City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (6 page)

Luis rose and pointed to a parking space.

“That’s where he parked?”

“Yes. It was towed away by the police to check for forensic evidence,” Siu-Tung explained. “We should get it back in a few days, they said.”

“A parish car?”

“Again, his own. He bought it used a few years ago. Perfectly acceptable by the rules of the parish.”

The way the pastor said this last part told Luis exactly how he really felt about one of his priests having his own car. Luis reconstructed Father Chang’s path, exiting the driver’s-side door and moving toward the rectory. He glanced around, looking for where Shu Kuen Yamazoe might have hid.

“And no one saw Yamazoe before?” Luis asked.

“No, but most had gone to bed long before Father Chang returned from his party.”

Thai Cultural Day festival.

“So it’s possible he’d been hanging around?”

“It’s possible.”

“Any chance the shooter could’ve ridden in the car with Father Chang?” Luis asked. “It would explain why no one saw him. Also, why the police towed it to look for forensic evidence.”

From the look on Pastor Siu-Tung’s face, it was clear he hadn’t considered this at all.

“I don’t know. Father Minxuan and Father Yali were the only witnesses,” Siu-Tung said, pointing up to two of the rectory windows overlooking the parking lot. “But then they heard, not saw. Both said they heard one car door open and close before the young girl’s father—”

Not “the killer.” Not “Father Chang’s murderer.”

“—called out Father Chang’s name. Then they heard the shots. They both came downstairs and saw Yamazoe sitting in the parking lot, legs crossed, the gun a little away from him. He was soaking wet. It had been raining that night.”

No car ride,
Luis thought.

“Then what happened?”

“Father Minxuan called an ambulance. Father Yali woke me. We couldn’t find our first aid kit, so we took the one Father Chang kept in his trunk and tried to save him, but he was already gone.”

Luis nodded to a camera over the rectory. “Did the police take the original or a copy?”

“Father Chavez,” Pastor Siu-Tung said, now annoyed, “I appreciate the archdiocese wanting a full report, but I cannot see how watching a man die is either respectful or appropriate.”

“You haven’t had a respectful word for him since I arrived,” Luis said. “Why start now?”

The look on Siu-Tung’s face soured even more, but he seemed to understand that the sooner he did what Father Chavez asked, the sooner he’d be gone.

“We can watch a link in the office. Come along.”

The security camera footage, as viewed on the church secretary’s iPad, was taken from such an awkward angle that Luis doubted it could be used at trial. Neither Father Chang nor his killer were identifiable in the few frames in which they appeared, though the image did go white with muzzle flash four times as Father Chang’s body almost immediately dropped to the pavement and convulsed. It was some time before the other priests cautiously emerged, but Luis could tell that the pastor was right. Father Chang was already dead.

Though they were alone in Pastor Siu-Tung’s office, the older priest had kept glancing away from the computer showing the footage, as if fearing they’d be caught. When it came to Father Chang’s death, however, he made a show of looking away. Luis didn’t have the luxury.

Even as the priests buzzed around him, Yamazoe sat stock still after the killing, as if meditating. Though Luis couldn’t make out his face, nothing about his body language suggested he even took notice of what was going on around him.

Pastor Siu-Tung came into view, checking Father Chang’s car for the first aid kit, coming out first with a box before putting it back and taking the first aid kit.

“What was that?” Luis asked.

“Nothing. Prescription medication. I saw the cross on the side of the box and mistook it for the first aid kit.”

“He carried prescription medication in his trunk?”

“Our insurance, as you must know, makes us receive medication for ongoing conditions through the mail. Father Chang had hypertension and was on beta-blockers for it.”

Luis nodded. He’d become intimately familiar with the archdiocese’s medical insurance plans due to Pastor Whillans. “Was there anything else in the trunk?”

“No, just his dry cleaning, a box of dual-language Bibles like the kind we give out, and a couple of boxes of flyers for his causes.”

“Like?”

Pastor Siu-Tung glanced around until he spied a bulletin board out in the hall. “A couple of them are still up. Community outreach stuff. Low-income housing mostly. A couple of marches. That kind of thing.”

Not your kind of thing,
Luis surmised.

“Can I see his room?”

Pastor Siu-Tung led Luis to the rectory. Father Chang’s room had been locked but not sealed. Inside, the space was as familiarly spartan as Luis’s own room at St. Augustine’s. There was only a bed, a small chest of drawers, a wooden crucifix hanging on the wall, and a bookshelf. Luis opened the closet door and found clerical clothing and three pairs of shoes. The chest of drawers contained underwear and socks.

“He only ever wore the collar?” Luis asked.

“His uniform day and night,” Pastor Siu-Tung said, the first words he’d spoken about Father Chang that weren’t negative.

Under the pretense of pushing the clothes aside to see if anything was tucked behind them, Luis went through the pockets. They were empty.

“How about the bathroom?”

As with the rectory at St. Augustine’s, the priests shared a bathroom on each floor. Continuing his search, Luis opened the small medicine cabinet above the sink and, sure enough, was able to identify Father Chang’s personal effects by a bottle of prescription eyedrops on the second-to-lowest shelf. There was a safety razor with extra blades, deodorant, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a comb. Alongside all that were two bottles of a prescription for Lozol.

“What about the apartment you mentioned?” Luis asked as he stepped back into the hallway. “The one he kept in town. Do you have the address?”

“No. We only know of it because there were times he didn’t stay the night here.”

“He couldn’t have been with friends or at a hotel?”

“He’d return in fresh clothes.”

“And these are things he couldn’t have brought with him?” Luis asked.

The corner of Pastor Siu-Tung’s lip curled and fell. He looked Luis up and down reproachfully.

“I still can’t for the life of me understand why the archdiocese would enlist an outsider to help in their investigation,” Siu-Tung said.

Outsider. Now there’s a word that can be taken many ways,
Luis thought.

“I imagine the archbishop didn’t mean to impinge on you during your time of grief,” Luis said. “He and Father Chang go way back, and he doesn’t want to believe these allegations.”

“Which is why you don’t, isn’t it?” Siu-Tung asked.

“I don’t think I have enough information to form an opinion,” Luis replied.

“But you have anyway,” Pastor Siu-Tung said, though his tone had softened.

“I only have one more question,” Luis said. “Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

The pastor raised a hand as if to say there was little he could do to stop him.

“The girl. Yamazoe’s daughter. I know the police have a lot of questions about her. But you seem to be one of the only people who actually saw this person. As the entire case hinges on it, I think confirming her identity becomes pretty important.”

Pastor Siu-Tung fell silent for a long moment, looking down to the carpet as if weighing his words carefully before giving them to Luis. When he looked up, Luis was surprised to see a sad smile on his face.

“First of all, you’re wrong. Plenty of people saw the girl. She was in the congregation every Sunday for the past several weeks. Maybe people don’t like talking about it or getting involved in a murder case, but they saw her. If they don’t remember her, it’s because she was so slight, so clearly uncomfortable and unhappy, that she did everything she could to disappear into the pew. What angers me and, perhaps to my discredit, provokes my disrespect for Father Chang’s memory is that I saw that and prayed for her. He saw that and took advantage. I wish I’d known then what it was that caused her such displeasure to be in the house of God. But if it had been revealed to me, I’m afraid I might’ve done what her father did, and we’d be having a completely different conversation right now. She’s real, Father Chavez. And now she’s gone. Whatever the circumstance, it’s just one more person this church has managed to fail. So, pardon me if I try to alleviate some of my own guilt in this by venting my anger at the late Father Chang.”

Luis extended his hand. “Thank you for your time, Father.”

“If you find her, please tell her I’m sorry.”

Luis nodded and headed away.

VI

In the age of Google Maps and Waze, addresses in a big city like Los Angeles should have been the easiest things to find with a smartphone in hand. So why was it, Michael thought, that he couldn’t locate the law office of Caesar deGuzman, Yamazoe’s attorney?

He’d called to make an appointment, the receptionist registering surprise to hear that a deputy district attorney was coming in to meet her boss.

“Of Los Angeles?” she asked to confirm.

“Yes,” Michael had replied with relish. “Can he see me?”

But now, as he made his way up and down the stairs of what looked like a courtyard apartment converted into offices, including one that had the logo of a recently canceled television series on it and two more for a so-called wellness clinic, Michael wondered if he was even in the right part of the city.

“Mr. Story?”

Michael turned. A young woman with hair so unnaturally red it looked less taken from a bottle and more from the side of a fire engine waved a hand at him from a doorway across the courtyard.

“That’s me,” Michael said, striding over. “Couldn’t find the place.”

“Oh, that’s Koreatown for you,” the woman said, pointing to one of three placards alongside the door that listed deGuzman’s name under several others. “We’re all on top of, under, and behind everybody here.”

Michael resisted uttering the single entendre that entered his head as he followed the receptionist inside. For someone who spent thousands placing ads on the back of every bus and phone book in the city, the firm’s actual office space was no larger than that of the two-bedroom apartment deGuzman’s place of business now occupied.

“He’ll be with you in just a moment,” the receptionist said, taking a seat behind a desk which sat, Michael imagined, in what had at one time been the kitchen.

He’d just picked up an aged copy of
Popular Mechanics
when a squat man with a long black ponytail and bushy facial hair emerged from a back room. At first, Michael took him for another client. It wasn’t until he extended a hand that he recognized him as the man from the bus ads, just an additional forty pounds and at least a decade further along on his journey through life.

“Mr. Story,” deGuzman said, eyeing the deputy DA through thick glasses.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Michael replied, shaking his hand.

“Come on back,” deGuzman said. “And tell me how I can be of assistance to the great city of Los Angeles today.”

Though the ads and trappings read ambulance chaser, what Michael saw in deGuzman’s obsidian eyes was someone who in another life could’ve been a law professor or Supreme Court justice. He looked shrewd, and his eyes missed nothing. He folded his hands and sat at the head of a small conference table as he waited for Michael to speak.

“It’s about Shu Yamazoe,” Michael said.

“So you told Irma.”

Michael decided that was the receptionist’s name and pressed on. “I’m just curious as to how you and he came to know each other.”

“You can’t believe I’d actually have a conversation about this with someone from the prosecutor’s office,” deGuzman said. “I assume you thought I was someone who might wish to curry favor with a deputy district attorney by hanging a controversial client out to dry, but that’s incorrect.”

“No, I’m actually acting in an unofficial capacity at the behest of the Los Angeles archdiocese. They are concerned that Yamazoe’s confession—”

“They should be,” deGuzman interrupted. “So, they’re already looking to discredit my client, are they? I guess I would be, too.”

“No, they’ve just made mistakes in the past, so they want to approach this case as a model of what to do right next time.”

“Because with the Catholic Church and statutory rape there’s always a next time,” deGuzman said.

Michael sighed. He wasn’t getting anywhere with this man, who clearly enjoyed thumbing his nose at an office that he’d likely sat across from in contentious situations for decades. Michael realized he’d probably have had more of a shot if he’d announced himself as a ditch digger or trash collector. Saying he was from the DA’s office meant deGuzman was more than prepared to stonewall and toy with him for as long as he sat there.

But then something occurred to him.

“You called Yamazoe your client. When did that become the case?”

“What do you mean?” deGuzman replied quietly, though his face said he was rapidly searching back over his words to check for miscues.

Not quite a Supreme Court–worthy poker face there, Counselor.

“I’ve read the confession. He didn’t ask you to be his attorney. You only inferred that from the fact that he sent you the e-mail. How did you know he didn’t send it to twenty lawyers, hoping one would show up?”

DeGuzman shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“But when you spoke to officers you called him by name,” Michael said. “You said that you were there because of
Shu Kuen Yamazoe
. Correct?”

“Yes,” deGuzman said warily.

Michael took out his iPhone and found the copy of Yamazoe’s confession that had been sent to him by Detective Whitehead. He stared at it for a long moment before looking back up at deGuzman.

“How did you know his name?” Michael asked simply.

“It was at the end of the letter.”

Michael held up the letter on his screen in the original
hanzi
. To a native Mandarin speaker, he was sure it looked just fine. To someone familiar with the Roman alphabet, it looked like Chinese logograms. But unlike a letter written by a Westerner, there was no real signature. Shu’s name was simply the last three letters on the page.

“There are about a dozen words here that don’t properly translate when plugged into a translation app. How did you know the difference between the ones that were actual mistakes and then the ones that were your soon-to-be-client’s full name?”

DeGuzman said nothing, choosing to merely eye Michael through his thick glasses as if waiting for the younger man to continue. Michael simply sat back in his chair.

“So, you can either tell me how you came to know Shu Yamazoe’s name,” Michael said. “Or I can get a warrant from a judge to search your offices and suspend your license.”

DeGuzman took off his glasses and placed them on the conference table. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, sighed, and leaned over the table toward Michael.

“I guess you’ll just have to go see that judge then.”

Luis had believed finding Shu Yamazoe’s house wouldn’t be easy. But then a simple search of the archdiocese’s parishioners’ mailing list database during his off period revealed an address of an apartment in Monterey Park straightaway. This was unlucky. A house he could’ve probably broken into if he needed to get a look around. An apartment meant a building manager and likely a sealed-off door.

Rats.

Still, at the end of the school day he hurried to take out a parish car to check out the space before he had to return to help with evening Mass. He had told Pastor Whillans in vague terms what he was doing. Whillans gave his equally vague approval.

“If you get arrested, say you were impersonating a priest,” the pastor had said.

Luis had considered wearing street clothes when he went to the apartment. The problem was, he more often than not felt this invited trouble, as if announcing that he was denying the Lord in some way, which in turn would make the universe deny him. So he kept on the collar, drove to Monterey Park, and parked in front of the building.

All he really wanted was that one piece of evidence telling him that the girl, whatever her name might be, had stayed with her father at the apartment—it could be an article of clothing, a second bed, a book, a keepsake,
anything
—so that he could erase the skepticism of her existence from his mind. So when he arrived at apartment 12B and found the front door wide open, he was about to say a quick prayer of thanks to God when he suddenly noticed that the place was completely empty. No furniture, no wall hangings,
nothing
.

A middle-aged man pulling a commercial steam cleaner stepped out from a hallway. When he saw the priest, he stopped short, as if doing a quick self-assessment to see if he was in the process of sinning.

“I heard this guy was a crazy killer, but did they really call for an exorcist?”

Luis grinned. “New city requirement. Apartment vacancies have to be exorcised whenever someone’s broken a lease. Heading to jail counts.”

“Hope the archdiocese is getting a big cut of that,” the man said with a laugh.

“Oh, they are. Big-time. Bonus if we have to fight demons.”

The man laughed and extended a hand. “Jerry Bunker.”

“Luis Chavez.”

“Are you looking at this place? I’m just finishing up. Building manager is around somewhere.”

“No, I was just—”

“Oh crap,” Jerry said, paling. “I knew this guy was a killer but didn’t realize it was the guy who murdered the priest.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“So what? You coming around to bless the place? That’s kind of weird.”

“No, no. The shooter was a parishioner, and he had a daughter. We just wanted to check in on her.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth, either. Luis hated himself a little for putting it out there. To make it worse, Jerry nodded reverentially.

“That’s something,” he said. “That’s very Christian of you. Ain’t no girl here now, though. I don’t know the story, but the place is getting cleaned out and ready to be rented again. Anything that was left behind I took to the Dumpster.”

“Was there much?” Luis asked.

“Nah. Trash mostly. Contents of the kitchen. Somebody had already come for the furniture. Which means the building manager probably sold it. Sinister business this.”

“I agree,” Luis said. “Nothing of the daughter’s?”

“Not a damn thing as I could tell. Sorry.”

Luis turned to exit, then glanced back. “Which Dumpster, by the way?”

There were three at the back of the building. Jerry had said he’d tossed everything in the one closest to the back door. Sure enough, Luis found two garbage bags of food pulled from the cabinet. As they were dry goods, he considered yanking them out to take back to the church’s stores, but then relented. They already smelled of the Dumpster, and there was no telling how long their contents had been in Yamazoe’s cabinet.

Under the garbage bags, however, were a handful of pint glasses, a couple shattered, all with the logo of a bar, Old Taipa, including the address, a place down in the City of Industry. Each also featured a different animal and year. Luis realized they were commemorative glasses of some sort tied to the Chinese New Year.

“Hey, did you pull these from this apartment?” Luis asked Jerry after carrying a couple of the surviving glasses back up.

“I did,” Jerry said, nodding. “Tried not to break them in the Dumpster, as some trash digger might come along and get some recycling nickels out of them. Think I was only half-successful. If you want those, they’re all yours.”

“Ever heard of this bar?”

“Oh, of course!” Jerry said, smiling. “It’s not really a bar, though. Why? You feeling lucky?”

Susan had slept for ten hours straight. She’d blown past the time she was supposed to be back on shift but surprised herself by not feeling guilty.

Oh well.

She got dressed, realized she didn’t have a single clean lab coat left, and made a pile of all her used ones to trade at the dry cleaner’s for the ones she’d dropped off the previous week. Even when they’d handed her the ticket and said, “Tuesday after five okay?” she’d grinned, knowing it would be days after that before she’d finally have time to come back.

She checked her phone, was perplexed to see no messages from Nan, then hoped that meant he’d managed to get some sleep, too.

As she drove from her tiny duplex in San Gabriel toward the clinic, she scanned through the radio stations looking for news but found none. She took out her cell phone and while in traffic flipped through the websites of the local TV news stations and the
Los Angeles Times
, looking for updates on the Father Chang murder. She wondered what it meant that there hadn’t been anything new reported in the past twenty-four hours. Weren’t people interested?