I woke up bloated and tired—last night’s wine leaving me headachy. I yawned, pulled myself out of bed, and showered. My muscles ached. I really needed to get back to running. I’m not out of shape but in need of muscle on my long, lanky body. The slightest beginning of a paunch because I was no longer a young man. Thirty-nine now, my last birthday—a created birthday, given me when I arrived in America, a thirteen-year-old boy who, till then, had no birthday at all, or at least none that I remembered from the orphanage.
I decided to hit the gym before my ten o’clock class. I teach two days, Tuesday and Thursday, one section of Introduction to Criminal Science and one of Investigations. While swimming laps in the pool after the workout, I was distracted, unable to focus. A horrible image overwhelmed me—Marta Kowalski dropping off that final cold stone bridge. The cleaning lady no one paid any attention to—an old woman dragging a dust cloth over my bookcases. Was it possible Karen’s instincts were on target?
At that moment a wave of belief swept over me. But why would anyone kill her? And in so gruesome a fashion? Toppling onto those rocks. A neck snapped. So I stopped swimming, resting on the side of the pool, my hair in my eyes, heart pounding, the veins in my hands jutting out as I gripped the side of the pool.
Leaving the gym, I spotted Hank Nguyen headed to the parking lot with a backpack casually slung over his shoulder, a couple books cradled against his chest. Despite the morning chill, he wore his jacket unzipped, flapping in the slight breeze. Worse, he wore a pair of khaki cargo shorts. November, I thought—why do young people think they’re invincible to the elements? Probably because they are. When you hit your late thirties, you realize that nature crouches on the dark horizon, getting ready to trip you.
“Hey, Hank,” I yelled, causing him to stop moving.
“Rick,” he answered. “I was gonna call you later. I had to be in town this morning. See what you’re up to.”
“You’re just the man I want to talk to.”
He grinned. “Ah, you need my help with some mystery.”
I paused. “Actually, I do.”
That surprised him, so he stopped moving. “Really? Tell me.”
“Time for coffee?”
He nodded. “I’m on a break from the academy. Thought I’d use the library at my old alma mater.” He pointed toward the College Union. “The coffee is not good here. They use your recipe.”
“You’ll live.” I smiled. “No one has a recipe for making coffee.”
“Maybe that’s the problem then. Mystery solved.”
Now twenty-three years old, Hank Nguyen had graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice from the college and was training at the Connecticut State Police Academy. He wanted to be a state trooper—the first Vietnamese-American, he claimed—and then, a few years down the road, a private investigator. Like me. We’d become close friends after a bumpy start. Pure Vietnamese—part of a big, rollicking family in East Hartford, all fleeing from Saigon in 1975 or thereabouts, drifting on hostile waters to Hong Kong—he had disliked me when he was my student, sitting in my class with a scowl on his face. I’m mixed blood, one of those pathetic lost souls celebrated in Broadway’s Miss Saigon—to my horror—and the native Vietnamese are notorious in their dislike of such impurity. We also served as grim reminders of the deleterious American presence on that war-torn soil.
Hank and I had some angry moments, even foolishly grappled on a tennis court one afternoon—a lame physical confrontation that was more ludicrous than hurtful—and then, curiously, Hank began to trust me—and to like me. Born in America, he had been raised at home with the blustery old biases carried from Vietnam, but also a lot of love. A bright guy, and funny. Hank—his real name is Tan—became my buddy. I liked him a lot.
“So you got a case you want me to help solve?” Hank asked, walking alongside me.
“Willie Do.” I threw out the name of the man who’d supposedly skirmished with Marta Kowalski.
Hank stopped walking, his face hardening, and leaned into me. “Vuong Ky Do.”
“The one and the same.”
“Willie doesn’t bother anyone, Rick.” His tone was nervous and dry. “Willie…well, hides from the world.”
“So I remember.”
“Tell me.”
I watched Hank’s face closely, animated, twisting to the side but back to me, eyes bright but wary. Ever since we became friends—and especially after he made it his passion to make me a part of his family, the Sunday morning guest for familial mi ga, the ritualistic chicken soup—Hank defined himself as my sidekick in my investigations. Most of my endeavors involved mundane and deadly dull insurance investigations that kept me busy and paid the bills. Tedious, granted, but for Hank, with all the fire of a young man who loved mystery and crime and punishment, my wanderings were the stuff of Arthurian quest. Sir Galahad with an iPhone, a Twitter obsession, and a Mac Powerbook. Jimmy Gadowicz found him a little too eager, but tolerated him with a grandfatherly tap on the shoulder. Liz, those times we were together, found him charming, delightful. And he blushed when she smiled at him. I found him good, honest company.
As he tagged along on my fraud investigations, sitting in the car stuffing his face with doughnuts and drumming his fingers on the dashboard, turning up the radio when a Maroon 5 tune came on though I immediately lowered the volume, he had a lot to say about the world I inhabited. So many years my junior, he sometimes assumed a patronizing tone—the cocky American-born Vietnamese man who felt a need to school the always insecure immigrant boy who chose him as a friend.
We sat at a table in the back of the hall. Hank stretched out, his legs resting on the bottom rung of a cafeteria chair. He was wearing a canvas jacket, vaguely military, and a J.Crew T-shirt beneath it. In his baggy shorts and orange sneakers he seemed ready for a day of surfing at a Rhode Island beach rather than getting ready for autumn and Thanksgiving feasts. A tall gangly young man, dark as nut bread, with narrow, slanted eyes in an intense hard-angled face, all his hair cropped close to the scalp and one discreet earring, he watched me closely.
“Willie Do is a dangerous topic, Rick.”
That surprised me. I sat up. “What? For God’s sake, why? I remember him from the college. He never spoke but…”
He broke in. “Everybody in the Vietnamese community sort of leaves him alone.”
“Because of…”
“What he went through. Christ, Rick. The torture, the escape.” A long pause. “But I think the brutal rape and death of his little girl ended his life. He had to watch that as it happened. He stopped breathing.”
I shuddered. “I can understand that.” The frozen man.
Now Hank stared into my face. “No, you don’t. I don’t think anyone can ever understand that. Yeah, my family…you on those Saigon streets, alone…yeah. But not like that. So you got to be careful when you bring his name into any investigation.”
I breathed in. “Which is why I was planning on calling you.”
“What could he have done?”
“Maybe nothing.” I sighed. “Probably nothing.”
“You know his story,” Hank stressed.
I nodded. Quickly I filled Hank in on Karen Corcoran’s belief that her Aunt Marta had been murdered. Hank knew nothing of the suicide—though he insisted he remembered seeing Marta leaving my home one afternoon, her glare at him unfriendly, a finger wagged angrily at him for some reason—but now, hearing about Karen’s hiring me, Hank got angry.
“You don’t mean she says that Willie…?”
I held up my hand. “Let me tell you. Wait. You’re getting hot under the collar. Marta called the cops on him, I understand. She cleaned for old Joshua Jennings, and he was the yardman on the grounds. Something happened—something stupid. Something about dirty footprints tracked inside, and she lost it, screamed at him, accused.”
He leaned into me. “But he wouldn’t have fought her. The man has no fight left in him….”
“He didn’t. But she claimed his look was—venomous. Dangerous. She felt threatened. So she called the cops.”
Hank’s anger was growing, the reddish color rising in his cheeks. His eyes flickered. Protective of Willie, he stammered, “She…she had a hell of a nerve.”
“But the cops questioned him. I guess they had to follow up, you know, but I guess Willie got really quiet, started to tremble, you know, maybe flashbacks to…the old days, cops…and his son…”
“His name is Toan but everyone calls him Tony….”
“Well, his son intervened. Nothing happened.”
“Despicable, all of it.”
“Hank, relax. Cops doing their job.”
“This Marta was a damn troublemaker.”
For the first time I smiled. “She was a bit of that, I agree. A hard woman to like. A woman of strong opinions.”
He smirked. “And yet you let her into your apartment.”
“I liked the way the woman handled a dust cloth.”
“And yet your apartment always looks like the back room of Goodwill.”
“Nevertheless…”
He hurled out his words, fierce and unfriendly. “Well, what do you want from me, Rick?”
I watched him. So much confusion. I pointed at him. “Hank, calm down. I’m on your side, remember?”
A thin smile. “Sorry.”
“I know the sad story everyone knows about Vuong—Willie.” I began. “But that’s about all.”
“It’s more than sad, Rick. It’s…it’s so raw you wake up sweating about it. That is his only story, really. A quiet man, but a brooding one, so hurt.” He hesitated. “My mother says he is just waiting to die.”
“I don’t know anything about his family. Where does he live?”
“They got a three-family in Unionville, by the railroad tracks. An old company house from the factory days. A little run-down, sagging porches, asphalt siding. The son and his wife live on the first floor—they own the place. They got a fifteen-year-old boy, sort of a wise guy kid, rumor has it, always picked up for things like shoplifting. Kid named Roger but everyone calls him Big Nose. Nice touch. He answers to that. Willie and his wife, Linh, live on the second.” Hank smiled. “The third floor is one of my distant cousins, a young guy named Fred, just married last year with a new baby. I mean, no one knows Willie because he stays away from folks.”
“Does he work?”
“Not that I know. The college let him go. Handyman jobs. I guess, well, like he cut Joshua Jennings’ lawn, that sort of thing. Lives on Social Security.”
“So he just stays home?”
“The funny thing is that his wife—we call her Aunt Marie—knows my grandmother, good friends from somewhere, probably back in Saigon. They see each other at New Year’s—that sort of thing. Grandma likes her a lot because she’s warm, caring, and, I guess, she put up with a life with Willie. I mean, she loves her husband.“
“I need to talk to him.”
Hank had been sipping his coffee but choked. “God, why?”
“Because I have to follow up on Karen’s story.”
Fiercely: “Willie didn’t murder Marta Kowalski.”
“You don’t know that.”
He sat back. “Yes, I do.” He locked eyes with mine. “Because she yelled at him for tracking mud on a floor? Jesus Christ, Rick.”
“I know, I know. Crazy, yes. But I need to follow up on everything. Maybe Willie can tell me something about Marta’s state of mind, her attitude, what set her off.”
“Trouble, Rick.”
“How so?”
A deliberate hesitation as he chose his words carefully. “He’s old-fashioned.”
“Meaning?”
“He won’t talk to you. He’s—well, like my father and grandfather.”
I nodded. “You’re kidding me, no? After all this time? He won’t talk to me because I’m mixed blood. Bui doi?”
A sheepish smile, embarrassed. “Yeah.”
An old story, marrow deep. I’m that curious breed produced by the Vietnamese Conflict: an 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. I was dumped off at an orphanage when I was around five. I have dim memories of my mother, whispers of stories, though sometimes I can feel her holding me tight. My real first name is Viet, but in Vietnam I was Lam Van Viet. In America, a young boy, 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. I didn’t mind—I was thirteen and I wanted to become American. I wanted to fit in.
I still do.
“I still don’t fit in,” I said to Hank.
“You got a home here.” He pointed out the door. “You were lost in Manhattan so you came here. This is home now. And my grandma adores you.”
“And I adore her.”
Slowly he whispered, “Poor Willie Do.”
“I need to interview him, Hank. And I’d like you to come with me. I need you to set it up.”
A sigh. “He won’t talk.” Finally, pushing his coffee cup away, he decided. “Then I gotta get Grandma on it. Call his wife. This isn’t going to be good. Willie suffered in the re-education camps. If he runs from authority—if he trembled and hid when the Farmington cops showed up—that could not be a good sign.”
“I gotta talk to him.”
“I’ll talk to Grandma.”
Now I smiled. “She has magical powers.”
He rolled his eyes. “So you say. My God, you and her mouthing all that Buddhist wisdom.”
“Maybe you should listen to her—and me.”
“I do listen, but…” His voice trailed off.
“But what?”
“What would Buddha say about Marta’s death?” he asked suddenly, a grin on his face.
I considered the question a serious one, though I knew Hank often got a bit mocking about his roots. After all, he lives in a divided household where his imperious father is a nominal Roman Catholic while his mother is a Buddhist, and his maternal grandmother whispers Confucian precepts in his ear all the time. He’d rather listen to hip-hop dance music or whatever faddish noise is blaring off satellite radio.
I was born a Buddhist. I believe that because the only thing I carried from the Catholic orphanage was a tattered, faded brown-covered paperback, slim as a calendar, that my mother supposedly left with me. It’s my only proof—my only family heirloom. The Sayings of Buddha. I still cherish it. In Hank’s house there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary and Jesus covered with palms from Palm Sunday Mass. But there is also a Buddhist shrine next to it, dedicated to dead relatives—you see it the minute you walk into the kitchen. Sticks of powerful incense, a bowl of blood-red oranges, joss sticks, and bright glossy icons. I always think of my mother when I see it. Sometimes I believe I see her bowing before the shrine.
My unknown but beloved mother.
“Earth to Rick.” Hank waved his hand in front of my face.
“Sorry, my mind drifted.”
“Back to that orphanage?”
I didn’t answer, bothered by his flippancy. But then I said, “As a matter of fact, yes.” Those pithy, wonderful sayings come at me every so often. I listen to them. They warn me of danger. They humble me, level me. So now, thinking of murder, I found myself thinking of Buddha. “Always appropriate, let me tell you,” I said to Hank. “Buddha would say: ‘When you think you are at the beginning, then you are really at the end.’”
“I’m confused.”
“I know, but that’s all right.”
He watched me closely. “I’m starting to think you believe Marta Kowalski was murdered.”
The moment he spoke those words, a little mockingly, a boyish glint in his eye, I froze. Yes, I realized—some gut instinct told me there was more to the story than the sad suicide of an old depressed cleaning woman.
Hank was shaking his head.
I told him, “The end of the story is already in my hands. Another quote: ‘You start the journey in one place and you at that moment have reached your destination.’”
“So we have to investigate.”
“We do.”
“I’ll talk to Grandma.”
“Once again we’re partners.”
“TV Associates.” He sat back, triumphant.
An old joke—perhaps not a joke any longer. Tan and Viet, partners. Blood brothers. The firm he envisioned down the road: TV Associates, Private Investigation. Private eyes on the world of crime and punishment. Superheroes. His dream and, I supposed, mine. Brothers born out of a country of monsoons and banyan trees, the whisper of jasmine always in the air. Tan and Viet. For a new America.
But first—Vuong Ky Do. A diplomatic interrogation of one of the shattered souls who wanted to forget that land of monsoons and banyan trees and the scent of jasmine. What that man had burned onto his soul was the stormy South China Sea and the approaching Thai pirates with death in their hearts.