Caught Dead (3 page)

***

Back at home, I switched on the local news, and Mary Vu was still the lead story. They ran a snapshot of her with husband Benny, taken when they were in their twenties. I had to admit that she was a stunner. Even the newscaster termed her “a local beauty,” quoting someone in the Vietnamese community. Near bedtime, I sat there, the room still warm, and I stared at the air conditioner. Three days into a heat wave. Grimly, I thought—people kill people when the thermometer stays over ninety degrees.

The phone rang.

“Rick, it's Hank. I'm at work, and not happy. People who don't speak English are waving meat cleavers at me.”

“They must have a reason.”

“Jealousy.”

“What's up?”

“I smell like stale soy sauce and look like leftover mu shu pork.”

“Is that why you called?” I yawned.

“What did you find out from Liz?”

I shook my head, grinning. “How did you know I called Liz?”

“You always do when you're on a tough case. Like this one. She's your, well, lifeline.”

“Hank, I'm not on a case.”

“Of course you are.”

“Hank…”

“After the funeral Thursday, you will be.”

“I'm not going to the funeral.”

“I'll pick you up at nine. We can get coffee first. You can buy me a doughnut.”

Chapter Three

The next morning I woke up bloated and tired, last night's wine leaving me headachy. Yawning, I pulled myself out of bed and showered. My muscles ached. I really needed my morning jog. I'm not out of shape but in need of muscle on my long, lanky body. It's a jogger's body. I have great calves, but I have the upper body of a teenage drug addict. Drying myself off, it suddenly dawned on me: birthday. Liz's birthday, her thirty-eighth. In a month I would be thirty-eight, too. We were the same age, though I'd always ragged her that I was the baby.

I was turning thirty-eight on September 15. It's a phony date, I know, given me when I arrived in America, a thirteen-year-old boy who, until then, had no birthday at all, or, at least any that I remembered from the orphanage. September 15. It was birthday by fiat. Catholic Charities and Immigration Services giving me puberty, America, and a birthday all at the same time. Talk about your hat tricks.

I decided to hit the gym before the heat settled in, do some prep for my Wednesday night class. The college has a rich man's health facility, with state-of-the-art wall-to-wall workout equipment and free weights, even a jogging track, but I like to use it early in the morning, before the droopy-eyed undergraduates drag in for fun, games, and rendezvous. A few inveterate muscle boys who ignore everyone always arrive early, but the rest don't arrive until eight. I got there at six-thirty.

While swimming laps in the pool after the workout, I felt distracted, unable to focus. Images flooded me: one minute poor Mary Vu shot to death in a forbidden drug zone and, in the next moment—me. I couldn't escape my birthday. My American birthday. The mingling of these two events—one a sad death, one a legislated birth—overwhelmed me, stunned. I stopped swimming, resting on the side of the pool, my hair in my eyes, heart pounding, veins in my hands jutting out as I gripped the side of the pool. Liz's comments about my being an orphan bothered me more than I thought.

My name is Rick Van Lam. My real first name is Viet. Most Americans can't pronounce the distinct monosyllabic Vietnamese inflections. No matter. In Vietnam I was Lam Van Viet. In America, resting in a foster home in the Bronx for a month, I was Viet Van Lam, and then I allowed myself to become Rick Van Lam at the insistence of Father He from Catholic Charities, my English-speaking conduit to my new American culture. I didn't mind—I was thirteen and I wanted to become American.

I'm that curious breed produced by the Vietnamese Conflict—I'm Amerasian, one of the so-called children of the dust, the dirty secret, the
bui doi
. I have no idea who my mother was, except that she was a Vietnamese woman who, in the final days of the war, carried a child by a white American soldier, also nameless and now forgotten. Left at an orphanage when I was around five, I have trouble remembering my mother, but sometimes I recall her holding me tight. I remember her story of the baby boy attacking the clay demon. That's an important story I hold in my heart. So I grew up hated by most Vietnamese—“Your mother was a whore, your father a pig”—as I struggled through childhood in a Catholic orphanage. I was hated by white people, too. Dust boys, that's what they call us. But it also explains why I have those violet-blue eyes encased in sleepy slanted sockets, my tall lanky body, and the bone structure of an all-American soldier, probably some milk-fed boy from Des Moines or—I don't know, maybe Pensicola. God knows. I never will.

One document I own suggests that my real last name is indeed Lam, which, like Nguyen, is as commonplace as Smith or Jones or Garcia in America. And supposedly the Van and the Viet are real. But there's no mother to guide me, as they say. And for a long time, in America, I would look at older white men and think, Hey, is that you, Daddy? What did you do in the war?

Sometimes I find myself still doing that.

I was a bright child, alert, the darling of the severe, unyielding nuns, a cute little bugger who played every manipulative game because I wanted to survive. I knew the odds were stacked against me. I'd sneak out of the home at night, maneuvering my way through cluttered, hostile Saigon streets, hiding in the shadows of walls plastered with posters of benevolent Uncle Ho, the leader who saved us from America. Those days I was always hungry. Soon I wormed my way into America. Being half-white was a liability in the best of worlds, but it also afforded me guilt-laced entry into the country of my father. So at thirteen I was sponsored to America by the good Catholics, who found me a permanent home in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I excelled in school—of course—making my adopted parents, Jesse and Connie Greeley, inordinately proud, but not currying much favor with the less-bright natural siblings, Judith and Harry, who still don't speak to me to this day. Jesse Greeley was a lawyer, and that was to be my career. Full National Merit Scholar at Columbia College, Phi Beta Kappa, American success story, until my senior year when bouts of depression kept me in bed.

In the words of my adopted father: “What the hell's your problem all of a sudden?” I'd been a model teenager.

I never knew how to answer him. I still don't, to this day. I see my parents whenever I can, though they still look at me with the same pitying expression they wore when I stepped out of Brother He's limping station wagon onto their suburban lawn. They never lost that expression. There I was, poor boy, frightened, trembling, in a Salvation Army sweater, in baggy jeans with frayed cuffs, carrying a battered GI Joe toy I got at a Goodwill toy bin. Half-eaten Oreos in a Catholic Charities tote bag. Thirteen years old, with a war toy. Years later, with BA from Columbia College in hand, they hugged me like the orphan I was—a barefoot boy with cheek.

How was I to tell these wonderful people, my deliverers into a safe America, that I would wake in the night in a cold sweat, hungry for something besides law and money, hungry instead for quiet and order. I wanted something to stop the shaking, the nighttime sweats. Sometimes I still get them. I wake up feeling lost and homeless. I'm drifting in space, no rock to cling to. Helpless, screaming.

In my senior year, riding the IRT subway from 116th Street down to Times Square, I saw an ad for a master's program in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. At that moment a transit cop was shoving a homeless black man into a sitting position across from me, shaking him out of a sleep, kicking him, and it seemed the only route to go for me. I wanted the front lines, not the three-piece-suit world of the corporate courtroom. I wanted my blood to boil. Fire in the belly, fury in the marrow.

“What?” I can still hear Liz's precise intonation—clipped, a tinge of hysteria. I'd been dating Liz Sanburn throughout my senior year. A psychology major from a Riverdale family of psychiatrists and tax attorneys, she acted as though I'd slapped her in the face. Our romance had been magical. Madcap, stupid, filled with laughter, a little bit taboo, but it had become serious in the last spring semester. Suddenly we were talking about marriage because we were both drunk with each other. I couldn't believe there could be anyone else for me. We'd see each other in the stacks at Butler Library and burst out laughing, out of control. But when she fought me on my going into police work—I wanted the master's and then the police academy—something started to die in me. Stupidly, we married anyway, hoping the marriage certificate and the settled life in Manhattan would jump-start our love again. It didn't. And the more I withdrew, the more Liz—so aware of my distance, my moods, my running away—tightened her hold.

We stayed together for three years, she getting a psych master's at Hunter while I became a foot patrolman in Chelsea. She cried every night. I never wanted to go home. My brief stint on the force was a blur, a kind of manic, headlong assault on crime and injustice. One day, collaring some piece of trash who'd just beat up an old woman for her purse and a few bucks, I found myself up against a .22 pressed into my neck. I flipped out, overreacting, fighting the scumbag. He fired, grazing my left shoulder—I still have a jagged, lighting-bolt scar—as I tried to wrestle the gun from him. He was stronger than he looked, a wiry drugged-out maniac who fought for his life. As did I. I won, getting out my revolver and blowing him away.

But something happened to me as I stood over him, my body virtually connected with his, pumping lead into him. My head became light and airy, echoey, and I found myself staring into the man's face, and I kept yelling,
Take that, take that take that, you fucking bastard
, until I was pulled off him by my partner. Years later, when I dreamed about it, things got mixed up. In those feverish awakenings, I found myself yelling,
Take that, father, take that, father, take that, father
. Over and over. The day the little Vietnamese boy struck back at his white daddy. Today on Dr. Phil.

Months of police-mandated therapy and my own mournful introspection compelled me to leave the force. Frankly, I was happy to go. But when I did, I realized I had to clear up a number of nagging lies, and one was my sputtering marriage. I needed a fresh start, so I asked for a divorce. Liz knew it was coming.

An old police friend had connections in Farmington where the College was initiating a new degree in Criminal Justice. He got me the job, I made the move out of the city, I connected with a private investigator named Jimmy Gadowicz because I still wanted to be active in the profession—out there in the field—and that's how I ended up where I am. Jimmy took care of me, maneuvering me through the medieval criminal justice red tape of Connecticut. Proudly he gave me tours of places like the Connecticut State Police Forensic Crime Lab in Meriden. The Connecticut Police Academy. He has buddies everywhere. Everyone likes him. He took care of me.

Now, years later, Connecticut—this town, Farmington, so far from Manhattan and the frantic life I led there—is the only home I want. Quiet, quiet. I teach undemanding kids—a little too pampered, a little too dumb—at the small liberal arts college that struggles to stay afloat. I do knee-jerk fraud investigations and slimy divorce investigations with Jimmy. Quiet. Life hums along, the heartbeat of the dead.

I wanted nothing to do with murder.

Chapter Four

Hank and I were late arriving at St. Lawrence O'Toole Roman Catholic Church in the South End of Hartford. We'd started out in my BMW, which chose to sputter to a halt in the middle of Main Street, directly in front of Miss Porter's school.

“How ignominious,” Hank whispered. “And not even a newer model.”

So we walked back, got into his rusty Chevy, skipped coffee, and ended up in the last pew of the church. At ten in the morning the temperature was ninety-one. Mourners wilted in pews with paper fans and soggy handkerchiefs. A packed house, the entire Vietnamese community gathered, it seemed, largely because of Mary Vu's spectacular and senseless death, but also because she was a well-loved woman. Local TV crews were set up on the sidewalks on New Britain Avenue, interrupting the mourners for local color vignettes. A photographer from the
Courant
leaned on a car and watched us walk by. Hank and I rushed past another latecomer, an old Vietnamese man, who was stopped by a news stringer with bleached blond hair and oversized sunglasses. When he started babbling in Vietnamese, she simply turned away. The old man stood there, perplexed, then followed us in, sitting next to us.

At one point Hank's mother looked back anxiously, checked out the mourners, spotted Hank, and was satisfied that he'd made it there.

The Vietnamese priest was conducting a High Mass in the native language of virtually all the mourners, who were mostly Catholic but with a generous number of Buddhists. The singsong rhythms, coupled with the incense and the intoxicating aroma of flowers, lulled me, made me drift off.

Sitting there, I remembered that I was born a Buddhist. I believe that because one of the few items I carried to America from the Catholic orphanage was a tattered, brown-cover paperback, slim as a calendar, that my mother had supposedly left with me when she dropped me off at the orphanage.
The Sayings of Buddha
. I still cherish it. In college, hanging with friends, I'd glibly quote bits I translated from my little book. Like:
All things small are as all things large when boundaries disappear.
Everyone would smile. Sometimes I'd deliver them a little mockingly. But one night someone called me Charlie Chan. It meant nothing to me then. But when I suddenly became addicted to late-night black-and-white movies and heard the drippy maxims, I shuddered. I stopped my joking—and hated the way I'd acted.

Well, Charlie Chan and number one son. Rick and Hank. Someday, Hank insists, he wants us to be partners in a detective agency. Tan and Viet. Our Vietnamese names. TV Associates. Chopsticks—with surveillance cameras.
All things small are as all things large
.

Those pithy, wonderful sayings come to me every so often. They warn me of danger. They humble me, level me.

So now, dwelling on Mary, I found myself thinking:

The act cannot separate from the actor;

The actor cannot separate from the act
.

But I didn't think Buddha could help me find Mary's killer.

I shook myself out of my reverie. What was it about churches that always brought me back to my childhood? The music? The solitude? The incense? The resonance of bells? The coldness of shadowy stained glass? Suddenly I heard raspy, choked noises erupting from the front pew, jolting me to attention. One minute absolute silence, then the garbled rasp of overweening grief, covering our heads like rain. Everyone leaned forward, expectant.

Hank whispered, “It's Benny Vu.”

Mary's Vu's husband, a small squirrelly man with almost no chin, was making guttural, desperate sounds, a man suddenly lost to shock and explosive grief. For a moment he stood, looked around him with wild, passionate eyes, his head lolling to the side like a rag doll, and then he was tucked back down into his seat by his children, Tommy and Cindy. They looked embarrassed.

When I looked at Hank, there were tears in his eyes.

***

A reception was held in the church hall, with platters of homemade dishes arranged on long rows of folding tables. There was
goi cuon
, the aromatic spring roll of mint, shrimp, pork, vermicelli noodles. Small bowls of
nuoc mam
, the savory fish sauce
. Tom ram man,
salted shrimp.
Ga xao gung,
chicken with ginger. Dish after dish, mouth-watering. Parched from the heat, Hank and I reached for
cha fe sua
, the iced coffee with condensed milk, so cold and sweet it made my teeth ache. Nearby were pitchers of
nuoc mia
, the sugar cane drink, and
tra da chanh
, lemonade. But I also spotted the influence of such American gatherings: bowls of baked ziti and meatballs, chicken wings, potato chips, and Sara Lee cake. One table held a huge aluminum bucket packed with ice. Inside was Budweiser. And more Budweiser. Already, the men huddled in the doorway were smoking Marlboros and drinking.

Benny Vu sat quietly at a table, relatives hovering protectively around him. His two children were sitting across the room with friends. I thought that odd. In his rumpled suit and cowlicky hair, their father was lost in a sea of cold comfort. Someone had placed a dish of food in front of him, which he ignored.

I didn't know much about him, and on the drive over Hank had filled me in on a few details. Part of the first wave of much-televised Boat People of 1975, Benny had bummed around for years, lost in America, a handyman at an apartment complex, a janitor at a school, even a hot dog vendor at the UConn football games out at Storrs—a drifting sort known for his easygoing demeanor that disappeared only when he drank beer with his cronies. Then his face would turn beet red, the spittle would fly, and the fiery condemnation of the Viet Cong—as well as his enforced exile in an America he could never understand—would first startle, then scare, his drunk listeners at Bo Kien, the bar-restaurant where he hung out. Then, after making a few bucks off a vending cart parked in front of the Aetna Insurance building on Farmington Avenue, where he sold lunchtime Chinese food, he opened a small Asian grocery on Park, right in the heart of the burgeoning Little Saigon, a cluster of similar grocers, lunch places, nail salons, gift shops, and beauty shops. Tucked between My Xuyen Clothing and Song Ngoc Dental Office, his Vu Pham Market was one of the few struggling stores on the bustling strip. For years I used to stop in the neighborhood at Nha Trang Noodle Shop for the best
pho,
beef noodle soup with basil, or go for the best
bun
at Viet Huong. His piddling market barely made a decent living for the family, Hank said, because Benny wasn't much of a businessman. Sometimes he'd close shop on a busy Saturday afternoon, when most Vietnamese did their shopping for the week, and head to Foxwoods Indian Casino to gamble.

In the car I'd asked Hank, “He has a gambling problem?”

Hank shook his head. “Dunno. No more than most Asians. You know, it's a part of the culture. Look at Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun on Christmas Day or New Year's. More Asians there than in all of Thailand. Don't you get those glossy mailings in the mail from the Indian casinos? All in impeccable Vietnamese.”

“But some have problems. Maybe he's in debt.”

Hank nodded. “Could be. My dad bitches that Benny closes the store at odd hours. He drives there to find that handwritten sign on the door:
Dong cua
. Closed. Tommy works there some days, but not always. He's not loyal to the store.”

I told Hank about my only venture into Benny's store, back before I knew Hank and his family, days when my encounters with the Vietnamese community were minimal. I'd gone into the market looking for some Vietnamese bean pudding, a weakness of mine, but there was not a soul in the store. “I didn't like the place,” I told him. “It had a musty, leaden smell of uncleared shelves and unswept floors.”

“Sort of like your apartment.”

I ignored him. “Then I heard noises. Some loud voices, laughter, and in the back of the store I saw a stairwell. Stupidly, I walked down into what was a storage room and found four men playing poker at a table, piles of American dollars on the table. Benny was there, though I didn't know him at the time, but the whole bunch jumped up, nervous. Apologizing, Benny followed me upstairs, introduced himself, shook my hand, and took my money for the food I bought. But he wasn't happy at being discovered down there. I could have been Hartford undercover. There's gambling like that going on all over Little Saigon.”

“Probably his son was supposed to be working and cut out. Tommy does that,” Hank said. “My cousin is a slacker.”

I joined Hank's family at a table at the back of the hall as the room filled up. His grandma motioned me to sit by her side, smiled, and held my hand. I leaned in to kiss her cheek. “This is a great sadness,” she whispered in Vietnamese, and I agreed. Hank's grandfather wasn't there, and I didn't ask why. Hank's father, Nguyen Van Tuan, barely nodded at me. Hank's younger brother and sister, Tinh and Phuong, fifteen- and thirteen-year-old kids, were giggling over something one of them said to the other. Grandma frowned.

Hank's older sister Linh, who called herself Anna, sat stone-faced, pensive, looking at no one. Anna was taking a leave of absence from her job at Travelers Insurance—she'd been a scholarship student at Miss Porter's and an economics major at Trinity in Hartford—to spend three months in Vietnam. Sometimes, after a little wine at New Year's, she only spoke Vietnamese, refusing English as a language, a woman caught between cultures. Sometimes she smiled at me, but sometimes her cold stare dismissed me as a diminutive insect.

Hank said to his mother, “Why aren't the kids sitting with Benny?”

His mother glanced at Grandma, then shook her head. “I guess they're embarrassed by their father.”

Grandma clicked her tongue. “American children.”

Hank smiled. “Unlike me, right, Grandma?”

Anna looked at him and grunted. “Self love…”

“…is all I have sometimes,” Hank finished. “Anna, you've been telling me that since I was five.”

“Because you think you're God's gift to the earth.”

“Only women.”

Grandma interrupted, not happy with their conversation. “Quiet, you two. We are in a Catholic church.”

Hank insisted, “Not really. It's the hall connected to the church.”

Grandma pointed at him, unhappy.

“How did the Le sisters get to be Catholic?” I asked Grandma. “Your side of the family is Buddhist.”

She waved her hand in the air. “Their ancestors lived in a different province. I guess the power of a Catholic God was stronger there.”

I watched Benny's two children, sitting across the room. Tommy was the older, perhaps twenty-five now, a few years older than Hank. I'd met him a few times. Tommy had started his rebellion against his traditional and poor Vietnamese-American family early on by shoplifting plastic action figures at Walmart at age ten. One stupid, infantile arrest after another, loitering, sassing a teacher, petty theft, a smart-alecky boy who hated his parents—or so family lore went. Now he sat with friends and his sister, all of them picking at the food. Tall, skinny, with a bony, pushed-in face, his dark skin the color of nut bread, he usually cultivated a slacker appearance, wearing a weathered leather jacket with too many buckles and twists, a string of glittery earrings up and down both lobes, a tattoo of a green dragon with red fiery tongue on his upper left bicep, and a shaved haircut with a Mohawk sliver of hair left intact. Stomping boots, even in the dreadful heat of August. Today, for the purposes of grief, he did not have on his leather jacket. Instead, he wore a simple military camouflage jacket over a T-shirt, as tasteful as public urination.

At the other end of the table Cindy sprawled out, eyes half-closed, glossy red lips parted, listening to a chatty new-wave Asian boy with bright red hair puffed so high he could be taken for a streetlight. Whatever he said must have amused her, because I noticed the trace of a smile. Idly, she checked her cell phone—tapped out a text message. She looked like a candy cane confection with her white-powdered face, kohl-rimmed eyes, purple ribbons in her hair, too much costume jewelry, and mismatched pieces of clothing, colorful if not downright eccentric. Her miniskirt rode high over long legs encased in boots that were best worn in seasons other than summer.

Hank saw me sizing up her outfit. He leaned in. “No one dresses like Madonna anymore. Sad.”

As I got up to get some jasmine tea for Grandma, I sensed a shift in the currents in the cavernous room. People, sitting back after finishing eating, suddenly became alert. Every head suddenly shot to the entrance. Hank's mother and grandmother were talking about the new super-sized Asian market, A Dong, that had high-quality lemongrass for ginger chicken, but stopped the conversation midsentence.

The Torcellis had arrived. Of course. Always the late entrance. Mary Le Vu's twin sister, Molly, swept into the room, striding forward, trailed by her husband, Larry, who looked the way he always did at Vietnamese functions—why the hell am I here? Behind them, walking as though they'd been promised Porsches if they behaved, were the two children: Jon, the aloof young man of twenty-five and heir to the vast car dealership franchise, and his younger sister Kristen, the fashion-plate daughter with the brain of an aquarium pebble, gorgeous and wide-eyed and personally happy that she was so stunning. Okay, I admit to a certain bias in these belittling descriptions, despite my scant acquaintance. I'd sat at a New Year's table with them one time. It was very easy to dislike them. All four of them, Benny and Mary's two kids, and Larry and Molly's two, were kids who struck me as appropriate metaphors of a twilight of the American dream. Only the presence of Hank in this world—purposeful, smart, compassionate—saved me from utter disaffection with that Vietnamese-American generation.