The Dark Root

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.”

Sally turned away, ostensibly to face the view, but I thought in fact to avoid making eye contact. “So what?” she asked rhetorically.

Her studied vagueness was encouraging.

“C’mon, you’re one of four or five people at most who make things happen in this town.”

She snapped back around to glare at me. “What the fuck’re you gettin’ at? I don’t have anything to do with the slopes, and I didn’t whack Vince. He was a loser.”

I smiled guilelessly at her. “You and I know that. Somebody didn’t.”

“The fuckin’ Chinese,” she tried again. “If they set Benny up, why not Vince, too?”

I shook my head. “Using Vu as bait? Doesn’t make sense.”

There was a prolonged pause as she stared out at her view. Finally, she let out a sigh and chucked the rest of her meal down the embankment, paper wrapper and all. We both watched it tumble and roll, disgorging its crimson contents as it went.

What she said then exposed her confusion. “You’re sayin’ somebody put Vince up against the chinks, knowing you guys might take ’em both out?”

“I’m saying Benny’s death created a vacuum that more than one person wanted to fill. Vince spent the entire night winding himself up and could barely see straight when he pulled that gun on Vu. We talked to the people who got high with him. They don’t think the party was Vince’s idea-they felt the glue and dope were supplied by someone else, and that Vince was as happy as they were to get it. You got any ideas about that?”

She made a face and spat into the dirt between her tattered sneakers. “You could ask Alfie Brewster. He and Vince didn’t get along, and he sure doesn’t like what’s goin’ on.”

“You think he could’ve manipulated Vince into confronting Vu?”

“He’s a smart guy, and he’s running scared as shit now. After the shoot-out, first thing I heard was Alfie had called in some buddies from Springfield, Mass., to back him up.”

“They here now?” I asked, not bothering to hide my surprise. If she was right, Brewster’s reaction would fit a man whose plans had backfired. Also, if Vu and Brewster both knew that the latter had tumbled to the home invasion ahead of time, then Vu would now have good cause to go after Brewster.

“Oh, yeah. Alfie’s takin’ good care of ’em-for as long as he can. His stock is a little low.”

His “stock,” we both knew, primarily meant girls, most of them very young.

“So what happens when the entertainment runs out?” I asked.

“Who the shit knows? They either leave town or they start throwing their weight around. Alfie’s just adding to the problem, if you ask me.”

I tried for some specifics. “And what is the problem, from where you stand?”

She shook her head and then looked at me steadily. “You’re not going to like it. The other reason Alfie got some troops is that Michael Vu is really ripped over what happened. Losin’ his boys like that makes him look bad-there’ve already been a few jokes about it. You might want to check out Lenny Roberts if you don’t believe me. He gave Vu some lip, and Vu damn near took his head off.”

“Hit him?”

My enthusiasm gave me away. She smiled bitterly. “Forget it. If you want to get Lenny to press for assault ’n’ battery, you’ll have to find him first, and then you’ll have to convince him that talking to you isn’t the same as a death wish. He was scared shitless, and so are most of the rest of us. Michael Vu isn’t fuckin’ around anymore.”

Her eyes widened suddenly as she thought of something else. “You know, all your bitchin’ and moanin’ about who’s setting up who… You were the one who yanked Vince’s chain. Got him so pissed off he couldn’t see straight. But now that he tried to whack Vu, you’re running around planting ideas that somebody else set him up. Scared they’re going to figure out you fucked up big time?”

But she missed her target. Instead of hitting what was in fact a guilty soft spot, she brought back what I’d mentioned earlier to Sammie. I hadn’t set Vince against Michael Vu. I’d set him against Sonny. So what had made Vince go after Vu?

“Sally,” I asked her, “have you ever actually met Sonny?”

She looked away again. “Sure.”

Her brevity told me otherwise. The trick was going to be forcing her to admit she was lying without making her look bad. I faked a surprised reaction. “That makes you the only one in town who has-the only one who can pick him out of a mug book, or prove he was in Bratt when this whole thing comes to trial.”

“I didn’t say I met him face to face,” she snarled, her face flushing. “It was on the phone… Once,” she added for safety’s sake.

“It’s been Vu from then on?”

“Yeah.” She hesitated and then said belligerently, “And from what I hear, you better hope you don’t meet Sonny, either.”

“What’s that mean?”

She stood up, suddenly restless to get away from this conversation. “That means, Joe Gunther, that the best way for a guy like Sonny to take back the juice is to whack a cop.”

One of the selling points of the house that Gail and I had bought together was a rear deck with a huge maple tree growing through the middle of it. During the winter, we, or lately I alone, had sat by the sliding glass door of the living room and watched the snow settle around the tree in a perfectly flat plane, setting it off so that it looked like a bonsai arrangement with hormone problems, towering overhead, white and crystalline, isolated in its own natural beauty.

I was sitting beneath it now, in the pink afterlife of the setting sun, listening to a soft breeze rustling its new leaves, and keeping out of sight of the two cars parked on the street out front. Both of them contained reporters from out of town. They’d shouted questions at me after I’d parked in the driveway, but Gail’s earlier warnings to them had obviously been dire enough to keep them from actually stepping onto the property.

Gail came out with a soda water, and a Coke for me. “You look like you had a rough day.” She nodded toward the road. “Were there a lot of them at the Municipal Building?” She stretched out onto the lawn chair next to mine and tilted her head back to enjoy the branches above us.

“They’ve made the central hallway look like a panhandlers’ convention. Every time any of us cuts from one side of the building to the other, we run the gauntlet. Tony’s scheduled two update sessions a day, upstairs in the selectmen’s room, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

She reached out and took my hand in hers. “They came by here so often, I finally went to the library to work. What’s the mood like at the police department?”

“Not good. You see the paper?”

She nodded. “It’s in the kitchen.”

“Willy said the only section not covering the shooting is the funnies page. He’s not far off. They feel like they’re under a microscope, and they don’t like the second-guessing that’s already started-excessive force, endangering the public, all the rest. There’s a rumor that one of the Leungs’ neighbors is considering a lawsuit because of the stress we put them through. I had a meeting with the squad this afternoon-just to make sure everyone’s on track-and you could’ve cut the air with a knife. Only Dennis was normal… Oh, and Ron’s on administrative leave. Seems like the shooting totally pulled the rug out from under him.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“I tried to-spoke with Wendy instead. Anyway, it means we’re a man down.” I took a long swig from my Coke. I didn’t bother mentioning Sally Javits’s last words of warning.

“I take it the case isn’t going too well, either?” Gail commented gently.

“I’ll give you an example. There may be a crooked credit-card angle tied into the Thomas Lee home invasion, so I called the investigation branches of some of the major card companies and told them I was worried about a possible fraud taking place at the Blue Willow Restaurant in Brattleboro, Vermont. I could almost hear them yawning. They told me-though not in so many words-that certain losses are built into the budget, and that any fraud emanating from a Podunk backwater like ours wouldn’t amount to much. They took down the information and thanked me very much, but you know what that means.

“Any other time, we get one dead body, we know pretty much what to do about it. Now we’ve got five and we’re basically nowhere. And on top of that,” I concluded, “I’m no longer sure the guy I’ve been after isn’t a figment of somebody else’s imagination.”

“I’ve lost you, Joe,” Gail said, smiling at my rambling.

“No one’s ever set eyes on the mysterious Mr. Sonny. I’m beginning to think Michael Vu made him up.”

The phone rang inside the house. Gail moved to answer it, but I got to my feet first. “I thought that damned thing was off the hook.”

She gave me a warning look. “Dinner’ll be ready in five minutes, okay?”

It was Dennis DeFlorio. “Hi, boss, sorry to call you at home, but I got something I thought you’d like to hear right away. Remember you asked me to look into Michael Vu’s background in California, for something beyond his rap sheet?”

I shifted my weight impatiently. I’d received this update right before I’d gone out to meet Sally Javits. “Yes.”

“I think I might have found something. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with Vu, but Sammie was real excited about it.” He paused, as if he’d just given me something I could work with.

“Keep going, Dennis,” I encouraged him, used to his style.

“Right, well, after you left this afternoon, I got hold of a cop who’d dealt with Vu. He wasn’t real helpful-friendly enough, but kind of busy. I got to talking to him about what had happened here, you know, trading war stories and stuff, and I mentioned Henry Lam. He jumped on the name, said he’d dealt with Lam as a juvie. ’Course, it was a long time ago and, like I said, he was busy, but he told me to talk to a caseworker who’d handled Lam early on, from when he first came to America. He said this caseworker was super-involved with the Asians-that since he was retired now and a regular civilian again, he’d probably be free to give you the lowdown on Lam and maybe some of his buddies.”

“Up-to-date information?” I asked, my interest caught. Lam’s only official appearance in the information network-that of his license registration-had been on the East Coast. This sudden California connection created a potential historical link to both Michael Vu and Truong Van Loc.

“I guess. He hasn’t been retired long.”

“This is good news, Dennis. Nice job. Did you or Sammie call him?”

There was a predictable pause on the other end. The response, when it came, fit Dennis like a glove. Having started out well, he was unsure of how to proceed. “No… Sammie told me to, since she’s kind of swamped, and I was about to, but then I figured if this guy is as good as the cop said he was, you’d probably want to talk to him anyway. You know-ask him things I wouldn’t think of, maybe.”

I smiled at the receiver and shook my head, all traces of my earlier depression washed away. “What’s his name?”

“Jason Brown.” He gave me the number. “That’s a business number. He works full-time as a hospice volunteer now.”

Gail appeared in the doorway as I was writing it down.

“Dennis,” I said, “if Willy’s around, put him on, will you?”

Kunkle came on the line a minute later, sounding peevish. “What?” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Relax,” I told him. “You’ll like this. Find Alfie Brewster. Sally Javits thinks Brewster might’ve set up both Vu and Sharkey for that shoot-out. Find out if he supplied Vince with the goodies for last night’s smoke-’n’-dope bash and if he knew about the home invasion ahead of time, okay?”

Predictably, Willy sounded suddenly more cheerful. “Sure.”

“But be careful,” I warned him. “Sally also told me he’s surrounded himself with hired help.”

Kunkle merely laughed and hung up.

“No dinner?” Gail asked from the door.

“Maybe. I’d like to see if I can contact this character first, if only to set up an appointment.” I checked my watch. “He lives in California-should still be at work.” I passed along briefly what Dennis had told me.

“Can I listen in? Sounds interesting.”

I hesitated a moment. It wasn’t a request she’d ever made in the past, nor was it even remotely within department rules. On the other hand, she and Tony Brandt were my two best sounding boards, and with Tony in his present mood, I wasn’t sure how much I could lean on him. Besides, I rationalized, with Gail’s ambitions to be a prosecutor, she was almost a part of the family.

“Okay,” I said.

She disappeared to turn off the stove while I dialed long distance. By the time she returned, a portable phone in hand, I was waiting for Jason Brown to come on the line.

“Hello?” His voice was deep, quiet, and curiously comforting-the voice of an older man.

“Mr. Brown, my name is Joe Gunther. I’m a lieutenant with the Brattleboro Police Department in Vermont.”

“Hello, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”

I found the lack of usual chitchat about Vermont and its quaint and provincial reputation-or my profession-reassuring.

“I’m on a bit of a fishing expedition, really. Did you ever have dealings with a young Asian calling himself Henry Lam?”

“Yes, I did,” came the immediate answer. “What’s he been up to?”

It was a fair question-Jason Brown didn’t know anything about me. But I also didn’t know him-or whether he and Lam had enjoyed a lasting friendship. Telling him right off the bat that I had killed him seemed a little impolitic.

I hedged a bit. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Ah.” Brown’s voice trailed off, and I heard the sense of loss in the brief silence. “I thought that might happen.”

“You had some trouble with him?” I asked diplomatically.

“Not personally,” Brown answered, “but he was more prone to the wrong sort of influence than some of them. He wasn’t very old when we met-just nine-but he’d had a terrible time of it and had already been in trouble a few times. Meeting him was a little like seeing someone just beyond your reach, sinking out of sight underwater.”

I could tell from Gail’s expression that she was as struck by the image, and the sympathy in Brown’s voice, as I was.

“How did he die?” came the inevitable question.

The truth would have been simply, “In a shoot-out with the police,” but I took a gamble that a little generosity would serve me well here.

“I’m afraid I had to shoot him. He opened up on me with a machine gun.”

The response was unexpected. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes. Some of my clothes got slightly shot up, but I’m fine. He was part of a home-invasion team, and my partner and I sort of stumbled into them. We don’t know who the other two were-they died, too. We’re trying to figure out where they came from, and why they were in our neck of the woods.”

“Yes, I don’t guess Brattleboro is much like L.A. Tell me something, these other two boys, were they younger than Henry?”

“They certainly looked it-mid-teens, I would guess.”

I could almost visualize him nodding at the other end of the line, reflectively taking his time.

I opened my mouth to say something, but Gail shook her head.

She was right. The next thing Brown said was, “Maybe I should tell you what I know about Henry Lam.”

I smiled at Gail and merely answered, “Please.”

“When I met him years ago, he was already as tough as nails, and God knows he should’ve been, considering everything he’d been through. He was Vietnamese by birth, but of Chinese heritage, which in Vietnam is a little like being black in the South in the fifties. After the Communist takeover, the fact that his father had been with the South Vietnamese Army made life pretty difficult for the whole family. Henry was only a year old when the U.S. was booted out of there in ’74, and his father tried to get by for about six years afterward.

“Around 1980, the whole family-Henry, his parents, and two sisters, one older, one younger-cashed in whatever savings they had and paid some crook for space on a boat heading out. Not surprisingly, things didn’t go well. It took me a while to get him to open up-although ‘open up’ is probably the wrong phrase with him-but I eventually found out what happened.

“The boat was just a small fishing rig-not designed to hold more than maybe ten people at most-and there must’ve been more than fifty on board. But the plan wasn’t to sail too far anyway. The boat owner was in cahoots with local pirates. About a day or two out to sea, he killed the engine, claimed it had broken down, and had them sit there in open water while he faked a repair job. Eventually, the pirates showed up on another, much bigger boat, and worked them over good and proper. Everyone was robbed, virtually all the women were raped, including Henry’s mother and older sister, and all the men and really small children-and Henry’s father and the other sister-were executed and thrown overboard.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Right. Hell of a thing for a seven-year-old kid. Anyway, the pirates took who was left with them, sold the women off as prostitutes-Henry never saw his mother and sister again-and were planning to sell the young males as slaves. At that point, things suddenly improved. There was a raid on the place Henry was being held, and the authorities placed him in a refugee holding camp for people hoping to come to the States.”

Brown paused a moment. “Is this more than you want to know?”

“No, no,” I answered quickly, amazed at my luck. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. Well, the camp was the pits-a training school for crooks and perverts, but it also provided one of the most effective networking systems I’ve ever seen. I mean, not all these camps are as bad as this one was-a lot of it depends on who’s running them and which country it’s in-but all of them seem to graduate refugees who keep in touch, no matter where they end up. The sense of village unity that most of these folks were born with is transferred onto the larger population of the camp. They become like family to one another. Whether they like each other or not, whether they’re crooked or straight, everybody ends up connected for life. Part of it’s because many of them spend years in the camps waiting for the chance to finally emigrate, but I also think it’s a little like a primer course in ghetto living. The strong ones, the ones with families intact, and especially the older adults, manage to survive. But the kids like Henry are pretty much doomed to end up in what the Chinese call the Dark Root, the underworld. They’ve got to hang onto someone, after all, and all that’s left are the slightly older, equally dispossessed male hoods. They’re a tiny minority of the overall population, but because of the social dynamics, they exert an incredible influence that ties into a heritage born of centuries of either foreign domination or dictatorial rule by feudal tyrants.

“In any case, by the time Henry got to California, he was a hardened crook, living off his fellow humans, dedicated to grabbing what he could get, and-although he couldn’t have articulated it-living totally without hope, resigned to having his life end violently at a moment’s notice.”

“How old was he when he reached California?” I asked.

“Nine. I met him less than a year later as part of my job. I was supposed to counsel and evaluate underage offenders, and then file suggestions that might help both them and the state find some common ground. Of course, almost none of the kids gave a damn anyway, and nobody in the bureaucracy either knew what my paperwork was for or had enough money to implement my recommendations. Kids like Henry just kept falling through the cracks, and getting into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Guns, drugs, gambling. Children are used as runners, lookouts, to hold contraband. The older ones know the judicial system doesn’t deal with minors well, so it doesn’t much matter if they get caught, since all we do is throw them back. But while Henry never played a direct role in any of the violent stuff, he saw it done often enough that he came to see it as normal behavior.”

“We think the group Henry was mixed into here has ties to Montreal.”

Brown laughed. “I’ll guarantee it, and to New York and Boston and Falls Church and Lowell and Bismarck, North Dakota, for all I know. I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I realize you’re trying to do your homework. I talk to the police a lot-or I used to-and the one thing I kept drumming into them is that they should throw out every preconception they have about organized crime when it comes to Asians. These people aren’t just mobile-they’re fluid, both geographically and in terms of alliances. I was always being asked, ‘What about this gang?’ or ‘What about that leader?’ or ‘Is this type of tattoo significant?’ But those labels will only mislead you. You’ll spend all your time trying to put together Cosa Nostra-type organizational charts, and by the time you’re done, none of the people you pegged down will be where they were when you started, and few of them will even have the same interrelationships. A leader in one group becomes a soldier in another. Enemies in one town become allies in another. That’s what living one day at a time really means.

“It’s true that there are established gangs out here-Born to Kill, Ghost Shadows, the Wah Ching, God knows how many others. Some of them have direct ties to the tongs in New York and even to the triads back in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and work almost like branches of a corporate whole. On an organizational level, they make the Mob look pathetic. But underneath that huge, interconnected, well-oiled machine, you’ve got dozens of nonaligned freelancers, like the people you’re probably dealing with.”

“I get what you’re saying, Mr. Brown,” I told him, familiar with much that he’d just told me. “But you said these folks keep in touch, so that no matter where they are, they’ve always got a place to go. If that’s true, then some of the same names must keep cropping up.”

“To a certain degree,” he agreed cautiously, “although many of them use our difficulty with their names against us, switching them around or changing them entirely. Henry Lam obviously wasn’t born with that name, for example, although it appears he kept it to the end. And we’re dealing in huge numbers here-while the criminal element is small in proportion to the overall Asian population, that population is still vast-the ‘overseas Chinese,’ as they call them, are fifty-five-million strong-so we’re talking about a criminal element of hundreds of thousands.”

“Have you ever heard of Michael Vu?” I asked almost abruptly, hoping to head off a far less pertinent lecture.

“No,” came the remarkably short reply.

I thought back to the name Amy Lee had given me. “How ’bout someone named Tri?”

“That’s a first name-right up there with ‘Bob’.”

That stung-intentionally, I thought. I didn’t bother with Ut or An-the two men killed at the Leung house-and sure as hell not Sonny. “Truong Van Loc?”

“No-sorry.”

“Edward Diep?”

“Lieutenant,” Jason Brown answered, his voice betraying his own thinning patience, “I don’t think this is going to get you anywhere. There are just under a million Vietnamese in California alone, not to mention countless Cambodians, Laotians, Chinese, Hmong, and anything else you can think of. You got lucky with Henry Lam. Given all I just told you about their mobility and numbers, I doubt we’ll be able to come up with another match.”

“One last name,” I asked, making even Gail’s eyebrows rise at my persistence. “There was a tattoo on the arm of one of the men who died with Lam, and under it were the initials CTG. Does that ring a bell?”

Brown burst out laughing. “My God, Lieutenant. You will make me eat my words, won’t you? Yes, it does. Are the initials in the web of the left hand, between the thumb and index?”

“Yes,” I answered, smiling with relief, “and the tattoo is of a crawling panther.”

“It stands for Chinatown Gang. They operated briefly in the Bay Area, and then were either absorbed by the bigger groups or dispersed. Now that you mention it, in fact, they were sort of like the gang you’re involved with-freelancers. They were trying to carve out some territory for themselves-make a name, gain some respect. That’s why the tattoo-they had big ambitions to become the next Born to Kill. But if you want to find out what really made them tick, talk to Nicky Tai. He used to run with them. He’s straight now-joined an uncle in the restaurant-supplies business. You’ll have to deal with him gently, though. He’s not a squealer. He left because Chinatown Gang collapsed and he had nowhere to go. Between you and me, he’d run out of gas, but whether he still has a sense of loyalty to that life, or he just knows that talking to cops is an unhealthy pastime, your profession will not be an asset to you.”

“All right,” I said as I wrote down the phone number and address he gave me.

“One last thing,” Brown added, his voice full of good humor. “Just to prove there are such things as miracles. I seem to remember that, as a little kid, Henry Lam used to hang out with Chinatown Gang. He was too young to merit a tattoo, and he moved with other gangs as well, but that’s another connection you might be able to use.”

I took one last shot, my eagerness overriding good manners. “Do you know if one of the other gangs he hung out with was the Dragon Boys?”

“I believe it was.”

I sat back in my chair, for the first time flushed with the feeling that I might be getting somewhere with all this. Michael Vu had been with the Dragon Boys also-back in the old days.

“Thanks for the information, Mr. Brown. You’ve been a glass of water in the desert.”

There was a telling pause at the other end. “Don’t make any assumptions, Lieutenant. You’ll never really get a handle on all this-no more than any of the rest of us.”