Hank and I sat with Cindy and Tommy in Tommy’s apartment. Tommy took a phone call from Danny, right after our parking-lot talk, and he’d called me, angry, spitting out the words so fast he had to start again. “Come over now. We gotta talk. Now. Cindy’s here, too. We need to talk this shit out. Get the hell over here.”
They were waiting for us, the two of them, sitting next to each other on the shabby sofa, cans of Pepsi gripped tightly, cell phones in their laps.
“Just what the hell’s going on?” Tommy spat out the minute we sat down. Cindy grumbled. Humorless, jaws set, hands folded over chests, they looked like they’d practiced this particular posture especially for our mandated visit.
Cindy’s voice was squeaky, nervous. “You trying to pin Mom’s murder on Tommy? If you are…”
I broke in. “Is that what Danny told you?”
“Why are you hounding my brother?”
Hank looked from one to the other. “Nobody’s hounding anybody, Cindy.”
“Just what did Danny tell you?” I asked.
Tommy looked ready for another outburst, but he changed his mind, answering me calmly. “He said you’re trailing him around, even to the apartment he keeps in Frog Hollow…”
“You know about that?” Hank interrupted.
Tommy frowned. “Everybody does. I’ve been there.” But then he looked as though he’d misspoke, and backtracked. “I watched a Super Bowl game there. His Mom doesn’t like sports.”
The look Cindy gave him told him to shut up.
I noted, “For someone everyone seems to dislike, you all seem to spend a lot of time with dear old Danny.”
“What you don’t understand is that he’s one of us, but that doesn’t mean we see him a lot. He’s around now and then.”
“So why did he call you now?”
“Because you put him on the spot—for that apartment, but also because of the fact we buy a little weed together.”
“And?”
He looked exasperated. “A little weed, man. A little. We don’t even think about it any more. It’s like we buy toothpaste when we run out.” He liked his own analogy because he smiled, looked appreciatively at Cindy, who wore a blank look on her face.
I stared into his face. “You know, I bring up drugs, and all you kids run amok.”
“That’s because you’re trying to somehow connect it to Mom and Aunt Molly’s murders.”
“Preposterous,” Cindy yelled loudly. “My brother would never kill our own mother. Do you know how stupid that sounds?”
“I never said he did.”
“Danny said…”
“Tell me exactly what Danny says I said.” I looked at Tommy.
“He mentioned that Molly found a joint in Kristen’s room…”
Cindy scoffed, “Barbie goes to pot.”
Tommy glared at her. “And Molly blamed Danny. The way she blamed him for everything. I mean Danny can be an asshole and all, but, like, Kristen is a twenty-something girl. She can buy her own shit.”
“But what if Danny did give it to her?” Hank said.
“So what? A joint. Do you people hear yourselves? She’s not hiding the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction, for Christ’s sake.”
“But Molly called your mother, and you know how your mother got crazy over drugs.”
“I know, I know,” Tommy grumbled. “Do I have to hear it again?”
Cindy looked at me. “But I don’t understand how this connects to murder. You don’t kill people over a joint in someone’s purse. The fact that Tommy and Danny smoke a bit—and me too if you gotta know, why don’t you lock me up in your loony bin?—has nothing to do with murder.”
“I never said it did.”
“Then why are you asking the questions?”
“I’m asking every question I can think of. I’m hoping something will fall in place.”
“That’s a helleva way to do a job,” Tommy snickered. Cindy smiled.
“So Danny told you I thought the drugs were connected to the murders?” I asked.
“Not in so many words. He said you were on him and me for smoking, and because Molly was losing it over the idea of her little kiddy smoking a little cannabis, you thought somehow that we had to kill them.”
“Kill them,” Cindy echoed.
It did sound—to use Cindy’s word—preposterous, but somewhere deep within me, in that hollowness where I listen to my own quiet, I felt there was something going on here. And in that moment, just like at other times in my life, I remembered the Buddha quotations from that tattered phrase book my mother tucked into my breast pocket. The smallest moment is the shadow of the greatest. The greatest is a shadow of the smallest. In the tiniest moment, in the most irrelevant anecdote, there lurked, somehow, the larger picture, the sun spot that came to dominate the sky.
“Sometimes,” I translated, “by talking about something like this trivial stick of pot on Kristen’s bureau, sometimes, maybe, there’s another story behind it.”
Both Tommy and Cindy yelled. “There you go again,” Tommy screamed. “What you’re saying is that we’re…like hiding something.”
“No,” I rushed in, “I’m saying that there may be a part of the story that you both don’t understand because you don’t have all the pieces.”
“And you do?’
“No. Not yet.”
“But Danny…”
“Tommy, the phone call from Danny was meant to scare you. He’s pissed off at me, and he wants everyone pissed off at me.”
“It worked.” From Tommy.
“I don’t get it.” From Cindy.
“Look.” Tommy looked first at Hank, then at me. “I wouldn’t kill Mom. She was…my Mom. And I wouldn’t kill Molly, even though she got on my nerves. This isn’t news to us, you know.”
Cindy drew her lips into a tight line. “Aunt Molly was a troublemaker.”
“You know,” Tommy said, “yeah, it was funny how Mom kept asking me if I was doing drugs just recently.” We all waited. “I told her no.” A pause. “You know something? One time she even asked me if Danny did drugs. Opium, no less. Sometimes we joked—you know, okay it’s time to relive the Opium Wars again. Shit, who the hell sees opium? I thought that was strange, after all this time, but I figured that was Molly’s doing.” He sighed. “You know, sometimes like we’re all eating together—like when she made mi ga on Sunday morning—I see her just staring at me, hard and long. Once, stoned out of my gourd, I told her how good her mi ga was, and she smiled at me.”
Hank spoke up, “But your mother was getting worried. She’d even put in that call to Detective Smolski.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “Rick told me. I don’t have a clue what that was about.”
“What it suggests is that she did believe you were back on drugs.”
He nodded. “I guess so. Unless—unless she believed me, and was calling for Molly. After all, Mom had lots of contact with Smolski back when. She liked him. Maybe she was helping Molly deal with Kristen.”
“Huh!” Cindy roared, again melodramatically. “Kristen, the drug fiend.”
“You don’t like her?” I asked.
“What’s to like? It’s like asking my opinion of an air bubble.”
Tommy grinned. “Cindy, that’s cold.”
“Kristen likes only herself.”
“And Danny,” Hank added.
Cindy sat up. “I assumed that. One dirt bag fucking another.”
“Cindy.” Tommy put his hand on her wrist. “Stop it.”
She stood up and left the room. I could hear her rattling around in the cluttered kitchen, forks and spoons banging against a drawer.
“Your mother was afraid you’d go to jail,” I told him. “She didn’t understand how insignificant the prep school arrest was.”
Cindy came back into the room and sat down.
“Danny talked to your mom shortly before she died,” I told them.
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “I know. He told me. He was trying to reach me. To change plans.”
“He never got you?”
“I was planning on blowing him off anyway. Sometimes when I knew he’d be calling, I turned off my cell. Blocked his texts.”
“What did you do together?”
“Not much. Like a couple times a year…you know…go to get a hamburger in his Mercedes and drive around. Maybe stop at Hooters or a strip club.”
“Smoking dope?”
“I swear, we never did that together. I didn’t want to—with him. It would bum me out.”
“He must have been angry that Molly suspected him of giving drugs to Kristen.” I looked at Hank.
Tommy answered. “I don’t know. I told Danny that Mom suspected something, but he said, ‘Your mom loves me to death. She won’t believe anything bad about me.’”
Cindy echoed, “‘Your mom loves me to death.’ Sure got that one right.”
***
Driving back to my place, Hank and I were quiet. The united forces of Cindy and Tommy, two lost siblings on a decrepit sofa, bothered me. And, I think, their blood relative Hank. Finally, he mumbled, “The only comfort I got this afternoon is that Cindy has become Tommy’s biggest advocate.”
“Loyalty.”
“It seems to be a novelty in my family,” he said grimly.
My phone rang. “Where are you?” From Liz.
“With Hank, back from Cindy and Tommy’s.”
“Family reunion?”
“Of course.”
“I just got back from Bank of America.” Humor in her voice.
“Holding it up?”
“No, just protecting my cherished assets. No, I wanted to take a look at your boy, Danny Trinh.”
“Why?”
“My being a world famous Farmington psychologist and all. I asked for information on my statement, an answer I had all along, being a financial whiz. I had to wait until he was free of the swooning women who encircled him like he’s the last cupcake at the church bazaar.”
“And?”
“Well, I hoped he’d topple the inkwell so I could get hints to his psyche, a la Rorschach—just what do you see, Banker Trinh? A dead rabbit? A coiled snake? But no, all I could manage was a good moment of chitchat.”
“And?”
“You keep saying that word with such expectation. And I was very taken with him. He’s quite the looker. And the way he looked at me, it was clear he liked what he saw.” She waited.
“I didn’t ask you to date him.”
“A smooth talker, he is. Quite the work of art. Those dark brooding looks, Heathcliff meets Saigon. My, my, my. But the line of his female acolytes was bustling behind me, and you know how such women are. Full-force tsunami love. I had to thank him for ending my abysmal ignorance, and he flashed those brilliant ornaments the rest of us simply call teeth.”
“Liz, for God’s sake. Isn’t there a car wash nearby you can walk through?” She laughed. “So what do you think?”
“I think that Danny could get a woman to do almost anything he wants.”
“I hope you’re not one of them.”
“Alas, no.” She sighed melodramatically. “I was once married to a good-looking guy. Hot actually. I’ve forgotten his name though. Sounded foreign. He had one of those smiles, too. Made a simple city girl like me dizzy. But that was a long time ago, in a faraway kingdom by the Rivers Hudson and East. That girl is no more. Once, to disappoint Jacqueline Susann, is definitely enough.”
When I hung up the phone, I found myself smiling.