No Good to Cry (22 page)

***

Simon was sitting by himself on a wooden bench outside a busy Arby's. He was staring into space, ignoring the bustle of strolling shoppers. Slouched on the bench, the collar of his spring jacket turned up around his neck, his legs stretched out, his arms folded over his chest, he looked dazed. He also looked a bit menacing, as in—Don't come near me. As we approached, I noticed the laces of his oversized, clunky sneakers were undone, though the brilliant red stripes seemed freshly painted on. He was wearing baggy jeans, the cuffs rolled up, and under his jacket a black T-shirt. I read the message: EVERYTHING IS A LIE. In huge black block letters. But tiny cursive letters below it said:
Especially This
.

“Simon.” I stood ten feet away and tried not to sound threatening.

He looked up.

“It's okay,” Hank reassured him, sliding into the seat next to him.

“No, it ain't.”

“I was worried about you,” I began. “You left that note.”

He looked up into my face, his cheeks becoming pink. “I didn't know what to do.”

“Why leave home?”

He closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them, they were fiery. “There was so much yelling yesterday. Everybody so crazy. And Wilson said it was my fault—I brought it on. Me and Frankie. He said it was all right, but…I don't know.” A boyish shrug of his shoulders. “So I took the bus here.”

“Not with Frankie?” Hank asked.

“He's with his brother. They didn't ask me. I don't got Frankie. I got…no one.”

For a second his eyes shot around the open space, finally resting on a beefy security guard who'd been eyeing him.

“You could have stayed in your room. With Wilson. Video games.”

He scoffed. “Yeah, Wilson beats me at everything. He's smarter. And when he wins he gloats. Like a victory lap or something. Lords it over me. It's…”

“Hard to take,” Hank finished.

Simon snickered. “It's worse when he feels sorry for me and lets me win. Then his—like triumph—is so disgusting because it's not, you know, said. Just the looks.”

He pointed around the mall. “I just didn't know where to go. This is a place we come to…me and Frankie. Other guys. They only throw us out when we stay too long or get loud or take things.”

“You take things?”

A crooked grin. “Not here.”

Hank's words were soft, comfortable, as he leaned in, his hand brushing the boy's shoulder. “You have to come home with us.”

Simon look confused, his head bobbing. A round head, I realized, too large for his scrawny short body. Those long ears—Buddha's ears. A constellation of acne gracing his forehead, his nose. A small, sensitive mouth and a tiny chin. He looked like those Chinese kids on the Asian Relief charity ads you see on late-night TV. Faces to warm your heart.

He nodded and stood up. “Yeah. Home.”

I dialed Mike Tran from the car, reassured him that Simon was fine, that he was in our care, and that we'd be home shortly. “Thank God,” he said, and Simon, listening. When we got to the house, darkness had fallen, the street dark. Yet the Tran household was ablaze with light—upstairs, downstairs, front yard light, even a sweep of spotlight that stretched in the backyard to a neighbor's fence.

We sat for a minute in the car, Simon hesitant to get out. “Saigon,” I said slowly, “can I ask you about Khoa and Diep?”

He sucked in his breath. “No, they're nothing.”

“You told Hazel you had a secret—you were scared.”

He resented the questions, fidgeting, pulling at his jacket. He opened the door and slipped his feet out. Still he didn't move.

Lucy and Mike stood on the front steps, illuminated by bright light behind then, silhouettes unmoving, waiting.

“Go,” I prodded Simon.

Then he started to run toward the house, but stopped, looked back and began to say a thank you—it emerged as a grunted “thank”—which was, I suppose, enough at the moment. Then he scooted toward his parents. When he reached them, they looked ready to grab him, squeeze, but Simon plowed between them and disappeared into the house. Lucy immediately disappeared. Mike stood in the doorway, facing out, watching the street and us, and finally, looking defeated, offered a hesitant wave. We waved back, and he waved again. It was like he didn't know how to say goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-five

Napping on my sofa, I dreamed of the market in old Saigon. Nguyen Tat Thanh in District Four. The aroma of potent coffee. Monks beat hollow wooden drums and chant,
“Kinh mu sieu.”
A prayer for peace. A woman sits over a basket of dragon fruit, her teeth stained from chewing betel nuts. Horse flies buzz around her head. She whispers to me that ginger will let me see in the dark. Avoid ghosts. It is December.
Chap ma
. Time to look after my dead ancestors. The woman laughs—You, boy, have none.

It's a dream I often have. Usually it forces me awake and into the kitchen where, groggy and unhappy, I brew my own anemic American coffee. But the raw power of Vietnamese coffee lingers in my head, and makes me smile.

But sudden thumping on the floorboards roused me. Since Jimmy was housed below in Gracie's apartment, I'd been through this routine a couple times. Not exactly smoke signals, but the pounding of the war drums. Jimmy stretching up to the high ceiling and banging with a broom handle.

“I have two telephones,” I told him the first time after I scooted down the stairs in my boxer shorts and U.S. Open T-shirt.

“Which you ignore,” he grumbled. He pointed to the broom handle. “It worked, no?”

Now, again, I stood before him, scratching my side and realizing I had a magnificent hole in my
Born in the USSR
T-shirt. “Can I help you, Jimmy?”

“You don't tell me nothing, Rick.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

Jimmy was eating take-out from Wah's Garden. He dripped soy sauce onto his sweatshirt, and ignored it. He reached for the General Tso's chicken and slobbered it onto his lap. A chunk of crispy chicken toppled onto the carpet, and Gracie scurried after it. He examined a floret of broccoli as though it were an insult to epicures everywhere. When he was finished, he tore the cellophane from the fortune cookie and read out loud: “15 19 55 67 34. My lucky numbers. Rick, remember to pick me up a Mega Millions ticket at the gas station, okay?” I nodded. “And,” he went on, “my fortune: ‘Wisdom is what you offer the world.'” He waved the slip at me. “Now you know.”

I smiled. “Hey, Jimmy, I've known that for years.”

He pushed his plate away. The plastic fork he'd used flipped onto the carpet, and his unused chopsticks disappeared into the sofa cushions. “All right, let's get busy. Rick, fill me in.”

So I did, beginning with the unpleasant incident in Mike Tran's front yard, the ugly incident with Judd Snow and Frankie. “He's trouble,” I said. “Slumped in his car, getting out when the police ordered him to and staggering on a bum leg, Judd still looked at the cops like he was going to spit at them. The cops gave him a warning, maybe because his father was there, promising that his son would comply, not show up again.”

“A mistake,” Jimmy said. “Hazel isn't out of danger yet.”

“Liz sent me a text and said Judd's daddy is raising the roof, his turn to call the cops, blaming everybody, accusing Mike Tran, throwing out phrases like ‘alienation of affection' and other insults, talking of hiring lawyers.”

“The man's a fool,” Jimmy noted.

“He is that. A playboy daddy who envies his son's life—maybe.”

Jimmy eyed me closely. “For all your running around, Rick”—he smirked—“and Hank, who is not a part of my firm but serves as mascot, what have you found to
prove
Simon
didn't
attack me and Ralph?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” he echoed.

“There are two dangerous players, Diep and Khoa, who are grooming them for more serious crime.”

Jimmy listened closely. “Well, what are you gonna do about it?”

“I'm gonna track them down.”

He waited a second. “Bring your gun.”

“It's in my glove compartment, Jimmy. Locked.”

“It should be in your lap.”

Gracie chuckled. “The Wild West, Jimmy?”

“Second amendment. You heard of it?”

“I've also heard of the first amendment, Jimmy, but you seem to forget that sometimes.” Gracie smiled innocently.

“Okay, here's how I see things.” Jimmy's eyes were bright pinpoints, focused. “That family is like an old pinball game, metals balls pinging off each other. So much so that nobody can see straight.”

“But how does this help me clear Simon?” I wondered.

“Maybe it don't, Rick. But you gotta keep in mind that maybe Ralph's death got nothing to do with this family. But—and this is a big ‘but'—if they are involved, it's because one of those pinball pellets banged into them.”

“Chance?”

“Choices,” he stressed. “So everybody's got it into their heads that the boys got a bad reputation. A locked-in image of the bad boys roaming the streets. Probably the whole Vietnamese community.” He thought for a second. “Even Detective Ardolino zeroed in right away. He assumed Ralph's attack was by the boys because, well, they'd cemented that image into his head. Farmington Avenue, late afternoon. Bingo, now they're back home. The assaults begin right away, this time deadly. Who else?”

“So,” I nodded my head, “someone might be taking advantage of their bad-boy reputation.”

“Maybe,” said Jimmy. “Maybe not. Keep in mind there's been another attack.”

“Which,” I went on, “could be a distraction. Or, maybe, the culprits found out they liked hurting people.”

“That's ugly,” Gracie said.

“But it happens,” Jimmy told her. “Jackasses get intoxicated with what they can get away with.”

I summed up, “So maybe somebody
wants
us to believe it was Simon and Frankie.”

“Meanwhile,” Gracie said, “there's Hazel to watch out for.”

“I talked to Liz. She's moving through channels. She'll orchestrate whatever needs to be done. She said that Judd tried to reach her through Facebook, but she'd unfriended him.”

Gracie frowned. “Whatever that means. How do you unfriend someone? In my day you waited until they walked by you, and then you cut them dead. Very Victorian, and very effective.”

“But then he sent a tweet—‘Goodbye, Hazel.' Just those words. And those words scared Hazel more than anything.”

“Choices,” Jimmy broke in. “The Tran family. Choices.”

“But,” I said, “maybe someone is making the choices for them.”

Jimmy yawned. “Well, Rick, it's up to you to do your job. Your name is in gold lettering on the office door, no? Under mine. Not as big, of course, but there. Investigate.”

***

Thinking of Jimmy's words, I sat in the Hartford office, lazily staring down into the street. My cell phone rang. Detective Ardolino.

In the morning's
Courant
there was a short page-six piece about the delays in the arrests for the two deaths in the West End, as well as a snide, accusatory commentary on the editorial page. Citizens, the editors noted, were squawking, fearful of strolling the popular streets. Business was impacted. Folks from the suburbs heading for Japanese food at Ginza or Portuguese food at Porto's changed their minds. Somehow I suspected the reporter's piece and the editorial board's testy, slap on the wrist rankled Ardolino, and he'd be itchy for an arrest.

“I was expecting your call,” I told him.

“Yeah, like we got this psychic bond, you and I.”

“Maybe we do. We're destined…”

He cut me off. “Quiet, Lam. By August I'm gonna be lying in the shade of a palm tree in Porto Gordo while the missus merrily wades too far out in shark-infested waters.”

I laughed. “Then you'll have to rescue her.”

“It's bad enough I gotta constantly save your ass.”

That surprised me. “I thought we were a team.”

“I work alone.”

“Which explains why you're calling me now?”

“Don't be a wise guy. I'm calling because…well, just listen to me. There was another incident yesterday afternoon. Can you believe it? My fucking luck. Same time. Four o'clock. The hour when everybody in the world is hiding office supplies in their trousers and getting ready to leave good old Hartford.”

“Except the school kids,” I said. “Prime time for wandering the streets, no?”

“And the dropouts like your boys.”

“They're not my boys.”

“Look, Lam. This nuttiness got to stop.”

“Tell me what happened. There wasn't anything in the papers this morning except…”

He rushed his words. “Yeah, I read that shit. The editors of the
Courant
are noted for gazing off into the sky while some pervert diddles their privates. If you know what I mean.”

“That's not a good image.”

“Are you saying I ain't a poet?” He chuckled to himself. “There was nothing in the paper because nothing happened. Sort of. I mean, this happened right in Little Saigon, go figure. This old Asian fart tells a cop two boys dressed in black hoodies run past him, and the big one is breathing down his neck. He sees a fist go up, he ducks 'cause he got this survival instinct, I guess, but down the street two cars slam into each other, a loud bang that has everyone running out of their skin, and the boys run on. Nothing happened. But he calls the cops. All the old folks buying their dog meat at some Vietnamese market think they're next. Christ, they expect to see it on
CBS Evening News
or on Anderson Cooper—that ass gets all excited over a homeless guy sneezing on the subway—and that's that.”

“Almost a knockdown,” I said, almost to myself.

He echoed my words. “Almost. Yeah, an almost-killing.”

“Same culprits?”

“Bingo.”

“No exact identification?”

“What do you think?”

“I would've thought Simon and Frankie would be taken in by now.”

A rasp in his throat, angry. “Yeah, you'd think so. So would any decent person on this earth. But the D.A. is dragging his heels, biding time. No visuals, no witness identification, just that lousy postcard that could mean nothing—he says. It's a bus stop, he says. Lots of kids step off the bus there. The bus to Frog Hollow. Where Frankie lives. He says a defense lawyer can eat up that bit of evidence in court. But it seems to me…” His voice trailed off. “Never mind.”

“What do you want from me, Detective?”

“Here's the deal. Go to Little Saigon, Rick. Talk around. Those VietBoyz losers. This is your territory, man. You speak the language. I walk those streets and I'm in never-never land. Every store looks like a kung-fu palace or something. Christ, in the Minh Loc Pool Hall even the cue balls look foreign to me. Nobody talks English.” A pause. “Maybe they'll tell you things.”

“Maybe not. I've gone there a few times. Talked to folks.” I was ready to hang up. “You know, Detective, maybe you should get some Vietnamese cops on the force.”

“There's a rumor that we got one or two, but maybe they're Chinese.” His voice was laced with laughter. “And, besides, I hear there's gonna be a Vietnamese state trooper coming up. Excuse me—Vietnamese-
American
trooper. It's a new America.”

“Thank God.”

“From sea to shining sea.”

“Goodbye, Detective.”

“As I say, I like to look at the larger picture.” The line went dead.

***

Near dusk someone rapped on the downstairs door, and I looked out the window. I'd been home for an hour, reviewing my files, getting nowhere. The “almost” attack on Park Street. Little Saigon. The “almost” knockdown. A different area of Hartford. Different attackers? But two boys in black hoodies? Copycats?

The rapping got louder.

A Harley motorcycle was parked in front of the house, nosed into the curb. I'd heard the loud rumble of the bike, but paid it no mind. The tenant on the top floor, a fortyish manager of a local Pizza Hut, rode bikes, had friends who disturbed our quiet evenings. Gracie repeatedly asked me whether she should ask him to leave, but Gracie was too kind-hearted to evict anyone. “I told him I want a quiet building. He said he worked for Pizza Hut.” At the time I thought—there's no connection between these two sentences, but I let it go. “Talk to him, Rick.”

Again the loud knocking, insistent. Regular visitors knew to open the front door, always unlatched, and check the three mailboxes. Gracie's apartment door faced the mailboxes. Now, listening, Gracie's voice rang out. “Door's open, whoever you are.”

I smiled and opened my door and peered down the stairwell.

JD walked into the vestibule, stood there looking lost, and Gracie, stepping into her doorway, said, “From the looks of you, I guess you want Rick. Second floor.”

JD said nothing but glanced up the staircase where I stood on the landing, waving him up. Slowly he climbed the stairs.

He didn't look happy. We watched each other, feet apart, me in the doorway now, arms folded across my chest, and JD stopped in place at the top of the stairs. Dressed in an old brown leather bomber jacket with a ratty fur collar, unzipped over a camouflage T-shirt, tapping a biker's boot on the floor, he was waiting for my move.

I smiled. “I thought you said you never went to the suburbs.”

A quirky smile. “You believe everything I say?”

“Why not?”

“Then you're a fool.”

“I've heard that before.”

I motioned him into my apartment, but he hesitated, unsure. I stepped back, leaving the door wide open, and he walked in, though he lingered just feet inside. Nodding his head up and down, his tongue rolled into the corner of his mouth, he surveyed the room.

“You want to sit down?” I asked him.

“No.”

“You want to stand there?”

“That's what I'm already doing.” His eyes swept around the walls, stopping on the wall of leather-bound books. Ignoring me, he walked up to the floor-to-ceiling hardwood bookcases and ran his fingers across some flaky bindings. “You read all these?”