“ Agassiz,” he said. “You know, near Dali.”
“I love that restaurant.”
“How about you? How long you been here?”
“Oh, four years or so.”
Up close, she was more appealing than he’d anticipated. As opposed to Marcella Ahn, she was exactly his type, natural, unpretentious, a little shy, forgetful but not at all ditzy, not unlike his ex-girlfriend. Toua had to remind himself that Caroline Yip was the subject of his investigation, and that she was, in all probability, unstable, if not out-and-out dangerous.
“Hey, I gotta go,” she said, “but if you’re not doing anything later, we can have a drink in the garden.” They both looked over at the “garden,” broken concrete slabs and crab-grass where a battered wire table and two cracked plastic chairs were perched, and they shared a smirk. “I make a mean gin and tonic.”
“I don’t drink,” he told her.
“Iced tea, then.”
It was a bit unorthodox, but Toua accepted the invitation. He thought it’d give him an opportunity to probe, so he met her outside at 6, Caroline Yip bringing out two tall glasses of iced tea, Toua a plate of cheese and crackers.
They made small talk, mostly chatting about the neighborhood, the laundromat, nearby stores, takeout places- soul food from the Coast Cafe on River Street, steak tips from the Village Grill on Magazine. Then, as casually as he could, Toua asked, “What’s the owner of this property like?”
“What do you mean?”
“She a decent landlord? She fix things when they break?”
“She’s a cunt.”
“Okay,” he said. He had thought he’d have to work a little harder to uncover her feelings. He had agreed to give Marcella Ahn daily e-mail updates, but thus far he’d had nothing to report. Caroline Yip wasn’t doing anything untoward in the house, and her water usage, according to the meter, which he dutifully checked every day, was normal. He had begun to think this was all a figment of Marcella Ahn’s imagination, that the gifts had been from a fan (did poets have fans?), that the meter had been malfunctioning or there’d indeed been a leak. But now, startled by the vehemence with which Caroline Yip said “cunt,” he reconsidered. “Why do you say that?”
“Let’s talk about something else. Want a refill?”
She took their glasses and went into the kitchen. She returned with a gin and tonic for herself.
“When’d you quit drinking?” she asked, handing him his iced tea.
“The first time?” Toua said. “After college.”
“There must be a story there.”
“Long story. I’ll tell it to you some other time, maybe.”
“I’m interested.”
“It’s not very interesting.”
“Come on. Start at the beginning. Where’d you grow up?”
She kept pressing, and finally he told her the story, not bothering to disguise it. When he was three, his family had fled Laos to the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, where they spent three years before being shipped off to White Bear, Minnesota. He worked hard in school and was accepted to M.I.T., but once there he felt overwhelmed, afraid he couldn’t cut it, and he started drinking. In his sophomore year, he flunked out. He enlisted in the army and served as an MP in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, then returned to the States and joined the Cambridge Police, going to night school at Suffolk for years and finally getting his degree. Eventually he made detective, staying sober until two years ago, after which he quit the force.
“What happened?” she asked.
“It wasn’t one thing. It was everything. I burned out.” He was working on a new task force. A gang called MOD, Methods of Destruction, made up of Hmong teenagers, had moved into Area 4, and Toua was given the assignment because everyone assumed he spoke Hmong. Drive-bys, home invasions, extortion, drugs, firearms, prostitution-MOD was into it all, even sending notices to cops that they’d been “green-lighted” for execution. Toua received one, emblazoned with MOD’s slogan,
“Jesus. Are these guys still around?”
“Some. I heard most of them have moved on.”
“I had no idea. I’ve always thought Cambridge was so safe. What have you been doing since?”
“Not a lot,” Toua said. He had revealed too much. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because he hadn’t talked to anyone in quite a while. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a poet,” she told him.
He was an idiot. A lazy idiot. He had taken the client’s word for granted, when a simple Google search would have revealed the truth.
“You lied to me,” Toua said to Marcella Ahn at her house.
“Lying is a relative term,” she replied, once again decked out as an Edwardian whore: a corset and bodice, miniskirt and high heels, full makeup, hair glistening. “I might have omitted a few things. Maybe it was a test, to see how competent you are.”
“She has every reason to hate you.”
“Oh? Is that what she told you? I’m the one at fault for her being such a failure?”
For several years, the two women had been the best of friends-inseparable, really. But then their first books came out at the same time, Marcella Ahn’s from a major New York publisher, Caroline Yip’s from a small, albeit respected press. Both had very similar jacket photos, the two women looking solemn and precious, hair flowing in full regalia. An unfortunate coincidence. Critics couldn’t resist reviewing them together, mocking the pair as “The Oriental Hair Poets,” “The Braids of the East,” and “The New Asian Poetresses.”
But Marcella Ahn came away from these barbs relatively unscathed. Her book, Speak to Desire, was taken seriously, compared to Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson. Her poetry was highly erudite, usually beginning with mundane observations about birds or plant life, then slipping into long, abstract meditations on entropy and inertia, the Bible, evolution, and death, punctuated by the briefest mention of personal deprivations-anorexia, depression, abandonment. Or so the critics said. Toua couldn’t make heads or tails of the poems he found online.
In contrast, Caroline Yip’s book,
Worse, in Caroline Yip’s eyes, was what happened afterward. She accused Marcella of trying to thwart her at every turn. Teaching jobs, coveted magazine publications, awards, residencies, fellowships-everything Caroline applied for, Marcella seemed to get. Caroline told people it didn’t hurt that Marcella was a shameless schmoozer, flirting and networking with anyone who might be of use. Yet the fact was, Marcella was rich. Her father was a shipping tycoon, and she had a trust fund in the millions. She didn’t need any of these pitifully small sinecures which would have meant a livelihood to Caroline, and she came to believe that the only reason Marcella was pursuing them at all was to taunt her.
“You see now why she’s doing these things?” Marcella Ahn said. “I’ve let her stay in that house practically rent-free, and how does she repay me? By smearing me. Spreading anonymous rumors on Internet forums! Implying I slept with award judges! Posting bad reviews of my book! So enough was enough. I stopped speaking to her and asked her to move out. Was that unreasonable of me? After all I’ve done for her? I lent her money. I kept encouraging her. I helped her find a publisher for her book. What did I get in return? A hateful squatter who’s trying to mindfuck me, who’s intent on the destruction of my reputation and sanity!”
This was, Toua thought to himself, silly. He glanced around Marcella Ahn’s plush, immaculate house. Mahogany floor, custom wood furniture. Didn’t these women have anything better to do than engage in petty games? And what did this say about him? He’d given up his shield only to go from trailing husbands to skip-tracing debtors and serving subpoenas to accommodating the paranoid whims of two crackpot poets.
