THE ACRE USED to be the Greek section, back when the Greeks followed the French Canadians who had followed the paddy camp Irish as the immigrant wave washing into the city to work. The Olympia restaurant, with its Zorba Room, was still there, and a few small stores where you could buy Calamata olives and mizithra and over a glass of ouzo grouse with the proprietor about death and taxes. Like their predecessors, the Greeks who had prospered had moved to better neighborhoods, leaving the hard streets behind. Puerto Ricans, Cambodians, and Laotians lived there among the canals now, in ragged wooden tenements and their bunker-like counterparts, which locals had dubbed Cement City. I parked in front of a market with faded posters in the window in the curlicue typography of a language I didn’t recognize, touting a month-old event. As I scanned building numbers, I observed a trio of men conducting a business transaction in a doorway of one of the project houses. They weren’t trading stock tips. Down here hostile takeover had whole new shades of meaning.
On his job application in the personnel office at TecStrand, under “whom to notify in case of an emergency,” Bhuntan Tran had listed Samol and Mai Lim. There was no hint as to who these people were, but he had given a telephone number. I had called ahead and struggled with making myself understood. Finally I suggested that it might be easier if I came by in person. I think the woman on the line understood me.
Number 402 was a three-story wooden building painted battleship gray. There were no screens on the windows, and bright curtains waved in many of them like semaphore flags. Help might have been the message they spelled out. In front stood a cluster of Southeast Asian youths. We checked each other without making eye contact; there was no threat in it, only mutual awareness. I went into the hallway, where I scanned a lot of foreign names on the scabbing mailboxes and pressed a bell button for apartment D. I had no idea if it rang anywhere until I spotted four small heads peering over a top floor railing at me, like dark mops set to dry. Then two only slightly taller people appeared, a young woman with glossy black hair and an older, gray version of her.
“Mrs. Lim?”
The young woman gave a smile that looked pained. “Come up stair if you please.”
They made a little aisle for me, and I went into a kitchen with sparkling linoleum and a big table covered with an orange vinyl table cloth. Mai Lim ushered me through tied-back curtains into an adjoining room. The kids scampered along like I was the Pied Piper. In addition to the four, who probably had sixteen years among them, there was a slightly older girl, maybe ten, plus Mrs. Lim, and the old woman and an equally wrinkled man, who she said were her mother and father. The old man pushed himself up on a cane to join the others in watching me respectfully as I stood in their apartment. His right pant leg was knotted ten inches from his hip and hung empty.
“Please, sir, sit,” I said, though I was pretty sure it was my gesture and not the words he responded to. Only Mai Lim and the children seemed to know English. The little kids went off to play. The ten-year-old hunkered down on her haunches under a playbill for a film called 12 Sisters and a Batman poster.
The grandmother brought in a kitchen chair for me, and rather than argue chivalry, I sat. The ten-year-old went on staring at me the way a child will watch a magician, looking for the trick. I said to Mai Lim, “I understand you and your husband were friends of Bhuntan Tran.”
“We friend of Bhuntan. Very good man.”
“How long did you know him?”
“My husband know Bhuntan since they take class here to become American citizen. Then I come to join too.” She smiled broadly. “I’m citizen soon.”
Her pride in this moved me. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you very much.”
“So Bhuntan was not a relative. A brother or sister or cousin,” I added to avoid confusion. “He was a friend.”
“Yes. We love him very much. He come in our home many time. His family was kill in Cambodia before he go to Thailand and then coming here.” She was still smiling and I realized it must be a form of politeness. “Bhuntan good friend,” she said again, and again I felt an admiration bordering on affection for a man I would never meet. He had survived horrors only to succumb here in the promised land.
I felt lousy bringing up the next topic.
“What about drugs. Did Bhuntan use drugs?”
Mai Lim and the old woman exchanged words, and I saw what looked awfully like expressions of disapproval—of me or the drugs or Bhuntan, I wasn’t sure. Mai Lim said, “No drug. In Cambodian home, family very important. When man and woman marry, priest he tell them—no longer say, ‘I.’ Always ‘we.’ When man and woman join, they speak, ‘we.’” She pressed her small brown hands together. “No drug. We think drug very bad thing. Bhuntan—no drug.” The old woman showed her gold teeth and seconded this in vigorous Khmer.
I dropped the topic. “Bhutan had a relative in California,” I said. “A cousin.”
She frowned. “I’m not think so. All family kill in Cambodia.”
I dug out my notebook and showed her the name I had copied at the mortgage office. Suoheang Khoy. “Swang Coy” is how she pronounced it. She shook her head. “I do not know him.”
“Did Bhuntan have enemies?”
She thought about that one. “Enemy, no. Not here. In Cambodia, very many enemy for all of us. Khmer Rouge. Terrible. Here we live in peace.”
The old man spoke for the first time and the adults conducted a three-way conversation, the ten-year-old cupped her mouth and snickered. A couple words sounded familiar, but I told myself, no way.
Mai Lim interpreted. “Father say you detective like Magnum, P.I.”
I grinned at the old-timer. “Give or take the moustache and Ferrari.”
He grinned back with perfect incomprehension.
“Ferrari,” I heard the little girl say softly, and I realized the reason for her attentiveness. This was a vocabulary lesson.
“That red car Magnum drives is a Ferrari,” I told her. She gave me a shy smile. Mr. Rogers had nothing on me.
I asked a few more questions and left open the possibility of speaking with Mai Lim’s husband Samol sometime. On the landing outside the door, with the kids lining up again, Mai Lim gave me a pained look of questioning. “It not fair,” she said. “We here, Bhuntan gone. Why anyone kill Bhuntan?”
I wished I had an answer for her. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You find out?”
What did you say to that except that you would do your best?
* * *
I brought a sandwich back to the office. Lieutenant Rosenheck of the Houston PD had returned my call. I bounced another one his way and missed. We were on the court at least, only playing different matches. I hauled over the typing table, snapped the dustcover off the Royal, rolled paper into it, and began to log the day’s events.
I use the notes to undergird a better-than-fair memory, and for the detailed reports I provide clients upon completion of an investigation. Sometimes, as now, the notes reminded me of something so obvious I forgot it now and again. Reality is relative. It’s the elephant and the blind men. What you tried to do was come at a problem from as many ways as made sense, and even a few that didn’t. Through the gradual buildup of detail, the superimposing of layers, you got an approximation of reality. That was just beginning to happen for me with Bhuntan Tran.
I had the testimony of Ada Chan Stewart, of Claire Azar and hubby Joe, of Perry at the laundry, of Cassie Samms, Norm Turcotte and his assistant, Lois, and Mai Lim. Each view was doubtless distorted to some degree; and I’d handicap Joe Azar and Turcotte a few points for general sourness. The result was an emerging portrait of Tran. Truth? Objective reality? No, but more than I’d had yesterday. Like a print in the developing tank, something was starting to take form. I put my notes into a file folder.
When I finished my sandwich and coffee, I dragged out into the light something that had been crouching in a corner of my mind all day. With it, my skull gave a last throb, and then the pain was gone. There would be other pain to come, but it would locate itself elsewhere. Given time and luck, that ache might fade too. I went down the hall to attorney Fred Meecham’s office. I told him what I wanted. He asked just once if I was sure I shouldn’t play hardball. I said I was sure, and he got a few points of detail and said he’d have paper ready for signature in a day or two. When I took out my wallet he scowled.
As I stepped back through my waiting room, the phone was ringing.
“Howdy, Rasmussen?” said a voice that was familiar.
“Speaking.”
“Nate Rosenheck here.”
It was familiar from my tape machine. “Thanks for getting back,” I said.
“What can I do you for, partner?” He had a deep Texas drawl that made me feel like a caller on a radio advice show: Y’see, Calvin, I’ve got this mail-order pickle business, and …
I said, “I got your name from a news account of some killings you had in late May. I wanted to ask a few questions.”
“You work with…” I heard paper rustle, “Sergeant St. Onge.” He gave it a hard g and an ee sound at the end, but I let it go, since they weren’t likely ever to meet.
“Formerly. I’m private now.” I explained the current arrangement, which he didn’t seem to have any problem with. He wasn’t one of these small-bore papercrats who get so hung up on jurisdictions they’d rather see the bad guys walk than cut someone else a piece of case.
“What are y’all looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” I briefed him on the Tran killing. “No motive or suspects yet.”
He grunted. “We haven’t found anything for our two either. You have any gangs operating up your way?”
“There’s an occasional something running between here and Providence. Car theft is big, home invasions. You think a gang’s involved?”
“Nah. They’re mostly punks, too stupid to know that being tough’s got nothing to do with violence. The victims here were older than that.” Of the two in Houston, he said, one had been shot with a handgun at close range, the other with a rifle. He knew about the killings in California and Seattle.
Something got me thinking, and I reached over to my bookcase while he talked.
“Funny you called, Rasmussen. Few days back I telexed the PDs in those other cases to request police and ballistics reports. I ought to be hearing soon.”
“So you wonder if there might be a bigger picture?”
“The thought occurs.”
I had the Rand McNally atlas open on my desk, my finger touring California. “Drugs involved in any of the others?”
“Inconsistent. Some coke in a few, and now yours. Be honest with you, I don’t see a strong pattern. Down here we spend a half-zillion dollars to have a symphony orchestra and an art museum, and probably half again as much for the joys of guns and drugs. What can I tell you?”
“We’re a fun-loving society.”
“Yup.”
“So you think I’m spitting in the wind?”
“Hey, if you can shut a few files by coming up with a pattern that makes sense, go for it. If it don’t fit, let’s try another tune.”
I let the mixed metaphor go and played my long card. “Does the name Souheang Khoy jingle any bells?” I gave the name the sound Mai Lim had and spelled it.
“Y’all saying it should?”
“He’s an acquaintance or a relative of the man who got gunned here,” I said. “His name came up in a mortgage application file because he gave Tran five thousand dollars a few years ago to buy a house. He’s from San Jose, which isn’t too too far from San Francisco or Stockton. Big deal, huh?”
“I got the name down. Won’t hurt to check. Anything else?”
“I wish there were.”
Either he’d just thought of it, or he’d taken his time getting there. “Did y’all notice anything more about the gunshots?”
“Like?”
“Don’t know. Look, would you ask St. Onge to get me a copy of his report, including the death certificate?”
It had been the latter. He’d guessed I hadn’t eyeballed the report. “I’ll ask him.”
“I’d be obliged. Maybe we’ll be in touch.”
I put the atlas back on the shelf with my collection of phone directories, road maps and take-out menus. I got an idea. But first I placed a call to the Immigration and Naturalization Service number in Boston. A recorded voice told me that practically anything I’d ever want to know about INS was contained in a series of taped messages, all I needed to do was signal by punching in three-digit codes whenever I wanted to hop off, and then I was gone, hooked into a tape loop that promised to go on and on. It was probably an improvement over the old days when government phones would ring forever; but even getting through was no guarantee of anything. Conversations with the government could turn into Abbott and Costello routines. I let the loop ride for a few minutes. Not finding anyplace I wanted to visit, I cradled the phone.
I brought the Royal back for round two. I’d go after them in cold print.
A quick klackety-klack, listing the names of the Cambodian victims, requesting information that might connect them, thank you very much, yours, Citizen Rasmussen. With luck I’d hear by Labor Day. I mailed the letter across the street, then shagged my car.