Back Bay Blues

Book 2: Andy Roark Mystery

by Peter Colt

Genres: General Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

1985, Boston. In Vietnam, Andy Roark witnessed death and horrifying destruction. But for the soldiers who made it back alive, there are other casualties of war—the loss of tenderness, trust, and connection. Still feeling adrift and unsettled, Andy has struck up a welcome friendship with Nguyen, a Vietnamese restaurant owner. Sipping beer and trading memories after the restaurant shutters, Andy gradually learns of the extraordinary lengths Nguyen took to flee Saigon shortly after its fall.



Andy's latest case, too, has ties to Vietnam. His new client, a beautiful and enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, hires him to investigate her uncle's murder. Andy discovers a connection to a group of refugees determined to overthrow the communist government. Led by the sinister Colonel Tran, the Committee is extorting local business owners to raise funds. The search for more answers takes Andy from Boston to Washington DC to San Francisco, and deep into a web of political and personal betrayal.



Somewhere near the heart of this mystery is a connection to Nguyen's daring escape from Saigon. Decades may have passed, but sometimes the price of freedom twists allies into enemies, loyalties into betrayals, and truth into a web of lies . . .

Release date: September 29, 2020

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 304

Sample

November 1982 had been a hard month for me. I had witnessed a man killed, killed a man, and found out that an old friend had betrayed me. I could see if he had betrayed me for a woman, but in this case, it was just money. Not even a lot of money.

I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to find work without Danny Sullivan feeding it to me from his business as a criminal defense attorney. I had about a week in without work, and then it picked up. I put a new ad in the Yellow Pages, and that did the trick. It also helped that a lot of cops and lawyers knew me. A lot of former clients had sent referrals, and I didn’t starve. After a time, I figured out that Danny’s referrals had been nice, but I didn’t need them, and the last one had almost gotten me killed.

November had slipped into December without much fanfare. Christmas came and went, and New Year’s passed without resolution. February found me cold and worn out. I had been hired by a lawyer for a big shipbuilding company to investigate a workers’ comp case down at the shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the end of January. It was a couple of days that wrapped up quickly.

That case led to one involving union agitators. The shipyard did a lot of work for the navy and operated on close margins. Too many union problems could shut them down. There was always a fear that the Soviets would pay agitators to do that at the shipyard and that the giant crane called “Goliath” that dominated the Quincy skyline would fall still.

For me, it meant a lot of time hanging around the docks, the yard, and the bars that the shipyard workers went to. It meant a lot of time trying to figure out who was who in the world of shipyard labor. February down on the docks by the Fore River was cold, damp, wind-driven cold, the type of cold that started at my feet and worked its way up into the very center of me.

I was dressed for the weather, plenty of wool, and on the colder days a peacoat and watch cap. I had good gloves, but they could only keep my hands warm for so long. I had a .45 caliber Colt Lightweight Commander in the pocket of the peacoat, in the special pocket the navy had designed just for it.

It was a big gun that shot a big, slow .45 caliber bullet, but if I needed a gun down on the docks then I would really need a gun. I had two spare magazines in the other pocket. I had a big folding Buck knife stuck down in the pocket of my faded jeans. I could flip the blade out fast, and it was sharp enough to shave the hair off my arm. I used to carry a Colt 1903, but for legal reasons that was now in a safe deposit box in the basement of a bank in Providence, Rhode Island. I am not telling you which one, but it looks a lot like the building Clark Kent works in.

Detective work is a lot of boredom: waiting, watching, and trying to make sense of what you see. Sometimes I was on foot, and other times I would park the Subaru Brat that I was borrowing from a friend. The Ghia wasn’t good for surveillance, so it stayed at home. The Brat was tan and had a cap on the back. The jump seats had been removed, and I could lie down in a sleeping bag in the back. It would get cold, but it let me unobtrusively take pictures of people in and around the shipyard. The downside was I ended every day cold, stiff, and hungry.

One night when I was fighting traffic trying to get back to my apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, I saw a brightly lit restaurant in a strip mall on the outskirts of Quincy. It had red curtains and lacquered lattice woodwork in the windows. There was a yellowing menu in the window, and a bright neon sign that said, THE BLUE LOTUS, formed into that weird faux Asian version of the English alphabet you could only find in Chinese restaurants. It looked inviting, and the tickle of the cold starting in my throat made me think of Hot and Sour Soup.

It had snowed lightly that day, adding to my need for warmth. I pulled the Brat through the slush and slid into a parking spot. When I pulled open the door, I was greeted by the wonderful smell of cooking food and exotic spices. There was a small counter in front of me with a cash register, and a ceramic golden cat with one raised paw was next to the register. To my left was an unused coatrack and a small shrine with a ceramic Buddha and incense. Behind the cash register was a dusty bar with dusty liquor bottles that ran half the length of the restaurant. There were two booths by the window that the Brat was facing and then a series of tables that ran the room’s length opposite the bar. Behind the bar were three red vinyl booths. The chairs were all black metal with red vinyl cushions.

Two of the tables were taken up by older Asian couples: Chinese, Vietnamese, it was impossible to tell. There was a young white couple sitting in one of the booths by the window. A skinny Asian man with black slacks and a checked shirt with rolled sleeves walked up to me from somewhere in the back. He wore aviator-framed prescription glasses and was smoking. He said, around the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, “You wan table?” His accent was thick but not indecipherable. He could have been thirty-five or fifty-five, I couldn’t tell.

“A booth, if you don’t mind.” He shrugged and, taking a menu from the stack by the register, led me to a booth. I sat down, the peacoat folded next to me on the booth, with the pocket with the Colt facing up. He took my order and, later, brought it out without saying much or taking the cigarette from his mouth. The restaurant and its menu were Chinese, but I had spent over two years in Vietnam and knew that he was about as Chinese as I was. He could have stepped right out of any restaurant, bar, or club in Saigon.

I turned down the bowl of bread rolls and Chinese mustard that every Chinese restaurant seemed to insist you eat. He merely grunted something that sounded like approval. I asked for chopsticks, and he answered with another grunt and put a paper sleeve with two wooden chopsticks down in front of me. He seemed genuinely shocked when I ordered tea instead of a drink; by that I mean he raised his left eyebrow a millimeter higher than the one on the right.

The food was excellent. The Hot and Sour Soup did its job, and the dumplings I ordered were perfectly steamed and pan seared. I managed to eat Lo Mein with the chopsticks without wearing much of it or embarrassing myself. He brought the check on green paper on a plastic tray, pinned down by two fortune cookies, which I ignored. I left enough cash to pay the bill and leave a tip.

When I stood up and put the peacoat on, he was at the table, moving on quiet catlike feet. “You din have fortune cookie. You no wan?”

“No, I learned my fortune a long time ago.” He grunted, which seemed to be his preferred method of communicating with me. I wondered if he smelled Vietnam on me. I walked out past the ceramic cat, which was waving its frozen paw at me.

The case seemed to have little end in sight, and the weather in Boston wasn’t going to get much warmer until the end of March, which to a true Bostonian meant May. I spent a lot of time down by the Fore and Weymouth Rivers, always in the shadow of the Goliath. I found myself stopping at The Blue Lotus once or twice a week. The only recognition that I was becoming kind of a regular was that the skinny Vietnamese man stopped bringing me bread rolls or fortune cookies. One night when a young, slim woman whom I took to be his daughter tried to bring me some bread rolls, he barked at her in their native language, and she whisked the rolls away.

One day when I came in my peacoat and watch cap, the Asian man looked at me and said, “What are you, sailor? You in navy?”

“No, I’ve been working down at the shipyard.” My hair was still pretty short. I was getting used to it being not shaggy anymore. My mustache, on the other hand, I had let go a little. It was good but it wasn’t Magnum good.

“No, you no sailor. Hands too soft. Sailor have rough hands.” He held out his and showed me his palms, which were calloused and rough. The fingers were gnarled like tree roots and nicotine stained at the tips. They spoke of rough work done with stoicism and little else.

One day in early March, I was the only one other than him in the place in the late afternoon. A car squealed into the lot and parked across two spots. It was an asshole move no matter how you looked at it. The car was a green Chrysler from the Carter years, and the four kids who got out looked like high school football players. Two had on team jackets from Quincy High, and two had baseball bats. I slid the Colt out from the peacoat and into the small of my back. The Asian man heard the bells on the door and came out.

The tallest of the boys, with long dark hair, said, “We’re sick of you gooks coming here to our town.”

One of the others added intelligently, “Yeah.”

“We are gonna bust up your gook restaurant, then your gook face, and you are gonna leave.”

The Asian man stood still and quietly, almost at a whisper, said, “Fuck you” in the clearest English I had ever heard him use. His anger seemed to radiate off of him. It was incandescent.

“What did you say, gook? We are gonna trash the place and teach you a lesson.” This one had long blond hair and looked like he bench pressed small cars when he wasn’t stuffing smaller boys into lockers or dropping lit M-80s in the toilet. I saw his feet shift and I stood up.

One of the others looked at me and said, “What the fuck do you want, faggot,” with all the toughness that a seventeen-year-old bully can muster.

I pulled the Colt out with little hurry and flipped off the safety as it was on its way up. It made an audible clicking noise, but by then the restaurant was very still and very quiet. I pointed it squarely between the eyes of the first kid. His eyes widened but not as big as the barrel of the. 45 must have seemed. “It isn’t nice to call people names, like faggot. Also, I don’t like the word gook. I especially don’t like it when a bunch of limp dick high school jocks say it to a friend of mine.”

“You won’t use that gun, mister. You won’t shoot anyone,” from one of the team jackets. His voice cracked with his lack of confidence.

“My fren, he kill before, lots of times. He in Vietnam. He kill lots of gooks.” I was not expecting him to speak, much less say that.

“Gook, round eye, it’s all the same to me. Okay, who’s first?” My turn to sound like a wannabe tough guy.

“Come on, guys, let’s get out of here. My dad will want the car back.” Like that, they fled out the door. They couldn’t get in the Chrysler fast enough and almost caused an accident pulling out of the parking lot.

“Okay, you put away you gun. Looks like something you buy in Tu Do Street. Like some Tu Do Street pimp with shiny gun.”

My pistol was stainless steel with stag horn grips, and Tu Do Street was in Saigon, famous for its fleshpots and other forms of vice. If you had the money, you could have it on Tu Do Street. A pimp on Tu Do Street would have a chrome or nickel pistol.

“How did you know?” I asked him. He held out his hand to me and I took it.

“Old fren, my name is Nguyen. I am from Saigon. I have seen lots of American boys with guns. You different, your face, your eyes, you a killer. I have seen men like you.” He then smiled and laughed. He was right. He went to the dusty bar and poured us each a snifter of very old, very good cognac. We toasted in Vietnamese, French, and then English.

From that moment on, when I went in the restaurant, he insisted on making me Vietnamese food. No more of the bread roll and fortune cookie variety of Chinese food that littered the South Shore; from then on it was pho so hot and spicy it would clear out my sinuses and water my eyes. Bee bong that was cool and filling and always good. I never saw an egg roll again, because nime chow displaced them on my plate. Sometimes it was something simple like rice and vegetables with a little meat in nuoc mam and soy sauce. He insisted on giving me the sweet, cloying Vietnamese coffee, made with condensed milk served over ice. If it was dinnertime, it would be Japanese beer in a silver can. There was no more Vietnamese 33 Beer to be had, and if there were they probably wouldn’t sell it in Quincy, Massachusetts.

A few weeks later, I stopped into The Blue Lotus on a night when the April sunset had given away to an India ink sky. It was chilly but not raw. My case was wrapping up. The shipyard had offered me a permanent job as a security consultant. The money would be regular, but it would mean having a boss. I hadn’t much liked that in the army and even less so in the cops. The shipyard’s man paid me and told me if I reconsidered . . . but we both knew that I wasn’t going to.

Nguyen waved me over to a booth toward the back when I walked in. He motioned me to sit and somehow without saying so indicated we would eat together. Two cans of Asahi arrived with chopsticks and napkins. A plate of nime chow arrived, translucent tubes of rice noodles, bean sprouts, cucumber, cilantro, and shrimp all in a rice wrapper. Nguyen sat down across from me, tapping the ash of his cigarette into an old cracked saucer that he placed not quite between us. He took off his silver-framed aviators and put them down next to his ashtray. His daughter brought out two steaming bowls of pho, spicy noodle soup. She placed a plate heaped with thinly shaved slices of rare beef between us. We each picked up a slice and put it in our soup.

Nguyen’s daughter, Linh, looked at me, smiled, and said, “Enjoy your pho, Andy.” She pronounced it the Vietnamese way, “fa,” not the stupid white guy way, “fo.” I thanked her, and her father grunted one of his usual commands. I knew I had achieved status as regular when Linh started using my name.

“I think she has a crush on you, Round Eye,” he said between slurps of pho. He seemed to enjoy calling me by the mild racial slur. In his mind, it probably made up for all of the times I had referred to his people by racial slurs. It was easier in Vietnam not to think of them as people, to be dismissive, to dehumanize them. That was Vietnam. The war was over, and I had grown up enough to be ashamed of things like that.

“I’m too old for her.” It was always a thorny point when someone tells you their teenage daughter has a crush on you. We each slid more beef into our pho.

“You not rich enough, either.” He laughed.

His laugh was the laugh of a much fatter man. It started somewhere in his stomach and positively rumbled out of his wiry frame. I ate my pho, alternating between chopsticks and the shallow spoon that you can only get in Asian restaurants. I managed to not drip too much broth on my shirt. When the soup got to be too hot for me, I bit into a chewy nime chow for a break from the heat, washing it all down with the excellent Japanese beer.

When we had finished eating, he leaned back contentedly and grunted another command. Linh brought two more beers, didn’t make eye contact with me, and began clearing away the plates and bowls. “I hope you liked your pho, Andy.” She had the habit of overusing my first name, the way that teenagers do when they start dipping their toes in the world of adult acceptance. I assured her I did, and she cleared everything and left.

“That was good, Round Eye, wasn’t it?”

“It was.” My mouth was still burning, and I was still dabbing my nose with a napkin.

“Were you in Vietnam in ’75 for the fall?” Nguyen asked.

“No, I was home by then.” I had watched the helicopters on the roof of what everyone assumes was the embassy, but the famous shot was really of a CIA safe house. I sat in front of the TV with a can of beer warming in my hand and tears running down my face. The Vietnam War had gone on for so long that we all assumed it would go on forever. I had thought that I could always go back if I couldn’t cut it in the world. Then it ended, and I wept. I would never be able to go back to the war; I could never go home. My true home. The only place I felt that I belonged. I would never go back to being a Recon man, the only exceptional thing I had ever done. From that point on, I would always just be some guy, some shmuck.

“It was . . . ho’o lan”—he paused searching for the English word—“chaos.” He sat across from me, looking through me to almost a decade before. The smoke from his menthol cigarette curled up in front of us. “At first, no one wanted to believe that it was happening. We thought, there is no way the Americans will let the communists have it all after spending so many of their young men’s lives here. Then it became undeniable that you had abandoned us. That is when the panic started. It finally occurred to people that the NVA were coming, with tanks, artillery. They were coming, and they were going to destroy everything we knew.

“As they got closer, you could hear the artillery, could hear it getting closer and closer. Every day, more and more refugees poured into the city. Every day, more and more of our soldiers fled into the city. Each day, more chaos. Each day, more young men with short hair and civilian clothes, their uniforms thrown away, trying to blend in.

“People trying to flee, people trying to plan. Money changed hands. No one wanted piasters. U.S. dollars weren’t even that popular. Everyone wanted gold or diamonds. The markets that sold them were raising prices per ounce and still getting cleaned out.

“I was lucky. I was a sailor. Not important, but lucky to be on a ship. I was able to get my family on board: wife, son, and Linh. Ship had important people on it. Important people who brought their important things with them. Papers, jewels, money, and gold. We had many who were fleeing, they had paid to get on ship. Paid everything they had. Bought gold and paid it all just to stand on deck. Some tried to barter their daughters, Linh’s age, to the important men on board.

“The night of April 29, 1975, we slipped away from the pier. Saigon was burning, and the smoke was thick. We were trying to sneak out of the city to the sea. We were afraid that they would shell us or bomb us from planes. But there was nothing. We slipped down the river to the sea. We were the flotilla of defeat: rich man’s yachts, navy ships that would not fight, and merchant ships like mine. Some of the ships were in such bad shape we ended up towing them to sea. We were packed with refugees and those who had been important people in government. Not the most important. They could afford to buy their way onto airplanes and helicopters. No, these were the somewhat important and the unimportant but not the poor. There was no room for the poor on the boats.

“There were stories about how we were carrying the people who were going to start the government in exile. Some thought we were going to Taiwan or the Philippines. People said we had gold on board, enough gold to start the government in exile. There were rumors that all of the gold bullion from the South Vietnamese treasury was on board. Some of the crazy fucking generals thought that we would start a counterrevolution and topple the communists. Can you believe that the same assholes who just lost a war through their greed, corruption, and bungling thought they would topple the government that had just sent them running? Assholes.” He snorted.

He barked at Linh again, and this time two more beers and two cognacs arrived. The nice thing about not having a boss, a wife, a girlfriend or even a pet that cared meant that I could stay and drink with Nguyen. No chance of getting fired or dumped. Just a hangover in the morning to remind me that I am not twenty anymore.

“I stayed with the ship, the Adams. It was a ship the Vietnamese government was loaned from the Americans. It was an old cargo ship. What you call it? A Freedom ship . . . no Liberty, a Liberty ship. We sailed on the Adams. People got off the ship in the Philippines. We stay a long time there. I stay with ship because I know about engines, fixing them. Then we told ship will go to America. San Francisco, California. We will get to stay in America. In California, I am able to find some work in garage. Working on engines. The pay is small, but it is job. My wife work in restaurant. Kids go to school. We live in small apartment, kids sleep in bed, wife on couch, and daddy Nguyen gets floor or bed if no one in it.

“I find second job, washing dishes. I am always hungry, never enough. And kids, kids get most, then wife . . . then daddy Nguyen. That is why I like good food now. So long, I eat nothing o. . .