Justice at Risk (17 page)

I started back in his direction. He hunched his shoulders and turned his head away from the light. I immediately wheeled and sprinted to the corner, then cut down a side street leading away from the boulevard toward the residential neighborhood to the south. I turned left at the first street I came to, stepped into a dark cluster of arching banana palms, and waited. Not half a minute later, he was turning the same corner. As he passed, I recognized the profile and stepped out to the sidewalk behind him.

“Out cruising, Sergeant?”

Felix Montego stood where he was for a moment, with his back to me. Finally, he wheeled slowly, keeping his mouth shut.

“Really, Sergeant, I’m flattered to be followed by such a handsome man.”

“You may think all this is funny, Justice. I can assure you it’s not.”

“Why don’t you fill me in, Montego? Maybe I’ll believe you.”

“The less you know, the better off you are.”

“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine? Shouldn’t you be home playing Nintendo with your kids instead of out here playing Keystone Kops?”

He glanced around, then took several steps, closing the gap until there were only inches between us. When he spoke again, his voice was dead serious.

“I’m telling you, Justice, you’re poking around where you shouldn’t, asking too many troublesome questions.”

“Somebody needs to ask them.”

“That’s my job.”

“Then why aren’t you doing it, instead of shadowing me like a second-rate private eye?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Because I don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt. Not the Zeigler woman, no one.”

“How touching, Sergeant, to know how much you care.”

“Listen to me, Justice. Please. Butt out of this, let it die.”

“You sound like you might have a personal stake in it.”

His eyes grew uneasy, the way they had in his office when my comments had cut too close to the bone.

“This thing is far more complicated than you could ever guess. You’re dealing with forces much bigger and more powerful than you realize.”

“I’m getting aroused, Sergeant.”

“This is not a battle you can win, Justice.”

“Any other advice? Maybe something a little more concrete? Because the bullshit’s starting to run a bit thin.”

He looked at the ground, shook his head, muttered something to himself. Then, very directly:

“Just this. Don’t even consider looking up Charlie Gitt. I have a feeling he’s on your list, but he’s one person you definitely don’t want to mess with.”

“Dangerous, Sergeant?”

“Totally out of control.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

His eyes stayed on mine for a moment, and I thought I saw genuine concern in them. Then he stepped around me and back around the corner. I followed more slowly, and when I reached the boulevard, he was nowhere to be seen.

*

I arrived home to find Peter Graff sitting alone in the swing on the front porch. He’d lit a candle in a hurricane lamp on the rail at the far end and sat in its soft glow, bundled up in a plaid wool jacket with a fleecy collar. He stood up to meet me as I mounted the steps.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“So I see.”

“I was hoping—”

“Hoping what, Peter?”

“You know. That maybe we could spend the night together.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we should think about how involved we both want to get before it goes any further.”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

“Not exactly.”

“You met somebody?”

“Sort of.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be staying in the apartment, then.”

“I didn’t say that, Peter.”

“I’m confused, Ben. Are you seeing someone else or not?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“I don’t expect anything from you, Ben.”

“I know that. That’s what makes being with you so damned easy.” I looked him up and down. “Aside from the other obvious reasons.”

He reached for my face, and initiated the kiss. It was his first time doing that with me, with any man, and it was awkward for him. I maneuvered him into the corner by the door, into the deepest shadows and out of the wind, taking over for him, kissing him with real force, pushing past his hesitation. Within moments, I was pressing against him and touching him in such a frenzy I never heard the car door shut on the street, or the footsteps coming up the walk behind me.

It wasn’t until I heard Oree’s voice that I realized he was there.

“I was in the neighborhood, Ben, and I—”

He didn’t see Peter until I took a step back, and Peter emerged, wiping my saliva from his lips. Oree’s thin laughter was tinged with irony, maybe some pain.

“Obviously, I came at a bad time. Forgive me.”

He turned and started down the walk.

“Oree, wait! I need to talk to you!”

I pursued him to the street, where he turned and put up a hand like a traffic cop.

“No words needed, Ben. It’s all right. I understand.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t.”

His voice was soft, knowing.

“I think I do.”

And, of course, he did.

Then he was in his car, pulling out, speeding away. Gone.

I woke at dawn and drank my coffee on the front porch with the cats nearby, each of us angling for the first of the sun’s warmth, while I ran through the events of the previous evening, trying to sort things out. Finally, I decided that if I couldn’t get some order into my personal life, I’d at least try to make some headway in the Callahan and Mittelman murder cases. I hadn’t forgotten Sergeant Montego’s dire warnings to butt out—if anything, they fueled me to push harder, faster.

By 8 a.m. I was on the Hollywood Freeway, cruising toward the San Gabriel Valley, the neon dragons of Chinatown to my left, the downtown skyscrapers to my right. I crossed the Los Angeles River, which had once been lush and green, with Indians camped along its fifty-eight winding miles. Now it was a cement-lined flood channel, as well as a handy canvas for graffiti artists, who used the concrete-covered embankments to spray-paint their messages, and a hangout for skateboarders, who coveted the same steep slopes and were sometimes swept away to shocking deaths when flash floods caught them by surprise. Six miles past the river, across the sleepy barrios of Boyle Heights, I reached Monterey Park.

Variously dubbed “the new Chinatown” and “the Chinese Beverly Hills,” the hilly suburb of not quite eight square miles had been reinvented in the 1970s as a haven for immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Communist China. So massive was the influx that by the eighties nearly as many businesses were advertised in Chinese as in English, causing a white backlash and failed attempts to mandate English-only sign restrictions. By the nineties, nearly half the city’s sixty thousand residents were of Chinese descent, and more than a hundred authentic Chinese restaurants were competing for each other’s business. Asian gangsters had moved in to make their shakedowns, and
pai gow
poker became the most popular form of gambling in the city.

At half past eight, most of the business district was still asleep as I passed quietly through. I followed a Thomas Bros. guide that directed me toward the hills rising to the south, separating Monterey Park from the poorer barrios of neighboring East Los Angeles. Most of the street names on the flatter north side were in Spanish, reflecting the city’s nineteenth-century land grant beginnings as a Mexican rancho, and later a growing pueblo. Those to the south sounded right out of an Anglo land developer’s real estate brochure: Sunny Hill Drive, Cresthaven Way, Glenview Terrace, Rolling Hill Road. Pearl Tsao-Ping, according to my notes, resided on Summit Place, which turned out to be a cozy cul-de-sac tucked into the hillside, with views across the San Gabriel Valley to the snow-capped mountains to the north.

I circled slowly, found the number I was looking for, and parked just outside the mouth of the cul-de-sac, where I could watch the house from a few hundred feet without being observed. It was a compact Tudor-style home of white-painted brick, with an orderly yard of freshly clipped grass ringed by a profusion of blooming flowers in at least a dozen varieties. A brick walkway divided the lawn, leading to a porch on which sat a lounge chair that looked singular and lonely. In the driveway was a truck whose side panels advertised a business—Trade Winds, Fashionable Apparel for the New Century—and listed a toll-free phone number and the addresses of several stores, all of which I wrote down.

At nine o’clock, an hour that seemed reasonably civil, I climbed out of the Mustang, walked to the house, and rang the bell. I could now see a shiny black Mercedes-Benz sedan parked in front of the truck, separated from it by a locked driveway gate. I was about to ring the bell again when the door was opened by a small, wrinkled man of perhaps sixty-five. He had a pleasant, inquisitive face, happy, childlike eyes, and a chin of sparse white whiskers.

“Mr. Tsao-Ping?”

He nodded and bowed slightly.

“I’m looking for your son, Winston.”

His smile remained but the happiness went out of it, and out of his narrow eyes as well. He shook his head slowly, almost apologetically, several times.

“Your son Winston no longer lives with you?”

Mr. Tsao-Ping raised his hands like a pair of small, soft wings, and shook his head again, sadly.

“Is Winston still alive?” I recalled how limited his English had been on the phone when I’d called before. I repeated carefully: “Winston—alive?”

Suddenly, the door was pulled wide by a tiny, robust woman with dark, angry eyes, whom I took to be Pearl Tsao-Ping. She appeared to be roughly the same age as her husband, but carried herself with a fury and a force that seemed unimaginable in him. Her face, squashed and buttoned down with a tiny pug nose, was heavily made up under a wig of dark, lacquered hair. Gold jewelry, with stones in several different colors, embellished her wrists, neck, and fingers.

She thrust out a finger with a painted nail long enough to take out my eye, if she were so inclined.

“I tell you not to bother us! I tell you that when you call! Now go away!”

“It’s important that I find Winston, Mrs. Tsao-Ping. He may be able to give me some information I need.”

“I tell you, I have no son Winston! Only Franklin! Good son! Married boy! No son Winston! Winston dead!”

“I’ve checked records in the Los Angeles area, Mrs. Tsao-Ping. I found no death certificate for a Winston Tsao-Ping during the past fifteen years.”

“Why you want to bother us? Not your business! Go!”

I glanced at the Trade Winds logo on the parked truck.

“Perhaps he works at one of your shops, and I could reach him there.”

She glared at me a moment, then disappeared inside. When she came back, it was straight at me, with a broom raised above her head. She brought it down on my back and shoulders—two, three, four times—as I turned and scurried back down the walk. She stood at the edge of the bricks, holding the broom like a bayonet, watching, until I climbed into the Mustang and drove away.

I covered three blocks, using up a minute or two, swung back, parked where I could see the house again, and waited.

Mr. Tsao-Ping came out a few minutes later with a small kneeling stool, which he placed at the edge of a flower bed, and used for support as he pulled weeds. Not quite half an hour had passed when a young Chinese man emerged from a side door. He was on the tall and husky side, but moved with his head slightly bowed, and I guessed he was Franklin Tsao-Ping, which would later prove correct. He climbed into the truck, started the engine, and backed into the street as his father paused in his gardening to wave.

As the truck came in my direction, I rolled up the Mustang’s dirty window and slouched low in my seat, out of sight. When it was past, I fired up the engine and gave Franklin a safe lead before I followed. Fifteen minutes later, I was back on the 101 Freeway, heading west across the Los Angeles River, through downtown, into Hollywood. As the freeway veered north, Franklin took the Melrose Avenue exit, continuing west for two miles until he was into the trendiest section of the street, between La Brea and Fairfax avenues. Melrose, as the neighborhood was known locally, was comprised of a dozen blocks of boutiques, cafés, coffeehouses, and record stores that had once catered to an arty, thirty-something crowd but was now a hangout for the funkier teenage grunge set that seemed to have endless money to spend on ridiculously overpriced clothes that were out of style by their second laundering. Most of those clothes were imported, many of them from the sweatshops of Asia—even the grim prisons of Communist China—where workers as young as five or six cut and stitched fifteen hours a day to satisfy the world’s voracious appetite for fashion, and to make importers like the Tsao-Ping family rich. The teenage grunge set didn’t seem to care much about that. Not many people did, for that matter; they just kept on buying and buying, and looking for another sale.

At a traffic light, the truck’s right turn signal began blinking. I surveyed the block ahead, and spotted a store bearing the Trade Winds logo. The truck turned right, then made a quick left into an alley, and pulled in behind the store. I parked on the street, slipped quarters into the meter, glanced at my watch, saw that it was half past ten, and went looking for coffee and a place to take a leak.

When that was taken care of, I returned to the store. By then, Franklin Tsao-Ping was at the front, unlocking the door. A young woman, also Chinese, was in the window, hanging colorful papier-mâché streamers behind several headless mannequins dressed in outlandish vinyl-covered clothes. A few feet away, a chubby Chinese baby played in a small chair with wheels, pushing it about with his tiny feet and laughing with excitement each time he bumped into a rack of hanging clothes.

I smiled as I entered, said hello, and began browsing.

“If you need any help, just let me know.”

Franklin’s voice was soft, deferential; unlike many retail sales clerks, he left me to roam on my own while he busied himself behind the cash register. I sauntered down one side of the store, which was filled with garish, retro-seventies nylon shirts that hadn’t even looked good on John Travolta when he was svelte. The other side was devoted to women’s apparel; I could tell because I saw a few skirts, the kind I thought had disappeared with Twiggy, but which apparently had made a comeback. I checked a price tag on a shirt I wouldn’t have been cremated in: ninety-five bucks, plus tax.

I decided it was time to speak with Franklin Tsao-Ping. He had lifted his son from the rolling playchair and was bouncing the giggling baby high above his head on outstretched arms.

“Cute kid.”

He lowered the boy and cradled him against his chest.

“This is my son, Dwight—after the great general and president, Eisenhower.”

“You look too young to know much about Ike.”

“My mother picked the name.” He laughed dryly. “She picks all the names in our family.”

“What did she call you?”

“Franklin.”

“After Roosevelt, no doubt.”

“How did you know?”

“A lucky guess.”

He glanced toward the shirts.

“Did you find something you like?”

“Not really my style.”

“Mine, either, if you want to know the truth.”

“Then why do you sell it?”

“Because people buy it. Because my mother owns the store and puts me here.”

The young woman stepped down from the window and took the baby from Franklin’s arms.

“And this must be your wife.”

“Yes. Lu-Ling.”

She was a pretty woman, with unusually large, long-lashed eyes set evenly in her pale Chinese face, and a small, heart-shaped mouth. She was dressed conservatively like her husband, her clothes at odds with the styles offered for sale in the store.

She smiled, looking flustered.

“I sorry. I not speaking English very much yet.”

“How long have you been in our country?”

She looked at her husband.

“Lu-Ling came over from Taiwan just before the wedding two years ago.”

“You met when you were overseas, on a buying trip?”

The dry laugh again.

“My mother chose Lu-Ling for me.”

“Ah.”

“I met her the day she arrived, three weeks before we were married.”

I reached out and touched the baby’s tiny nose.

“You have a beautiful son.”

“Yes, my mother was very pleased.”

There was no laugh this time, and the edge in his voice surprised me. He struck me as a man who had a great deal he wanted to say, but never quite said it.

“Would she have been as pleased if your wife had given birth to a girl?”

“Apparently you know something about the old Chinese attitudes.”

“I know that in traditional Chinese families, sons are often fiercely loyal to their parents. Especially to the mother, when the family structure is matriarchal, as it so often is.”

He was looking at me keenly, shrewdly. “Are you the man who came to our house this morning?”

“You saw me?”

“I was upstairs, but I heard your voice.”

He turned to his wife, speaking Chinese. When she had walked away, out of earshot, he reverted to English, speaking more urgently.

“You know something about my brother, Winston?”

“Not as much as I’d like to.”

“What can you tell me?”

“When did you last hear from him?”

“I was eight when my mother banished Winston from the family. He was twenty-four.”

“Were the two of you close?”

“I worshiped my brother. I miss him more than I can tell you.”

“You said you were eight when your mother disowned him. That would have been fifteen years ago?”

He nodded. “I never saw him again. He sent me letters, called, until my mother found out and stopped it. In her mind, he’s dead; he doesn’t exist.”

“He could have found a way to contact you if he wanted to.”

“Something happened. He changed.”

“Changed how?”

“I don’t know. The last time I heard from him, when I was ten, he told me I’d never see him again, never hear from him, that it was better that way. He told me he loved me, asked me to always remember him. That was the last time.”