The Dark Root Page 13

  The revelation that this attack had been made to stimulate a local money-laundering operation broke that mold. It indicated a long-term interest in a specific area by criminal elements, and introduced the possibility of a conspiracy, which could be used as a selling point to the feds.

  I tried to keep the satisfaction out of my voice. “Was Henry the leader, or did you feel someone else might be pulling the strings?”

  Leung’s voice was definite. “No. They referred to another—a dai ca, which means ‘big brother.’”

  “How did they refer to him?” I asked.

  He gave me an apologetic look. “I am sorry. I don’t speak Vietnamese—just a few words.”

  That was a disappointment. “They only spoke Vietnamese?”

  “No—a little English, too, but not very good. That’s how they told me about the money cleaning.”

  “So when they spoke to each other, you didn’t understand anything?”

  “Very little.”

  “Did you catch any names beyond ‘Henry’?”

  Leung nodded, his mood improved from just a few minutes earlier.“Yes. One was called An, and the other Ut—those are first names.”

  “Which one had the tattoo?”

  “Ut.”

  “Did anyone refer to Michael Vu, or Sonny? Or anyone else?”

  Leung shook his head.

  “Did any of them make any phone calls from your house?”

  “Yes—the man Henry did, a few minutes before you arrived.”

  A few minutes before Michael Vu arrived, I thought sourly, knowing the Leungs’ phone bill would reflect no local calls.

  I let out a sigh, my earlier eagerness tempered. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “I regret, no.”

  “Nothing was said to you other than what you’ve just told me?”

  “Nothing besides the instructions to go to the bank. The man Henry bragged that Brattleboro was going to be a pot of gold.”

  “Did he elaborate? Brag about other people he’d attacked?”

  Leung shook his head sadly. “I am sorry.”

  I rose to my feet. “Don’t be. You’ve been more help than you know.”

  · · ·

  The high-school cafeteria was jammed with students, their laughter and noise filling the large room. I stood with my back to a corner and scanned the crowd carefully. I finally spotted Amy Lee sitting at a middle table, talking quietly with another student. She looked better, not as skinny or forlorn. Her expressions were still muted—she played no role in the cheerful cacophony that vibrated off the walls—but the haunted look of a victim was gone.

  I didn’t want to embarrass or scare her by a direct approach, so I asked a passing student to tell her that I’d be waiting to speak with her in the library down the hall.

  She took several minutes to appear at the door. It was immediately obvious my attempt at diplomacy hadn’t worked too well. The haunted look was back.

  I got up and came to her, taking her elbow and gently steering her to a table far from where anyone else was sitting. “Hi, Amy. How’ve you been?”

  “Okay.” Her voice was a monotone, barely above a murmur.

  I pulled out a chair. “Have a seat.”

  She followed my suggestion robotically and sat staring at the tabletop between us.

  “Have things gotten better since you went to Women for Women?”

  “A little.”

  “I thought they might. They’re good people. Are you still going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do your parents know about it yet?”

  She looked up at me abruptly, her eyes narrowed. “Are you going to tell them?”

  “Not at all. That’s a private matter between you and them. I’m just happy you’re taking care of yourself.”

  She didn’t answer and went back to looking at the tabletop.

  “Did you hear about the shooting yesterday?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the newspaper pictures of the four men who were killed?”

  She shook her head.

  “I think one of them was among the three who attacked you. If it’s okay, I’d like to show you a photo of him.” I pulled the shot of Henry Lam—the one that had made her hysterical earlier—and cradled it in my palm, awaiting her decision.

  It was a calculated risk, which was one reason I’d taken the time to watch her in the cafeteria. I’d wanted to see how she was behaving on her own, away from adult scrutiny, and what I’d seen had been encouraging.

  She didn’t disappoint me. She slowly nodded, raised her eyes to the photo I laid before her, and murmured yes.

  I took the picture back and put it in my pocket. “I’m sorry, Amy. If it’s any comfort, this also means you’ll never have to worry about him again.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Could you answer a few questions about that night? If you don’t want to, that’s fine. And if you just want to answer some and not others, that’s okay, too. Would that be all right?”

  “Okay.”

  That was the first obstacle cleared. Whether it was the passage of time, the influence of her counseling, or the fact that her parents had given her such little support, Amy Lee no longer seemed so concerned with her father’s wish to keep silent, which was another reason I was here, and not trying to talk to him again.

  “You told me there were three men that night. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the man whose photo I just showed you the leader?”

  “It was him.” Neither her voice nor her posture had changed. It was as if I were talking to a soul hovering just outside the body before me.

  “Did you catch his name?”

  “Henry,” she said without hesitation.

  “And the other two?”

  “One they called Tri. The other one I don’t know—he never got near me.”

  I let that last statement go, not wishing to cut too close to what we both knew had happened to her. “Did they speak in Vietnamese or Chinese?”

  She looked up at me, surprised. “Both, and a little English. They spoke Vietnamese to each other. Henry spoke Chinese to my mother.”

  “How about to your father?”

  “Henry spoke English to him. He seemed proud of that—he bragged that he spoke good English.”

  “Did he?” I asked, remembering my own encounter with him.

  “It was dirty.” A tone of contempt had crept into her voice.

  “You speak Chinese?”

  “Cantonese.”

  “And Vietnamese?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did they say anything besides giving you orders? Any references to other places or people or events?”

  “No.”

  I reached into my pocket and extracted a thick wad of pictures—mug shots, surveillance shots—all of which we’d accumulated over the past week. Included among them were the photographs I’d shown John Crocker.

  I handed them to Amy like a deck of cards. “Could you give these a look? See if you recognize anyone else.”

  She solemnly did as I asked, slowly and methodically going through the photos, never pausing throughout. She finally shook her head and laid the deck before me.

  “Nobody?” I asked.

  She looked me straight in the eye. “No. I’m sorry.”

  I broke the rules a little then, extracting Michael Vu’s and Truong Van Loc’s pictures specifically. “How ’bout them?”

  Again, she shook her head. “No.”

  I returned the stack to my pocket. “Not to worry. What did the three men want that night? Money?”

  “They took money, but they wanted more. Henry wanted to talk to my dad.”

  It was an almost imperceptible shift, but I sensed her beginning to relax a bit, as if the realization that she spoke better English than had her attacker endowed her with a hint more pride and self-worth than she’d been feeling just moments before.


  “About what?” I asked of her last comment.

  “I don’t know exactly. Part of their talk happened in another room, and Mom was crying a lot, and screaming…” She hesitated, as if collecting her courage, before adding matter-of-factly, “They’d already raped me. It was near the end.”

  I was impressed by her frankness—a good sign that she, if no one else in her family, was dealing with reality. “Did you hear any of what they discussed?”

  She took a deep breath and seemed to think a moment. A furrow appeared between her eyes as she looked up at me. “I remember something about credit cards. Does that make sense?”

  I smiled and squeezed her hand. “Yes, it does. When you’ve been out shopping with either one of your parents, have you seen them use credit cards?”

  “Sure. Not often, though. My mom always pays cash.”

  “What card does your dad use?”

  “It’s a Visa… I think.”

  “Okay—going back to the night of the attack, what did they take from the house? Anything?”

  “My dad has a safe in his bedroom. They made him open that up. I think it had a lot of money, and maybe some jewelry.”

  “Any pieces you could describe?”

  “There was a pendant my mom let me see sometimes—gold and jade. It had the Chinese characters for her family name—Ho—engraved in the stone. I’m pretty sure they stole that.”

  I opened my note pad to a blank page and pushed it over to her. “Can you draw it, along with the name?” I asked.

  She took my pen and quickly drew the piece of jewelry, returning the pad with an apologetic smile. “It’s not very good, but that’s pretty close. The name’s right, at least—she taught me how to do that.”

  “How’s she doing, by the way?”

  A flicker of irritation crossed her face. “Who knows? She doesn’t say anything anymore. She cooks and does the housework and stares out the window and cries a lot.”

  “And your dad?”

  “He’s changed, too. When he looks at us, I think he’s sad, but sometimes, when he thinks he’s alone, he looks angry.”

  “Do you think everything’s going all right at the restaurant?”

  Again, she gave me that quick, slightly surprised double look. “I don’t think so. He stays later at work than he used to, and he doesn’t seem to like it much anymore.”

  “Sounds like home isn’t much fun, either. How’re you holding up?”

  She shrugged. “I got my friends, and dad never did much with me anyhow.” She paused, and then placed her hand against her cheek. Her eyes slowly lost their focus, and she went back to looking at the polished wooden surface between us. “I miss my mom, though.”

  12

  I SAT IN MY CAR AND WATCHED Sally Javits receiving her dripping-wet wards at the exit of the car-wash tunnel. She’d motioned impatiently to the driver to proceed to a line painted on the asphalt, and then she and several others would launch themselves at the vehicle, flogging it with towels and chamois cloths with all the enthusiasm of an anger-venting therapy group. Several times I thought I could see a look of alarm growing on the distant faces of the drivers, just before the buff-’n’-shine crew abruptly withdrew, turning their backs contemptuously, to let the car timidly roll away.

  This was her latest job, to be held, if she kept to her statistical norm, for a month at the most. It followed a string of similar employments—washing dishes, mopping floors, sloshing coffee at broken-down donut shops. Chances were always fifty-fifty that she’d get bored and leave before getting fired.

  Still, she worked, albeit erratically, as did many of her streetwise cohorts, which is what distinguished a town like Brattleboro from the urban battlefields that monopolized the nightly news. We’d been spared the full-time preoccupation with drugs, violence, and general hopelessness that crippled those other places. So far.

  I was parked inconspicuously down the street, waiting for Javits’s shift to end, and for a private moment in which to draw her attention.

  A couple of cars later, a new team sauntered onto the receiving apron, replacing Sally’s crew in a ritualized exchange of physical and verbal insults. A few rags flew through the air, a sponge or two was thrown at a ducking head, and then she was walking down the sidewalk after punching out, her square, compact body straining the fabric of her damp uniform T-shirt.

  I started up my engine and slowly drove up alongside her as she walked. “Hey, Sally.”

  She barely glanced at me, her face still flushed from the enjoyment of her boisterous departure. I was happy to see she was in a good mood. “Hey, yourself, Gunther.”

  “Got time for a chat?”

  “’Bout what?”

  “I’ll buy you dinner.”

  She stopped and gave me a dubious look. “Where?”

  “Your call.”

  Her face cleared. “Yeah! No shit. How ’bout Toney’s?” She pointed to a tiny grocery store on the corner where Elm Street slopes away from Canal to cross a bridge over the Whetstone Brook. The store served grinders from a rear deli counter, the quality of which was famous all over town. A good many of the department’s patrol division considered this an altar of affordable haute cuisine.

  “You got it,” I agreed and parked by the curb.

  She ordered meatball, and I, despite knowing Gail was making something at home, had a bag of chips and a Coke. After receiving our food, Sally led the way outside and headed back up the street toward the recently opened Little Caesar’s. “Wanna dine with a view?” she cracked over her shoulder.

  She entered the fast-food restaurant’s parking lot, walked to the rear, and plopped herself down on one of the six-foot-long concrete wheel stops marking the lot’s boundary, using the bumper of a parked car as a backrest.

  “Wicked, huh?” She gestured out ahead of us as I settled down next to her. The ground fell away precipitously at our feet as a fifty-foot embankment went in search of the winding Whetstone Brook far below us. There was a wide field between the foot of the grade and the water’s edge, choked with brush and weeds, strewn with trash and garbage, and occasionally clotted with larger items like a stray grocery cart or a gutted sofa. On the distant bank was a holding yard for a lumber company, with metal-roofed sheds and bundled stacks of boards on pallets, and beyond that lay most of lower downtown Brattleboro, climbing, street by parallel street, back up the more gradual opposing slope.

  It was the kind of gritty, blue-collar urban view to make a tough kid’s spirits soar. I looked out the corner of my eye at her pleased expression, her mouth already smeared with tomato sauce, and couldn’t resist a matching smile of my own. “Yeah, wicked.”

  She took another wolfish bite and spoke through her food. “So, you and Ron almost bought the farm. That why you’re here?”

  She remained, in her fashion, a businesswoman.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Did you or anyone else know a home invasion was in the works?”

  Her chewing slowed. I could sense the caution lights going on in her head. “That’s what those people do. It’s not the first time it’s happened. You guys just walked into it.”

  “So did Vince.”

  She stopped chewing altogether and looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We figured something was going down—that’s why we followed Leung home. How did Vince know where to show up?”

  In point of fact, we knew Sharkey had been watching Vu. What bothered me was his timing, which smacked of a double setup. The only catch was that, in order to make it work, the person pulling the strings had to have known about the home invasion.

  The sandwich forgotten, she twisted around to face me bodily, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You wanna shit or get off the pot?”

  I gave her a scenario I thought she might accept, and maybe even confirm. “Vince was suffocating under Benny, but he didn’t have the balls to do anything about it—until Sonny showed up, or at least Michael
Vu in Sonny’s name. A deal was cut. The Asians would remove Benny if Vince set him up. In exchange, Vince would replace his boss, and then allow Sonny a large hunk of the local action, something Benny had refused to do.”

  “And you think they planned to off Vince?” Sally reinterpreted. “A double cross?”

  “Maybe,” I countered and edged closer to where I wanted to be. “And maybe not. As things turned out, Vince almost killed Vu. If it hadn’t been for us, he might’ve succeeded, even as high as he was. So if Vince was set up, it means someone was after him and Vu both—or at least didn’t care which one got whacked.”

  Sally turned away, ostensibly to face the view, but I thought in fact to avoid making eye contact. “So what?” she asked rhetorically.

  Her studied vagueness was encouraging.

  “C’mon, you’re one of four or five people at most who make things happen in this town.”

  She snapped back around to glare at me. “What the fuck’re you gettin’ at? I don’t have anything to do with the slopes, and I didn’t whack Vince. He was a loser.”

  I smiled guilelessly at her. “You and I know that. Somebody didn’t.”

  “The fuckin’ Chinese,” she tried again. “If they set Benny up, why not Vince, too?”

  I shook my head. “Using Vu as bait? Doesn’t make sense.”

  There was a prolonged pause as she stared out at her view. Finally, she let out a sigh and chucked the rest of her meal down the embankment, paper wrapper and all. We both watched it tumble and roll, disgorging its crimson contents as it went.

  What she said then exposed her confusion. “You’re sayin’ somebody put Vince up against the chinks, knowing you guys might take ’em both out?”

  “I’m saying Benny’s death created a vacuum that more than one person wanted to fill. Vince spent the entire night winding himself up and could barely see straight when he pulled that gun on Vu. We talked to the people who got high with him. They don’t think the party was Vince’s idea—they felt the glue and dope were supplied by someone else, and that Vince was as happy as they were to get it. You got any ideas about that?”

  She made a face and spat into the dirt between her tattered sneakers. “You could ask Alfie Brewster. He and Vince didn’t get along, and he sure doesn’t like what’s goin’ on.”