Riding the Snake (1998) (6 page)

Like he'd said, his thoughts about Pres were complicated.

The office was a madhouse. Phones were ringing; there was an air of funereal reverence amidst confused, frenzied activity.

"Angie didn't come in this morning," the pretty redhead said, looking at Wheeler, trying not to flirt. She correctly reasoned this would be a bad morning for it, even though she found Wheeler terribly attractive. "We met last time you were here. I'm Georgette, I was in Legal Research then," she said. "I'm so sorry. We're all . . . we're so ... I just don't know how to say it. Prescott was a wonderful . . . just a wonderful person."

"Yeah, he was," Wheeler said softly and looked around at the chorus of faces watching him, all of them wondering how he would surf the crest of this wave. He showed nothing.

"It's been crazy," she said. "Clients have been calling. I'
m j
ust temping up here, but somebody apparently broke into your brother's house last night and set off the alarm. And now Angie didn't come to work and she's the only one who knows where everything in his office is. . . ."

"Somebody broke into Pres's house?" Wheeler said, concerned. He knew that Pres's wife, Liz, and his son, Hollis, were in Connecticut at Liz's parents' house for Hollis's winter vacation. Pres had been planning to go there on Tuesday. Now they were flying back, or at least that was what Jimmy had said as Wheeler left for Century City.

"The police called. We gave them a key. They shut the alarm off. I tried to find Angie. She's got her machine on and she's not picking up."

Wheeler remembered the last time he had seen his brother's secretary. Angie Wong had breezed by him on her way out of the country club a week before.

"Is his Rolodex in the office?" Wheeler asked. His mind was still whirling and skipping beats, nibbling at stray thoughts but locking on nothing. She shrugged, then nodded, and he moved into his brother's huge corner suite filled with certificated Chippendale furniture.

Chip and Dale--aren't they cartoon mice?

Wheeler started to look through the Rolodex for the number of the alarm company so he could contact them to see if a window or door had been broken. It was then that he noticed the first strange thing ... all of the little cards were out of order, as if somebody had removed them and stuck them back in without looking. None were under their correct alphabetical listing. Pres would never do that. Pres was over-organized; even his closets were color-keyed.

"These are out of order," he said, looking at the hundreds of cards, thinking it would take forever to find the alarm company in this jumbled mess.

"Well . . . uh, he . . . that's strange." She couldn't explain it, but theny she was just a temp, transferred up from--what was it?--

Legal Research. He sat down and went through the cards, finally finding the alarm company in with the Q's, where there was almost everything but a name starting with Q.

He handed it to Georgette and asked her to call the company and make sure the house was secure. While she went out to call, Wheeler sat in his brother's high-back swivel chair and looked out the window toward the ocean.

The offices were on the twenty-fifth and -sixth floors and the view was spectacular. This particular L
. A
. afternoon was better than most. A light Santa Ana wind had cleared the basin of smog, blowing it out to sea, giving Catalina Island a good dose of twentieth-century reality. He felt strange sitting in his brother's chair, where Pres had died. He'd never sat there before. He didn't belong in this chair ... or did he?

The next thing that happened was downright spooky. Pres had died at his desk, working late . . . and his car was still in the garage. It had been, for some reason, parked across two spaces. Orderly, compulsive Prescott would never do that.

Who's pulling this shit?

The building's parking garage had been asking that it be moved. Nobody had the key. Georgette came back in and told him that the police had not reset the alarm, but the house was secure. He nodded and went down to move Pres's car.

It took no time for Wheeler to get Pres's classic brown Mercedes sedan open. He popped the chrome strip off the door with his penknife, reached in through the hole under the strip, and pushed the lock up. He hot-wired the car by reaching under the dash, disconnecting, then touching the ignition wires together. The engine coughed and purred to life. Prank car theft was another of Wheeler's deft social accomplishments.

"Stop," Prescott said, his voice clear and commanding in the car interior. Wheeler's heart jumped up into his throat. He spun around, looked in the back seat . . . empty! What the fuck?

"New paragraph, Angie," his brother's voice continued. It was coming from the speaker system. The radio in the dash had
a d
igital readout on the LED screen that now said "Tape." Wheeler's heart slowed. It was just a dictation recording:

"All our contacts at I
. N. S
. will remain intact, and John will continue to process the account on your end. However, I must caution our friend in Hong Kong against continuing to increase the flow in all three divisions. At this level of activity, he will surely have political trouble at the highest level of the U
. S
. government. Stop. New paragraph, Angie. Lastly, I regret to inform you that, as of this date, I will no longer be able to continue to participate. Stop. I have been making all of the above arguments to the White Fan here, but have basically been ignored. I have no other choice but to withdraw from the equation. New paragraph, Angie. I wish you well and hope all is successful, and that everything we worked for will eventually happen in mid-V8. Please make no further contact as my decision is final. Sign that with the usual closing, Angie, and get it off immediately. Then erase this tape and shred the file."

The tape was over.

Silence.

His brother's voice had shaken him deeply. He wanted to get the fuck out of there.

He reparked the car between the lines, replaced the chrome strip on the door, then left the tape in the tape deck, locked safely inside the newly orphaned Mercedes.

When he went back up to the office, he was approached by the office manager, a narrow, hawk-faced man with a perennial scowl. "It would really help us if you could find out what happened to your brother's secretary. Pres confided only in her, and frankly, she's got to get in here and untangle some of this mess. There are arrangements, details only Angie knows about. Pay-out schedules, court calendar dates ... I know it's a horrible time, but some of these situations won't wait."

"I'm ... I don't really know how I can help," Wheeler said, wanting to get the hell away. Being in this place where his brother had mounted his successful rise to power on the very day of his death was unsettling. It was as if Pres's spirit hadn't quite left yet.

Hearing Pres's voice on the tape had only made this feeling worse.

"If you could just go out there, we'd really appreciate it," the office manager pressed. "I'd go myself, but I'm trying to deal with half-a-dozen things right now. This has really knocked us sideways."

Wheeler wanted to get out of the office and still be able to tell his mother he had helped out, so he reluctantly accepted the assignment. Angie Wong's address was in Torrance, California.

Where the fuck is Torrance, anyway?

It was off the 110, south of the airport. The houses were small, wood-frame jobs, most with neatly trimmed gardens. Angie Wong lived at 2467 Clarkson Street.

When he pulled up, he could see a red Toyota in the driveway. He got out, walked across the neatly trimmed grass, then rang the front-door chimes. They were just like the ones at his grandmother's house in Baldwin Park. He vaguely remembered standing on his grandparents' porch as a child, maybe only three years old, ringing the doorbell of their huge old white Spanish mansion, then running to hide every time they came to answer, until his grandparents finally stood on the porch and begged him to stop. What a jokester. Wheeler was driving his family nuts even before he could shit sitting down.

Nobody opened Angie's front door, so he walked around to the back. There he found another strange thing. The back door had been jimmied. The wood door had been pried, leaving a deep hash mark by the lock. The door was ajar.

Wheeler pushed it open with the flat of his hand and walked into a very small kitchen. He could tell the place had been searched, even before he got all the way inside. He moved slowly through the disheveled house and found that, from one room to the next, things had been strewn everywhere. He called out for Angie, but there was no answer. The last door he saw led to th
e b
asement. He turned on the light and moved cautiously down the wooden stairs.

The basement room was a small gym with mirrors on the walls.

Angie Wong was reflected in most of them.

Her dead body was tied down on the workout bench. It was naked and bleeding. The corpse was covered with cuts. With hundreds and hundreds of incisions, the dead woman had been mutilated and bloodily desecrated. Her flesh was riddled and had retracted. The cuts had puckered and now oozed. Angie glistened red. Her eyes were open, her cut-up mouth fixed in a silent scream. It didn't look like her tongue was still in there. On her stomach was placed a framed picture of a young Chinese man, maybe about thirty years old.

Vat 69 was a damn good Scotch, but it was a lot smoother going down than coming up. It spewed on the carpet and all over his Spanish shoes. It stained his shirt and floppy linen trousers.

Rimshot. Another Wheeler Cassidy masterpiece.

Chapter
5.

Tanisha and Kenetta

It was the second new moon after the winter solstice, which was February 9--Chinese New Year.

Ray Fong and A1 Katsukura didn't want to drive all the way out to fucking Torrance, because they had plans to celebrate. Al, of course, was Japanese, but never passed on any drinking holiday, regardless of its ethnic origin, so they reluctantly gave the squeal to Tanisha Williams.

The homicide dick at the scene thought the killing looked ritual and wanted somebody in LAPD Asian Crimes to take a look. The vie was Chinese, or so they thought. She was so cut up it was hard to tell.

Ray moved across the linoleum floor in the run-down fifth
-
floor rented office that housed Asian Crimes and dropped the green slip on Tanisha's desk. She was on the phone, trying to talk Mandarin Chinese to someone. It was pathetic, but at least she was making the effort. Ray Fong was good in that dialect, almost fluent, but he didn't help her because he'd been told by Internal Affairs to leave her alone. Everyone had.

Tanisha Williams, known to her friends as Tisha, was departmental poison. She had been parked up here by I
. A. D
., and everybody knew a Black female had no chance of conducting a successful "field shake" on an Asian male. Asians didn't trust other racial groups, especially Blacks. Being female just made it worse, no matter how trim her body or how beautiful and smooth her coffee-colored complexion. Nonetheless, Ray had to respect her, because as soon as she had been assigned there, she immediately went to work to learn the terrain. The first day she had checked out an armload of library books on the many Asian cultures, and she had been reading constantly, even during lunch. It was almost as if she didn't know she was supposed to be up on blocks while the I
. A
. Shooflies crawled around under her career, looking for wet spots. I
. A
. had taken her off the LAPD Crash Unit because, as a teenager, before joining the Department, she had been associating with Crip gang members in the neighborhood. They now suspected she was giving up her investigations to old gang-banger boyfriends. The Crash Unit worked the Black gangs in South Central and Tanisha had grown up in that hood. Her grandmother, niece, and nephew still lived there, south of Manchester, and she visited them on her old turf during her days off.

Tanisha hung up the phone and cocked her eyebrow as she picked up the greenie.

"One eighty-seven in Torrance, Asian woman hit the slab. The lab techs are already rolling. It's all yours," Ray said and moved back to his desk. The address was 2467 Clarkson Street.

She grabbed her sweater and her purse and left before they changed their minds.

Tanisha got in her Department-authorized P
. O. V
. (Personally Owned Vehicle), which was parked across the street from the rented fifties building on Hill Street in downtown L
. A
. where the Asian Crimes Task Force was officed. ACTF was located miles from the steel-and-glass efficiency of Parker Center. The unit had been an orphan division from inception. It had been formed by Chief Redden in the mid-sixties as a political unit to deal with the problem of rising Asian crime in Los Angeles. Back then, the actual criminal investigations had been done by regular detectives out of Parker Center, the Asian detectives on ACTF spent most of their time explaining American police tactics to wary Asian groups at specially arranged Department lunches. Gradually, with the rising tide of politically correct thinking, their charter was expanded and now they handled all Asian CAPs--Crimes Against People, which included the whole gory smorgasbord of human atrocities: rape, theft, assault, child abuse, and murder.