Caught Dead (15 page)

Chapter Twenty

Benny Vu struck me as a man so simple there was no way anyone might see him as a mystery. Which was why he intrigued me. Hank made a comment on the phone that got me thinking about the quiet, grieving widower. Actually he was questioning me, the way he often did, hurling back my random Buddhist-infused aphorisms, my loose translations, and my own brand of American-tinged Asian wisdom. “Remember,” he was talking about his own father, “what you always say. ‘Sometimes in the silence is the greatest noise.'”

His father had stopped talking to him. They'd been having a running battle after he quit the Chinese restaurant but also his sudden interest in a Vietnamese girl who happened to be the granddaughter of a North Vietnamese soldier. His father rarely liked Hank's girlfriends, mostly white girls. But there usually was something wrong with the Asian girls he brought home—mixed blood,
bui doi,
lowlife parents, too giggly, too skinny, too timid, and now, the ultimate horror, a Vietnamese-American from the Commie North. Uncle Ho's army. Viet Cong mon amour.

“Are you listening to me?” Hank spoke into the silence.

“I'm sorry. What you said made me thinking of Benny Vu.”

“My father?”

“No, the silence. The quiet man who doesn't talk. The unassuming grocery man, lost in the bags of Thai rice and stalks of lemongrass and mint.”

“Sounds like you're composing a haiku. But why Benny?”

“Because we never think about him, other than to express sympathy over his loss.”

“Maybe that's all he is, Rick.”

“I'm gonna check him out, Hank. By myself.”

***

The next afternoon I found Benny alone in the grocery. Of course, there were no customers, so Benny sat on a stool, reading a Vietnamese newspaper published in one of the colonies in California. Tommy wasn't working. Benny looked up, didn't look surprised, nodded a faint greeting, and shook my hand. The guest in his house. The stranger at the door. His thin smile was laced with the smallest hint of wariness.

I apologized for interrupting and asked if I could visit. Is it okay? Yes, he said.
Da
. But I knew that Vietnamese men and women would often agree, say yes when they meant no. I'd have to read him carefully.

“
Ban co thích uong gì khong
?” Did I want something to drink? he asked. He knew I was not a customer.

I accepted a can of soy milk. It tasted metallic to me, or how I imagine aluminum might taste on the tongue. He offered a cigarette, which I accepted. To do otherwise would be an insult.

I expressed my sympathy again, which was customary, and he nodded gratefully. Looking at him, I saw a humorless man with a tiny coconut head set on a skinny, bony frame. And the clothing he wore—like today's faded blue dress shirt and the baggy, rolled-up jeans over shoes cracked at the seams—looked hand-me-down.

“I saw Cindy at your home.” I told him something he probably already knew. “And I've seen Tommy, too.”

He made a thick, heavy sound and jerked his hand in the air. “American-born children.”

I joked. “Typical American kids, these days.”

“Look around you. This is the American civilization that everyone wants. Money and makeup and babies born in the street.”

Hank had told me that Benny Vu was the world's last moralist, and the most melancholic. Here was a man who compartmentalized the world into black and white and refused any gray areas. Looking at him, I realized that he could be unyielding, unforgiving. A man with a code.

“You know,” I countered, “America gives everyone a lot of choices.”

He looked into my face, searching for meaning. “Which can be a blessing. But to choose bad is not to choose well.”

“True,” I agreed, “but what's the truth?” Intro to Philosophy 101, I thought, grinning. A B-plus grade at Columbia College.

“If you don't know now, you never will.” Then he smiled that humorless smile. “But you didn't come here to discuss philosophy.”

“It's safer than a lot of topics.”

“And more interesting perhaps.”

“But there are no answers there.”

“And you're looking for answers to my Mary's murder.” He said the line so matter-of-factly, but the words hung in the air. I waited.

“And Molly's,” I added.

He nodded. But mentioning his wife's name seemed to have some effect on him, softening the corners. “Come.” He nodded behind him. “I will make good tea for us.” I thought he'd hang a “Closed” sign in front, but he didn't. We walked into a small back storeroom with a tiny stove and refrigerator, almost lost among boxes and boxes of canned and paper goods. “In the afternoon I drink a root tea I buy in Chinatown. It takes away worries and loss.” He pointed to a chair. “Sit, please, sir.”

Neither of us said a word as we waited for the water to boil. Meticulously he spooned dried herbs into a tea caddy, poured steaming water on them, and the two of us waited. The acrid smell of dried autumn chrysanthemum and old weathered wood permeated the small space, not pleasant or tempting. With the cups steeping before us, he finally nodded, and I picked mine up. The taste was amazingly soothing, a little tart, a hint of old dried flowers and the sweet mildew of an attic space. But in the hot, steaming back room, sweat on my brow, the liquid calmed me down, settled me, and, in fact, cooled me like a window fan.

“I sense you're a good man, Rick Van Lam.” He watched me closely. “This awful pursuit my family—Hank's mother—has set upon you. It's an honorable journey but maybe an empty one. Maybe the answer is some misguided Spanish boy in Hartford we'll never meet.” He didn't speak with any acrimony, just a low-key statement of fact. “I don't sense murderers in the aisles of my store or on the green lawns of Larry Torcelli.”

“It's something I have to do now.”

“As I said, a good man. Loyal to his people. To a country far away. But what do you find?”

“So far I seem to be collecting studies of the family, bits and pieces of lifetimes.”

“These are character sketches, not clues.”

“Exactly.”

“But let me tell you—that is the only way to do this. I don't understand American investigation. I can't watch the TV police shows because they are all microscopes and fingerprints and red flashing lights and…DNA.”

I laughed. “That works.”

“If you say so.” His tiny face was animated now. “But I think you are hard on yourself because you believe you are
not
listening to the white part of your soul, Rick Van Lam. The American self that is good and perhaps logical and fine. You are listening to the Asian part of your soul, the part that uses the mind to draw pictures of each person you meet. Snapshots in a book. Have more faith in the way you are doing things. If there is a story behind the faces, then you'll find it. Do you know why?”

I waited. “No.”

“Of course you do. You're being polite. It's because when you look into one of our faces you see yourself, and in the act of looking you understand your heart. All the parts of your heart that are black are the parts that let you see the evil in others. The less-than-good in people that you call evil.”

“I thought we weren't gonna talk about philosophy.” I sipped the tea. The afternoon seemed dreamy, suspended.

He almost smiled. “This is not philosophy. This is conversation over tea on a hot, hot afternoon.”

I was starting to like this man.

We sat back, sipped the tea, which seemed to put him into a trance. “You are too much in this country to remember the old Vietnamese saying.” Then he quoted: “
Khi than vang mat khong co la tri nuong tuong.
”

I had trouble translating. “I don't know—something like—When God is away, imagination can't come about.”

“Roughly.” He looked at me. “You have a difficult job, despite your talent. God has chosen to ignore the world. I have told no one how much my wife meant to me.” I stared at him, uncomfortable. “I love my boy and girl, though I don't understand them, but Mary was my life. Now there's this empty store and an empty home. The best part of me is gone.” But there was no sadness in his voice, not even bitterness. A plain statement of fact—there, out there, presented to me, a virtual stranger he somehow felt comfortable with.

“I'm sorry.”

He waved the comment away. “Of course. We had nothing but everything we needed.”

I drank the tea and felt like napping, my eyes lazy with the mixture of coolness and heat.

“Now I can grow old watching the mountain of disappointment in my own children.”

“They're all right.” I tried to say something, but my words sounded too American, even in my stilted Vietnamese. So I said in English, “They're all right.”

A weak smile. “A little right.”

I nodded.

“Tommy is weak, so unusual for a Vietnamese man. He lacks the spunk of a king.”

“How weak?”

He thought about it. “A couple weeks ago he's working here and Danny is on the phone. Tommy is saying he has to work, but then he tells me he'll be right back. He doesn't come back until closing.”

That surprised me. “Danny? I didn't think they were friends—spent time together.”

Benny looked at me. “They are not friends. They haven't been friends for years.”

“But you said he called…”

“I didn't say he wasn't around.”

“He comes around?”

“Now and then, running in with his fancy suit and his fancy car, bowing and scraping to me. All slicked over like an oiled road.”

“But if they're not friends…”

“Tommy tells me he can't stand Danny.”

“But…”

Benny threw his hands in the air, as though the contradiction was trivial. “Danny stops in to say hello now and then, to talk to Tommy, to me, to Cindy. It's like a rich person visiting a poor person—some charity. There's nothing friendly in their talk, not when I'm here listening. In English: ‘Hi, how are you? Nice to see you. How's the job? How's the car?' Strangers on a city bus.”

I had to digest this new information. I'd been lied to, it seemed. Danny, indeed, was more a presence in Tommy's life than I'd been led to believe.

“You don't like Danny?”

He didn't hesitate. “I'm indifferent to him. To
dislike
him is to, well, value him too highly. He's a violator of what's good in life because he's too hungry.”

“Hungry?”

“He is someone else's success story.”

“Larry?”

What was Benny talking about?

“Danny has no influence on my Tommy now. He once did. A bad influence. Trouble with the law. Some drugs. But that is over. Now he's just a reminder of how some people make it and some don't.”

“But you don't trust his success.”

“I don't really think about it.”

“Did Mary like him?”

“At first, yes. But that changed. She thought he was dangerous around the impressionable Tommy. But once he became a banker out of Harvard, well, he charmed her again. He wooed her, praised her cooking.”

“But still around.” I was talking to myself.

“Not around. Running in, running out. Months go by, and then the visit. We need to stop and honor him.”

“Are you bitter?”

“I told you—indifferent. Bitterness takes too much energy.”

But then I noticed cloudiness in his eyes, dullness. “What?”

“I was just thinking of his last visits to the store and once to the home.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I mean, he was the same, all that swagger. But I think he could no longer charm my wife. She got quiet when he showed up at the house that one time. Tommy was staying there because of the fire at his building. But she frowned at him.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No, just closed up. It was strange, though.”

“How so?

“She wouldn't leave the room when he came. Like she was guarding Tommy
from
him. I know it made Tommy angry, but Danny just chatted and flattered. But she stared at him. Hard.”

“Could he have offended her?”

“He was never around long enough. Quick visits, hello and out the door. Blowing the horn on the fancy car.” Benny stopped to prepare us a second cup of tea. I waited.

“He ever let Tommy drive his car?”

“Once, I think. That's all Tommy could talk about. But Danny said never again. Tommy came close to running over an old woman. Danny joked about it, but he never tossed the keys to Tommy again. If they went off for a spin, Danny drove.”

“They did go places?”

“Up the street to get food. For a slice of pizza or a hamburger.”

“But you didn't want him around?”

“Tommy doesn't have many friends. Danny has a flashy car and bucks for food.”

“When was the last time you saw Danny?”

“A while back. Later I heard Tommy on his phone, and he was not happy about something.”

“Why?”

“I couldn't catch the words but he called Danny an ass. Tommy calls everyone—including me—an ass, but this time he was sputtering, he was so mad.”

“Do you know what happened?”

Another surprised look. “Do you think he'd tell me? Tommy yells at everyone who gets in his way. Sooner or later Danny gets on his nerves.”

His eyes were closing so I knew it was time to leave. I thanked him for the tea and conversation, and we shook hands.

As he walked me out, back through the empty store, and ushered me onto the hot sidewalk, he shook my hand again. “You are important here,” he whispered. “
Gio thoi la choi troi
.” When the wind blows, it is God's broom.

I started to say something, but he stopped me. “You know, in the war, many dead soldiers and civilians were buried in unmarked graves or left rotting in the fields. Their bodies were untouched. In Vietnam we believe the ghost of these people will wander, lost and afraid, seeking proper burial, homage, respect. At night I think about Mary's murder. Her violent end. And I think her ghost is wandering now, somehow stunned, shattered, wanting retribution. There is no world without justice, you know. She—her ghost demands it.”