1

How do you tell yet another story that begins in a barroom and ends in a graveyard? You say, listen:

 

“HEY, PALLY.”

The woman’s voice came out of the dimness. The place was a cave on Middlesex Street with graffiti on the walls, like messages from an ancient past—warnings maybe, to stay away. But I was impervious. I was working.

“Over here, pally.”

I looked over my shoulder for a guy with a pocketbook maybe, but the entire party at eight o’clock in the morning was a woman, an unshaven barkeep stocking a cooler chest, and me. I’d been called a lot of things by a lot of people, but pally wasn’t one of them.

“You him?” the woman said as I got nearer. “You Alex Rasmussen?”

I said I was. “Rita?”

She raised an empty beer glass. “Thaz me.”

My eyes were adjusting. Too much bleach had turned her hair into a bird’s nest, and despite the makeup, her complexion was sallow. But she featured one of those shapes that could work in the foldout of a magazine, the kind they kept in shrink-wrap behind the counter at Quick-Mart. It better be this month’s issue, though—she looked like she was hitting something pretty hard, and I didn’t think it came in a bottle.

“Siddown, pally, buy yourself a beer. Buy me one too. Lez party.”

“Give her a coffee,” I told the barman.

He shot me a look and kept loading bottles. “You want croissants too?”

His pronunciation wasn’t great, but I gave him that one. He uncapped another High Life and set it in front of her. When he’d gone back to work, I said to the woman, “Did you bring the goodies?”

“Did you?”

I took the packet out of my suitcoat pocket and laid it on the bar. She reached for it, but I kept my hand on top. Grumbling, she got a large brown envelope from under her pocketbook and shoved it at me.

I opened it and fingered through the eight-by-tens inside, then sealed it again. She was counting the cash, but I think the number of bills threw her off. Her fine-motor skills didn’t seem too acute. “What’s this?” she said when she came to my note. “Who the hell’s Tony Rossi?”

Her acting was no better than her math. “Just give it to him.” I put a couple singles on the bar for the beer.

The woman turned jerkily and clamped a hand on my arm. “Hey, how ’bout that party? I can get us a room upstairs.” Her smile was like the vacancy sign outside a cheap motel; she wasn’t wasting any neon on the “no”.

“I’m not a morning person,” I said. “And you better tell Rossi you want a bigger cut if you’ve got to be doing his job for him.”

Her pet name for me wasn’t pally anymore.

My eyes winced at the raw sunlight outside. I turned left on Middlesex, walking past barrooms exhaling their dank breath into the cool morning, past flophouses and storefront churches, junkies and hookers and bums, passing no judgment. Years of working with cops and lawyers taught forbearance.

The phonebooth-sized waiting room outside my office was empty. Undaunted, I made coffee, then called the political candidate whose money I had just spent. “In ten minutes they’re in the mail,” I told him.

“Sweet mother of God, is this really the last of it?”

“You have any other daughters?”

I told him I was personally going to carry the envelope across the street and mail it when the post office opened. He said he couldn’t thank me enough. I told him that a check would be a step in the right direction. The candidate laughed the laugh of the relieved and hung up.

I stood looking out the window like a king in my own little empire where the sun never set. Day or night I could look up and there it was. These days the newspaper is actually printed directly across the street, at 15 Kearney Square, but my third-floor streetfront office at number 10 looked kitty-corner on the original building with the three big letters on the roof, ten floors up.

The eight-by-tens lay on my otherwise clear desk, samples from a figure studies class that must have been held off-campus one day. The candidate had not gone to the police because then the blackmail try would have been news, and there would be ten other people in line looking for a lever. The young woman in the black-and-whites was the candidate’s daughter, three years ago when she was an art student in Boston. They weren’t all that naughty by some standards, but these days she was running dad’s campaign.

The blackmailer, I’d discovered, was an ex-classmate of hers and sometime pimp named Tony Rossi, who had gotten the negatives. My client had hinted that maybe I could knuckle the guy’s head, but I convinced him that that kind of behavior was best kept on the statehouse floor—though I did give him an option clause should any more threats appear.

That done, it meant I’d caught up on my caseload: not hard to do since it was the only job I’d had all month. I had a standing offer from a guy I knew at Raytheon to come walk rounds with a Detex clock. I hadn’t taken him up yet. It was only July tenth.

So I stood at the window gazing out across the intersection of East Merrimack and Bridge streets, meditating on the fall of empire and how easy it was to talk people out of their clothes when a knock on the door jarred the chain of thought.

Most people approach that outer door as if it might hit back. Most are doing it for the first and only time, so they’re edgy about why they’ve come. Seeing my name with INVESTIGATOR under it probably hurts as much as it helps. So my ear is tuned to soft knocks, quiet knocks, timorous, tentative, hesitant, apologetic knocks, maybe-I-should-forget-the-whole-thing knocks. This was another kind. The butt-end of a cop’s flashlight knock, an “Open up, we know you’re in there!” knock. I opened.

I had to drop my gaze a foot to see the woman standing there.

“Mr. Rasmussen?” she said in a soft voice.

“Yes.”

“My name is Ada Stewart. May I talk to you?”

No one that good-looking had asked that question in months. I got her inside and settled into the chair in front of my desk. I covered the pictures on the blotter and offered coffee from the vintage Joe DiMaggio autograph-model Mr. Coffee. She demurred politely, and I warmed my own cup. I was sorry I didn’t have any green tea to offer: she was some part Asian, a generation or two removed; Chinese if I had to guess, but with a last name like Stewart, no trace of accent, and round-eye mixed in, a guess is all it would be. I’d have said thirty, but it could have gone up or down by a few. She missed petite because she was full-figured, with thick black hair that tickled the knob at the base of her neck. She wore a pink blouse, a simple black skirt, nylons, and shoes as glossy as licorice. The fragrance that came with her, so subtle it reached me only now, was jasmine. Maybe the drumming on the door had been an effort to control the slight tremor I saw in the hands she curled in her lap. She wore no rings.

People sitting in front of my desk generally feel about the way they do at the dentist’s. They show up because they are in some kind of trouble and this represents a last resort. Sometimes charm helps, sometimes not; this time I didn’t know, so I let it be.

“How can I help you, Ms. Stewart?” I asked.

She told me she was a caseworker and job counselor with the state’s Department of Social Services. For the past three years she had been working mostly with Lowell’s Southeast Asian population, which, after that of Long Beach, California, included the largest group of Cambodians in the U.S.

“Two weeks ago, on June twenty-seventh,” she said, “a man was murdered here. Do you remember it?”

I might not have if she hadn’t been doing the asking. The only real estate market not in a slump was graveyard plots. “Cambodian, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Bhuntan Tran. I worked with him when he first arrived. He was already educated, but I got him into English classes at the junior college. He held down two jobs.”

“Ambitious.”

“He was an inspiration to a lot of others in the community.”

“His house was in Belvidere, as I recall,” I said. It was the high-rent end of town.

“A small one on Longfellow Street. Paid for with a lot of hard work and sweat and owned by the bank just like everyone else’s.” Her eyes sparked and two spots of rose came to her matte-finish cheeks. “Mr. Rasmussen, why is it with so many ‘Americans’”—she supplied the quotes with her tone—“that while getting ahead is what they live for, when they see a well-dressed Hispanic woman, or a black man driving a Mercedes, it’s suddenly unfair.”

“Was I implying,” I said, “or are you inferring?”

“I don’t know you, and I shouldn’t judge. It’s just that I’ve seen it so often. It irks me. People want to throw up barricades around the country, and everyone who isn’t in can stay the hell out.” She stopped, maybe contrite all of a sudden; probably just convinced I was not worth the energy. Her features softened a little, and she looked around. “Could I have a glass of water?”

I got it, pouring it from a plastic gallon jug into a clean mug. “You don’t like city water?” she asked.

“This time of the year it tastes like it comes out of the tadpole tank in the fifth-grade science class.”

“You should’ve heard Bhuntan tell about drinking water. In Phnom Penh he was an environmental engineer. He had to bury the fact that he had an education just to stay alive. The Khmer Rouge emptied the entire city and drove everyone out into the country to work like pack animals.”

“Grim. I saw The Killing Fields,” I said.

“I’m talking life, not Hollywood. Bhuntan’s wife and kids never made it out. He went to a camp in Thailand, and later got to California. When he came here, I helped him get work. He ended up a lab assistant in a plastics plant, and a laundryman at night. Forget the fact that he held a Ph.D.”

“Prejudice stinks,” I agreed, “but I’m not sure this office is where it gets redressed.”

“I guess I’m just tired of seeing America duck out of its promise.”

“You won’t get an argument from me.”

That dulled the last of her attack. She sipped the water, then slid closer in the chair. “The reason I came isn’t to beat up on you. I’m concerned with Bhuntan’s murder. The truth is I’m frustrated with the police investigation.”

“Have you spoken with them?”

“Twice. The second time was yesterday afternoon. I talked with a Sergeant St. Onge.”

I knew then where she had got my name. “In person?”

“Yes. He said there were drugs found at Bhuntan’s home.”

“It was in the paper,” I said.

“Well, I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t think the police would make up something like that.”

“Cambodians and drugs don’t fit together.”

“Come on. These days?”

“It’s rare.”

“Maybe this was the exception.”

She shook her head. The movement had the certainty her knock had had. “Then something’s wrong somewhere. In fact, Sergeant St. Onge hinted that he had details he hasn’t revealed.”

“For now, probably. That’s standard practice.”

“I’d like to hire you,” she said.

I could have told her the job was strictly a police job. My usual gig was civil investigations, insurance, saving the occasional good name from the breath of scandal. I thought about the photos, which should be going in the mail right then. “I’m not sure this is something for me,” I said.

“It isn’t your specialty?”

“You could say that.”

“I guess I didn’t know where else to go.”

“If Tran was such a model citizen, what about the Cambodian community?”

“They’re newcomers here, most of them. They’re not ready to challenge the power too directly.”

“But you are?”

“Someone has to.”

I sighed. “The police are still the ones who’ll handle it best,” I said. Sometimes, I added to myself. Sage counsel, Rasmussen. Words of wisdom from one who should know.

“Sergeant St. Onge got stern yesterday. I don’t think he’s eager to talk to me again soon.”

I knew what she meant. When they didn’t want to give it, getting information from cops was a pick-ax operation. Still, Ed St. Onge was a good cop. He would do his job. I took a sip of coffee. I had the feeling that it meant Ada Stewart’s whole sense of herself that Bhuntan Tran not be condemned with having brought on his own death by having got in wrong with drugs. In the fifteen minutes she had been there, I had developed a healthy respect for the woman. A good social worker made what I do look like fooling with Play-Doh. Maybe we needed more concerned ones like her before we all went down the tube.

Still, it didn’t stack up for me. Two weeks was not a long time for a police investigation. But I also knew the longer a case went unsolved, the less likely it ever would be. So flip the coin. Heads they win, tails you lose. I said: “All right.”

Her eyes widened. “You’ll investigate?”

“I’ll have a look.”

She snapped open the little candy bag. “I can give you some cash, or a check…”

“Whichever’s easier. It’s two and a half for a retainer, which is also the rate per day, plus any out-of-pocket.”

“Two and a half—that’s two hundred and fifty dollars?” she asked.

I nodded. “If I can’t find anything promising in a day, then we should talk and decide if this is worth your spending the money.”

“Let’s make it two days then. Five hundred dollars.”

I liked her math.

“Don’t worry about the money,” she said, the way everyone said it. I bundled bounced checks for the Cub Scout paper drive.

I opened the desk’s lone drawer, took out a business card from the deck of five hundred, crossed out one s in my name and inserted it later on with a caret. Printer’s error, but I had let it slide; figured I had a favor coming. Lately I had been thinking about asking him to print tens and twenties; but maybe that could wait now. She wrote the check out and handed it across. Ada Chan Stewart: hunch confirmed.

“Is this a current phone, Ms. Stewart?”

“Yes, and my office phone’s on here.” She gave me one of her Massachusetts DSS cards. I gave her a receipt.

“I’ll be in touch in a day or two,” I said as I walked her through the waiting room to the outer door, “but if you have any questions, feel free to call.”

“Thank you.”

She was a lot less nervous than when she had come in twenty minutes ago. She paused in the doorway and played her trump smile. “Detective St. Onge was right about you.”

Oh, what the hell; everyone else was being a comic this morning. “Is he still gossiping about how brave and handsome I am?”

Ada Chan Stewart’s mouth curled, and I almost expected to see her giggle into her hand, but that had been left behind generations ago, on a boat. She just gave a healthy jingle of laughter. “He said you’d be easy to hire.”