City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (8 page)

“Okay,” Luis agreed.

“The license plates of your car say it’s registered to a church. What’re you, a thief? A volunteer?”

“A priest,” Luis said.

The man raised an eyebrow. Luis didn’t think he could be much older than twenty, but the other men in the room clearly respected him. He, too, was Asian and had a shock of spiky black hair jutting up from his scalp like porcupine quills. His suit was not only expensive, it was immaculately tailored. Still, he hadn’t seen him out on the floor.

“Why are you using a crooked man’s phone number?” he asked. “A mistake and you could’ve gotten by. But you took a picture of it? That got our attention.”

“Yamazoe may be a bad guy,” Luis said evenly, “but he was a parishioner, and there’s a concern in the parish for his child.”

The man eyed Luis long and hard, then shook his head.

“I don’t like priests,” he said. “We’re in the same business—taking the money of fools hoping for a better life—but somehow I think we’re more honest about it.”

Luis actually found this analogy intriguing but had to save it for later. “Do you know where Yamazoe’s daughter is?”

The man rose, moved close to Luis, then slapped him so hard that Luis tumbled from the chair. The slap stung Luis’s skin but didn’t do any real damage that he could feel. He righted himself but stayed on the floor.

“Not his daughter,” the man said simply. “Got another question?”

“Is she safe?”

The man slapped Luis again, but this time on the other cheek. Luis wasn’t ready, and his head snapped back, his neck crashing into the chair leg. This sent a jolt down his spine. As his head throbbed, his fingers and toes burned, as if he’d touched a live wire.

“Of course she is. She’s back with her family. She did great, don’t you think? Any more?”

“How much was Yamazoe into you for?”

The young man balled up his fist and fired a right into Luis’s face, sending his head into the carpet. Blood trickled from Luis’s nose and mouth. By now the pain was coming in from so many directions that his body twisted and reeled as if to escape it.

The man considered the question, then shook his head. “Not answering that one. What else?”

“If the girl wasn’t Yamazoe’s daughter, why did he kill Father Chang?”

The young man straightened to his full height and indicated for the special security men to lift Luis and put him back on the chair.

“Hold him there,” he commanded.

He punched Luis twice, a quick one-two to the face again, more blood smearing across his hands. “Another question? Go ahead. Ask anything.”

“If the girl wasn’t Yamazoe’s daughter, why did he kill—?”

Before Luis could finish his sentence, the young man boxed him in the ears. The twin blows affected Luis’s equilibrium to the point he almost threw up. He still righted himself, however, and stared up at his tormentor as if asking for more. He was obliged with three swift blows to the head.

One of these knocked the delirious Luis unconscious. When Luis came to, he was being dragged to the parish car. Even the slightest movement sent darts of pain through his system, so he hung as limp as possible. One of the security men unlocked the driver’s-side door, and the other shoved Luis behind the wheel. His keys were tossed in his lap and a pistol placed to his temple.

“If you come back here, priest or not, we’ll kill you. Understand?”

Luis managed to nod, the motion practically bringing tears to his eyes. The security men moved away. Luis felt around in his pockets, then leaned out of the car.

“My cell phone. You still have my phone.”

The security men looked back at him incredulously. The taller of the two plucked Luis’s phone from his pocket, turned it on to delete the photo of Yamazoe’s loyalty customer screen, then threw it as far away into the parking lot as he could, a star quarterback’s amazing field-long Hail Mary of a pass.

Then the two security men walked away.

It took ten agonizing minutes of staggering through the parking lot to find his phone. When he discovered it behind the rear wheel of a Datsun, the screen was cracked, but he could still dial. He immediately rang Michael Story, only to get voice mail.

“Yamazoe was a big gambler. Lost a fortune to, I think, the local triad. The girl worked for them in order to establish some kind of cover story. So it was either the triad who wanted Father Chang dead or someone who hired them. That’s all I got.”

He hung up, turned on the ignition, caught sight of his monstrous reflection in the rearview mirror, and grimaced as he thought about how he’d explain this away in front of the congregation on Sunday.

VIII

When Michael listened to the message from Luis, he couldn’t call Detective Whitehead fast enough.

The triad? No one could touch the LA triad. It was understood they existed, sure, but they kept themselves so far from the spotlight and politically insulated that they were practically untouchable. Even the tiniest foothold into their operations was worth taking a run at.

He arranged a sit-down with Yamazoe first thing the next morning and headed over to the Hollenbeck station.

“What do you have?” Whitehead asked when Michael entered the building.

“Nothing remotely actionable or concrete,” Michael said. “Which is why I need to work him alone.”

“You can’t talk to him without his attorney,” Whitehead said.

“Wrong. I can’t talk to him about the shooting of Father Chang without his attorney,” Michael said. “But I can ask him about an unrelated crime.”

Whitehead eyed him curiously. “This your guy working?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

That didn’t sound good enough for the detective, but Michael knew he’d have to accept it anyway. Whitehead arranged to use one of the interrogation rooms and had Yamazoe brought in from the cells. As the prisoner hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, he was grumpy about being interrogated so early. When he saw Michael and Detective Whitehead waiting for him instead of deGuzman, he got downright irritable.

“Where’s my lawyer?” Yamazoe demanded.

As if having been waiting for such a prompt, Whitehead rose and moved to the door. “I’ll go see if he’s here yet.”

After Whitehead exited, Yamazoe turned his dull-eyed attention to Michael, who sat down opposite him.

“Who’re you?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you, asshole.”

Yamazoe scoffed. “You think that’s how you get me to talk?”

“Not at all.”

Yamazoe sighed and glanced around the room. It was claustrophobically small. Michael knew it had been constructed that way on purpose.

“All right,” Michael said. “Let me ask you something.”

“You can’t ask me anything without my lawyer present,” Yamazoe said.

“There are two things wrong with that statement,” Michael said, leaning back in his chair. “First, I sure can ask you questions without your attorney present; it’s just inadmissible in court. Second, why don’t you listen to the questions first before deciding you don’t want to answer?”

Yamazoe smirked but said nothing.

“Oh, come on.”

Yamazoe crossed his arms and eyed Michael as if challenging him to stop wasting his time.

“Okay, but let’s just pretend for argument’s sake that you’re a big gambler and that you are actually into people for a lot of money.”

Yamazoe didn’t so much as twitch. Michael almost laughed. When someone was working that hard to betray nothing on their face, well
 . . .

“And let’s just say that you’re also a big loser. And I mean across the boards a big loser. Sporting events, horse tracks, cards, you name it. In fact, the one thing you’re actually successful at is getting idiots to float you as you rob Peter to pay Paul to the tune of the low- to mid-six figures.”

While it was true Luis had only mentioned the one casino, Michael was able to use this information to extrapolate the next few steps. A contract killing from a nonprofessional was a huge chunk of change. To get somebody to do that implied a debt that had gone so far outside of Yamazoe’s control that his desperation took over. It had become mortal.

Do this or die.

To Michael this meant a lot more money than a casino, particularly a Los Angeles card room, would ever allow a player to get into the hole to them for. Yamazoe probably owed the Golden Dragon guys somewhere in the low five figures. But knowing inveterate gamblers, he imagined the casino was only one of the places Yamazoe had found to lose money.

The triad aspect threw Michael a little. He hadn’t dealt much with Chinese organized crime in the prosecutor’s office. He knew it existed, sure, but the main number he always heard was that they made their bones controlling 70 percent of North America’s heroin trade and then on moving illegals into the US—the birth hotels bust of a few months back had been just that, a bust, as zero charges came out of it.

But Luis knew the city’s criminal element better than Michael did, particularly the ones that didn’t get caught. If he said the casino was triad-run, he believed him.

“Let me be frank,” Michael continued. “The people who put you up to this probably targeted you early on. They like nothing more than to cultivate marks with an impossible level of debt. In fact, they like to go around to the people you owe money in order to consolidate that debt, like a reverse loan shark. Yeah, I’ll bet some of your debtors would’ve been just as happy to break your legs, but when the triad comes along—”

This time there was a flinch.

“—and they’re offering to pay the full amount to assume the debt, well, then you’re really screwed.”

Yamazoe seemed to fold on himself, like prey trying to make itself a smaller target. Michael knew he’d rattled him.

“Now, maybe you’ll answer a few questions.”

“Not without my attorney present,” Yamazoe said weakly.

“The one the triad set up for you? The one that, when he hears the kinds of questions I’m asking, will report back just how much we know to the local Dragon Head? I’m not entirely sure that’s how you want this to go.”

Yamazoe’s knee bounced up and down. As soon as he realized he was doing it, however, he made it stop.

“But then there’s the version where your attorney knows that no one in law enforcement or the prosecutor’s office would be stupid enough to jeopardize a murder trial by talking to you without your lawyer present. Which means if I’m able to act in any small way on anything you say, no one will believe it came from you, right?”

Yamazoe said nothing, but his eyes found Michael’s. He opened his mouth and exhaled so hard Michael thought he’d deflate.

“If they find out I said anything, I’m dead,” Yamazoe said quietly. “Not ‘my time in prison will be hard.’ Not ‘they’ll find the judge that’ll make sure I never see the light of day again.’ They’ll just kill me, and no one’ll care. Not you, not Detective Whitehead, nobody.”

Michael was too giddy to realize he should’ve countered this, but Yamazoe plowed on.

“And I get it. I was dead to them already when they gave me this shot to keep breathing. I knew it was a sucker’s bet, but I didn’t have a choice. They said you’d never be able to link it.”

“That’s because they’re not as smart as they think they are,” Michael said. “But if you tell me what I want to know, I can’t promise you leniency, as there’s no doubt you pulled the trigger on Father Chang. What I can do is take your case to the Justice Department and get you into protective custody. You’ll be so gone, I won’t even know where you are. Understand?”

Yamazoe considered this. Michael doubted the gambler trusted him, but he knew his options were dwindling. There was also the possibility that if Michael could tie him to the triad in a matter of days, someone else could, too.

“All right,” Yamazoe said. “What do you want to know?”

Susan checked her phone for the hundredth time in the past half hour. It was fifteen minutes before she had to leave.

“I can see one more patient,” she told the receptionist as she turned over the billing information for her last appointment. “Then I have to go. Try to make it someone who won’t ask a lot of questions.”

The receptionist nodded and sent back a fiftysomething Hispanic man who didn’t want to be there in the first place. Only, he’d let some kind of ear infection go so long that it was now affecting his balance and speech. Susan felt around his swollen nodes and recognized an out-of-control infection, but one that could be handled with antibiotics. She retrieved the boxes of pills from the supply closet, explained how to take them, and then sent him on his way. He seemed relieved to be done so quickly.

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she announced on her way out the door.

Not wanting to answer questions, Susan changed into her black dress in the backseat of her car rather than in the office. She’d already tempted fate by printing a couple of photos of Father Chang on the office printer, which she knew Clover would find a reason to complain about. This was a bad enough day already.

The photos had actually been an issue, though. There were practically none of just Father Chang. All were either Benny and Nan, her and Benny, or, in a single instance, the three of them together. She tried to remember the occasion, then realized it was taken at some art opening and later e-mailed over by their host.

What made the photo all the more interesting was how it illustrated just how unlikely a trio they were. On one side there was her, short and stocky, in her midthirties with her thrift-store fashion. On the other, Nan, tall and thin with a perpetual slump, barely into his twenties, wearing his perpetual dark corduroy pants and gray-green sweater. Then in the middle, with his arms around them both, was Benny, in his midfifties and well preserved, if not a little rotund, his equally perpetual Roman collar the focal point of the image.

The smile on Benny’s face reminded Susan of why she enjoyed his company. Sure, he could be something of a depressive who medicated himself with alcohol and sleeping pills, making him manic, paranoid, and horrible to be around. But when he was clean, his sense of wonder and curiosity made him a boon companion. He was always reading the new book, listening to the latest music, or taking in the most modern art out of a sense that
someone
had to, or the world might as well hand itself over to the barbarians.

And he felt the exact same way about people who couldn’t fight for themselves. In fact, there was nothing quite so unstoppable as Father Chang when he decided an injustice was being done. She remembered that he’d even been teaching himself Thai at the time of his death, his sixth tongue, in order to better communicate with a group of locals in the garment district he thought could benefit from his activist support.

Though she assumed Benny knew how much she respected him, she was never really sure where she stood with him. He used her—to pick up scuttlebutt from the various communities that utilized the clinic, as a sounding board for his latest schemes, but most of all for Nan.

They’d go to a movie or attend the opening of an art exhibit and be mistaken for God knew what. As a Catholic priest, the obvious—that Father Chang was literally their father—was likely ruled out. Besides, Nan and Susan could not have looked more different, so siblings was out. The process of elimination then had it that Nan and Susan, despite their age difference, were somehow a couple, and Father Chang their benevolent friend and chaperone.

What no one ever suspected was the truth.

“You said ten o’clock,” Nan scolded as he climbed into her car seconds after she pulled up to the steps of the biochemical engineering building. “I’ve been waiting half an hour carrying these.”

He indicated a bouquet of white lilies. She couldn’t understand why her lateness was such a crime but didn’t blame Nan for being so touchy, given the week he’d had.

“Check your texts,” Susan said, turning back onto the road. “I said ten thirty. I said it twenty times.”

Nan didn’t check but simply folded in on himself. She touched his arm.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he huffed.

No, it doesn’t.

The cemetery was on a flat stretch of ground just off the 110 freeway. Cars whizzed by, and the suffocating stench of diesel fumes choked the area. Susan thought Nan might criticize her for allowing the priest to be buried here, but he said nothing. He probably knew there hadn’t been much choice.

“Over there,” she said, pointing to a van alongside an open grave.

They hiked up to the spot and saw three men in work clothes alongside a fourth in a suit.

“Dr. Auyong?” the suited man asked. “I’m Walt Broderick. We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes,” Susan managed, unable to take her eyes off the simple cherry-wood coffin sitting nearby.

Her friend. Her lively, rambunctious, fatally stupid friend.