Chasing the Dragon (9 page)

“What kind of incident?”

“We’ll give you the details in a minute. It would be better, more helpful, if you could tell us where you were this afternoon.”

“I’m in town for my father’s funeral.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I liked your dad.”

“I appreciate your sympathy. Especially in the small hours of the morning like this.”

Toliveri laughed at Dante’s remark. It was an uncomfortable laugh and made the detective look foolish.

“So tell me, what’s this about?” Dante asked. He was not smiling.

“Where were you this afternoon?”

“What time? Just tell me exactly the time you want to know about, and I’ll tell you where I was.”

“About two.”

“Two,” Dante hesitated. “About that time, I walked up the hill to see my Uncle Salvatore. Up Union. You know where that is, don’t you?”

“Your uncle’s? Yes, I know where it is.”

“We were supposed to get together. Discuss some family business. But he wasn’t there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I knocked on the door—but he didn’t answer.”

“And then?”

“I came back here.”

The two cops looked at one another. The game had gone about as far as it could go.

“What’s going on?” Dante asked. “What’s this about?”

Ying took over now. “I’m sorry to tell you this. You’re uncle’s dead.”

“No.” Dante looked genuinely confused. A little too genuine, maybe. “No,” he said again. “It’s my father who died. We buried him Tuesday.”

“I’m sorry. But your uncle was shot to death earlier today. He was found on the floor of his office, upstairs in his house.”

“Jesus,” said Dante. And in the instant he uttered the word, his eyes met Ying’s. It was the kind of naked moment you looked for while cross-examining a suspect, when the two of you looked into one another’s eyes, and you tried to see if the grief, the surprise, was a lie, and what was hidden underneath. It was the tiniest of instants, but sometimes it was all you had to go on, and you had to make up your mind whether there was something to pursue.

In this case, Ying didn’t know. His gut pulled him two ways. Given the circumstance, though, he had little doubt about what to do next.

“We’re going to need to take you downtown. We need a statement.”

“It’s routine,” said Toliveri. “As you know.”

But it wasn’t routine, of course. Just as it wasn’t routine to have a couple of cops knock on your door in the middle of the night to tell you your uncle had just been murdered.

“You want to change your clothes?” asked Ying. “Toliveri here, he will accompany you back into the house.”

Toliveri bristled. Ying realized he didn’t like being told what to do in front of Mancuso. Sensitive about his rank. Didn’t want Dante to see that it was Ying leading the investigation, a Chinese dragging an Italian around by the nose.

“No,” said Dante. “Just let me grab my jacket, and I’ll come the way I am.”

A smile crossed Dante’s lips, a smirk, as if there were part of him that thought it was a joke, going down to Columbus Station in his imported pajamas.
Before this is over
, Ying thought,
we’ll be back with a warrant
. But if Dante was as smart as he suspected, they wouldn’t find a damned thing.

Columbus Station was an anonymous building composed of steel and glass. Despite its name, the station was not on Columbus Avenue at all but squatted on the edge of Chinatown a couple blocks up Vallejo, between the old Italia Café and the Wung Family Vegetable Emporium. The police station was remarkable only in its anonymity, resembling from the outside nothing so much as the back office processing center for an insurance company.

Dante had worked at Columbus Station for close to a decade, and he knew it well enough. The overcrowded garage underneath. The elevator up. The interrogation room at the end of the hall. One floor above was the Homicide pen, and above that was the chief’s office.

Inside the interrogation room, Toliveri gave him a cordite test—to see if there was gunpowder residue on his hand.

Toliveri was not near as chatty as he had been earlier.

“Where’s our buddy Mr. Ying?” said Dante.

“He’ll be back shortly.”

“Used to be with SI?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he leave?”

“I don’t know. Lost his nerve.”

“He doesn’t seem like the type to lose his nerve.”

“People say what people say. You know how things are around here. It isn’t always fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Dante, but he remembered how it was to work with Toli. He had his insights, but he spent a lot of time grousing. He worked in fits and starts. In the beginning he was affable, but when the case got hard, he resisted—and sometimes bulled off in the wrong direction.

Now Toliveri went away. It had been almost three
A.M
. when Ying and Toliveri woke him from his slumber, and it was getting close to dawn now. Likely he would still be sitting here after the sun went up. Dante knew the routine. Let you sit. Then let you sit some more. It was a hackneyed technique but it had its uses.

When Ying came back, he came back alone.

“Coffee?” Ying asked. His manner was matter-of-fact, neither cordial nor otherwise.

Dante shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I’m going to get myself a refill. We’ve got a new brewing system. You know how it is these days—people and their coffee. Everybody’s a connoisseur.”

Dante knew what was going on—and he knew Ying knew he knew—but he decided to play along.

“All right,” said Dante. “Get me some coffee.”

Ying went away again. He was a long time away. Much longer than it took to get to the coffee trough and back. It was part of the old routine, and Dante remembered doing the same. Offering fresh coffee, then coming back a year later with cold mud.

And that was the way Ying played it. Handing him the coffee as if it were some kind of gift, when it was the same awful stuff. Sitting there in the pot since Dante had left seven years ago. Coffee that had been burnt to begin with, then allowed to go cold, then reheated again a couple million times. Packets of powdered milk on the side and enough artificial sugar to kill a rat.

“Sorry it took me so long,” said Ying. “I got caught up in something.”

“Sure.”

“How’s the coffee?”

“Delicious.”

“Always is.”

Ying stared into his cup, disguising a smile, perhaps, or maybe just weariness. Or maybe he really thought the coffee was good. Ying had the hangdog look of a man who had been up all night. His eyes were way back there in a tunnel someplace. He was about Dante’s age—but taller, lanky, and loose-jointed. He had a strong jaw and wore his tie loose around his neck. His hair was black and disheveled.

“So you used to work in Homicide, here in Columbus Station?”

“Yes,” Dante said.

Dante guessed the man already knew the whole business: how Dante had gotten tangled up on the wrong side of the Strehli case and left the department under a cloud. Dante wondered if those allegations had grown over the years, reiterated in rumors, repeated and fleshed out with invented details, augmented and then augmented again. The truth was, Internal Affairs had nothing on him—and he’d quit in disgust.

“I appreciate your cooperation,” Ying said.

The cop settled in across the table, and his composure changed in some indefinable way. Dante recognized the small talk was all but over, and he was grateful. He wanted to get on with it.

“I spoke with your father before he died,” said Ying.

Dante was taken aback. His aunt had mentioned something at the funeral home: how a Chinese cop had been by to talk with his father. Dante was surprised at the coincidence, but this was the way things went in The Beach. Like a small town, you were always stumbling into someone.

“He thought someone was out to kill him, apparently. But when I spoke with him, he backed off.”

“The doctor said he was delusional.”

“Was there anyone with a reason to kill him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Dante could guess the question on Ying’s mind. It had occurred to him as well. He wondered if his father’s death was what it seemed. Or if there was some connection between his father’s passing and his uncle’s murder.

Ying sat with his hands flat on the table—and Dante saw an earnestness there. Ying had been in SI, then transferred off, and now here he was back in Homicide. It was an unusual move—not a step forward for a guy thinking about career—and Dante wondered what lay behind it.

“Why are you in town?” asked Ying.

“I was attending my father’s funeral.”

“Did you visit your uncle yesterday?”

“We went over this.”

“I know, but there are a few details that I need clarity on. I think you understand.”

“I did visit him, yes. But as I told you, he wasn’t in.”

“Did you go inside?”

Dante had given this some thought. If he were Ying, and this was his investigation, and a relative had been sighted outside the house at the time of the murder, he would pursue the obvious. He would try to tie the suspect to the scene—to the crime inside.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I knocked. I rang the bell—but no one answered. So I left.”

“It didn’t occur to you to go inside and look around?”

“Yes, but the door was locked.” He was lying now, of course, but there was no way for Ying to know this.

“What was the reason for that visit?”

“My uncle asked me over. He had some things he wanted to talk about. Family business. He didn’t elaborate—and I didn’t ask.”

“Did your father leave behind a will?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen it?”

“A few months back, yes. I saw him in Houston, and he showed me a copy.”

“Were there any provisions you—or somebody else—might have found troublesome?”

“I was an only child. He left everything to me.”

Dante knew what was going on here. The cop was trying to establish motive, though the truth was his father’s will had been pretty straightforward. The only catch was that part of his father’s money was tied up in the warehouse. After his father quit the business, he’d stayed on as a silent partner. The way things were set up, Dante had a chance to reactivate the partnership if he wanted, or sell out. Either way, he gained nothing from his uncle’s death. He explained this to Ying, but the cop wouldn’t let go.

“Given what you describe about the estate, and the arrangement of the business, could there be a conflict down the line between you and your cousin?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Sometimes, things get emotional, things happen quickly.” Ying’s voice softened, and there was a note of invitation. “Did you and your uncle have an argument?”

Ying paused, waiting. Dante let the pause linger.

“I lost my father a few days ago,” he said at last. “And now my uncle. As a cop, I understand what you’re doing here.” Dante’s voice was calm. When he spoke again he himself could hear the venom underneath. “But maybe you’d be better off out there, looking for the murderer.”

Ying didn’t flinch. As an interrogator, Dante knew, you expected a reaction when you pushed someone; it was almost instinctive—odd if they did not push back. If they responded too vociferously, though, or not at all, that’s when you wondered. Still, even then, you didn’t know for sure. There were innocent people who trembled and fell apart, looking guilty as hell, and then there were the actors, the sociopaths who shrugged off their crime like an ill-fitting suit.

“All right,” Ying said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Dante put his head in his hands and all of sudden his anger gave way and his grief washed over him, here in this peculiar little room with the smudged walls, the plastic chairs, the table anchored to the floor. There was an emptiness the size of the moon inside his heart. His father and his uncle had vanished, taking with them a part of himself, as well. Because who else was there to remember the boy he had been, hobbling his first steps down the wharf while the brothers Mancuso joked and laughed? Who else to remember the crabs crawling from their silver buckets, and the fish flopping in their purse seines, and his mother before she went nuts? He held his head in his hands, and as he did he imagined the Homicide cops watching from the other side of the one-way mirror as he himself had once done, studying the suspect, trying to figure out how to entrap him. Ying would be there, of course, and Toliveri. And probably Angelo, too, his ex-partner. But at the moment Dante didn’t give a shit. They could watch till kingdom come.

After a while Ying and Toliveri returned to the interrogation room together. Ying took the plastic chair and slid it around; he sat with his hands hanging between his legs. They were long hands, with finely sculpted fingers. Meanwhile Toliveri made a show of turning on the tape then he leaned against the wall, regarding him with that same empty countenance Dante remembered from years ago. When you got down to it, he had little fondness for Toliveri.

“Earlier tonight, we did house-to-house interviews,” said Ying. “And Toliveri here talked to a woman who lives across the street from your uncle.”

“The Widow Bolinni,” said Toliveri. Dante could see that Toliveri wanted him to know that the Widow Bolinni had been
his
interview: that
he
was the one who’d wriggled his ass up the stairs and sweet-talked the old witch. “She saw you on the walkway outside your uncle’s house yesterday. About the time of the murder.”

“That’s not surprising,” said Dante. “I was there. I told you that before.”

“Did you go inside the house?”

“I already told Mr. Ying what happened.”

“Did you kill your uncle?” Toliveri staggered forward a little as he spoke, like a boxer, but punch-drunk, a little too eager. Dante recognized the behavior.

“You got the cordite tests?” asked Dante.

“Yes.”

“Then you know I didn’t fire a gun.”

“You could have been wearing gloves.”

“Then where are they?”

“You could have thrown them away. Or they could be up at your house.”

“They’re not.”

Ying cut in now. “The Widow Bolinni, she told Toliveri you were wearing a red shirt and white slacks. Is that correct?”