The Heaven Stone Read online

  A varnished wooden door with a wire-reinforced glass pane opened into a bright warren with a chest-high counter setting off a small work area. Beyond it receded the shelves of county death records. In the middle ground, behind his desk, sat Al LaRosa.

  He looked the same as he had the last time I saw him, which had to be five years, give or take forty pounds. On him it didn’t show. He was the size of a Dumpster, wearing a straw fedora and a pale yellow wash-and-wear shirt. It was refreshingly cool there, out of the July sun, but he was dripping on the Herald spread open to the racing form.

  He’d been there for a decade that I knew of, ever since I was a uniform and had to come for the first time after an indigent woman had been pulled from one of the canals. Accidental drowning was the ruling that time. There had been other times, but now I got the feeling that LaRosa only dimly recognized my face. He probably wouldn’t know I didn’t carry a badge these days.

  “Long time,” he said in his rusty, Andy Devine voice.

  I grinned hello and bellied up to the counter. “Never long enough as far as most visitors are concerned, I bet.”

  His chair groaned. “Here to ID someone?”

  “Just an M.E.’s report on a homicide victim.”

  “Don’t you get a copy at the station? You’re Arlington, right? Or Somerville.”

  “Lowell. Rasmussen’s the name.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “But I’m private these days.” I opened the manila folder on the linoleum countertop and futzed importantly with papers.

  He adjusted his hat. “’Course, autopsy reports are considered medical files now. State law says they’re protected from public disclosure.”

  “This is official,” I said, stretching it. “I’m working in connection with Frank Droney.”

  “That son of a whore?”

  “Can I quote you?”

  “You certainly can. I hope I see the day he ends up in here, bagged and tagged.”

  “Too bad we have to wait.”

  He gave me a look. Maybe there was a stir of memory of who I’d ended up being. The Boston papers had given the story a pretty good ride, though cop corruption was getting to be old news. After a moment, LaRosa lumbered from his chair and moved the five feet to the counter. “Homicide, you said?”

  I pointed at Tran’s name on the top of my sheet. I tried to keep it from getting dripped on. LaRosa said, “Lowell. The Chinese fellow.”

  “Cambodian. Got the report?”

  “Got it somewheres.”

  He went to a file cabinet papered with photocopied notices on Commonwealth stationery, attached by magnets fashioned to resemble small wedges of cake and pie. He came up empty and hipped the drawer shut. He lifted his straw hat and fanned himself.

  “Don’t you use that?” I said, nodding at the computer on a table alongside his desk.

  “Hasn’t worked since the day they brung it in here.”

  “Isn’t there a service contract?”

  He shot me a dark look, resettled his lid and waddled toward the back area, tweezing the seat of his pants from between buttocks the size of sofa cushions. He edged sideways and disappeared into the maze of shelves.

  I went around the counter to the computer. It was an IBM, with a coat of dust on the shell that told me it had been down as long as the Pilgrim nuclear plant. Experimentally I snapped the power switch and heard the circuits hum to life. I hit the monitor switch and the screen lit up.

  LaRosa was back too soon to have gone far, moving with surprising grace for a man his size. He had a single sheet of paper in his hand. Seeing me poking keys, he frowned at me. I shrugged. “Seems to be running okay. You have any floppies around?”

  “I didn’t say it was broken—I said it hasn’t worked. I haven’t used it. Hardware is something I get at True Value. I want software and floppies, I go the Combat Zone.”

  I shut down the machine. Back on the authorized side of the counter I faced Al LaRosa, who had a hand on the sheet of paper so I could see only random words between his fingers. “Can I make a copy, or doesn’t the copier work?” I said.

  “It works. It takes money.”

  “I figured. How much?”

  “Twenty.”

  He wasn’t talking about two thin dimes. I dealt a pair of Hamiltons onto the counter and waited while he burned off a copy and brought it over to Checkpoint Charlie. We both let go at the same moment. The tens vanished among his fingers like a magic trick he had been perfecting for years. The copy was shiny and as gray as a March sky, but I saw Bhuntan Tran’s name typed in reverse order in the correct space. I was eager to see what the rest of the report would say, but just then I had a craving for sunlight and real air.

  * * *

  The car was hot enough to fire ceramics in. I got the windows down and sat there and started to scan the death certificate. Under state law, every homicide and fatal accident victim was required to be declared so by a county medical examiner. Most of the M.E.’s came out of central casting, old docs who would show up at the scene in the middle of the night, with Tilt-Wheel in the Olds to get it over the potbelly. They’d come wheezing out and kneel beside the body, squinting against the smoke from the cancer stick spiked in the corner of their mouths and finally grunt, “He’s dead,” as if there were a question in anyone’s mind. Generally, it was routine to do an autopsy. Tran had gotten one. I scanned until I got to the recap of the findings. Blood and urine had tested clean for drugs, as St. Onge had already told me.

  Then other words grabbed hold.

  Major trauma to occipital lobes by gunshots behind right and left ear. Both wrists show abrasion, as if bound prior to shooting. (No rope or handcuffs found at scene.)

  Parked there at hot noon, I felt a chill squiggle along my backbone. Lieutenant Nate Rosenheck’s drawl came back to me: “Y’all notice anything else about the shooting?” Was this what he’d meant?

  I realized now what details the police had determined to hold back—but these were more than tidbits. I was left with the sour afterthought that St. Onge had not given me much at all.

  I tried to pick a shortcut back to I-93, but there aren’t any anymore. Boston was like a corpse, with long worms of traffic crawling over it. It was three-thirty when I got back to the office. The lag made it two-thirty in Houston. Rosenheck was out, but someone else knew my name, and I silently lauded Rosenheck’s efficiency.

  “We checked that name you gave us,” the other cop said. “How you pronounce it?”

  I told him.

  “Right. Khoy. The scoop is he lived in San Jose about two years—lived pretty good too. Fancy pad, car, duds. Evidently made his money selling jewelry and precious stones. He was married briefly and divorced. Local police say he had one prior for domestic violence and possession of cocaine, a few years before he moved there. He got three months suspended and a year parole. But he hasn’t been heard from in six months, maybe longer. There’s a stale outstanding on him for parole violation.”

  “You have a name or a phone number for his ex-wife?”

  “You’ve got everything I have.” He paused. “Could it be this Khoy’s deceased?”

  We mulled that long distance for a moment, then I thanked him for his help. I like to reward competence, which is getting as scarce in our society as a high school grad who can read. I was tempted to spill what I had learned from Tran’s death report, but I figured I had better let the Lowell PD do it, officially. We said we’d be in touch.

  Outside, the tar was gummy underfoot, even in the lengthening shadows, and the air was abroil with hovering blue fumes from the traffic. Lowell’s clocks are still synchronized to the old shift whistles of the mills. Seven-thirty and four are when you can make better time on foot. I hiked down the street to my dyslexic printer and made a copy of a copy. Not that I doubted Ed St. Onge would mail one to Houston, but I wanted to be prepared. Back at the office I left the inner door open for circulation and settled at my desk with a book. I read some more on the Khm
er Rouge, whose emblem had become a cairn of skulls. Under their theories of social reorganization, anyone who had ever been out of the country, possessed skills beyond planting rice, or wore glasses—and therefore probably read books—was suspect and often summarily shot. I could take only a chapter of that before I put the book down.

  As I was sitting there, the knob of the outer door turned. I looked up to see a pretty, silver-haired woman come right in. She was checking her makeup in a compact mirror. Seeing me, she started; her finely plucked eyebrows rose in surprise, and she glanced around quickly. A blush spread over her cheeks—not a lot of one, just enough to be disarming. “Goodness!” she said.

  “Not much to look at this time of day, I admit,” I said, “but it’s home.”

  She gave an embarrassed little shrug. “I beg your pardon. I wanted Attorney Meecham.”

  Ah. My neighbor down the hall. It was a reasonable error. Take away his Thomas McKnight lithos, oriental rugs, and electronic office amenities, and his suite was a mirror image of mine. “Some guys get all the luck.”

  “Are you an attorney?” the woman asked.

  “I’m a poet,” I said. “‘Linger a little, for thou art fair.’”

  Her hair had a sheen that went with the bar of mellow sunlight on the wall behind her like a gold setting on an antique cameo. “Mr. Meecham is representing me,” she volunteered.

  “I’m sure he’ll do his best.”

  “Divorce.” She offered a game little smile I had to admire. She kept it up and I smiled back and we locked on for a span of a few slow seconds, then she backed out the door and closed it between us, and life went on with only her after-image in my mind and the tarrying spice of her perfume in the room. Forty-eight? Fifty? Working hard to keep it, and holding time to a pretty good draw. But it was a treadmill that kept speeding up on us all. I couldn’t blame her for the try, though. It was why I did my miles along the river mornings, why people went to high school reunions and did the shag and the twist, why old soldiers got together to toast battles won and lost. It was the grab each of us made to get what we never would because the clock didn’t run backwards, and that was the name of that tune.

  The sun pattern on the walls had assumed a lower angle, and the light dimmed a little. The motes of dust stirred by the woman’s entry and departure twirled slowly toward the floor. I put my mind back in the book before me and read three pages before my telephone rang.

  13

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN. When I parked where I could see the spotlighted white-on-red sign—DRAGON RESTAURANT: THAI, LAO, CAMBODIAN, CHINESE, AND VIETNAMESE FOOD—and smell the aromas filling the hot dark, I realized I had not eaten dinner. Somehow, though, I didn’t think Samol Lim would want to eat. On the phone he had said in front of the restaurant, and he had said after dark.

  It was going on 9:05, just after the time we had agreed on. Lim’s English had been simple and direct, better than his wife’s whom he said had given him my card as I had asked her to. Lim had also seemed reluctant about meeting me.

  As I waited, a Camaro cruised past with a big rumbly engine and chrome mags (and a quartet of Cro-Mags inside, yelling and tossing beer cans). I didn’t figure they were looking for the city library. The driver stopped at the corner and red-lined the mill awhile before he popped the clutch. Burnt tire smoke overrode the food smells and hung in the air long after the banshee wail had faded. If the city would just organize these guys, for a few cases of Bud it could get the streets paved with fresh rubber.

  By 9:15 I was starting to wonder if Lim had changed his mind when I heard a soft tap at the passenger side door. I had seen no one appear on the street at all.

  “You the policeman?” a young Asian man asked. He didn’t have to stoop to peer in the window.

  “Close enough. Samol Lim?”

  “Yes.”

  He opened the door and slid in quickly, pulling the door closed. I keep the dome light turned off; when I’m sitting in the car at night I usually don’t want to advertise it.

  Lim was wiry, with a mop of black hair that made his head look too big for his shoulders. He had on sandals and jeans and a fishnet shirt that showed thin, tattooed arms. His face was coffee brown and private, and I imagined he was checking me out just as carefully as I was him. He had not showed up the way he had for no reason.

  “Do you understand why I’m asking questions?” I said.

  “You want to know who kill Bhuntan?”

  “Yes, although that’s for the official police. Someone has hired me to try to prove Tran wasn’t doing bad things. Tell me, did Bhuntan take drugs?”

  “He never take drug,” said Lim with the certainty his wife had shown.

  “But the police found cocaine at his house.”

  Lim wasn’t dissuaded. His hair bounced like a symphony conductor’s. “I was friend with Bhuntan since he come here. He was very good man, work very hard. He like to get married again, have children. He have bad memory of Cambodia, where all his family die.”

  “Did he have any enemies here?”

  “Here, no enemy. In Cambodia, Khmer Rouge.”

  “Was he a member of a gang?”

  “No gang.”

  “Why did he receive five thousand dollars from someone named Suoheang Khoy?”

  Lim was slower answering. “I didn’t know this until you say it to my wife and she say to me. Who is Suoheang Khoy?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. He was living in California two years ago when Tran was there.”

  His face seemed to show recognition. “Ah—Khoy maybe Bhuntan’s friend in California who make money.”

  “Cambodian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Tran tell you about him?”

  “Only little. He sell jade and making much money.”

  “Jade—the precious stone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he get jade?”

  Lim glanced outside and fell silent while a couple walked by. When they had passed he said, “In old Phnom Penh some people collect. Maybe he have it and keeping it with him. When Khmer Rouge take city, many citizen bury valuable in their garden so soldier not find. Some took valuable with them, or maybe buy rice. Cambodian money no good after Khmer Rouge come.”

  I knew it from my reading. Amounts of the Cambodian riel which once would have purchased a home might get a few pounds of rice. Anyone with gold watched it carefully, because only gold kept any value. And maybe jade?

  “How did Tran know Suoheang Khoy?” I asked.

  “Maybe met when Bhuntan first come to United State. Bhuntan arrive in California first. Come here after.”

  I asked a few more questions, but there was little to learn. I debated, then decided to tell Lim what I had learned from the M.E.’s report. He looked tough enough to hear it. I told him about Tran’s hands possibly having been bound, and about the gunshot pattern. In the dim reach of light from the Dragon Restaurant, I thought I saw the man’s eyes change. Something passed across them like the shadow a raptor casts circling high over a small animal it’s going to eat.

  “Does that mean anything?” I asked.

  Lim’s jaw muscles bunched, and he angled his flat, lined face away. “Khmer Rouge get answer like this.”

  Not sure what he meant, I hesitated and he said it again, more forcefully, impatient with me. “Khmer Rouge get answer.”

  “When they interrogated someone?”

  It was his turn to be puzzled. I thought of words to rephrase it, but the gestures are universal: seize an imaginary shirt front, slash a hand across a face. Lim nodded grimly and put a finger pistol behind his right ear, then did the same with the left. I felt a chill. It was an execution method used by the Khmer Rouge.

  Lim said, “I friend with Bhuntan. He was brave man. But when I talk to him last time, he’s seem … sca-red.”

  There it was again—two syllables this time, but the same word Cassie Samms had used. “Scared of what?”

  Lim was rubbing his hands over the
fading tattoos on his slim, muscled arms. “Don’t know.”

  I noticed something in my side mirror. As casually as I could, so as not to spook him more than he already seemed to be, I said to Samol Lim, “Let’s ride a little, okay?”

  He frowned a question at me.

  “Just ride,” I said.

  I started the car and eased away from the curb and drove slowly to the intersection where I made a left onto Market Street, past the Rendezvous Dine and Dance, a holdover from the 1930s, where in more recent memory a patron had pulled life at Walpole for the castration killing of his wife’s lover. We headed back downtown, over the trolley tracks and cobblestones. The wide-set headlights of the car I had noticed stayed a few cars back in the evening traffic. I swung left onto Gorham and again onto Merrimack. Taking the drag slow enough to catch some of the traffic lights, I meandered back toward the Acre.

  “Do you have any friends who drive a big car?” I asked Lim. “Maybe a Cadillac?”

  He got my meaning and glanced rearward. He seemed a little flustered, as if he should have refused my request to meet, because now something he had been dreading was finally coming to pass. But he shook his head and faced front again.

  There was still the possibility of coincidence, I supposed, so I pulled in front of the police station and stopped. The tail car slowed in momentary hesitation, then drove past. I saw the silhouette of a driver in a two-tone green Lincoln Town Car as long as a mortgage.

  I hooked an illegal U and headed back into the Acre. “I’ll let you out anywhere you say.”

  He gave me an intent glance. “You got bad trouble? I stay with you.”

  “No need,” I said. “In fact, if I drop you here instead of at your door, it’ll be safer for you. In case anyone is still looking.”

  He got out but left one arm on the door. “Good luck, mister,” he said.

  He flitted away as swiftly as he had appeared. The citizens had told him he was not particularly welcome; that he had too many kids, that his food stank of fish, and his language was just a harsh noise. I liked him. He was a brave man determined to survive in this new world.