White Ghost (8 page)

G
age's receptionist beeped him at the end of the day, telling him that Jack Burch and Lucy Sheridan were on the phone. He pressed the blinking button and caught Lucy saying, “My father had to leave for Hong Kong this morning.”

“I thought your mother would join us,” Gage said.

“She decided it would be simpler if she didn't, but I don't understand what she meant. She asked me to pass on how grateful she is that you agreed to help us.”

“How does it look?” Burch asked.

“It appears that Ah Ming was involved in something pretty significant recently, but I don't know if it had anything to do with what happened to Peter.”

“You mean he's a criminal,” Burch said, “but maybe not the right criminal.”

“And I'm not in the business of playing Lone Ranger. Unless we can connect him to the robbery, there's no reason to stay with this.”

“What did Ah Ming do?” Lucy asked.

“I'd rather not say. My thinking is based too much on assumption and speculation. I'd like to follow up on a couple of
leads. Depending on what we find, we may want to hand it over to the FBI and let them finish it up.”

“When will we know?' Lucy asked.

“Let's talk in a few days.”

“A few days?”

Gage sensed the beginnings of frustration in Lucy's voice.

“That's the best we can do. Hang in there.”

Gage's cell phone rang moments after he hung up from the conference call. It was Burch.

“So what did he do?”

“I told you it is mostly speculation.”

“So speculate. I won't pass it on to the Sheridans until you say it's okay.”

Gage outlined what he learned about Ah Tien.

“That's a lot more than speculation.”

“My guess is that if Peter hadn't died during the robbery, Ah Ming would have killed him later. The kid was probably chosen for the robbery by mistake, kind of like a clerical error. And that clerical error was his death sentence.”

“And you're thinking it might be better if Lucy and her parents never find out how trivial and inevitable Peter's death was.”

“That's part of it.”

“What's the other part?”

“Faith and I have spent most of our marriage ten time zones apart. I think we're both tired of living that way. I can see myself lying in a hammock, reading a book in some jungle camp while Faith does her fieldwork. And the only way to do that will be to turn the firm over to my employees.”

“Did you get some medical news you're not telling me about?”

“No news at all. And even if there were, it wouldn't affect what I'm thinking.”

“And that means that you're going to let this Sheridan thing go?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Taking down Ah Ming wouldn't be a bad way to end. And I think I can come up with a way to do it.”

“If you're healthy enough.”

“The symptoms have backed off a little. It might get better on its own.”

“Does that mean they're close to figuring out what it is?”

“Almost. One more test and I think this'll be over with.”

“What's that?”

“Nothing. Don't worry about it.”

“Tell me or I'm going to call Faith.”

“A little surgery.”

“What kind of little surgery?”

“A biopsy. A minor one.”

“There's no such thing as a minor one. Where are you having it done?”

“Stanford Hospital. I'll just be there overnight. In and out. No big deal.”

“Of course it is. I'm going to make some calls.”

“Jack, don't—”

But Burch had disconnected.

L
ew Fung-hao stood near one of the last remaining phone booths in San Francisco's Chinatown reading a nightclub playbill pasted to the side of a fish market. He cocked his head when the telephone rang as though puzzled by why it was ringing with no one standing by to answer it. He shrugged toward the fruit and vegetable vendors a few yards away, then reached for the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Me and my friends are in the other city.”

It was Le.

Lew lowered his voice. “Did you destroy Ah Ming's cell phone?”

“Yes. What now?”

Lew smiled at the vendors.

“Go to Tai Ping Travel and ask for Tat Mo. He's expecting you.”

Lew hung up, then shuffled away like an old man with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He wound through the Chinatown alleys, then back out to a commercial street of restaurants and offices. He walked until he found a cellular outlet and bought
a pay-as-you-go phone. He then stepped into the recessed doorway of a residential hotel and sent a text message to Ah Ming:

All is well.

A
H
M
ING READ THE WORDS
, then leaned back in his chair and looked at the calendar. All he needed to do was replace Ah Tien, he told himself, and everything would continue as planned, and as it always had. But he knew he was deceiving himself for he was on the needle end of two capital murders: Ah Pang and Ah Tien.

Tension pushed him to his feet. He held out his hands and stared at them. At moments like these he saw them for what they were and recalled the day thirty years earlier when they transformed from flesh and bone into weapons, when they'd beaten a gambler to death in Taiwan who hadn't paid a debt to United Bamboo.

At the time the act had seemed like a kind of metamorphosis. He later came to understand it was more a moment of revelation about himself to himself. For he'd come to recognize it hadn't been guilt he'd been feeling as he looked down at the man's body, but rather an almost incomprehensible combination of power and shame. He'd had the gambler under control with the first blow. There'd been no reason for a second, even less for the fatal third one.

Ah Ming turned his hands over and inspected the lines on his palms, troubled not by the deaths of that man or of Ah Tien or of the dozen others over the years, but by Ah Pang's. He was certain he could dominate men, the killings were proof of that, but the coincidental was uncanny and unnerving, and too much like a fortune-teller's prediction that mirrored a reoccurring nightmare.

I
'm just pulling away from Winston Fong's house,” Sylvia said in a call to Gage. “I snagged him when he walked to the corner store. He's nervous and wants to meet in a public place outside of San Francisco. I suggested Jack London Square.”

At 7:45
P.M.
, Sylvia and Gage were sitting at a wrought-iron table watching the tourists, the seagulls, and the moneyed high-tech young intermingle on the Oakland waterfront.

At 8:00 she tilted her head toward Winston emerging alone from the underground garage. Gage rose and once again offered his condolences to a grieving sibling.

“We're looking into a number of things,” Gage said, after they sat down, “and one of them is the death of your brother.”

“The detective came by this morning to look around Haitien's room,” Winston said, “but he didn't spend much time and didn't take anything.” He smirked. “I guess when he didn't find drugs or guns or a gang sweatshirt and matching cap he lost his enthusiasm.”

Gage let the sarcasm pass. He knew part of the reason SFPD was stumbling around in the investigation was because he had yet to share what he knew with them. And he couldn't. Spike Pa
checo, the last of his generation in the homicide unit, had retired and Ramon Navarro, the best of the new generation, had been cross designated as a federal agent and sent to Michoacán to help the Mexican police and DEA in investigating cartel murders.

Delay would do no harm anyway. Gage never accepted what was called the forty-eight-hour rule when he was in homicide, and even if there was such a rule, he knew that discovering the truth about Peter Sheridan's death would be the exception.

“Did the detective ask you anything?”

“Not this time. The night my brother was killed he asked if Hai-tien had any enemies or gang affiliations. But it was less like he was investigating a crime and more like he was drawing a line on a flowchart or filling in a blank, and ignoring the possibility that the answer might be none of the above.”

Winston inspected Gage's face through his wire rim glasses. “Are you trying to fill in a blank, too?”

Gage shook his head. “Our focus is on who killed your brother and why, not on blank filling, and we have some ideas we're working on.”

“Which are?”

“I'm sorry, but I'm not ready to share them.”

Winston reddened, opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. Finally he nodded and said, “I did some Internet research about you after Sylvia left this afternoon, so I know the kind of work you do. And I called a friend's father who's a lawyer with a big firm in Beverly Hills. He said they hired your firm last year on a government contracting fraud case in Iraq and that you recovered something like forty million dollars. He was surprised you were interested in just a homicide.”

“There's no such thing as
just a homicide
. A life is a life.”

Winston shrugged. “You know what I mean. Because my brother did some things he shouldn't have almost twenty years ago, the police seem to be blaming him for his own death.”

Gage imagined Ah Ming had been thinking the same thing, that Ah Tien brought it on himself.

“We'd like your help, but we don't want you telling anyone what we're doing. If the wrong people start thinking we've figured out this homicide might be connected to something they want hidden, they'll come after us.”

“Okay.”

“Not even your mother?”

“Okay.”

“Not even your friend whose father is a lawyer in Beverly Hills?”

Winston smiled and nodded. “What do you need?”

“To start with, your brother may have brought a briefcase back with him from New York.”

“There's one in his room, but I don't know how long it's been there. The detective looked inside, but he just left it. I guess he didn't find anything important. You can have it if you want.”

“Does your brother have an office at the Great Asia Import and Export in LA?”

“Just a cubicle in a room with other sales reps. I'm going back to UCLA tomorrow and I can see whether his supervisor will let me take what's there that belongs . . . I mean . . . belonged to him.”

Gage tilted his head toward Sylvia. “She'll fly down with you and bring it all back, and maybe you can get her into the place where he lived down there.”

“I can get the spare key he left with us, but the house is pretty bare. Monklike. A lot like him, or at least how he became in the last five or ten years.”

“Became how?”

Winston hunched forward, paused for a moment, then spoke.

“I guess you could say that in some ways he was more in my parents' and grandparents' generation than mine. He went to a trade fair in Shanghai a few months ago, then down to Guang
zhou to meet a woman my folks had picked out for him to marry, like it was 1930.”

“Is that where your parents are from?”

“And where he went to elementary school. My parents know a lot of people in Southern China who have daughters they want to send to the States and they wanted a daughter-in-law that spoke Cantonese, like them.”

Gage smiled. “Has your mother been looking for a wife for you?”

“That's a whole different problem that Chinese culture hasn't prepared her for. I've read all the old texts, but there don't seem to be arranged marriages for gay people.”

“Lucky you.”

“Lucky me.”

Gage circled back. “You know whether he traveled anywhere else in China besides Shanghai?”

“I don't think so, unless taking the five-minute ferry ride across the river to Pudong counts as going somewhere else. I know he was there because he wrote me a postcard from the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower talking about how much of Shanghai he could see. He never said much about his work. I think the only reason he told me about Shanghai was because I needled him about picking his own wife.”

“What about Taiwan?”

“I know he was there a few years ago, when I was still in high school. He showed me some Taiwanese money when he got back.”

“You said the police are still taking a hard view of him because of things he did when he was young.”

Winston pointed his thumb toward San Francisco across the bay, now overlaid by the evening's fog.

“You remember when the Wo Hop To triad came from Hong Kong and tried to take over Chinatown?”

Gage nodded. That was almost twenty years earlier.

“My brother was in the Stockton Street Boys. Until Wo Hop To showed up, all they did was stand around and look tough. If the police hadn't taken them seriously, not that many people would have.”

In fact, that wasn't true. The Stockton Street Boys were the muscle protecting gambling dens and houses of prostitution, extorting protection money out of restaurants, and committing takeover robberies of Chinese homes down the peninsula.

But Gage didn't challenge him.

“Everything changed when the Wo Hop To guys came from Hong Kong and recruited the Stockton Street Boys to join them. They couldn't just look like hard guys, they had to do stuff or get pushed off the streets. There was a shoot-out where a couple of rival tong heavyweights got killed. The police always believed my brother was involved.”

“Did he get arrested when Wo Hop To finally got rounded up?”

Winston nodded. “But he wouldn't snitch and there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute him, so they had to let him go. I think the arrest may have scared him out of the life. I never saw him with any of his old Stockton Street friends after that. He went to work at East Wind and then moved down to LA. My folks were really proud of him, and grateful, too. A few years ago he bought the house we live in.”

“Even with the best intentions,” Gage said, “some guys have a hard time leaving that life behind. The adrenaline rushes. The money. The women. The power.”

“He wanted all that stuff when was young, but after the shootings, he became just a face in the crowd. A lot of Stockton Street Boys hooked up with United Bamboo, 14K, and Big Circle, the triads that filled the vacuum Wo Hop To left, but Hai-tien turned into a working guy.”

“He make any money at it?”

“A lot.” Winston looked away for a moment and his brows furrowed, then he shook it off and said, “But it didn't seem like he was under a lot of pressure. Wasn't always scratching for clients. He had his regulars, and it looked to me like he was satisfied with those.”

“You ever meet anyone he worked with?”

“I went by his office a couple of times and he introduced me to a few people, but I don't remember their names.”

Gage leaned forward, folding his arms on the table.

“Now, here's the tough one. Why do you think your brother was killed?”

Winston shrugged. “I don't know.”

“You think you'll be ready for the answer if we find it?”

“I don't know that, either.” Winston took in a breath and blew it out. “I think I can live with it, but I'm not sure my mother can. Losing her husband and son back-to-back has really torn her apart.”

“
D
ON'T YOU THINK
Winston has a theory about what happened to his brother?” Sylvia asked as they walked toward her car in the underground garage.

“The kid is an accounting major. He knows there's no such thing as a free lunch, and Ah Tien wasn't working very hard for what he got. My guess is that Winston fears what we know. By refusing to cooperate with the police against his bosses in the Wo Hop To, he proved he was a stand-up guy. Somebody noticed and he got himself promoted.”

“And that's why Ah Ming walked Ah Tien into the Eight Dragons Café.”

“Exactly.”

Sylvia unlocked her car doors and they got in.

“You want to meet tomorrow when I get back from LA?” Sylvia asked, turning the ignition.

“I'll be busy. Let's do it the day after.”

She looked over. “Are you going out of town?”

Gage avoided her gaze. “No. I'll be local. You can reach me by phone.”

“Anything wrong?”

“No. Just something I need to take care of.”