The Dark Root

7

Geographically, Hartford Township is a hard item to pin down. Of the five villages that form it, three-Hartford, White River Junction, and Wilder-are so seamlessly joined as to be the same entity, while Quechee and West Hartford, economically and physically removed, are like far-distant satellites. Adding to the confusion is West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a stone’s throw across the Connecticut River, whose high-pitched commercial bustling makes all the others look like suburbs.

But even the village of West Leb, as it’s called, falls prey to competition. Its tax-free commercial advantage is in turn subverted by the most highly developed shopping strip within a forty-mile radius, stretched out along Route 12A about a half mile to the south.

The Hartford Township-West Leb hub, therefore, suffers a bit from second-class status. It’s not quite where the bargain buyers flock, and with high-class Hanover just to the north, home of Dartmouth College, it’s not where the elite shop for designer wear or hobnob over micro-brewery beer in expensive, tasteful, low-fat eateries.

It is, on the other hand, a major crossroads, marking the juncture of two interstates and Vermont’s Route 4, which, according to Detective Heather Dahlin, was a distinctly mixed blessing.

“We’re a transient stopover-a place to take a leak, grab a burger, sleep a few hours, and get back on the road. If you’re an illegal alien heading south or a flatlander going skiing, chances are you’ve stopped here. We’ve got more motels, hotels, and fast-food joints than anywhere between Burlington and Concord. For the type of Asians you’re talking about-the ones who go from place to place, work for peanuts, and live like hamsters, it’s a custom fit. We might not have a hundred Asians in town at any one time, but whenever we check them out, it’s always a new batch.”

“They’re all illegal?” I asked, surprised at the high number.

“Oh, no. Fewer than ten percent have no papers at all, and maybe ten to twenty percent more have counterfeit documents. But we don’t have the expertise to tell the real stuff from the fake. And by treating them all the same, moving them constantly from one place to another, their handlers make it even harder for us to separate the ones who should be here from the ones who shouldn’t.”

“And most of them live there?” I asked, looking to where she was pointing. We were slowly driving by a large, neglected, empty-looking pile of a building on one of White River Junction’s least affluent streets-White River already being the poorest of the township’s five cousins.

“We’ve counted forty at a time in that one, stacked like cordwood, sometimes ten mattresses to a room. We’ve basically got three types of Asians in this whole area-year-round residents who just happen to be Oriental, transients who live in places like that-illegal and other-wise-and the dirt bags that control ’em. The first group’s the majority, and they’re no more trouble than anyone else.”

“What do you do about the others?”

Dahlin shook her head. She was a tall, muscular, attractive woman, with short blond hair and a permanently determined expression. She was one of only three detectives on a force of twenty sworn officers, and I had no doubt she’d honed her personality meeting any and all opposition on its own ground.

“Not much. We come here a lot less than we do to places with one-tenth the occupants, and that’s usually only because some outsider is raising Cain. They keep to themselves, take care of their own problems, and stay out of trouble. The interesting statistic is how rarely we are called. They’re so quiet it makes us suspicious.”

She smiled and shook her head at the irony. “There’re other reasons, of course, but they’re all just as vague. Like, why it is that when most of them work in West Leb and Hanover, they sleep over here? It’s not necessarily cheaper, and it’s an inconvenient commute. All we’ve been able to figure is they’re taking advantage of the two jurisdictions. Work in one state, live in another, it keeps the cops from getting to know them too well-same reason they’re kept on the move. I can show you a couple of restaurants that have worn paths in the grass running from their back doors to the interstate.”

She shifted in her seat restlessly. “But it’s all smoke and no fire. The Border Patrol and INS come down here once in a while, wander around, set up a roadblock on I-91, catch a few illegals. For those few days, the population drops. And as soon as the feds are gone, they’re all back. The seven Asian restaurants in the area do good business-like a ton of other people around here-but retail turnover is hot and heavy, especially in food. Rents go up, competition is fierce, and when the economy wobbles, even the best go under… Except for those seven. They just keep plugging away, paying all their bills in cash. And it’s not because they’re great advertisers or community boosters. They do zero along those lines. It all sounds like money laundering at the very least, but we’ve never found a shred of evidence. We can’t even say all the owners are in cahoots with the crooks, ’cause we’re pretty sure most of them are as coerced as the illegals. They either have to play along, or they’re shit out of luck. Basically, you could call us racist paranoids about all this stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to prove you wrong.”

I nudged her toward the topic at hand. “You must’ve had some problems, though. You filed a report on Michael Vu with Dan Flynn. What was that about?”

She pulled over into a side street and killed the engine in the shade of a large maple tree. A pleasant, flower-scented breeze drifted in through the open window.

“That creep,” she murmured and turned to face me, her gray eyes narrow with anger. “He’s in the third group-the bloodsuckers that keep the others in place. I look at these people, they come from the far side of the world, pledging thirty to forty thousand dollars to some shit to get them over here, and they end up like gerbils in a box, working for years so they can pay off their debts. The FBI says alien smuggling is the most profitable of all organized Asian crime activities. I can believe it.”

She paused, took a breath, and then resumed. “We had a case a few years back. A small group was using a motel room as a warehouse for stolen goods-mostly clothing, bundles of it, stacked to the ceiling. They were going around to all the big retail outlets and robbing them blind. We nailed the actual thieves-never got the bosses-and found out they came from Fukien Province in China. They were illegals who hadn’t been able to keep up on their debt payments to the smugglers by doing legitimate work, because every time they saved enough to make a deposit, they were robbed, sometimes six times in a row. Finally, the smugglers-the same ones who were ripping them off, of course-gave them a choice between being killed or tortured-or having their families take the rap back home-and becoming thieves. They were given a quota. The men we talked to had been doing this for years, and still they weren’t even close to settling their debt.

“The kicker is we only talked to the men, because the women we caught with them were bailed out as soon as the paperwork cleared-never to be seen again. We found out it was so they could work as prostitutes in the city until their tab was settled. A vice cop I know in New York told me that. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘they keep ’em locked up.’ One girl he knew had to turn four hundred tricks before they let her go.” She paused and looked out at the quiet neighborhood around us. “The saddest thing is that when I asked the men we caught how they felt about it all, they had no anger for the people who’d abused them. They were just humiliated at having been caught and probably getting deported. It was the shame they’d brought on their families that really got to them.”

“Are all the transients you see on their way south?” I asked after a few moments.

“It’s a mix. The same New York cop told me they have employment agencies to place illegals and legals both, all over the country, so we probably get some of those. My guess is that most of them are in a pipeline, though. Not, as I said before, that we have proof of any of that.

“The handlers don’t add up to much in numbers,” she continued. “No more than twelve at most-and while they come and go, too, they tend to be more stable, which gives us a chance to get to know them. That doesn’t mean they ever get busted, of course. We know they’re crooked only because they act that way-they shepherd what I call the worker bees, they come and go from the restaurants without paying their tabs, they drive around in expensive cars, and they basically look like enforcer types.

“Michael Vu was one of them, although he didn’t run with the others-he was flashier and a lot more arrogant, which I guess is why he drew my attention. I nailed him twice coming out of restaurants with a red envelope full of cash-red is a good-luck symbol, like a neon sign saying ‘extortion’-but the owners wouldn’t ’fess up. Everything was all smiles and politeness, and Vu went on his way both times, with the money. That’s why I filed his name with Dan-it was the only way I could get even… Pathetic.”

“If he didn’t run with the others,” I asked, “what was he then? An independent? Part of a different gang?”

She didn’t answer immediately, giving herself time to reflect. I became aware of a bird high above us in the tree, singing for all it was worth, lending an incongruously cheerful note to our conversation.

“First off,” she said finally, “I don’t think there are any independents among the crooks-not truly. Everybody’s connected-through race, through religion, family, geographical origin, you name it. You kick one hood over here, and everybody knows it from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The confusion comes because various groups freelance a lot. I hear the Vietnamese are bad that way, but they also contract out to the tongs, or to each other, or to anyone else who needs muscle, especially when cash is low. Makes it hard to pin them down, not knowing who and when, or even if, they’re tied to somebody.

“Michael Vu came out of nowhere, and until you brought him up, he’d disappeared into nowhere, but I still think somebody ran him, and I’d bet that somebody ran the guy who ran him, too. I definitely got the sense Vu called a lot of his own shots-like when he extorted those restaurants. That was pure freelance stuff. But I felt he wasn’t his own boss either-that he kept within some limits that’d been set for him.”

“Any idea why he left?”

“Nothing I could prove. Corporate shuffling, maybe. He was only here a few months, but we’d see him in phone booths and at the post office sometimes, and we followed him to a meet with some people in a motel room once-we never could get an angle on who they were. They used phony names, paid in cash, and drove a rental car. But he sure wasn’t tied to the local boys. They hung out together some, but I always sensed some hostility. We even heard tell of a shoving match between him and one of the head guys here, not long before he left.”

“You think he was in competition?”

She hedged her response. “Could be. There was no violence between him and the locals except that one time, as far as we know-but there was always that distance. Now that you mention it, given his style and the short time he was here, it’s possible Vu was testing the market, putting the squeeze on people to get a reaction and a little spare change, and then reporting back to some boss… It would fit.”

“You ever heard of someone named Sonny?” I asked.

She shook her head.

I tried out the other names I’d accumulated, with the same results. She finally said, “I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t been much help.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I answered. “We’re doing this brick by brick, and you’ve just given us quite a few.”

Ideally, after my conversation with Heather Dahlin in Hartford, I would have assigned round-the-clock surveillance of Michael Vu, as well as the two buildings in Brattleboro that housed an ever-changing community of Asians, and the four Asian restaurants in town. But our operating budget being what it was-and considering that I’d already put a tail on Vince Sharkey-that was out of the question.

What I did was less dramatic, less effective, and more affordable. The following morning, I brought the entire detective squad up to date, sharing with them my suspicions that we were being market-tested for an Asian gang.

“I think you’re getting paranoid,” Willy said flatly, a toothpick in his mouth and one foot propped up on the edge of the conference table. “You said yourself that they feed off each other. What do you guess we have in this town? Maybe a hundred and fifty Asians, four hundred in the whole county? Nothing close to a Chinatown.”

“What about Sally Javits?” countered Sammie.

“I think she’s paranoid, too,” Willy answered. “What do a bunch of kids know, for Christ’s sake? They chuck a brick through a window now and then, spray paint a wall, do a little dope, scare a few merchants who’re dumber than they are. The first slope who walks in with a gun and a sales pitch has ’em all standing around bawling.”

“I know you’re not going to like this,” I interrupted, “but that’s the last time I want to hear ‘slope’ or ‘gook’ or anything like it. It’s wrong, it’ll only cause problems we don’t need, and it’ll alienate the very people who might otherwise help us.”

Kunkle rolled his eyes. “I seriously doubt you’ll get any help from them.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll keep this short, but I want you all to hear me loud and clear. There are just over three thousand Asians living in Vermont-that’s fifty percent more than all the state’s blacks, making them our largest minority. Exactly two of them are in prison. Ninety percent of the others have a work ethic and morals that make the rest of us look degenerate. So while Asians may seem a whole lot different from us, they’re to be treated like everyone else. Do I make my point?”

“If Sonny was only making a sales pitch by killing Benny,” Sammie said quietly, getting us back on track, “he did a hell of a job, and his target sure shoots a hole in the they-only-feed-on-their-own theory.”

I nodded to Tyler. It had been two days since we’d discovered where Travers had eaten his last meal, and I was behind on Tyler’s progress. “What more do we have on Travers’s death?”

His voice slid into its professorial mode. “We’ve been able to piece together what happened to him in the house, more or less, but the people who did it went out of their way to be neat and tidy.” He pulled several sheets of paper from a folder before him. “This is my report-finished this morning. It doesn’t include the blood and fiber samples we sent up to Waterbury. Those results won’t be back for a while, but I don’t expect much anyway. From what I could determine, most of the blood came from Travers, and even if the blood we found under the broken glass on the other counter came from someone else, there’s probably not much we can do with it.”

He sat back in his chair, getting comfortable. “The blood was a help in one way. There was so much of it that his attackers couldn’t get near him without either stepping in it or touching it. Problem is, they all wore gloves-surgical latex, from what I could tell-and those slip-on things surgeons wear over their shoes. We could still tell the general shoe size-which was small, by the way-and the fact that there were three men involved, but that’s about it.

“I analyzed the cut pants. The knife used was razor sharp, and from the marks left on the tabletop, it was the size and shape of a fillet knife, with a thin, slightly curved blade. But they must’ve taken it with them, so I can’t confirm any of that.

“We also found a blue plastic bag, ten-gallon size, which was used over the victim’s head. It was under the table, wadded up behind the pants.”

“How do you know it was used over his head?” asked Dennis DeFlorio. Dennis was our robbery/burglary/B amp; E specialist, just back from vacation. Neither my best nor my brightest, he was nevertheless my most consistent subordinate-not given to moods, or prone to office politics, and utterly dependable to do exactly what he was told, if little beyond that.

“Teeth marks on the inside,” Tyler answered. “You could tell they’d used it to cut off his air supply and that he tried to chew his way out. Suffocation’s not the point, of course. It’s just a way to build up panic.”

“The voice of personal experience?” Willy cracked.

J.P. gave him a rare but telling hostile stare. For all his seeming detachment, Tyler was not unaffected by the ghostly agonies left behind at many of the scenes he investigated. He covered his sensitivity well, but he took no pride in pretending he was unaffected. To his own rare credit, Willy dropped it, feigning a sudden interest in his coffee.

“The point is,” J.P. concluded, “that this was neither spur of the moment nor the work of amateurs. It’s difficult to extract oneself from such a scene without leaving something incriminating behind. But that’s what these people did. And the use of gloves and booties implies prior experience.”

“How ’bout the duct tape?” I asked. “Could you trace that?”

He shook his head. “It’s cheaper-grade stuff-something you could get at any discount store anywhere. In fact, that’s the reason Benny got away. At some point, they must’ve either taken a break or gone off to talk privately, because they all left the kitchen and went into the living room. I found small traces of blood from their feet in there, and I could tell from disturbances in the dust where they’d cleared three seats for themselves. Travers took advantage of the opportunity to tear his right hand free and get loose. He escaped through the kitchen door, which leads into a sort of garage-barn combination, where he’d hidden the repainted car.”

A donut halfway to his mouth, DeFlorio asked, “Without his pants?”

Sammie gave him a scowl and pushed Tyler’s report toward him. “They’d been torturing him, Dennis. They cut his pants off and used the knife on his balls. He didn’t care how he looked.”

It wasn’t totally fair. This was the man’s first day back on the job, and Tyler had been delicately circumspect in his description of Travers’s ordeal. Dennis’s hand froze. He looked around self-consciously, murmured, “Right,” and replaced the donut in its colorful box.

I tried to cover the embarrassed silence. “Ron, what’s Vince Sharkey been up to since we put that tail on him?”

Klesczewski pulled a note pad from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “Not much. Hanging around the Flat Street address that houses some of the Asians, watching from his car, partway down the block.”

“Is there any sense that he’s up to something?”

Ron shook his head. “He’s been meeting with his boys, but so far we haven’t seen anything unusual.”

I looked over at Willy. “Anything from your sources?”

“Word has it you threw Vince in the river. Right now, it sounds like he’s more pissed at you than at any goo… Asian. Things have settled down a bit over the last two days. Vu and his people have been quiet, the old patterns are starting to pick up again, and nobody’s seen hide nor tail of Sonny.”

“But what about Benny’s operations?” I pressed him. “What’s the feeling out there? Is Vince going to inherit the business, or is he going to have to fight Vu for it?”

Kunkle wobbled his hand from side to side equivocally. “Vince doesn’t get much respect without Benny around. If Vu or Sonny knocked off Benny to grab his business, there’s not much Vince can do about it.”

“So, was hassling Scott Fisher and Alfie Brewster and the others just his looking for a soft spot, or is Sonny out to dominate everything in town?” I asked.

Sol Stennis, who was in on this meeting because of his knowledge of juvenile crime, now spoke up for the first time. “Vu’s been dropping by the local hangouts a lot, talking to the kids like a recruiter, using Sonny’s name. He’s paid for a few parties and takes people for drives in a new Beemer he just picked up. Rumors are he’s offering drugs and guns and cars to any converts. It’s looking pretty serious. He’s also been making regular visits to the Asian restaurants and businesses, probably to keep himself financed.”

I turned to Billy Manierre, the rotund and avuncular chief of patrol, who commanded the uniformed troops. “We can’t afford an around-the-clock tail on him, but I want Michael Vu to see us damn near every time he looks up. I want him pulled over for minor traffic violations, questioned for anything he or one of his people does that warrants a conversation, and I want everyone he deals with to feel the same heat. Keep in touch on the radio when you see him around town, and keep him company as much as you can. And take pictures-I want to build a photo album of everyone he contacts. Asians, whites… I don’t care. And get names if you can. Don’t be subtle. Word should get out fast that dealing with Michael Vu is like dealing with us.”

Manierre nodded, and I addressed the others. “In the meantime, I want us digging into this clown’s background, beyond just his rap sheet. I want calls made to California to find out where he came from, who he hung out with, where he’s been. I want to know what he’s been suspected of doing, as well as everything he’s done. Dennis, once you’ve checked what’s on your desk, maybe you could start on that.

“Also, none of us has even set eyes on Sonny yet. I want to find out how the two of them keep in touch. Find out if Vu makes a habit of using a particular pay phone. And ask around about Sonny, too-find out who, if anyone, has seen the guy, or had a conversation with him, and if they have, get a description, a psychological profile, anything you can. We need to know who Sonny is.

“And J.P., don’t give up on that crime scene yet. That routine with the tape, the chair, the knife, and the plastic bag sounds like a practiced MO. Circulate the details everywhere you think makes sense, especially cities with big Chinatowns, like San Francisco and New York. And don’t forget Canada. Toronto not only has the oldest Chinatown on the continent, but it’s considered the primary trans-shipment point for aliens coming into this country.”

Tyler nodded silently.

I held up a cautioning finger and looked specifically at Kunkle. “But, remember, leaning on Vu does not mean leaning on every Asian you come across. It’s the innocent people who are the primary targets of gangsters like this, so we’re working for them, not against them, all right?”

“What about the tail on Vince?” Ron asked. “You want that maintained?”

I thought for a moment. My just-completed speech to the contrary, I hadn’t totally overruled Willy’s dismissal of all this as paranoia. Twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance was beginning to sound excessive, especially given what little it had produced. Besides, if we started watching Michael Vu with a magnifying glass, we’d pick up Vince Sharkey if he wandered within sight.

“No,” I answered him, “I think we can call it off.” But a small doubt lingered-one I hoped I wouldn’t come to regret.