LITMIR.BIZ

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      Beauprix looked at me and, when he spoke, his voice was in some middle ground between concern and challenge—a male cop struggling to figure out how to relate to a woman who is not his mother, sister, lover or a hooker or a perp.

      “Sure you can you handle this?” he said.

      “I’m not a rookie,” I said, implying that my experience with corpses was recent and professional. Certainly the memory of those who had died around me on a small boat in the South China Sea remained vivid.

      “All right then,” Beauprix said.

      He pulled the drawer and it slid noiselessly open, releasing a draft that briefly intensified the cold and the smell in the room. Inside the drawer was a corpse shrouded in a dark green sheet.

      Beauprix grasped the edge of the sheet, folded it back and revealed the face of a young man. Waxy yellow skin. Blue lips. Darkly hollow eyes. An angular face with a thin growth of long, silky hair on the chin and upper lip. Largish ears. Dark, straight hair clumped with dried blood.

      Suddenly the autopsy room was airless and much too warm. And everything seemed to be slowly rotating….

      A strong hand grasped my arm.

      “Don’t you faint on me, little girl,” Beauprix said.

      His voice made it a challenge.

      Anger cleared my head and I pulled away from his support. I lifted my chin, swallowing the bitter liquid that had pooled at the back of my throat, and took a deep breath. The sharp whiff of menthol made it possible for me to ignore the smell that accompanied the oxygen.

      “I’m okay,” I said shortly. “Get on with it.”

      “Nguyen Tri,” Beauprix said. “Five foot five. One hundred twenty-five pounds. Body found below the I-10 bridge on the east side of the Inner Harbor Canal.”

      He said the words as if he was reading from a clip board, as if the boy was nothing more than a number on a toe tag. I wondered if the fate of this child was nothing more to him than a job. Curiosity compelled me to lean forward and turn my head so that I could look directly into Beauprix’s face. Our eyes met.

      “Tomorrow, we’re releasing the body. His family will be burying him on his eighteenth birthday,” Beauprix continued without pausing. But I knew, without a doubt, that his indifference was feigned.

      I looked away, refocusing on the boy’s face. But some detached part of me was still thinking about Beauprix. About what I had glimpsed in his eyes. Could I capture that suffering, I wondered, with pen and ink? And that thought led me to wonder if I wasn’t the coldhearted monster in this vignette.

      “The trauma to the head—” I began and was surprised when the words emerged as a whisper. I cleared my throat. “The trauma to the head,” I repeated. “Was that the cause of death?”

      Beauprix used a gloved hand to part the young man’s longish hair.

      “You see how little blood there is here, in spite of the relatively large wound? That’s an indication that the blow was delivered after the time of death. Judging from this mark here, he was struck with a sharp—”

      “What killed him?” I interrupted.

      “It isn’t going to be pretty….”

      “I need to know.”

      He pulled the sheet away.

      “He was tortured. Then dumped.”

      Beauprix’s voice mixed oddly with the ringing in my ears. I saw brown-encrusted punctures and slashes. Distorted hands with mutilated fingers. And a deep wound just over the heart.

      My head throbbed, my cheeks and ears burned, tears blurred my eyes. Bile rose in my throat, filled my mouth. I gagged and turned blindly away, seeking escape.

      I felt Beauprix’s hands on my shoulders.

      “Hang on,” he murmured, and there was nothing but sympathy in his tone. “Bathroom’s just around the corner.” He guided me through the door near Joe’s desk, across the foyer and into a tiny rest room. “Go ahead. Throw up. You’ll feel better.”

      Chapter 5

      I entered Uncle Tinh’s hotel through a locked door on a narrow alley. The word Private was stenciled on the door, which was just a few feet removed from the entrance to the restaurant’s kitchen. During my first visit to New Orleans, Uncle Tinh had given me a key to the private door.

      Unlocked, the door swung open to reveal a small foyer and a smooth wall of marble hung with two simply framed photos. One photo was in color, taken of Uncle Tinh standing in front of Tinh’s City Vu. Matted in the same frame was a newspaper article about the hotel’s recent renovation and the restaurant’s grand opening.

      The other photo was older, black-and-white, and looked like a candid shot. In it, a middle-aged Vietnamese man, who I recognized as Uncle Tinh, sat at a sidewalk café sharing a meal with a group of American soldiers and journalists. He wore a uniform shirt, but the camera angle made it impossible to see his rank. Everyone in the photo was laughing or smiling.

      The photo had been taken just weeks before Saigon fell to the Vietcong, Uncle Tinh had told me. Uncle Tinh was among those taken by chopper from the rooftop of the American embassy to an aircraft carrier bound for Hong Kong. From there, he had immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Evanston, Illinois. In all the years I’d known him, I had never heard Uncle Tinh speak of who or what he’d left behind.

      To the left of the foyer entrance was a highly polished wood panel that, at the push of a button, slid silently open to reveal an elevator large enough to accommodate two people comfortably. I tapped a five-number code onto the keypad inside, the elevator door closed and I was taken upstairs to Uncle Tinh’s apartment—the entire fourth floor of a seventeenth-century Creole town house.

      Uncle Tinh and I sat in a pair of upholstered, high-backed chairs at one corner of the long dining table. It was just past noon but, as was Uncle Tinh’s custom, he ate his primary meal before the start of his busy business day. Downstairs on the first floor, in the bistro atmosphere of Tinh’s City Vu, he worked nonstop and was completely devoted to serving his customers. But in the privacy of his home, he indulged himself. That meant having a live-in staff, including a chef. As far as I knew, Uncle Tinh rarely stepped into his ultra-modern kitchen except to pour himself a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.

      The meal was, by Uncle Tinh’s standards, informal. I had dressed appropriately in a simple black sheath topped by a red linen jacket and wore the string of pearls that Uncle Tinh had given me on my twenty-fifth birthday. Tiny silver clips just behind my temples anchored my long, unruly hair back from my face. Uncle Tinh wore a white shirt, tan slacks and leather sandals. Despite the simplicity of his outfit, the quality and cut of the fabric made me wonder if he and Beauprix shared the same tailor.

      A uniformed male servant I didn’t recognize from my last visit carried a large silver chafing dish into the dining room and brought our conversation to a halt. With a quick bow—first in Uncle Tinh’s direction and then in mine—the servant placed the dish on the table.

      “Thank you, Vin,” Uncle Tinh said in Vietnamese.

      Vin reached to lift the chafing dish’s lid, but Uncle Tinh stopped the motion by laying the fingers of his left hand lightly across his wrist. Vin stiffened at the unexpected touch and his eyes widened. Uncle Tinh casually moved his hand and lifted the linen napkin that lay beside his plate.

      “My niece and I will serve ourselves,” he said as he carefully arranged the napkin in his lap. “I will call should we need anything.”

      Vin, who now held his arms rigidly at his sides, bowed again, this time only to Uncle Tinh. And his fear made me wonder anew if Uncle Tinh was, as Uncle Duran had often insisted, the anh hai for the central region of the United States. Anh hai was a traditional title of respect that Vietnamese gangs had co-opted for their most senior leaders.

      As

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