The Heaven Stone Page 6

  I wished I had an answer for her. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You find out?”

  What did you say to that except that you would do your best?

  * * *

  I brought a sandwich back to the office. Lieutenant Rosenheck of the Houston PD had returned my call. I bounced another one his way and missed. We were on the court at least, only playing different matches. I hauled over the typing table, snapped the dustcover off the Royal, rolled paper into it, and began to log the day’s events.

  I use the notes to undergird a better-than-fair memory, and for the detailed reports I provide clients upon completion of an investigation. Sometimes, as now, the notes reminded me of something so obvious I forgot it now and again. Reality is relative. It’s the elephant and the blind men. What you tried to do was come at a problem from as many ways as made sense, and even a few that didn’t. Through the gradual buildup of detail, the superimposing of layers, you got an approximation of reality. That was just beginning to happen for me with Bhuntan Tran.

  I had the testimony of Ada Chan Stewart, of Claire Azar and hubby Joe, of Perry at the laundry, of Cassie Samms, Norm Turcotte and his assistant, Lois, and Mai Lim. Each view was doubtless distorted to some degree; and I’d handicap Joe Azar and Turcotte a few points for general sourness. The result was an emerging portrait of Tran. Truth? Objective reality? No, but more than I’d had yesterday. Like a print in the developing tank, something was starting to take form. I put my notes into a file folder.

  When I finished my sandwich and coffee, I dragged out into the light something that had been crouching in a corner of my mind all day. With it, my skull gave a last throb, and then the pain was gone. There would be other pain to come, but it would locate itself elsewhere. Given time and luck, that ache might fade too. I went down the hall to attorney Fred Meecham’s office. I told him what I wanted. He asked just once if I was sure I shouldn’t play hardball. I said I was sure, and he got a few points of detail and said he’d have paper ready for signature in a day or two. When I took out my wallet he scowled.

  As I stepped back through my waiting room, the phone was ringing.

  “Howdy, Rasmussen?” said a voice that was familiar.

  “Speaking.”

  “Nate Rosenheck here.”

  It was familiar from my tape machine. “Thanks for getting back,” I said.

  “What can I do you for, partner?” He had a deep Texas drawl that made me feel like a caller on a radio advice show: Y’see, Calvin, I’ve got this mail-order pickle business, and …

  I said, “I got your name from a news account of some killings you had in late May. I wanted to ask a few questions.”

  “You work with…” I heard paper rustle, “Sergeant St. Onge.” He gave it a hard g and an ee sound at the end, but I let it go, since they weren’t likely ever to meet.

  “Formerly. I’m private now.” I explained the current arrangement, which he didn’t seem to have any problem with. He wasn’t one of these small-bore papercrats who get so hung up on jurisdictions they’d rather see the bad guys walk than cut someone else a piece of case.

  “What are y’all looking for?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.” I briefed him on the Tran killing. “No motive or suspects yet.”

  He grunted. “We haven’t found anything for our two either. You have any gangs operating up your way?”

  “There’s an occasional something running between here and Providence. Car theft is big, home invasions. You think a gang’s involved?”

  “Nah. They’re mostly punks, too stupid to know that being tough’s got nothing to do with violence. The victims here were older than that.” Of the two in Houston, he said, one had been shot with a handgun at close range, the other with a rifle. He knew about the killings in California and Seattle.

  Something got me thinking, and I reached over to my bookcase while he talked.

  “Funny you called, Rasmussen. Few days back I telexed the PDs in those other cases to request police and ballistics reports. I ought to be hearing soon.”

  “So you wonder if there might be a bigger picture?”

  “The thought occurs.”

  I had the Rand McNally atlas open on my desk, my finger touring California. “Drugs involved in any of the others?”

  “Inconsistent. Some coke in a few, and now yours. Be honest with you, I don’t see a strong pattern. Down here we spend a half-zillion dollars to have a symphony orchestra and an art museum, and probably half again as much for the joys of guns and drugs. What can I tell you?”

  “We’re a fun-loving society.”

  “Yup.”

  “So you think I’m spitting in the wind?”

  “Hey, if you can shut a few files by coming up with a pattern that makes sense, go for it. If it don’t fit, let’s try another tune.”

  I let the mixed metaphor go and played my long card. “Does the name Souheang Khoy jingle any bells?” I gave the name the sound Mai Lim had and spelled it.

  “Y’all saying it should?”

  “He’s an acquaintance or a relative of the man who got gunned here,” I said. “His name came up in a mortgage application file because he gave Tran five thousand dollars a few years ago to buy a house. He’s from San Jose, which isn’t too too far from San Francisco or Stockton. Big deal, huh?”

  “I got the name down. Won’t hurt to check. Anything else?”

  “I wish there were.”

  Either he’d just thought of it, or he’d taken his time getting there. “Did y’all notice anything more about the gunshots?”

  “Like?”

  “Don’t know. Look, would you ask St. Onge to get me a copy of his report, including the death certificate?”

  It had been the latter. He’d guessed I hadn’t eyeballed the report. “I’ll ask him.”

  “I’d be obliged. Maybe we’ll be in touch.”

  I put the atlas back on the shelf with my collection of phone directories, road maps and take-out menus. I got an idea. But first I placed a call to the Immigration and Naturalization Service number in Boston. A recorded voice told me that practically anything I’d ever want to know about INS was contained in a series of taped messages, all I needed to do was signal by punching in three-digit codes whenever I wanted to hop off, and then I was gone, hooked into a tape loop that promised to go on and on. It was probably an improvement over the old days when government phones would ring forever; but even getting through was no guarantee of anything. Conversations with the government could turn into Abbott and Costello routines. I let the loop ride for a few minutes. Not finding anyplace I wanted to visit, I cradled the phone.

  I brought the Royal back for round two. I’d go after them in cold print.

  A quick klackety-klack, listing the names of the Cambodian victims, requesting information that might connect them, thank you very much, yours, Citizen Rasmussen. With luck I’d hear by Labor Day. I mailed the letter across the street, then shagged my car.

  9

  ONE PLACE WHERE you could always find parking space was in front of the city library. I used the card catalog, then the non-fiction stacks, where I unshelved several books that appeared to be personal recollections of life in Cambodia during its fall. One was called To Destroy You Is No Loss, from a snappy little saying of the Khmer Rouge which went, “To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss.” I settled at a long table with my pad and pencil. For a while I scribbled notes, then I got pulled in and just read. When I remembered where I was, it was 5:40. I signed out the book, thanked the librarian for her hospitality, and went outside to find my meter overrun. A ticket smiled at me from under the wiper. I could put it on the tab as an expense, I supposed, but it was my own stupidity, so I’d eat it. Teach a man to read …

  I drove out Lawrence to the six hundred block, where the Department of Social Services branch office sat, a two-story beige clapboard building with an outside staircase, reminiscent of an Army barracks. It was five minutes before metered
parking lapsed for the day, but I plugged a coin in anyway. Two bits against a sawbuck made sense. As I walked to the building, a short, trim man of middle years was locking the front door. He was wearing a green Izod shirt and chinos with a page-call clipped to his belt. He had freckled arms and neatly brushed sandy-gray hair.

  “Hi, has Ada Stewart gone for the day?” I asked him.

  He sized me up through photobrown glasses with gold frames. “Friend?”

  “Friendly. We’re working on something together.”

  He grinned and unlocked the door again. “Ada’s back yonder, doing paperwork.”

  “Still?”

  “That’s one thing about this job just won’t quit—and ever’one wants their cc yesterday. I’m Walt Rittle, by the way. One of the old burnouts Ada’s stuck with.” He thrust a hand at me and I took it and introduced myself.

  “Jeezum, it’s a high-wire act, this job,” he went on. “But I figure it’s the peoplework, the contact with the client that means something at the end of the day. The paper gets done when it gets done.” He had the amiable, indefinably Southern accent that people acquire when they have put in years bouncing around for the government. I had heard a lot of it in the Army. “Well, I’m off to one more client—family case we can get together only in the evening when the old man’s home. You take care.”

  The ground floor of DSS was a large bullpen with lots of desks and lots of paper on the desks. No one was sitting at any of them. At the rear was a copy machine and a row of flimsy-looking cubicles. Ada Stewart was in the second one back, standing over a computer screen, a little V of perplexity crinkling her forehead. She was wearing a denim skirt with a halter top over a pink leotard. She didn’t look up.

  “Walter, I thought you left.”

  “He did.”

  She glanced up in surprise. “Oh, Mr. Rasmussen.” She straightened. “Come in.” She gestured me into the cramped little work space, where files were stacked alongside heaps of printout.

  “You’re going to give government employees a bad name. Aren’t you supposed to be smoke at four thirty-one?”

  “Walter ruins that around here. He’s the most energetic social worker I’ve ever known.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  She flushed slightly and smiled. “I’m glad you came by. I’m dying to hear what you’ve found out. Please sit.”

  She moved some papers, and I straddled a chair as she took her own seat. I told her how she’d spent her money the past two days.

  “You’ve covered a lot of ground,” she said when I’d finished.

  I lifted a shoulder. “What’s it amount to? For all his low profile, Tran seems to have left his mark. He stirred up a lot of admiration, loyalty, hatred, jealousy, even love.”

  “He was a remarkable person.”

  “I’m a little sorry I didn’t know him.”

  “So you do believe me about the drugs?”

  “Fingerprints notwithstanding? I’m inclined to,” I said. “Though where’s the proof? I don’t think you’ll really find any.”

  “Short of his killer being found?”

  I granted the possibility.

  “I’d like to keep you working on it,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t feel right taking your money.”

  Her eyes were penetrating, intelligent, and … shy? Oh, hell, inscrutable. Her face was less round and flat than Chinese, less sharp than Caucasian; her hair dark. She was a greatest-hits album.

  “Do you know who my family are?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Sergeant St. Onge gets credit for the brilliant discovery.”

  “But you understand money isn’t really an issue.”

  “It is with me. You asked me yesterday what kind of work I specialize in. There are jobs I like doing, and a few I don’t, but my specialty is anything that comes in the door. It would be a sore temptation to string you along with promises that I’ll fulfill all your expectations. The truth is I probably can’t.”

  “Who says I’d need them all fulfilled?” she asked, meeting my gaze.

  I took a pass on that one.

  “I mean, look what you’ve accomplished already,” she said.

  “About all I can. There might be a couple more phone calls, a little more shoe leather, another paragraph in my report. But your best card is still the one you’ve had all along.”

  She looked away. “The police.”

  “You’ve already paid for them.”

  She said nothing for a moment. In the outer office a telephone rang half a dozen times, then quit. Abruptly, Ada turned to her computer. Unlike the Royal in my office, the keys queeked as she pecked them. From the angle I was sitting at I saw clusters of words and numbers begin swarming the screen.

  “‘Rosita Lopes,’” Ada read off the monitor, “from the Azores. Nguyen Thoc, Vietnam. Teeda and Boreth Leng, Cambodia by way of a Thai refugee camp. Haiti. Cambodia again. Puerto Rico.” She looked at me. “They come here with dreams, Mr. Rasmussen. But they get a big dose of reality too—the kind you won’t see featured in the four-color brochures from the Chamber of Commerce. No job, poor English skills, substandard housing, prejudice.”

  “Maybe they should think twice about coming,” I said.

  “Some of them, yes. We don’t need people who won’t follow the rules, or who are looking only to stay on these rolls. But that’s not the majority. People can usually make it if they get their feet under them. But to do that they need more than just Walter Rittle or me. They need hope, because it’s easy to give up and go down. Then we’ve all got a problem. A Bhuntan Tran stands for hope. Dammit, I want to see him keep standing.”

  The energy and heat of her words withered my smart retort. With the dough her family was worth, she could be anywhere, doing anything, instead of sitting here in this two-by-four office making me feel guilty because my contribution amounted to little more than the taxes I shipped off each quarter. I stood up, jingling change with my pocketed hands. “There’d be no guarantees.”

  “Are there ever?” Her tone softened. “Stay on it, that’s all I’m asking. Do those last few things you mentioned, whatever they are. What will it take you, another day? Two?”

  “I might turn up something.”

  She stood too, watching me with wry, inquiring eyes. “You’re not completely booked, are you?”

  So what do you say? I said, “You drive a tough bargain, lady,” and I grinned.

  She took out her checkbook, but I held up a hand. “You’ve retained me already. The bill comes with my final report. I’ll be in touch.” I started for the door.

  “Mr. Rasmussen?”

  Shyness had reclaimed her, leaving only the afterglow of intensity on her cheeks, and for an instant I thought she would tell me never mind. She said, “Are you going back to work already?”

  “I thought I’d go catch and kill dinner first,” I said.

  Her small, sturdy fingers worried a paperclip. “Do you ever eat with clients … or is there a rule?”

  I shrugged. “It’s neater than eating with my hands.”

  10

  THE APPLETON INN has improved since it opened, having learned that fancy rooms are not enough to get the business trade if you are not the only show in town. The modern commercial traveler is too savvy about food to settle strictly for proximity. Tonight the dining room wasn’t busy. A pair of tables had been drawn together to accommodate a party of visiting fire-people with name tags on their lapels. Ada Chan Stewart and I got a table in a corner. The brass and the fox and hounds prints gave a nice faraway feel to the place. The waiter lit the candle in the tall glass chimney and said that the swordfish had just come in. I ordered that. Ada Stewart chose lobster.

  “Are you married, Mr. Rasmussen?” she asked me when the waiter had poured wine.

  “Is this social work?”

  “Personal curiosity. Tell me to mind my own business if I’m overstepping.”

  “The answer is yes. Technically.” I told her how things w
ere, up to and including Fred Meecham, Esq.’s, newest assignment.

  With only the subtlest shifting of planes her face showed sympathy. “It’s a tough world,” she said. “It’s easy to get derailed in it.”

  “That is social work.”

  “I’ll shut up.”

  “I was just thinking about something that Mai Lim said today—about a Cambodian couple not using ‘I’ in their home.”

  “Yes. After the wedding it’s always supposed to be plural.”

  “Interesting custom. I don’t recall a lot of ‘we’ over the last couple years of my marriage.” I shrugged and let it go. “What about you?”

  “Wed to work, I guess.”

  “Sounds one-sided.”

  “I don’t know. It has its satisfactions.”

  “You have a private life?”

  “From time to time. Low-maintenance relationships mostly. Dinner, a movie. Work occupies me pretty much. There’s never any end of people in need.”

  “Don’t you ever feel like the little Dutch kid?”

  “Not often. And I don’t imagine you do either.”

  “Not more than seven dikes a week.”

  She smiled, and I realized it wasn’t an expression I’d seen a lot of on her face. I liked how it looked.

  “But we don’t give in to it,” she went on, the smile fading.

  “First person plural?”

  “You, me, Walt Rittle—lots of others. You find us in every occupation. What we do is important. Each of us is just one person, but if we can do something for one other person today, it’s enough. Tomorrow will have challenges of its own.”

  “You really feel like that?”

  “I try to wake up each morning eager for what the day will bring.”

  “You weren’t me waking up this morning.”

  “Okay, sure, every so often I think of chucking it all. I had this idea of going back to school … to study Egyptology, believe it or not.”