Molly Torcelli opened the door before we rang the doorbell. “You’re early.”
On the phone I’d said five o’clock, and it was ten of the hour. “Sorry.”
She turned, walked back into the vast foyer under the chandelier, and Hank and I followed. She hadn’t said come in, but she was used to people following her. To her back I mumbled my traditional Vietnamese condolences.
I’d never been to her home in Farmington, but I was surprised when Hank said he’d never been there either. Molly didn’t entertain stragglers from the Vietnamese community. Lost in the leafy, mountainous hills, the estate was set far back in a cove of towering maples, far inside the gated acreage, unseen from the narrow road we drove in on. A white sprawling Colonial, with Greek columns staggered across the front, it looked like the forest had grown up around it, sheltering it. A circular driveway followed a rise of land, with beds of flowers speckling the overwatered blue-green lawn. A bank of garages masquerading as a carriage house was off to the left. The neighboring estates were barely seen—a hint of chimney, a suggestion of attic windows—tucked away in their own private forests.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Molly said as we sat in a sunroom, all wicker and polished green ivy. “People have been coming all day, and they look at me for answers.” She sighed. “What answers can I give people? What? Tell me that. My twin sister is gone. Stupidly gone.”
Suddenly she was quiet, staring from me to Hank, but I could see her body tighten. She sat still, her hands folded into her lap, a study in fragile self-control. She was dressed in a light yellow cotton summer dress, with yellow sandals. A gold bracelet. In her hands she held a crumpled yellow handkerchief, wadded and damp. Only her hair held slight reddish highlights. And her nails—fingers and toes—were a shade of pink. Of course, as I looked at her, I pictured the dead sister, her dark flashing eyes in the oval, delicate face. Here was a woman who’d known nothing but being beautiful since she was a child. And the redundant yellow of her appearance simply reinforced her exquisite look. I was impressed.
A maid entered the room, almost apologetically, and set a large silver tray on the table. I saw a pitcher of iced tea and an array of Italian cookies. Four tall glasses, chilled. “Anything else, Miss Molly?”
Molly looked into her face and suddenly burst into tears. The maid nodded, made a sympathetic sound, looked ready to cry herself, and backed out of the room. Molly sobbed into her crumpled handkerchief. In between the giant, sloppy gasps, she tried to apologize, tried to control herself.
“No need to apologize,” I told her. “Maybe we should leave you alone.”
“No, no,” she protested, half rising. “I can’t get used to—can’t believe—Mary is gone. Unbelievable. Unbearable. Someone shot her. Mary. Quiet, simple Mary.”
Those quaint, sentimental words—“quiet, simple”—jarred me, maybe because I sensed a little patronizing tone, and I found myself adding the obligatory final word—quaint, simple, poor Mary. Probably this was unfair of me, I told myself, as I watched Molly pull herself together, pour herself a glass of tea. She forgot to offer us some. Her hand trembled.
I repeated, “Maybe now’s not a good time.”
She breathed in. “Will there ever be a good time for something like this? I don’t think so. Oh no.”
“Are your children here?”
She waved her hand in the air. “Somewhere.” The flighty hand suggested they were lost, out of satellite range, in some distant wing of the large palatial estate, doubtless playing violent video games on a Sony PlayStation in the lower forty.
Then, her sobbing under control, Molly looked at Hank, her voice all business. “Your mother called this morning. She told me about your grandmother wanting Rick to ask around.” She glanced at me.
Ask around—what did that mean? I tried to distance myself. “Mrs. Torcelli, the truth of the matter is that I don’t even know if there’s any reason to ask around. The police are pretty sure about this.”
“Please—my name is Molly.” Then, blunt, to the point. “But isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I suppose so. I told her I’d talk to people. But also, of course, bring my condolences.”
She almost smiled. “Like a good Vietnamese.”
She started to nibble on an almond cookie, collecting the crumbs in the palm of her hand.
“I’m not the kind of investigator who takes on murder…”
The word murder startled her, and she choked on the cookie. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “Just the way you said that hit me to the quick. It’s not a word I’m comfortable with.”
I apologized.
“No, no.” She leaned toward me. “It’s me. I had a sleepless night last night. I expect I’ll have a few more such nights ahead of me.”
“How’s your family doing?”
She ignored me. “I expect I’ll have to see someone.” She looked away, as though running through a list of therapists on call.
It dawned on me that Hank had said nothing since we’d arrived. After offering his own condolences, he’d closed himself up. Glancing in his direction, I saw him leaning forward in his chair, elbows on knees, hands on the sides of his face, staring wide-eyed at nothing. Not at Molly, to be sure. His lips were drawn into a thin, disapproving line, bloodless and tight. In the car on the way over he’d confessed that he never really cared for Molly, what little he saw of her.
“Money has made her different.”
“It has that effect,” I’d told him. “How different?”
“She likes it too much.”
“That’s not a sin.”
“She learned it from her husband Larry. He’s the dean of that school, let me tell you.” He sounded angry.
“Well, think about it, Hank. She came from nothing, born in Saigon during the war, airlifted out, dirt poor, you know, and now she’s on the Board of Directors for the Athenaeum in Hartford. That’s a leap.”
Hank made a face. “I don’t trust people who don’t have any self-doubt.”
“But we can cut her a little slack in light of her twin sister’s death, no?”
“We’ll see.”
So now he sat still, Rodin’s The Thinker meets the young kid in Home Alone—that pose. Frozen, the prisoner in the tower.
When Molly confided, “You know, I’ve had to cancel four appointments this week alone,” Hank stood up, coughed, and gazed out the bank of windows at the rolling acres that swept down the back into a thicket of hemlock. The muscles on the back of his neck looked like rough thick rope.
Molly paid him no mind. “How do you go about questioning drug dealers?” she asked.
Good question. I had absolutely no response to that.
“Well?” Impatient.
“This really is not a case, Molly. Right now, I’m just exploring. I’m just talking a bit…”
She interrupted. “Rick Van Lam, it’s either a duck or it’s not a duck. You either do something or you don’t.” She half-closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. That’s not me talking. That’s my husband Larry. That’s his philosophy of life.”
“Drug dealers—or gangbang shooters—are not known to talk about themselves. Even the police hit a brick wall there. I’m more concerned with Mary’s behavior that night. Her decision to go there.”
Hank returned, sat down, and stared at her.
“Iced tea?” she interrupted, as though just remembering to be a perfect hostess. She leaned forward, indicating the pitcher. The gold bracelet, I noted, was inlaid with tiny diamonds. She handed two glasses to us.
“Molly,” I began as she sat back, “why do you think Mary was in that neighborhood, even stepping out of her car?” I waited.
The question took her off guard. She hadn’t expected it. Then she composed herself. “You know, I don’t have a clue. Mary wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place.” She looked away.
But in the split second that she caught my eye, repeated the line she’d said before, and then turned away, something happened. I caught a momentary flicker of an eye, a quick bleak flash of fear and terror. When she looked back, the eyes were dull, veiled.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I swear I saw something there.
The front door opened, and Larry walked in, undoing a tie and the top button of his blue dress shirt. He didn’t look happy to see us there. “I wondered who was driving the ancient BMW.” He looked at me.
He sat down, reached for the iced tea. That explained the fourth glass the maid had placed on the tray. I noticed thick graying beard stubble on his afternoon face. Larry had the rumpled, slightly gone-to-seed look of a very wealthy man who once was tremendously handsome, athletic, popular, and aggressive. Now, it seemed to me, the aggressiveness dominated, but it was tempered with a hazy sort of good looks. People would always refer to him as handsome, but they might also comment on the steeliness of his eyes, the harsh wrinkles around the sensual mouth. The Mediterranean good looks—he and Molly must have been Scott and Zelda country club luminaries way back when—had hardened, and the shock of black hair was thinning now, gray at the temples. What he exuded, I felt, was a kind of blunt, no-nonsense force, the authority of stock portfolio and embarrassingly wonderful cash flow.
He was trying to be friendly, joking idly with the totally unresponsive Hank. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” He punched him in the shoulder. Hank nodded.
Molly introduced me. “This is Rick Van Lam, a friend of Hank’s.”
Larry looked like he could care less, but he extended his hand, and we shook. His palms were wet.
“Horrible, horrible,” he spoke to no one in particular. “Makes no sense to anyone.” He undid another button on his shirt. The home was beautifully air-conditioned, but he looked flushed from the heat of the afternoon. He dabbed his face with a handkerchief.
Molly smiled thinly. “You know how we said the police were doing absolutely nothing, Larry?”
“What do you expect? It’s Hartford. Most of the cops are on the take, if they’re not boinking some crack hooker on Asylum Hill.”
“For God’s sake, Larry.” She looked at me, then back at her husband. “Larry is a man of definite opinions.” Her face crumbled a bit.
He smirked. “Molly hates it when I’m candid.”
“Rick here is an investigator and he’s looking into the case…”
I raised my hand in protest. “Wait. It’s not a case…”
“What case?” From Larry.
“Hank’s mother and grandmother have asked if he’d ask around about Mary. To see if anyone knows why she went there. You know, help the police a bit. You know. Talk to people.”
Larry looked at me as though he were in the presence of a lunatic. “You’re doing what?” Incredulous.
“Just talking to people.”
“Like us?”
“People.”
“Well, knock your socks off.” He shrugged, dismissing the subject. “But it seems to me you’d be better off nailing that lowlife that gunned her down.”
“For God’s sake, Larry,” Molly pleaded.
“Let the Ricans shoot each other. What’s sad is that Mary was…”
Hank spoke for the first time, “. . . in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I stared at him. His face was red now.
“Exactly,” Larry summed up. “Well, I got business I gotta take care of.” He stood up. “Molly,” he turned back, “where are Jon and Kristen?”
In the lower forty, I thought.
“I told Susie a half hour ago to get them to say hello to Hank and—and to Rick when they arrived.” She made a you-know-how-they-are gesture, and smiled.
“I’ll tell Susie again.” He nodded at us. “See you, guys.” He rushed off.
A horrible man. Or maybe not—a man used to having the world fall into line, a world that obeyed his commands.
Eventually, after an awkward silence during which we sipped tea, I heard footsteps on the stairwell, and Jon and Kristen strolled into the room, both looking like they’d been summoned to a gathering they preferred to skip. “What?” asked Jon.
His mother pointed to the two of us. We stood and shook hands. Jon said, “I saw you both at the funeral.” He sat down, yawning, but covering his mouth after the fact. I found myself looking at him, thinking of him in ways I often thought of myself. Here was this half-Vietnamese, half-white man, twenty-five years old, I’d been told, comfortable with himself, a BA from Yale, a perpetual student, now living at home during the summer break. According to Hank’s capsule summary in the car, Jon was getting a graduate degree in Public Policy, intending to become a lawyer “down the road, maybe.”
That was Hank’s quote.
Jon looked more Asian than white, though he had a square jaw and a shock of Italian hair. Those narrow eyes. Sepia skin like his mother’s, supple and silky, and he’d inherited his mother’s looks. Tall, a little too thin, he sat down with his long legs stretched out. He wasn’t wearing shoes. Hank had told me Jon had forgotten most of the Vietnamese his mother taught him as a boy. Mary once told Hank’s mother that Jon thought speaking Vietnamese made him sound like a Disney cartoon character. The few times I’d spotted him at gatherings he looked sullen and miserable. We’d never been introduced.
“Hi, Hank,” Kristen nodded at him. “I saw you in church.”
“Hi, Kristen.” Hank smiled. “Sorry again.”
“Oh, it’s just awful. Awful.” Then she stopped, as though confused.
“It’s all right, dear,” Molly said protectively.
We all knew that Kristen was, as one old Vietnamese man announced, “as dumb as two chopsticks trying to find each other in the dark,” a cruel barb that had some currency a while back, one that got back to Molly and Larry. Kristen was, well, slow. As Hank told me in the car, “She’s ngu nhu cho.” As thick as two short planks. She’d become a recurring joke in a Vietnamese community that celebrated brainpower. And because she was rich—and half-white—the joking was often vicious and heartless. She said dumb things, not knowing they were dumb. Her father had a long history of enrolling her in progressively more and more expensive girls’ schools. One of the last and most unsatisfying had been Miss Porter’s down the street from my apartment, a school that talked of Jackie Kennedy as though she were still enrolled there, sitting in the cafeteria adjusting her bobby socks. But Kristen forgot to go to class and was expelled. She didn’t care. I’d talked to her once at a New Year’s party and I found her a sad young woman who’d come to believe her drop-dead gorgeous looks were all she needed to survive. That, her cell phone, and a checkbook.
Molly turned to Jon. “Hank and Rick have come to talk about your Aunt Mary.”
“Why?” From Jon.
I spoke up. “Everyone feels that there has to be some investigation, some answer to why Mary drove her car…”
Jon interrupted, brusque. “You mean, everyone in the Vietnamese world.” He ran his tongue over his lips.
“That’s right,” I insisted. “Closure, I guess.” I despised the handy word. “We may never know.”
On the defensive Hank added, “The Vietnamese need to tie all the strings, you know. Right, Jon? To leave little unanswered. What did Buddha say? ‘When the line of a circle begins to be drawn, it must go until it finds itself again.’” He looked at me. “Rick taught me that.”
I smiled. “Good for you, Hank.”
Jon just stared.
“We’re Catholic,” Kristen said suddenly.
Jon frowned. “I never knew Aunt Mary that well, so I don’t know what you want me to say. I couldn’t even guess why she went there. I know Tommy and Cindy, but I knew them better a few years back, when we went to the same school for a while.” He stared over my shoulder. “Our lives have gone in different directions. I don’t know what they’re up to these days. I mean, we’re all friends on Facebook, but that’s a way of not caring about people, right?”
“When we’d hang out with them, Aunt Mary wasn’t around much,” Kristen added. “She didn’t like to talk to us.”
“You know, she seemed uncomfortable around us,” Jon said. “Sometimes she looked at us like we were dollar signs, two little privileged kids.”
Molly spoke up. “You are privileged kids.”
Jon looked at her. “Thank God for that.”
Kristen smiled. “She was always nice to me.”
Jon smirked. “Everyone’s nice to you, Kristen. They want something.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Kristen suddenly said good-bye. “Gotta run, gang.” Nodding at her mother, she left the room.
Hank and Jon had started discussing Hank’s desire to be a state trooper. “Sort of cool,” Jon admitted. “Not for me. But sort of cool.”
Molly didn’t look too happy with the conversation, eyeing her son. I glared at Hank.
“When was the last time you spoke to Mary?” I asked her.
For a second, she got flustered, uncertain. “A day or so before she died, I think. We talked all the time on the phone. I‘d got her on a local Asian Relief charity that I chair. She had better connections to the old Vietnamese community, and—and—I, well, I was supposed to pick her up for a meeting. It would have been the day of her funeral.” She paused. “I missed her phone calls the day she died. She called me a few times—nothing unusual there. I called her. We played phone tag. Back and forth. We never spoke that day.” She began sobbing and reached for a handkerchief.
Jon got up to leave. “Ma.” Impatience in his voice.
I nodded at Hank. We said our good-byes. As we stood up, Kristen suddenly bounded down the stairs. Surprisingly, she’d gone to her room and changed her outfit, replacing the silky red blouse and baggy shorts for some tight jeans and a skimpy top.
“Going out?” her mother asked.
“No. Why?”
She disappeared back up the staircase.
Hank hugged Molly, who held on a long time. I could see Hank squirm. The maid stepped into the room. “Susie.” Molly introduced her to us. “Do you know Susie? Her name is Suong but somehow, years back, we started calling her Susie.” The short woman grinned, uncomfortable. We introduced ourselves. Susie led us into the foyer, but she hesitated on the threshold.
“Yes?” I encouraged her.
In broken English: “I know Miss Mary when she came here now and then. I always like her. A lot. She bring me cookies from her store, and she always asked about me and my boy. So sad to learn what happened to her. So cruel for a woman so good like her.” She looked into my face, and I saw her eyes were wet. She held my hand.
We stood there, awkward, the three of us.
Somewhere in the house Larry was barking at his daughter, the words biting and angry. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You don’t have a brain in that goofy head of yours.”
Susie saw me glance at Hank. “No listen to Mr. Larry. Please. He’s, well, a rough man, but only on the outside. Inside he’s a good, good man, let me tell you. I would not work in this house for more than twenty years if a man is evil.” She opened the front door for us and watched us leave. I looked back. She was looking over her shoulder in the direction of the father-daughter altercation. The door closed.
In the car I said to Hank, “Why is it I’m not liking these people?”
“I feel the same, and they’re my family. But I gotta tell you, Rick, they’re distant, distant cousins. Maybe not even real cousins. You know how Vietnamese call lifelong friends family, like brothers and sisters and uncles. We probably don’t even share blood….”
“Keep talking.” I was smiling. “It’s not helping you distance yourself from your, excuse me, cousins.”
Hank waited a second. “When you asked Molly why Mary might be at that drug-dealer corner, I noticed her body tighten so fast it caught my attention.”
“Not only that.” I told him I saw some confusing flicker in her eyes, a flash of fear.
“Does it mean anything?”
“Maybe nothing at all. Grief sometimes is hard to translate.”