Las Vegas Noir (11 page)

At the
ph
. shop, I stared out into the parking lot and watched a stout, middle-aged Asian man climb into a red BMW. It could have been him, but on his driver’s license Suzy’s new husband had broader cheeks and more stubborn eyes, and also sported a thin, sly mustache. DPS did list a silver Porsche and a brand-new red BMW under his name—Sonny Nguyen. The master files at Vegas Metro confirmed he was my age, that he owned a posh restaurant in town, that he once shot at a guy for insulting him—aggravated assault, no time done. It was Happy who told me he was a gambler, fully equipped apparently with a gambler’s temper and a gambler’s penchant for taking risks with little sense of the reward. Something in that reminded me of myself.

In my twenty-five years on the Oakland force, I’d shot at people several times, in the arm, in the fleshy part of the thigh, mostly in response to them shooting at me; I had punched a hooker for biting my hand, choked out a belligerent Bible salesman, wrestled thugs twice my size and half my age; I once had to watch a five-year-old boy bleed to death after I night-sticked his mother, who had stabbed him, coked up out of her mind; and three or six times other officers have had to pull me off a scrotbag who’d gotten on my bad side. But never, not even once, had I come close to killing anyone.

I walked down Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, outside of the Strip, is not a place for walkers, especially in this brutal heat. I’d pictured a Chinatown similar to Oakland’s or San Francisco’s, but the Vegas Chinatown was nothing more than a bloated strip mall—three or four blocks of it painted red and yellow, and pagodified, a theme park like the rest of the city. Nearly every establishment was a restaurant, and the one I was looking for was called Fuji West. I found it easily enough in one of those strip malls—nestled, with its dark temple-like entrance, between an Oriental art gallery and a two-story pet store. It was not set to open for another hour.

Hardly surprising that a Vietnamese would own a sushi joint—Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the seven-foot, white-aproned Mexican sweeping the patio, though you might as well have called it swinging a broom. He gazed down at me blankly when I asked for Sonny. He didn’t look dumb, just bored.

“The owner,” I repeated. “Is he here?”

“His name’s no Sonny.”

“Well, can I speak to him, whatever his name is?”

The Mexican, for whatever reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man—late twenties probably, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored charcoal suit and a precise pink tie—appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the two wooden pillars that flanked the patio.

“How may I help you, sir?” He spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he’d ironed it. He held his hands behind his back.

“I’d like to see Sonny.”

“I am sorry, but no one by that name works here. Perhaps you are mistaken? There are many sushi restaurants around here. If you like, I can direct you.”

“I was told he owns this restaurant.”

“Then you
are
mistaken. I am the owner.” He spoke like it was an innocent mistake, but his eyes had strayed twice from mine: once to the parking lot, once to my waist.

“I’m not mistaken,” I replied, and looked at him hard to see if he would flinch.

He did not. I was a head taller than him, my arms twice the size of his, but all I felt in his presence was my age. Even his hesitation seemed assured. He said, “I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.”

“How about this. I’ll come back in two hours for some sushi and tea. And then, for dessert, all I’d like is a word or two with Mr. Nguyen. Please tell him that.”

I turned to go, but then felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness in his face, but his words had become chiseled.

“Your name is Robert, isn’t it?” he declared. When I didn’t answer, he leaned in closer.

“You should not be here. If you do not understand why I am saying this, then please understand my seriousness. Go back to your city and try to be happy.”

That last thing somehow moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I suddenly realized how handsome he was—how, if he wanted to, he could’ve modeled magazine ads for cologne or expensive sunglasses. For a moment I might have doubted that he was dangerous at all. He nodded at me, a succinct little bow, then grabbed the broom and walked back through the heavy mahogany doors of the restaurant.

I felt tired again.
Ph
. always made me sleepy. I walked back to the hotel and in my room stripped down to my boxers and cranked up the AC before falling back into bed.

People my age get certain
feelings
all the time, even if intuition had never been our strong suit in youth, and my inkling about this Sonny guy was that he was the type of restaurant owner who, if he came by at all, would only do so at night. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was just itching for the chance to eat me alive. I had a long night ahead of me. Before shutting my eyes, I decided to put my badge away, deep in the recesses of my suitcase. I would not need it.

When Suzy left me two years ago, it was easy at first. No children. Few possessions to split up. And no one we knew really cared: Her family all still lived in Vietnam, my parents were long dead, and in our thirteen years together, I’d never gotten to know her Asian friends and the only things my cop buddies knew about her was her name and her temper. She gave me the news after Sunday dinner. I was sitting at the dining table, and she approached me from the kitchen, her mouth still swollen, and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow and I’m taking my clothes. You can have everything else.” Then she carried away my empty plate and I heard it shatter in the sink.

The first time I met her I knew she was fearless. My partner and I were responding to a robbery at the flower shop where she worked. She’d been in America for a year. Her English was bad. When we arrived, she stood at the door with a baseball bat in one hand and pruning shears in the other. Before I could step out of the patrol car, she erupted in an angry, torrid description of what had happened. I barely understood a word—something about a gun and ruined roses—but I did know I liked her. The petite sprightly body. Her lips, her cheekbones, full and bold. Eyes that made me think of firecrackers. We found the perp two miles away limping and bleeding from a stab wound in his thigh. The pruning shears had done it. Suzy and I married four months later.

Her real name was Hong, which meant
rose
in Vietnamese, but it sounded a bit piggish the way Americans pronounced it, so I suggested the name of my first girlfriend in high school, and
this
she did give me, even though her friends still called her Hong.

Our first few years were happy. She took over the flower shop and I’d stop by every afternoon during my patrol to check in on her. We had a third of the week together and we spent it trying out every restaurant in Chinatown, going to the movies (she loved horror flicks), and walking the waterfront since the smell and the waves reminded her of Vietnam. At first I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the crosses in every room, the food, the sappy ballads on the stereo, all her friends who (with the exception of Happy) barely spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the gruesome crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead grandparents and uncles and aunts. That was all fine, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself. But after two years of this, I finally noticed that she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball, my craving for a burger or spaghetti now and then, the fact that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when my unit just barely missed deployment. Vietnam was suddenly everything again … until she made it mean nothing. The least she could do was share her stories from the homeland, like how poor she’d grown up, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had gone to a concentration camp and was tortured or starved or
something
; but she’d only say her life back there was
difficult
and
lonely
, and she’d only speak of it with this kind of vague mysteriousness, like she was teaching me her language, like I’d never get it anyway. So I got nothing.

When we made love, she’d whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, only her whimper sounded more like a wounded animal’s, so that eventually it was just another way of making me feel like a stranger in her presence. An intruder.

I suppose our marriage became a typical one: petty arguments, silent treatments, no sex for months, both of us spending our free time more with friends than with each other. And still we kept at it, God knows why, until I came to believe, in an accepting kind of way, that she was both naïve and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean that I’d never hurt her.

The night I hit her was a rainy night. I’d just come home from a shooting in West Oakland, where a guy had tried robbing someone’s seventy-year-old grandmother and, when she fought back, shot her in the head. I was too spent to care about tracking mud on Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her when she saw the mess and began yelling at me. Couldn’t she understand that brains on a sidewalk is a world worse than mud on a tile floor? Shouldn’t she, coming from where she came, appreciate something like that? I told her to fuck off—which I rarely throw at anyone. She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.

I had never before raised my hand at her. I’d arrested men who’d done worse to their girlfriends and wives, and I always remembered how pathetic and weak those guys looked when I confronted them. But when I felt the sting in my fingernails, saw the blood curling down Suzy’s busted lip and her just standing there in a kind of angry stubborn silence, I hit her again. She yelped this time, holding that side of her face and still staring at me, though now with a look of recognition that told me she’d never been as tough as I thought, which somehow annoyed me more. Would I have stopped if she had hit me back, as I’d expected? Her nose began bleeding. Her eyes teared up. But her hand fell from her face and she stood her ground. So I hit her a third time. She stumbled back a few steps, covering her mouth with one hand and steadying herself on the dining table with the other, until she finally went down on one knee, her head bowed, like she was about to vomit. She spat blood two or three times. As I walked upstairs, I heard the TV from the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside and then the kitchen faucet running, and everything had the sound of finality to it.

In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a house full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. Months later, someone told me she had moved to Vegas. I sold the house and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I also went on a strict diet of hamburgers and spaghetti.

But then a month ago I bumped into Happy at the grocery store. To my shock, instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually she looked a lot like Suzy, a taller and more carefree version of her—and, in truth, a version I’d always been attracted to. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterwards, we went home together. We drank wine and went to bed and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized my other reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I finally asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this rich, cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how they got married and she quit her job, and how everything had been good for more than a year.

“Until he begin losing,” Happy declared soberly, sitting back on the headboard. She said nothing more and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She glanced at me impatiently, like I should already know. “He hit her,” she said. “She hit him back, but he very strong and he drink a lot. Last month, he throw her down the stairs and broke her arm. I saw her two week ago with a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And he always say he need her, he need her.”