Death in North Beach (34 page)

That seemed to settle McFarland's threats. There was silence. Carly allowed it to go on for a while. People were no doubt evaluating their own personal situation and the risk involved. It was what Carly wanted, needed. She had no proof, only a series of suspicious behaviors and speculation.

‘No?' Carly finally asked the group. ‘Everyone want to stay on the list of murder suspects? OK, let's talk about the hotel business. Mr Chiu, in addition to your other investments – massage parlors, for example – you have a thriving real estate business. You own more of North Beach than you do of Chinatown and you own the land for the hotel that Mr McFarland pretends he doesn't want built here. Is that right?'

‘That's right,' Bart Brozynski said, his booming voice echoing in the room. ‘But that secret was already out of the bag. We did a story.'

‘But Whitney Warfield presented a problem. Not only did he not want the hotel to be built, he was prepared to make a big deal about the highly respected Mr Chiu's financial interest in sex trafficking, which would have presented one more nail in the hotel's coffin. Though scandal rarely keeps a politician from being re-elected in San Francisco, McFarland, already in trouble, didn't need the added baggage.

Brozynski laughed. ‘Breaking news. Damn, I wish we weren't a weekly.'

‘None of this is true,' McFarland said. Chiu remained quiet.

‘This is why Angel LeGard had to die. Because she could testify about Mr Chiu's involvement and his other businesses.'

‘I beg your pardon,' Ralph Chiu said, standing. ‘We all know that Miss LeGard was a reluctant false alibi for Mr Mickey Warfield for the night of his father's death, and that she was changing her mind. It had nothing to do with this so-called sex traffic. Isn't that true, Mr Lang?'

Carly moved forward to keep the focus. ‘We'll have more to say about that, Mr Chiu. Perhaps you know what's coming.'

She moved toward Lili D. Young.

‘You made no withdrawals,' Carly said. ‘Are you the only one left out of this cozy little group?'

The artist seemed to implode. She was silent, unreachable.

‘You did get a call from Mr Sumaoang, didn't you?'

She didn't answer.

‘We've got the records.'

‘Be quiet, Lili,' Sumaoang said. ‘Let's stop playing this game.'

‘He called. I told him there was no way I could lay my hands on that kind of money.'

‘Ten thousand dollars?'

‘Didn't matter, ten, five, one. I don't have it.'

‘Weren't you afraid that your secret would be made public?' Carly asked.

‘What could I do? Can't get blood out of a turnip.'

‘Richard,' Carly said in not quite a shout. ‘The money. We've got you on the money trail.' Carly turned to Marlene Berensen. ‘Ms Berensen, you got a call too.'

‘I talked with Richard about Mickey needing some money. That's all. Richard was trying to help him and I agreed to chip in. It was a loan. Richard was being kind.'

‘I think it may be too late to paint Richard as a saint,' Carly said. ‘Blood out of a turnip and all that.'

Carly walked by Elena and Marshall Hawkes to get to Bart Brozynski.

‘You paid?' she said, surprise in her voice.

Brozynski shrugged.

‘I thought you said you didn't have any secrets,' Carly asked. ‘What would you want to hide? You revel in being controversial.'

Brozynski smiled. He was smart enough to know he wasn't required to answer.

‘Corruption of a newspaper devoted to exposing corruption?' Carly continued.

‘No. I have reasons. That's all I'll say.'

McFarland stood up. ‘If we all just get up and leave, all at once, all of us, what could they do?'

‘This isn't going away,' Gratelli said. ‘We're just trying to sort out the thieves from the murderers.'

The room went so silent, you could hear the soft music and low grumbling playing out in the bar area.

‘I have a feeling there will be a fire sale on the truth very soon,' Thanh said.

Serving drinks was now a distraction. Thanh, with nothing to do, watched in awe as Carly conducted a mass interrogation.

‘She's good,' Thanh said to Lang.

‘She is.'

Lang had to give her immense credit. Carly Paladino may not have had much experience with the nitty-gritty of the streets, but she knew how to run a meeting. It wasn't all improvisation either. She had already separated the murderers from the thieves, but she knew she couldn't prove it. She needed witnesses and while they were all in this room, could she get enough of them to incriminate each other? It was pretty amazing. This wasn't a couple of cops interrogating a suspect in a small room with a one-way mirror. This was a group interrogation by one person designed to get a few of them to turn on the others.

‘Murderer or thief, which are you?' Carly said, looking around the room.

‘This is ridiculous,' McFarland said. ‘Even if you had something here, none of this would hold up in court.'

‘Wanna go to court?' Carly asked the room, then targeted her gaze. ‘Marlene, you want to go to court? Agnes?'

Agnes DeWitt laughed. ‘Perhaps they can put me away for life.'

‘I thought you told me you wished you had something to hide?' Lang asked.

‘Oh, it wasn't about me,' she said. ‘It was about the whole idea of that nasty book. It not only focused on perhaps brief lapses of judgment in an otherwise creative career of many of these fine folks, but he seemed to want to destroy this wonderful place called North Beach and its rich, culture-changing history. I don't know why Whitney had to do that. It was as if he was destroying himself. He was going to die and he was going to take all the memories and dreams with him.'

‘You read the manuscript?' Carly asked.

‘No, we talked though. He would come by and we would talk. He said I was too timid.' She laughed. ‘Ten thousand to me is a significant amount of money, but it's quite unlikely I'll outlive my modest resources.'

The room seemed to grow calm. A strange perspective had been given, Lang thought. Is it possible to buy off ugliness?

‘Ms DeWitt,' Carly said, ‘by stealing the manuscript and all its copies, you are only delaying things. The only way to make sure it never sees the light is to destroy its creator as well. Did you see the inevitability?'

‘I would if the embattled Mr Warfield was twenty-five. He was not. It took him years to write this. He hadn't time left. He had been given his death sentence.'

‘How is that?' Carly asked.

‘Cancer, young lady. In the blood, in the brain. He told me so. Even if he had lived many months more, he would not have had the strength, or the clarity probably, to recreate it. His impending death was noted in the book.'

Quiet again.

Carly continued. ‘But he didn't die as nature chose. He died because someone else decided that. And the killer has, in fact, confessed.' She waited. She looked around the room, milking it a bit. ‘Mr Malone, when you told me you killed a man, you led me to believe that it was someone deep in your past. It wasn't. It was Whitney Warfield. You told him you were going to kill him. That's why he ran. That's why he was stabbed in the back of the neck. He was trying to get away.'

‘Go on, Ms Paladino,' Malone said, sipping his Scotch. ‘This is quite amusing. I have to hear it.'

‘Mr Sumaoang called you from the bar, saying that Warfield was leaving, going home, and that his son, Mickey, needed more time to make sure he got everything. You knew or Sumaoang knew Whitney's routine – and I'll repeat what I said earlier – you arrived and waited for him in Washington Square Park, where he would cut across on his way to his home up Russian Hill. The idea was that you'd engage him in discussion and slow him down until Mickey could complete his task.'

‘I was home asleep. I'm not up late. My wife will attest to that.'

‘Your wife, Mr Malone, is an alcoholic. She would have been passed out, not at all likely to awaken when you slipped out of the house. You did intercept Whitney. It wasn't difficult to engage him in conversation. He had already been arguing. He was drunk and the two of you were more rivals than friends.'

‘We were probably neither,' Malone said.

‘Oh, you were. You spent hours telling me how the two of you tried to out-macho each other. And that was it, wasn't it? He somehow impugned your manliness and your ability as a writer to write about the real world. It was Whitney who had killed someone and he lorded it over you as a very special experience yielding a very special understanding. And, quite symbolically, you killed him with his own pen. Very poetic. Much like your work.'

‘Very fanciful, Ms Paladino. I like it. It's almost believable.' Malone smiled. ‘And how might I have killed Mr Wiley, the Chinese girl and the private eye? I went on a spree, is that it? After all these years I went on a psychotic spree.' He laughed.

There was a low-level twittering of laughter in the room.

Thirty-Five

‘You ask the right question at the right time,' Carly said. ‘You, Mr Malone, killed Whitney Warfield and no one else. You didn't need to kill anyone else. It was only Whitney who threatened you and no one else's death benefited you in any way. You and Whitney were rivals and you won.'

‘Why on earth would I tell you I killed someone?' Malone asked.

‘You had to tell somebody. What good is having achieved something so important and no one in the world would know it? So, you and Richard Sumaoang conspired to kill Whitney Warfield.'

‘I had nothing to do with Whitney's death,' Sumaoang said, standing. ‘I just wanted them to talk to give Mickey time to collect the manuscript and any notes. It wasn't even a crime. Whitney was stealing from us. Our lives. Our private moments. We were merely taking back what was rightfully ours.'

‘Thank you,' Carly said. ‘You can discuss that with the police.'

‘You idiot,' Malone said to Sumaoang.

Carly turned to Lang. ‘You want to talk about who killed Ms LeGard, Mr Lang?'

‘I can,' Lang said, with a mix of surprise and fear. This hadn't been part of the plan. But he did know this part best. And it did involve him . . . deeply.

‘Because Mickey's whereabouts were questionable the night his father was killed, he knew he was in trouble. One, he would be a serious suspect because they didn't get along. Two, he had a specific motive because he wasn't in his father's will. Three, and the biggest problem of all, he had no alibi on the night his father was killed. The reason he had no alibi is that he was busy committing his own crime, stealing his father's book. Mickey's girlfriend, Angel LeGard, initially agreed to lie for him, to say that he was with her the entire evening.'

Lang looked around the room. He let his gaze stop at Ralph Chiu who was dutifully fulfilling the stereotype as inscrutable.

‘Angel worked for you, didn't she, Mr Chiu.'

‘No, I don't believe so. I have so many enterprises that it might be possible, I suppose, but . . .'

‘You knew her, didn't you?' Lang asked.

‘I have made her acquaintance.'

‘For some reason – and I know this because she told me – she changed her mind about testifying for Mickey should he be arrested.'

‘So Mickey killed her?' Mr Chiu said. He shrugged.

‘Well, I thought so. But she also told me that she was tired of keeping secrets, that she had something more important to tell me.'

‘And she told you what?' Mr Chiu asked.

‘She died between the knowing and the telling,' Lang said.

‘How unfortunate.'

‘The point is, what did she know and how did she know it?' Lang asked.

Chiu looked at Lang, but gave no clue about what he was thinking.

‘She knew what she knew because of what Mickey told her during the many intimate moments they had together. About your business. Where and how you get your girls and how you keep them.'

‘What is it that you have then besides conjecture? Have you told us who killed the lovely Ms LeGard?'

‘In a way, it doesn't matter. If it was Mickey, he's dead. If it was Markham, he's dead. I doubt if it was Mr Malone. But he's going down for Warfield's death. Of course, it could be you, couldn't it? If that were the case you would have had it done. We'll just have to wait and see.'

The truth was, Carly wasn't hired in the first place to find out who killed Angel or Mickey – or Markham for that matter.

Mr Chiu shut his eyes slowly and opened them just as slowly. He looked away.

The businessman's arrogance got to Lang.

‘A down-and-out private investigator named Scotty Markham came to you after Mickey went missing,' Lang said.

‘That's what you say,' Mr Chiu said.

‘I have a witness,' Lang said. ‘He stormed out of your office. I thought it was Mickey who hired Scotty Markham to run me off. But Scotty was working for you, wasn't he? I don't know if even the police know that Markham was a great deal more deadly than anyone who knew him casually might imagine. He was a Navy Seal, trained in the art of . . .'

‘This is all a mishmash,' McFarland said. ‘You're throwing crap against the wall just to see what sticks.'

‘What sticks is that Angel LeGard, who may have been on your unofficial payroll, Mr Chiu, was killed expertly and coldly. A hand over the mouth and an ice pick directly into a vital organ. After LeGard's death, which you all hoped could be pinned on me, there was a problem with Mickey. He had a naturally loose mouth and it probably really pissed him off that you had his girl killed. Mickey was found with his neck broken in an abandoned building in Dog Patch. Not many people know how to break another man's neck. It would have to be a pro.'