He ended with something else in Vietnamese, saying it like some soldier going off to war.
I was stirring now, and he turned to me with some of that toughness he’d shed in the last hour or so. “You can’t go though,” he said. “Not yet. Our orders were to watch you tonight and, if nothing happens, let you go in the morning. If you return to your hotel room now and do nothing, then nothing’s going to happen. I’ll give you your car keys at noon tomorrow.”
“That’s it — they just let me go?”
“Miss Hong — she isn’t coming. You’ll be useless to them, don’t you see? And you’re a cop. They can’t hold you here forever.” He looked at me for the first time with something approaching pity. “You’ve been an insurance policy, Officer. That’s as much as I know about it.”
He grabbed his backpack and gave Mai one final glance before walking toward the exit.
11
WE’D BEEN IN THE BAR for almost two hours, and the sun was already setting, the Strip lit up now and aglow amid a sky of sudden gathering clouds that smeared orange below and tinged the air blue.
The bar’s back lot was still mostly empty. A few men had parked their car near us only to wander over to the strip club next door, where the neon lights had become a flashing signpost in the twilight.
The Jeep’s flimsy vinyl top did little to keep out the cold. I zipped up my jacket and asked Mai if it was okay that I smoked.
She was sitting behind the steering wheel with her keys in her hand, her eyes focused on the Stratosphere Tower in the near distance, rising above the surrounding buildings. It was a copy of the Space Needle in Seattle except much taller, both more regal and more vulgar.
I wasn’t sure what we had to discuss first. If Victor’s last words were to be believed, then I’d been given a reprieve, possibly absolution — at the very least a little time now to consider our next step. But my unease had deepened. Leaving town was still a no-brainer. The thought of leaving behind everything Victor just told us, though, was like tugging at a shackle.
Mai spoke up. “Did you believe all that — about my mother?”
“A lot not to believe.”
“Yeah, but that she sees things? Forgets she’s fucked someone?” She glanced at the duffel bag at my feet. I had shoved the videotape in there, buried it in my clothes.
“God, don’t say it like that,” I said, but I could see she was asking me sincerely, as if for confirmation. “What do you want me to tell you? I went through similar shit with her for eight years.”
She seemed ready to say something, but then gestured for a drag of my cigarette. She exhaled smoke through her nose, holding on to the cigarette as she continued eyeing the Stratosphere. The neon lights next door flashed red and blue across her face.
“I’ve seen things too,” she finally said. “Things like that. When I was a kid, I used to see my dad every once in a while. Standing in the doorway of my room at night. Or by the tree below my window. I never saw his face exactly, but I knew it was him because he was bald. Didn’t scare me. Over the years I got used to it. That’s one thing she and I have in common.”
She handed back the cigarette. “You think I’m fucked-up too, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking at me. “It’s been less frequent the last ten years. I sometimes forget that it happens at all. But every time he appears, it’s like she does too, and I end up thinking about them both. Usually happens around the holidays. My very own ghosts of Christmas past.”
Her smile was vacant. She dragged her finger along the top of the dash and left a clean trail in the dust.
“You ever go talk to someone?”
She chuckled. “You mean like a therapist? You kidding? Vietnamese don’t believe in therapy. I vaguely remember my uncle taking me aside about this time twenty years ago and telling me that my mother had to leave town and would be gone for a long while. It took him all of five minutes. He said it like it was something I already knew. I don’t think it upset me at all though. I forget what happened in the following months, if he or my aunt ever explained anything more to me, but I do remember it feeling natural to be without her. ‘Gone for a long while’ meant she’d come back at some point, so I didn’t think any more of it. It’s weird, right? That I would just accept the unexplained disappearance of my mother? That’s how it was for a few years.
“It wasn’t until my fourth Christmas there, when I was watching the end of It’s a Wonderful Life—you know, when Jimmy Stewart gets his old life back and runs home and hugs and kisses the hell out of Donna Reed and all his kids on the stairs? That’s when it hit me that she was gone for good. No one in the family ever mentioned her. It was like she never existed. I started crying then and got real angry — at her, at my aunt and uncle, at my cousins too. Everyone thought I was crying because of the movie.”
She stuck her key into the ignition but left the key chain dangling there.
“That’s rough, kid,” I said. “I can’t imagine.” I offered her the last of the cigarette.
She shrugged, finished the cigarette, and put it out in an ashtray filled with gum wrappers and loose change. She nodded at the Stratosphere. “You know that’s the tallest observation tower in the country? At the top they got a moat and two tall metal fences to keep people away from the edge, but last year some guy still managed to climb the fences and jump off. Fell over a thousand feet. His body hit the roof of the parking garage before landing in some bushes by the valet parking. God knows why he did it. There’s a story going round about people seeing his ghost in the elevators. I rode them up to the top a few weeks ago, to see if I might bump into him. Then I realized I had no idea what he looked like. He could’ve been one of the men in the elevator.”
Her eyes went again to the top of the Stratosphere and followed the phantom falling body down the tower’s white walls. She was playing with a casino chip, blindly flipping it across the knuckles of her right hand so that it seemed to move on its own.
“More suicides here than anywhere in America,” she mused. “I hear about hotel maids finding dead guests in their rooms all the time. In bed, in the bathtub, on the toilet.”
A green minivan pulled up to the strip club and a middle-aged guy stepped out in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt and walked to the entrance like he knew the place well, like he regularly went alone to ogle tits and ass at five in the evening. He could have been my father thirtysomething years ago, heading to the store for milk and coming home with a bottle of Jack.
I said to Mai, “We should get going.”
She turned to me. “What did Victor mean at the end there — you being an insurance policy?”
I’d been waiting for her to ask, though I was loath now to explain it out loud.
“Means that if your mother shows up and they had to hurt her to get their money back, kill her even, they can always blame me, the jealous and bitter ex-husband — tell the police what I did five months ago, that I came back to steal his money, steal his wife, whatever. The story’s adaptable. That’s why my car is here and the hotel room is in my name, paid with my damn credit card too. Just in case they need a story. And if they don’t and your mom doesn’t show, then I am useless to them like Victor said. Sonny would’ve at least had some fun with me.”
Mai was staring out the windshield and still knuckle-rolling the poker chip, her face alive now with concentration.