“Who is this Gabe Holerstone?” Jess asked.
“He’s one of my clients. And he’s from LA,” said Calvino.
“He was my boss at Sisuda. A club on Vine Street in Hollywood,” said Noi. “I worked there as a singer.”
Sure you did, sweetheart, Calvino was thinking to himself.
“I know the place,” said Jess. “Your brother worked there?”
Jess had driven past the bar—he never thought of it as a “club”—hundreds of times; he knew the bar mostly from the outside. Maybe a year, two years ago, he had gone inside for a look around. Unimpressed, he never went back. It was one of those farang places. The bar was next door to a liquor store and sometimes there would be gang members hanging around by the liquor store, smoking, drinking, indulging in low-level intimidation of customers, and sometimes a fight would break out on the street. But Jess had never any personal or professional reason to enter Sisuda’s karaoke bar other than that one time. He remembered that the bar had a dozen or so yings working, dork tong—gold flowers—planted inside, getting customers to water them and talk to them for fifty bucks an hour. Lots of Korean and Japanese customers would go into private rooms and sing along with the yings. She called herself a singer, Jess thought. He looked at Noi in her nun’s habit, trying to imagine her as just another one of the gold flowers.
“I thought Gabe promised you a singing career in LA,” said Calvino.
“He lied to me. He lied to my brother. I hate him,” she said.
“This is the first time a nun has openly professed hatred for a fellow human being,” said Father Andrew. Calvino brought over the bottle, waited until Father Andrew finished his wine and then refilled his glass. It had been a long day for the slum priest. The AIDS patient who didn’t die. A Thai ex-bar singer dressed as a nun sitting in his house, her eyes filled with hate.
In Father Andrew’s sitting room, Calvino and Jess discovered an axis of interest, of interlocking friendship and of sleazy LA business deals. What was coming into sharp focus was the identity of the bomber’s target. If Calvino were a betting man, he thought that with some serious digging—and Pratt would know where to start—they would probably find a connection between the disappearing heroin and Gabe Holerstone, a wise guy running a near-beer karaoke bar called Sisuda on Vine Street in Hollywood. Whoever the serial killer was, one thing was for certain in Calvino’s mind: the murderer would not be using Gabe and Noi to draw him into the Emporium for a hit. All they had to do was walk into his apartment and shoot him. He was no more important, in the scheme of things, than Naylor. Unless, of course, there was some bad blood between LA bar owner and LA lawyer. In which case, Naylor was the target.
“Did you know Wes Naylor in LA?” Jess asked her.
A Thai woman wandered into the room and whispered in Father Andrew’s ear about how the dying man was doing with his dying. He was doing well, but was still holding on to the edge of life.
“It was Kowit’s idea to get Wes involved,” said Noi. Bring the slightly overweight yingzine—the Cause-members’ online magazine of beautiful women—lawyer into the mix. Why not lay off some of the risk on the farang? Calvino thought. If anyone was cruising for a major league setup it was Wes Naylor and his Cause-member boys.
Jess leaned over, his hand cupped, and softly said to Calvino, “Pratt showed me a list of big-time distributors and their associates. This guy Kowit made the list as an associate.”
Whatever the fuck that means, thought Calvino.
“You think your brother got the heroin from Kowit?” asked Calvino.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t tell me. I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know.”
“We could get him an immunity deal,” said Jess. “But he has to co-operate. Do you understand what I am saying? Not just say he will help. He has to get into a witness box and point the finger at the man.”
“He’s fucking scared.” She looked over at the priest, “Sorry, Father.”
“Just keep talking. Language isn’t the issue. Staying alive is,” said Father Andrew.
Noi nodded, looked back at Jess. “I am scared. What they tried to do to you makes me afraid. And you’re a cop. And they can do this to you. You have no protection.”
When someone like Noi spoke straight about the reality of the situation it sounded different than when they talked their way around the tight intellectual and emotional corners of their life. A lot of what Noi had been saying, to Calvino’s ear, had the sound of skid marks of a life in a near collision with the wall of reality. She hadn’t given some bullshit assessment. Noi knew the score. It was all summed up in four words: You have no protection. And she was right, and he knew why she did what they asked her to do. What real choice did she have?
One of the nuns who had been at the shop suddenly appeared in the room. Her presence stopped the conversation cold as she went over to Noi and handed her a glass of water. “Would you like to rest? We have finished preparing your room.”
Noi looked up at Jess, drank from the glass of water and put it down on the table. “I can rest later,” she said.
“Sister, if you could come back a little later, then I am certain Sister Teresa will be ready for a rest,” said Father Andrew. “Right now we are deep in the discussion of a theological crisis.”
After the sister left, Noi loosened up more. “We should hear the rest of it, Noi. There’s no point keeping any secrets,” said Calvino.
“Vincent is right,” said Jess. “If we know who is behind what happened at the Emporium it can only help you and your brother. You’ve got nothing to lose.”
It turned out that ever since Noi’s brother, Charn, had been in jail waiting for his trial date, Kowit had steadily become more nervous. He was afraid that the kid would make a deal; he wasn’t doing all that well in jail and the way things worked in America, Charn might lose his courage, turn state’s evidence. That would be his best move. He had less to fear in California and that made Kowit uneasy. Without the ability to instill raw fear, he lost his home-court advantage. But if Charn’s case never went to trial, then the police would have to release him. Kowit let Noi understand that she had a role to play to keep her brother healthy and happy and breathing; she had to help out. She got the idea fast that, unless she helped Kowit, her brother could have a pretty hard time in prison. In fact he might never get out of prison. She believed Kowit had that power.
“No one was to get hurt, they promised me,” said Noi. “They said they wanted to scare you. Then the case would be dropped against my brother.”
“You saw the car, Noi. These people weren’t trying to scare someone. Why did you get involved in this?” asked Jess.
Tears welled in her eyes. “They lied to me. I am so sorry.”
She was a narrative creature totally devoid of any power of analysis to allow her to know what her story meant. That was the reason she always started to repeat her story whenever Jess asked her a “why” question. She couldn’t answer such a question. She could only narrate and hope the story would wear down the resistance of the why question-askers. “Kowit talked to me about my brother. I had no choice if I wanted to help my brother.”
Jess shook his head and she stopped the narration.
Whether this was a good ying pitch or the truth or something in between a pitch and the truth was difficult to say; the nun’s habit gave her an edge of credibility that a cocktail dress lacked. She had knowingly agreed to set up the trial cop in her brother’s narcotics case. Without Jess, the State’s case against Charn fell apart; his evidence was needed to convict or the brother walked. She did the Thai thing, she did whatever was necessary to save her older brother. Family always came first; everyone else and everything else was way down the obligation ladder. And within the family the younger yielded to the elder. Noi understood the overriding obligation: be there for her family. That was her operative principle. He had been there for her; now it was her turn to help him. She would not let him down.
“His na
me was Danny. The farang who died at the mall. Gabe and Kowit sent him to watch me.”
“Or help you?” asked Jess.
She shrugged, looked down. “Gabe wanted to make certain I didn’t screw up. I didn’t know he was going to try and kill anyone.”
“Right, he seemed like such a nice boy,” said Calvino, catching Father Andrew’s eye.
“He probably did, Vincent,” said Father Andrew, whose years in the slums had not stripped him of a glimmer of hope that a small amount of goodness resided in all men and women. Or almost all.
“They said that Danny only wanted to talk to Jess. Nothing heavy, just to let him know that testifying against the brother wasn’t a hot idea.”
They used the brother to get at her. Or that was her story. Seems that brother Charn had found Noi the “singing” job in LA. Actually he got a commission from Gabe for recruiting her. It hadn’t taken her long—one night working in the bar—to find out that her brother was mixed up with some bad actors. According to her version, she didn’t ask and he didn’t offer to tell her about his connection with Kowit. Also she knew that Kowit was a frequent visitor to the nightclub, one of those near-beer places that the ABC hate but can’t bust down to the foundation. The place didn’t serve alcohol. It didn’t need to; the men came for the women.
“Kowit had a share in the business with Gabe,” said Noi.
“Who told you that?”
“Gabe did.”
Enough of a piece to launder drug money, wondered Calvino. Noi’s brother worked as a bouncer at the bar. She warned him not to disgrace their family name. He smiled, promised, gave oaths of walking the right path, and then did what he wanted.
“If you thought he wasn’t involved in drugs, why warn him?” The cop in Jess was coming. For Jess her story had enough holes that the boat of credibility had started to list.
“He had too much money. I knew he wasn’t getting that kind of money from his job at the bar.”
“Then you weren’t all that surprised when I arrested him?”
“Yes and no,” she whispered. “On the job he was clean. I never saw him doing anything other than what he was supposed to do. But he was spending a lot of money.”
“Sometimes he would disappear for an hour or two. This happened a couple of times a week.” Jess had Charn under surveillance and the bust had been done three blocks away, at a hotel. He dealt drugs out of a room in a rundown hotel. He had been tacking back and forth between the bar and the hotel, selling smack.
She blamed herself for not convincing her brother that he had to return to Thailand. He had enough money for a good life in Bangkok. But he was coming into some minor fame in LA, he liked the freedom. People didn’t look down on him, he was someone, and he wasn’t about to leave. “Wes Naylor was also a customer who came in a lot.”
“How much is a lot?” asked Jess.
“I saw him a couple of nights a week. He spoke a little bit of Thai. He had been to Thailand and was always talking about the Cause this, the Cause that. He had bar yings on the brain. He took photos of some of the yings for his yingzine. He said guys downloaded off his website. Paid him to do so. He thought everyone working at Sisuda was a whore.”
She waied Father Andrew. “Sorry, father.”
“Were they?” asked Jess. “Prostitutes?”
Her answer was a wan smile. After all he was a cop. He was going back to that neighborhood and she could see him working with Vice to throw her friends in jail, or worse, having them sent home.
“Did Kowit and Naylor know each other?” said Calvino.
Jess smiled, “Kowit saw the chance to help himself if he gave Naylor his big break.” He told Calvino and Father Andrew about how Gabe had made the introduction. One night Naylor sat at the bar talking about getting laid on the Causeway and Kowit walked in. Wes had a photo layout ready to load onto the yingzine and was inspecting the pictures. Half an hour later Kowit told Naylor about a possible hotel venture with a couple of respectable doctors. They needed a lawyer. Kowit would convince them to cut Naylor in for five percent of the deal. What did Kowit want? He wanted Naylor’s friendship. Naylor took the job as unofficial adviser in case things got complicated. In LA, Kowit thought he needed a farang lawyer in his pocket. Kowit’s pitch was good, fast balls down the middle, knee level over the plate; no way that Naylor was going to do anything but strike out. Dr. Nat, LA brother of the doctor in Bangkok, let Kowit convince him that Naylor was the right farang to attract the farang trade. He agreed that Naylor should be cut in for five percent of the deal. Naylor would do all the legal work at a discounted rate. A week later, the death threats started. Wes Naylor met with Kowit who told him to fly to Bangkok and to take a bodyguard, someone with police experience, someone who was an ethnic Thai. Such a man could lay the right groundwork and put an end to the threats. There was an LAPD officer who was Thai. “Naylor contacted me,” said Jess. “He asked me to write my own ticket. Naylor told me that a buddy of his named Gabe had recommended a private eye in Bangkok, an American to help out. ‘Write your own ticket,’ said Naylor.”
“What did you say?” asked Father Andrew.
“I said yes,” said Jess. “And I wrote my own ticket.”
“So did I,” said Calvino.
There was a lot of loud talking and wailing outside Father Andrew’s house.
“I think it must be his time to die,” Father Andrew said. He opened his door and watched as the relatives removed the dying man in a chair to his sister’s house. Calvino rose from his chair and walked through the kitchen in time to see the man slumped forward in the chair pass by the door.
“He will die tonight. I can feel that. Then we will have the wake and the funeral. We don’t keep the dead long. The bodies start to fall apart real fast.” He turned back to his guests “You, Father Ben, and you Sister Teresa, are welcome to stay here. Until Vincent can find a way to get you to safety.”
“Back to LA?” asked Noi.
“Whatever it takes, we will get you back,” said Calvino.
“You still want to help us?” Jess asked Father Andrew. “Because I wouldn’t blame you if you asked us to leave right now.”
“I just saw a man on his way to die,” said Father Andrew. “I’ve seen it many times. You know what? It doesn’t really worry me.”
Noi’s head was bowed and she slowly raised it until she looked straight at the priest.
“And you, my child, need to help these two fine men,” said Father Andrew.
She looked at him like the Chinese guy staring down the tanks. “Whatever it takes,” she said, using Vincent Calvino’s words as she rose and saw the relatives of the dying man filing past. He was going to die soon. She sensed the presence of Death lurking in the shadows of the narrow pathways. Death was a frequent visitor in the slums of Klong Toey. Tonight the man in the chair would leave with that visitor. As she felt the shadow pass, she thought of Danny, and a sudden chill went up her spine.
ELEVEN
THE WOMAN WITH the shrivelled arm from the shop house came into Father Andrew’s living room, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Pee chai dtai laew,” she said. She looked weary from the ordeal, her eyes, red-rimmed, expressing sadness and relief. “My older brother has died.”
Father Andrew was on the phone, “I know that it’s important,” he said into the receiver. “But someone has just died next door and his sister is standing in front of me.”
He didn’t bother to cup the phone as he spoke. “Tell your family that I will be right over. Let me finish this call first,” said Father Andrew. “And I will be with you as well.” He looked at his three guests. The woman slipped out of the house. Calvino went to the door, looked in the walkway. The neighbors and family were gathering outside. Father Andrew returned to the phone. He did not miss a beat.
“Who told you we can’t drive the piles for the school? That guy? He said no one would stand in our way. What do we do? I tell you what we do. We drive the piles tomorrow and I’l
l have 322 kids handwriting letters to the Governor, the Chief of Police, and the Prime Minister. The kids write, ‘Can you give us a chance? We want to do better. We want an education for a better life. Or would you rather us little ones do like our parents and live on drugs and commit crimes?’ And we send all 322 letters to the English language newspapers. Tell him that. So don’t worry, you just get the crew to show up for work tomorrow.”
He put down the phone and smiled. “Someone is either scared or wants a pay-off. So we do what needs to be done. We are practical here. We let the kids make the officials’ position a public issue. These bad guys hate negative publicity. Three hundred plus kids talking to the TV cameras will send them running for cover.”
This time Father Andrew’s mobile phone rang. “No, I can’t. I have a special mass in twenty-five minutes. Why? Because it is my birthday, and I always hold a mass on my birthday. Yeah, at the slaughterhouse. I hold it for the Laotians who are hiding out,” he said, looking at his wrist. “I’ll have to call you back. But tell Henry we can meet with his Board of Directors next Tuesday and tell him about the lunch program for our kids.”
Father Andrew looked over at his guests. “Now where were we?”
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