She took a deep breath and seemed to think a moment. A furrow appeared between her eyes as she looked up at me. “I remember something about credit cards. Does that make sense?”
I smiled and squeezed her hand. “Yes, it does. When you’ve been out shopping with either one of your parents, have you seen them use credit cards?”
“Sure. Not often, though. My mom always pays cash.”
“What card does your dad use?”
“It’s a Visa… I think.”
“Okay-going back to the night of the attack, what did they take from the house? Anything?”
“My dad has a safe in his bedroom. They made him open that up. I think it had a lot of money, and maybe some jewelry.”
“Any pieces you could describe?”
“There was a pendant my mom let me see sometimes-gold and jade. It had the Chinese characters for her family name-Ho-engraved in the stone. I’m pretty sure they stole that.”
I opened my note pad to a blank page and pushed it over to her. “Can you draw it, along with the name?” I asked.
She took my pen and quickly drew the piece of jewelry, returning the pad with an apologetic smile. “It’s not very good, but that’s pretty close. The name’s right, at least-she taught me how to do that.”
“How’s she doing, by the way?”
A flicker of irritation crossed her face. “Who knows? She doesn’t say anything anymore. She cooks and does the housework and stares out the window and cries a lot.”
“And your dad?”
“He’s changed, too. When he looks at us, I think he’s sad, but sometimes, when he thinks he’s alone, he looks angry.”
“Do you think everything’s going all right at the restaurant?”
Again, she gave me that quick, slightly surprised double look. “I don’t think so. He stays later at work than he used to, and he doesn’t seem to like it much anymore.”
“Sounds like home isn’t much fun, either. How’re you holding up?”
She shrugged. “I got my friends, and dad never did much with me anyhow.” She paused, and then placed her hand against her cheek. Her eyes slowly lost their focus, and she went back to looking at the polished wooden surface between us. “I miss my mom, though.”
12
I sat in my car and watched Sally Javits receiving her dripping-wet wards at the exit of the car-wash tunnel. She’d motioned impatiently to the driver to proceed to a line painted on the asphalt, and then she and several others would launch themselves at the vehicle, flogging it with towels and chamois cloths with all the enthusiasm of an anger-venting therapy group. Several times I thought I could see a look of alarm growing on the distant faces of the drivers, just before the buff-’n’-shine crew abruptly withdrew, turning their backs contemptuously, to let the car timidly roll away.
This was her latest job, to be held, if she kept to her statistical norm, for a month at the most. It followed a string of similar employments-washing dishes, mopping floors, sloshing coffee at broken-down donut shops. Chances were always fifty-fifty that she’d get bored and leave before getting fired.
Still, she worked, albeit erratically, as did many of her streetwise cohorts, which is what distinguished a town like Brattleboro from the urban battlefields that monopolized the nightly news. We’d been spared the full-time preoccupation with drugs, violence, and general hopelessness that crippled those other places. So far.
I was parked inconspicuously down the street, waiting for Javits’s shift to end, and for a private moment in which to draw her attention.
A couple of cars later, a new team sauntered onto the receiving apron, replacing Sally’s crew in a ritualized exchange of physical and verbal insults. A few rags flew through the air, a sponge or two was thrown at a ducking head, and then she was walking down the sidewalk after punching out, her square, compact body straining the fabric of her damp uniform T-shirt.
I started up my engine and slowly drove up alongside her as she walked. “Hey, Sally.”
She barely glanced at me, her face still flushed from the enjoyment of her boisterous departure. I was happy to see she was in a good mood. “Hey, yourself, Gunther.”
“Got time for a chat?”
“’Bout what?”
“I’ll buy you dinner.”
She stopped and gave me a dubious look. “Where?”
“Your call.”
Her face cleared. “Yeah! No shit. How ’bout Toney’s?” She pointed to a tiny grocery store on the corner where Elm Street slopes away from Canal to cross a bridge over the Whetstone Brook. The store served grinders from a rear deli counter, the quality of which was famous all over town. A good many of the department’s patrol division considered this an altar of affordable haute cuisine.
“You got it,” I agreed and parked by the curb.
She ordered meatball, and I, despite knowing Gail was making something at home, had a bag of chips and a Coke. After receiving our food, Sally led the way outside and headed back up the street toward the recently opened Little Caesar’s. “Wanna dine with a view?” she cracked over her shoulder.
She entered the fast-food restaurant’s parking lot, walked to the rear, and plopped herself down on one of the six-foot-long concrete wheel stops marking the lot’s boundary, using the bumper of a parked car as a backrest.
“Wicked, huh?” She gestured out ahead of us as I settled down next to her. The ground fell away precipitously at our feet as a fifty-foot embankment went in search of the winding Whetstone Brook far below us. There was a wide field between the foot of the grade and the water’s edge, choked with brush and weeds, strewn with trash and garbage, and occasionally clotted with larger items like a stray grocery cart or a gutted sofa. On the distant bank was a holding yard for a lumber company, with metal-roofed sheds and bundled stacks of boards on pallets, and beyond that lay most of lower downtown Brattleboro, climbing, street by parallel street, back up the more gradual opposing slope.
It was the kind of gritty, blue-collar urban view to make a tough kid’s spirits soar. I looked out the corner of my eye at her pleased expression, her mouth already smeared with tomato sauce, and couldn’t resist a matching smile of my own. “Yeah, wicked.”
She took another wolfish bite and spoke through her food. “So, you and Ron almost bought the farm. That why you’re here?”
She remained, in her fashion, a businesswoman.
“Yeah,” I answered. “Did you or anyone else know a home invasion was in the works?”
Her chewing slowed. I could sense the caution lights going on in her head. “That’s what those people do. It’s not the first time it’s happened. You guys just walked into it.”
“So did Vince.”
She stopped chewing altogether and looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We figured something was going down-that’s why we followed Leung home. How did Vince know where to show up?”
In point of fact, we knew Sharkey had been watching Vu. What bothered me was his timing, which smacked of a double setup. The only catch was that, in order to make it work, the person pulling the strings had to have known about the home invasion.
The sandwich forgotten, she twisted around to face me bodily, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You wanna shit or get off the pot?”
I gave her a scenario I thought she might accept, and maybe even confirm. “Vince was suffocating under Benny, but he didn’t have the balls to do anything about it-until Sonny showed up, or at least Michael Vu in Sonny’s name. A deal was cut. The Asians would remove Benny if Vince set him up. In exchange, Vince would replace his boss, and then allow Sonny a large hunk of the local action, something Benny had refused to do.”
“And you think they planned to off Vince?” Sally reinterpreted. “A double cross?”
“Maybe,” I countered and edged closer to where I wanted to be. “And maybe not. As things turned out, Vince almost killed Vu. If it hadn’t been for us, he might’ve succeeded, even as high as he was. So if Vince was set up, it means someone was after him and Vu both-or at least didn’t care which one got whacked.”