Caught Dead Read online

  “How do you know all that?” I spoke to his back.

  He turned. “Witness.”

  “In this neighborhood?”

  He grinned. “I’m very charming. People tell me their life stories.” He nodded at Hank. “Sorry for your loss, son.” But he looked away as he spoke, glancing over Hank’s shoulder, eyes hooded, checking out the street, scanning the walkers and loiterers, a couple teenaged hip-hop kids in baggy jeans sagging around their ankles. Eyes vacant, they looked straight ahead. I followed the detective’s eyes. This was an old pro, I realized, someone who grasped a message in the flick of an eyelid, the sly twisting of a mouth corner, the turning of a lip. “I’m Detective Tony Ardolino.” He walked closer. We shook hands.

  He agreed to talk—“for a minute”—in a bodega-and-café across the street. “Could use a cup of coffee. Christ.” He strode across the street with the cockiness of someone who knew no car would dare smash into him. Hank and I followed. Inside the small café, a place with three lopsided tables for coffee drinkers and a light fixture that hummed loudly, we sat by the front window. “The fact of the matter,” he summed up, sipping iced coffee and twitching for a cigarette he couldn’t have, “is that Mrs. Vu was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He wiped his sweaty brow. “Fucking heat.” He looked up at an air conditioner that seemed to be dying.

  “But why was she there?” I wondered.

  “We guess—that is, I guess—she was headed for Little Saigon where her husband got this grocery, and got confused—got lost or something.”

  Hank protested. “But she’s done it many times before.”

  I added, “And Little Saigon is in the West End, not near here.”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? People get lost.”

  “But,” I explained, “she would have had to have made a couple of wrong turns.”

  “It happens.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me,” Hank said.

  “Hey, she just got lost. As I say, it happens. The wrong neighborhood. You know, they’ve closed off some streets near the highway—detours. Construction. Maybe she couldn’t read English.”

  Hank got angry. “She reads English just fine.”

  Ardolino narrowed his eyes. “Hey, I’m just talking. It’s getting a little dark. Like eight o’clock. It’s goddamned boiling. She’s low on gas. She gets lost. We’ve had four drive-by murders here in the last year. Four—count ’em. All drug-related shit. One just a month or so ago. Remember the little girl that got shot?”

  It came back to me: the horrific drive-by in Goodwin Square that got national attention. A father pulls up before a bodega around midnight, his wife runs in for milk, his three-year-old daughter crawls into his lap, half asleep. A gang car passes, the driver thinks he spots an enemy, opens fire, and the girl is shot in the head. Big news on CNN and Fox. Welcome to Hartford.

  “You ever get the killer?”

  “What do you think?”

  “And Mary Vu’s the fifth?” I asked.

  “A real sad case, this one.” He sighed. “For me, at least.”

  “Why?”

  “Hey, she was a simple woman caught in the cross fire among assholes. The punk kids selling drugs go their merry way.”

  “So the odds of catching her killer are what—minimal?”

  “At best.” He grinned. “Surprised?”

  “So where’s this going?” Hank asked.

  “Well, we’ll do the routine. Round up the usual suspects, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “So that’s the conclusion you’re making?” I asked. “And the matter is dead?”

  Detective Ardolino locked eyes with me. “What are you saying, PI Lam? Like she was murdered on purpose?”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, that does seem farfetched.”

  He chuckled. “Like from out of space.”

  “Are you gonna talk to the Vietnamese community of Hartford?” I asked.

  “Sure. I talk to everyone. My job. I am curious how she ended up here, but we may never get an answer to that.”

  “They can be a little nervous around cops,” Hank said. “Some don’t speak English well.”

  “We’ll see.” Ardolino was getting ready to leave.

  I slipped the detective my card. “If you need me to be, well, a liaison, I’ll be glad to help.”

  The cop slid the card back to me. “I don’t share my work with amateurs.”

  I started to mention that I was once a New York cop, now a licensed PI in Connecticut, but I stopped. The look on Detective Ardolino’s face was telling—closed in, tight, the eyes cloudy. He looked at his watch. Hank started to say something, but I touched his wrist. I stood up and Hank, clearly angry, did too.

  I pushed the card back across the table. “Don’t close off all your options, Detective.”

  Hank and I left.

  “Asshole,” Hank said, once outside.

  “We’ll see.”

  ***

  It was almost midnight when I dropped Hank off at his home, and he rushed out of the car, already late for his job. He was spending the summer vacation doing kitchen prep overnight and some early evenings at a Chinese take-out in Glastonbury, a job his dad secured for him in repayment of some cloudy family obligation. Hank hated it—he had wanted to be an intern with a local police force. Or, in fact, to do nothing but tag along after me as I did routine insurance fraud investigations that were the bulk of my daily workload. But his severe father was adamant. Hank worked for meager wages paid under the table and put up with the mercurial spurts of anger and irrational demands of the entire Fugian family that ran the restaurant.

  “They claim chopping bok choi is an art form,” he complained to me. Mornings, he told me, he went swimming or played tennis. “There has to be some summer for me.” So now he waved good-bye to me, yelling back that he’d check back with me in the morning. “I’ll text you.”

  “About what?” I yelled back.

  “What you’ve learned.”

  “I’m not on this case, you know.”

  “Oh, but you will be. You love Grandma.”

  “So?’

  “Think about it.”

  Chapter Two

  The next morning I called the Farmington Valley Police District and got transferred to Liz’s office.

  “Liz Sanburn here.”

  I smiled. I loved the way she answered her phone—a rich whisky voice, throaty, a sensual greeting that always struck me as incongruous in a police station, especially coming from the on-staff criminal psychologist.

  “Oh, it’s you.” She laughed. “What’s got you out of bed before noon?” For a second she turned away from the receiver, talking to someone nearby. “Sorry.” She came back on the phone. “Madness takes no holiday here.”

  “Meet me for drinks at the Corner House?” I asked. “Around seven this evening.”

  “Are you buying me dinner?”

  “Will you be hungry?”

  “I am if you’re paying.” She sighed. “What do you want now?”

  “Information.”

  “Have you heard of 411?”

  “Yeah, but I have more of a history with you.”

  “Ancient history.” A pause. “You know, we are divorced. I had the papers laminated and tacked to my dart board.”

  “But you’ve always had bad aim.”

  “What I had,” she chuckled, “was poor judgment.”

  “Ah, terms of endearment.”

  It didn’t matter that she was my ex. Liz was a part of my old life in New York City, my student days at Columbia University, and my failed life as a city cop. And now, strangely, my days in Connecticut.

  We’d been married right after Columbia College, yet by the time I’d joined the NYPD, our marriage was crumbling. Three years later, when I left the force an
d headed to Connecticut, it was over. The divorce was my idea, and she agreed because we couldn’t live together. But love somehow stayed in place—it was as if we always had to know where the other one was. Because of that, I figured, she followed me to Connecticut. She said she was drowning in Manhattan—alone. The skirmishes and spats, the late-night telephone calls, the silences, the shared confidences, the volcanic angers—all finally resulted in a peaceful coexistence. Sort of. We were, well—friendly. We had dinners together. We spent too many hours together. We joked dangerously with each other. All the wounds stayed open.

  I heard someone asking her something. She covered the mouth of the receiver. “Liz, you’re busy,” I said when she got back on.

  She sounded harried. “It’s okay. Really.”

  Quickly I summarized the drive-by at Goodwin Square, Mary’s murder, Ardolino’s reluctance to look beyond the obvious conclusion. I could hear Liz scratching something on a pad. “I’m curious about Ardolino.”

  “Poor Hank,” she said. “You know how I adore that boy.”

  “Seven o’clock.”

  “I already said yes.”

  ***

  For most of the afternoon I played computer Scrabble, paid some bills, organized an investigation I was working on for the Hartford Insurance Group, and then got restless. I switched on the air conditioner, but my rooms on the second floor of the creaky old Victorian were still stifling. I lounged in running shorts, considered going down the street to Farmington College for a swim, changed my mind, and tried to straighten up the place. Invariably I kept circling back to Mary Vu’s murder, my thoughts centering on my role in this hapless event—that is, Grandma’s utter faith in me. But…to do what? Rick Van Lam, the miracle worker? A murder that was impossible to imagine.

  Hank texted me, then phoned, pushing me, and I told him I’d make calls on people, but I didn’t want to pester family members yet. “I’ll wait a day. Let them grieve.”

  He wasn’t happy with that. When I hung up, I washed the kitchen counter. Bored, restless. Then it hit me—I didn’t want to get involved. My connection to the Vietnamese community was tenuous at the best of times.

  So I vacuumed my carpets.

  My apartment is on the second floor of a wonderful painted Victorian lady on Cedar Lane, a quiet street, maple-shaded and elegant, that runs off Main, steps away from Miss Porter’s School. With its gingerbread moldings and rococo turns and surprising angles and widow’s peaks, with its floor-to-ceiling bay windows and rippled glass panes, the house is a throwback to days when families were gigantic, stayed at home, and huddled by blazing fireplaces in winter. Gracie, the landlady, had painted the house a shrill canary yellow, which compelled some unhappy souls to malign it as the cheap blonde on the corner. I liked that.

  My apartment is a complicated two-bedroom, with deep, walk-in closets, but what I really like are the window seats in the two bedrooms, both with faded burgundy crushed velvet from decades back, both overlooking a backyard of overgrown oaks and sunshine-hungry maples. There’s also a lush garden with wild honeysuckle vines covering a white picket fence. I love my apartment because of its sudden surprises: cobweb-like nooks and unnecessary crannies, quick turns into meaningless alcoves where octagonal stained glass catches the morning sun or the late afternoon twilight. High vaulted ceilings, the one in the kitchen covered with tin plating, many times painted but still making the room echoey. Ornate carved oak molding wherever you look. Floor-to-ceiling living room bookcases with milky leaded-glass doors. Early on, I filled the shelves with old leather-bound law books I bought for a few bucks at a garage sale, alongside rows of gilt-edged family-parlor volumes of Tennyson and Thackeray I picked up at a church rummage sale.

  Yet the place has my own Rick Van Lam touches, such as they are, because the apartment certainly needs no help from anyone to make it charming. I added old couches and deep, worn leather chairs, spreading a frayed oriental on the dark oak floor. I wanted it roomy but homey, a place I could fall into at the end of a day. Hank, when he first visited, squinted and called it the backroom of the Salvation Army. That was the perfect comment.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon moving the furniture around, then shuffling it back to where it was originally. I worked up a sweat.

  Later I strolled down the street past Miss Porter’s, where girls in summer dresses were headed to some dressy function, their high laughter sailing across the sidewalk. Usually I saw them in shorts, talking into cell phones. I stopped at Farmington College, checked my mailbox, and retrieved essays from my summer session Wednesday night Criminal Justice class.

  I dressed for dinner with Liz, donning iron-pressed khaki slacks, a pinstriped tan shirt with an art-deco design tie, and a tan summer sports coat, finished off with tasseled oxblood loafers. In the hall mirror I saw a long dark face, thick and sleek black hair inherited from my mother, and the sharp jawline—chiseled as a fashion model’s—I got from my American father. And his blue eyes. I’m decent looking, I know. That isn’t just vanity. Women like me. I tell myself it’s the slanted lazy eyes that widen to reveal deep baby blue irises. People don’t expect such eyes from an Asian.

  We met in the parking lot of the restaurant. She was waiting when I pulled my ten-year-old BMW into the lot, positioning it next to her creamy beige Lexus, parking it just a little too close. Psychologists love worrying about territory. She was smiling. Liz is a snob about cars. My treasured black BMW, still a looker, keeps breaking down, and she chides me about it.

  I kissed her on the cheek. She was wearing lilac, I noticed, a scent she knew I didn’t care for. It reminded me of family funerals and old grief. Inside, I watched as she walked ahead of me—a white cotton summer dress, stark against her tanned skin, a string of pearls, and very high heels that I’d seen before. They reminded me of lethal weapons. They probably were. Liz once told me heels on women were male-mandated torture. She wore them only on special occasions, she’d said.

  “Like what?” I’d asked.

  “First dates, last dates, funerals. Sometimes”—a wink of the eye—“the last two are one and the same.”

  So now I had to say something. “Heels?”

  “It’s the place, not the company.” She loved the eighteenth-century ambiance of the Corner House, which is why I chose it: hand-hewn stained beams, warped wide-board floors, fieldstone fireplace, pewter wall sconces, and candlelight illuminating the stylized oil paintings of severe-looking New England patriarchs on the walls. A place for Yankee pot roast and dumplings, for apple butter and molasses-baked beans. Spiffy customers in suits that held fat wallets. A corporate expense account haven for the Farmington tax attorneys and their Arts League wives. All the women wore pearls. All the men talked of golf and handicaps.

  Sipping her dry martini while I worked a scotch-and-tonic, Liz got serious, rifling through her handbag for papers. Though she protested my occasional use of her local police connections—and her easy access to inaccessible records, something I lacked—she once told me, in an unexpected burst of familiarity, that she enjoyed “helping” me. Her job, though stimulating at times, had become routine. “Levels of aberrant behavior are surprisingly limited.”

  Now, tapping the sheets she placed on the table, she shrugged. “Nothing much, Rick. The Hartford Courant largely had it right this morning. Supposedly Mary Le Vu was in the wrong place, et cetera, et cetera. The reporter simply mimicked the police report, which I got a copy of. My limited connections at the Hartford PD—my counterpart and her captain lover—say the same thing. The death of an innocent Asian lady did give them some pause, I hear. But they’re swamped. Too many murders happening in that happy city. Too much gangbanger violence. Too many drugs. Especially in Goodwin Square. They just want to close this one out—make it go away.”

  “Sounds like they’re blaming the victim, Mary Vu.”

  “Sort of,” Liz agreed. “She shouldn’t have been there.”
>
  “And if the story goes on too long, they don’t look too good, do they?”

  “Based on track records for that neighborhood, they’re not gonna find the shooter, that’s for sure, unless they lean on a rival gangbanger. But nobody snitches to the police. And so we can’t have a middle-class, middle-aged respectable housewife on the first page of the Courant for a week. People stay out of Hartford as it is. Make it go away. Chalk it up to: oops! End of story.”

  “And Ardolino?”

  She smiled. “I knew you’d get to that work of art. He actually mentioned you to someone—showed them your card. Doesn’t like interference but can’t leave a question unanswered. Following up on you. Very thorough. Nice touch, Rick.”

  “He wants me out of the picture.”

  “Think about it—he doesn’t want the Asian angle to get any bigger. To begin with, Hartford doesn’t understand Asians, especially the cops. You know how inscrutable you people are. Someone joked that the mayor just learned about Little Saigon, like it’s a brand new geography. But the Vietnamese don’t vote. So who cares? And Ardolino, I hear, is a loner who doesn’t even have a buddy on the force. He’s two years from retirement to Miami, he’s got acid reflux big time, and there’s a rumor that he has a silver-dollar-sized mole on his left buttock.”

  “All valuable info, Liz, but…”

  “But the talk is that he’s a real good cop most of the time, pretty thorough, but of late he’s getting a little lazy. He can surprise with excellent, on-top-of-it work some days. Some days they’re surprised he even shows up.”

  “Maybe he’ll surprise us.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “Drinker?”

  “What detective isn’t?” Liz leaned in. “You want my advice?”

  “Of course.”

  “Stay clear of him. If you’ve got to, work around him. Quietly. I gather that’s your intention. You’re in this, thanks to Hank and Grandma.”

  I held up my hand. “No, I’m not. I’m just asking a few questions…”