Chasing the Dragon (12 page)

His parents had doted on Gary, it was true. His mother always with her fingers in his hair. When he was young he had spent endless hours around tables with his mother’s friends—the same women who were here in Gary’s house now, gathered around his mother in her grief.

Beautiful women. With their black eyes and their black hair and their darted sweaters. Their tight skirts and high-heeled pumps. Or they had been beautiful once. At some point, they had begun to resemble the crones of his youth. Painted moles and bagging eyes. Drooping hose. Hairnets to hold their wigs in place.

The women formed a kind of circle around Regina on the couch. One at a time the arriving visitors would penetrate that circle to offer their condolences.

Even so, there was an air of suspicion, an undercurrent of whispering and speculation.
There is something behind this death, some other business
. It didn’t help that Detective Ying had been out front, lurking on the walk. Mayor Rossi made him nervous, too. Penetrating the circle now, come to press his cheek against Gary’s mother’s.

“Your husband, he was one of the most respected men in this town.” The mayor dabbed at his eyes and smiled at the same time. He was clownish in his grief, with his bald head and shining eyes. “I remember when I was on the town council, he went door to door with me. Helping get out the vote.”

All the while the crones regarded the mayor, and everyone else around them as well. Slitting their eyes. Peering. Lips pushed out. Chins nodding. Heads tilted like crows on the wire. They might humor the mayor, but later they would talk.
Rossi ruined this goddamn town, him and his big plans
. As a kid, their opinions, their gossip, were all Gary had known. He had wanted their approval, and he internalized their thoughts so often that after a while their imagined voices were like a running commentary in his head.

“Bring me a cookie,” said Aunt Regina, “a chocolate leaf”—though in fact she had a small plate of these cookies at her elbow.

It didn’t matter. Gary got more from the table. Her heart fibrillations had been induced by the trauma the doctor said. Though they had subsided, she was still pale and winded easily.

“I’m afraid I can’t hear a word the mayor is saying,” said Michele Salini. Mrs. Salini had been gorgeous beyond belief at one time. Now she had an inoperable tumor in her brain; it dulled her senses intermittently—and without warning—but for some reason did not give her any pain.

“What did you say?” asked Eva Besozzi.

“She’s says she can’t hear anything,” said Gary.

“Say again?”

“Hearing!” said Mrs. Mollini. “Who cares about hearing when you can’t stand up? This diabetes gets any worse, doctor’s going to amputate my feet.”

“That happened with my brother,” said Eva.

“They start with your feet, then it’s the knees,” said Mrs. Mollini. “Piece by piece. I tell you. There won’t be anything left of me to put in the grave.”

No one was paying any attention to the mayor any more. Rossi glanced up at Gary. He elbowed his way over, and Gary felt the dread all over again, the sense that everyone was watching him.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I saw the police outside.”

“Just doing their jobs,” said Gary. “They have to get their information.”

“Do they have any leads?”

“Nothing solid,” he said. “Excuse me. My wife needs my assistance in the kitchen.”

Rossi was too damn curious. Old fool. Probably he just wanted to be consoled, patted on the head. He was that way, the mayor, as if everything had to do with him, but even so, Gary didn’t have a good feeling about it. His father and his uncle and the mayor had had their dealings in the past, and the mayor had always had a proprietary attitude, as if somehow the business of the warehouse were his business too.

Gary went into the kitchen, but things were no better there. His wife, Alice, was in a foul mood. She was a second wife, an Irish blonde full of freckles, whose big ass had driven him wild once upon a time. It was even bigger now, but the effect diminished after a certain point. He had grown weary of looking at her. His ex, Gina, was here as well, and that was part of the reason for Alice’s mood. Gina had kept her looks; in fact, she looked better than ever. They didn’t like each other, Alice and Gina, but he’d had two children by Gina, and she had brought them to their grandfather’s funeral.

“She’s driving me nuts,” said Alice.

“Who?”

“Who do you think? One little crack after another.”

“That’s why I divorced her.”

“She goes on she’s not got enough alimony. In front of everyone. She smells the inheritance, and she wants to rob us blind.”

He looked back at the couch and saw the crones regarding him, studying. No doubt they’d gossiped him up over the years, him and his two wives. Now Eva Besozzi and Michele Salini whispered something to one another, shaking their heads.
There’s a secret here, something. Something this ugly happens, a man shot in the head, the brother delirious, there’s something going on. How do you think Gary affords a place like this?
There had been grief in the air at the funeral, the welling of tears, but also suspicion. As if the answer to the puzzle of his father’s death might rest in the crowd hovering by the casket.

Now Tony Mora arrived with Marilyn Visconti, and together they made the pilgrimage to the sofa. Then came Dante, his cousin, unabashed, though he’d spent the last two days in jail. There was a sudden hush in the room, everyone watching as Aunt Regina embraced him, letting the crowd know it meant nothing to her, this was her nephew whom she had cradled at his birth, who had played with her son in the street. Gary’s cheeks went red. He was looking at Dante and Marilyn, and he saw the glance they shared when Mora wasn’t looking. It wasn’t right.
I was with her first
, Gary thought.
Dante took her away, and everyone here knows the story
. And if Dante hadn’t interfered, then none of this would have happened either. He wouldn’t have bounced into that marriage with Gina, then bounced again to Alice; he wouldn’t be standing here quivering over just how far the cops would poke into his life. For a moment this line of reasoning seemed to make sense. If only Dante had kept his hands to himself. If only . . .

The crones looked at him, and Gary knew they knew everything, those goddamn women. There was no way to keep a secret in this town.

Now Mora was here. Right in front of him. Taking a slice of melon off the tray, wrapping it in prosciutto. Holding a glass of wine. Mora the well-dressed, Raybans cocked on his head.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“A real devastation.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother seems, well, she is a strong woman. . . .”

“They’ve got on her on antidepressants.”

And then there was some foot shuffling, some more muttering, and he saw the old ladies staring at him.

There’s something rotten here. This adopted child, his real parents, who knows who they were, what criminal blood
. . .

“Anything I could do to help you,” said Mora.

Suddenly Gary wondered where Dante had gone. Off with Marilyn. Out the kitchen door, onto the terrace. He felt the old jealousy, absurd as it might be—as if he could stop now what he couldn’t stop then.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He nudged away from Mora, determined to find them.

Ying was at home when his cell rang. It was late afternoon, and the blinds were at a slant, so the light had the half-cast look of twilight. Lei lay on the bed beside him, faceup, her lace shirt unbuttoned and her feet hanging over the bed. They were talking about the kids, and Ying had his hand on her stomach, studying her face, her lips. Meanwhile, she stared at the ceiling, occasionally casting a glance at him; aware of his desire or not, he had no idea. She had a marvelous self-possession, his wife. He moved to kiss her. And it was in that instant the phone rang.

“No,” she said. “Don’t answer.”

Her manner had changed. Her voice was still soft—it was always soft, trained to delicate pitch by her proper mother, Hong Kongese with a touch of English blood—but there was a steeliness there as well, the same urgency he recognized from months back when they’d still lived in the city and he’d been investigating the Wus. Back when the threats had come.

“It’s my work phone,” he said.

He glanced at the incoming number. The exchange was familiar. Chinatown. But the particular number was not one he recognized.

“Don’t answer,” she said.

He shrugged. “Honey . . .,” he said, and let it falter. There was nothing else to say. She knew his response.

“Whoever it is, whatever—it will keep. This is your day off. And you already spent this morning interviewing that man’s son.”

She was right. He had gone this morning out to Telegraph Hill, to pigeonhole Gary Mancuso. Toliveri was supposed to pick up where he left off, looking into the details of the man’s alibi, talking to employees at the warehouse, but it wasn’t Toliveri’s number on the line. Even so, it was hard to ignore the phone. There were times, in the middle of a case, when somebody might step forward, when they might have something to say. And if you missed the opportunity, you might never get it back.

“Lei,” he said. “It’s my job.”

The look she shot him reminded him of the arguments they’d had a year ago: her insistence that he transfer out of SI, if not leave the force altogether, and in the end they had settled for this, a compromise. It had not been easy for him to let it go, but he’d done it. He transferred back into Homicide and they’d moved the family across the bay. It seemed to have worked. There were no more scrawled messages, no more threats on the phone.

He turned his back to her, clicked on the cell.

“Detective Ying,” he said.

There was a pause on the other side. Then a woman’s voice.

“We haven’t spoken for a long time.”

He recognize the voice, low and sultry, and felt a twinge of excitement. The voice belong to Miss Lin. Or that was the name she gave herself.

Miss Lin was an informer—an insider at the Wus’. He had not heard from her for some time, since back when he was still active in SI, and the truth was she had never given him anything of value. He had met with her only once—a good-looking woman with a haughty air who worked in the Wu Benevolent Society. The one time he’d met with her, she had a flower in her hair. A chrysanthemum, maybe. He’d asked her then about Ru Shen—the Shanghai businessman who’d disappeared—and she’d gone cold on him. He did not know her motives, or her reliability as an informant, but he was not about to send her off. He glanced at his wife, still on the bed, and felt vaguely disloyal. Not because anything had gone on between himself and Miss Lin, but because he felt himself drawn to the whole miasma once again, where he had promised he wouldn’t go. To the Wu family, the benevolent associations, the intertwined businesses of racketeering and everyday commerce that stretched across the sea, to Hong Kong, to Guangdong, to the markets where chickens sat in cages next to frogs and jungle monkeys and snakes, delicacies waiting to be skinned and gutted. Illegal contraband that traveled like the flu, making its way along subterranean routes, unseen yet in full view, as impossible to suppress as a handshake on a busy street.

“I have some information. I know you are investigating the murder of this man in the paper, Salvatore Mancuso.”

“Yes.”

“A man came here yesterday to make a connection with Mason Wu.”

Ying knew about Mason Wu, of course. He was the youngest of Love Wu’s grand-nephews—anxious to make his mark in the drug trade. From what Ying had heard at SI, there was friction between Mason Wu and his great-uncle, but maybe it was just talk.

“What kind of connection?”

“Am I going to get something for my trouble?”

“It depends on what you have.”

“It has to do with drugs. I don’t know when or where. But I know the name of the man who’s making the arrangements.”

“Okay.”

“Dante Mancuso.”

Ying was surprised but then he was not surprised. You worked a case, and worked it, seeking out the logical connections, unearthing little bits of this, of that, none of it adding up—and when you found something it was in a place you didn’t expect, something you tripped over on your way to somewhere else. Except he was not sure what this meant, either, or why it had been offered up to him like this, all of a sudden. He remembered the vinyl sheet and wondered which side of the law Dante was working.

“I can’t talk much longer,” Miss Lin said. “Is it worth anything to you?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? I don’t know if I can put that in my pocket.”

“Remember before, we talked about Ru Shen.”

“I remember.”

“I am curious about his disappearance.”

“That is more dangerous. For me. For you.”

“I understand.”

“But if you have money, if you are generous . . .”

Ying heard something in the background. The woman was in a market, it sounded like, there were the sounds of cash registers and someone speaking Cantonese dialect.

“I have to go,” said Miss Lin. “You know how to contact me.”

Ying knew he shouldn’t be messing with this informant; his days with SI were over. His job now was to close the book on the murder of Salvatore Mancuso, though he was beginning to realize this might not be so easy to do. Especially if his nephew was involved in some kind of covert operation.

He did not know Miss Lin’s motive. She could be in it for the money, and if that was the case she might be playing both sides against the middle—hawking information to the Wus as well.

“So how important was it?” Lei asked.

“Not very.”

And he felt it there between them again, the secrecy, the way he’d kept an empty face during the Wu investigation.

Ying walked over to the open window and looked out at the street. Every once in a while, he’d see someone out here, someone lingering under a sycamore, a man in a parked car, a solicitor, and wonder if they were who they seemed. Or if instead it was someone else, watching, biding time. If it was really all behind them.