by David Daniel
“Tch. Bob, what about you? When were you born?”
“February thirty-first,” Whitaker told her.
She started to thumb pages, then caught on. Guys in the adjoining booth got into it. “Hey, Doris, my sign is ‘free breakfast served all day.’”
“And free something else.”
Doris cocked a fist on her hip and swept us all with a stare. Couldn’t men ever take anything seriously?
When the food came, Whitaker went at his with appetite. I chewed the muffin deliberately, visualizing the bran trapping poisons in my system. The little carrot-top cashier came over with her name printed on a meal check and handed it to Bob with a smile. I gave him a look. “I took her picture,” he said. “I’m going to send her one.”
She headed back to the register. “Did you catch the freckles?” he asked. “And that smile? Like an angel by Botticelli. What bone structure.”
“She’ll make a beautiful skeleton.”
“You’re high-fivin’ this morning.”
“I saw Lauren last night.”
He looked at me and said nothing more, knowing I’d give it if I needed to. Bob and his wife, Anne, had been our first neighbors when they moved from the South Shore. They knew the two of us and had kept the doors open both ways after our split.
“More to the point,” I said, “I’ve got to see Fred Meecham, Esquire, today. There’s no win in fighting.”
Whitaker nodded. He was a talker, but he listened more than most people, and he caught details. He bitched and moaned and talked about getting out of Lowell and the newspaper racket and maybe hitting the road with Anne and their two kids. And he had the talent to take him as far as he wanted it to, I just wasn’t sure he wanted. He’d have spit in my eye if I told him he had the makings of a lifer, but I had seen it happen with this place. Some people fell in love with sunlight on old brick, yesterday’s news blowing in the street, girderwork bridges spanning the big river. And greasy spoon diners in tasty abundance. Doris brought more coffee, and the conversation turned to what he had exhumed from the Sun’s files.
In the past twelve months, besides Bhuntan Tran’s, there had been six murders of Cambodians that had made the wire services and so had come up in the files he’d checked: Two each in San Francisco and Houston, one in Stockton, one in Seattle. Five men and a woman. “Plus I got one Laotian and two Vietnamese.”
“Give me the Cambodians first.”
“The most recent were Houston, in late May. Separate crimes, both victims males, and like all the others, they’d been shot. None of the crimes was solved as of the time they got reported. I did get a name of a cop who was handling the two in Texas.”
He was a Lieutenant Nathan Rosenheck. I took the name down, as well as the names and ages of the victims in all nine cases, plus the dates of the killings and a few other details that Whitaker had got.
“You think it’s a serial killer?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t be my first guess.” There was a definite gang structure. We had it in Lowell, punks preying on other Southeast Asians who worked for a living. The cops kept a pretty firm hand on them, but it was still an alien culture, not always easy to read.
As Botticelli’s angel took my money, Doris sneaked up and peeked over my shoulder at the driver’s license in my wallet.
“October seventeenth,” she declared triumphantly. “Libra.” She did a quick shuffle of pages. “‘Romance is indicated. Your love prospects are strong.’”
Bob caught my eye and piped in, “I’m Pisces, Doris.”
She found the page. “‘You’re going on a journey and meeting mysterious women.’”
“Nothing fishy about that. The Sun is sending me over to Fort Devens this afternoon to shoot the Officer Wives’ Club strawberry festival.”
“Y’see?” Doris crowed, vindicated.
* * *
I slotted the wheels in front of the Christian Science Reading Room and went into my building carrying black coffee in a paper cup. The elevator button responded with a Bronx cheer. I spotted the index card by my shoe. With vast labor I retrieved it and saw the hand-printed OUT OF ORDER of Fred Meecham, Esq. Probably something he had picked up in a courtroom. The dab of tape had dirt and hairs stuck to it, so I propped the card over the push button and hoped Fred had called the landlord. All that done, I gazed around the sad lobby, debating. But it’s a tough call when phoning in sick would only get you your own tape machine. I put my legs to work on the stairs, concentrating on the worn brown patch in the middle of each green-carpeted tread, like the spot where Williams used to stand in left field at Fenway. I wondered if the Splendid Splinter had ever played feeling this rotten.
The waiting room wasn’t exactly SRO. In fact it was empty, which for a change lifted me. I unlocked the office and went in and had dropped into my chair before I spotted the light blinking on my machine.
Ada Stewart had called to say she was to appear in juvenile court, which would tie up most of the day, but she would be back at DSS after five-thirty for at least an hour and would try me then. I wondered if I still heard the confidence in me she had walked away with yesterday. I couldn’t decide.
I dug out the name Whitaker had given me and called long distance information and got the central number for the Houston Police. A woman with a voice like a windmill creaking in a Panhandle wind told me I’d gotten through and that my call was being recorded. She said Lieutenant Rosenheck was out of the office. I left my name and number, invoking Sergeant St. Onge; not lying, but maybe letting the woman believe I was with the Lowell PD. Sometimes you can Rockford it, but if the bluff backfires you get zip. Honest omission was more practical.
It was nine-thirty. I finished the coffee, then steeled myself for the three-story descent.
* * *
With the breeze from clocking sixty on I-93, my head finally started to clear, though no such luck for the sky, which went right on glowering, just enough rain spitting out of it to make the wipers squeak after a few strokes and keep me switching them off and on. I hung in behind a tractor-trailer with a yellow sign on the back that asked: HOW’S MY DRIVING? and gave an 800 number. I was in Wilmington in fifteen minutes.
TecStrand, Inc., was one of the low, glass-and-brick operations nestled off the highway behind screens of evergreen. Invisible to speeding traffic two hundred feet away, it was probably pinpointed on defunct target maps in the old war room of the Kremlin. I wheeled past the idle BMWs and Audis and occasional Benzo in the reserved lot and put the Bobcat next to a Jag. Keep the big felines together. I only hoped the Jag owner wasn’t a door-banger.
In the smoked-glass entry I touched my tie, brushed rain off my face, then strolled into the lobby. A Cher look-alike without the edge smiled from a reception desk. “May I help you, sir?”
I gave her my name and said I had a ten o’clock appointment with Mr. Turcotte. She said if I would like to have a seat she would tell him I was there. “Help yourself to coffee.”
I passed and wandered over to a glossy marble wall where there was a PR display on TecStrand. Teamwork was the company’s biggest asset, I learned. I also learned that headquarters was in Little Rock. The Wilmington facility was chemical manufacturing—synthetic fibers for textiles and medical applications.
At a jingling sound I turned and saw a fiftyish man in a rumpled lab frock moving my way. The frock hung open over a pale yellow shirt and tired gray corduroys with a clip-on beeper and a big ring of keys. If keys were status, he was a CEO.
“Mr. Rasputin?” he said.
Nice talk when he was the one looking like a mad monk. I set him straight and we shook hands. He had the look I’d have if I didn’t curb my ways—sallow, suspicious eyes and broken capillaries netting his cheeks. He wasn’t much cheerier than I was this morning.
“What was it you wanted?” he asked.
I went through my intro. As soon as I mentioned Tran, his face shut down like the window shades of an old maid’s bedroom. “I don’t get it,” he said. “The
police are investigating. Why you?”
“An individual hired me.”
He looked doubtful. “You’re licensed to investigate a murder?”
“Not really. It’s a cooperative arrangement. Look, if you’ve got problems with it, call Detective St. Onge at the Lowell Police.”
He didn’t look any less distrustful, but he wasn’t going to bother to make the call. “So what can I say about Bhuntan Tran,” he paraphrased me. “That he was a hard worker and an adequate technician.”
“That sounds like faint praise,” I said. “I understand Tran’s specialty was environmental engineering.”
Turcotte checked it for hooks, shrugged. “He was doing simple lab work here. He could’ve had a degree in flower arranging.”
“Were you close?”
“You don’t get close to people in this work. You do your job and keep an eye open for where the knife’s going to come from.”
I glanced around. “The knife?”
“Oh, it’ll come. I guarantee it.”
“I guess you didn’t write the company promo about teamwork,” I said.
“Look, you want the truth? This business is a jungle, same as any other. As for Tran, I hated the slope-headed little son of a bitch.”
His testimonial was interrupted by a shrill beeping. He flapped open his smock and deactivated the page-call clipped to his belt. “Maria,” he called to the woman with Cher hair. “Check three-one-seven for me.”
She did, then called over her glass divider. “They want you in the gas lab.”
“Do this, do that. They’re running me goddamn ragged. I’ve got to go.”
“Mind if I tag along? To see where Tran worked?”
He gave me an unhappy glance. “Okay. But you stay where I say. There’s security work going on.”
At the end of a long, rubber-tiled corridor that smelled strongly of sulphur, a woman came out of a door and conferred briefly with Turcotte. He said to her, “Take this guy into C lab and show him Tran’s work station,” then he disappeared through the door she had come out of.
The woman led me into one of the open labs and pointed at a lot of machines and glass piping, which meant nothing to me and even less after her brief explanation. She was an earnest, pretty woman of middle years and, according to the lapel button on her smock, committed to saving the ozone layer. “You knew Bhuntan?” she asked.
“I never met him.” I told her why I was there. Maybe I should get small yellow cards made up: HOW’S MY DETECTING? and a toll-free number.
She shook her head. “I don’t believe that drug business either. He was a sweet man, from everything I’ve heard.”
“Mr. Turcotte doesn’t seem to think so.”
She appeared to consider whether to say more, then decided. “Norm was a good chemist for a lot of years. Believe it or not, his was once a name in synthetic fibers and plastics. He was very big.”
So was the Hula Hoop, I thought. “What happened?”
“A colleague at another company took some formulas Norm had developed and stole all the credit. Norm never got over it. He became very distrustful, never worked well on a team again. But that was a long time ago. He’s still a top-notch technician. Unfortunately, the man’s worn out. At this stage in his life, he simply doesn’t want the competition from anyone.”
“Was Tran competition?”
“He was bright and capable. But this wasn’t his field. He was just a hard worker.”
“Any chance of my looking at his employment file?”
“You could check with personnel. Ask at the front desk. Under the circumstances, they might allow it.”
I thanked her and went out. Turcotte appeared at the door of the other lab looking no less harried than before. “Lois, I’m going to need you.” He glanced at me. “I’m in this up to my elbows. I told you everything I know anyway.”
I watched him go back in, scared to death of his own demons. I found my way out all by myself.
8
THE ACRE USED to be the Greek section, back when the Greeks followed the French Canadians who had followed the paddy camp Irish as the immigrant wave washing into the city to work. The Olympia restaurant, with its Zorba Room, was still there, and a few small stores where you could buy Calamata olives and mizithra and over a glass of ouzo grouse with the proprietor about death and taxes. Like their predecessors, the Greeks who had prospered had moved to better neighborhoods, leaving the hard streets behind. Puerto Ricans, Cambodians, and Laotians lived there among the canals now, in ragged wooden tenements and their bunker-like counterparts, which locals had dubbed Cement City. I parked in front of a market with faded posters in the window in the curlicue typography of a language I didn’t recognize, touting a month-old event. As I scanned building numbers, I observed a trio of men conducting a business transaction in a doorway of one of the project houses. They weren’t trading stock tips. Down here hostile takeover had whole new shades of meaning.
On his job application in the personnel office at TecStrand, under “whom to notify in case of an emergency,” Bhuntan Tran had listed Samol and Mai Lim. There was no hint as to who these people were, but he had given a telephone number. I had called ahead and struggled with making myself understood. Finally I suggested that it might be easier if I came by in person. I think the woman on the line understood me.
Number 402 was a three-story wooden building painted battleship gray. There were no screens on the windows, and bright curtains waved in many of them like semaphore flags. Help might have been the message they spelled out. In front stood a cluster of Southeast Asian youths. We checked each other without making eye contact; there was no threat in it, only mutual awareness. I went into the hallway, where I scanned a lot of foreign names on the scabbing mailboxes and pressed a bell button for apartment D. I had no idea if it rang anywhere until I spotted four small heads peering over a top floor railing at me, like dark mops set to dry. Then two only slightly taller people appeared, a young woman with glossy black hair and an older, gray version of her.
“Mrs. Lim?”
The young woman gave a smile that looked pained. “Come up stair if you please.”
They made a little aisle for me, and I went into a kitchen with sparkling linoleum and a big table covered with an orange vinyl table cloth. Mai Lim ushered me through tied-back curtains into an adjoining room. The kids scampered along like I was the Pied Piper. In addition to the four, who probably had sixteen years among them, there was a slightly older girl, maybe ten, plus Mrs. Lim, and the old woman and an equally wrinkled man, who she said were her mother and father. The old man pushed himself up on a cane to join the others in watching me respectfully as I stood in their apartment. His right pant leg was knotted ten inches from his hip and hung empty.
“Please, sir, sit,” I said, though I was pretty sure it was my gesture and not the words he responded to. Only Mai Lim and the children seemed to know English. The little kids went off to play. The ten-year-old hunkered down on her haunches under a playbill for a film called 12 Sisters and a Batman poster.
The grandmother brought in a kitchen chair for me, and rather than argue chivalry, I sat. The ten-year-old went on staring at me the way a child will watch a magician, looking for the trick. I said to Mai Lim, “I understand you and your husband were friends of Bhuntan Tran.”
“We friend of Bhuntan. Very good man.”
“How long did you know him?”
“My husband know Bhuntan since they take class here to become American citizen. Then I come to join too.” She smiled broadly. “I’m citizen soon.”
Her pride in this moved me. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you very much.”
“So Bhuntan was not a relative. A brother or sister or cousin,” I added to avoid confusion. “He was a friend.”
“Yes. We love him very much. He come in our home many time. His family was kill in Cambodia before he go to Thailand and then coming here.” She was still smiling and I realized it must be a
form of politeness. “Bhuntan good friend,” she said again, and again I felt an admiration bordering on affection for a man I would never meet. He had survived horrors only to succumb here in the promised land.
I felt lousy bringing up the next topic.
“What about drugs. Did Bhuntan use drugs?”
Mai Lim and the old woman exchanged words, and I saw what looked awfully like expressions of disapproval—of me or the drugs or Bhuntan, I wasn’t sure. Mai Lim said, “No drug. In Cambodian home, family very important. When man and woman marry, priest he tell them—no longer say, ‘I.’ Always ‘we.’ When man and woman join, they speak, ‘we.’” She pressed her small brown hands together. “No drug. We think drug very bad thing. Bhuntan—no drug.” The old woman showed her gold teeth and seconded this in vigorous Khmer.
I dropped the topic. “Bhutan had a relative in California,” I said. “A cousin.”
She frowned. “I’m not think so. All family kill in Cambodia.”
I dug out my notebook and showed her the name I had copied at the mortgage office. Suoheang Khoy. “Swang Coy” is how she pronounced it. She shook her head. “I do not know him.”
“Did Bhuntan have enemies?”
She thought about that one. “Enemy, no. Not here. In Cambodia, very many enemy for all of us. Khmer Rouge. Terrible. Here we live in peace.”
The old man spoke for the first time and the adults conducted a three-way conversation, the ten-year-old cupped her mouth and snickered. A couple words sounded familiar, but I told myself, no way.
Mai Lim interpreted. “Father say you detective like Magnum, P.I.”
I grinned at the old-timer. “Give or take the moustache and Ferrari.”
He grinned back with perfect incomprehension.
“Ferrari,” I heard the little girl say softly, and I realized the reason for her attentiveness. This was a vocabulary lesson.
“That red car Magnum drives is a Ferrari,” I told her. She gave me a shy smile. Mr. Rogers had nothing on me.
I asked a few more questions and left open the possibility of speaking with Mai Lim’s husband Samol sometime. On the landing outside the door, with the kids lining up again, Mai Lim gave me a pained look of questioning. “It not fair,” she said. “We here, Bhuntan gone. Why anyone kill Bhuntan?”
