Compromised (23 page)

“I’ll show you.” We were in the restaurant where Aguri Maeda had worked, the man who had been stabbed in front of the Shinto temple. I pulled Harry’s photo out of my pocket and called for the waitress.

“Everything prepared all right?” she asked politely.

“Everything’s delicious.” I showed her my badge and Harry’s photo. “We’re with NYPD. Do you recognize this man?”

Her eyes went wide, and she nodded. “Just the other night,” she said in a delicate voice. A tear ran down her cheek. “He was here talking with Maeda-san.” Her throat tightened. “Is he . . . is he the killer?”

“No, definitely not. We’re just trying to locate this man.” I already knew how to locate Harry, but I asked about his whereabouts to make my inquiry sound credible. “Do you know how to reach him?”

“No,” she answered nervously. “But I can ask the others about him.”

I slid the photo toward her. “Great. Thank you.” It was an unnecessary request, but it would’ve seemed odd if I hadn’t followed through, and I needed a way to engage the other sushi chefs.

I could see in his expression that Gus already knew what I was doing. “So Harry knew the stabbing victim?”

“It appears so. I showed Harry the photos of the victim, but he denied knowing him.”

“But you didn’t believe him?”

“Not for a second. He broke out in a sweat and had to dash off to the little boys’ room as soon as he saw the picture.”

“So you think that this chef is somehow tied up in the shooting?”

I spread wasabi over a piece of yellowtail. “I really don’t know what his business was with Harry, but he’s most likely dead because of it.”

I glanced at the sushi bar and saw the waitress conversing with two of the chefs. One of them looked up at us, wiped off his knife, and made his way over to our table. He placed Harry’s photo on our table. “Sugi say you are looking for this man?”

“Yes. Do you know where we can find him?”

He shook his head. “
Iie.
No. He come here and speaks to Maeda-san, not me, but someone else ask who he is.”

“Someone else from the police department?” Gus asked.

His eyes were large as he shook his head. “Oh no. This man not police. This man . . .” He appeared to be searching for a suitable translation. “Fully tattooed this man. He how you say . . . hit man. You know. Enforcer.”

“Yakuza?”

He nodded slowly and assuredly. “Al Capone. You understand?”

“Yes. Have you seen him before?”

“Ya. He eats here all the time. His name Ryo, Ryo Goda.”

“Was he here tonight?” Gus asked.

“No.” He tapped the photo. “He not here since that night he ask about this guy in the picture.”

I handed him a business card. “Please call me if you think of anything else that might be useful.”

He accepted the card with two hands and bowed. “Thank you,” he said and backed away.

“What do you think is going on here?” Gus asked. “Why does a yakuza killer have an interest in Harry?”

“We’ll just have to ask him.” I pulled the GPS tracker out of my pocket and showed Gus the screen.

“You’re a sly dog. I should’ve known you’d hedge your bet.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, pretty boy. Finish your dinner and let’s get his and hers matching tattoos.”

“Yeah,
right
. Get a life, would ya?”

“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun.”

“Did you take your meds today?” he gibed.

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I’m in no hurry to get a tramp stamp, but I need to know why everyone involved in this dog and pony show is covered in tats.”

“Is this the place?” Gus asked as we pulled up in front of Tiru’s Traditional Tattoo and Body Piercing shop.
The store sign was hand painted with ornately drawn gold dragons in a Japanese motif on a deep red background. The security shutters were down and locked over the windows and the front door.

“Grab the bolt cutter,” I told Gus as I slipped Tiru’s business card back into my pocket.

“We can’t do that. Not without—”

“I hear cries for help. Don’t you?”

“Oh. Oh yeah,” he agreed, suddenly catching on. “Sounds like probable cause to me too. Someone must be in trouble. New York’s finest to the rescue.”

“What a ham you’ve become. Too bad there’s no demand for vaudeville actors anymore. Lucky for this poor unfortunate soul, we just happened to be passing along when we did.”

Gus approached with the bolt cutter and popped the padlock as if it were a toy. The door had a wood frame with a glass center panel. “The glass is going to shatter if I kick it in.”

“Yeah. That’s life in the big city, my brave little buckaroo. Make it so.”

“Stand back,” he warned. “Some glass may go flying.” He measured the doorframe with a stride, and backed away like a placekicker preparing to punt a football. He shielded his eyes, then stepped forward and struck the door solidly on the wooden frame. Somehow, the glass remained intact as the door flew open.

“Remarkable precision, grasshopper. I’ll bet you can snatch a fly out of thin air with a pair of chopsticks.”

“Never mind catching a fly,” he said as he covered his nose. “Smells like there’s a rotting, maggot-infested carcass in there.”

There was no mistaking the smell of a rotting corpse. It’s revolting in the most offensive sense of the word. The store was silent and seemed unoccupied, but we pulled our guns for precaution, hit the light switch, and entered guardedly.

The body wasn’t hard to find. It was lying behind the counter surrounded by dried blood. The victim was face up with a pencil through his throat. I pulled the artist’s sketch of the temple suspect out of my pocket and compared the likeness with our newest stiff. “It’s not our guy.”

I had asked my dear friend Herbert Ambler, the Senior Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s criminal investigation division in New York, to run the artist’s sketch and tattoo rendering through the bureau’s Next Generation Identification system, which cross-references facial features from photos against an international database of high-risk individuals. The system worked pretty damn quickly, so I was hoping for an update before the end of the night. There was no worry about Ambler going to bed before I did—the man never slept. He was a rerun junkie and watched vintage TV until the wee hours.

“No. No way,” Gus agreed. “This guy is thin and slight of build, and the perp who stabbed the chef looked to be thick and stocky. There’s a dragon tattoo on his neck, but the facial features are completely different.”

I took several pictures with my iPhone. “I wonder if this is the notorious Al Capone.”

“The guy the sushi chef described?”

“Uh-huh. If we swing back there in a hurry, we can get a visual confirmation before they close for the night.”

I tugged on a pair of gloves, palpated the flesh, and then tested the compliance of the arm joints. Signs of rigor mortis had already begun to subside.

“How long?” Gus asked.

“The body is just beginning to soften. I’d say about three days, give or take.” There were signs of a scuffle. A sketchpad and reference book were open on the counter. “I’m thinking that someone snuck up on Tiru while he was doodling over there, but must’ve underestimated his fighting skills. Tiru probably had the pencil in his hand and drove it into his attacker’s throat. He looked like one of those small wiry types with quiet inner strength and mad ninja skills.”

“Harry’s accomplice?”

“Right. He’s Harry’s man on the street, his partner in crime, so to speak. Needless to say, when I first met Tiru he neglected to tell me that he’d just been attacked and had killed his assailant in self-defense, a purported yakuza enforcer no less.”

“You shouldn’t be around when the troops arrive,” Gus said. “I can handle CSU, but there’ll be mucho explaining to do if any white shirts show up.”

“We certainly can’t have that now, can we?”

“
No es bueno
, babe. Why don’t you take the car back to the restaurant and see if the chef can make this guy from the pictures you just snapped. You can swing by afterward and pick me up.”

“I can do that.”

He cleared his throat to make a point. “Before you get behind the wheel of the car . . .”

“Yes. I swear on all that’s holy. I took my meds, and I’m okay to drive. Trust me.”

“One hundred percent sure? I don’t want you going all convulsion-like on me while you’re behind the wheel.”

“Gus,”
I responded assertively. “I’m
good
.”

“We’ll have to pick up this Tiru guy for questioning. He should be with Harry, correct?”

“Should be. If not, Harry will know how to get ahold of him.”

He checked his watch. “Gonna be a late night. No hero shit while you’re still on the mend, right?”

“Got it. Besides, I’m only going back to the restaurant—I’m not off to North Korea for covert espionage. So how long before you stop treating me like an invalid?”

He grinned. “When you’re declared fit for booty.”

“Don’t you mean fit for duty? Oh, I get it.” Ignoring the rotting corpse lying at our feet, we kissed long and deep.

“When you have me twitching as if I had been Tasered.”

I gave him a bad-girl grin. “Smart money says I can do that right now.”

“I’m sure you can, love. I’m quite sure you can.”

“I don’t like this,” Tiru said over the phone.
“I don’t like hiding underground like a rat.”

“You have little choice,” Haruki explained. “They killed Maeda-san, and they would’ve killed you in your shop if you hadn’t been so alert. Somehow the Inagawa-kai have found out that I am here, and they’re killing everyone I come in contact with. I don’t have the resources to protect you.”

“Why would they do that? They have been coming to my shop for years. We have history.”

Haruki paused before answering, “It’s complicated. I have to go it alone from now on.”

“And me? There is a yakuza enforcer lying dead in my shop. I can never go back. What will I do?”

Harry had difficulty swallowing. “I understand and I’m terribly sorry, but . . . you’ll know when it’s safe to come out of hiding. That’s all I can say.”

“How?”

“Trust me, Tiru-san, you will know. I’m sure of it.”

“No,” Tiru said firmly. “I prefer to take charge of my own destiny. I prefer to—” He went silent.

“Tiru?” Haruki sensed that something was wrong. “Tiru?” he repeated. He listened intently, hoping to detect whether there was a problem with the cell phone reception, but there wasn’t. Instead of hearing the silence of a terminated connection, he heard something that charged his arteries with adrenaline. It was the sound of labored breathing on the other end of the line, just before it went dead.

I’d called Harry several times without getting an answer, which could’ve meant that he had fallen in harm’s way or that he had dumped the burner phone.
I hoped we weren’t racing toward a sewer drain or dumpster into which he had tossed the phone. “He knows something we don’t.”

“What makes you say that?” Gus asked.

“I can sense it. His whole attitude was different the last few times we talked. There’s something he doesn’t want to tell me—information he doesn’t want me to have.”

“You think he knows who killed his brother?”

“Possibly.”

“So why wouldn’t he want NYPD’s help in apprehending him?”

“Because, Gus, this isn’t about apprehending the guilty. This is about revenge. He’s out to kill his brother’s murderer, so for obvious reasons, he doesn’t want us around when he finds the guy he’s looking for. Like I said, he broke out in a cold sweat when I showed him the artist’s sketch. He tried to play it cool, but I could see that he was shaken. Whatever he was thinking, that sketch must’ve confirmed his suspicions as to who murdered Yana. I just hope he still has the phone with him.”

I was behind the wheel as we approached the source of the GPS signal, a tenement house in Washington Heights.

“You drive okay for a woman with a few loose screws,” Gus said. “I was a little nervous about letting you get behind the wheel, but you did okay.”

“Don’t be a dick. It’s not as if I just got my learner’s permit.”

“Just bustin’ your chops. It’s not as if you don’t have it coming.” He glanced at the tenement house. “Let’s hang back and surveil for a bit. We’re not exactly sure what we’re walking into.”

“Agreed.”

“So what’s with the Japanese mob?” he asked. “I’m not real comfortable with all the tattooed bodies piling up, and now that the sushi chef confirmed that our stiff is, in fact, Ryo Goda . . .”

“I’m not sure, but you know how all roads lead to Rome, right?”

“Meaning?”

“Everything brings me back to Harry. Someone who was probably a yakuza henchman whacked the chef Harry visited, and they sent an assassin to take out his buddy Tiru. I think it’s safe to say there’s a hefty bounty on Harry’s head. I think it’s time we had a talk with my ex-partner’s brother.”

“Shouldn’t be difficult,” Gus said, pointing through the windshield. “There he is now.”

Harry was hurrying down the block away from us, wearing a black hoodie and carrying the telltale backpack.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Gus asked.

“I’m not sure, but there’s a subway entrance a couple of blocks up, and if that’s where he’s headed . . . one of us needs to follow him on foot before he ducks into the subway and disappears.”

“Why don’t we just pick him up now?”

“Because he’ll just clam up like he did before, and then we’ll never know what’s going on.”

“So you want to tail him and see who he leads us to?”

“Yeah. Flip a coin—one of us walks and the other rides.”

“Not a chance, you slippery little stick of butter,” he said while unbuckling his seatbelt. “We do this together.”

Stunned by his unusual metaphor, I gave my head a brain-rattling shake and then got out of the car.

My hunch had been correct.
Harry boarded the A train at 168th Street and was headed uptown. Gus and I boarded train cars directly in front of and behind the one Harry had entered, an old surveillance ploy we’d been successful with before. He was seated and surrounded by passengers.