The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Later though, okay?” He looked at his watch. “Look, sweetheart, Maggie, I need you to focus on more pressing business right now. Lana has dodged my calls all day. So has the head of her division. I checked your network account and no funds have been released to you.”

  “What are the odds the network will come through by tomorrow?”

  “They get longer every minute that passes without word,” he said. “I went ahead and scheduled a phone conference with the folks at Canal Plus for five minutes past noon, our time, tomorrow. And I’m working on a backup, in case they both fall through.”

  “Good idea.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Where’s your phone?”

  I pulled it out of my pocket and showed him the dark screen. “Out of juice. I forgot to put it on the charger.”

  “Go give Guido a call,” he said. “He’s been trying to reach you. He asked me to tell you that he made the revisions on The Crooked Man you two talked about. He put what he hopes is the last draft of the film in the Cloud for you to look at. In his opinion, it’s finished. I think it’s best that you go take a look at it now, as in right now. Guido’s headed for the airport. If you think the film’s ready to go, I want that project submitted and signed off by end of business tonight so that, come noon tomorrow, there’s one less thing the network can jerk you around about if they still haven’t released funding for Normandy.”

  “Good thinking.” I handed him the broom. “I’m on it.”

  As I went inside, I heard Max sweeping the driveway. Bless his heart.

  I called Guido as I waited for our film to download from the Cloud file where he had stowed it. He was at the San Francisco airport waiting to go through security. Before he had to drop his phone into a plastic bin with his shoes and go through the scanner, he explained the changes he had made. While I waited for him to get re-assembled and call back, I fast-forwarded to the segments we thought needed some tweaking, saw what he had done, admired his technical skill for maybe the thousandth time, and relaxed. Before Guido boarded his short flight to Burbank, we agreed that the project was finished, and it was good. Very good, indeed.

  When he was buckled into his seat, he made a last call before he had to turn off his phone for takeoff.

  “What if Lana balks, and won’t sign off?” Guido asked.

  “Smile enigmatically and tell her that’s exactly what we hoped she’d do,” I said. “Drop a hint that the other folks we’re talking to would love to have The Crooked Man, too. She’ll call Uncle Max and he’ll explain how many different ways he’s going to sue her.”

  “So, we’re really going to Normandy,” he said, sounding very happy indeed. “If you can stay out of the line of fire long enough.”

  Max had some pressing business to deal with, so I took his Cadillac and went to see Bart without him. But first I stopped by the house, as I promised Beto I would, for some things Bart wanted.

  Auntie Quynh answered the door wearing a baker’s cap and apron, holding a pastry bag in a plastic-gloved hand.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, leading me toward the kitchen. The counters were covered with trays of exquisite bite-sized pastries. “I’m just finishing up; Zaida will be here soon to get me. Big party tonight, you know, down in the Marina. Carlos and Trips are with Bart now, but we need them to come home and get ready to work tonight. We didn’t know how we were going to get Bart’s bag to him until you said you’d take it.”

  She leaned toward me. “You know how Bart gets grumpy when things don’t go his way.”

  “I do.” Eyeing the pastries on the counter, I said, “A couple of those would cheer him up.”

  She handed me two little pink boxes tied with red string. “Top one is for Bart, bottom one is for you.” She pointed a finger at me and tried to look stern, but didn’t quite pull it off. “For after dinner.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What else do I need to take to Bart?”

  “Come with me.” She pulled off her cap and gloves and untied her apron.

  As we headed toward the back of the house, I asked, “Do you still have your bakery?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Auntie got old and retired. No, I just do this for Zaida a couple times a week. Otherwise, I’d just sit in a chair and rust.”

  She led me into Bart’s bedroom, the sanctum sanctorum of the house, left untouched since the day Mrs. B died.

  Quynh stooped quickly to get a pair of fleece-lined slippers from under the edge of the bed. Holding them, she slid open the closet doors, found a canvas overnight bag and put the slippers inside.

  “Honey, there’s a checkered robe in the other end of the closet,” she said. “Will you get it for me?”

  I slid the doors the other way and found the cotton robe on a hook at the end. That half of the closet was still full of Mrs. B’s clothes, neatly hung on hangers. After all those years, couldn’t Bart bring himself to remove them? Or was he just used to them being there?

  Quynh carefully folded the robe I handed her and put it into the bag on top of the slippers. As I watched her, I said, “Auntie, does it bother you to talk about Vietnam?”

  “Not so much.” She walked across the room and opened the top drawer of the dresser. “What do you want to know?”

  “I remember when you came here, how sick you were at first,” I said. “I know you were in a re-education camp in Vietnam, but I never heard how you got out.”

  “Just like Indiana Jones,” she said, taking a few pairs of white cotton socks out of the drawer. “When the communists took over Saigon, they sent me to work in the rice paddies because I was a capitalist—I owned a little market—and I had to learn how to be a hardworking proletariat. I stayed in that place maybe three years. Then one night, a man came into the hut where I slept and gave me a shot of something to keep me asleep, and then he took me away, up into the mountains.”

  “He kidnapped you?” I said.

  “He and his friends kidnapped a lot of people,” she said, packing the socks into the bag. “In that place he took me to, everybody had families living outside Vietnam. At first, I thought that we were put there for special punishment, but the others told me we were being held for ransom. Only, when their relatives followed instructions to deposit money in a certain bank account, the kidnappers asked for more. And more.”

  “You must have been scared to death,” I said.

  “At first, yes.” She packed reading glasses and a book from the nightstand before she went into the en suite bathroom for a toothbrush and other toiletries. She talked as she collected. “But there was food, I didn’t have to work in the rice paddies anymore, and no one beat me. Every now and then, someone did get out, so I just waited for my sister Trinh and Bart to do what they could. I knew Trinh would figure out a way.”

  Bag packed, she zipped it closed and handed it to me.

  “So what happened?” I asked, walking back to the kitchen with her.

  “I told you, Indiana Jones,” she said. She put Bart’s little box of pastries inside the bag and handed me mine. “One day, a man I knew from our family’s village came with some money, American money, and said he wanted me to go with him. When the kidnappers said it wasn’t enough money, my rescuer whistled for some friends who ran in carrying M-16s.”

  She smiled. “I guess it was enough guns.”

  “They got you out?”

  She nodded. “I rode on the back of a scooter to the sea. A boat came for me, and took me to a refugee camp in Hong Kong.”

  “And that’s where you were when you called Bart,” I said. “And found out about your sister.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s quite a story, Auntie,” I said. “It has both a happy and a sad ending. My mom and my uncle told me how hard your sister tried to get you out. I’m sorry she wasn’t around when it finally happened.”

  “Yes, but it was Trinh who got me out,” Quynh said, very matter-of-fact.

  “How so?”

  “The man who res
cued me,” she said, “he was always in love with Trinh. But our fathers were enemies so they were not allowed to see each other. It was for memory of her that he did what he did.”

  “What was his name?”

  I thought I knew the answer when I asked the question, but I was very wrong.

  She said, “Thai Van.”

  Chapter 17

  Beto’s sons, Carlos and Trips, were in chairs on either side of their grandfather’s bed, stockinged feet up on the bed, playing video games or texting or watching movies or whatever teenagers do on their cell phones. Bart was snoring like a hibernating bear. Both boys put their feet down guiltily and stood when I came in.

  I whispered, “How is he?”

  Trips, who was closest to me, came over and whispered back, “After all the tests he had today, he’s out for the count. If the nurses would leave him alone, he’d sleep through the night.”

  “Auntie said to tell you to go home, shower, and get to the Marina,” I said.

  He checked his watch. “What time is Dad getting here?”

  “As soon as he closes the store,” I said. “I’ll wait for him.”

  “Thanks,” Trips said, pulling on his shoes. “Grandpa gets a little crazy when he wakes up alone in a strange place.”

  After they left, I unpacked Bart’s bag, put his book and glasses where he could reach them and the pastry box where he could see it. The slippers went on the floor beside the bed, and the robe I draped over the back of one of the chairs next to the bed. Socks and toiletries went into a night table drawer, and the bag went into the small wardrobe.

  The room was dimly lit and quiet. The only sounds were people out in the hall and the steady beeping of the heart monitor. I sat down in the chair with the robe over the back and took out my phone. Jean-Paul had left a message earlier in the day, before I recharged the phone, telling me his flight plans. I checked my watch. If his plane left on time, he should be in the air at the moment. And because there wasn’t a second message telling me there was a delay, he most likely was in the air. He also told me that Rafael was picking him up at the airport. I left a text message asking him to have Rafael drop him at the hospital if his plane landed on schedule. I waited a few minutes for a response. When there wasn’t one, I knew his phone was turned off, so I texted Kevin. I told him where I was and asked if he could come right over; we needed to talk.

  A nurse bustled in to take Bart’s vital signs. When she put the digital thermometer in his ear, he stirred, opened his eyes and looked around. Seeming confused, he looked from the nurse, who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his arm, to me, and then around the room. His eyes lit on the things on the night table, and then on the robe behind me.

  “Is my wife still here?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.

  I exchanged glances with the nurse.

  “Your wife just stepped out for a minute,” the nurse said, taking off the pressure cuff. “She wants you to go back to sleep.”

  “Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

  I followed the nurse out to the corridor. “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Are you family?”

  “Friend,” I said.

  She smiled. “He’s stable, but he’s still pretty confused. And he can get volatile. Whatever he says, just go along with it to keep him quiet.”

  “Okay.” I glanced back into the room; Bart was snoring again.

  After checking for messages, I turned the phone to silent ring, sat back down in the chair beside Bart’s bed and watched the heart monitor—it was hypnotic. I don’t know how long I sat there, probably half an hour, before Kevin came into the room. He made sure Bart was sleeping before he gestured for me to follow him out into the corridor. We left the door open so we could see Bart, but we stood on the far side of the wide passageway so he couldn’t hear us if he wakened.

  “Why am I here?” Kevin asked, nervous, looking down the corridor toward the nurses’ station.

  “Because no one will question you coming to see Bart at the hospital,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I need to know whether you’re seriously looking into Mrs. B’s case, or you’re just saying you are to humor Beto.”

  His eyes flashed with anger. “Did Beto put you up to this?”

  “No,” I said. “Why do you think he would?”

  “He asked me the same damn question.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  He glanced toward Bart. “I told him that of course I’m performing a serious investigation.”

  “Is that the truth, though?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “But I wish it weren’t. Honest to God, Maggie, the further I get into the case, the more I have to ask, what good is it going to do anyone to drag all that up again? You told me yourself that you could have gone your whole life without knowing the truth about your parentage or seeing that crime scene shot of Mrs. B. Now you tell me that Mrs. B was sleeping with some guy. Beto worships his mother. Does he need to know that? Does Bart?”

  He braced a hand on the wall next to my head and put his face close to mine. “And Bart, jeez, look at Bart. I’m at the point in this that I need to ask him the hardball questions no one asked the first time around or I’m stuck. But who is that going to help, Maggie?”

  “I think the real question is, who benefits most if you bury the investigation?”

  Still standing uncomfortably close to me, he said, “I’m sure you have an opinion about that.”

  “A few,” I said. “Has Chuck Riley asked you to walk away?”

  “My father-in-law? No.” He moved back half a step. “Why would he?”

  “He was the original detective assigned to the case,” I said. “He’s the cop who neglected to ask Bart those hardball questions, among other things, when he should have. I didn’t see a record in the murder book that Chuck ever roused himself to look into Bart’s bedroom, sent carpet samples to the crime analyst, looked for blood or bullet hits. Why do you think that was?”

  “Chalk it up to inexperience.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, leaning in toward him, forcing him back a bit, and looked right up into his face. “Your department is small, but they’ve always been damn good at what they do.”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess.”

  “Have you talked about the case with your father-in-law?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “You said it yourself, this was his case in the beginning.”

  “I guess that’s the part I keep going back to,” I said. “You told me you took Lacy over to her parents after her meltdown at my house the other night because you didn’t want your kids to see her in that state again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you explain to Chuck when you took Lacy to him why I had asked you to come to the house earlier that day?”

  He lifted a shoulder, dismissing the issue as inconsequential. “No reason not to.”

  “Tell me, what experienced cop, tasked with watching over his highly agitated, pathologically jealous, not very sober daughter would leave a loaded gun where she could easily get her hands on it?”

  “You can’t think Chuck put Lacy up to taking shots at you,” he said.

  “At you, you mean. I don’t think she was gunning for me on the freeway, and neither do you—you said so. Who planted the idea with her that you were at my house on Saturday?”

  “Oh for cryin’ out loud.” He turned away from me and pressed his back against the wall, arms folded defensively across his chest.

  “You can still pass the case to someone else if you don’t have the stomach for it,” I said. “Conflict of interest alone should have kept you from taking it on at all.”

  After he fumed to himself for a few moments, he looked down at me. “You got anything more you want to throw at me?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “Have you done anything with the shirt Mrs. B was wearing when she
was shot?”

  “I gave it to our crime analyst,” he said. “To our department’s licensed, certified, professional analyst, in case you’re wondering. And so far, he’s told me that the shirt has DNA from more than two people on it, but the DNA profiles won’t be ready for a while. And, FYI, the shirt’s a size fourteen and a half.”

  “I doubt Bart has worn a fourteen and a half since his first communion,” I said. “If then.”

  “You want me to say the shirt belonged to this guy, this lover, you say Mrs. B was fooling around with?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything you can’t substantiate, Kev. But think about this: When I saw Mrs. B the morning she died, she was wearing a blue shirtwaist dress. She looked like she was ready to go to work at the deli.”

  ‘You told me that before,” he said.

  “I saw that blue dress hanging in Bart’s bedroom closet this afternoon.”

  He said, “I...” and got no further. We stood there, side by side for a moment, watching Bart sleep.

  The elevator doors down the corridor opened and a dietary tech came out pushing a tall cart full of dinner trays, making a great racket of it. Bart stirred. He began kicking off his blankets as if he were trapped by them, waving his arms against unseen foes. I rushed to him, afraid he would pull out his IV line. The blips on the heart monitor spiked crazily. I caught his hands and held them.

  “Bart, it’s okay,” I said. “Look at me. Bart.”

  With effort, he focused his eyes on me and stopped thrashing about, but he still seemed confused, frightened. He saw Kevin standing at the end of the bed and dropped his head back on his pillows and lay quiet, seemed dazed. After a minute, he looked at me and said, “How are ya?” And then he paused, as if he couldn’t dredge up my name.

  “I’m fine,” I said, watching the heart monitor settle back into normal rhythms. “And how are you?”

  He raised the arm with the IV and managed a smile. “Guess you should ask the doc that.”

  The dietary tech came in with Bart’s dinner tray.

  “Good evening, Mr. Bartolini,” he said, awfully damned cheerful, setting the tray on a wheeled table and moving it into position over the bed so that Bart could eat sitting up. “We have something really yummy for you tonight.”