Caught Dead Read online

  Jimmy made me his only partner years back—“Don’t need no partner, so I don’t know why I’m doing this”—gave me office space, helped me get a Connecticut license, mentored me, and maneuvered me through the cumbersome ropes. He lent me the money to post the bond for my license—my right to investigate and gather info on criminal and noncriminal matters. His firm—our firm—does mostly insurance fraud. Hartford is the insurance capital of the world, of course, with Aetna, Travelers, Cigna, the Hartford, you name it—and where there’s insurance, there are people trying to rip somebody off. A lot of my work is fielding cases Jimmy can’t get to. That’s how I make my money. We don’t get into murder, Jimmy and I. We play it safe among the white-collar insurance execs.

  I took the elevator to the sixth floor. The Colt Building is a nineteenth-century derelict factory building, once owned by Colt Firearms. You know, the gun that tamed and maimed the Wild West. With its dilapidated façade, dreary and bleak, it houses public TV access shows, fundamentalist religious crusades, starving artists, karate or tai kwon do classes, left-wing political action groups, and fly-by-night business ventures. A world of spirited people living off nothing. A catacomb of cheap, partitioned rents.

  Gaddy Associates—everyone calls Jimmy by the nickname Gaddy except his friends—is a straight-arrow firm, no doubt about it. Yes, Jimmy’s a man of incredible bluster, but always principled. I swear I’ve never met a man so honest…and so infuriating at times. He’d fought in Vietnam and that’s why he had me around in the first place, why he discovered he could actually tolerate someone else around the office. So many Vietnam vets hold a lingering affection for the land of their early manhood. A shattering experience, one you couldn’t get away from, lodged in the bone marrow, deep as death. Jimmy saw me as part of that past—his past. His dangerous rite-of-passage days.

  “What the hell you doing here?” Jimmy greeted me. The room smelled of thick cigar smoke and old tuna sandwiches and stale breath.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked back.

  He clenched his fists. “Got a goddamn deadline on this Aetna fraud case. Fact is, I was making no progress until a few minutes ago. Think I got the answer.” And again, “Why are you here?”

  I told him about Mary’s murder, the funeral, Grandma’s request that I investigate—he scrunched up his face—and I even told him about my dinner the night before with Liz. His frown deepened.

  He’s old fashioned. When you get divorced, you don’t go out to dinner with the ex-wife, just the two of you. You just don’t, even though he adores Liz. Now Jimmy never married because—well, “Nam ruined me for a good woman,” something that made no sense to me. But he has a lot to say about marriage. And everything else.

  He’s a big pile of a man, unshaven half the time, always sweating even in winter, mopping a grainy forehead with a gray handkerchief, a man poured into extra-large sweat shirts that ride up a tremendous belly. When he gets drunk on his celebratory rye-and-ginger highballs, his thinning blond hair stands on end, and he announces that he is the Polish Prince. Last year he didn’t talk to me for three days when I told him I thought Bobby Vinton had that title. Didn’t he watch late-night TV music offers? The Best of Bobby Vinton, the Polish Prince. Like the Best of Jerry Vale. The Best of Vaughn Monroe. On some sleepless nights, I sometimes wondered: Who are these people?

  Jimmy doesn’t give a damn about most things that don’t matter, and a lot about things that do. We get along great—my good friend. I’d trust him with my life. I don’t know if it would ever come to that, but I would. I don’t say such things lightly.

  “Murder?” he barked. “And you took the case?”

  “It’s not a case. I’m just gonna talk to…”

  “I think you lost your mind. The money is in fraud, not murder. Murder is too messy.” He was getting ready to leave. “Turn off the air conditioner on the way out.”

  I invited him to dinner that night at Zeke’s Olde Tavern.

  “Maybe. You paying?”

  I nodded. I knew he’d be there.

  “I’ll close up in a bit,” I yelled after him. “Check the mail. Play with my computer.” That was his expression. When I became his associate, I computerized and streamlined his chaotic office, which he grudgingly accepted. He knew it was time, but he fought the idea. Nobody from Aetna or Travelers hires an investigator who keeps notes on slips of paper in his breast pocket. The man tucked important information in outdated Manhattan phone directories and then, forgetting, recycled them. He recorded crucial facts on the backs of gas station credit card slips.

  So now I could bring up files via Wi-Fi in a split second, information that used to cost him weeks of foot traffic, as well as favors traded with people in high and low places. “Holy shit” is what he usually says when I give him instantaneous access to personnel and personal files of people he’s investigating. Most of it is matter-of-fact online data available at the public library in Hartford.

  “Go play with your computer” is his way of letting me know whose office it really is.

  ***

  That night, after a dinner of steak and potatoes at Zeke’s, Jimmy and I lingered over coffee—me—and tepid beer—him. He didn’t want to return to the one-room efficiency he rented in the West End of Hartford, and he brightened when my landlady Gracie wandered in “for an early nightcap,” joining us at the table. I shredded a placemat while the two flirted with each other, danced around their mutual attraction. They’d been playing this game for a long time. Gracie’s in her late seventies, maybe early eighties, a tall woman, a string bean, her hair tied back into a chaotic bun, her face pale. She refuses to wear makeup but creates the illusion that she does. I can never quite figure it out: a flick of an eye, her tongue rolling over her lips, even an upward thrust of her head into a shaft of window light. She has high, pronounced cheekbones and an aging dancer’s spent body, all angle and wrinkle. She looks like she got lost, years back, on the way to the opera, what with her scarlet-lined Dracula cloaks and oriental scarves and whalebone hairpins. Sometimes she has the mouth of a street thug.

  Gracie often stops in at my apartment, lingering, gabbing, annoying, trying to convince me to get remarried as quickly as possible, to eat more, to go to church. Some of the time Gracie is flamboyant and wacky, but other times she’s rock-bottom rigid. She’d been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall a thousand years back, had entertained the troops with Bob Hope in Korea, done some minor acting in failed Broadway reviews, and then followed a wealthy businessman husband to Connecticut. When he died, she inherited the elegant, sparkling Victorian home. She lives on the first floor, rents out an apartment on the second to me and one on the third to an old guy. Gracie considers us her boys, smothers us, loves us, admonishes us, abuses us, tries to run our lives. Her mission is to steer us into lives she would never want for herself. And we often let her.

  Her smile reveals a showgirl’s faded teeth: chipped caps, murky as puddles.

  I ordered her another beer and she nodded her thanks. She always drinks from the bottle. Like a man, she says. After all, she entertained troops, in her words, “north of Seoul.” Sometimes she recalled it as “north of Panmunjam.” One time Jimmy, a little too drunk, said it was north of Jersey. She gave him a look that would have withered a lesser man.

  Finishing her beer, she stood to leave, convinced she’d left some burner on or some gas jet flickering in the basement or some water running somewhere. It was always the same. Jimmy watched her leave.

  “Christ, you two love playing this game,” I told him.

  “And what game is that?” Snippy. He sipped his beer.

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re damned right—never mind.”

  My cell phone rang. Liz was in the neighborhood. “But let me guess, Zeke’s?”

  “Right.”

  “The land that time forgot. The place where the bodies are buried.”


  “Only the dreams of mankind.”

  “Then you must be real comfortable there.”

  “Are you joining us?”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  “Jimmy and me.”

  “I love that man.” She waited a second. “I’m a couple streets away.”

  Jimmy was happy to see her, the two of them hugging like father and daughter. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek. She asked about Mary’s funeral, but was shaking her head.

  “So what I still don’t get, Rick—and this is a big what-I-don’t-get—is this: What does Hank’s family want you to do about this drive-by shooting? If the Hartford cops can’t locate any past shooters in those little urban bang-bang episodes, then what can you do? I mean, you’re not a homicide investigator. Especially, too, if Mary Vu’s killing was just wrong place, wrong time.”

  “I don’t know,” I agreed. “Grandma thinks I’m Superman.”

  Jimmy was nodding furiously. “Yeah, I can see if there was a motive for Mary’s killing, like someone knew she had hidden money in her home, broke in, surprised her. Or something to do with business, maybe. Like she was actually targeted. Then I’d say, it needs a look-at, especially since the Hartford cops have written it off.”

  “Do you know Detective Ardolino?”

  “By rep,” Jimmy answered. “Never met him. Heard he could be a hard-ass.”

  “He’s written off Mary’s murder already.” I tapped my fingers on the table. “Or so I’m guessing.”

  Liz was opening her purse, pulling out a sheaf of folded sheets. “Does anybody here wonder why I was circling the neighborhood?”

  “I thought you were stalking Rick,” Jimmy smirked.

  “Well, there is that. But no, sorry to report, I called to say look at this.” She handed over the sheets, more printouts. “I’ll cut to the chase. Mary was killed by a bullet from a Glock 19, right in the head. One shot. Dead on. The gun of choice of street gangs. But I think you may be curious to learn that a kid was also shot. A known dealer, picked up a couple of times near that square and for some reason released over and over by a myopic judge, checked himself into the Hartford ER around six the next morning. Until then nobody knew there was a second victim. Gunshot—a slug extracted from a baggy-clad shin. Kid scared he was gonna lose a leg. Turns out it’s the same gun. Big surprise. Kid said he was ‘walking by’ on his way to see his baby’s mama when a car he didn’t see drove by and shot him. Oh yes, he saw the ‘old lady’ hit, but he was too busy ducking into an alley.”

  “Shit,” Jimmy roared. “Sounds like maybe he was the target.”

  “Police were slow to release news on him to the press, questioning him, but to no avail. You’ll read about it in tomorrow’s Courant.”

  “Lots of priors?” From me.

  “Like a hundred. He claims he’s clean. No longer selling—has no beef with anybody.”

  “And the cops say?” I asked.

  “What do you think? Detective Ardolino is crowing like a rooster in a hen house. Proves his case. More gang-bang rivalry.”

  “But,” I insisted, “it doesn’t explain why Mary was there. And out of her car. If you find yourself in the wrong neighborhood, you gun it, find your way back home.”

  Liz spoke, “Maybe she got disoriented?”

  “Over what?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  Jimmy sighed, rubbed his belly, made gestures of leaving.

  “I’m curious,” I began. “Do we have specifics on the earlier shootings there? Besides the notorious one where the little girl died in her father’s lap.”

  Liz took back the sheaf of papers from me, found one in the middle. “Well, four deadly shootings in the past year alone, but there may have been more attempted murders, unreported. One kid was Julio Sanchez, another Marcus Lopez, a third Mario Lucia. All gang members. The Latin Kings. It’s their turf. And the sad little girl, member of no known gang. In the second one cops spotted a kid in a stolen Jeep, gave chase, lost him, but a cop knew him, a gangbanger from rival Los Solidos. Tracked him down an hour later at his sister’s, but he was clean. That is, the stolen gun in his pants was not the shooter, no residue on his hands.”

  “So?”

  “So police are convinced he’s the killer, and they suspect he did a quick gun exchange with a brother—everyone has more than one stolen gun these days—and then washed his hands in tomato juice. These kids are one step ahead. He knew they’d expect him to have a gun.”

  “Are they looking at him for this shooting?’

  “No reason to. Someone shot him six months back. In the head. Dead at eighteen. Right in front of the State Legislative Building.”

  Jimmy snickered. “A loss for civilization.”

  “That’s cruel,” I said.

  Jimmy got up to leave, mumbled good-bye, but Liz lingered, curling the edges of the printout absently. She looked up at me, smiled, and asked if I wanted some wine.

  We ordered a carafe, and I was glad she suggested it. A glass of chilled wine on a hot, hot night. “Good idea.” We touched glasses.

  “You know,” Liz leaned in, “there’s one thing that bothers me about the killing.”

  I tapped the sheet of paper in front of me. “I think I know what you’re gonna say.” She waited. “Mary was shot around eight o’clock, still early, lingering daylight, on a busy intersection, with all the mom-and-pop bodegas bustling with people buying their lottery tickets, malt liquor, and smokes. It’s a street that’s alive that time of night.”

  “Exactly,” Liz nodded. “Every other shooting happened late at night, early in the a.m. in fact, the streets were closed up. Only the dealers manning the corners while the suburbanites cruised in over Avon Mountain in their Land Rovers to buy some coke.”

  I agreed. “Even the little girl’s murder was at midnight, her parents coming home from somewhere, running in for milk. After eleven or so all the decent citizens are sheltered in their apartments. No one wanders out—at least not there. You’d think no one lived there. But not at eight o’clock. People flood the streets.”

  Liz sipped her wine, rolled her tongue over her lips. “Don’t you find that odd, a killing in a busy city square on a brutally hot night when people sit on stoops or hang out windows?”

  “We can’t be the only two that noticed that.”

  “Right. Ardolino is no fool, Rick.” Liz stared into my face. “But maybe it means that the drug-traffic turf wars are escalating…that this, this”—she checked the sheets for the wounded kid’s name—“this Jose Santiago was targeted, and it took him off guard.”

  “Whatever happened to after-midnight, deep-in-the-night sales?”

  Liz grinned. “Lord, I’ve driven down Washington Street, headed for a doctor’s appointment near Hartford Hospital at ten in the morning, and there are hookers in fake red-leather mini skirts and not much else, sashaying their rumps in the parking lot across from McDonald’s.”

  “I should make note of that.”

  We laughed. I drank more wine. She looked at her watch but made no effort to leave, yawning, but trying to hide it by smiling. Finally, hesitant, she said, “It’s getting late.” She stood up.

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  Before she got in, jiggling her keys, she paused. “This was fun, seeing you and Jimmy.” She hugged me and kissed me on the lips, lingering a little too long. I smelled perfume and wine on her, and I stood there as she drove away. I loved Liz—always would—but sometimes when Liz got lonely in that apartment of hers, years away from the life she remembered in New York, times when she had no romance in sight, she looked back at me. I was always there in that rearview mirror, the tarnished knight of all those New York nights.

  I walked home, feeling the wine now and sticky from the unrelenting wash of still, hot air that hugged the dog days of August. But
I was also afraid of the delicious scent of perfume that stayed with me, like soft humming in my ear.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning Hank plagued me to do a walk-through at the crime scene, ignoring my halfhearted protest and reminding me that his grandmother loved me, trusted me, expected some Buddhist comingling of spirits, even promised me home-cooked chicken soup on Sunday. And, well, I agreed. I picked him up in East Hartford in my repaired BMW. The third-floor tenant of Gracie’s house, a retired mechanic she’d dated a hundred years before, checked it out for twenty bucks, replacing a switch. I knew nothing of cars. I always assumed they’d keep running.

  We drove to Pho 501 on Burnside, had beef noodle soup for breakfast, the savory pho, the comfort soup of the Vietnamese, North and South, and everyone in between. Sitting in the crowded restaurant, I leafed through the Hartford Courant. The reporters who’d covered Mary’s funeral described it as a sad day, with a photo of the coffin carried into the church on page one, “Story on page 3” under it. It was already becoming back-burner news, but there was a reiterated statement from the police that the shooting was an accidental drive-by. The reporter mentioned the grazing of Jose Santiago in the leg, with the glib speculation that the drive-by shooter had been trying to kill that hapless young man, who was quoted as saying, “Hey, it gotta be a mistake. Me and that dead lady was in the wrong place, like everybody says.”

  “Like everybody says,” Hank echoed, spooning vermicelli noodles into a wide plastic dipping spoon, biting into a basil leaf.

  “I guess it’s official,” I summed up. “So why are we going to the scene of the crime, Mr. Nguyen?” I stressed my words so they were capitalized—The Scene of the Crime. I waited. Hank slurped his soup, made a disgusting digestive sound that suggested his utter satisfaction with the meal, and then smiled. “Grandma feels it in her ancient bones. The spirit of the legendary Truong sisters rising up against the Chinese.”

  I interrupted. “Makes sense to me.” I nudged him. “Hurry up. I got things to do today. There’s a file clerk in the bowels of the Aetna building who’s siphoning off billions of misdirected health benefits intended for the old lady from Dubuque.”