Dr. Mai shook his head impatiently. “No identification,” he said. Nina wrote on her pad, “Knows the guy? But closed society, these people don’t want to go outside.” She was guessing. She couldn’t tell what Dr. Mai was thinking or how a Hmong would handle being shot in the face.
“That must have been very painful,” she said gently to Kao. Dr. Mai translated. Giving his injured jaw a smack with his own hand, Kao shrugged to show his obliviousness to pain. Nina wrote, “Brave guy.”
“Go on,” she said.
For the sake of his wife and son, Dr. Mai said, Kao bought a gun to keep under the counter. Several months passed. In early June, just before closing, a man came into the store, keeping his face hidden under a cap. But Kao Vang, alone behind the counter, knew immediately who he was.
“The same man?”
“Yes. Back again.”
This time Kao was ready. When the man pulled out a gun, Kao already had his hand on his own gun. No time to think. He pulled out his gun and shot the robber point-blank in the chest.
This time Kao punched in 911. Then he called his family.
“Yes,” Nina said. “I remember this story.”
The Tahoe police detectives made out the report, clapped Kao on the shoulder, and recommended no further action. The dead man had thirteen previous felony convictions including two assaults with a deadly weapon in the course of a robbery. But the police also took away Kao’s gun. Two days later he got his first E-mail. The one-word message, a sort of declaration of war, came in his own language. “Revenge,” it read. Family or friends of the robber probably wrote it.
Dr. Mai said, “Kao couldn’t sleep anymore. His jaw hurt all the time. He was afraid to leave his wife alone in the store. He didn’t know what to do.”
Nina wrote all this down. She looked up to see Kao adjusting his jaw again as though it had slipped off its track. Dark, intense eyes studied her. When his hand came down she noticed that his jaw was not symmetrical.
“Kao and his family came to me. We decided he must continue. Friends came to the store to help. Kao worked hard.”
The July fourth holiday brought tourists and heat to Tahoe. Kao woke at four o’clock the next morning to a phone call from a fire marshal who yelled that his store was on fire. By the time they got there, the interior of the store had been gutted by quick and successive plagues of flame, smoke, and the rescuers’ water and foam.
Everything was ruined. All the Vangs’ stock had been reduced to rubble. Cash register, counters, display shelves, bottle glass, melted candy pieces, and ashes jumbled together in blackened heaps.
“Destroyed,” said Dr. Mai, putting a finger to the bridge between his glasses and pushing delicately upward. “So much hard work for nothing.”
“I am sorry,” Nina said, moved, knowing her words were inadequate. She felt the urge to apologize for all Kao’s bad experiences in America.
Kao said something curt. “But this is America,” Dr. Mai translated. “Kao had a small-business loan.”
Nina nodded. “So he was required to carry casualty insurance,” she said.
Now Kao nodded. “Casualty insurance,” he repeated.
“No one knew,” Dr. Mai said. “No one thought of this when they destroyed Blue Star Market. Kao was supposed to crawl away. But he brought me the policy. And I wrote a letter to the insurance company.” Dr. Mai laid two much-handled documents in front of Nina. She picked them up but did not look at them yet.
“When was this?”
“I wrote the letter on July twelfth and sent it certified.”
Almost a month ago.
“They sent me this letter quick.” The letter bore a July 18 postmark and the imprint of Heritage Insurance’s office in Reno. The company was sorry to hear of his loss. Kao had ninety days from the date of the event to file a claim.
Nina flipped open her calendar. “Today is August eighth. October third would be the deadline. We have plenty of time. Good.”
“Kao and his wife would like to know if you wish to help them.”
“Yes,” Nina said. “Yes, I wish to help.”
“No one must know of the claim.”
“No one will know. But why does it matter?”
“If anyone learns that Kao is not destroyed-that he will have some money even-then his family will be in very great danger again.”
Nina said, “Why? Who is threatening Kao? Are the police being told everything?”
Dr. Mai consulted with Kao. “There are no suspects.”
“If you know who these people are,” Nina said, “you have to tell the police.”
“You don’t understand. Kao does not want revenge. He does not want justice. He wants his family to live. Kao wants to take his family back to Laos. For that he needs the insurance money. Whatever you can obtain for him.”
Nina wanted to tell the Vangs to stay here, fight the good fight awhile longer, do it our way, put ’ em away. Again her eyes met Kao’s. Maybe now she understood better what she saw in them. Kao was brave for himself, but he was afraid for his family. He had no fight left in him. He wanted only a dignified retreat.
“Okay,” she said. “All right.”
Dr. Mai nodded. “Thank you. Also I do not know what is charged for these services.”
Nina considered this. To take a percentage of the Vangs’ recovery seemed wrong to her, like another nick at them, and it would probably result in an overpayment to her. She adjusted her sliding scale lower than she had in a long time and said, “I would charge forty dollars per hour for this work.” She drew a retainer agreement out of the drawer.
Another short consultation. This time, See Vang spoke to Dr. Mai, too, although she said only a few words in a soft voice. “That is fair,” Dr. Mai said.
That same night, at her second office on her bed at home, Nina read the documents Dr. Mai had laid in front of her, three different sets of police reports, news accounts, medical bills, the insurance policy, the loan documents, and the lease agreement for the store. Every detail matched. For her, the sad and notable reality was how little attention had been paid to Kao’s tragic experience. The
A determination grew in her to have one thing go right for Kao. The family, traumatized, wanted to return to Laos. So be it. She would help them get the insurance money. They had followed the rules, paying the premiums each month. Examining the policy again, she saw that the maximum insurance payout could go as high as $250,000.
The next day she called Heritage, locating the adjuster assigned to the claim, a woman named Marilyn Rose, who seemed startled to hear that the Vangs had hired a lawyer. Nina gave her an overview of the situation and promised to submit a detailed claim shortly. She tried to communicate the urgency of the Vangs’ problems by going on at some length about their difficult adjustment to a new country, how hard they had worked, and what their trials had cost them personally. She felt she connected. Her contact at Heritage sounded sympathetic by the end of the conversation.
A few days later, on a hot mid-August Sunday, Kao, his wife, his son, and Dr. Mai returned to her office. They brought every business-related scrap of paper they possessed with them in white plastic trash sacks.
They all sat down on the beige carpet in the outer office and started making piles. The documentation consisted of hundreds of paper scraps-mimeographed, penciled, faded, half-legible, in the writings of half a dozen Southeast Asian languages-and most of it was legally irrelevant. Many of the actual receipts, the inventory list, the bills, had burned in the fire. This would be no ordinary insurance claim.
“Many times no receipt,” Dr. Mai explained. “Mrs. Vang went to Salvation Army, houses of friends, farmers’ market in Fresno to buy items for Blue Star. Paid cash. Many items burned up with no receipts.”
“Can we get a list of those items?”
Dr. Mai spoke to Mrs. Vang, who first shook her head and then shrugged.
“Things came from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos. Refugee items. Records burned up. Wrong language anyway.” Dr. Mai squatted comfortably on the floor. They all drank Sprites. Although Kao’s wife looked much younger than he did and was more traditional-looking with her turquoise bracelets and black braid, she too bore the careworn look of premature age. She could have been twenty-five or forty.
“Don’t worry,” Nina said.
“But we cannot-we just cannot prove all the lost items.”
“Just make me a list. In English. Everything you remember. Can you help with that, Dr. Mai?”
“But-we do not know the money paid.”
“Estimate. Here.” Nina made a heading on a fresh legal pad and picked up a scrap. “What does this say?”
“Four pairs sneakers. No amount.”
“What kind of sneakers?”
Shrugs all around. Kao’s shoulders sagged. He and See looked at each other.
They could have been Chinese and worth five bucks a pair. They probably were Chinese.
But they could have been Nikes.
“Estimate forty dollars a pair,” Nina said. “We’ll make sure the insurance company knows it’s only an estimate.”
At the end of the week the family trekked back to the office. This time Nina managed to persuade them to accompany her to Sato’s for dinner. Dr. Mai wore his usual oxford-cloth shirt and sandals. Kao somehow managed to look debonair in spite of everything. Boun, their son, came, too. Their daughter, Dr. Mai explained, was ill and couldn’t come. See smiled here and there, and Nina got the feeling that she had a sunny disposition in better times and understood English fairly well. After dinner, Dr. Mai presented Nina with the list. Estimated $54,000 in inventory lost.
She gave it back and said they must have missed a lot.
By the following week the loss amount topped $175,000. Nina had gone over almost every item. Almost twenty pages long, with several hundred paper scraps pasted onto ink-jet paper as exhibits, the list had been generated out of thin air, the same thin air that the inventory had burned into.
Nina spent a whole office day, phone off and door shut, dictating the claim letter. She gave a lengthy summary of the violent events and attached all the documents she had along with photographs of Kao’s face after the first shooting, creating a package both heartrending and intimidatingly thick. A solid week passed before she and Sandy had all the exhibits organized completely to her satisfaction. Kinko’s had to keep the package overnight to make the copies, and the final hefty original had to be carried in a box.
After completing all this labor, Nina drove the claim over to Heritage personally, staying for a long chat about the need for discretion and speed with Marilyn, who did not overreact to the large claim amount and continued to flash hints of a beating heart.
Sandy took the first call from the insurance company on the first Tuesday morning in September. She came into the office, where Nina was stuffing pleadings into her briefcase for court, and said,
