City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (4 page)

Tony arrived at John Wayne Airport at a quarter to seven. He changed his suit in the United Club lounge and moved to the noncommercial gate. His airport contact, Shen Mang, was waiting.

“How was the drive, Mr. Qi?”

“As expected,” Tony replied. The overly obsequious Shen wasn’t his favorite person.

“I just heard from the tower. The plane is on its final approach. Ten minutes maybe.”

Tony nodded. The client’s name was Jun Tan. She carried the child of Kuo Kuang, a wealthy businessman and Hong Kong triad heavyweight who’d made his money only recently through a series of construction scams. He was married and had as many children as he did mistresses—six. Tony had heard through the grapevine that he’d planned to ditch Jun when he’d heard she was pregnant. But when he’d learned she was to have a son—his first—he’d had a change of heart.

Now she was arriving to spend the next two months in relative luxury before giving birth. Tony had no illusions that she would likely be cast off following this and hoped Jun had none, either. According to the San Gabriel Dragon Head, a friend of Kuang’s who had arranged this, Jun was to be accompanied by her “aunt.” Tony took this to mean a Kuang-approved minder/chaperone, not a blood relative, and he agreed to give them every consideration.

When the plane came into sight, Tony signaled the driver waiting in the bar to pull his SUV around to the hangar. Shen unlocked the security door that led out of the terminal and escorted Tony to a waiting cart. The hangar was only a hundred yards away, but Tony didn’t wish to perspire.

“On the Internet it said that she was some kind of actress in the making,” Shen offered. “Kuang saw her on television and demanded she be brought to him, as if he was some kind of feudal lord.”

That’s exactly what he is,
Tony thought.

“You don’t recognize her, you don’t know her,” Tony admonished. “She is the client. Therefore, she is your employer. Do you understand?”

Shen shrugged.

The private plane, a Challenger 605, landed on Runway Two and taxied slowly to the hangar, arriving at the same time as Tony and Shen. As a ramp agent hurried to put chocks behind the tires, Tony signaled the driver, who’d already arrived, to be ready to open the back door of the SUV. He then stepped alongside the plane, stopping where the foot of the air stair would soon be.

A flight attendant unlocked and lowered the door before stepping back. The next person to appear was Jun Tan herself. She looked cautiously around the hangar, a rabbit anticipating predators. When her eyes found Tony, she smiled. He returned the smile with a deep bow.

She wore peach-colored Capri pants and a matching blouse that mostly hid her protruding belly. Her hair was cut short, the back coming down just to her earlobes. Her eyes, brown as chestnuts, were wide and searching. She looked like every provincial Hunan girl that had ever washed up in Shenzhen.

“Welcome to California,” he said. Not Los Angeles with its negative crime-related connotations; not America and its implicit threat. California conjured images of sunshine and movie stars.

Jun smiled and accepted Tony’s hand as she stepped down the stairs. Her fingers were so light in his hands he worried he might crush them if he squeezed too hard or at all. Even her scent seemed chosen as emblematic of flowers native to where she was from.

“As you know, your house is being prepared for you right now,” Tony explained. “For the first few days you will be a guest at the Beverly Hills Hotel in order to acclimate you to your surroundings.”

In truth, it had more to do with making sure that if she just so happened to be followed by law enforcement, as some pregnant foreigners were, it would appear that she really was on holiday.

“Archie here will be your driver for the duration,” Tony said, introducing the man now holding open the back door of the SUV. “I am Tony and will be at your disposal as well.”

He took a cell phone from his pocket and was about to hand it to Jun when an older woman emerged from the plane, came down the steps behind her, and snatched it from his hand. She had a pinched face and was dressed in clothes that all looked a couple of sizes too big, as if she’d recently lost mass. From the way she eyed the phone, Tony wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d taken a bite out of it. But then Jun took it away from her and checked the contacts list.

“Thank you,” Jun said. “Yours is the only number programmed in?”

“It is.”

“Fantastic,” she enthused. “What am I to be doing these first five days?”

“Whatever you like,” Tony replied. “Rodeo Drive is close by, as is the Beverly Center, the Grove, and the shops on Robertson. Some prefer just sitting by the pool.”

“But what about other things?” she pressed, stopping just before the SUV. “What if I want to go elsewhere? Will you personally see to it that I get there?”

“Within reason,” Tony said guardedly.

“No,”
Jun snapped back. “It was my understanding that everything was within reason.”

“Of course,” Tony said, not daring to look at the aunt. “What do you have in mind?”

“Disneyland,” she said in a tone more akin to someone suggesting a bank robbery. “And I want to see the Los Angeles Dodgers. And the tar pits, where Tommy Lee Jones stopped that volcano. S’okay?”

Tony nodded and bowed.

IV

Luis’s day had passed in a haze. He hadn’t expected to be so angry about Michael’s appearance. In truth, it wasn’t so much anger as indignation. St. Augustine’s was his sanctuary. To have it invaded by someone he found had no respect for the godly life made him livid. To do so under the guise of defending his church was even more insidious.

For even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light,
Luis thought, recalling the words of Paul.

To clear his mind, he’d needed to pray, but the demands of the classroom kept him from doing so. And once class let out, Luis had to help Whillans with the evening Mass and hear confession for an hour after that. The unsated desire to hear from God was maddening, like waiting for the answer to an urgent letter. It wasn’t that he wanted to petition for the Lord’s guidance; he desired the cleansing feeling of being in the Lord’s presence.

His last task of the day was a home visit to a young couple down the road in Crenshaw who were experiencing their first real marital problems following the birth of a baby and the loss of employment for the father. After counseling the couple to reach out to fellow parishioners to help with the baby, as well as to the parish itself for financial assistance should they require it, Luis even considered praying in his car before returning to the rectory. This was hardly practical, however, so he kept going, trying to obey as many traffic laws as he could.

When he finally reached the rectory, having challenged every yellow light and speeding as much as he dared, he hurried to his room, took off his shoes, got down on his knees, and forced the world from his mind.

God, I come to you for guidance,
Luis prayed, opening his mind.
My understanding of my vocation is that I am here to act as your vessel on earth, to guide your congregation as you would. But there is a confounding soul in my path . . .

There came a soft knock on Luis’s door.

“Father Chavez?” said Father Passarella, the Argentine priest. “Are you awake?”

“I am,” replied Luis.

“You have a phone call in the chapel office. They apologized for the hour but said it was very important.”

Luis sighed and stood. Anything God had to say to him would have to wait.

Luis hurried from the rectory to the chapel to find Erna’s lamp on next to the phone. He picked up the receiver and hit the blinking “Hold” button.

“Hello?”

“Am I speaking to Father Chavez?” a vaguely familiar voice said from the other end of the line.

“This is he,” Luis said cautiously.

“I apologize for the late hour, but it’s quite early here and we’re all due downstairs to continue our progress with a breakfast at St. John in Lateran.”

Luis’s heart leaped. He tried hard not to afford the church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy undue reverence, but when speaking to the archbishop of Los Angeles, this wasn’t so easy. That His Eminence was calling from the Vatican, where he was traveling with the pope himself on a short tour of Northern Italy, didn’t make it any easier.

The pope,
Luis mentally intoned, hoping it sounded to him like any old word. Instead, the image of Saint Peter’s keys on crimson slippers filled his mind.

“It’s no trouble, Your Eminence,” Luis replied quickly. “I had just returned from a home visit. What can I do for you?”

Why did I say that?
Luis thought, beating himself up for trying to impress the archbishop with his diligence.
He would’ve understood if I’d merely said I was in prayer.

“I have heard good things about you, Father,” the archbishop said. “Your pastor and I go back several years. While we don’t always see eye to eye, he is extremely adept at judging character.”

“I am humbled to hear it,” Luis said.

“He told me you were set to deliver your first homily this Sunday about Saint Peter Claver,” the archbishop continued. “A great man. A man of humanity who condemned the slave trades as wretched and inhuman even as other Jesuits turned a blind eye. Apparently baptized over a quarter of a million slaves while serving in Colombia. Nowhere near as controversial as the problematic Saint Serra y Ferrer. Did you know Claver called himself the Servant of the Ethiopians?”

“I didn’t know this,” Luis said, wondering why Whillans didn’t tell him he’d spoken to the archbishop.

The line went silent for a moment. Luis wondered if they’d been cut off. When he heard the archbishop draw in a slow breath, he knew the call wasn’t simply for a pre-sermon pep talk.

“Benedict Chang was a close friend of mine, Father Chavez, going back several years,” the archbishop said quietly. “A very good man beloved by his parishioners but also his community. His death is a terrible blow to the archdiocese, but also to those who benefited from his charitable works and deeds. He was a crusader for Christ.”

“Yes, Your Eminence,” Luis said when there was a pause.

“What compounds the tragedy are the accusations and rumors going around about the man after he can no longer defend himself. There was a time when the church turned its back on gossip it believed to be false or, worse, decided to sweep it under the rug. This is not something we can allow anymore. Too many people have been hurt. Too many lives destroyed. When I became archbishop, I had to strip my predecessor of all but his title, as he was one of the worst offenders when it came to aiding and abetting the accused and shrugging off the accusers. The church in America may not recover for generations.”

Luis suddenly understood where the archbishop was going with all this.

“Which is why someone coming along to use those accusations to tar an innocent adds tragedy to tragedy. There is no benefit of the doubt. The accusation was all it took for his congregation to turn their backs on his memory. Now, I’ve been told that someone sympathetic to our cause, someone who also doesn’t believe the rumors, has reached out to you from the district attorney’s office.”

An electrical charge burst through Luis’s nervous system. He’d stepped into an open snare without noticing. How much had Michael told the archbishop? It wasn’t as if he’d kept his past a secret from the archdiocese, but he doubted everyone knew.

And more than that, how might it affect his station in the eyes of the congregation if word somehow got to them?

No one who practices deceit shall dwell in my house; no one who utters lies shall continue before my eyes.

“I just wanted to let you know that you have the full backing and support of the archdiocese as you assist the city with their investigation. Normally, this would be considered too weighty a concern for a novice priest, but as Pastor Whillans has indicated his confidence in you by elevating you to his assistant, I think we can safely follow his lead and trust you as our representative.”

If the archbishop had said this while sitting in the same room, or over the phone from the seat of the archdiocese at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Luis could’ve found a way to navigate around this. “Our” might mean the archdiocese or even just the archbishop and, say, Pastor Whillans. But that the call came at the exact moment when Luis was most in need of the Lord’s wisdom and that the archbishop was a few yards, if not a few steps, from the Holy Father himself imbued it with the full weight of the Holy See.

“Yes, Your Eminence,” Luis said, already overwhelmed.

“God bless you and aid you, Father Chavez,” the archbishop said. “Please keep me informed as your investigation progresses.”

Luis was about to respond when the line was cut off. He sat down in Erna’s chair and hung up the phone before turning off the lamp. Cast in darkness, he was finally surrounded by the silence and peace he’d chased all day.

But now he had no need. God had made his wishes clear as a bell.

All right, God. Let’s get started.

“Take the two pills in the pack right away, right when you get home with food.
Dos. Con comida
,” Susan explained, indicating the pills in the Z-Pak—well, at least its generic third cousin twice removed, albeit with the exact same active ingredients. “Then take the next five, one each day, with food.
Una cada día.
As I said, it’s just an upper-respiratory infection. Should knock it right out.”

Her patient, a seventysomething Guatemalan woman whom Susan knew had been sick for weeks and had to be cajoled into coming to the clinic by her two sons, nodded skeptically and pocketed the drugs. Susan had no idea if she planned to take them and made a mental note to call the eldest son the next morning and get him to make sure.

After the patient left, Susan checked her watch. It was already half past two. She’d been on shift for fourteen-plus hours. Well, except for the hour she’d spent eating lunch with Nan, who’d taken the bus over from USC, up around the corner at Barnsdall Art Park. Barnsdall had been a favorite spot of Father Chang’s, and they’d decided to go there to honor his memory with a lunch of his beloved pho. Though it was small enough to walk from one end to the other in five minutes, Chang had never tired of leading Susan and Nan through Hollyhock House, the Frank Lloyd Wright creation that stood in the center of the park, and pointing out obscure features and Wright’s architectural signature.

“He loved the view up here,” Nan had said. “He could see the whole city.”

Susan had agreed, though mostly she could see the rooftops of nearby Little Armenia. Still, it had been a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky to remind them of the previous night’s rain.

They’d spoken of so many things relating to Father Chang. How each of them had met him for the first time, how neither were particularly religious, which was why Chang had probably enjoyed spending his off-hours with them. They spoke of Chang’s relentless curiosity and thirst for knowledge. They tried to come up with subjects that might not have interested Father Chang in the slightest, and couldn’t come up with one.

“Watching paint dry,” Nan tried finally.

“No, he’d go off on some tangent about the subtle spectrum of colors the paint arced through as it released its water and took its final form,” Susan joked. “And by the end he’d have convinced us it was the most interesting thing ever.”

They laughed over this. They moved on to discuss the funeral, though Nan hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Susan didn’t bring up the fact that when she’d called St. Jerome’s, the parish pastor had said that no one from the church would be available to deliver the eulogy. As it had been so many times in life, it would be just the three of them at the grave, though one would stay behind.

The one thing they didn’t talk about was who killed him. Not the identity of the shooter himself. That part wasn’t important. Nor was the rumor going around that it had been linked to some kind of sex crime. No, what they really didn’t want to talk about was who Father Chang, on one of his endless crusades against injustice, had pissed off enough to want him dead.

“He always said he’d be martyred, but I think he did it like people who joke about their plane crashing,” Nan explained. “Say it enough times and it won’t happen.”

“I think you’re right,” Susan said dully. “He was too interested in whatever was going to come around next.”

After seeing Nan off on the bus back to campus, Susan considered going home. But that would mean thinking about things, obsessing about things, and that would do no one any good. So she returned to the innocuous square two-story East LA shopping plaza that housed her clinic to throw herself into work. The clinic itself was rather small, with only four examination rooms, a tiny waiting area, a medication-filled break room that doubled as a pharmacy, and then an office Susan shared with four other doctors. All four had like Susan trained overseas but hadn’t been accredited in the States yet due to immigration issues.

Susan didn’t mind. When she spoke to friends of hers who worked in licensed doctor’s offices and hospitals, the threat of malpractice and the bureaucratic nightmare that the HMO/PPO era had created made hers seem like a quaint neighborhood practice. Susan had gone into medicine at first because of parental pressure and expectation but then realized that she just genuinely liked helping people. One day, she hoped, she’d earn enough money to get away from Clover Gao, poach the best staffers, and set up a shop of her own.

But if the licensed practices did have anything up on the unlicensed ones, it was that they at least could operate out in the open, with signs on their doors. Susan had to walk up to what looked like an unmarked service exit with no handle and be buzzed in by a receptionist. Clover Gao was so afraid of being caught in a raid that she kept her office on the floor above the clinic, and even that was a single room in the back of a small tax preparer’s office. For the first three weeks on the job, Susan had walked into the kitchens of restaurants, supply rooms, and almost got herself locked in the back room of a kitchen appliance wholesaler by choosing the wrong unmarked door.

“I’m going to knock off,” Susan announced to the night receptionist as she gathered her things. “Be back around nine. Tell Clover, okay?”

The receptionist nodded. No sooner had Susan pushed through the outer door, however, than a harried-looking young woman hurried up to her in a panic.