Unlike Brown, he didn’t inquire about the officers or the intended victims.
“Anyway, we’re trying to find out who two of those three were.”
“And my name came up as someone with past experience who would talk to you.”
I paused a moment, wondering how to play this. Tai was well spoken, obviously bright, and apparently not given to snow jobs. I decided to reciprocate in kind. “Not really. Brown said you’d be pretty reluctant-that either you still had some fond feelings for your friends from the old days, or that you knew better than to talk to a cop.”
I sensed, however unconsciously, that I’d ruffled his pride. “Well, he’s wrong on both counts,” he answered sharply and then added with a hint of face-saving swagger, “although I haven’t made a habit of the second.”
“I understand that. What I’m after,” I continued, “or I think I am, is pretty much ancient history anyhow, so if I ask anything out of line, feel free to let me know. As far as I’m concerned, you’re doing me a favor here.”
“All right,” he said, cautious again, but seeming more in control.
“The only one of the three dead men we’ve identified was named Henry Lam-that’s how we made the connection to Jason Brown, who counseled him after he got to this country. Brown said Lam used to be a runner for Chinatown Gang back when you were a member.”
There was a moment’s silence on the line. “I remember Lam.”
That was the first hurdle, I thought. “What was he like?”
He hesitated again. Despite Tai’s denial of Brown’s appraisal of him, I sensed the man was in a quandary. Talking to me would have cost him dearly a few short years ago. Not talking to me now would make true the suggestion that he was still too scared.
“Dangerous,” he answered in my favor. “He was hard to control. He wanted to be a big man fast.”
“I understand he also ran with the Dragon Boys, among others.”
“That was done all the time. We all used kids.”
“One of the men killed with Lam was called Ut, and had CTG tattooed on his hand. Did you know him?”
His immediate answer was disappointing-and familiar. “Ut’s a very common name.”
I quickly moved along, not wanting to lose momentum. “All right. The man we think was running all three of them here used to be a Dragon Boy. His name is Michael Vu. Does that name ring a bell?”
Another long pause, this one filled with potential. With Michael Vu, I was no longer asking about “ancient history” or dead people, which meant the possible danger to Nicky Tai was no longer to his pride alone. “Why do you ask?”
I shored him up with a real concern of my own. “Two reasons. The obvious one is that I’m trying to file some paperwork and retire this case. The other one is that I don’t want the Asian population in general-such as it is here-tainted by something like this. Vermont is mostly white, rural, and lower-middle-class to poor, and racism is always just below the surface. If I can get a fast handle on who’s behind this, I might be able to nip a big problem in the bud.”
He thought about that for a few moments, weighing my sincerity. I was hoping I’d touched some portion of what had stimulated him to leave the gangs.
“I knew Michael,” he finally answered.
“Did he leave Dragon Boys?”
“I heard that. I don’t know where he went.”
“When was the last time you were aware of his being in California?”
“A few years ago-I don’t know exactly. We were not friends. Dragon Boys was one of the reasons Chinatown Gang was destroyed. They saw us as a threat and took out our leadership.”
“Killed them?” I was caught off balance, surprised that members of what I thought was a single gang might have once been bloody rivals.
“Yes. There was a shooting at a restaurant in San Francisco. Five of our people died. The police never brought any charges, but everyone knew it was Dragon Boys.”
“Did Michael Vu play a role in that?”
“He was a ma-jai then,” Tai said dismissively, “a street soldier. This was done by higher people.”
“So Dragon Boys became a major gang?”
“They got bigger. They absorbed some of our group, and others, too. Taking care of us gave them big face.”
Which probably explained what the one named Ut was doing working for Vu. “Did Michael Vu move up the ranks?” I asked.
“For a while. Then Dragon Boys began to fade. Their leadership got in trouble with the cops. People started to leave. There wasn’t as much room at the top as there had been. Michael Vu got stuck.”
“Sounds like a middle-management crisis,” I murmured as an aside.
He actually laughed, if only for a second, but it showed me how far we’d come in just a few minutes. “Yes. I guess someone made him a better offer.”
The whole Sonny-as-smoke-screen gambit rose anew in my brain. “Couldn’t he have just set up a whole new operation on his own?”
Tai hesitated and finally compromised. “Not the Michael Vu I knew. People change, of course.”
I remembered Heather Dahlin reporting how the Hartford Police had seen Vu meeting with anonymous parties in a motel. Her assumption that he’d been acting under orders apparently matched Tai’s reading of Vu’s character. “All right, do you have any idea who he might be working for? We’re starting to think the people who are giving us problems here got to know each other in the Bay Area.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me, Lieutenant. When CTG died out, many people went looking for new places to go.”
“Could I fly a couple of names by you?” I asked, my voice studiously nonchalant.
“You can try,” he said, back to his neutral self.
Not expecting to get much further than I had with Jason Brown, I began with Edward Diep and some of the people we’d seen most frequently in the company of Michael Vu. Nicky Tai showed none of Brown’s impatience with the process, but he was also no more helpful.
Until I mentioned Truong Van Loc.
“I knew a Truong On Ha. I think you’re talking about his older brother.”
I quickly pawed through the papers on my desk and retrieved the report I’d received months earlier on Truong Van Loc, following Marshall Smith’s now-famous traffic stop. As I’d remembered, On Ha was in fact the brother who’d been killed in a gang fight. “But you didn’t know the elder Truong?”
“No. I only saw him at the funeral. On Ha was one of the victims in that shoot-out I mentioned.”
Startled again, I blurted out, “But you said only the CTG leadership was wiped out in that.”
“No, no. You misunderstand. Truong On Ha was an innocent bystander-a waiter. He never had anything to do with the gangs.”
As in the cartoons of old, I felt a light suddenly snap on above my head. “And the older brother-Van Loc-was he in the gangs?”
“Not ours-or theirs-but I think he had been. But he’d dropped out, like I did.” Tai paused a moment, reflecting. “Lieutenant, are you familiar with the concept of karma?”
“What you do now may come back to haunt you later?”
“Crude, but close,” Tai conceded. “At the time of the funeral, it was said that Truong On Ha’s death was part of his older brother’s karma for his past activities.”
I did some quick thinking about retired Dragon Boy Michael Vu, the late Mr. Ut of the CTG, and the hard-eyed, upwardly mobile Henry Lam, who as a child used to travel between these old gangs. “Did Van Loc feel his karma played a part in his brother’s death?”
“I don’t know-it is not something that is asked.”
“But did he act on it, as far as you know? Seek revenge?”
“It is not realistic to seek revenge against destiny, Lieutenant.” A mental picture returned to me, drawn a few days earlier by John Crocker, of the driver of the car that had forced him off the road-a face empty of all feeling except cold rage. “Lots of people do, Mr. Tai. They find someone or something to act as a substitute, and then they open up with both barrels.”