Are you from the police?”
“Private,” I told her. “My name’s Rasmussen.”
She glanced sidelong, indicating the house next door. “There was one party. Actually, more of a cookout, wouldn’t you say, Joe?”
Joe stewed, but Claire took no notice. “Mr. Tran came over very polite and shy the day before and asked me if we’d like to come. It was some sort of Cambodian celebration, back in May. I’d like to have gone. Learning about other cultures is an education in itself. I love the Geographic specials. But we were going up to Hampton to visit Joe’s side that day. We didn’t get back till late. They were a little lively over there, it’s true. But mostly it was just talking, which if it’d been English, we wouldn’t even have noticed. And everyone was gone by midnight.”
Azar looked sullenly at his wife. “You going to tell the rest?”
“Moon festival,” she said abruptly.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“What the celebration was for. In May. I just remembered it.”
“What did you mean by ‘the rest’?” I asked Azar.
He was still looking at his wife. “Well?”
Claire Azar left the window and came out the front door and down the steps, rubber thongs clapping softly against her bare heels. She was a tanned, fit woman wearing pink culottes and a tank top. I knew who used the pool in back.
“The night before the awful thing happened,” she said, “I was home. Joe works three to eleven. So I was here alone, watching TV on the breezeway. Murphy Brown I think I was watching. Anyway, during a commercial I got up, and suddenly I thought I saw someone in the back yard. I peered through the blinds and sure enough, someone had come out of the woods behind Mr. Tran’s house. That’s all woods back there, runs over to Brae Road. Kids play in it sometimes, but it’s swampy and this time of year it’s all mosquitoes. Anyway, I see someone I think is a kid, and he jogs across the lawn and I guess went to the back porch on the far side.”
“Of Tran’s house?” I asked.
“That’s a guess, because I only saw him go around the side and then I didn’t see him again.”
“Did you recognize the kid?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think it was a kid. I mean, he was slender, but I think it was a man.”
“That was the night before the killing?” I said.
“Right. Monday. The next night I fell asleep early. Some neighbors down the street say they heard a car leave around eleven, but nobody saw anything.”
That had been in St. Onge’s version. “Do you remember anything else about the person you saw?”
She scratched her tanned elbow a moment. “Did I mention that he was Oriental?”
* * *
I asked a few more questions, but there wasn’t much else to be learned. As I walked to my car, Azar stood at the edge of his lawn, treating me the whole time to his bunker stare like I was going to sneak around some night while he was at work and mix it up with Claire and maybe queer Century 21’s deal in the bargain and then no nice regular people would ever move into the house next door. It would be haunted with slant-eyed ghosts, and toadstools would invade the back yard, and kids would throw rocks through the windows on Halloween. That’s how it starts, his bitter eyes told me as I turned the car around and drove away.
There was no street sign on Brae Road. Probably in some college dorm room in Boston. The street was one closer to the hill, so the homes were larger, all-American ranches and splits. School vacation was less than a month old and the kids were sitting among their bikes, skateboard ramps and street hockey nets, staring and idle-minded. These established neighborhoods were starting to get to me.
I was interested in one stretch of road where there were no houses, only a sandy shoulder alongside woods that came out on the back yards of the homes on Longfellow. The woods was a tangle of green gloom in the July midday, and I could imagine someone pulling over that Monday night and parking to slip guerrilla-like through the two hundred feet of trees and swamp. One of the “other people,” in Azar’s crude-but-true parlance. I drove off with a cool sense of how little I knew of my Southeast Asian townsmen.
4
WITH PLANS FOR dinner at six, I decided to pass on lunch. I found a phone booth and called the Sun and asked for Bob Whitaker. He had just come out of the darkroom. We kibitzed for a minute, then I told him I needed a favor. He didn’t go “Uh oh” or anything, so I mentioned the Tran killing. “I want to know if there’ve been other murders of Southeast Asians in the past year, Cambodians in particular.”
“In Lowell?”
“Anywhere in the country.”
“Do you want it before Christmas?”
It was a tall order, especially since Bob was a photographer. It would mean combing the Sun’s files; but he had the best access of anyone I was friends with. “Sooner the better.”
He said he would get back. I dropped more coin and called the company where Bhuntan Tran had been employed days. A woman with a voice that would never be replaced by a robot said, “TecStrand.” I told her who I was and that I wanted to talk with Bhuntan Tran’s supervisor, and without having said a second word she put me through. I got sandbagged at the next level and told the plant was in a production cycle—I would have to make an appointment for next week sometime.
“That’d be grea
t,” I said. “No problem. The thing is I’ll be in Washington all next week, appearing before the Senate Committee on Law and Order.”
“Minute please.” The person was gone for a few bars of “Yellow Bird,” then came back. “Would tomorrow morning at ten be convenient?”
“Um…” My calendar was as bare as the Playmate of the Month, but once you start the tangled web, you have to keep weaving. I rattled pages of the phone book. “I can just make that.”
“I’ve put you in, sir. Mr. Turcotte, ten A.M.”
The laundry was easy. Shifts changed at three-thirty, come by then, ask for Mr. Perry; they’d tell him someone was coming. I cradled the phone and thought about going for four in a row, but I had a pair of hours to kill. Besides, I’m much more impressive in person. I took 113 along the river.
The Merrimack River springs out of mountains up toward the Canadian border, making its debut near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, then for a hundred miles keeps dubious company with tired mill cities like Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill before dragging its soiled skirts to the ocean at Plum Island, like an old tart on seaside holiday. But the river made these cities. As it snakes through what is now Lowell, it drops thirty vertical feet, and some smart cookies a long time ago decided to carve the farmland into canals and locks and put all that energy to use. The river is still impressive as it rolls along, particularly on fine days like today when the wind was right and you didn’t catch a whiff of it.
In Tyngsborough I went out 3-A. River View Mortgage was housed in a pale-gray-and-blue, gambrel-roof reproduction in rough-sawn clapboard with quaint farm implements over an ersatz barn door. The place fairly oozed down-homeyness—until you couldn’t make your monthly payment, then they came at your credit rating with a scythe. I greeted a young woman at a desk inside and asked for R. Morrisette, the name I had taken off the listing sheet Ken Smith had shown me. I was told that Rachel had left the organization.
“Can I help you?” the young woman offered. “I’m pretty new, but I try hard.” A small diamond solitaire twinkled from her finger, as bright as her personality. I told her who and what I was and didn’t get any further. “An honest-to-God detective?” she said.
I could have let her feel the biceps, but that meant taking off my suit jacket and probably popping some shirt seams, so I showed her the license instead.
“We prefer ‘investigator’ over ‘detective,’” I said. “The cops do too.”
When she caught her breath, I gave her the mortgage number I was interested in. She left her desk for a few moments and came back with a file folder. A look of pain had come over her face.
“I thought the name was familiar. That’s really too bad what happened.” The sympathy was genuine. “He was right up-to-date too. Eight hundred fifty-six dollars a month, including twenty-six for mortgage insurance. That was required because he’d put down ten percent.”
I counted some mental fingers and toes. “So last February Mr. Tran fronted about seventeen thousand dollars for the house, give or take.”
“Plus a point and a half and whatever the lawyers held him up for. And after all that … tch. Imagine.”
I was thinking of Ada Chan Stewart’s remark about saving. It was a hefty nut to make on laundry money. “Who holds the note now?”
“Central West Mortgage. Secondary market.”
As I was wondering where to go, she said in a confidential voice, “Mr. Tran also included a gift letter with his loan ap.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“A gift letter? Anytime you have money that’s been given to you, the mortgagor requires a letter from the giver, stating it was a gift, free and clear. So it doesn’t represent a liability. Mr. Tran got five thousand dollars from … a cousin, it says.”
“The cousin have a name?”
“Suo—…” She frowned into the file a moment, then grinned and gave it a quarter turn. “I’m not even going to try that one.”
The name typed on the line was Suoheang Khoy. I didn’t try it either, but I wrote it down. The address was a P.O. box in San Jose, California. The rest of the file was routine lawyer fodder. I wondered how many trees it cost to buy a house.
The young woman had been helpful, so I thanked her and gave her a card with the s inked into the right spot. I didn’t think she would be needing it anytime soon, but like the song said, a diamond doesn’t always sparkle. I hoped hers would. If nothing else, she could keep the card in her wallet and write other people’s phone numbers on the back.
* * *
The Ajax Linen Company’s logo—a helmeted spear-carrier—was painted in faded lines on a brick wall facing an alley where I parked.
The three-thirty shift was in full hiss and roar; I could feel the crease dissolving from my pants as soon as I stepped inside the building. A lot of people were trundling big canvas hampers around in the sultry air, fitting sheets and pillow cases on industrial pressers. I asked a towering black man where I could find Mr. Perry. He nodded toward a glass door at the far end.
The office was a snug little affair with a rolltop desk. Years of steam had not even started to warp the slab oak. A bearded man with long hair stood in a corner plucking punch cards out of a rack under a time clock.
“I’m looking for Mr. Perry,” I said.
He turned and regarded me with sharp eyes. He had a potato nose with pores in it as big as the eyelets on his work boots. His uniform was a tie-dyed tank top and jeans held aloft by a garrison belt with a ZigZag man buckle, his wallet secured to the belt with the Queen Mary’s anchor chain. He gave a grunt that could have meant most anything.
“Is that you?” I asked.
“There ain’t no ‘mister.’ It’s Perry Martin. Who the hell are you?”
I knew my earlier message had been like a penny foolishly tossed down a wishing well. I went through the explanation; it’s amazing how often you need to when you’re working, but it beat the silence of not working all hollow. Perry Martin checked time cards and made little jottings on each, one furry shoulder turned to me as he talked, all to the only slightly muted accompaniment of the anvil chorus outside the door. Tran got a good rating as a worker.
“Did he use drugs?” I asked.
Martin’s eyes locked with mine, lots of challenge and who knew what else in them. “What’re you, a narc? I wouldn’t have cared if he was into sniffing toilet seats in his spare time. If I had a dozen of him, I’d get ridda the wetbacks and bushboogies who want a paycheck but don’t wanna earn it.”
“Is that a yes?” I asked.
Just then there was a knock, and a black woman carrying a flower print carpetbag opened the door and hurried in.
“’Scuse me,” she murmured and went to the punch clock before she saw the cards were gone. She looked over. “Sorry, Perry,” she said. “My little girl’s sick and I had to wait on my husband to get home from his shift to be with her. I’d rather run a little late here and make the time up by staying longer.”
Perry had been looking over, nodding in what might have been sympathy. “Daughter sick, huh, Cassie?”
“I’ll make up the time.” She was dressed in a loose polyester dress, a big woman with a strong, handsome face and expressive eyes. “Nervous” was stamped in those eyes now. Her hands worried at the handle of her carpetbag. “I can stay extra.”
“Extra? Naw,” Perry said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you take the week off and come back Monday.”
“Mr. Martin, you can’t do that.”
“I just done it. I ain’t taking any of that late news. People got a shift to work, I expect them punching in when they’re supposed to.”
The woman stood a moment and I tried to study the wall. Humiliation in the face of white males probably was nothing new to her, but it hurt me. From the outer area, over the silence, came the rumble of laundry machinery. At last, in a weak voice, the woman said, “Monday?”
“On time,” Perry said.
She turned and went slowly
out and pulled the door closed behind her.
“Kind of a tough policy,” I said.
He gave me the stone stare. “I tell you how to do your job?”
I stared back. After a moment he twitched his mouth and turned to the desk. “That’s why Tran was a pain in the ass,” he said. “He’d fight me now to get her reinstated. I’d still make the call. I’ve got a business to run. But he worked hard, I’ll give the little son of a bitch that. And, no, I don’t think he was a doper.”
Driving out I noticed the woman who had been inside. She stood across the street waiting for a city bus. I stopped. “I’m going downtown if that’s any help.”
She checked me warily, looked to see no bus in sight, then picked up her parcel. “Gorham Street’s where I’m headed if you’re going that far.”
“It’s on the way.”
The silence sat around us in a sluggish pool most of the way down Lawrence Avenue and I began to think I should have kept right on driving and not stopped. There was no way to acknowledge what had just occurred. Instead I said, “Did you know Bhuntan Tran very well?”
“You a policeman?”
“No. Tran was a friend of a friend.”
She nodded. “He had no trouble making them.”
“Why’s that?”
“Folks took to Bhuntan, because he took to folks. Always smiling and talking. That was real sad what happened.”
“Did Bhuntan seem different at all when you saw him last?”
“Different? Well, now that you mention it, the day before he got killed, he come in and asked Perry for the second half of his shift off. That wasn’t like him.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, Bhuntan was a worker.”
“Do you know why he asked to leave?”
“He didn’t say, but if I was to guess? I’d say there was something he had to do, something he didn’t much want to do.”
I glanced over at her.
“His face,” she said. “He looked scared.”
I negotiated past several double-parked cars to a four-way stop. Shifts had ended and the liquor store on one corner was doing brisk business, like the bar on the opposite corner. “Scared,” I said when we were rolling again.
