Riding the Snake (1998) (11 page)

"No progress is possible without stability and unity," the President said to him, implying that the current political systems of China and Hong Kong must remain unchanged.

"The Yellow River flows for thousands of miles, but eventually it reaches the sea," Willy said, his voice lost in the vastness of the moment. The Yellow River had always been the symbol of a powerful China.

The politician nodded his agreement. "But remember," he said, "a river that is too clear will never grow fish."

This was the very sentiment that had always defined Willy. Corruption was the soil of his garden.

The President of China extended his hand to Wo Lap Ling, then took one step backward, indicating that the meeting was complete.

Willy Wo Lap Ling had been born in the stinking ghetto of Kowloon. Now he turned and walked off an island that had once been the home of an Emperor. He and Chen Boda stood for a moment on the other side of the bridge. Willy did not want the moment to end. He had new ambitions, new goals. Chen Boda finally took his elbow and walked Wo Lap Ling out of the magnificent garden.

It took until evening to hammer out the terms of their agreement. Chinese New Year had just started as Willy boarded his private jet to head back to Hong Kong. He had altered his goal but not his quest. . . . Power, as the politician had implied, was the earth's fertilizer. Power made things grow.

There were no weeds left in Willy's garden. His river would grow many fish.

Chapter
9.

Aftermath

Asian Crimes was a hung-over division the day after Chinese New Year. The detectives moved at their same pace for the benefit of their Occidental Captain, but the din of conversation was several decibels lower than usual. Tanisha had gone to the Homicide Board to make sure that the Wong murder was still up in her column. Ray Fong could have swiped the case if he got the Lieutenant to okay it. She'd been right about it hitting the news. There was a story on the Metro page of the Times and all the local TV newscasts had led with it this morning.

As she stood in front of the case chalkboard, she noticed a homeowner shooting that had taken place last night in Bel Air--a botched residential burglary where three Chinese John Does got killed. Ray Fong had rolled after the responding patrol unit called. It was the practice in ACTF to assign cases to detectives of the same ethnic origin, if possible. It facilitated the investigation, especially if the detective was fluent in that dialect. Tanisha went back to her desk and fished in her purse for the spiral notepad with Wheeler Cassidy's address on it. 1243 Belaggio Road, P-3. Penthouse? Probably a condo, she thought. Then she turned on the computer that she shared with four other desks and entered the triple case number. The computer told her the shooting had taken place on Canon Drive, not Belaggio. She was about to shut it off when she saw that the name of the owner of the residence was Prescott Cassidy.

"What the fuck?" she said to herself softly. That was the dead lawyer's house. Then she pulled up the full case report, and her amazement grew. The computer screen gave her Ray Fong's detailed and colorless account of the shooting. She was dumbfounded when she got to the name of the shooter. It was her smug, vomit
-
speckled asshole, Wheeler Cassidy.

"What's going on here?" she said to herself softly. She instructed the computer to hard-copy the case to her printer, then shut off the console. She sat in her chair, looking at the blank screen, trying to piece it together. She ran the beats, chronologically.

Prescott Cassidy had had a heart attack. Maybe. She made a note on her pad to get a look at Prescott's autopsy report. After Prescott Cassidy died, Chinese bodies started dropping like bunny shit. First Angie Wong gets a Death Doll from a Tong street gang, then she gets a punishment kill, complete with a rat gnawing her insides. A young Chinese man's picture is left on the body. Identity still unknown. No prints or trace evidence at the scene, so the perps had been thoroughly schooled in periand post-mortem crime scene behavior. She had asked patrol to interview the neighbors to see if anybody had seen anything unusual, a car, people who didn't belong. Nobody had. So far, the Wong killing was a complete "Who done it?" The Wong house appeared to have been thoroughly searched. Then, three Chinese gangsters were caught apparently burglarizing Prescott Cassidy's home. Wheeler, who is bringing his sister-in-law home from the airport, walks in on it. He gets his brother's target pistols out of the pool house. Next comes the O
. K
. Corral. Wheeler acquits himself surprisingly well and puts two of the three gangsters in the county freezer. The patrol unit skags the third one as he's running off the property. According to
Ray Fong's detailed report, Wheeler took one in the leg and spent the night at Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills.

Way too much activity in one place.

Something much bigger was going on. She looked over at Ray Fong, who was leaning back at his desk, his feet up, reading a Chinese paper. She wondered how this would go down. Only one way to find out. She got up and walked over to his desk.

"You have a good New Year last night?" she asked conversationally, playing dumb and smiling at the Chinese detective.

"I caught a squeal right after I left here. Triple kill in Bel Air. Brother of the homeowner dropped two. The responding unit got the other. I was up all night with it," he complained. "My D
. B. S
had no I
. D
. Prints can't pull up anything. They're probably illegal immigrants. Maybe Tong members. So it's gonna be a stonewall out there."

"How do you know they were Tong?' she asked.

"They had more drawings on 'em than a South Central overpass. From the tattoos, I'd say they're Bamboo Dragons."

"I think those three shootings may be connected to the Wong hit."

"Yeah?" he said, putting the paper down. "How come?"

"The guy who found Angela Wong's body is Wheeler Cassidy, the brother of the guy whose house was being burgled. The same guy who lit up two of your Bamboo Dragons."

Ray sat up and took his feet off the desk. "Nobody told me Wheeler found Angie Wong's body. He didn't say anything last night. 'Course he was going into shock."

"And it wasn't in the computer," she said, stating the obvious.

"All the more reason you've gotta give me the Wong case," he said.

"Look, Ray, I don't want to fight with you over this. Department guidelines say that everything that stems from one killing is under the direct control of the primary on the lead case. That's me."

Ray stood up to look Tanisha directly in the eyes. "That's what it says, but if they are connected, we got two burglaries, three shootings, and a punishment kill in less than twenty-four hours. You1 re not gonna get anywhere on this because nobody is going to talk to you. I tried to tell you that last night, and you laid all that discrimination shit on me. You don't belong in this unit. You and I both know why they put you here. It wasn't my fault. But if you learned anything from all that Asian culture you read, you should know by now how things work."

"I'm sorry about last night, Ray. That rat thing spooked me. I know I need help, but you've gotta let me at least run with you. These two deals are connected. You can't freeze me out." She knew if the three dead Chinese in Prescott's house were Snake Riders and Bamboo Dragons, then information was going to get scarce. She'd need somebody like Ray, who was fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, maybe Fukienese and Chin Chow, or any of the other dozen Chinese dialects. She could see he was teetering on the brink of saying yes, so she decided to give him something to help push him over. "I dropped the rat off at my neighborhood pet store. Don, who runs the place, is good with rare species. He told me it was a naked mole rat. Originally native to Ethiopia and Somalia." She looked at her notepad. 'Tts scientific name is Heterocephalus glaber."

"Sounds like a venereal disease," he said.

"It sure was for Angie Wong. They mostly come to the U
. S
. from Hong Kong . . . illegal exports to the pet store market here. In the wild, they live mostly underground in narrow tunnels and can survive for a long time with almost no air, making them ideal for that kind of torture."

Ray started to write this down on a pad.

"The thing about putting it up the vagina . . . last night, I looked it up and read about it," she continued. "It's an old Chinese torture developed by the ancients. It all but died out, but recently it was reintroduced. The Royal Hong Kong Police saw it a few times in the old Walled City of Kowloon, the last few years before Hong Kong got handed back. Apparently there was no governing body that controlled the Walled City while the British ruled there. Some pretty weird shit happened."

He looked up at her but didn't say anything. He had developed the Chinese poker face used by inveterate Chinese gamblers. His flat features showed overpowering boredom, his eyes registered disinterest.

She went on, "Obviously the Cassidy house wasn't being robbed, it was being tossed, just like the Wong house. These guys were looking for something. It's too much of a coincidence to be just a straight burg."

"Okay, Tisha, we'll work this together. But right now, for the purpose of noninterference, let's keep the two cases technically separate. Once the Lieutenant finds out they're linked, he'll have to notify Major Crimes and we're gonna have a platoon of Parker Center cowboys in here, scooping everything up. We'll both be standing out in the rain."

"Fair enough," she said, and then, unexpectedly, he put out his hand, and without hesitation she shook it.

And that was how Tanisha Williams and Ray Fong both turned up in Wheeler Cassidy's hospital room at ten A
. M
. that morning and caught him arguing with his mother.

His leg was bandaged and hanging in a pulley hoist. She was in her mid-sixties and incredibly beautiful, wearing a Givenchy cocktail dress with a single strand of pearls. The woman had just taken a silver flask from Wheeler and was holding it, accusingly, as Ray and Tanisha entered.

"This is a private room. Unless you're doctors, we were having a personal discussion," the older woman said.

"Detective Fong and Detective Williams. We have some follow-up questions about last night," Ray said, pulling his badge case and showing his shield and plastic-covered I
. D
. to her.

"When will it end?" the woman sighed in disgust and set down the flask on the bedside table as she moved to the window and looked out. Tanisha could tell from her body language that she was under a great deal of strain. From the resemblance to Wheeler, Tanisha also assumed she was his mother.

Then Wheeler flashed a glassy smile and confirmed it. "May I present my mother, Katherine Cassidy," he said with alcoholic largesse.

"My God, Wheeler, your brother is gone, his secretary has been murdered. You have shot two men dead. How can you be drunk? I just can't . . ." She didn't finish, nor did she turn away from the window to look at them.

"Maybe I'm drunk because of all that, Mother, not despite it," he said, slurring a few words.

She turned and fixed an angry look on him but said nothing.

"You had a very busy day yesterday," Tanisha said to him, trying to change the energy in the room.

"Yep," Wheeler grinned, looking through her. There was a desperate gleam in his eyes when you looked close. She'd seen it the night before when he'd mocked himself, only now it was more pronounced.

"That was quite a shootout," she said.

"I got real lucky, you want my opinion," he said. "Damn fool bullshit thing ta do. . . . 'Scuse the language, Mother."

"Mr. Cassidy," Ray said, "we think the people you shot were illegal aliens, mainland Chinese who are in a local Bamboo street gang. The fact that they were searching your brother's house and had also, most likely, searched Angelica Wong's house and murdered her is more than slightly significant. All of this happened shortly after your brother died. Do you have any idea what they might have been looking for?"

"No," he said.

"It could have to do with your brother's business," Ray added.

"What on earth are you trying to say?" Katherine blurted. "Are you trying to say that Pres was involved in something illegal?"

"We don't know anything yet, Mrs. Cassidy," Ray said. "The timing of his secretary's murder right after his death and the fact that both houses were searched indicates--"

"You can't possibly be serious," she interrupted. "Do you have any idea the clients he had, the political contacts? He was a central part of the Clinton re-election campaign. Bill and Hillary Clinton had him to the White House twice. He was on the Presidential Commission on International Trade Alliances."

"That's very commendable," Ray said, wilting badly.

"Mrs. Cassidy, I'd like the name of the doctor who's doing the autopsy on Prescott," Tanisha said, deciding to break in and give Ray a rest.

"There is no autopsy," Katherine said. "It was judged a heart attack by the attending physician at the hospital that received the body. It was confirmed by Pres's own doctor. He had high blood pressure and was being treated for it. We didn't see why there was any reason to mutilate his body before the funeral, so we got the autopsy waived."