Chasing the Dragon (19 page)

“It was just the lab.”

“Are you investigating the Wus?”

“No.”

Her inclination was uncanny. They knew each other well.

“Are you stepping out on me?”

Her tone was lilting, almost flirtatious. She fixed him with her eyes. They were gray eyes, very clear. Even so, there was something hidden there. Her chin tilted, she smiled ever so slightly, and suddenly he feared, despite her question, that she was the one drifting from him.

“Don’t worry,” he said, kissing her forehead. “It’s just another murder.”

After he dropped off the kids, Ying drove across the bay. He stopped at Figone’s Hardware on Grant to pick up some plaster and some bleach and a small chisel, then he returned to Winter Alley.

His grandmother was not in the kitchen, nor was she in the tiny bedroom at the foot of the stairs. She was upstairs, on her knees, with a brush and a bucket, scrubbing at the blood.

Blind as she was, she had beaten him to it.

Grandmother Ying raised her head as he entered. He bent down and put his cheek against hers.

He put the Clorox on the floor next to her. With the chisel, he dug out the bullets he’d fired the night before. He counted the shots in his memory. Two from himself, one from Anita Blonde. Now he dug her shot from the doorjamb, and one of his own from the plaster opposite. The bullet had gone through her body and into the wall. The third bullet, he guessed, was still inside her. While his grandmother scrubbed, he stirred the plaster. Slowly, methodically, he patched the two holes, then brushed them over with paint.

Then he went to Columbus Station. Technically speaking, the evidence room was under lock and key, but the truth of the matter was that the detectives had unfettered access. He went to the metal drawer and lifted one of the bullets from the Mancuso murder. Then he took the bullet and drove back across the bay to Berkeley.

Ying had studied criminology at UC some fifteen years before. It was where he had met Lei. She’d been a nursing student, and they’d met in a class about emergency trauma. Here on the quad, underneath Sproul Tower, they’d staged a mock triage with student volunteers sprawled on the ground. Lei had been one of the wounded, and he’d helped carry her off on a canvas gurney.

Now he walked down the long halls of the criminology building, seemingly unchanged: the same worn tile, the same yellowing paint made dingier by the overhead fluorescents. Grudgeon was in his office.

“Ah, Frank,” said Max. “How’s things in the real world?”

“A little too real.”

“You back home in Homicide?”

“Yes.”

“Feel good?”

“Well, it’s home, like you say.”

“Well, you know me, pure theory.”

There was an awkward moment. Max Grudgeon had been among the brightest of the young criminologists, but instead of going into law enforcement he’d stayed at the university. There was an undercurrent of tension between the two men, as there often was between academics and the people who worked the field. Over the years, Grudgeon had done some consulting work for defense clients, undermining the physical evidence on a couple of murder cases where helping the accused, in Ying’s opinion, was of questionable ethics. On one of those cases Ying himself had been the arresting officer—but this was all old news.

“What can I help you with?”

“It’s a simple thing, really. A ballistics check. I know you have a lab here for the students.”

“Can’t the police lab do that for you?”

“In this case, no.”

Max smiled. It interested him. Ying could see. It appealed to his anarchist heart.

“You going to tell me what this is about?”

“I can’t.”

Max nodded his head. The man was obviously pleased to know that Ying, too, had occasion to work outside the boundaries. Exposing himself bothered Ying, but he had no choice.

“Show me what you have.”

Ying opened his case and put Anita Blonde’s gun on the desk with one of the bullets from Salvatore Mancuso’s corpse.

“I need to know if we have a match.”

“All right,” said Max. “I have to teach a class this morning. And another this afternoon. But talk to me Friday. I should know by then.”

“Thanks.”

Max Grudgeon looked at the gun on his desk.

“I’m not going to have the SFPD down my throat for this?”

“No. It’s confidential. You and me.”

Ying walked back across campus to his car. As he opened the door, he glanced around, and he felt again the uneasiness that had plagued him when he was with SI: the suspicion that someone was following him, that everything was about to break loose—but there was no one in the lot.

He went home then. Early, for once. Lei wasn’t there. She returned a few hours later, nonchalant in her sleeveless blouse.

“Where have you been?”

“Errands,” she said.

She gave him a kiss on the lips. He closed his eyes at her touch. He didn’t want to open them. There was a lie at the heart of things, he knew that now. You couldn’t hide it forever. No matter how you sanded, no matter how you scrubbed. Go into a dark room—with the ultraviolet, the Luminol—and you would see it glowing, a puddle of luminescence where the blood had been.

Across the bay, in Duboce Park, the Cole Valley Mosque was holding a benefit for their bakery. The community was out in their dashikis and cornrows, listening to a man named Pharaoh play his saxophone. It wasn’t the real Pharaoh—not the Pharaoh from the old days of jazz, who’d played the clubs along Fillmore—but one of his children, so to speak, a disciple: a man in purple raiment with a quartet behind him, filling the breeze with the sound of electricity and light.

It was a sweet moment and Joe Williams felt its sweetness flutter through him, but at the same time the coldness at the core of his being was untouched. While the music played, Williams worked the edge of the crowd, handing out leaflets to the passersby. He wore gray slacks and a white shirt and was clean-cut-looking and earnest.

He was the kind of man who could smile warmly as he shook your hand while inside he felt nothing at all, or almost nothing; the machinery clicked and spun. His own time in San Francisco was all but over, he figured. He would do the thing he had come to do and get gone.

All around him the people were grooving: the hipsters and gangsters, together with the crack freaks and kids from the Haight, playing homeboy for the day, and also some gay boys from the Castro.

Sister Hannah flashed him a little wave from the booth where she was selling cookies and all-natural bread. Fakir was working the booth, too, standing next to Hannah. She and Fakir exchanged a laugh, and Williams felt the jealousy sear through him, then vanish in the coldness at his center. The women liked Fakir, with his beard and his righteous demeanor and his talk of the Third Force. Fakir had his share of opportunities. Still, he wasn’t the kind of man to lay down with a brother’s woman.

A feeling like guilt pricked at his chest, but it did not pierce very deep. Fakir had brought all this on himself, Williams thought. This business about the Third Force, it was delusion. Just like this bakery benefit was delusion. Raise fifteen cents by the end of the day. No, there wasn’t any Third Force rising, no Black Kingdom. And if it did rise, it would be crushed soon enough, and the people who’d do the crushing would be your Howard graduates, your up-and-coming niggers. Men from West Point. Women from the Stanford School of Minority Business. People who spent all day scrubbing their faces with pumice and at night fingered themselves dreaming about the white man and his money.

Everyone was a traitor.

After the benefit, Williams walked with Sister Hannah and her two kids up to the apartment. They ate a dinner of grits and ribs and afterward watched the television daughter of Bill Cosby, whatever her name was; fat and sassy, she had her own show now.

The sweetness fluttered against him once more and he smiled at Hannah, but the smile was just muscles moving, a trick he had learned. Even if he wanted to stay here, he couldn’t. He had made a deal.

Fifteen years left on his sentence, now to forever, and another case pending—double homicide—and they’d told him he could walk. A protection program and a new life.

Just a small favor in return.

The first night he had met Hannah, he had made love to her on the couch here in this apartment. He had reached up under the muslin dress and felt her taut brown breasts. It was the kind of behavior the daughters of Islam were supposed to avoid, and the sons, too, but she had that wiggle in her and he wasn’t a fool. You didn’t get two kids locked up in a chastity belt.

It was a sweet little apartment, with two kids and the dinner smell, and she had the job at the bakery, and he himself was respected on the street, being the right-hand man of Brother Fakir. Maybe he wished for a moment that this could be his life—but that was like wishing he was another person.

“You think it’s going to work out?” she asked. “That new location for the bakery. Brother Fakir told me you been talking to some people.”

“Yes. That’s right,” he said. “I have to go out for a while, honey. I’ll be back later.”

“Where you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“And who are these people, they have this space for us?”

“Some Italians. They own a place down at the waterfront.”

The idea had come to him, how to get Fakir where he needed him when the mule came in. Mancuso wanted Fakir at the warehouse, and Fakir wanted a location for his bakery. All it took was a little talk, a little imagination, and he could get Fakir where he needed him.

“How do you know any Italians?”

“I know plenty of people. No reason to wonder about that.”

He slid his hand underneath her muslin dress.

“The kids are watching.” She slapped his hand way, but then gave him a big kiss, sloppy as hell, and brushed up close. “And where are you going?”

“Church business.”

There was part of him that wanted nothing to do with what lay ahead. He considered taking off, leaving Frisco. Or just doing nothing. But if he were ungrateful in that manner, the powers-that-be would send him back where he came from. Or worse.

Williams walked downstairs and out into the street. He headed toward Bay View, to a little strip joint on the west side of town. There were a couple of sisters on stage. One of them was swirling a white handkerchief while she stripped. She wore a pair of donkey ears and brayed for the crowd.

It was mostly black men here, sitting in the shadows. Then he saw his man, white like a grub. He sat in a vinyl booth with a woman on either side. Laughing like hell. Across from the white man sat a wide-faced Chinese with a black mustache, like in the movies—an ugly man with cruel eyes—and as Williams slid in beside him, something like regret penetrated the coldness, and he wished for a moment they’d left him in jail. But he was who he was. He had no choice but to play along.

Anita Blonde lay in the silt at the bottom of the bay. It was not the deepest water, but she was well weighted and away from the currents. Her corpse moved imperceptibly with the shifting tide. Over time her skin would slough away, and perhaps the bundle would inch slowly landward, and someone walking upon the industrial shore would discover it, the bones inside, the fragments of lycra and silk, the tarnished ear rings, and the bullet that had killed her. Or maybe the bundle would not move at all and the sediment would slowly cover her remains. Meanwhile, though, the tarp had loosened about her head, and her face was exposed. The bottom feeders and the crabs and the scavenger fish had found her. Her eyes were open. The depths above her were murky but not so deep as to exclude all light—and somewhere overhead a container ship passed and her body shifted and settled again in its wake. A pair of mudfish scuttled in closer, drawn by her scent.

Friday morning, Detective Ying drove across the Bay Bridge on his way to Columbus Station. He looked out over the gray water and thought about the depths below, and he did not know if he would be able to glance at the bay again without thinking of that minute when the light had fractured through the open door and he’d fired his gun and watched the woman crumple.

He drove down the Embarcadero and up Kearny to Columbus Station. For years he had been nothing but on time, but today he walked into the skull session late. Angelo was already at the head of the table, Toliveri was to his right, and a half dozen other detectives were gathered around with their files and unsolved cases.

“Traffic,” said Ying.

“Yes,” said Angelo. “Traffic.”

It was the standard excuse. No one argued with it. No one believed it, either.

“We were just turning to the Mancuso murder. You want to run it down?”

Ying started his rundown then, the lab reports and the forensics, the interviews and—

“We’ve been through this,” Angelo interrupted. “Anything new?”

There was plenty new, if Ying wanted to show them the pictures Strehli had taken seven years ago. If he wanted to explain to the gathered detectives his suspicion—logical or not—that the Mancuso murder was connected to the disappearance of Ru Shen. But he was not in the position to make that case.