The Bad Place

Page 20

“Whatever.”
“Mr. Karaghiosis, you seem terribly blase about this. Do you fully understand what I’ve said? This would appear to be an entirely new species, which would be extraordinary. Because how could any such species, producing individuals of this size, be overlooked for so long? This is going to be big news in the world of entomology, Mr. Karaghiosis, very big news.”
Clint looked at the bug in the bottle.
He said, “Yeah, I figured.”
32
FROM THE hospital, Bobby and Julie drove a company Toyota into the county’s western flatlands to Garden Grove, looking for 884 Serape Way, the address on the driver’s license that Frank held in the name of George Farris.
Julie peered through the rain-dappled side windows and forward between the thumping windshield wipers, checking house numbers.
The street was lined with bright sodium-vapor lamps and thirty-year-old, single-story homes. They had been built in two basic, boxy models, but an illusion of individuality was provided by a variety of trim. This one was stucco with brick accents. That one was stucco with cedar-shingle panels—or Bouquet Canyon stone or desert bark or volcanic rock.
California was not all Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Newport Beach, not all mansions and seaside villas, which was the television image. Economies of home design had made the California dream accessible to the waves of immigrants that for decades had flooded in from back east, and now from farther shores—as was evident from Vietnamese- and Korean-language bumper stickers on some cars parked along Serape.
“Next block,” Julie said. “My side.”
Some people said such neighborhoods were a blot on the land, but to Bobby they were the essence of democracy. He had been raised on a street like Serape Way, north in Anaheim instead of Garden Grove, and it had never seemed ugly. He remembered playing with other kids on long summer evenings, when the sun set with orange and crimson flares, and the feathery silhouettes of the backlit palms were as black as ink drawings against the sky; at twilight the air sometimes smelled of star jasmine and echoed with the cry of a lingering sea gull far to the west. He remembered what it meant to be a kid with a bicycle in California—the vistas for exploration, the grand possibilities for adventure; every street of stucco homes, seen for the first time and from the seat of a Schwinn, had seemed exotic.
Two coral trees dominated the yard at 884 Serape. The white blooms of the azalea bushes were softly radiant in the bleak night.
Tinted by the sodium-vapor streetlamps, the falling rain looked like molten gold. But as Bobby hurried along the walkway behind Julie, the rain was almost as cold as sleet on his face and hands. He was wearing a warmly lined, nylon jacket with a hood, but he shivered.
Julie rang the doorbell. The porch light came on, and Bobby sensed someone looking them over through the fisheye lens in the front door. He pushed back his hood and smiled.
The door opened on a security chain, and an Asian man peered out. He was in his forties, short, slender, with black hair fading to gray at the temples. “Yes?”
Julie showed him her private investigator’s license and explained that they were looking for someone named George Farris.
“Police?” The man frowned. “Nothing wrong, no need for police.”
“No, see, we’re private investigators,” Bobby explained.
The man’s eyes narrowed. He looked as if he would close the door in their faces, but abruptly he brightened, smiled. “Oh, you’re PI! Like on TV.” He took the chain off the door and let them in.
Actually he didn’t just let them in, he welcomed them as if they were honored guests. Within three minutes flat, they learned his name was Tuong Tran Phan (the order of his names having been rearranged to accommodate the western custom of putting the surname last), that he and his wife, Chinh, were among the boat people who fled Vietnam two years after the fall of Saigon, that they had worked in laundries and dry cleaners, and eventually opened two dry-cleaning stores of their own. Tuong insisted on taking their coats. Chinh—a petite woman with delicate features, dressed in baggy black slacks and a yellow silk blouse—said she would provide refreshments, even though Bobby explained that only a few minutes of their time was required.
Bobby knew first-generation Vietnamese-Americans were sometimes suspicious of policemen, even to the extent of being reluctant to call for help when they were victims of crime. The South Vietnamese police often had been corrupt, and the North Vietnamese overlords, who seized the South after the U.S. withdrawal, had been murderous. Even after fifteen years or longer in the States, many Vietnamese remained at least somewhat distrustful of all authorities.
In the case of Tuong and Chinh Phan, however, that suspicion did not extend to private investigators. Evidently they had seen so many heroic television gumshoes, they believed all PIs were champions of the underdog, knights with blazing .38s instead of lances. In their roles as liberators of the oppressed, Bobby and Julie were conducted, with some ceremony, to the sofa, which was the newest and best piece of furniture in the living room.
The Phans marshaled their exceptionally good-looking children in the living room for introductions: thirteen-year-old Rocky, ten-year-old Sylvester, twelve-year-old Sissy, and six-year-old Meryl. They were obviously born-and-raised Americans, except that they were refreshingly more courteous and well-mannered than many of their contemporaries. When introductions had been made, the kids returned to the kitchen, where they had been doing their schoolwork.
In spite of their polite protestations, Bobby and Julie were swiftly served coffee laced with condensed milk and exquisite little Vietnamese pastries. The Phans had coffee as well.
Tuong and Chinh sat in worn armchairs that were visibly less comfortable than the sofa. Most of their furniture was in simple contemporary styles and neutral colors. A small Buddhist shrine stood in one corner; fresh fruit lay on the red altar, and several sticks of incense bristled from ceramic holders. Only one stick was lit, and a pale-blue ribbon of fragrant smoke curled upward. The only other Asian elements were black-lacquered tables.
“We’re looking for a man who might once have lived at this address,” Julie said, selecting one of the petits fours from the tray on which Mrs. Phan had served them. “His name’s George Farris.”
“Yes. He lived here,” Tuong said, and his wife nodded.
Bobby was surprised. He had been certain that the Farris name and the address had been randomly matched by a document forger, that Frank had never lived here. Frank had been equally certain that Pollard, not Farris, was his real name.
“You bought this house from George Farris?” Julie asked.
Tuong said, “No, he was dead.”
“Dead?” Bobby asked.
“Five or six years ago,” Tuong said. “Terrible cancer.”
Then Frank Pollard wasn’t Farris and hadn’t lived here. The ID was entirely fake.
“We bought house just a few months ago from widow,” Tuong said. His English was good, though occasionally he dropped the article before the noun. “No, what I mean to say—from widow’s estate.”
Julie said, “So Mrs. Farris is dead too.”
Tuong turned to his wife, and a meaningful look passed between them. He said, “It is very sad. Where do such men come from?”
Julie said, “What man are you speaking of, Mr. Phan?”
“The one who killed Mrs. Farris, her brother, two daughters.”
Something seemed to slither and coil in Bobby’s stomach. He instinctively liked Frank Pollard and was certain of his innocence, but suddenly a worm of doubt bored into the fine, polished apple of his conviction. Could it be just a coincidence that Frank was carrying the ID of a man whose family had been slaughtered—or was Frank responsible? He was chewing a bite of cream-filled pastry, and though it was tasty, he had trouble swallowing it.
“It was late July,” Chinh said. “During the heat wave, which you may remember.” She blew on her coffee to cool it. Bobby noticed that most of the time Chinh spoke perfect English, and he suspected that her occasional infelicities of language were conscious mistakes that she inserted in order not to seem more well-spoken than her husband, a subtle and thoroughly Asian courtesy. “We buy house last October.”
“They never catch the killer,” Tuong Phan said.
“Do they have a description of him?” Julie asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Reluctantly Bobby glanced at Julie. She appeared to be as shaken as he was, but she did not give him an I-told-you-so look.
She said, “How were they murdered? Shot? Strangled?”
“Knife, I think. Come. I show you where bodies were found.”
The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but one bath was being remodeled. The tile had been torn off the walls, floor, and counter. The cabinets were being rebuilt with quality oak.
Julie followed Tuong into the bathroom, and Bobby stayed at the doorway with Mrs. Phan.
The rattle-hiss of the rain echoed down through the ceiling vent.
Tuong said, “Body of youngest Farris daughter was here, on the floor. She was thirteen. Terrible thing. Much blood. The grout between tiles was permanently stained, all had to come out.”
He led them into the bedroom his daughters shared. Twin beds, nightstands, and two small desks left little room for anything else. But Sissy and Meryl had squeezed in a lot of books.
Tuong Phan said, “Mrs. Farris’s brother, staying with her for a week, was killed here. In his bed. Blood was on walls, carpet.”
“We saw the house before it was listed with a real-estate agent, before the carpet was replaced and the walls repainted,” Chinh Phan said. “This room was the worst. It gave me bad dreams for a while.”
They proceeded to the sparely furnished master bedroom: a queen-size bed, nightstands, two ginger-jar lamps, but no bureau or chest of drawers. The clothes that would not fit in the closet were arranged along one wall, in cardboard storage boxes with clear plastic lids.
Their frugality struck Bobby as similar to his and Julie’s. Perhaps they, too, had a dream for which they were working and saving.
Tuong said, “Mrs. Farris was found in this room, in her bed. Terrible things were done to her. She was bitten, but they never wrote about that in newspapers.”
“Bitten?” Julie asked. “By what?”
“Probably by killer. On the face, throat ... other places.”
“If they didn’t write about it in the papers,” Bobby said, “how do you know about the bites?”
“Neighbor who found bodies still lives next door. She says that both older daughter and Mrs. Farris were bitten.”
Mrs. Phan said, “She’s not the kind to imagine such things.”
“Where was the second daughter found?” Julie asked.
“Please follow me.” Tuong led them back the way they had come, through the living room and dining room, into the kitchen.
The four Phan children were sitting around a breakfast table. Three of them were diligently reading textbooks and taking notes. No television or radio provided distraction, and they appeared to be enjoying their studies. Even Meryl, who was a first-grader and probably had no homework to speak of, was reading a children’s book.
Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid’s grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible.
Throughout the country, universities were in a bind, because an inordinately large percentage of the best applicants for admission were of Asian extraction. Blacks and Hispanics complained about being aced out by another minority, and whites shouted reverse racism when denied admission in favor of an Asian student. Some attributed Asian-Americans’ success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based—including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals.
The kitchen was open to a family room that was furnished as humbly as the rest of the house.
Tuong said, “Oldest Farris girl found here by sofa. Seventeen.”
“Very pretty girl,” Chinh said sadly.
“She, like mother, was bitten. So our neighbor says.”
Julie said, “What about the other victims, the younger daughter and Mrs. Farris’s brother—were they bitten too?”
“Don’t know,” Tuong said.
“The neighbor didn’t see their bodies,” Chinh said.
They were silent for a moment, looking at the floor where the dead girl had been found, as if the enormity of this crime was such that the stain of it should somehow have reappeared on this brand-new carpet. Rain droned on the roof.
Bobby said, “Doesn’t it sometimes bother you to live here? Not because murders took place in these rooms, but because the killer was never found. Don’t you worry about him coming back some night?”
Chinh nodded.
Tuong said, “Everywhere is danger. Life itself is danger. Less risky never being born.” A faint smile flickered across his face and was gone. “Leaving Vietnam in tiny boat was more danger than this.”
Glancing at the table in the adjoining kitchen, Bobby saw the four kids still deeply involved with their studies. The prospect of a murderer returning to the scene of this crime did not faze them.
“In addition to dry-cleaning,” Chinh said, “we remodel houses, sell them. This is fourth. We will live here maybe another year, remodeling room by room, then sell, take a profit.”
Tuong said, “Because of murders, some people would not consider moving here after the Farrises. But danger is also opportunity.”
“When we finish with the house,” Chinh said, “it won’t just be remodeled. It will be clean, spiritually clean. Do you understand? The innocence of the house will be restored. We will have chased out the evil that the killer brought here, and we’ll have left our own spiritual imprint on these rooms.”
Nodding, Tuong said, “That is a satisfaction.”
Removing the forged driver’s license from his pocket, Bobby held it so his fingers covered the name and address, leaving the photograph visible. “Do you recognize this man?”
“No,” Tuong said, and Chinh agreed.
As Bobby put the license away, Julie said, “Do you know what George Farris looked like?”