Chasing the Dragon (20 page)

“No. Nothing new.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time out of the office lately. Beating the bushes, I assume.”

“Yes,” said Ying. “Beating the bushes.”

“And . . .?”

“I haven’t found anything.”

The room was silent. Ying felt the disdain of the other dicks, but he’d felt that on more than one occasion lately.

Angelo pursed his lips. “All right. Given the evidence, we can’t move on Dante Mancuso. Meanwhile, I think we need to expand our search. Throw out a wider net.”

“There’s always the possibility this was a random thing,” said Detective Roma. She was a dark-haired woman with dark eyes. “Regina never locks her door. So maybe someone came in—and what we have is a robbery that went bad.”

“How about the son?” asked Angelo. “Did you check his alibi?”

His partner was supposed to take the initiative in this regard, but Ying saw in a glance that Toliveri had little to report. Angelo’s eyes ran from one to the other, but they ultimately settled on Ying. He was the one leading the case.

“We’re working on it,” said Ying. “People are reluctant to talk. But we’re going out to the warehouse later today, together. To interview the secretary.”

Angelo drummed his fingers.

“How about Salvatore’s cronies? His old friends?” said Angelo. “Any ideas?”

“George Marinetti,” said Detective Roma. “And Ernesto Mollini. Those two, they’ve been tight with the Mancuso brothers since they were kids. That’s what the wife tells me. And they hang around the Serafina Café.”

“Toliveri and I can stop by there,” said Ying. “This afternoon, when we get back from the warehouse.”

“No,” said Angelo. “We need to get the ground covered a little more quickly. Toli, I want you to go talk to the secretary at the warehouse. Get her alone. On her lunch hour. And Ying, you talk to Marinetti and Mollini. Then check back with me, let me know what you’ve got.”

Ying had heard the criticism implicit in Angelo’s voice, the suggestion he was not on the ball. He felt the others watching him, wondering if he’d lost it. If all of a sudden he just wasn’t any good anymore. It happened, Ying knew. He’d seen it himself.

“All right,” said Ying. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

The Serafina Café was not the kind of place Ying sought out on his own. It sat in the shadow of the Sam Wong Hotel, off Broadway. It had been there for some thirty years, if not longer, back when the street had been Italian, before Chinatown overgrew its borders. It had a linoleum counter and a tin ceiling and tables with red and white checkered cloths that were not as clean as maybe they had once been. The front window was smudged, and the woman who owned the restaurant, Stella, was known in the neighborhood for berating her Chinese busboys.

Inside, the place was dark. The proprietress stood behind the counter. Stella was a fiery woman, wearing a flower-print dress that was open at the collar. She stood with her hands on her waist and her breasts pushed forward. She was maybe seventy years old.

“I am looking for George Marinetti,” said Ying. “And Ernesto Mollini.”

Stella said nothing. She pointed at the table in the back, where the two old men sat with cigars burning and a bottle of grappa between them. Ying walked over.

“Mr. Marinetti?”

“Yes.”

Marinetti had big eyes that seemed even bigger because of his glasses. He wore a mustache waxed up in a barbershop fashion that had been out of style since the Depression, if not longer, and it was apparent he could not see well despite the glasses. He was extremely friendly, though, and spoke with a certain flair.

“Yes, yes, how can we help you?”

“If you and Mr. Mollini have a few minutes?”

“Certainly,” said Marinetti. “Old men like us, we are flattered when anyone comes to talk to us. We have no dignity.”

“No teeth, either,” said Mollini.

“No. No teeth. No money. But we have time.”

“I appreciate it,” said Ying, and showed them his badge. “I’d like to speak to you about Salvatore Mancuso.”

A palpable melancholy passed over the men.

“You have a drink?”

“No. No, thank you.”

“Please. Have some grappa?”

“No.”

“No? What part of Italy you from, you don’t want any grappa?”

For a second Ying thought maybe Marinetti was even more blind than he thought, then Ernesto let out a guffaw, and Ying realized it was the old rigmarole, a joke at the Chinaman’s expense. Marinetti did not seem to mean anything by it, but then they never did.

“You ever visit Salvatore up at his house?”

“On occasion,” said Marinetti. “We would have a glass of wine.”

“You know his office upstairs?”

“The room where he was killed?”

“Did he keep anything valuable up there that you know about?”

“You think it was a thief who killed him?”

“Money? Jewelry?”

The men shook their heads.

“Did he have any enemies?”

“What do you mean?”

“Business deals, people he owed?”

“He didn’t owe anyone.”

“Or owed him?”

“He was a respectable man. You going to ask about his love life next?”

“Was there a love life?”

The old man laughed. They snickered and choked a little on their cigars.

“You get our age, you see how funny this is.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Mollini.

“His brother,” said Ying. “Before his brother Giovanni died, there were rumors he thought someone was trying to kill him.”

“What rumors?”

“I never hear these rumors.”

“Did Giovanni have any enemies?” asked Ying.

“No, no. Everyone loved him. Both of them, the Mancuso brothers. Salvatore and Giovanni.”

“Were there any money issues?”

“You already asked that.”

“In the Mancuso family—the business. Did he ever talk about how it was doing?”

“The brothers were extremely successful. Especially Salvatore. He knew how to run a business.”

Stella approached the table. She had some spaghetti for the men, and put it down with a flourish but did not bother to glance at Ying. Even so, she was not shy about inserting herself in the conversation.

“How can anyone make any money at the docks these days? All the container ships off-load in Oakland,” she said, “and the storage warehouses on the waterfront, who needs them?”

“That’s not completely so,” said Mollini.

“Of course it’s so,” she said. “You know there’s only one way the Mancusos have survived so long.”

“Stella,” said George. “This isn’t the time for that.”

“Time for what?” asked Ying.

“No one wants the truth,” said Stella, but she still did not look Ying’s way. “We had a waterfront once. We had Little Italy. Then they put that son of a bitch Rossi as mayor. Everybody talks like he’s a hero now. But him and his friends, the Chinese, the Hong Kongs, the goddamn Sicilians—they made their deals. And you see. You see what you get . . .”

She made a sweeping gesture that included not just Ying but all of Chinatown. Ying had heard this line of thinking before, of course—how Rossi had sold the place out to Hong Kong—but he didn’t know what it had to do with the case at hand. Stella threw her hand up in disgust.

“And that boy, Gary Mancuso, he lives like a prince on top of the hill. Everyone else is gone from the waterfront, but not the Mancusos. Tell me how they make all that money out there? You think that warehouse is full of soccer balls? Hah! This was an honest place once, not full of crooks. Secret deals. The Chinese. This, that.”

Marinetti shrugged his shoulders and Ernesto shrugged, too, both of them embarrassed, maybe, knowing there was no way to stop Stella once she got going.

“Goddamn Chinese own the police. They own it all. And the only reason they send this one here,” she said, pointing at Ying, “is for window dressing. For show. They are not going to catch Salvatore’s murderer. This is a dirty business.”

There was a clattering in the kitchen, dishes falling to the floor. Stella scurried away, furious. You could hear her scolding the busboy—yelling in Italian though the busboy was Cantonese and didn’t understand a lick.

“Salvatore Mancuso was the salt of the earth,” said George. “Him and his brother both.”

“Yes,” said Ernesto.

“I don’t know why such an awful thing would happen.” Marinetti nodded toward the noise in the kitchen. “The old lady—she is a little crazy.”

“Pay no attention.”

They started in on their spaghetti. Ying wasn’t going to get anything more from them, he knew that. It was all platitudes now. They didn’t bother to look up when he left. They were too busy with their noodles and their sauce.

It was possible to reconstruct facial features from the photograph of a decayed corpse, but Ying did not have the equipment or the computer skills. In a sense, he had misrepresented himself to Dante on this issue, intending to get help from an old friend at SI on the photo analysis—but that did not seem wise now. Instead, he did it the hard way. He pulled some file photos of Ru Shen, then went to the Chinatown library where he could examine them unencumbered. While he was there, he pulled some magazine profiles as well.

Ru Shen was a complicated figure, a businessman, Shanghai-born. He had been raised a Buddhist but converted to Christianity. Married an American woman but insisted his children speak Chinese. He dined with the mayor, contributed to downtown development, but objected on spiritual grounds to the materialism of the local Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Ru Shen had made his money as a go-between, helping entrepreneurs in China outfit their factories for U.S. companies—but at some point Ru Shen’s religious convictions had prompted him to speak out against the smuggling and kickbacks that permeating the business.

Now Ying studied the photos of Ru Shen and his family alongside Strehli’s photos from the container, and he saw the superficial resemblances, particularly in the face of the dead wife, in the size and stature of the children, and in the way Ru Shen’s hair was parted, even in death—and though in the end such observations were not definitive, his suspicions were enhanced.

When Ying returned to his office, there was a message from Angelo. The Homicide chief wanted to see him. Angelo was usually pretty hands-off: He had advanced up the ranks in part by knowing how to stay out of the way. Even so, he was taking an interest in this one. The case was all over the newspapers, and it was his old turf after all.

“There’s been a break in the case,” Angelo said. “Toliveri met with Gary Mancuso’s secretary. And she fell apart on him.”

“He cracked the alibi?”

“Partly. It seems Gary wasn’t in the warehouse the afternoon of the murder, after all. And he’d been arguing with his father the day before.”

“So where was he?”

“An affair, that’s what the secretary says. A friend of hers. He lied to us because he was with the other woman. And he didn’t want his wife to find out.”

“What does the other woman say?”

“We’re bringing her in. Her and Gary both. We’re going to question them here.”

“This afternoon?”

“Detective Roma’s with the affair right now. Out at her apartment. Roma’s giving her a preliminary, and then she’s going to bring her in. Go over it all here while lover boy’s in the next room. Compare their stories.”

“So you have Gary now?”

Angelo shook his head. “He wasn’t at the warehouse. Meeting with his estate lawyer apparently, him and his family. But he’s going to be back at the warehouse around three. Toliveri will nab Gary then. And we’ll interrogate him here.”

“All right,” said Ying. “I’ll be ready.”

Angelo’s face had a certain slackness in it all of a sudden, and Ying had a hunch what was coming. “That’s another thing.”

“What?”

“The way this case is developing, I think it’s best for Toliveri and Roma to do the interrogation. We want a woman in the interview room. And Toliveri, he knows these people.”

Ying understood the rationale. He’d been brought into cases in this capacity himself when the suspects were Chinese. Also, he’d had his shot at Mancuso, softening him up, and it was the kind of thing you did sometimes, alternating interrogators until the subject gave forth. He understood, but he didn’t like it.

“You’re still in charge of the case,” Angelo said. “Just drop back. Let Roma and Toliveri do this interrogation.”

Angelo left then, and Ying looked out the window. He could see Chinatown from here, the streets where he had walked as a kid, the balustraded pagodas and the crowds coursing their way up Stockton. His world was slipping through his fingers, he thought, everything was getting away. Then his cell rang. It was Grudgeon at UC. He had the ballistics report.

“Negative,” he said.

“There’s no match?”

“No.”

Grudgeon wanted to talk longer—to know what this was all about—but Ying got off the phone. So Blonde’s ballistics didn’t match, and now Toliveri was bringing in Gary Mancuso. Well, it made things easier, anyway. If he could let it go. If he could drop into the background and let the case run its course. But he kept thinking about Ru Shen. He was all but convinced Ru Shen was the man in Strehli’s photographs, but the only way to prove it was to exhume the bodies and perform a DNA analysis. He already knew this wasn’t possible from his investigations the year before. He’d been down to the Immigration Authority. According to a man down there, the bodies had been picked up by a local benevolent society, then cremated at the Chinese Cemetery down in Millbrae.

Wiesinski sat in Molly’s, an old-timey bar off Union Square. Shamrocks on the wall and the bartender dressed in green. Wiesinski sat in the back where it was dark and he could watch the clientele come and go. After a while the informer strolled in. She was maybe twenty-five years old and wore a blue dress with white polka dots and comported herself with an arrogance that was hard to resist. She wore a string of white pearls and carried a white handbag. And there was a white flower in her hair. A chrysanthemum.

It’s an ugly world
, Wiesinski thought.

You might look at a woman like her and think otherwise, but the truth was she would betray anyone for a dollar. At the same time she had the kind of looks that made you not care. That made you think,
Go ahead, betray me. Just let me put my hand up your polka-dot dress
.