City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (3 page)

“According to the historical record, James the Brother of Christ, also known as James the Just, may have been Jesus’s designated successor,” Luis continued. “But Paul, though he had never met Christ, had amassed a following based on his interpretation of so-called miraculous events authored by Jesus and what he claimed were Jesus’s own words to him from the afterlife. It’s hard enough having a conversation with a zealot. Now imagine if that zealot is countering your arguments with information he’s saying Jesus is giving him from heaven.”

Sure enough, a few students shifted in their chairs, while others cleared their throats as their parents might’ve done in church having heard the same thing.

“The study of the Gospels is a study in comparative literature,” Luis said. “Why in the Gospel of Mark, which was written first, is he the Son of God but in Matthew he’s described more like Moses, a teacher? Why in the Gospel of John are Christ’s last words ‘I am thirsty’ and ‘It is finished,’ whereas in Luke he says ‘Father, forgive them’ and ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’? If the Gospels had been written by the apostles, they might be a very different thing. But as they were written by men who’d never met Jesus and had to set down their history by parsing stories passed down from the original disciples, and often through Paul’s interpretation, context is key. Did you know that Luke was converted by Paul? That Mark was one of Paul’s translators? There’s a reason so much of the New Testament is made up of Paul’s letters to groups of Christians. So again, is Christianity about Jesus? Or is it about Paul’s interpretation of Jesus?”

In the back row he saw the first head bobbing downwards, sneaking a look at an iPhone.

Ah well.

Luis pressed on as best he could and even received a few interesting questions by the end. Just when he thought he would send them out on a high note for the rest of the day, someone raised their hand tentatively and asked if he’d known the slain priest in East LA. When he looked around the rest of the faces in the classroom, he realized it was all any of them had been thinking of.

“I didn’t,” he said. “But I’m sure he was a good man. I’m just glad the man who did it has come forward and admitted it, as there’s now some hope for his immortal soul.”

The answer was met with a few seconds of silence, before the bell, mercifully in Luis’s opinion, rang to signal the end of the period. Once the students had evacuated the classroom, Luis gathered his books to head back to the rectory for his break period.

Instead, he found Michael Story leaning against the hallway wall, checking his cell phone. A small sticker identifying him as a visitor was stuck to his suit jacket’s left breast pocket.

For a terrifying moment Luis imagined the deputy DA was here to tell him something about Miguel Higuera. But then Michael extended his hand and nodded, suggesting to Luis that he was here about something else entirely.

“Father Chavez, I thought priests were meant to lead with ‘What the church believes is this,’ or ‘What we’re taught is that.’ You’re more like ‘Some people believe this,’ or ‘There are those in the church who believe that.’ You don’t think that confuses the issue?”

Luis shrugged, not taking the bait. “I believe the way we strengthen our beliefs is by allowing them to be rigorously challenged from all sides at all times. What do you believe?”

Michael grinned and extended his hand. “I believe it’s been too long.”

However dubious he was that Michael Story cared how long it had been, Luis shook the proffered hand. He peered into the deputy DA’s eyes for any signs of remorse for past transgressions. He saw not a one.

“What can I do for you?” Luis asked.

“Can we go somewhere quiet?”

Luis led Michael out of St. John’s and over to St. Augustine’s next door. They were an unlikely pair: one a former teenage hood who’d traded that life for a path to the priesthood after his brother’s murder; the other a onetime starry-eyed crusader for justice who had discovered, after joining the LA district attorney’s office, that his ethical resolve was more pliable than he might’ve thought.

They reached a small courtyard, where there was a statue of Saint Francis alongside two benches. Luis sat on one and indicated for Michael to take the other. Michael remained standing.

“I’ll get right to the point,” Michael said. “You’ve no doubt heard about the shooting last night in the San Gabriel Valley. Did you know Father Chang?”

“Not at all.”

“I didn’t either, so I looked into him today. Seems like a good man actually. Cared a lot about his parishioners and the community around the parish as well.”

“So, the shooter gave a reason.”

Michael eyed him with a look that suggested he felt Luis may have missed his true calling.

“He did,” Michael said. “But in a letter to his lawyer he also admitted the killing was premeditated. He says Chang molested his daughter.”

Luis’s face flushed hot. He knew he wasn’t supposed to judge others, but he couldn’t help the flash of anger and hate that coursed through his brain. The molestation scandals that had just about brought the church to its knees were such a raw wound, Luis winced at the possibility of another one.

“Is the girl safe?” Luis asked.

“We have no reason to believe not,” Michael said. “The confession states that she’s gone back to China. Just we can’t get any kind of confirmation on that. We get a lot of ‘yes’ from people we talk to, only to find out it means ‘Yes, I understand the question,’ not ‘Yes, I know where she is.’ It’s a cultural gap. Of course, we’d love to talk to her, but like you, her safety is our primary concern.”

Luis could tell from Michael’s body language that this last bit was a lie. He didn’t care, though. The sooner he could get the deputy DA out of here, the better.

“So, why are you here?”

“We’re getting some red flags,” Michael admitted. “And given the recent scandals, including here in the LA archdiocese, we have to be right about this before the confession hits the press. No one wants to embarrass the archbishop, but no one wants to sweep something like this under the rug if it is true.”

“What’re the red flags?”

“It’s just all so convenient,” Michael said. “The daughter who doesn’t leave a trace. The confession arriving at the station a moment after the shooter was brought in. The accusation of sexual misconduct at a time when everyone is primed to automatically believe it’s true.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Luis asked, afraid he already knew.

“No one at that church is going to talk to the cops,” Michael explained. “But they might talk to another priest. And you’re good at this. You have an instinct for knowing who the bad guys are and the background to understand what makes them tick.”

This tossed-off allusion to Luis’s criminal past angered Luis even more. Michael didn’t seem to notice.

“On top of that it’s your own church’s reputation on the line here. If anyone’s motivated to get in there and get people talking, it’s you. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as anyone. If it’s a case of a molested daughter and a revenge shooting like he says, I want the truth of that to come out. If it’s something else entirely and that’s a smoke screen, I want that truth to come out. With you, I can get that done.”

Luis eyed Michael for a long moment before rising to his feet.

“The answer’s no,” Luis said. “If you need someone to play mediator between you and Father Chang’s congregants, the best person to ask is the parish priest at St. Jerome’s or someone from the archdiocese. Not me.”

“This is one of your brother priests,” Michael protested. “Don’t you even want to think about it?”

Luis considered a raft of responses to this. Instead of choosing, he turned and returned to St. John’s.

III

“This is amazing,” Oscar de Icaza, small-time gangster and car chopper, enthused as he stared out the bay window overlooking Los Angeles. “You feel like the king of the city.”

“It’s what they mean by ‘jetliner views,’” the listing agent, a middle-aged woman named Miranda, said. “You look down on everything as if you’re in a—”

“Yeah, I figured that’s what it meant,” Oscar snarled, cutting the woman off midthought. “I’m not a five-year-old.”

Miranda shot Oscar an aggrieved look, but when he offered no apology, she turned it on the third member of their party, Helen Story.

“Should we look upstairs?” Helen offered, acting in her official capacity as Oscar’s realtor. “We haven’t seen the rooftop deck.”

“Yeah, let’s see the
deck
,” Oscar snapped, turning from the window.

He caught Miranda eyeing Helen with a strained look but didn’t care. Helen raised a placating hand and followed him to the steps. When Miranda moved to come up as well, Helen stopped her with a smile. The agent got the picture and hung back.

“This is it!” Oscar announced once he reached the deck. “You can look back into the canyons, turn around and see all the way to Catalina, downtown, the beaches. This is dramatic. This is what he wants.”

Helen smacked his arm.

“Who were you trying to impress with that cock-of-the-walk routine down there?” she asked.

“You, obviously,” Oscar said, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in for a kiss. “Is it working?”

“No,” she said, scowling, then kissed him back. “Maybe a little bit, but we need Miranda.”

“Oh, do
we
?” he asked.

“Yes. She lives in this neighborhood. This is her territory. There’s never inventory up here, so you want to be that real estate investor she—”

Oscar cut her off with another kiss. He loved this woman.
Loved
this woman. Every ambitious, California, daddy-pleasing, white-bread, sun-kissed cell. But every so often he needed to remind her that he was the man, something he doubted her deputy DA husband-in-name-only ever did. As she shifted to acknowledge his hard-on, but without any real invitation to do something about it, he stepped away.

“Okay, so we make her happy,” Oscar agreed. “How do we do that?”

“This house is way overpriced, but we go in at the asking price anyway,” Helen said. “If it gets competitive, I’ll confide in her what your top bid is and say I’ll drop my commission to make it work without suggesting she drop hers. That’s when I say ‘cash.’”

“But won’t we lose money on the resale?” Oscar asked.

“No, if you play it right you’ll break even. But then you’ve got someone like Miranda slipping you leads in hopes of making another cash commission.”

Oscar smiled and put his arms around Helen’s waist. “How much time before she comes up here?” he asked, nodding to the rattan sofa on the far side of the deck.

“You’re crazy,” Helen said, brushing his hand away, albeit without much force.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “We’re about to pay three million dollars for this house. We should be able to use it once before handing the keys over to our new partner.”

He slipped a hand under her shirt and felt her heart quicken. He knew the answer was still no but liked the effect he had on her body regardless.

“You’re ridiculous,” Helen said, voice barely a whisper, as she pulled his hand away. “But behave yourself and maybe—
maybe
—I’ll come up with some reason why we have to come back and see the house on our own.”

Goddamn, I love this woman.

“Are you hearing me?” the red-faced businessman, a Mr. Jim Jakey of Compass Bank of Fort Wayne, Indiana, thundered. “This was supposed to be billed to the company. When they reserved the travel, they should’ve paid for the room.”

Zhelin “Tony” Qi, the hotel’s front-end manager, smiled placidly in the face of the tantrum. Behind the businessman stood three of his junior colleagues, all of whom could not have looked more embarrassed. The trio obviously knew their boss had made a mistake. It was telling that none came to the man’s rescue.

“The rooms were reserved by a corporate card,” Tony explained without a hint of condescension. “But we were not authorized to charge it. We have a second company card, the one you gave us for incidentals when you checked in, on file. Would you like to put the rooms on that card?”

Mr. Jakey’s chin jutted upwards, his knuckles whitening. Tony wondered how many times this performance had worked in the past.

“Why aren’t you telling me anything different than her?” he said, nodding toward the young desk clerk who’d had Tony paged moments earlier when it seemed as if things might become violent. “I thought I was talking to somebody in charge.”

The businessman’s face was all contempt now. Tony straightened and reached for the phone.

“I apologize for wasting your time,” Tony said. “It is my fault. I misinterpreted the situation.”

Jakey tossed a smug look back to his surprised colleagues. They obviously wanted to see their overly entitled boss knocked down a few pegs. As he reached for the telephone, he hoped his next action didn’t disappoint.

“Hello, this is Zhelin Qi, front-end manager at the Century Continental Hotel at 3021 Avenue of the Stars,” he said when the call was answered. “We have a customer, Mr. Jim Jakey, at checkout refusing to pay his bill. The total is over eight thousand dollars. Yes, he is still in the lobby. Thank you.”

Tony hung up. Jakey’s look of bluster switched to one of confusion.

“What was that?”

“Los Angeles Police Department’s Commercial Crimes Division, Fraud Section,” Tony explained. “They prefer we do not escalate these matters ourselves, particularly when the amount is equivalent to grand theft.”

“The
police
?” Jakey roared, though through a cracking voice. “Are you crazy? Why would you call the police?”

“You are refusing to pay your bill,” Tony replied. “I am trying to resolve the situation in a way that prevents loss to this hotel.”

Tony allowed himself a glance to the desk clerk, Perla, who’d called him over in the first place. She not only seemed to be enjoying this, it appeared she was taking mental notes for the story she’d repeat a dozen times over the next few days to every worker in the hotel.

Oh, you should’ve seen unflappable Manager Qi take on that big, bad American asshole from Room 810.

As Perla was the hotel workers union rep for the Century Continental, it could not have gone smoother or more in his favor.

Tony Qi is a man who gets things done,
she’d say.

And when down the line he needed her to, she’d follow his lead and make the others do the same. As a representative of the city’s largest triad, Tony knew his reputation had to be sterling. The triad wasn’t some murderous criminal organization like the Sicilian mafia, the Sinaloa drug cartel, or the Salvadoran MS-13. Rather, it was a political organization that operated outside the mainstream and worked to help those who similarly found themselves outside the political mainstream.

Or that was, of course, what Tony needed the workers at the Century Continental to believe about the sometimes-criminal organization. When they needed help and could turn to no one else, there’d he be. He just might need a favor—could be something as simple as a vote—somewhere down the line in return.

It took only a moment more for Tony to wrap up the matter with Mr. Jakey. Knowing the businessman had no recourse, he simply waited until he produced two credit cards for Tony to split the bill on and then left for the airport.

“Did you really call the police?” Perla asked once Jakey’s shuttle pulled away.

“Absolutely. You should have the number, too,” he said, writing it down. “This is a friend of ours in the fraud division. His personal cell. If you are ever in this situation and I am not here, call and use my name.”

Perla had already appeared impressed. Now she looked awed.

“Thank you, Mr. Qi,” she said, offering a slight bow.

“Of course,” he replied, returning the bow and moving away. Tony had come over from Shenzhen via a so-called snakehead, the triad equivalent of the Latin American “coyote,” when he was sixteen. His parents, grandparents, and even an uncle had chipped in almost everything they’d managed to save to pay the man to get Tony onto a container ship that docked at the Port of San Diego three weeks later.

When he was dropped off in the Gaslamp Quarter with only a crewman’s ID, listing him as a Filipino national, he didn’t blink. He marched into the first restaurant he could find and two days later he had a cash-under-the-table job as a busboy at a seafood place in Mira Mesa. Intent on making his way north, he looked for another job as soon as possible, finding a position as a poolside server at an Indian casino in the City of Industry. Over the next twenty years he worked his way to Los Angeles through several hotel jobs and wove himself into the fabric of the city, gaining citizenship and rising through the ranks of the San Gabriel–based triad, until he landed at the Century Continental. He didn’t know if he would rise higher, either in the triad or in the hotel business. Those were the decisions best left to others. What made him happiest was continuing to further his reputation as an eminent and imperturbable problem solver.

The incident with Mr. Jakey turned out to be the only real fireworks of Tony’s day. He did his rounds of the kitchen, the laundry, and the administrative offices. He spot-checked the ballrooms before the organizers of the Women in PR awards dinner arrived to oversee the setup. He then went outside to look over the grounds. All was in order and ready to be handed off to the night manager.

Tony went to the valet stand, where his car and keys were already waiting.

The traffic from Century City to the John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana was worse than he’d anticipated. Tony had hoped to stop somewhere and change. This was impossible now. He’d worn his blue Brooks Brothers suit to work that day, but it always struck him as officious. The gray regent-fit suit laid out in the garment bag in the trunk was more appropriate for the image he wished to cultivate to clients in his other job.

Particularly now.

Tony had two careers really, but only one employer. At the hotel he made sure the hotel workers union was kept happy. This meant providing jobs, bribes, and favors in return for a strong voting bloc, both politically and against hotel upper management when it came to supporting which outside vendors the hotel used for linens, liquor, and food supplies. Meaning: triad-owned ones.

Tony’s other job for the triad, very much away from the hotel, was in the area of birth tourism.

The business of birth tourism in America had always been fairly skivvy and low end. It was rife with unlicensed doctors or midwives, seedy motels, and iffy paperwork that said it ensured American citizenship to those born on US soil but often did not. Somewhere along the line the triad had sensed a business opportunity.

As the Chinese economy surged, the desire among China’s nouveau riche to have it all increased along with it. The idea that dual citizenship would make it easier for their children (well, their sons) to do business in America in future years meant they were willing to pay any cost. This led to high-end package deals—not dissimilar to ones offered by exclusive resorts—that included airfare, four-star accommodations, fine dining, and weekly in-home visits from a doctor fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, or the language of the client’s choice.

Clients weren’t flown directly from Beijing or Hong Kong but to Hawaii first. Then they would board a separate plane that would land not at LAX but at the smaller John Wayne Airport in Orange County. The only time they would have to clear customs would be in Hawaii. It was not only foolproof, it was technically legal. This, Tony believed, appealed to the triad the most.

Once they arrived in the city, the client would be put up in a luxury condominium, complete with swimming pool, gym, and a twenty-four-hour concierge. For a little more money they could be put up in their own private house, one the triad owned for a short time, renovated utilizing triad-owned construction equipment and supplies, then flipped for profit afterwards.

After much internal discussion, it was decided that Tony Qi should run the operation. And the first thing he did was reach out to a trusted triad contact who’d dealt with them for years, shipping high-end stolen cars to Hong Kong, without being anything but a perfect gentleman and business partner along the way. Given that his “business” meant that he acquired an impressive knowledge of the city’s poshest neighborhoods, Tony thought him an unimpeachable ally in this new venture.

Tony’s cell phone buzzed.

Speak of the devil.

It was a text from Oscar de Icaza showing sixteen photographs, taken from various angles, of an amazing three-story house with views—jetliner views, an earlier text had promised—all the way to the Pacific from high over Sunset Boulevard. Even on his phone’s tiny screen he could make out his hotel.

Again, he’d been proven right about Oscar. The house would work perfectly. He wrote back that they should acquire it right away and get it ready for their latest client. He didn’t want to be too optimistic, but given his own commission on these arrangements, his time facing down irritating and boorish business travelers might be nearing its end.