The Dark Root Read online

  They didn’t even make it to the bushes. As the first of them was about to vanish, Stennis magically appeared, planting his hand against the first one’s chest.

  I pointed a finger at Sharkey, the last one in line. “You stay. The rest can go.”

  The first three sheepishly hurried past the cheerful-looking Stennis, who’d stepped aside to let them by. Vince Sharkey was left staring sullenly at the ground.

  “I’ll give you two a little privacy,” Stennis said affably, and followed the others back to the railroad tracks.

  “You gonna bust me?” Sharkey demanded, folding his arms across his chest in an effort to inflate his size. He was more fat than muscular, but big nevertheless, with the prominent brow and single-line thick eyebrows that caricaturists routinely place on dim-witted bullies.

  Vince Sharkey was not the kind of kid I liked. The product of as poor a home as any of them, he’d shown no interest in taking any road other than the one he’d pursued from the time he could walk. A natural troublemaker, he’d forever made the people who’d tried to help him rue their efforts, and had made it a point to screw up every decent opportunity offered him. While by instinct no bleeding heart, I did understand why a good number of our younger customers had become the way they were, and despite our being on opposite sides of the law, I’d even developed a grudging benevolence for some of them, like Sally and the Beauprés. But Vince was not one of those, and I knew for a certainty that he’d end up either killed or doing hard time before too many more years went by. He had long ago worn out his welcome with me.

  I pointed to a box by his side. “Sit.”

  He hesitated, pondering whether to give me a hard time, but he, again unlike the lately departed Ben Travers, was no natural leader. He sat.

  “Tell me how Benny died.”

  “There’s nothin’ to tell. I didn’t know what happened to him till after. I hadn’t seen Benny for days.”

  “Was that the way it was supposed to go down?”

  He looked at me sharply, alarmed, which lent me confidence that I was on the right track. “What’s that mean?” he asked, about a full count too late for believability.

  I picked a time and date at random. “What were you doing around two o’clock the day before yesterday?”

  His face registered total bafflement. “How the hell do I know?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head, his confusion deepening. “What’s to remember?”

  “What were you doing at two o’clock the day Benny died?”

  “He didn’t die the day before yesterday.”

  “Answer the question.”

  Vince shook his head, regaining confidence. “I was with a girlfriend and another guy.”

  “Give me times.”

  He pretended to think back. “Maybe from ten to four that afternoon.”

  “And the day before yesterday?” I repeated.

  He gave me a glare and began to get up. I caught his shoulder and pushed him back. “What the fuck do I care about the day before yesterday?” he growled at me angrily.

  “You don’t know what you were doing at two in the afternoon? Who you were with? Where you were, even? Think hard.”

  “I was around, okay? I was on the street, maybe, or visiting friends.”

  I didn’t speak for a long time, but turned to look out over the slightly rippled surface of the broad river beside us, enjoying the cool breeze. “It’s funny how you know exactly what you were doing when Benny died almost a week ago, but have no idea about the day before yesterday. I guess that’s because you didn’t need an alibi.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Benny was pretty spooked the night before he died. What did you tell him the next morning to get him to stay in town?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but I interrupted him. “You say you hadn’t seen Benny for days. How many days, Vince? And be careful. Don’t make a mistake. The two of you were seen together.”

  He licked his lips.

  I cut him off again as he started to speak. “Whoa, Vince. You look like you’re getting nervous. Don’t mess this one up. This could be important.”

  “I don’t remember,” he shouted at me, again trying to stand up.

  I pushed him back a second time, toppling him from his seat. “Not good enough, Vince. The alibi’s got to stick all the way. Hanging out with your girlfriend for a few hours won’t cut it. Didn’t Sonny tell you that? Shit, yes. If we find out you and Benny were together too close to the time he died, you’re still in it up to your neck.”

  “What the fuck’re you talking about?” he screamed.

  I stepped forward and stood over him, staring down, gaining confidence from the fear in his eyes, knowing I was pinning him down. “I’m talking accessory to murder, Vince. Not actually being there doesn’t matter. You set Benny up. You swallowed Sonny’s line of bull, but Sonny fucked you over. He needed someone to hang this on in case things got hot, and who better than old Vince—the dumb number-two man?”

  He shook his head, incredulous. “You talked to him?”

  I crouched down, my face close to his. “Don’t you know how it works, you dumb bastard? What does he give a shit about a zero like you? He didn’t tell you what he was going to do to Benny, did he? And when Benny gave him the slip and had to be chased down, what was Sonny supposed to do? Cover his ass, that’s what. Pull in Plan B. Guess who Plan B is, Vince?”

  I pulled away suddenly, leaving him sprawled out on the ground, looking awkward and small. He gathered his legs under him and sat up, rubbing his head, trying to think.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Sonny told you to get hold of Benny before he split town, and tell him you had to talk—just the two of you, at the Rivière place. That’s what the alibi was for, right? Give you some cover for when Sonny met up with Ben. And you actually believed the alibi was to protect you from being tied to an illegal conversation? Boy, oh boy, Vince, Sonny must’ve thought you were a gift from heaven, you’re so stupid.”

  Vince sprang up from his crouch and threw himself at me. Anticipating it, I sidestepped, cupped the back of his neck with my hand as he went by, and gave him a helpful shove, letting his own momentum finish the job for me. He fell face-first into the shallow, muddy water by the bank.

  Unfortunately, the gymnastics played against me. The cold water cleared his head, and while he grappled back onto shore, spitting and cursing, he also emerged holding the one flaw to my approach. Looking up at me with his hair plastered to his face, he demanded, “Are you going to bust me?”

  But I, too, had a Plan B. I gave him a big smile. “Bust you? Vince, you’re a nobody—Sonny’s right on that one. Think of the paperwork, the time, the wasted money. Much easier to let Sonny finish chewing you to little pieces—that way I’ll have more on him when I bust him. You’re much more useful as bait.”

  I turned away then and quickly retraced my steps through the brush.

  Sol Stennis was standing guard by the tracks. “Have fun? I heard a splash.”

  I thought about the gauntlet I’d just thrown at Sharkey’s feet. “The first of several, I hope.”

  7

  GEOGRAPHICALLY, HARTFORD TOWNSHIP is a hard item to pin down. Of the five villages that form it, three—Hartford, White River Junction, and Wilder—are so seamlessly joined as to be the same entity, while Quechee and West Hartford, economically and physically removed, are like far-distant satellites. Adding to the confusion is West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a stone’s throw across the Connecticut River, whose high-pitched commercial bustling makes all the others look like suburbs.

  But even the village of West Leb, as it’s called, falls prey to competition. Its tax-free commercial advantage is in turn subverted by the most highly developed shopping strip within a forty-mile radius, stretched out along Route 12A about a half mile to the south.

  The Hartford Township–West Leb hub, therefore, suffers a bit from se
cond-class status. It’s not quite where the bargain buyers flock, and with high-class Hanover just to the north, home of Dartmouth College, it’s not where the elite shop for designer wear or hobnob over micro-brewery beer in expensive, tasteful, low-fat eateries.

  It is, on the other hand, a major crossroads, marking the juncture of two interstates and Vermont’s Route 4, which, according to Detective Heather Dahlin, was a distinctly mixed blessing.

  “We’re a transient stopover—a place to take a leak, grab a burger, sleep a few hours, and get back on the road. If you’re an illegal alien heading south or a flatlander going skiing, chances are you’ve stopped here. We’ve got more motels, hotels, and fast-food joints than anywhere between Burlington and Concord. For the type of Asians you’re talking about—the ones who go from place to place, work for peanuts, and live like hamsters, it’s a custom fit. We might not have a hundred Asians in town at any one time, but whenever we check them out, it’s always a new batch.”

  “They’re all illegal?” I asked, surprised at the high number.

  “Oh, no. Fewer than ten percent have no papers at all, and maybe ten to twenty percent more have counterfeit documents. But we don’t have the expertise to tell the real stuff from the fake. And by treating them all the same, moving them constantly from one place to another, their handlers make it even harder for us to separate the ones who should be here from the ones who shouldn’t.”

  “And most of them live there?” I asked, looking to where she was pointing. We were slowly driving by a large, neglected, empty-looking pile of a building on one of White River Junction’s least affluent streets—White River already being the poorest of the township’s five cousins.

  “We’ve counted forty at a time in that one, stacked like cordwood, sometimes ten mattresses to a room. We’ve basically got three types of Asians in this whole area—year-round residents who just happen to be Oriental, transients who live in places like that—illegal and other-wise—and the dirt bags that control ’em. The first group’s the majority, and they’re no more trouble than anyone else.”

  “What do you do about the others?”

  Dahlin shook her head. She was a tall, muscular, attractive woman, with short blond hair and a permanently determined expression. She was one of only three detectives on a force of twenty sworn officers, and I had no doubt she’d honed her personality meeting any and all opposition on its own ground.

  “Not much. We come here a lot less than we do to places with one-tenth the occupants, and that’s usually only because some outsider is raising Cain. They keep to themselves, take care of their own problems, and stay out of trouble. The interesting statistic is how rarely we are called. They’re so quiet it makes us suspicious.”

  She smiled and shook her head at the irony. “There’re other reasons, of course, but they’re all just as vague. Like, why it is that when most of them work in West Leb and Hanover, they sleep over here? It’s not necessarily cheaper, and it’s an inconvenient commute. All we’ve been able to figure is they’re taking advantage of the two jurisdictions. Work in one state, live in another, it keeps the cops from getting to know them too well—same reason they’re kept on the move. I can show you a couple of restaurants that have worn paths in the grass running from their back doors to the interstate.”

  She shifted in her seat restlessly. “But it’s all smoke and no fire. The Border Patrol and INS come down here once in a while, wander around, set up a roadblock on I-91, catch a few illegals. For those few days, the population drops. And as soon as the feds are gone, they’re all back. The seven Asian restaurants in the area do good business—like a ton of other people around here—but retail turnover is hot and heavy, especially in food. Rents go up, competition is fierce, and when the economy wobbles, even the best go under… Except for those seven. They just keep plugging away, paying all their bills in cash. And it’s not because they’re great advertisers or community boosters. They do zero along those lines. It all sounds like money laundering at the very least, but we’ve never found a shred of evidence. We can’t even say all the owners are in cahoots with the crooks, ’cause we’re pretty sure most of them are as coerced as the illegals. They either have to play along, or they’re shit out of luck. Basically, you could call us racist paranoids about all this stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to prove you wrong.”

  I nudged her toward the topic at hand. “You must’ve had some problems, though. You filed a report on Michael Vu with Dan Flynn. What was that about?”

  She pulled over into a side street and killed the engine in the shade of a large maple tree. A pleasant, flower-scented breeze drifted in through the open window.

  “That creep,” she murmured and turned to face me, her gray eyes narrow with anger. “He’s in the third group—the bloodsuckers that keep the others in place. I look at these people, they come from the far side of the world, pledging thirty to forty thousand dollars to some shit to get them over here, and they end up like gerbils in a box, working for years so they can pay off their debts. The FBI says alien smuggling is the most profitable of all organized Asian crime activities. I can believe it.”

  She paused, took a breath, and then resumed. “We had a case a few years back. A small group was using a motel room as a warehouse for stolen goods—mostly clothing, bundles of it, stacked to the ceiling. They were going around to all the big retail outlets and robbing them blind. We nailed the actual thieves—never got the bosses—and found out they came from Fukien Province in China. They were illegals who hadn’t been able to keep up on their debt payments to the smugglers by doing legitimate work, because every time they saved enough to make a deposit, they were robbed, sometimes six times in a row. Finally, the smugglers—the same ones who were ripping them off, of course—gave them a choice between being killed or tortured—or having their families take the rap back home—and becoming thieves. They were given a quota. The men we talked to had been doing this for years, and still they weren’t even close to settling their debt.

  “The kicker is we only talked to the men, because the women we caught with them were bailed out as soon as the paperwork cleared—never to be seen again. We found out it was so they could work as prostitutes in the city until their tab was settled. A vice cop I know in New York told me that. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘they keep ’em locked up.’ One girl he knew had to turn four hundred tricks before they let her go.” She paused and looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. “The saddest thing is that when I asked the men we caught how they felt about it all, they had no anger for the people who’d abused them. They were just humiliated at having been caught and probably getting deported. It was the shame they’d brought on their families that really got to them.”

  “Are all the transients you see on their way south?” I asked after a few moments.

  “It’s a mix. The same New York cop told me they have employment agencies to place illegals and legals both, all over the country, so we probably get some of those. My guess is that most of them are in a pipeline, though. Not, as I said before, that we have proof of any of that.

  “The handlers don’t add up to much in numbers,” she continued. “No more than twelve at most—and while they come and go, too, they tend to be more stable, which gives us a chance to get to know them. That doesn’t mean they ever get busted, of course. We know they’re crooked only because they act that way—they shepherd what I call the worker bees, they come and go from the restaurants without paying their tabs, they drive around in expensive cars, and they basically look like enforcer types.

  “Michael Vu was one of them, although he didn’t run with the others—he was flashier and a lot more arrogant, which I guess is why he drew my attention. I nailed him twice coming out of restaurants with a red envelope full of cash—red is a good-luck symbol, like a neon sign saying ‘extortion’—but the owners wouldn’t ’fess up. Everything was all smiles and politeness, and Vu went on his way both times, with the money. That’s why I filed his name with Dan—it
was the only way I could get even… Pathetic.”

  “If he didn’t run with the others,” I asked, “what was he then? An independent? Part of a different gang?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, giving herself time to reflect. I became aware of a bird high above us in the tree, singing for all it was worth, lending an incongruously cheerful note to our conversation.

  “First off,” she said finally, “I don’t think there are any independents among the crooks—not truly. Everybody’s connected—through race, through religion, family, geographical origin, you name it. You kick one hood over here, and everybody knows it from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The confusion comes because various groups freelance a lot. I hear the Vietnamese are bad that way, but they also contract out to the tongs, or to each other, or to anyone else who needs muscle, especially when cash is low. Makes it hard to pin them down, not knowing who and when, or even if, they’re tied to somebody.

  “Michael Vu came out of nowhere, and until you brought him up, he’d disappeared into nowhere, but I still think somebody ran him, and I’d bet that somebody ran the guy who ran him, too. I definitely got the sense Vu called a lot of his own shots—like when he extorted those restaurants. That was pure freelance stuff. But I felt he wasn’t his own boss either—that he kept within some limits that’d been set for him.”

  “Any idea why he left?”

  “Nothing I could prove. Corporate shuffling, maybe. He was only here a few months, but we’d see him in phone booths and at the post office sometimes, and we followed him to a meet with some people in a motel room once—we never could get an angle on who they were. They used phony names, paid in cash, and drove a rental car. But he sure wasn’t tied to the local boys. They hung out together some, but I always sensed some hostility. We even heard tell of a shoving match between him and one of the head guys here, not long before he left.”